by James Jones
“Well, if that ain’t the damnedest weirdest thing I ever took part in,” Wally said to Dawn after the others had both gone.
Dawn merely grinned at him excitedly. “When are you going up and sit in with the band?”
Wally made a face. “Not now. There’s too many people here. Wait’ll it thins out, later on. Then I’ll sit in on piano and have them take ‘Willow’ over. I know that one pretty good.”
So they sat and drank some more beer, and danced, and gradually the majority of the customers left. When he did go up to the bandstand later on, he noted that Doris Fredric was standing up at the bar talking to ’Bama. He caught the word poker. The petite cherry-headed Doris was looking up at ’Bama with a demure child’s expression. And ’Bama, with his semi-western hat, tall and with that tiny hanging belly, a reserved wry expression on his usually sneering face, suddenly looked a lot, Wally thought, like Gary Cooper. The two men—Wally looked to see—were still sitting in the booth.
Well, he thought, it’s things like this that make the world interesting and exciting. Puzzles.
He knew he ought to be getting home, and not drink too much, or get involved with a jam session. So he would be able to get up fresh and clearheaded and work tomorrow. It was a constant battle.
But he was still there, with Dawn, at nearly midnight when Doris Fredric left with her two men. Doris had had a number of drinks by then, and her eyes were a little glazed and puffy, but she still looked girlish and innocent and virginal. He had wanted so damn bad to stay and see what happened. But apparently nothing had happened. ’Bama and Dewey and their Terre Haute broads were still there, and they did not get up and leave after Doris had.
Wally collected Dawn and went home; and ’Bama and Dewey and their women were still there when he left.
Chapter 26
THE WEEKEND DAVE HIRSH had made up his mind not to spend at the Frenches’ turned out to be one of the pleasantest, most peaceful times he had ever had in his life after he changed his mind. He wouldn’t have missed it for anything. Especially, when looked back upon later. Because by then, it appeared as the last brief respite before the storm of the taxi service—a sort of ironic red herring, to trick men into false hope and not giving up, just at the time when Life or Fate, or Whoever it was, was secretly and gleefully preparing to lower the boom of misery on them.
He had lain in bed all day Friday, trying to sleep and failing, and waiting miserably for his damned body to throw off all the alcohol he had poured into it; three-fourths sick, still chilled from the night in the cornfield, and already hungover even before he was sober. It was one of those deep, bad hangovers in which a tight-drawn dehydration and some subtle deterioration at the base of the skull combined to make everything unearthly and strange, including yourself. Finally, in desperation, he had gotten up and dressed and driven back over to Israel, dead for sleep, to accept their invitation. They had forced a couple of martinis down him and fed him, and then the three of them had sat up in front of the fire until after one, discussing his novel and trying to lay out a form for it; and he discovered with amazement that he was no longer sleepy—and hardly even sick.
Everything seemed to smooth itself all out suddenly. There were no worries, and there were no fears. He seemed to have fallen into a state of complete desirelessness, and therefore of peace. Of course, it was only a mood. But it was a damned good mood. And that was the way it stayed for the next two days.
A great deal of the weekend’s success, he was quite sure, was due to the fact that he had discovered the secret of Gwen’s nymphomania. Knowing it, he was relieved of all pressure. The natural element of doubt, which you had with every woman, was gone. All he had to do was be patient, and wait, until one of her moods hit her, and then he wouldn’t have to seduce her, she would seduce him. It was unbelievable how much it put the mind at rest.
Actually, there had been damned few peaceful times in his life. Without being more than only a little bit dishonest, he could say there were none. At least, he could not remember any. He had always been running after some damned woman or other. Drive, drive, drive. Trying to engage in some damned love affair he could not engage in; or which if he did, soon deteriorated so rapidly and left him right back where he started. But now all that was gone; for the time being anyway. He was momentarily at peace, and consequently his long weekend at Last Retreat was as though he had gone clear off the planet somewhere, to Bacon’s New Atlantis Utopia or someplace.
