Goldengirl

‘If that was champagne, it was as flat as Ann-Marie,’ said Dryden. ‘Thank God I had the foresight to take the cognac in with us. Melody, I’m sorry it turned out like that.’

She sat up. ‘Sorry? Don’t be sorry. I haven’t laughed so much in years. I nearly wet my pants laughing. Say one word more about Ann-Marie and I won’t answer for your bedspread. No, that’s mean. I like to be humored. Which door is the john?’

Dryden used the interval to open the bottle of Campari he had picked up from the bar.

‘Get a load of this, then!’

Melody was standing in the doorway of the bathroom wearing a pale-green silk-satin underslip, her arms burlesquing the action of a go-go dancer. ‘It’s cabaret time for disappointed guys. How about some backing?’

He tuned the radio beside the bed to something Latin-American. Still giggling, but moving rhythmically with the beat, she glided and bobbed toward him, stopping a couple of steps short, and by degrees easing the lacework straps simultaneously from both shoulders with her fingertips.

He watched the fine grain of the material slip over her breasts until they emerged, undulating gently with the music, the nipples pink and promising as the first buds of apple blossom. With a wriggle she persuaded the slip over her hips, turning suddenly to cheat him of more than a glimpse of her coppery pubic wedge, mockingly rotating her bottom where it had been. As an erotic display, it more than compensated for the nightclub fiasco, and the entertainment didn’t stop at visual arousal. Dryden slipped his hands around her ribs and got a load of Melody Fryer.

‘You’re pretty good at it,’ she announced, an indefinite interval later, as he lit her cigarette. She lay facing the ceiling, on the bedspread, coyness forgotten.

‘Now spoil it by adding “for an English guy.”’

‘No, I’m being sincere, Jack. Too bad I should meet you now, after two years of sexual deprivation.’

‘Really?’ said Dryden. ‘You mean not one of those guys in the training camp...?’

‘You have some sauce, Jack Dryden, asking a girl things like that! Deprivation doesn’t mean total neglect, but if it panders to your male ego, I can tell you I haven’t met anyone who tops you in a long time.’

‘And just when you’ve found me, you’re taking off again,’ said Dryden. ‘Sad.’

She blew cigarette smoke at him. ‘You don’t give up, do you?’

‘Would you prefer it if I did?’

‘I guess not.’

‘If I thought it would end like this evening, I wouldn’t mind taking a chance on some other nightspot in an undisclosed location.’

‘You’d have to be determined. It’s a long way from L.A., buster.’

‘I get around in my line of business,’ said Dryden.

‘Like the shore of Lake Erie?’

‘That is a little remote.’ Dryden took stock. ‘I shall be in New York toward the end of next week. If I knew which part of Lake Erie...’

‘You have an office in New York?’

‘That’s where I shall work from,’ said Dryden, encouraged. ‘It wouldn’t take long from there by helicopter.’

‘Okay, if I feel like sampling the Erie nightlife, I can call you up, can’t I? That’s as much as I’m telling, Jack, and I think you know why. Now, how about finishing that Campari?’