Mila 18 - Leon Uris [36]
“I came as soon as I could get away,” Deborah said at last.
“Why wouldn’t you come to my apartment?”
Deborah merely shook her head. “Chris,” she sighed, “what we have been doing has never been right. Only now it seems even more wrong with Paul away.”
“It’s seemed so long. Just listening for you every minute.”
“You know I wanted to come,” she said. Her fingers betrayed her nervousness so badly that she withdrew her hand.
“I’m going off tomorrow,” Chris said.
She was startled.
“Just a few days. I’m going to make a round of the border.”
“I’m glad you called me.”
“Since the other night you haven’t been off my mind a minute. Deborah, we’re sitting here in the sunlight and we can think. We’ve just got to have this out with Paul.”
“No, Chris. Not with him in the army.”
“Before that it was another excuse, and before that another. I swear I’ve been hoping he won’t come back.”
“Chris!”
“I know, he’s a fine fellow.”
“I’ve thought a lot about us too, Chris. When I’m with you—it’s—I never thought it would ever come to me. But at the same time I am doing something against everything I’ve believed in. I’m not going to leave Paul.”
“Is there any feeling between you and him?”
“Not the way you mean. There never has been, you know that. There are other ways a man and woman can be something to each other.”
“Deborah, I’m not leaving you until you throw me out.”
“Then we have come to that. I can’t continue to see you and keep what little is left of my self-respect.”
His hand touched her cheek and her neck, and she closed her eyes. “Don’t, Chris, you know how I am when you touch me. Oh, Chris, all I do is give you problems. I’m no good for you.”
She felt his lips touching her face. “Come on up to my place,” he whispered. “I’ll undress you and we’ll lie in bed and listen to music and open a bottle of champagne ...”
“Chris ... get up and walk away ... please.”
“I will if you really want me to.”
“You know I don’t.”
The afternoon was filled with a hundred kisses and endearments and a hundred more. Their love-making carried with it an intense sort of desperation, and when they had exhausted each other they fell into deep, glorious naps. When they awoke, Deborah was happy. She bathed and roamed around the kitchen, all but lost in Chris’s big terrycloth robe, and fixed the steaks and iced the champagne while he soaked in a steaming tub.
“Wash my back!” she heard him call.
When she came into the bathroom, his feet were up on the edge of the tub and he was singing a Verdi aria, trying for a high C, which he missed by a full six notes. Deborah whimpered sensuously as she knelt beside the tub and rubbed the soap over his back. He tried to open her robe.
“No peeking,” she said.
She grabbed his hair and dunked him, then covered his wet face with kisses.
Toward evening it grew chilly and he lit a fire. They finished their meal and lay contentedly on the big sofa, sipping warming cognac. Deborah opened the robe and closed it over the two of them, and his hand traced the lines of her body from her shoulders to her knees.
“Would you believe that I was such a terrible prude and such a good girl? What have you done to me, Mr. de Monti?”
Deborah Androfski was only eleven when her mother died. She had to assume the role of homemaker for her father and little brother, Andrei. Before and after school, her job never ended. She had to cook and clean and do laundry and shop. They were poor as only a Polish Jew could be. She had to spend hours bargaining and haggling in the filth and poverty of Parysowski Place to save every zloty.
It seemed that all Deborah could remember of her mother after a time was an image of a tired and pain-filled woman waiting for the redemption of death to take her away from the smells and the dirt of Stawki Street. Momma always held her back and groaned as she climbed the stairs.
Momma always had a new ache in a never-ending assortment of them.
Israel Androfski was able to find respite from the struggle of existence in the comforts of a deep-rooted Jewishness which bordered on fanatic joys through prayer. He