He slept late. He drank little. He listened to music. He walked along the river bluff with Bob or with Gwen or both, breathing in the chill November air. He played chess with Bob in front of the fire, at which he was soundly and consistently beaten; or he played with Gwen, who also beat him, making him re-swear an unkept resolution to himself that he would study up and really learn the game like they knew it. And he ate ravenously, of those strange delicious meals which Gwen seemed to throw together from practically nothing. But mostly he talked, with one or both of them, and the constant subject was this novel of his. The conversations ranged, widely, but always they came back to the novel. Gwen had told Bob his idea—the comic combat novel—and Bob was enthused and excited about it. He agreed with Gwen that it was brilliant; and he agreed with Gwen that the thing to do now was to find a proper form for it, the right mold. Not a rigid plot-mold, you know? That would never do. But a channel, rather; some simple time-plan form which would give him a beginning and an end to work toward so he would not dissipate himself all over the place, while at the same time leaving him plenty of room to move around within it. And he agreed with Gwen and Dave both that there should be no hero. No hero and no heroine and no love story. Don’t complexify it; this was not a big, long character novel, with personal plots. The beauty of the idea was in its simplicity. And half of your striking power would be in the simplicity and shortness of it, in the simplicity of the story itself and of its presentation. Bob was very excited. When he would get to talking, he would stride his long-legged frame back and forth across the room, forgetting the chess game, calm, and quiet, and the bright vital eyes snapping. It must have continuity, it must progress. What kind of form, then, to give it? If the people themselves are incidental? Oh, it is my move? Ah! you shouldn’t have moved that bishop there, my dear Dave.The three of them struggled with it all day Saturday, through two meals, three chess games, and four walks outside. In the end, it was Gwen who came up with the idea of patterning it somewhat on George R Stewart’s book, Storm. There, too, she said, the people were only incidental; the protagonist was the storm itself. Did Dave know the book? There was a copy of it here someplace that he could take home with him. The main point was that the life of the storm, from its birth in the Pacific to its death across the mountains, formed the framework and the continuity.
Bob agreed excitedly. And so did Dave; he began at once to elaborate it. It was really ludicrously simple. All he had to do was take an organization, preferably a green one, and follow it through some campaign from its first combat to—well, to the end: the end of the campaign, or the relief of the organization, or—perhaps—to the final replacement of the last man who had been with the original outfit. But in this case, instead of the organization itself being the protagonist and hero, the main character would be the experience of combat itself—but controlled by the humorousness and comicality of death and war, as opposed to the usual solemn heroism and horribleness that everyone affected. And that would be what would make it shocking. Actually, it was all really very simple.
It was strange, he thought, the labyrinthine complexities of thought people had to wander through in order to come up with a simple idea. And the simpler the idea you wanted, the greater the complexities you seemed to have to go through to get it.
It had been a long time since Dave had felt in himself or seen in others that almost religious love of writing, and completely selfless abstract enthusiasm for it, that writing could sometimes give to people. He had had it once or twice, as a young man, but even then it h
ad been all tied up with ego. But here today there was no ego; it did not matter—to any of them—whose name would be on the book, who would get the money for it, who contributed the best ideas, or who contributed the least; all that mattered was that the book existed—existed now as an idea, and was about to be created as a fact. It filled him with a wild, euphoric happiness that made him want to yell out loud and slap them both on the back.
Here all that mattered was the work; and that was the essence of true creativity: just the work. The hell with the ego. Oh, how he wished he could take her to bed right now. He could show her what a lover really was. She’d never had a lover. He could really love her. High and enthusiastic and half drunk without a drink in him on his own creativity, he made notes and talked, talked and made notes, using Bob and Gwen as sounding boards to spread his ideas out before and throw his ideas against; and it was amazing what new ideas came to him, pungent visions and pertinent correlations he had never seen all four years in the Army. Right now he could hardly wait to get home and get started on the writing of it.
