t was a wondrous, rare October night—the warm air palpable, humid and thick.

“It’s so beautiful,” Anna said aloud. Ideal weather, her favorite weather. She had put the top down on her father’s car—a 1962 Chrysler 300H convertible, a few years old now, but still in splendid condition.

She drove along the road at the top of a rise above the river. On both sides of the street, a boulevard really, were large two story houses—substantial, carefully detailed and soundly built structures dating from the twenties and thirties with ample porches and broad eaves. They were set back deeply, uniformly, behind wide lawns piously maintained, meticulously trimmed hedges and abundant flowering plants. To her right, the side toward the river, the houses enjoyed views of the park below and the shimmering lights of the city beyond.

Tall trees planted at regular intervals along the narrow strip of grass between the curb and sidewalk formed a generous vault above the road. The leaves had started to change color. They were more vivid that year than usual—the brilliant early yellow of the elms, the blazing burnished red of the maples, the tawny sycamores—a few of them had already fallen. Some stirred in restless eddies near the curb. Others scudded along the street on this breezy autumn night. Anna leaned her head back and looked up at the low-hanging clouds and it was almost possible for her to believe that on a night like this, as fine and as perfect as this, the chill and dread of winter would never come.

The radio played, not too loud, a song she liked, “Strangers In The Night." Anna listened a tad dreamily to the lyrics. Just to take up some time, to hear the entire song, she took a turn onto a narrower street, one with smaller houses on less impressive lots. She drove along, serene, unhurried, turning here then there as her whim dictated.

A new song came on, something by Burt Bacharach. Thinking of nothing in particular and singing along with the words without paying attention to them, Anna had not a care in the world.

She was back home now and, for the time being, had left behind thoughts of her husband, her husband left behind in New York. It had, after all, always been his city, never hers. Though she missed the roomy, elegant apartment on West End Avenue filled with sleek modern furniture—the Mies chairs, the Le Corbusier table in the dining room, the Florence Knoll sofa—that was about all.

She knew now that she had never loved him, not really. Though she had tried, hoping to convince herself that she would come to love him, from the very beginning something had always been missing.

As far as she was concerned, their marriage was over, and had been for some time. Two years of his drinking, his countless infidelities. The never-ending arguments, his senseless, jealous rages. How had she lasted those two wretched years?

Back on the boulevard, she made a right at the Methodist church, then a left into the gravel parking lot serving a string of prewar commercial buildings that ran for a short block along the west side of the street. Already, quite a few cars were parked there.

She opened the long, heavy door of the car, and by the warm glow of the interior lamps assessed her reflection in the rearview mirror. She reapplied lipstick to her generous and already perfect lips—they were a full, lusty red, glorious and glossy. Hazel her eyes, hazel stippled with green and gold. Wide set and low-lidded, ending in sharp angles at each canthus, they suggested a sensual languor. She inspected her hair, dark and lustrous and cut above the shoulder, worn in a slightly asymmetrical swinging bob. Her long fingered hands with their lacquered nails, the color matching precisely that of her lips, made a few hasty, yet judicious, adjustments. She frowned somewhat, but, in the end, found her appearance satisfactory.

Anna was wearing a smart oolala minidress in black she had bought earlier that year at Bergdorf Goodman. Around her neck were the pearls her mother had given her when she turned eighteen. She wore cream colored hose and a pair of trick black shoes. The effect was subtle and elegant and stunning. Anna had little need for fads and had often felt that she would have been more comfortable, from the point of view of fashion, in some prior decade. She was reluctant to accept new styles and when miniskirts had first appeared, she was doubtful that the vogue would last. Over time she had adapted, had grown to like them. And her lean, lissome body with its long legs and slender waist and flat bust was well suited to this minimal iconic style which had originally been closely identified with the spirit of the counterculture, but had been by now, at the end of the decade, thoroughly co-opted into the mainstream.

