by James Jones
“You dont want a drink,” Karen Holmes said. “You dont really want a drink. What you really want is this,” she said, looking down at her own body and moving her hands out sideways like a sinner at the altar. “Thats what you really want. Isnt it? Thats what you all want. All all of you ever want.”
Warden felt a shiver of fear run down his spine. What the hell is this, Milton? “Yes,” he said. “Thats what I really want. But I’ll take a drink too,” he said.
“All right. But I wont mix it for you. You can mix it yourself or you can drink it straight.” She sat down in a chair beside the enameled kitchen table and looked at him.
“Straight’s all right,” he said.
“The bottle’s there,” she pointed to a cupboard. “Get it yourself. I wont get it for you.” She laid her hand flat on the cool smoothness of the table. “You can have it, Sergeant, but you’ll have to do the work yourself.”
Warden laid the papers on the table and got the bottle from the cupboard, thinking I can match that, baby. “You want one too?” he said. “You just wait,” he said. “You’ll help me.”
“I dont think I want a drink,” Karen Holmes said. Then, “Yes, perhaps I’d better. I’ll probably need it, dont you think?”
“Yes,” he said. “You probly will.” There were glasses on the sink and he took two and poured them both half full, wondering what kind of a woman this one was anyway.
“Here,” he said. “To the end of virginity.”
“I’ll drink to that,” she raised her glass. She made a face from the liquor as she set it down. “You’re taking an awful chance, you know,” she said. “Do you really think its worth it? What if Dana should come home? I’m safe you know: my word is always better than an EM’s word. I’d holler rape and you’d get twenty years, at Leavenworth.”
“He wont,” Warden grinned, repouring in her glass. “I know where he is. He probly wont be home at all tonight. Besides,” he said, looking up from filling his own glass, “I got two buddies from PI at Leavenworth, I’d be among friends.”
“What happened to them?” she asked, drinking what was in her glass, making another face at it.
“They got caught in a buggy with a colonel’s wife by one of MacArthur’s gook boy scouts.”
“Both of them?”
He nodded. “And with the same dame. She picked them up, they said, but they still got twenty years. The gook was the colonel’s orderly. But I’ve heard it said he did it out of jealousy.”
Karen Holmes smiled tolerantly, but she did not laugh. “I think you’re bitter, Sergeant.” She set down her empty glass and lay back in the chair, sprawled. “My maid is liable to be home any time you know.”
Warden shook his head, seeing in his mind a picture of her lying on a bed inviting him, now that his first insecurity was gone. “No she wont,” he said. “Thursday’s her day off. Today is Thursday.”
“You think of everything, dont you, Sergeant?”
“I try,” he said. “In my position you have to.”
Karen Holmes picked up the papers from the table. “I guess we can dispense with these now, cant we? They’re nothing, are they?”
“Yes, they are,” he said. “They’re letters. You dont think I’d bring something worthless, do you? so Holmes might see them? so you might use them as evidence when you turned me in? And you can call me Milt, now we’re intimate.”
“Thats what I like about you, Sergeant: You have confidence. Its also what I dislike about you.” Slowly she tore the papers into little bits and dropped them in the wastebasket behind her. “Men and their confidence. You can consider these as the payment you had to make. You always pay, dont you?”
“Not if I can help it,” Warden said, wondering again what all this amounted to anyway, not expecting anything like this. “I got carbons of those back at the office,” he grinned, “so it wont be much work to fix them up.”
“At least your confidence is real,” she said. “Not false confidence, or bravado—many men have that. Pour me another drink. Tell me, how did you acquire it?”
“My brother is a priest,” he said, reaching for the bottle.
“Well?”
“Thats all she wrote,” he said.
“What has that to do with it?”
“Everything, baby. In the first place it isnt confidence, its honesty. Being a priest, he believes in celibacy. He has a very heavy beard shaved very close and he believes in mortal sin and he is worshipped by his adoring flock. Makes a very good living at it.”