And yet in spite of all the exuberance, there was still that calm feeling of a peaceful weekend, and it permeated everything. Naturally, on Sunday, everything tapered off. Sunday couldn’t help but be an anticlimax. Nevertheless the ideas were there, the notes were down, the results existed.
As Bob said with a wry smile: “Now all you’ve got to do is write it.”
But it was a very peaceful anticlimax, Sunday. It was on Sunday that Dave accidentally made a discovery which puzzled him at first, but eventually convinced him more than ever that his basic theory about Gwen’s nymphomania was correct.
Wandering around the house (they had shown him the rest of the house before, at which he had discovered, as he had expected, that it was not nearly in so bad a shape as they had led him to believe), he had picked off a shelf a copy of Huneker’s Painted Veils.
It had been a long time since he had read the book. At the time, he had read it mainly for the sex in it, but he could remember the rococo overly arty style, and it was interesting to look at it and speculate back. Dave leafed through the book, and that was when he made his discovery. And it shook him.
The book had Gwen’s name written on the flyleaf, and on page 46 in the same hand was a margin note. It was the scene of the “Holy Yowler” orgy of whiskey, religion, and sex. Just before it, where the hero is being amused at the drunk whore Roarin’ Nell, the writer (Gwen, it obviously was) had underlined the sentence, and in the margin written: “Horrible! Men always love to degrade women, don’t they!” And on the margin of the next page—where the orgy itself was in progress—was written in large, no uncertain words: “EVIL! THIS MAN IS EVIL!”
For a moment, Dave was shocked dead-still. There was no way he could correlate this to the Gwen French he knew—or thought he knew? The woman who had had so many love affairs, the woman to whom sex was a familiar, ordinary occurrence, surely could not have written this. This sounded more like some virgin spinster. And if there was anything which Gwen French was not, it was a spinster.
He put the book back in its place and stood staring its spine, feeling guilty as if he had been caught window peeping, and at the same time casting around wildly for an explanation. But of course, it all did fit in, really. That sense of “EVIL!” which obviously came from inside the writer of the note herself, only went to prove his theory. Just like how Gwen would go for weeks, for months, even, without any sex; trying to dominate it, trying to be pure; and then, when the pressure got too much for her, would kick over and throw a real blaster; and then crawl off to a corner, to gnaw her own guilts and sense of “EVIL!” It was the classic nymphomaniacal type, wasn’t it?
Feeling considerably better, now he’d worked it out, he turned to go back to the big kitchen, where Gwen and Bob were battling out a hard fought game of chess. Cherchez la mom! he thought, feeling as epigrammatical as Huneker. It was always the mother. Dear mom. Mothers might not lead happy lives, but they never let it hamper them from doing their job well, and installing that good old guilt that ruined everybody else’s.
He supposed he would have to go up and see his own goddamned mother, eventually, now that he would be staying in town. Dear Frank would insist on it.
In the kitchen, where Bob and Gwen sat at the chess table before the fireplace, he sat down to kibitz, still feeling more relaxed and completely peaceful than he had felt in years. Gwen was slowly but surely getting beaten at the chess. He sat back and let the afternoon slip lazily and luxuriously past him.
Monday morning, after a sound night’s sleep—his second in a row—and feeling like a different man from the Dave Hirsh of Friday, he called Frank at the store in Parkman.
“Where the hell have you been?” Frank wanted to know.
“Been? Why?”
“I’ve been tryin to get hold of you for days, that’s why!”
“I’ve been over here in Israel visiting the Frenches.”
There was a moment’s pause. “Oh,” Frank said. He sounded surprised. “No wonder I couldn’t get hold of you. I’ve called just about everyplace else in the county.”
“What for? What do you want?”
“I wanted you to help me get the taxi service in shape to start operating, that was all,” Frank said sarcastically.
“Well, I’ll be over there in a half hour and help you,” Dave said. It was like coming out from under the water and taking off your face mask and looking at a totally different world, and realizing this and not the other was the real one.