As Anna made her way through a resonant passageway, she heard music, voices, laughter—the sounds of the party. She was drawn to it.

The gallery was located in what had long ago been a Sinclair service station. For many years it sat vacant, but recently someone had converted it into studio space.

She took in the scene. The canopy above the pump area was strung with tiny white lights that provided scant luminance. Outside were many people chattering, laughing loudly, smoking. Most held clear plastic cups brimming with either cheap red wine or cheap white wine. Thin, suntanned women wore drastic eye makeup and pale metallic lipstick in sundry shades, their bored faces framed by severely dyed hair, their ages unguessable at a distance. Closer, Anna could tell that they had taken desperate measures to mask the telltale traces time had left upon their once youthful faces. They sported brazen, short dresses—swirls of psychedelic colors, daring horizontal stripes in pastel hues, saturate Day-Glow greens and chrome yellows in wetlook polyvinyl. With them mingled middle-aged men, some squat, some tall, all portly. Their hair, or what was left of it, worn far too long for Anna’s liking. They stood somewhat apart—the men talking about money and football and the younger women; the women talking about clothes and diets and the younger women. Their invidious eyes devoured Anna.

Two very pretty girls—models perhaps, thought Anna—sat on a large plastic ice chest with their arms around each other, one brushing the hair out of the other’s face and stroking her cheek. As Anna went by, the redhead whispered something to the blonde, who had been crying, and both giggled.

Also present were professors from the university, graduate students in painting and English. A pack of four sorority girls roved about, getting drunk and hoping to meet men. They were round-cheeked and cheerleader cute, with long, straight, shining blond hair, firm honey-colored thighs and muscular calves—homogeneous and practically interchangeable.

Inside were more people and, of course, the paintings, the putative reason everyone had come here tonight. Severe white walls freshly painted and harshly lit. It was a one-man show by an artist named Julian Freshman. On the rear wall, painted in black in large letters were the words “Give War a Chance—12 Pro-War Paintings." Beneath this in smaller letters was the artist’s name and below that a typed sheet of paper and some photographs. She walked toward the wall to read something about the artist and the show, and passed a group of three men. One, with shaven head and lacking eyebrows, wearing a ribbed black turtleneck and black wide-wale corduroy bell-bottoms, dominated the conversation in a loud, lisping whisper.

“Joyce!” he joiced. “Joyce!” he rejoiced. “My God, how I love Joyce." His two companions sipped their drinks, nodding politely, unquestionably uninterested in what was being said. Both ogled Anna and one of them in particular caught her eye. He was fat as butter and stuffed into a rumpled tuxedo. He tottered, on the verge of collapse—his too small feet shod in grimy white Converse high tops.

Anna first studied a vertical strip of four black and white photographs, the kind taken in a booth for fifty cents. The photos, unclear and somewhat blurry, pictured a young man wearing dark, thick-framed eyeglasses and a porkpie hat. From the sheet she read: “Steven Julian Freshman was born in Brooklyn, New York on April 1, 1945. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Tulane University in New Orleans in 1967. He was the only Jewish recipient of a Master of Fine Arts degree at the May, 1969 commencement of Texas Christian University. He spent the summer of 1967 in...”

“A sort of portrait of the artist as a young man,” said a slurred, yet booming voice behind Anna. “Eh?”

She turned to find the man in the tuxedo standing very close to her. “Oh my!" She took a step back but bumped into the wall.

“Just a private little joke,” he said and laughed a private little laugh. His round baby face, the cheeks flushed to a healthy ruby glow, shook like savory aspic. His groggy breath came and went in uneven and audible flurries. Behind his black horn-rimmed glasses, his eyes had a moist, glassy quality about them.

Anna looked back and forth uncertainly between the photos and the man talking to her. “Are you the artist?”

