“Diva XVI”

The room was dark, womblike, and comfortable with the familiar scents of her perfume, cigarette smoke, and sex. Ellie lay on her back, staring toward a ceiling she couldn’t actually see, and one word slurred into the next as she spoke to no one in particular.

“I was almost married, once.”

He answered drowsily from the sheets next to her. “You mean to someone else?”

“His name was Alfred.”

“I’ve never heard you mention him before.”

“Couldn’t talk about it.”

“Do you want to talk now?”

She took a deep drag on her cigarette and let the smoke out through her nose. “I’d rather have another Scotch.”

“We’re out.”

“Shit,” she said before she took another drag.

Movement on her left suggested that he’d propped himself on an elbow to peer in her direction, though the dark was as impenetrable from his side of the bed as it was from hers. “Tell me what happened,” he coaxed. “Did you dump him?”

“He died,” she said.

“Jesus, Ellie ... I’m sorry. That was stupid.”

“It sure was,” she replied, though she wasn’t referring to his ill-timed joke. She took another puff and started to ramble, lapsing without realizing into her childhood drawl. “We were both really young and my aunt wasn’t crazy about me marryin’ a cowboy, so Alfred enlisted to give her some time. He reckoned joinin’ the army would make him respectable to my folks, and I’d be old enough to wed when he got back from his postin’. I was scared to death they’d send him straight into the war, but when they sent him to Hawaii instead, I thought my prayers had been answered. I prayed a lot back then; I sorta had to under the circumstances, but I really meant it when I prayed for God to keep Alfred safe. When he told me where he was goin’, I thought, Lord Almighty, you’re the best! You know? Hawaii was on the other side of the world from where the action was; it seemed a sure thing he’d come back and we’d be married soon as he stepped off the train. But two months after he left, the Japs bombed Pearl Harbour ... an’ that was that.”

Silence from the other side of the bed. She wondered if he had fallen asleep, until she felt his lips form a soft kiss on her shoulder. “Jesus, Ellie,” he repeated in a low voice, “I’m so sorry.”

She shrugged, grateful for the numbing amount of booze in her bloodstream. “I wasn’t good enough for him, I guess.”

“Not good enough? Who told you that?”

Immediately, Auntie’s voice echoed in Ellie’s head though she chose not to answer the question. “It’s as well,” she said instead. “If I’d a-married Alfred then, I wouldn’t be a movie star now.”

“That’s probably true, but did you want to be a movie star?”

“Hell, yeah. Doesn’t every girl?”

“I thought every girl wants to be married.”

Laughter mingled with the smoke she blew from her nose. “Now that’s stupid. Why be married when I can do whoever I want?”

“Is that why you’re not marrying Seward?”

She said nothing, just lay and smoked until ash scorched her fingers.

“Bond? Does he have any idea where you are?”

Ellie rolled away to grind her cigarette into the bedside ashtray, then rolled back again, into his arms. “Shut up, Swain,” she drawled, coiling one leg around his hip. “Shut up and fuck me again.”