Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  It took all of Matthew’s puritan restraint to keep from preening; even so, there came a glow to his face suggesting some fond if sheepish memory. Yet the kiss’s middling nature — more than formal, less than erotic — let the evening proceed without anxiety. In fact Matthew, empowered now and confident, grew pleasantly bossy as he instructed Willoughby to roll up his pant leg so Matthew could see the legendary damage. This led to Willoughby baring his stump to Matthew’s therapies of human touch and utter candor. Does it still hurt? Was the rest removed surgically or blown off? What do people do when they see it?

  “No one has really,” he told Matthew, deleting Brendan’s recent glimpse.

  “Maybe your girlfriend — ”

  “Never had one, least not one you’d need to take your pants all the way off with.”

  “What about your mother, she ever massage it like this? Feels good, huh?”

  “It’s pretty numb at the end. But the idea of it feels good, to have it out and . . . ”

  “Respected.”

  “Yeah. That.”

  “And your mother?”

  “She never saw it. I never showed it to her.”

  “Of course not. Your father condemned it and that was that.”

  “Don’t go judging folks you don’t know.”

  “I see the flower. I can guess the seed.”

  Willoughby laughed. “Gee, Matt. I always thought my lunacy was more profound than that.”

  “You called me Matt.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “I like it. Matt. Matt Priam. Ballplayer, private eye, United States Marshal. What should I call you?”

  “In Nam I was Willyboy.”

  “That’s for the birds. I believe I’ll call you my friend.” When Willoughby gave a groan Matthew snapped, “I forbid cynicism!”

  Chastened, Willoughby lay back on the sofa as Matthew resumed massaging the end of his leg. The intimacy bothered Willoughby slightly. But Matthew’s stern candor and delicate touch were new treatment for an old malady. You can’t expect instant results.

  Against all logic Ollie Newberry kept thinking he might get sex tonight. An air of marvelous possibility had filled his afternoon after Lois telephoned him at Mantra’s Cafe: “You’re taking me to dinner.” Before leaving his place to go meet her, Ollie had intended to masturbate to relieve performance pressure. He’d heard about the shame and heartbreak of premature ejaculation and figured an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of cure. But in his nervousness he’d forgot to, instead showering, dressing, and skipping off to her house with his prostate packed like a Superball.

  His exasperation at his oversight opened the way to some last minute dread. With each step a bit more of the human farce seemed verified in himself. Fundamental conjectures of Why am I? Who am I? blackened his mood with their futility. After days of forgetting it, Ollie suddenly pictured his roommate’s face as defined as a statue, as cold and as dead. Tim had scored pussy like nobody’s business, for what? To be dead and gone at twenty-eight. If Tim’s life were a fable, its moral was sophomoric and bleak. Outside Lois’s front door Ollie’s nerve failed as much from despondence as fear. He’d retreated three steps down the front walk when a voice spoke behind him, “Give ’em a kiss and they dump you every time.” He turned. Lois wore a sundress tight up top and billowy below, with her hair done wavy and her bare shoulders round and warm-looking. After a moment of staring, the profundity blazed through him like equations through Einstein: Let the good times roll.

  Amazingly, they soon grew comfortable with each other at the restaurant. Lois forgot to ditch him after the meal, instead entertaining familiar notions of fusing a friendship in orgasm. Meanwhile Ollie’s grip grew sweaty on his dream of at last getting laid by an expert. Because oh! her game yesterday of him licking the V between her fingers had understandably sparked his extrapolation of V to vagina and teasy sex game to major porno event. Finally, however, it wasn’t lust or resignation but pop-song sentimentality that got them into bed. Each felt the other was the more lonesome tonight. Presumptions of taking pity disoriented them as they strolled from the restaurant. Outside the White Bird she stood so near him he ventured a kiss. Her oddly maternal placing of his hand on her breast invited him onward. His hesitancy was real; he already was projecting a cruel morning-after with this pathetically lovelorn female. But these apprehensions fell away when Lois, in Ollie’s narrow bed upstairs at the inn, took him deeply aback when she gazed milkily, sadly into his eyes and murmured, “Tell me what to do.” Ollie had assumed that on the basis of her advanced years Lois would continue running the show. Instead, she was upping the emotional stakes by proposing a genuine exchange. She was offering to trust him, as far as he could tell. He in turn was supposed to trust her. How weird was this?