“Well, no, I’m not the artist,” he said with labored emphasis on the article. He gestured toward the paintings with an all-embracing sweep of his arm, spilling much from the ruddy cup he clutched in his hand. He laughed. “But I am an artist." A short pause. A long, unfocused look in Anna’s direction. “My name’s Ned. What’s yours?”

“Nadine,” she said without hesitation.

“Ned and Nadine,” he repeated speculatively, salaciously, savoring the sound, the idea.

“Why don’t you back up just a little bit and give me some room here?" Anna gently placed her hand on the man’s shoulder and pushed him back. He took a doubtful, staggering step rearward. “Thanks.”

“Would you like to meet the artist?” he asked eagerly. “I know him personally." Ned surveyed the room.

“Oh, let’s save that for later,” she said. “Give me something to look forward to.”

“There he is." He waved at a man of short stature with an insignificant build, a man with tight, wiry red hair of pubic consistency.

“Steve!” Ned cried. The artist looked nothing like the image in the photos and his glasses were identical to Ned’s. He was negotiating nervously with a pale but farded, blue-haired society matron concerning the selling price of one of his works, which she had not the faintest intention of buying. Unable to see Anna, the artist ignored Ned’s come-hither gesture.

“He seems to be busy,” Ned said, turning back to her.

“That’s too bad,” said Anna, looking at Ned, leery.

Nothing was said for a long moment. In a leisurely, torpid manner, Ned’s eyes closed.

“Forgive me,” he said suddenly, soddenly, stirring himself. “How rude." Another pause, then noticing Anna’s empty hands. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Would you?”

“Anything you like. Name it." Ned said this with manly confidence, masculine authority. “It’s yours.”

“What I’d like,” Anna said, lowering her voice and glancing around the crowded room, then looking back at him, blinking slowly, “what I’d really like is champagne.”

“Champagne?" Uncertain. “Uhh, I don’t think we have that.”

She smiled her prettiest smile. “You could go get some?" Ned fancied that he heard an unmistakably racy, provocative air in the tone she used, an unspoken promise of unimaginable pleasures to come later. “Couldn’t you?”

“So be it,” he said with a flourish. “Champagne.” French accent.

“Do you have a car here?”

Of course he did.

She took a look at her wristwatch; it was almost nine. She knew he’d never make it in time. “You’d better get going. The liquor stores will be closing any minute now.”

“Are you coming with me?” he suggested with a hopeful smile.

“I just got here.” Anna smiled beatifically. “Let me look around some.”

“I’ll be back.”

This Anna did not doubt. Ned weaved his way through the throng, then out the door.

She found herself before an outsize canvas called “Peace Is Our Profession.” A landscape of indescribable beauty—in the foreground rice paddies tended by black pajama clad peasants wearing wide conical hats. In the distance virid mountains spanned the horizon. In front of them was a grove of trees being carpet bombed. Brilliant, fiery blasts gave way to a lush, rich plume of smoke of impossible blackness rising into the numinous cloud-filled sky.

The painting disturbed Anna. It was undeniably beautiful and her eye was drawn to it, but the depiction of destruction was unsettling. She had seldom thought about the war. No close family members or friends were in the military. She had no brothers, and no male cousins near the age of eighteen. Her husband had been old enough not to need to worry, so the draft was something with which she had never been concerned. She had heard of people from her high school that had gone there, even some who had died there, but she knew none of them well. Her life had remained largely untouched by Vietnam.

Anna’s uncertain, equivocal reaction to the painting mirrored her feelings toward that long and unhappy war. She guessed that she was vaguely against it, but, at the same time, she felt that opposition to the U.S. military involvement was more than remotely anti-American, unpatriotic, and this aspect of dissent troubled her.

She was also, ambiguously, somewhat of a hawk. Had someone asked her, “Do you want the war to be over?” She would have said, without a doubt, “Yes.” Though to this she would have added, “But not if it means defeat.”