“Well?” she said.
“Whata ya mean, well? After watching him a while, I decided to believe in honesty, which means the opposite of celibacy. Because I did not want to hate myself and everybody else, like him. That was my first mistake, from then on it was easy.
“I decided to not believe in mortal sin, since obviously no Creator who was Just would condemn His creations to eternal hellfire and brimstone for possessing hungers He created in them. He might penalize them fifteen yards for clipping, but He wouldnt stop the ball game. Now would He?”
“You wouldnt think so,” Karen said. “But where does that leave you? if there is no such a thing as punishment for sins?”
“Ah,” Warden grinned. “You went right to the heart. I dont like this word ‘sin.’ But since there is obviously punishment, I was forced by irrefutable logic to accept the weird outlandish idea of reincarnation. That was when my brother and I parted. I had to beat him up, to prove my theory; it was the only way. And, to date, the reincarnation is as far as my philosophy has gotten. What do you say we have another drink?”
“Then I take it you dont believe in sin at all?” Karen Holmes said, a kind of interest flickering for the first time in her eyes.
Warden sighed. “I believe the only sin is a conscious waste of energy. I believe all conscious dishonesty, such as religion, politics and the real estate business, are a conscious waste of energy. I believe that at a remarkable cost in energy people agree to pretend to believe each other’s lies so they can prove to themselves their own lies are the truth, like my brother. Since I cannot forget what the truth is, I gravitated, naturally, along with the rest of the social misfits who are honest into the Army as an EM. Now what do you say we have another drink? Since we’ve settled the problems of God, Society, and the Individual I really think we rate another drink.”
“Well,” the woman smiled, and the momentary flick of interest had gone out, replaced by the old flip and coldness. “He’s smart as well as virile. Lucky little female, to be allowed to enclose the erect pride of such virility. But since you believe the conscious waste of energy is a sin, dont you believe the loss of semen is a sin? unless accompanied by impregnation?”
Warden grinned and dipped the bottle in salute, bowing over it. “Madam, you have touched the weak spot in my philosophy. Far be it from me to snow you. All I can say is—not as long as it is not cast out on the ground, or paid for, and sometimes even then. (Have you ever served in the field?) All I can say is—not as long as it is useful.”
Karen Holmes emptied her glass and set it on the table, with finality. “Useful. Now we’re getting into dialectic.”
“Dont such talk always?”
“And I do not believe in dialectic. I dont want to listen to your definition of what useful means.”
She put one hand behind her and flipped the snap of her halter and tossed it to the floor. Staring at him with eyes of liquid smoke in which there was a curious and great disinterest she unzipped her shorts and shucked out of them without moving from the chair and dropped them with the halter.
“There,” she said. “That is what you want. Thats what all the talk’s about. Thats what all you virile men, you intellectual men, always want. Isnt it? You big strong male men who are virile and intelligent, but who are helpless as babies without a fragile female body to root around on.”
Warden found himself staring at the twisted navel and the ridge of scar-tissue that ran down from it, disappearing in th
e hairy mattress, and that was so old now as to almost be a shadow.
“Pretty, isnt it?” she said. “And its a symbol, too. A symbol of the waste of energy.”
Warden set his glass down carefully. He moved toward her on the chair, seeing the nipples wrinkled tightly like flowers closed for night, seeing the feminine grossness that he loved, that was always there, that he always knew was there, hidden maybe behind perfume, unmentioned, unacknowledged, even denied, but still always there, existing, the beautiful lovely grossness of the lioness and the honest bitch dog, that no matter how much, shrinking, they tried to say it wasnt so, in the end always had to be admitted.
“Wait,” she said. “Not here, you greedy little boy. Come in the bedroom.”
He followed, angry at the “greedy little boy” but knowing it was true, and wondering wonderingly what kind of creature this one was with all the buried darknesses.
He wasnt wearing anything under his CKCs and she shut the door, turning to him blindly, her arms out, raising the roundnesses of her breasts, making hollows beside her arms.