  Ollie, relaxing, told her what to do. She removed her underpants; they lay otherwise clothed side by side on the bed. He kissed her and spoke to her, his fevered requests disguised as mellow imperatives, which Lois shyly followed. He touched her pussy before her breasts, touched her thighs and the outside of the infold between them, which on his fingertip’s fourth pass became slippery and indistinct. He was about to taste his finger when she, beneath him, said, “Me?” She held his hand in her two and suckled his finger as if from a delicate funnel. He began to be less relaxed. For him, next, Lois peeled down the top of her dress, prompting more kisses and soft discussion. After a while she was naked. He crooked one arm behind her neck and the flat of his hands closed over her nipples as her own hands touched herself. Words were occasionally failing him now. She kept him on track with leading questions as to what could she please do, and his answers evidently weren’t wrong. Undressing, he then experienced that lamplighted, torso-to-toe nude embrace that ranked just under spending a whole night together on his list of higher desires. A major low desire was to get blown, which to effect he (a quick study) merely slid up along her body, curled around to get a good view and presented his dick to her lips. “Feed me,” she murmured, before forming a perfect O with her mouth and filling it with him — wonderful, but a bad idea too, and after several plunges she realized it, swiftly detaching, swooping above him and sliding him up inside her. The temperature more than the textural change put him over the top. Lois was the one full of imperatives now, and though his ears clanged with his pulsebeat he obeyed every command, granted each wish to fuck her and come, only very distantly feeling the powerful grind of her crotch on his pubic bone and the discernible further wettening of her cunt as she also came. But it wasn’t over. He stayed hard inside her. She unstuck her chest from his and eyes closed, in silence, began again to move her hips. The pure selfish inwardness apparent in her face amazed and frightened him. He started to speak — to be a part, to be necessary — but Lois hushed him brusquely. He watched as from miles away she came again with a resistant groan. She lay on him like a stranger caught from a building leap. She was floppy as he eased her onto her back, his dick still erect in her and hurting a little. It was like fucking someone asleep. She wasn’t as wet now as before and the friction gave a sore feeling. He came a second time in a long dry heave. Then Ollie was the floppy one, the building leaper who’d landed on something soft, something warm, and she was the one who, reviving, breathed into his ear with sly tenderness, “Superman.”

  They rolled apart. He couldn’t keep his hands off her. She was so wide and white and warm, like a beautiful, unknown, edible root he’d unearthed from under a prickly stalk. “Lois?” he said.

  “Mmm.”

  “Say my name.”

  “Your name?”

  “Yeah. I wanna hear you say it.”

  A long moment went by. His stomach clenched as the sweet root turned toxic in his gut. Then it came to her, “Ollie,” her voice bland as a telephone operator’s. It sufficed. He laid his head on her breasts and exhaled in gratitude. He was sixteen, and so easy to please.

  During
his last few hours on desk duty this evening, Del had occupied his mind with intense sex fantasies he intended to make happen with someone somewhere tonight. His mother was waiting at home when he got off work, sitting erect in her chair. “You’re going back out?” she inquired, her tone full of meaning.

  “I am.”

  “Looking for a boyfriend?”

  “Perchance.”

  Her subsequent silence heartened him. She’d absorbed the fact of his earlier declaration and was dealing with it. But her next words flashed like a razor, leaving him unsure if he’d been cut. “Maybe if you stay home you can talk sense to your brother, if he returns.”

  “Talk sense about what?”

