by Andrea Lewis
He had spent the war wanting her, but she wasn’t coming. Like every guy at McClellan, he spoke of girls in short bursts of lewd remarks, but dreamed of girls in serious dreams about postwar bliss, postwar jobs, postwar houses and babies, home-cooked meals and Chevrolets and lawnmowers and Saturday night dances and baseball games and beers and paychecks and snug neighborhoods with fences and trees and mailboxes. Lily wasn’t coming. He buys another beer for himself and a Coca-Cola for Ruth. He asks the two GIs at the bar where a man might find a poker game. One of them nods toward the back hallway. “Card room right here,” he says. “Come back tonight. Around eleven.”
When Ruth returns she looks from the Coca-Cola bottle to Louis and sits down.
“Listen,” he says. “Why don’t you let me buy you dinner?”
“Sergeant Paradiso, I have done nothing but insult you since I sat down.”
“Call me Louis.”
She laughs. Her teeth are a little bit crooked, like Lily’s. She covers them with her tiny fingers, the way Lily does.
“I have a different idea,” Ruth says. “I will make dinner for us.”
* * *
She has a place a few blocks away, over the Woolworth’s. Metal stairs up the side of the building. One room with a little sink, stove and icebox lined up at one end and a narrow iron bedstead with a thin mattress at the other. A shaky-looking table with one chair on the bare wooden floor. A window overlooks the street. The shade is pulled partway down, casting the whole place in an orange cardboard light. He sits in the chair and she opens a cupboard. He sees a can of Vienna sausages and a can of Folgers coffee.
“Ruth, you don’t got to do this.”
“Just hold on. I have fresh eggs, believe it or not. You want a fried egg?” She grips the curved edge of the porcelain sink as if it’s the only thing holding her up.
“I’m a cook, remember? Let me do it.” He gets up and holds the chair for her. She lowers herself carefully onto it.
“Do you have a place?” she asks.
“No.” He opens the icebox and takes out the egg carton. Two eggs inside.
“How was this Lily supposed to find you? Not that she’s coming.”
“Santa Rosa Hotel. Man there said we could leave messages. Get mail too.”
“Where do you sleep?”
“Someplace cheaper than the Santa Rosa Hotel.” He doesn’t want to tell her he has slept on park benches and washed up in gas station restrooms. He finds a can of lard and a cast iron fry pan and gets the eggs started. “You saving those sausages for royalty or anything?”
“Help yourself,” she says.
“You got an onion?”
“Do I look like I have an onion?”
He opens the sausages and adds them to the pan.
“Hideo could cook too,” she says. “My husband.”
“What did he do? Before?”
“Hideo? He was an engineer. He worked for a company that built things. Big things. Bridges, tunnels.”
“Man, that’s good work,” Louis says.
She has one plate and one bowl, so he divides the food between the two. She has one spoon and one fork, and she insists he take the fork.
“Aren’t you going home to San Francisco?” he asks. He stands with his hip against the sink to eat.
“No.” She pushes a piece of egg white onto the spoon with her finger. “San Francisco is not large enough for me and this baby and my mother and my father.”
“Why not?”
“I have disgraced them.” She holds the bowl up. “I cannot eat these.” He takes the sausages out with his fingers and puts them on his plate. “As long as I was the widow of Hideo, the golden warrior from the glorious 442nd, I was a shining light. After I made a baby with a dirty gaijin—a camp MP, by the way—the shining light went out.”
“Guy-jeen?”
“Foreigner.”
He stabs the last of the sausages. “Did he—uh—”
“Force me?” She tries to stand with her bowl, but he motions for her to sit down. “He did not. My mother said to pretend like he did, but I could not.”
Louis puts the dishes in the sink. “Doesn’t he want the baby?”
“He doesn’t know about it.” Ruth goes to the bed and sits down and pries each shoe off with the toes of the other foot. “Why haven’t you returned to New Orleans?”
“Because I’m sick of that place. You can’t be anybody but the guy people think they know. If you try, well, then you’re showing off.”
“Would you rub my foot please?” She sticks out one foot in its white sock.