“I already gone done it,” Frank said disgustedly. “It’s all ready—as soon as you can get here and start workin.”
“Then I’ll meet you at the store,” Dave said, “in half an hour.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “Well, no,” he added. “Meet me at the taxi office instead. You know where it is? It’s on Plum Street, right behind the Foyer poolroom. No point in wastin time in comin here,” he added.
“Okay, then I’ll meet you there.”
“The drivers probably already be there,” Frank said. “I told them to report Monday morning. Before I found out I wasn’t goin to be able to get ahold of you.”
His voice sounded disgruntled and accusative and Dave did not bother trying to answer him. He just said goodby and hung up.
As he collected his belongings—not a hard job, since they consisted only of the clothes on his back, a stack of notes on the novel, and a shaving kit—he wanted very badly not to leave. It was not that he had really forgotten Frank and the taxi service; but he had removed them to where they existed only in his mind; and there he could control them. Now they were back full-force, in their own right.
Gwen had already left for school and he had said goodby to her then, at which time she had sternly admonished him to get right to work on the book while it was all still fresh. Now he took his leave of Bob—who was in old work clothes puttering around in his tool house out back—and for a moment he felt as if he actually, physically, could not leave. Bob must have understood how he felt, because he grinned wryly and invited him to come back any weekend or any other time, and to stay as long as he felt like. It was a very grand and very generous invitation, and what was more he knew Bob meant it. The secluded lovely yard with its big tall oaks and sycamores did not increase his pleasure at leaving a damned bit, either, as he walked to his car. He set out for Parkman in the little Plymouth with a feeling of going resolutely to meet his destiny, his miserable damned destiny.
As he drove out to the highway, something else was bothering him. He had discovered he wanted his money back, during this weekend. It was more important to him than he thought, in spite of his damned carefree gesture of throwing it away for a chance at Gwen French. He liked the feeling of having enough of it in his pocket and knowing there was more in the bank if he needed it. Apparently, in a business, you were still nominally the owner of your own money—in other words, you were still worth just as much—but you didn’t have access to any of it, and th
erefore it was just the same as if you didn’t have it. Well, if that was what business was like, the hell with business. Hell, if he had known the truth about Gwen French, he needn’t have turned his money over to Frank at all. But now, now the only thing he knew to do was to throw himself wholly and bodily into making this taxi service such a damned big success that he could eventually get his money back and get out; and the nervousness made him eager.
However, it turned out to be more bodily throwing than he had bargained for. From the moment he got out of his car in front of the little ex-lunch stand Frank had leased, he found himself submerged in a miserable, half-dead half-alive, hectic existence of work that was so demanding he hardly even found time to sleep, let alone write anything, and which lasted—the worst part—for over two weeks, and then continued on only slightly better for over a month until he finally rebelled.
The main thing was they had not hired any relief for him; consequently, he had to work from seven in the morning until after eleven-thirty at night, seven days a week. He even had to have all his meals except breakfast sent in. The other thing was that Frank had not thought to provide any system of bookkeeping or accounts except for some ready-made dispatcher’s forms he’d picked up somewhere and which in the end turned out to be so much more bother and time consumption than they were worth that they were discarded completely. As a result, he who had never done a damned bit of clerical work in his life, was left without any knowledge or system or records except some wildly scrawled junk in a spiral notebook that even he couldn’t read. A third thing, which no one could have foreseen, was that the taxi service caught on tremendously almost from the first day. Whether Parkman actually needed a taxi service or not, Parkman believed it needed one; and the result was the same. Frank had advertised the opening date in both the Republican and Democrat papers, and calls started coming in right away the very first day. Apparently, there was a large number of elderly women who could not, or did not like to drive, and an equal number of younger women whose husbands took their cars to work and left them no way to shop. These ladies provided an immediate backlog of business. Nobody knew how they had managed before “Frank’s Taxi Service”—as the firm was immediately dubbed by the town, despite the red checkered band on the cars—came along to save them.