Lyndon Johnson had reached dramatically, tragically, in two opposing directions at the same time. He had seen no reason why the United States, the most powerful nation with the most vigorous economy, could not simultaneously sustain both his Great Society and the crusade against Communism.

There had been no declaration of war, no calling up of the reserves, no rationing, no shortages. He had wanted none of the war footing, none of the home front sacrifices that had been imperative during World War II. Johnson had sought to disengage the country to the greatest extent possible from the fallout of the war. Vietnam remained culturally as well as geographically half a world away, but the baneful effects of the conflict and its images kept finding ways of coming home. The human, social, political, and economic costs of the war were impossible to hide with lies and obfuscations, with upbeat statistics and doughty press briefings.

Anna had always been largely uninterested and uninformed about what was going on in Southeast Asia. She was not alone in dealing with the war by simply remaining ignorant of it, by remaining uninvolved. This was not difficult to do. She changed the channel or picked up some other section of the newspaper. The magazines she skimmed did not routinely address the issue, and if they did, she turned the page. She knew no one who was stridently opposed to the war. Student unrest was all but unknown in Fort Worth; antiwar sentiment was muted. The Moratorium, which had occurred two days earlier, passed largely unnoticed there. The city was home to Carswell Air Force Base and General Dynamics and Bell Helicopter and hundreds of smaller companies that thrived on the teeming defense funds that poured into the town that produced Huey and Cobra helicopters and Robert Strange McNamara’s plane, the F-111 fighter-bomber.

The war, though disturbing, remained distant for Anna.

Everything she heard or saw or read about it caused her only confusion. There was no certainty, no consensus of opinion, no compelling justification for the colossal American military presence and the loss of life. If Vietnam did come up in conversation, someone always said: “Let’s not talk about the war.” It was an argument without end and it was just so much easier to leave it to others.

She stepped over to look at another painting, called “A Pleasant Morning in Saigon; February 1, 1968.” Here was a complex, crowded composition. In the foreground sat young American soldiers in neatly starched fatigues drinking Schlitz and Carling Black Label, Coca-Cola and Wink at a picturesque sidewalk café. The familiar, icy beverages were comforting symbols of the availability of everyday American staples within a difficult, alien context. The men appeared to be relaxed, enjoying themselves. Engaged in light-hearted conversation, their cares of the battlefield momentarily forgotten against the peaceful backdrop Saigon offered them. The city was depicted as a cheery, gaily colored place, the style and scale of its buildings recalled vaguely those of Paris. The cityscape was littered with eye-catching advertising placards promoting the products of Esso, Sony, Pepsi, Sanyo. Dense, dark-leafed trees with fiery red flowers lined the street. The sidewalks were full of people—Asiatic men in business suits, shoeless and shirtless children in shorts, one-legged beggars on crutches. Small, pretty women wearing pants and long, flowing white tunics with a tall slit; others in abbreviated microskirts and skimpy, clinging blouses.

In the background was a scene Anna remembered; the photograph had been everywhere, inescapable. Standing in the street, a plucky South Vietnamese officer aimed the barrel of his gleaming pistol at the temple of a Viet Cong soldier wearing a plaid sports shirt, his face grotesquely misshapen by complete, unalloyed fear, frozen an everlasting fraction of a second before the hammer strikes the shiny brass casing.

She stood now before another painting. Depicted, Warhol style, were six brisk, colorful variations of a Buddhist bonze in the act of self-immolation. Anna was plagued with grave misgivings.

She asked for directions to the restroom. They were located down a narrow passage on the north side of the building. She tried the knob of the door marked by an enameled metal plaque that read, “Ladies.” Locked. She walked to the edge of the building and glanced into the parking lot.

