by James Jones
Still, there was Rosalie beside him, still waiting for him to ask her to go, so she could turn him down. Dewey had already ordered the new round. “Ginnie,” Dave said, “how would you like to go out with me tonight?”
For a moment, he thought Rosalie was going to break him in two.
“Who?” Ginnie said. “Me?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yeah. You.”
“Why, that would be most nice,” she said. “I’d love to.” Surprise was spreading slowly over her round face. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t have nothing doing tonight.”
“Well that’s fine,” Dave said. “I didn’t have nothing doing, either.”
“Well, I guess I better be getting home,” Rosalie said stiffly. “That makes me the extra at the party. And you know what that’s like. How much do I owe for my share?”
“Let it go,” Dave said magnanimously. “I’ll get it.”
“Why, thank you, Dave,” Rosalie said sweetly, and shouldered her muscular shoulders into her expensive coat. “I’ll see you-all.”
“You made a wise choice,” Dewey said, after she had left; “especially after asking Mildred first.”
If Ginnie Moorehead heard this, she gave no sign. She still appeared to be getting over her surprise.
“Here, Dave,” Hubie said. “You want to sit over here in front of Ginnie? Me and Martha’ll move and let you in.”
“No,” Dave said. “This is all right. I’ll just sit here on the end.” He moved into the seat Rosalie had vacated.
“Yes,” Ginnie said. “That’s all right. He can sit right there.”
“Well,” Dave said, “here’s to a pleasant evening.”
“I’ll sure drink to that,” Ginnie said.
They all drank to it. But after that things sort of settled into an unexciting routine. They drank that round of beers and another one, and ordered others. There wasn’t much general conversation. Both of the other girls were glum, and Ginnie was just naturally not scintillating. Every now and then, Dewey and Hubie would bring up anew the question of going back into the Army. They were both having the times of their lives. It wasn’t often they could get—and keep—such a strong upper hand over their girls. Perhaps it was because his mood had changed, but Dave no longer got much kick out of it. He tried desperately to think of something to talk to Ginnie about and felt upset because he couldn’t, although he had to admit it apparently made no difference to her whether she was talked to or not. Once, when Hubie and Dewey were discussing enlisting again, he mentioned ’Bama just to sort of be in on things.
“Why don’t you ask ’Bama what he thinks about it?”
“That son of a bitch,” Dewey snorted. “There’s no point askin him. He thinks anybody’s crazy who would have anything to do with the Army voluntarily. I know what he’d say.”
It was not long after this that, in the back of the room, Raymond Cole exploded again, like a bad bottle of beer going off and scattering foam and bits of glass. One moment all was quiet, the next Raymond had stood up bellowing, upsetting both his own chair and the little round table of beer bottles. The only understandable words were: “I’ll beat the living hell out of all of them before I’ll . . .” The rest was lost in the confusion as his two friends grasped him each by an arm and hustled him, struggling, up front and out the door. “Be back pay you later,” one of them said breathlessly to Smitty who was standing behind the bar as they passed.
“I don’t know why I keep on serving Raymond,” Smitty said to nobody, as he looked after them. “I guess I’m just softhearted. Someday Sherm Ruedy’s going to catch him.” Sherm Ruedy was chief of police in Parkman; Dave had already heard about him from ’Bama, almost none of it good.
“Glad it was them instead of me,” Gus Nernst laughed to Dewey from across the back of the booth. “Tonight’s my night off.”
“Who were those two guys?” Dave asked Dewey.
Dewey had been looking after his brother disgustedly. “Couple friends of Raymond’s. Old Army buddies. Served in the 132nd with him.”
The one-armed Eddie had already gone back to clean up the debris. In a little while, he came over to their booth grinning with another round Dewey had ordered.
“Raymond’s not in very good form tonight, is he?” he grinned. “Didn’t even hit one guy before they collared him.”
“Aaanh,” Dewey said contemptuously. He took some money out of Lois’s purse and paid him.
“Look,” Eddie grinned; “put a quarter down on the table.”
Dewey looked up at him uncomprehendingly.
“A quarter,” Eddie said. “I’ll show you something.”
Dewey did as he was asked.
“Now watch this,” Eddie grinned. He lowered his hooks, spread open, over the quarter until their curved centers touched the table, then carefully brought them together on it. Slowly, he lifted the quarter, holding it by its milled edges, and then flipped it and caught it in his other hand.
“How about that,” he grinned. “Pretty good, hunh? Been practicing up on my tip collecting.” He put the quarter back on the table.
“By God, that is!” Dewey said. “That’s pretty damned good!”
Eddie laughed then tilted his tray rakishly on the plam of his good hand. He winked at Dave, then dropped his hand out from under his tray, catching it by its edge as it fell, and went back to the bar.
