by James Jones
“Do I get to kiss the bride?” Wally said gallantly.
“You certainly do!” she said. “If anybody does!” And just for a moment, her lips brushed his own, cool, relaxed, the perfect kiss of friendliness for an old childhood pal. Then he went on, down through the bridesmaids, not seeing any of them, really, and when he reached the end of the line, he looked around vaguely, the memory of those cool lips that just brushed his own, and misery and anguish descended upon him again like a cloak. And once again, his heart sunk down in him so low that he was reasonably sure it was now a hemorrhoid. Then numbness engulfed him.
His mom was over at the tables, getting a glass of champagne, and as he moved over there, she moved off. She did not drink the champagne, she only held it; and moved off talking pleasantly to some of the hoard of relatives, all of whom she knew. He supposed you had to give her credit in a way; but God! she sickened him. He got a glass of champagne himself, but he drank his. There were cases and cases of it, overflowing out through the french doors behind the table. This thing must be costing Frank a regular fortune. With his glass, he moved over to the center of the room to talk to Frank and Harry Shotridge.
Frank, already a little tight, threw his arm around Wally affectionately. Wally was suddenly just as equally sure, as he had been with Agnes, that Frank did not know. Frank offered him one of his big Churchills, which Wally took and stuck in his jacket pocket.
While he talked, and moved around, and got another glass of champagne, he kept an eye out on his mom. Finally, she gave him the nod and he drained off the rest of the glass and went over to her. She made her wailful excuses to the two mothers at the door, and he followed her out.
“You’re coming back, aren’t you, Wally?” Agnes asked. “I’m sorry about Marg. Do come back.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’ll be back.”
And after he had driven her home, he did go back. More just to be away from his mom than anything else. Anyway, what the hell, he thought a little bit tight himself, there was all that damned champagne still there to be drunk, wasn’t there?
As the reception lingered along, and more and more guests kept coming in, he drank more and more champagne and wandered around talking to this one and that. He was amazed at how totally painless he felt. He got one of the first pieces of the cake, and washed it down with champagne. Once or twice, he even spoke to Dawnie and to Shotridge, when they happened to appear somewhere in front of him. It was nothing much, just a pleasant word or two. He had had his little moment, in the receiving line. That was all he could really ask for. Wasn’t it? He talked to more people, and drank more champagne, playing the role of the happy best-male-childhood-friend of the bride. Finally, when he realized he was getting a little tight, he decided he had better go. But it was amazing, how really totally painless he felt.
And it was then, while he was thinking that amazed thought once again, that a sudden black bubble of fury burbled up through him and burst, drenching the inside of his head with a wash of black burning acid. He stood for a moment by himself, looking all around, imagining the scene he could create if he wanted to. Then, wisely, he turned and left, slipping out quietly by himself.
The pain, which he had been waiting and waiting for, started the moment he was outside in the fresh cool spring air. That was when he went down to Dave’s and ’Bama’s. It was the only place he knew to go. But nothing there helped him, either.
When he woke up the next morning, lying on the couch in their living room, he remembered vaguely that he had been told about ’Bama running Doris Fredric off, that he and Dave had sat up and drank, that he had insulted Rosalie and she had left, that he had sat up alone and drank after Dave had gone off to bed. Nothing had changed. The pain inside him burned and scalded until he wanted to fall down on the floor and writhe and twist.
Dave and ’Bama were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee when he went out there, but they were not real. Nothing seemed real. He sat down and tried to talk with them, and drank a cup of coffee, and the pain inside him seared and burned. He had never felt anything like this. Finally, he got up and left and shaky and hungover drove his mom’s old car, which was not real, up Route 1 which was not real to the West Lancaster road, which was not real. But before he had gone on down the gravel road to the west, which was not real, more than a mile or so, he lost his nerve and turned around and went back before he ever got to the woods. Where would they be now? Hadn’t somebody said they were going to Chicago for a week’s honeymoon before going back to school? Maybe they were already there. He had talked with her once about going to Chicago, long ago. But they never had.