A car was backing unsteadily out of its spot. The intermittent red glow of its brake lights illuminated an impassioned couple kissing fervently near the rear bumper of a Cadillac. A dusky girleen, leggy and lean, wearing a light cotton dress and with her hair pulled back, was in the arms of a much older man. He was trim and tan and athletic. Earlier, Anna had spotted him inside the gallery with a different woman clinging to his arm—a false blonde, a faded beauty several years older than the perky, ponytailed brunette he now held. The car came toward them in fits and they broke their embrace and guardedly watched its approach. It advanced by bounds, lurched and lunged. Wisely, they stepped out of the way. Anna saw the driver—Ned, behind the wheel of a battered old Bel Air, unmistakably borrowed for he mauled the clutch grievously. He made several attempts to get out of his spot, but couldn’t quite get clear. He pulled forward, creasing like paper the rear fender of a Volkswagen. He backed, this time crashing into the Cadillac. Forward again and the Bug’s insignificant bumper crumpled. Again reverse, again the Cadillac. He put the decrepit Chevy into first and gave it some gas. The engine raced, but budged not an inch—the bumpers were locked.

The bathroom door opened and a man and a woman emerged, both flushed and with disheveled hair. In went Anna.

As she was about to go back into the gallery, she overheard three men standing by the front door.

“I can’t see that his policies are any different from what Johnson was doing,” said the vigorous, older gentleman with a pipe.

“Give him a chance. He’s only been in office nine months.” The man speaking was wan, in his mid-thirties with his hair was pulled back into a ponytail.

“It hasn't been long enough to do anything, really,” said the hearty, overweight man wearing a beret.

“That’s what Nixon himself keeps saying.” The man made soppy sucking noises on his pipe.

“And he certainly can’t be any worse than that goddamned Lyndon Johnson.” Ponytail.

“You’ve got to remember,” the stout man cleared his throat, “he was the peace candidate.”

Through the curtain wall of glass, Anna saw Julian Freshman talking to a man whose back was turned to her. She stepped inside and here the curtain lifted. She could see only a little of the side of his face. His mouth was shut, as if he were trying hard to keep quiet, and it formed a straight line. He had about him a brooding, almost angry aspect. The artist was gesturing energetically with his hands, trying resolutely to make his point.

Shortly after she crossed the threshold, the man listening to the artist turned toward her and for an eternal second Anna’s world came to a stop. The moment he spotted Anna, his face relaxed, and involuntarily he smiled at her. She was struck by an abrupt, almost agonizing impact voiding her internals, her limbs. She went weak, her knees were watery. Nothing in Anna’s past shared a resemblance with this moment, nothing had prepared her for the sensations she was now experiencing.

His hair was cut quite short to an almost uniform length. He made no attempt to alter his look to conform to the style of the day. No hair over the ears, none over the collar, no sideburns. His strong, angular face was long and thin, clean shaven. Clear, green eyes, almost blue. When he smiled, his face assumed a more rounded appearance, radiating a boyish charm, youthful good looks, and Anna imagined what he had looked like as a child.

He wore a white cotton button-down, sleeves uprolled, and straight-leg Levis and pale gray socks. His shoes, a sleek black loafer, were buffed to a lustrous sheen. He stood with his arms folded, nodding his head as the artist spoke, but staring deep into Anna’s eyes.

She walked toward the artist and the man. He watched her as she approached; he was unable to ignore her though she did nothing particular to call attention to herself. He was drawn to her beauty, but there was something else. Something about her that eluded his grasp, something he could not immediately identify. She kept looking at him and smiling. It was an uncommon face, a lively face, one he would never forget.

She heard Julian Freshman say: “Of course it’s possible that some people will fail to see the irony in what I’m doing here.” He gestured toward the paintings. “People could easily get the wrong idea.”

“Imagine the consequences,” the man said.

“I’d be embraced by the right wing…”

“Wealthy, conservative types…”

“Republicans…”

“People with large houses, vacation homes…”

“Empty walls,” Anna added. She stood now next to them.

Julian turned to face her and smiled seductively. “They might actually think that I’m for the war,” he said, somewhat concerned but calculating his possibilities, both financial and amorous.

