Free Salt Water by Charles Simmons

on an international call! Zina’s out. I know you didn’t come to see this old flesh.”
    “I came to see you both, Mrs. Mertz.”
    “How gallant! Well, you’ll have to do with me. Jack and I are going to dinner. We’ll have all evening to talk. So you come in and entertain me while I change. And, Jack, after you deliver the drinks you stay out here. Misha and I have matters to discuss. Come along!”
    The bedroom was more Mrs. Mertz’s style—a dressing table with a mirrored top and flowered skirt, a high-backed upholstered chair, which she pointed me into, an unmade bed with pink sheets, and the smell of perfume and cosmetics.
    She went into the bathroom, left the door ajar, and talked from there. “Why didn’t you drive in with us this morning?”
    “I didn’t know you were coming in. Is Zina going with you to dinner?”
    “No. Are you having dinner with your father?”
    “No. I don’t know what Father is doing. Are you and Zina coming back tomorrow?”
    “I am. I don’t know about Zina. Your father’s picking me up at noon. Does he come to town to work?”
    “Mostly. Is Zina having dinner with anyone?”
    “Twenty-year-old girls tell their mothers as little as possible. Did your mother come in with you?”
    “No. Zina told me she was twenty-one.”
    “She will be. Your mother must hate being alone out there.”
    “She doesn’t mind if it’s not too often. Did Zina come in because she didn’t want to be alone?”
    “Your father said he was an insurance broker. I’m not sure what that is.”
    “He finds the right carrier for clients and the right clients for carriers. He’s not a salesman, he’s an insurance expert. He has his own business.” That’s the way it went. She wanted to talk about my father, and I wanted to talk about her daughter. “Are these Zina’s pictures on the wall?”
    Each photograph—there were ten of them, black-and-white— had a vase in the foreground in sharp focus and part of a female nude in the background out of focus. The point was playing the lines and planes off one another.
    “Yes, they’re Zina’s,” Mrs. Mertz said and poked her head in the bathroom doorway. “Do you recognize the body?”
    “Zina?”
    “No, darling. Moi. I hope you’re blushing.” She withdrew.
    I was blushing. Not because the pictures were of Mrs. Mertz, but because I had thought they were of Zina.
    Mr. Packard came in with our drinks, gave me mine, and blindly reached Mrs. Mertz’s into the bathroom.
    “You can look, Jack. Misha is out there, looking more or less at the same thing.”
    Mrs. Mertz came out, still in the kimono, nothing changed except she was barefoot. She took a small black dress from the closet and said, “Cover your eyes!” In a minute she said, “Look!” The dress was shiny and tight. There wasnothing to it. Otherwise she wore pearls and black high-heeled shoes. She posed for me, hands on hips, turning this way and that, but watching me. “What’s the verdict?”
    “Innocent.”
    “Not likely. Misha, let me see if I can tell what you’re thinking. You’re thinking Zina in jeans looks better. Right?”
    I nodded. Why not, she was right.
    “You’re thinking … you’re wondering if a time will ever come when you will really like a woman dressed like this.”
    She was exactly right.
    “What else? You’ll have to tell me, I can’t guess any more. You don’t have to be insulting, but there
is
something else.”
    “The hundred times I’ve seen my mother go out in the evening she never looked as good as you do now, is what I’m thinking.”
    “You
are
a charmer.”
    “It’s true.”
    “Yes, but you’re also thinking that nonetheless you prefer the way your mother looks. Don’t say anything! It’s too complicated. Come downstairs with us, we’ll drop you off wherever you’re going.”
    Back at Hillyer’s Melissa opened the door.
    It seems she had tried to get me at the Point, and Mother told her where I was. Melissa then called Hillyer