This was not the kind of pain he imagined a lost love affair gave. This was, in short, not the kind of pain he had bargained for.
He drove the car home and went upstairs to his room. Luckily, he did not have to see his mom. His suit was rumpled from last night and he had spilled whiskey on it down at Dave’s. He took it off and got it ready to send to the cleaners. When he did see his mom later, he told her he had been out celebrating with a bunch of the boys from the wedding. She did not argue with him, and he knew why. And also, in addition, she was not real anyway. And all the time, this pain seared and burned inside of him.
Well, if that was what she wanted, if that was what she hoped to cause, she had succeeded. Of course, he could not write. How could one write with a typewriter that was not real upon paper that was not real words that were not real? And it went right on and day followed day and it did not abate. He lay around his room that was not real and ate his meals that were not real, and his mom who was not real left him alone. He did not get drunk anymore. What was the use? During those two weeks before the wedding, he had not gone anywhere but he had at least kept on attending his few classes at the college, and he had at least kept on writing. Now he did neither. At the end of two weeks when it had not abated, this scalding burning pain inside of him, he began to get frightened. What would he do, if he could never write again? Finally, he went to Gwen.
Chapter 63
GWEN HAD SEEN WALLY at the wedding, and also later on at the reception, so she was not entirely unprepared for his visit. She remembered, at the wedding, that she had not seen him at all for two weeks, and after the wedding, she had noted that he stopped attending the two English classes he took under her, and had found that he had stopped attending the other two, non-literary classes he was taking. She thought she could pretty well guess what he was going through. She was not, however, at all prepared for the vehemence with which he was going through it. It didn’t take long though, as soon as she saw him with that blank, slack, haggard face in which the dark eyes darted frantically about, for her to realize how far she had underestimated his unhappiness.
Partly, she guessed, this was due to the way he had conducted himself at the wedding, and at the reception. She thought he had conducted himself admirably. Much better than his mother had, with that fake hearty happiness of hers that failed to cover up her thwarted ambitions of having her son there, in Shotridge’s place. But as for Wally, she thought he had done marvelously, and she was proud of him. Because she knew, of course—or rather was positive in her own mind—that Wally and Dawnie had been sleeping together since the beginning of last summer. And if he could overcome his first major love affair like that, so easily, she had great hopes of him—of his work—in the future.
Also, partly why probably she had so grossly underestimated Wally’s unhappiness, was that she was still having a lot of trouble of her own, over her own first major love affair. Well, she amended to herself, at least her first major one of any real consequence. The most horrible thing about it was that while she could not forgive Dave for what he had done she still loved him. Only when he came to the house (he had only been three times since that last scene when he tried to get her to tell him what was wrong) did she become cold and distant. When he was not there, she did not feel that way at all. She thought of him warmly, almost lovingly, even when it hurt her to do so. He had been drinking
a great deal more lately; it showed in his face; and she worried about him considerably. She worried about his work, too, which had fallen way off. And yet when he came to the house, she could not help acting distant. No wonder he did not come more often!
If only he had been willing to wait a little, put up with her foibles for a little while. She knew she was grossly neurotic, she knew she exhausted everyone’s patience. But most of all, if only he had chosen some other woman to have his mordant love affair with! Any other woman! Instead of that fat, sloppy, ignorant woman! A regular town whore! And he had a love affair with her! Ginnie Moorehead! God, how could she herself feel any other way than what she did?
But the really worst thing, worse even than the fact that she still loved him, was the real guilt she felt—when he was not there—for treating him the way she did when he was. All three times after he had been there, she had wept and upbraided herself for having treated him as she did. And yet as soon as she saw him, she would freeze up. But the guilt went deeper than that. Because Gwen could not escape a deep conviction that it was basically all her fault. If she had given herself to him— If she had not been so damned afraid of him finding out that she was a virgin— Maybe he wouldn’t have minded at all. The thought tormented her. And the way his work was falling off tormented her also. That was also her fault. If Bob was right, and Dave could not finish the book without her— That would be the most horrible of all.