“You do run that risk,” said the man.

“And we, my dear, run the risk of being late,” said Anna to the man, smiling graciously in apology to the artist. She tapped her watch with a mechanical little pat, as if reminding him of something forgotten. “We really need to get going.” She used a serious look now, nodding just a little, indicating that she would brook no argument. With a familiar, seemingly oft practiced gesture, she lovingly took his hand into her own and tugged on his arm in the direction of the door.

“I guess I have to go,” said the man to the artist, feigning resignation. He shrugged and Anna led him toward the exit.

“Really, can’t you stay?” Julian pleaded, stumbling behind them. “The party’s just getting started.”

“I think we’ve seen everything we want to,” Anna said to Julian with a winning smile and a wave of her free hand. “Bye-bye.” The man followed her lead without reluctance. He felt a thrilling flush of excitement at the touch of this warm, alluring stranger pulling him into the night with her.

Once outside and away from the gallery, he said to her, “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

“You’ve got to take me away from here.” There was a hint of urgency in her tone. “I being hounded by this horrid man, this drunken beast in a seedy tuxedo.”

“I think I saw him leave earlier.”

“No, he’s still here,” she said, shaking her head and continuing to tow him along. “He’s had a little accident in the parking lot, and I’m afraid if he sees me...” She stopped and turned to him. She shrugged a “Who knows?” gesture and smiled a disarming half smile. “I sent him off to buy champagne. There’s no telling what he has in mind.”

“A garden of earthly delights, no doubt.”

A brief moment of silence.

“Let’s not dwell on it.” She gave him a telling look.

They went down the passageway toward the parking lot. “Wait here,” she whispered. She went to the edge of the building and peeped around the side. Ned was standing on the rusty bumper of his car, trying to rock the Chevy free from the stately Cadillac. The couple was attempting to assist him. With a flick of her hand Anna motioned for the man to come to her side.

“My car's right there.” She pointed to the Chrysler and handed him the keys. “Back it out and pull up to me. I’ll wait right here.” He did as he was told. She dashed to the passenger side of the car and he reached across and pulled the slender silver handle up. The door swung open and she jumped onto the green leather seat.

“Nadine!” Ned cried, plaintively, longingly, upon seeing her get into the car with another man, his sense of loss evident. “Nadine!”

“Go!” The mighty car accelerated, spitting up gravel in its wake.

“Where are you going?” Ned wailed, loping after her car. “Nadine, come back.”

“Take the freeway and head west,” she said. She settled back in her seat, stretched her arms skyward and shook her hair in a jubilant wag from side to side. She looked at him for a long moment, not believing her marvelous luck. “Yes,” she thought to herself and she smiled a very big sparkling smile at him. “Yes.” He turned to look at her, at her manifest happiness, and he smiled back.

They entered the freeway, serenaded by Frank Sinatra, “All I Need Is The Girl.” Anna turned it up and hummed along with the tune.

The man turned to her, slightly bemused and asked, “You like this music?”

Anna looked to the right, watching the scenery whisk by. “Um-huh,” she nodded slowly. He saw that she was smiling expansively, rapturously. She swayed a little in rhythm with the beat, as if dancing in place, still humming along and smiling to herself.

They drove past the suburbs, the office buildings, past the vast empty plot of land where the new shopping mall was going to be built, past the fancy motel vaguely modeled in a charming fake Tudor style and the miniature golf course.

From their right came the hellish noise. They heard it before they saw the dark, big-bellied plane, just as it was taking off. It passed over them, low and so very loud, seeming too close—the thunderous ear-shattering wail deafening. The landing gear was still down and Anna could see into the wheel bays where small lights burned feebly. The Stratofortress, a Boeing B-52D, was painted a menacing, lusterless black, ready for war. It was a thrilling sight, a terrible sight, and Anna followed the arc of its ascent as it climbed out and then banked to the right, assuming a course parallel to that of the car.

