You Live Once by John D. MacDonald Page A

I dropped Dodd off first. Mary Olan didn’t move over next to the door after he got out. She stayed pleasantly and encouragingly close to me, the side of her leg touching mine. I took her out to the Pryor place where I had picked her up. Though a lot of the old line families have stayed down in the shady quiet streets of town, a few, such as Willy Pryor, have built out in the country. It has a stone wall, a bronze sign, a quarter mile of curving drive before you get toit. Probably the outmoded term for it would be a machine for living. You know the type—all dramatics. Dramatic window walls, dramatic bare walls, dramatic vistas. Two floodlighted pieces of statuary—one all sheet aluminum and the other a grey stone woman with spider limbs and great holes right through her where breasts should have been. The architects do fine, they can really set up a place. The only trouble is that no one has been similarly occupied redesigning people. Such machines cannot sit in sterile functional perfection. We people have to move in—bringing, of course, our unmodified belch, our unreconstructed dandruff, our enlarged pores and our sweaty love.
    I parked and Mary made no move toward the door handle, so I gathered her in and kissed her. She hesitated for a stilted second and then baked the enamel on my teeth. She was no pulpy junior miss. She brought to the task at hand a nice interplay of musculature, a crowding enthusiasm, and the durability and implacability of a Marciano. She stopped all clocks except the one in the blood, so that on terminus, I was dimly startled to find myself merely sitting in my own automobile.
    “You’re an agreeable monster, Sewell,” she said softly.
    “Likewise.”
    “You should get a bonus for overtime.”
    “A truly obscure remark,” I said, pretending young innocence.
    “Would, Sewell, that I were a touch more charitable and I would make of myself a suitable bonus, because I suspect you are a nice guy who deserves a better deal than you are getting.”
    “Tonight is my night to be told I’m a nice guy. How do I go about arousing your charitable instincts, lady?”
    She permitted a second flanking operation. During same I investigated traditionally, hopefully, a breast warm and classic. She rebanked her fires and extricated lips and breast, putting a cold foot of distance betwixt us.
    “No sale, Sewell.”
    “Anything my best friends have neglected to tell me?”
    “Nope. You are a fine crew-cut, long-limbed specimen of young American manhood, my dear.”
    “They why?”
    “Don’t ask it with a pout. I guess it is because you are what you are. For a man to intrigue me he must have a wide streak of son-of-a-bitch.”
    “I can work on that.”
    “Hardly.”
    “Could you force yourself?”
    She reached a quick hand and knuckled the top of my head. “That would be pure charity, sweets, and you have too much pride for that, don’t you?”
    “And the next line is let us be good friends.”
    “Seriously, I’d like that, Clint. I need a good friend.”
    I sighed with resignation. “Okay, what do you want to do with your good friend on the morrow.”
    “Wouldst go to church with me, sir?”
    It was quite the last thing I expected. “Yes. Of course.”
    “Pick me up here at twenty of eleven then.”
    I walked her to her door. She smiled up at me. “You
are
sweet.”
    “Then pat me on the head, damn it.”
    “Temper, temper! Kiss goodnight.”
    As that kiss ended I took revenge with my long right arm. She yelped and took a cut at me and missed. As I drove home I knew that if she had a full-length mirror and looked back down over her shoulder within the next ten minutes, she could admire a nice distinct hand print.
    Looking back I can count over twenty dates with her, including the time at the motel and the last one on the night of Saturday, May fifteenth. But not including that last ride we took together, up into the hills. Date from which she would not return.

chapter 4
    Nancy and I