The Eleventh Man - Ivan Doig [74]
"To my husband. Della, what's on your mind?"
"I'm thinking of putting in for a transfer. To ground duty."
Happy New Year to you too, gutless wonder.
The entire party seemed to somehow have shifted about a step and a half toward the far wall of the living room, leaving a pocket of expectation where he and Adrianna were left together to make the most of this chance to get acquainted. The young people, herded together as if nature intended. You'd think the two of us were being bartered by our tribes.
"I heard you on Meet the Forces," she was saying, wasting no time, "telling about your plane crash. You made it sound all in a day's work."
"They put anybody who can deal in consecutive sentences on that show."
"That's awfully modest of you." She studied the traces on his face as though they were gladiator souvenirs. "You maybe can guess—my folks have followed your doings ever since football. They tell me when you set out to do something, you're the best at it."
It took just a few such battings of the eyes for Ben to realize that she was being a good deal more than daughterly civil in making talk with him. And he had to admit, being around her was not hard duty. Adrianna was cute and a dash exotic in the same glance. Slender but substantial in the right places and in a snug maroon skirt and matching sweater that showed that off well enough. Caramel-colored hair that no doubt received a hundred brush strokes a day. Almond eyes and olive complexion. It was well-known that she was adopted, the senatorial couple setting an example of humanitarianism after that first inhumane world war. From somewhere on the Adriatic, or was he simply mixing that up with her name? She was a WAVE, that much he was sure of; the Senator had a practiced chuckle when he'd introduced her as his daughter the sailor.
For the next few minutes they kept on trading generalities—she told him she was just another of fifteen thousand Navy women serving in Washington wartime offices; he told her he was just a typewriter soldier being sent off on an overseas assignment early in the new year—until he came around to asking, "What do they have you doing?"
"I'm in the wire room."
Ben tried not to show any sign of the disputes he'd had with teletype clerks of many kinds down through time. Maybe she wasn't one of those, maybe she was in charge of changing the spools of telex ribbon. Which he immediately doubted; a senator's daughter would not be doing the chores.
"Keys to the kingdom, A to Z," he said guardedly.
"There's one bad part of the clerk job." Adrianna made a face. "Carbon paper. Our seersucker uniforms sop it up." She leaned a trifle closer, confidentiality coming with it. "Know how I get it off?"
"I have to confess I don't."
She looked around, then right up at him. "I climb in the bathtub with the uniform on and scrub the carbon off. It's kind of like using a washboard. Rub a dub dub." Hands in front of her chest, she surreptitiously pantomimed washerwoman motion on that handy part of herself for him. "Then drain out the blue water, take off the uniform and hang it to dry," she continued ever so innocently, "and go ahead and have my bath. It works."
"I'll bet it does." The back of his throat felt dry. There was a great deal more than a fleck of attraction in the thought of rub a dub dub. A debate had started up in him like dueling lightning. When someone such as Adrianna handed herself to him on a platter, was he obliged to do his best to drop it? After all, you can cordon sex off from love. Soldiers did it all the time.
"That's