Clandestine

We headed for the beach and the Malibu Rendezvous, a classy seaside eatery I had catalogued in my mind since the "old days" when I dreamed of the "ultimate" woman. Now, years later, I was driving there, an adult, a policeman, with a crippled Jewish attorney sitting beside me blowing smoke rings and casting furtive glances at me as I drove.

"What are you thinking?" I asked.

"You told me not to think, remember?"

"I retract it."

"All right. I was thinking that you're too good looking. It's disarming and it probably makes people underestimate you. There's a side to you that could take advantage of that underestimation very easily."

"That's very perceptive. What else were you thinking?"

"That you're too good to be a cop. No—don't interrupt, I didn't mean it quite that way; I'm glad you're a cop. Eddie Engels would be free to kill with impunity if you weren't. It's just that you could be anything you want, literally. I was also thinking that I don't want to be fawned over in a fancy restaurant; I don't want to go clumping through there getting a lot of pitying looks."

"Then why don't we eat on the beach? I'll have the restaurant fix us up with a picnic basket and a bottle of wine."

Lorna smiled and blew a smoke ring at me, then tossed her cigarette out the window. "That's a good idea," she said.

I parked in the blacktopped area adjoining the restaurant, about a hundred yards away from the beach. Lorna waited in the car while I went to fetch our feast. I ordered three orders of cracked crab and a bottle of chablis. The waiter was hesitant about boxing an order "to go," but changed his tune when I whipped a five-spot on him, even popping the cork on the wine bottle and throwing in two glasses.

Lorna was standing outside the car, smoking, when I returned. When she saw me she stared up at the warm summer sky and pointed her cane heavenward. I looked up, too, and committed the twilight sky and a low-hanging cloud formation to memory.

There was a flight of rickety wooden steps leading down to the sand. I carried our picnic and Lorna limped by my side. The stairs were barely wide enough for the two of us, so I threw an arm around Lorna and she huddled into my chest and hopped on her good leg all the way down, laughing, out of breath when we reached the bottom.

We found a nice spot to sit on a rise. The sun was a departing orange ball, and it lovingly caught strands of Lorna's light brown hair and burnished them into gold.

We sat on the sand, and I laid out our food on top of the brown paper bag it had come in. Not standing on ceremony, we polished off all three crustaceans in short order without saying a word. The sun had gone down while we ate, but the light from the big picture window of the restaurant cast an amber glow that allowed us a muted view of each other.

Lorna lit a cigarette as I poured us each a glass of wine. "To September 2, 1951," I said.

"And to beginnings." Lorna smiled and we clinked glasses. I didn't quite know what to say. Lorna did. "Who are you?" she asked.

I gulped my wine and felt it go to my head almost immediately. "I'm Frederick Upton Underhill," I said. "I'm twenty-seven years old, I'm an orphan, a college graduate and a cop. I know that. And I know that you've caught me at the most exciting time of my life."

"Caught you?" Lorna laughed.

"No, more correctly, I caught you."

"You haven't caught me."

"Yet."

"You probably never will."

"'Probably' is an equivocation, Lorna."

"Look, Freddy, you don't know me."

"Yet."

"All right, yet."

"But in a sense, I do. I went over to your dad's house last winter. I saw some photographs of you. I talked to Siddell about you, and she told me about the accident and your mother's death, and I felt I knew you then, and I still feel it."

Lorna's eyes glittered with anger and she spoke very coldly: "You had no right to pry into my life. And if you pity me, I will never see you again. I will walk up to that restaurant and call a cab and ride out of your life. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," I said. "I understand. I understand that I don't know what pity is, never having felt it for myself. I pity some of the people I meet on the job, but that's easy; I know I'm never going to see them again. No, for what it's worth I don't give a damn if you've got a bad leg, or two, or three. When I met you in February I knew, and I still know."

"Know what?"

"Don't make me say it, Lorna. It's too early."

"All right. Will you hold me for a while, please?"

I moved to Lorna and we embraced clumsily. She held me around the small of my back and nuzzled her head into my chest. I rested my hand on the knee of her bad leg until she took it and cupped it to her breast, holding it tightly there. We stayed that way for some time, until Lorna said in a very small voice, "Will you drive me back to my car, please?"