He turned to her but did not smile. He put his hand on her knee and gave it a reassuring little squeeze and left it there for a moment, rubbing her knee with circular motions, softly caressing the pliant flesh on the inside of her leg within the smooth silky hosiery. She felt a delightful, delirious quiver course through her body from the point where his hand touched her thigh, up her spine, and into the base of her head at the nape. Withdrawing his hand, he turned his attention back to the road and she slipped forward a bit, slouching lower in her seat. She did not take her eyes off of him. Anna wanted each moment to be drawn out, to last as long as possible; she wished that this night would never end.

He drove beyond the joyless outskirts, the fringe developments where people lived in small, rundown homes clad in asbestos siding with poorly kept yards, and Anna was content to be a passenger, content to be alone with him. They were out of the city now—only the occasional building or random structure. The drive-in movie theater where Anna had once gone in high school, liquor stores with harshly lit parking lots, shabby windowless strip joints, sagging barns, and a dusty concrete batch plant.

They followed the freeway for a while and then turned off at an exit Anna knew and drove north on a hilly, twisting road. He slowed the car over a one-lane bridge that spanned a creek. A crawling turn onto an unpaved road which they followed for a few hundred yards. They stopped on top of a hill with views in all directions. To the west a sloping grassy field toward a bosky grove. Rolling countryside to the north and south. A few exiguous trees and even fewer lights. A buff, gibbous moon could be seen from time to time. Behind them the sky glowed dull amber, marking the city beneath.

Anna slid over the seat toward him and leaned her head on his shoulder. She took up his right hand and held it in both of her own, interlacing the fingers—it was an insistent grasp, one that didn’t want to let him go. She pulled his hand to her lips and kissed it and said, “I don’t even know your name.” Another kiss. “And I don’t know anything about you.”

Matthew Hurley stroked Anna’s cheek. “I’m from a small town in Massachusetts, just outside Worcester.” He ran his fingers through her hair, rubbed the tendon where the neck meets the shoulder. Anna cooed. He smelled the heady, scant scent she wore. Something expensive, surely. Everything about this girl was expensive, he thought. She was someone he knew he could never afford, someone he knew he could not keep, but he didn’t care. There was no sense worrying about any of that.

“I don’t know who you are,” either of them could have said.

“I’m a pilot,” said Matthew Hurley, a captain in the United States Air Force, and he turned her gorgeous, wide-eyed face toward him, and he saw there unmistakable eagerness, avid desire. It was this he had seen but been unable to recognize when he had first caught sight of her in the gallery. Moving his fingers up into the hair at the back of her head, he kissed her for the very first time. Her lips seemed to him to be of an impossible depth and of a softness he had never before known.

“How did you know I wanted you do that?” she asked, unable to suppress the smile that came to her.

That face, again, that fabulous flashing face, and he could not resist the force of her smile. It was a soul-shattering face that had known loss and vexation, but was for the moment, a sweet short moment, blissfully happy.

He—who in a little more than forty-eight hours would sit at the controls of a Boeing B-52D, his destination Andersen Air Force Base in Guam to begin a 180 day tour in Southeast Asia—kissed her again and was lost for a while in the world of her lips, her embraces, lost in the gaze of her eyes. He nuzzled her hair behind her flawlessly formed ear. She bent her head down as he lingeringly kissed the back of her long, redolent neck. He lifted her head and held her face between the palms of his hands and stared into her dark eyes.

“I just want to look at you,” he said. But this he could not do for long, overcome by a flood of sensation, of emotion, overwhelmed by her beauty. He buried his face into the pane of visible skin above the neckline of her dress, grazing his lips across the top of her chest, following her throat upward, then again to her mouth. He could not believe the miraculous luck that fate or chance or God had suddenly bestowed upon him to put this willing, radiant creature in his arms, and he cursed the nasty luck that, just as quickly, would take her from him.