“Now,” she said. “Here. Now. Here and now and now.”
“Which bed is Holmes’s?” he said.
“The other one.”
“Then you just move over there.”
“All right,” she said. She laughed, the first time, richly. “You take your cuckoldry seriously dont you, Milt?”
“Where Holmes is concerned I take everything seriously.”
“And so do I.”
As he moved nearer and nearer to the center of the redness which contained himself, and which he never reached, feeling it blinding him with the light he hungered after and bringing the purring deep down in his throat, the screendoor in the back slammed loudly.
“Listen,” Karen said. “Theres someone. Listen.” They could hear the footsteps coming phlegmatically, not slowing, not turning, sounding heavy through the walls. “Quick. Take your clothes and get in the closet there and shut the door. Quick. Hurry up. For God’s sake, hurry, man.”
Warden vaulted the other bed, scooping up the uniform and stepped inside and shut the door. Karen was wrapping on a Chinese silk kimono and sitting before her dressing table by the window that looked through the truckway to the barracks. By the time the bedroom door was knocked on she was brushing calmly at her hair, but her face was very white.
“Who is it?” Karen called, wondering if the trembling in her voice was noticeable.
“Its me,” a boy’s voice said. “Its Junior.” He knocked again, demandingly. “Let me in.”
“All right,” she said. “Come in. It isnt locked.”
Her son, a nine-year-old miniature of Dana Holmes in his long pants and Aloha shirt, came in, wearing the unholy sullenness that is in the faces of so many holy offspring of duly sanctioned misalliances.
“They let us out of school early,” he said sullenly. “Your face is white. Whats the matter, you sick again?” he asked, studying his mother’s face with the unconscious distaste healthy children have for chronic invalids, and with a measure of the disdainful male superiority that in the last year or two he had picked up from his father.
“I’ve not been feeling well the last few days,” Karen told him, truthfully, trying hard not to be defensive, and looking at this boy who in one short year had become his father, thinking with a kind of sickness that his long-jawed beefy face, once round and merry, had grown inside her flesh, feeling again the old revulsion. Looking at the boy, there was suddenly no guilt inside her for the man hiding in the closet, there was only a dull anger at the furtiveness like the slipping around corners of youths in school going to their first whorehouse.
“I’m going over to the Company this afternoon,” the boy said, looking at her from across the battlements of the besieged city that is childhood. “I want my uniform.”
“Did you ask your father if it was all right?” Karen said, feeling tears rising behind her eyes at the prospect of what was before him, wanting suddenly to put her arms around him and explain so many things to him. “He isnt there today, you know.”
“Who said he was?” the boy said. “He’s never there in the afternoon. He dont care if I go over to the Company. Long as I dont get familiar with the men, he said. You got no right to keep me home just because you hate the Company.”
“Good God, child,” Karen said. “I dont want to keep you home. I dont hate the Company. I just wanted . . .”
“I dont care what you say anyway,” the boy said, cramming his fists down in his pockets. “I’m going anyway. Dad said I could go and I’m going.”
“I wanted to be sure it was all right with your father,” Karen said. “You always ask him first.”
“He went to town this noon,” the boy said. “If I had to ask him, I’d have to wait till tomorrow morning, probly. You talk like we had company.”
“All right,” Karen said, wondering if she was being bitchy, so many of them took their bitchiness and anger at their husbands out on the defenseless children; it was one thing she had promised herself that she would never do. “If you were going anyway, why did you even bother to come home and tell me?”
“I didnt come home to tell you,” the boy said. “I came home to get my uniform to wear and you have to help me put it on.”
“Go get it out then,” she said. At least there was one thing she could still do; anyway she could do it when Dana wasnt home. In the last two years his education in both school and life had been taken from her hands, along with all the other things. She felt herself slipping back into the old habit of indifference, and thinking pleasantly about Milt there in the closet. At least there was one way left for a woman to express herself, she thought distastefully, now that the chastity belts were outlawed, now that the stocks and ducking chairs were gone, although the condemnation still was just as bad.