He crosses to the bed. “What do I do?” he asks. But before she can answer he kneels and takes her foot in his long, brown hands and kneads it the way he did pastry dough back at the base.
“You’re good at that,” Ruth says. “So what show-offy things did you want to do?”
“I don’t know. Something. A college or something.”
“You have ambition.”
“Tell that to Lily’s mama.” He takes her other foot and starts in. “Partly it’s California. Feels like you can do anything here.”
Suddenly he wants to run his hand along her calf. Maybe along her thigh. He wants to feel closer to her. As if he could show Lily he has options and he doesn’t care if she doesn’t come. He lets his hand linger above her white sock. She looks down at him
“Don’t get any ideas,” she says.
His neck grows hot and he gently lets go of her foot. “I wasn’t,” he says.
The room is quiet except for cars passing on the street. “Do you need money?” he asks. “I have some.”
She lies back on the bed and stares at the ceiling. “You must keep your money for your girlfriend.”
“I thought she wasn’t coming.”
“She’s not. But you can hope.”
* * *
At night, the jukebox is louder. Couples dance in front of it, swaying to Dick Haymes crooning “You’ll Never Know.” The song weaves through a din of talk and laughter. Every barstool is taken and every booth is full. The same barman is rooted to the same spot behind the taps. The floor is sticky with beer and the air is dense with smoke.
Louis shoulders his way to the back hall and finds the card room. A single bulb lights an oval table where six men play five-card stud. He hangs back, hands in pockets, fingering his money and the lucky pelican. One of the card players is the GI he spoke to that afternoon. Two others are also in uniform, and one of these is a private who looks about seventeen years old. The other three are old-timers—black men with creased faces and pomaded hair. One of them cashes out and the others invite Louis to sit down. When the seventeen-year-old shuffles the deck, the sound works on Louis like a drug. His lungs expand. His chest feels light. Every card dealt him is a welcome, forbidden gift, like a pin-up girl stepping out of the wall, saying Touch me. He loses five dollars in the first two hands.
“Didn’t you leave today with that nip?” It’s the GI from the bar.
“She’s a Nisei,” Louis says.
He snorts. “What’s that, a kind of nip prostitute?”
Before Louis left Ruth’s room, he washed and dried the pan and their few dishes. Ruth fell asleep. Louis covered her with the limp blanket from the foot of the bed. The room was already too warm, but he wanted to do something for her. “She’s a nice lady,” he says.
The GI shakes his head. “If you say so.”
On the third hand, when Louis lifts the corner of his hole card and sees the king of hearts, his mind slips completely into that altered state where he is both anchored to the earth’s core and flying, with stars and moons rushing by. All he can see are the cards down a kind of tunnel. Time slows down. Sounds drop away. Money floats. Cards fall. On that hand he makes the five dollars back, kings over eights. But by two AM he is down one hundred dollars. The seventeen-year-old is the big winner, raking in pots while flicking a toothpick between his thin lips and never changing his expression.
&nbs
p; At four AM Louis is down two hundred and wondering what happened. He stays in for another hour, winning and losing the same fifteen dollars before leaving the tavern with ninety-six dollars in his pocket. He starts walking toward the Santa Rosa Hotel. Daylight is coming, a cave of yellow opening in the east. Starlings land on telephone wires and set up a racket. He feels hollowed out, the way he always does after a game, win or lose. Suddenly he remembers what the GI said about Ruth. Nip. Prostitute. He should have gut-punched the guy.
The Santa Rosa doesn’t have a real lobby. More like a narrow, dusty living room, with a scarred front desk and a broken-down sofa next to a dead palm tree in a pot. A boy behind the desk scans the comics in the Sacramento Bee.
“Any mail for Louis Paradiso?”
The boy takes eight or ten envelopes from under the desk and slaps them down. Louis flips through them. Nothing for him. Nothing from Lily. “Thanks.” He hands them back. The boy looks up. “Oh. Paradiso? Somebody here looking for you.”
“A girl?”
“Yeah. She’s—” he looks at a register—“She’s in room eight.”