  “About his new possession. A handgun, Delbert. A pistol.”

  “What?”

  “Marcus has a pistol, don’t ask me how. I found it under his pillow. It’s made of black metal.”

  “Where is it now? Where’s he?”

  “He took it and went out. The Abby, he said, wherever that is. You know he doesn’t listen to me. Had you been here, of course — ”

  Del was gone before she finished. He drove his car at the speed limit, keeping calm. But all the joy, the decadent fun and potential romance today’s liberation had promised him, now seemed at peril, as if even an innocent daydream of happiness was something bound to be punished. Like a man trotting impatiently up the scaffold steps, Del accelerated the car as he turned down Oceanside Road.

  Twenty-Seven

  Pie was eaten, coffee drunk, cognac offered all around. The guests moved to the library to hear Mr. Winston’s memoirs of life in the French air service during World War One. As he settled into his usual chair he hollered, “You two in the kitchen? Get out here!” Entering the room, Jerome jostled an ancient clay amphora standing by the door. Its neck and both handles broke off when it toppled.

  “Aw Dad,” Brendan said, embarrassed.

  “Dad?” Araby said.

  “Tell ya later.”

  “I can glue it,” Jerome assured Anna, who knelt with Johnwayne to collect the broken pieces.

  Mr. Winston barked, “Screw it! It’s been my ashtray for years.”

  Jerome came to attention before Mrs. Winston. “Ma’am — ”

  “It’s all right.”

  “— I wanna pay for it. Take it outta tonight’s check.”

  The woman was touched — the amphora was priceless. Anna too was touched. It’s only me, she remembered Jerome saying last night. No trivial promise, perhaps.

  Mr. Winston had begun writing his memoirs in the 1950s after a powerful seizure of immortality-craving, a mere week before he’d suffered his first stroke. The memoir opened with a strange prologue about a posh boozy party in Boston, 1920. Evidently the party was standard of its type; the champagne, the formal dress, the dancehall jazz were presented in only enough detail to arouse our own image of such a scene in the Roaring Twenties. Mr. Winston portrayed himself as brilliantly rakish amid stiff Yankee blue bloods rendered colorless by trench warfare. “‘I’d been a flier. My friends were fliers. Our war had been touched with poetry even at its worst. Our shared secret was that we missed it, which bestowed a dubious magnetism made stronger because we were conscious of it. You could pick out a flier across a ballroom. He had infantrymen’s wives for company.’”

  “Oh, dear,” Mrs. Winston sighed.

  One airman at the party was named Eddy Epps. He disappeared upstairs with a cocktail maid and made his reentrance in a headfirst fall three stories to the marble foyer. It was assumed that Eddy had gone over the railing while giving chase to the maid, and indeed she later swore that he’d assaulted her. But John Winston insisted that his friend had been after more than a kiss, that he’d leaped for the foyer chandelier like Tarzan in black tie. “‘I’m certain it was this blazing ornament that Eddy was seeking to possess, and that last seen flying past him it must have resembled the sun to a plummeting pilot. All of us had imagined the look of the sun behind us as we spiraled to earth. We boasted that it would be a blessing to die in the effort of flight, better still with bright light in our eyes. We said this because we believed we had no choice in any case, and better romanticism than horrific oblivion. . . . ’”

  The drone of the old man reading made monotonal music for the dance of thought in the room. Amos Clearwater and his wife took things in with guarded wonder; they were witnessing rich whites in decline and felt their lives affirmed by how ordinary it was. The Rickerts meanwhile had fallen into reflection about the son they’d lost in Vietnam long ago. Thomas and Sally were holding hands at the moment, behavior most rare if you knew them.

  On the sofa where sat Brendan, Araby, and Johnwayne, a psychic might have discerned a red tangle of destinies forming an aura about them. Araby was watching Jerome and Anna seated cross-legged together on the library rug, elbows and knees casually touching in the style of old friends or new lovers. Araby, who now knew that Jerome was Brendan’s father, had embraced the impression that Jerome had a cruel and mysterious past, a trait that made an alluring potion when mixed with Brendan’s peaceable blood.