Oh, Sex! Men and sex. God, would they never any of them ever grow up to where sex did not dominate their lives? Before their work, before their health, before their education— Sex came first. It was her theory. She had evolved it, from studying Stendhal and the others, from studying the moderns like Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the rest. It was her theory, and she had applied it to her own study of Dave’s old Los Angeles group and made it into an almost irrefutable treatise. And now it was impinging upon and threatening to ruin her own life. Men and sex. Sex and men.
Then she would think how Dave had not even waited, but had taken up with his fat whore almost as soon as he had met Gwen herself. The girl had as much as told her so. That, in itself, was proof that no matter what she herself had done, she could never have prevented it. But then the guilt would return just the same, and torment her. If she had been honest with him from the beginning— And so she went, backward and forward, pulled nearly completely in twain by the not knowing. She was even getting so she was screaming at Bob when he was late for meals, while the poor dear said nothing. And nowhere was there anyone to turn to for answer, not even Bob—unless she were willing to tell him the whole truth, and she could not.
Of them all, only Wally seemed to show any signs of real maturity, she had thought. Wally was becoming more and more her main hope. He was young, and green, and he had never really suffered yet. But perhaps he was not the type who suffered from sex. God hope it were true.
When she got the news of Dawnie’s wedding and then later the invitations came, she did not really intend to go. She would send a present, of course, but she did not want to go. She didn’t have the heart for it, just now, with all her own troubles. What she wanted to do was to spend the whole of Easter vacation working on her own book. It was getting well along now. Two to three months of good hard work would see it finished. And only when she was working—long, hard hours of slow, meticulous research and careful reconstruction—could she be free of thinking about herself. But when she saw Agnes’s card marked “within the ribbon,” she knew they would have to go anyway. Bob, of course, didn’t care if they went or didn’t go. And, in another way, Gwen thought it would be a fitting way of saying farewell to Dawnie. Dawnie had always been one of the ones she had had such high hopes of. So few women ever seemed to turn into real writers. They lied to themselves too much. And Dawnie had had talent—not only in her acting, but in her writing, too. It seemed that all of them were falling by the wayside, or preparing to, except Wally.
And so when she saw Wally at the wedding and later at the reception, and the way he conducted himself, she had been very pleased. Of course it was hurting him—but not enough to throw him. Maybe here at last was one writer who put his writing first, before sex. Maybe, after all, that was where the really great ones came from. And to hell with her own theory! If it was true, she was willing to stick it out till the end of the school term, and even stay the rest of the summer—in spite of her own unhappiness—if it would help Wally to get finished up. He only had six more months’ work at the most. And in May, his fellowship would be up for its allowable second-year renewal.
It did bother her some, when he did not show up the last week of April for classes; but still, she had thought hopefully, maybe he was going good on the book, and maybe that was why he was cutting school. But when in the first week of May she saw him come in through the side door and drag himself up the steps and across the kitchen to where she stood getting supper, she realized at once how wrong she had been in her estimate of how unhappy Dawnie’s marriage had actually, in fact, made him. Before he even spoke a word, she steeled herself to argue with him, and to try and figure out how best to get him straightened out. Her own troubles and unhappiness were forgotten.
Wally came right to the point. When she smiled at him and said, “Well! Come right in, stranger. I’ll put another can of beans in the pot;” he did not bother to answer, but only went straight on across and flopped himself down in one of the ladder-backs.
“I can’t work anymore,” he said in a hoarse voice. “I haven’t written a word for two weeks. And for two weeks before that, I don’t think I wrote anything that was any good.”