Dave was hit again suddenly—to the accompaniment of Stravinski’s The Rite of Spring—by that powerful, depressive feeling of living in the last days of the Roman Empire, that he had felt here before and that Raymond Cole and the one-armed Eddie seemed to have a peculiar power to evoke in him. These were the Plebs, he thought looking around the booth. The maimed veterans of the Legions, the shopkeepers without shops, the wives without husbands, the whores without cribs. The teeming life-loving life-devouring ant heap of the Forum, living their lives out in the taverns and the occasional circus given them for their vote, hooting at the false virtue of their leaders—but their willing prey nonetheless—and trying hard to forget the barbarian hordes gathering like a thunderhead in the horizons of the north.
And out at the Country Club tonight, the leaders. The vain energetic Caesars, the vain weakling Pompeys, the vain shrewd-politico Augustuses, their heads in a bottle, and talking to each other about how virtuously to handle the people, for the people’s own best virtuous good. We love the people virtuously. We serve the people virtuously. We virtuously ask nothing for ourselves—except the virtuous power to virtuously save the people from themselves.
All of them, all, both here and there, all little bricks in the crumbling edifice of the unbearable twilight of the age; while the barbarian wind sweeps down chilling from the north.
Probably, Frank was out there right now. Frank was a leader, he thought wanting to roar with unbearable twilight laughter, his brother Frank was a leader.
“What’s the matter, Davie boy?” a strange voice came in on him suddenly, cooing with dull coyness. He looked up startled. “You feel bad? You got the blues, Davie boy?” Ginnie Moorehead said.
“Damn it, don’t call me Davie!” he exploded. “Don’t ever call me Davie! I hate that name!”
Ginnie’s round face appeared to crumple into frightened chaos, from which her eyes peered forth like a hunted rabbit’s. “Well, God, I was only tryin to make—I didn’t mean to—” she stammered, and then gave up and merely sat, peering at him defenselessly.
Everybody in the booth had turned to look at him with surprise, and the sort of dumb frightened guilt on Ginnie’s face left him stricken.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I was thinkin.”
“Thinkin about what?” Dewey said.
“Thinkin about life, damn it!”
Dewey grinned. “Well; that’s enough to make any one of us holler like we was jabbed with a pin.”
“It’s just that I don’t like that name,” Dave explained. “Everybody used to call me that when I was little, like I was some kind of a pet dog or m
ascot. Or their personal possession. I never have liked it.”
“Oh, that’s all right, Dave,” Ginnie said, smiling at him dully. Whatever it was, the terror, was beginning to recede from her eyes now. “I didn’t know. I won’t call you that no more.”
“I think we better get out of here,” Dave said, rubbing his hand hard over his face. “How about it, Ginnie? You ready to go?” He got out his wallet and put six ones on the table. “That should be enough.”
“Any time you are, Dave,” she said.
“’Bama tells me you’re workin on a book now,” Dewey said to him suddenly.
“Yeah,” Dave said reluctantly. “That’s right.”
“Was that what you were thinkin about a minute ago?” Dewey said.
Dave turned back to look at him. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it was.”
Dewey nodded. “I figured it was.”
“Let me out of here, please, Lois and Dewey, will you?” Ginnie said. They got up.
“This book,” Dewey said. “Is it about Parkman?”
Dave shook his head. “No.”
“I thought maybe it was,” Dewey said. “Well, somebody ought to write one about this damned town.” He grinned that glitter-eyed rebellious grin of his.
“Let’s you and me do it, Dewey,” Hubie said. “We can write it in our spare time after we get back in the Army.” Martha Garvey turned her head to scowl at him, and he grinned.
“This is where I came in,” Dave said. “Well, we will see you-all.”
“Yeah,” Ginnie said from beside him. “We’ll see you-all.”
“Sure. Come back anytime,” Dewey grinned. “I reckon we’ll be here. If Lois’s money holds out, that is.”
Dave nodded at him, and made himself grin a little, as he escorted the short dumpy Ginnie to the door. He was aware of a sort of lull behind him in the place, as everyone more or less stopped what they were doing for a second and watched to see who was taking whom out. This made him inordinately happy, with a kind of savage pleasure, a sort of deliciously enjoyed vulgarity, and he took the rotund Ginnie by the arm so all could see. Ginnie positively beamed. He only hoped damned Edith Barclay was watching from her back booth with her Harold. Watching; and thinking about it. Make it harold, he amended: lower case: from her back booth with her harold.
Outside, he led the apparently very happy Ginnie to the Plymouth.
Sure didn’t take much to make her happy, did it? One of the advantages of being dumb. In the car, he drove her back to the Douglas Hotel. It was the “Hotel Francis Parkman,” but it was the “Douglas Hotel.” Funny, what myriad minute forms our snobbisms took in permeating everything, he thought.
“I thought we’d go to my room at the Douglas,” he said as he rounded the square. “I don’t know of anywhere else to go. I—I guess it’ll be all right. I’ve never taken anybody there before, though.” He looked at her hesitantly.
“Oh, yes, it’ll be all right,” Ginnie said. “That old night man, he don’t care,” she said. “Nor the day man, neither, for that matter, honey.”
Chapter 32
SHE WAS QUITE RIGHT. The night man merely looked up, once, with his countryman’s flattened eyes, then looked back down at his magazine, thereby replacing his face with the pink top of his bald head which, eyeless, continued to stare at them.