They got out and stood at the front of the car. They necked ardently standing, Anna leaning against the Chrysler. His hands moving here and there, cupping her firm buttocks from beneath and pulling her upward, pressing her against him. She felt the stirring, insistent pressure of his grasp. In his arms she felt warm, molten, completely at peace with herself, and unutterably happy. She needed him to understand that this was something rare, something very important to her.

“This is not something...” Anna began to say. He lightly kissed her cheek and she melted a little bit more, leaned into him more heavily. She felt his fingers on her back, rubbing upward along the spine, squeezing her into him.

“I don’t do things like this...” Again her words were interrupted. He kissed her delicately on the lips, so that she would not try to speak.

“I know,” he whispered and Anna believed him. She believed that he understood that this could not have happened with someone else, that she had never felt like this about any other man before him.

She placed his palm against her breast, and, through the thin fabric of her dress, he felt her hardened angular nipple. He ran his hands down the outside of her thighs, then ever so slowly up along the inside of them, lifting her hem a little. From toe to head, a shuddering, shaking quake of delight and desire jarred her. She put her arms around him and laid her cheek against his chest. Holding him hard in her grasp for a long time, she rocked him back and forth and she could not believe how extraordinary all this felt.

He picked her up and placed her upon the ivory-colored hood of the car. Anna kicked her shoes off into the grass and rested her feet on the cool chrome bumper. She lay back on the expansive sheet metal, sensing the rising heat of the engine. She felt his hand reach up under her dress and he pulled her hose down, removing each leg slowly, not turning them inside out and mindful not to put a run in them. He set them carefully on the hood next to her.

Captain Matthew Hurley, who, in a little less than a week, would fly his Boeing B-52D on the first of his forty seven scheduled bombing missions over the jungles of Vietnam and perhaps Cambodia, peeled off the sheer black Christian Dior panties that she wore and laid them on top of the hose. Starting with her toes, he began to kiss her. His lips paraded across her feet, shifting from one leg to the other and up her calves, paused at her salient knees, then continued their path along the soft bare flesh of her thighs. His hands climbed up along her legs and underneath her dress and they splayed across the flat plain of her abdomen. She drew in her breath with a convulsive spasm, a gasp, and she made a small, indistinct noise.

Her head did not quite reach the windshield and she gazed up at the sky and watched the clouds running northward low and fast, and, in the occasional breaks between them, she glimpsed the dim fire of the winking stars. Anna felt him pull her to him and she closed her eyes and smiled again as she gave herself over to him utterly, without reservation. She was his and would always be his from that moment forward. He was what she had been waiting for, what she had always hoped for, had always dreamed of, and now she had found him and she didn’t ever want to let him go.

 

nd it was on a hot, sunny morning in January of the following year that Captain Matthew Hurley and his plane fell out of the numinous cloud-filled sky and crashed into the side of a mountain shortly after takeoff from U Tapao, near Bangkok, and a lush, rich plume of smoke of forlorn blackness marked the spot where the plane and all of its crew had come to earth.

The next day Anna read in the newspaper about the rare loss of a B-52 in Thailand. She read the names of the plane’s crew with a plunging, bottomless sensation in her chest. She looked at the names again and again, not wanting to believe her eyes, thinking that there must be a mistake, hoping that he was still somehow alive.

The war came home to Anna that night when she watched the evening news and there was a story about the downed plane confirming the deaths of the crew, and they even showed a snapshot of Captain Matthew Hurley on the local broadcast. In the picture he was forever young and smiling and handsome.

For Anna the anguished nightmare of the previous three months had ended. She knew that she no longer had anything to wait for and no longer was there any reason to hope, and she was filled with a sadness that no words, indeed no language at all, could express. Another nightmare began, something that she would have to live with, something that couldn’t be pushed aside and forgotten or left to others. This was the nightmare of real things.

 

[END]

© 2003 Ryan Miller