“Oh?” Gwen said, and turned the burners on the stove off, then turned to him. It might be some time before she got back to cooking supper. She had never seen him looking so beaten down. His face stared at her blankly, while his two eyes darted here and there like two frightened animals. He looked ready to come all apart at the seams. “And why might that be?” she said.
“Don’t you know?!” Wally cried. “You were at the wedding! Dawnie got married!”
Gwen did not say anything for a moment, then came over to the big table and sat down at the end. Wally flung his ladder-back around to face her, and Gwen winced inwardly for the antique chair. There would be another one for Bob to fix, probably, like the one Dave had strained apart without ever knowing he had done it. With his heavy, muscled body and broad Slavic face Wally had in him much the same torrential energy and tremendous physical vitality that Dave had, and her heart contracted in her thinking of it. “Were you really that much in love with her?” she said quietly.
Wally stared at her, his eyes roving over her face desperately and at the same time hopefully. “I can’t sleep!” he cried. “I can’t eat! I can’t even concentrate to read!” Abruptly, he paused, and shook his head, as if to clear it. “Nothing seems real, anymore,” he said more calmly. “You don’t seem real. It’s like I’m dreaming and can’t wake up.”
“You seemed in such good shape at the wedding,” Gwen said.
“An act!” he cried. Again he made that abrupt pause. “You know, it’s funny, I didn’t really hurt much at the wedding. Or at the reception. It was only afterwards that it really began to hit me. The moment I left the reception, the moment I got outside the door, that was when it hit me. It fell down on me like a ton of—of—wheat,” he finished lamely. “Now I can’t think of anything but her!” he cried. “No control over my own mind at all. And—” he stopped, and momentarily his eyes cleared, and he looked at Gwen straightly. “Look,” he said, “what I’m telling you is strictly secret. We never told anybody about our love affair. But we were—were sleeping together; all last summer. And we were very much in love. Now do you see why?!” he cried.
“Well, of course, I never suspected anything like that,” Gwen lied calmly. “I only knew you were running around together. But if it was that strong, why didn’t you marry her yourself?”
“Well, I wanted to,” Wally said. “But I couldn’t.
I mean, I knew if I did, Frank would have me working in that damned store for him, you know? And I couldn’t do that. Dawnie wanted us to run off to New York and live there. But I couldn’t do that, either. I had my fellowship, and I had to stay here. Anyway, we didn’t have any money. And then she just started to draw away from me. And then she left me,” he said brokenly. “For Shotridge!”
“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Gwen said. “What do you want me to do?”
“Help me!” Wally cried. “You’ve got to help me! Hell, I can’t write! All I can do is sit around and think about her— You’ve got to help me!”
“How can I help you?” Gwen said. “You’ve just got to get over it.” Guilt assailed her: God! How could she help him! She couldn’t even handle her own love problems.
“Well, what do you do?” Wally cried. “You must have been in love a hundred times. How do you get over feeling like I feel now?”
“Oh, Wally!” Gwen said.
“Well, what do you do?!”
Gwen gazed at him a moment, her heart sinking at the very ridiculousness of it—of him asking her, of anybody ever even considering asking her—Gwen French the worldly-wise. She tried desperately to think over all the “remedies” for love affairs that she had ever read about. There didn’t seem to be many. And of those there were, they were all suspiciously slim. “You just have to let time take care of it,” she said lamely. “Let it wear itself out. After a while, it will. Though you may not believe it now. Or,” she said, “one of the best ways to get over a love affair is to go right into another one.” They sounded stupid, even to her. And she thought of Dave again, painfully.
“But I can’t let time take care of it!” Wally cried. “It’ll kill me before that much time passes! And anyway, I ain’t got that much time; I got to get back to my work! And as for fallin in love with somebody else, that’s ridiculous; I don’t think I’ll ever be able to fall in love with anybody else again!” He paused again and made a herculean effort to get control of his facial muscles, and stared at her. “Will you have a love affair with me? To help me get over it?”