As they walked across the lobby that was divided slightly (into Office and Lounge) by the old frame staircase, Dave rather wistfully wished he had as much aplomb about it as Ginnie had. In the room, after first pulling the blind, Dave got out a fifth of whiskey and set it on the table. When he turned around, trying desperately to think of some adequate way to begin operations, Ginnie put her fat arms around him and kissed him on the mouth.
They disrobed in silent unison and then just as silently went to bed. It was as simple as that, he thought with astonishment.
And for one night in his life, at least—well, perhaps not the first time; but certainly the first in a long time—Dave had his fill of sex. He was not only filled, he was runneth over, saturated, and thoroughly bored with sex. He found, to his irritated surprise, it did not relieve him near as much as he had earlier thought it would.
Sitting exhaustedly in the single armchair after the first ferocious session in the bed, her eyeballs red from fatigue and from liquor, Ginnie stared at him with a look almost of anxiety on her fat face while she sipped at her whiskey, suddenly began to talk about her life with a speed and energy Dave would not have up to now believed her capable of. She rattled off a story whose sole interruptions nearly, were the other three times they went to bed, and which began with her earliest thoughts and childhood dreams and continued through her school years and right on up to the present, and she was still rattling it off with no apparent diminishment when Dave finally fell asleep, exhausted.
The upshot of what she had to say was that she liked sex. She began with this, and came back to it a number of times, and every time she said it a look of anxious guilt came over her face as she peered at him to see his reaction. She not only liked it, she said, she loved it.
“Well,” Dave said, “there’s no law that says women shouldn’t like sex. That I know of.”
“Maybe not,” Ginnie said, still peering at him. “I don’t know what the law says. But everybody sure acts like there’s one. I’ll say that.”
“Well,” Dave qualified, “I suppose there is some kind of law about immorality. About adultery. Which means, I guess,” he said gently, feeling she might need explanation of these terms, “sleeping with someone you’re not married to. If you try to pin it down.”
Ginnie nodded. “That’s the one.” She continued to peer at him with her reddened eyeballs, merely observing.
“But just about everybody does that,” Dave said. He could not figure out what she was trying to get at. It wasn’t that she was afraid of him turning her in to the police. She knew better than that. It must be something else.
“Sure,” Ginnie said. “But some gets by with it and some doesn’t,” she added. “And, looks like, I’m one of the ones nobody don’t never want to get by with it.”
“That’s probably due to the respectable women,” Dave said. “Who would probably all like to do what you’re doin, but are afraid to take a chance on tryin it.”
One corner of her small mouth lifted itself up in a sneer. “Sure. That’s who hates me. You think I don’t know all the ‘respectable’ women in this town hates me? But what’s wrong with a woman likin sex? That shouldn’t be bad,” she said, peering at him, again, as if studying him for some reaction she either hoped for or expected.
And yet in spite of that, she went on, she loved sex. All her life she had. Even her earliest thoughts and her dreams as a little kid, she said, had been all about sex. She knew that now, although then she had not known what sex was all about. She told him some of them, such as the daydreams she used to have even as a little kid about how there had been a contest and she had won first prize for having the biggest titties in the county.
She told him other ones, too. Dave could see where they all could have had to do with sex per se; but he could also see where they might actually have had nothing to do with sex per se at all, but been only childish hungerings for attention and affection, and she herself only construed them as that, as sex, later.
It was really very interesting. In her dull, almost mechanical voice, Ginnie talked on, staring at him intently. Dave was interested in spite of himself. He would listen awhile, and then shut off his ears and think about it awhile (but still keeping his eyes on her, of course). It was like being able for the first time to go completely inside a woman’s head, because Ginnie apparently had almost no self-conscious awareness. In that, she was totally animal. God, he wished he could get Edith Barclay to talk to him like this; or even Gwen.
They interrupted Ginnie’s flood of words long enough to go to bed the second time, after which Ginnie got up immediately, almost as if she begrudged the time spent, got herself more whiskey,
sat down in the chair, and staring dully at him, began to talk again.
She had lost her virginity at twelve—in the fifth grade—she told him, when her stepfather had made her do it with him in the barn. Wasn’t that terrible? They were very poor, you see, and lived on a crummy little farm just south of town, and her stepfather seduced her in that barn there, and she had liked it even then. Actually, she did not say “seduced”; but she did not say “raped,” either; she said, again, “made her do it with him;” and her whole point was that she had liked it even then.
Well, when she was in the seventh grade—that was five years later, and she was almost seventeen—that was when the trouble came. Her and another girl had been sneakin off to Terre Haute and goin out with fellows over there, and one of them given her a dose of clap. She hadn’t even of known she was sick. Well, her stepfather got her a date with a friend of his, and she not knowing nothing about it went out with him and give it to him. Well, he went to the doctor and he told on her, and the doctor told the judge and they got the truant officer and the health officer and that son of a bitch Sherm Ruedy come down to the school and arrested her and, well, in the end they sent her and the other girl away to a state girls’ school for a year.
“What did they do with the guy?” Dave asked. He had almost fallen asleep twice.