“Well come on,” the boy said impatiently. “I’m in a hurry. I’m going to help Sergeant Preem cook supper tonight and eat with them.”
“Is that all right with Sergeant Preem?” she said, getting up to follow him.
“It has to be, dont it? If he’s my Dad’s mess sergeant. Come on, I’m in a hurry.”
In the little room he had for himself Karen helped him shuck off his clothes, staring wonderingly at the small naked agility, surprised again that this foreigner and stranger was her child to love and cherish the way all the books on childcare said. Here were bones and nerves and ligaments from her body, a photographic replica his father had made of himself, using the sensitized plate that had been Karen Jennings of Baltimore, Md., as a man might use an old box camera, for the pictures it would take, not caring about the technique of the using.
Now I’ve borne the heir, she thought. The film is taken out, the negative made, the picture in the process of development. And the crumbling shredding rotting leathered box is put back on the shelf. Useless now. The mechanism of its dark interior having been accidentally broken by a bad exposure. Thats pretty good, my girl. You ought to write yourself. You’ve got some good material. And I dont think you’d romanticize love so very much. The unspeakable loneliness of self-pity that is blind and tongueless rose up hot in her, trying to bring tears.
She helped the boy to struggle into the one-piece suit some of whose buttons he could not reach, cocked the cap right on his head, and tied the issue tie that was too big for him. Making of him suddenly what he would inevitably become, a fresh young second lieutenant complete with gold bars and Regimental insignia on his shoulders and US and crossed rifles on his collar tabs and all the painful illusions that went with them. God help you, she thought, God truly help you, and the woman you marry in order to reproduce a replica of yourself. The second generation of an Army line, begun by a farm boy from Nebraska who wanted more than farming and whose father knew a Senator.
Karen put her arms around her son. “My boy.”
“Hey,” he said, distastefully. “Dont do that. Leave me alone.” He shrugged out from under the arms and looked at her
accusingly.
“You’ve mussed your cap,” Karen said and set it straight.
Junior looked at her again and then inspected himself in the mirror and finally nodded. He picked up his allowance money off the dresser and slipped it in his pocket.
“I may go to the show,” he informed her. “Dad said it was all right. Its Andy Hardy. Dad said it was good and I would like it. And for gosh sake,” he said, “dont wait up for me, like I was a kid.”
He gave her another look to make sure she understood and then he left, wearing his responsibility heavily.
“Watch out for cars,” Karen called, and then bit her lip because she said it.
When the backdoor slammed she went back to the bedroom and sat down quickly on the bed and put her face in her hands, waiting for the nausea to leave, afraid she was going to cry. Crying was the last ditch where she always made her stand. She looked down at her hands and saw that they were shaking. After a while she made herself get up and go to open the closet door, sick with the humiliation of this unjust degradation of herself and Warden whom she could hardly face.
“I think you’d better go,” she said, pulling back the door. “It was the boy. He’s gone now and . . .” She stopped, amazed, the words trailing off forgotten.
Warden sat crosslegged on the pile of his uniform in the cramped space, the skirts of several dresses draped over his head like a crazy turban, and his big square shoulders were shaking helplessly with laughter.
“Whats the matter?” she said. “What are you laughing at? What are you laughing at, you fool?”
Warden shook his head and a dress fell down over his face. He blew his breath weakly, floating it aside, and looked at her, his body still shaking with the laughing and his eyebrows hooked up high.
“Stop it,” Karen said. “Stop it, stop it,” her voice going off up high. “It isnt funny. Theres nothing funny about it. It would have been twenty years for you, you fool. What are you laughing at?”
“I use to be a traveling salesman,” Warden gasped.
Staring unbelievingly at the obvious sincerity of his laughter, she sat down on the bed. “A what?” she said.