The stairs are creaky and smell like old Pine-Sol. Louis takes the steps three at a time and knocks on eight.
“Who is it?” Lily’s voice, close to the door.
“Baby, it’s me. I’m here.”
The chain scrapes and she opens the door. She looks thinner than he remembers, standing there in her bare feet and belted blue cotton dress with the little flower print. Her curly hair is mashed flat on one side. Her eyes are swollen and spilling tears alongside her nose. “What’s wrong?” Louis asks.
She stands with her arms limp and presses her face against his chest. Her hair and clothes smell like the train, like soot and crushed-out cigarettes. He closes the door behind them and pulls her to him, runs his hands from her shoulders down to her bottom, seeking the thrill he’s been waiting for, but finding fear instead, coming off her body, or his, and a resistance from her bones that is out of proportion to her small skeleton. “What?” he says again. They sit on the edge of the bed. On the dresser, a half-empty pint of Old Grand-Dad. He picks it up. “What is this for?”
“My nerves,” she says.
“You’re nervous?” He puts the bottle back and pulls Lily closer. Now he can smell the bourbon. They haven’t even kissed yet. “About me?”
“What am I doing here?” she asks. “What are we doing?”
“What are we doing? We’re together. We’re getting married.”
She swipes at her eyes and wipes her hands on her dress. “It’s all different.”
“Thank God,” he says. He’d like to take a swig from the bottle himself, but he’s already light-headed from too many cigarettes and not enough food. And he’s never known Lily to take a drink in her life. He lies back on the bed and pulls her on top of him. He kisses her, even though her mouth tastes sour. He tries to take her belt off, but gives up and takes his own belt off instead. Lily unbuttons one button of her dress and stops.
“Come on.” He tries to sound lighthearted. “We got catching up to do.”
She sighs and sits up and undresses matter-of-factly down to her cream-colored slip. Louis wonders if all the imaginary sex he had at McClellan was even with Lily, or if she was a stand-in for all girls, any girl. He takes off his tie and shirt. She touches his chest, his stomach, but without desire, fingers trembling. He puts her hand on his waistband and she dutifully opens his trousers and slips her hand inside. He is already hard. She pulls her hand away as if stung by a scorpion. He closes his eyes. He can’t quite believe things are not unfolding as they did in his dreams these many months. He tries to put her hand back, but she sits up again and turns from him. One of her slip straps falls down.
“Okay, look.” She tugs the strap back over her shoulder. “The truth is, I’m pregnant.”
For a moment, Louis is confused. He wants to say, No, it’s Ruth who is pregnant. Having known no pregnant women in his life, it’s absurd that he should encounter two in one day. “You are?”
“I’m sorry. I never should have come here.”
“Who got you pregnant?”
“Mama said I should come here and marry you and pretend it’s yours.”
“Whose is it?” he asks.
“And I thought I would, but now I can’t.”
“Are you sure?” He looks at her skinny frame and flat stomach. “Did a doctor say?”
“Yes. It’s only eight weeks or something. It’ll probably be so pale that not even you would believe it was yours.”
“Why? Was it a white man? What do you mean ‘not even me’?”
“I never should have come here and if you’ll just give me the fare home I’ll leave and we’ll forget it.”
“Why can’t this white man pay your fare?” In his fury, he tries to picture Lily with some other man. The teller at the Iberville bank in his cheap brown suit. The fat Cajun who employs Lily’s mother. The Greek iceman with the barrel chest. Lily’s legs wrapped around each one in turn. Why had this never occurred to him? Yes, he visited a few prostitutes, but Lily was supposed to wait. “Why can’t Mr. Big Shot pay your fare?”
She covers her face and starts crying again into her hands.
Louis zips his pants closed and takes the ninety-six dollars from his pocket. “This is all I have.”
She lowers her hands and takes the whole wad. “Thank you,” she sniffs.
Louis grabs it back. He peels off a twenty and puts it on the dresser. “This will get you back,” he says, although he knows it is not enough. He stands up and puts on his shirt.
“I’ve got to eat, too,” she says.
He finds a ten and adds it to the twenty. “So do I.” He stuffs his tie and the remaining money in his pocket.
* * *
He finds a pay phone a few blocks over, flips through the book for cabs, calls and asks for a pickup at the Woolworth’s. Big spokes of California sun poke through the leafy trees as he climbs the metal stairs and knocks on Ruth’s door. The long, warm day will find Louis hitchhiking east out of the Sacramento Valley, over Echo Summit and down into the level blue light of the Lake Tahoe Basin and the raggedy edge of Carson City, Nevada. The casinos start as soon as you cross the state line. The stakes get higher. The poker players get wilier. But he will learn.
He tries the door, and it opens easily. Ruth is asleep on her back, looking as if she has not stirred since he left. Her big belly rises and falls under the blanket. When he clicks the door shut, her eyes open fast. “What’s wrong?” she says.
“Nothing. It’s Louis.”
She pushes up on her elbows and looks at him.
“You were right,” he says. “She’s not coming.”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant Paradiso.” She closes her eyes and lies back.
“Call me Louis.” He goes to the bed and picks her up, thin mattress and all. “I should have done this before,” he says. “You are going to a hospital.”
“No I’m not.” It is not much of a protest. Her face is shiny and drained of color. She rests her head against his shoulder. He kisses the part in her hair.
“Don’t get any ideas,” she says.
He has lifted flour sacks and crates of potatoes that weighed as much as Ruth, but he has never carried them down a flight of stairs. He angles her out the door to the landing. Looks down. Takes the first step. Rebalances. A cab pulls up to the curb and the driver—a black man with iron-gray hair—gets out. At the bottom step, Louis nods to him. The driver eyes Ruth and says, “I don’t drive no drunks.”
“Open the back,” Louis barks in his best sergeant’s voice. He manages to get Ruth laid out, mattress and all, on the back seat.
By the time the two men settle into the front, the driver has figured out the pregnancy and softened up. “Your first kid?” His big-knuckled fingers have a light touch on the steering wheel.
“She’s a friend. Where’s the closest hospital?”
They come to a stop sign at the
end of the block. “You don’t want the closest.” The driver’s eyes, tired but kind, scan Louis’s face for understanding.
Louis nods. “Well, take us where we need to go.”
They cut across town to Sacramento County General, a mammoth stone building surrounded by old oaks, with the year 1880 carved over its front pillars. The driver is careful, quiet, a veteran of these situations. He pulls into a circular driveway. “Emergency room?” he asks.
Louis looks back at Ruth. “Don’t forget, I can walk,” she says. “I want to walk in the front door.”
Inside, an older white lady sits at a desk in the cavernous lobby and smiles at them. She wears a smart gray suit and red lipstick. Louis hangs back and Ruth walks to the desk. For the first time, he notices that she is still wearing her white socks and no shoes. How could he have forgotten her shoes? The woman talks to Ruth and hands her papers and a pencil and points to a little room behind her. After Ruth goes in there, Louis approaches. “I want to pay her bill,” he says.
“Sir, I don’t know what the bill will be.”
Louis takes all his cash, even the coins and the pelican, from his pockets and stacks it on the desk. “Would this be enough?”
“Sir, I don’t know.” She picks up the pelican, admires it, and puts it back.
“I just want to help. She’s a friend.”
“Well, you can go in there.” The woman tilts her head toward the little room.
He scoops up the money. Ruth sits at a table, frowning down at the papers. “Should I put Hideo as the father?” she asks.
“Yes.”
She hesitates. “I would be lying.”
“Do it anyway.”
Ruth writes the name and looks at it. “I’ll put ‘deceased.’” She adds the word.
“What was he like?” Louis asks.
Ruth raises her gaze to the milk-glass light globe hanging from the ceiling. “He was graceful,” she says. “Walking, moving—he had, I don’t know—” she looks at him “—no friction.” Louis nods. “He could do big math problems in his head. He could make yakisoba. When he asked me to marry him, he cried.” She frowns back down at the papers. “I never told that to anybody.”