  She leaned against Brendan and whispered, “I wish we were alone.” Johnwayne heard it, saw his rival color in joy. Yet he didn’t worry about losing ground in the competition for Araby. He more than anyone was hearing Mr. Winston’s words. To him they were all about self-respect and how it’s available if you want it enough. He listened intently as the old man read on.

  Mr. Winston’s central remembrance, at least of the portion he’d finished before the stroke hit, covered day-to-day operations of his World War One flight squadron. This was dry, technical stuff after which, while composing it, he’d intended to segue to personalities, dogfights, and Parisian R & R, a catchy format unfortunately never realized. He did, however, get to one tale about a renegade flier named Mitchelson.

  One of several members of the Harvard crew team who’d volunteered to fly for the French, Mitchelson had lost his coxswain and stroke to German ground fire after less than a month in theater. Bereavement turned to bloodlust. On sorties beyond German lines, he began saving ammunition for return-flight assaults on Boche convoys (fair game) and field hospitals (taboo). Protests were lodged under a flag of truce. A kangaroo court of Frogs and Yanks censured him — still Mitchelson invariably continued to peel off from the wing for a go at assorted ground targets. “‘One evening I tailed him,’” Mr. Winston read. “‘I held aloft in the sun whilst he machinegunned a medical tent. My tardiness in intercepting him, hence to prevent his atrocity, no doubt compelled me to more vehement action than had I been able to do so. I engaged him and drew smoke. He caught fire, the flames apparent within his cockpit and about his torso. In attempting to elude me Mitchelson had flown over low clouds. As his Nieuport went down, I passed him at close distance. He hailed me with a sooty face and raised his arm to give some sign. He ditched out and fell like a smoldering stone through the mist. He was older than I, twenty or twenty-one. Curiously, for we were over Allied land, his body never was found. Many times since I have conjured fantastic possibilities of his survival, of his landing in a haystack, say, or some similar marvel. The reprieve it affords me is passing but salutary.’”

  Without pause Mr. Winston turned to the next page, a leap of thirty years in the pages’ time of composition. He read:

  [EXT]

  Blue vase survived. Really amazing. A real miracle if done twice.

  Another miracle.

  Third miracle confirmed.

  [/EXT]

  Araby deciphered for everyone, “He throws stuff off the roof. Household items. Some breaks, some not, depending where it lands.”

  “Thank you for that, Araby,” Mrs. Winston said acidly. Her husband continued:

  [EXT]

  Setback. Test articles perform poorly. Blue vase survives like a champ. Left-side tree bullshit. Right-side tree bonafide, but what?

/>   Continued mixed results. Attempted live subject but dog escaped. Blue vase still intact. Have total faith now in blue vase and right-side tree. Rest bullshit.

  [/EXT]

  “John,” his wife implored as the Rickerts and Clearwaters glanced at one another uneasily. “Please stop now.”

  “I know, I know.” His tone conveyed his awareness of having lost his audience. He’d come to the final entry. “‘Hairline crack in blue vase. Nothing lasts it seems.’” Looking up, he removed his reading glasses with a shaky smile. He was at that moment sharper of mind than he’d been in thirty years, and the insights weren’t pretty. Almost drily he said, “Comments?”

  Jerome and Johnwayne clapped. Shamed, the others joined in hearty applause. Mr. Winston bowed his head. “On that kind note, I shall now make my way to the roof to put this matter to rest. Good evening.”

  “Stop him!”

  Jerome blocked the doorway.

  “Let him go,” Araby said. “The trapdoor’s locked anyway.”

  “Actually,” Mrs. Winston stammered, “it’s not. I had it opened this morning, from guilt.”

  “Then ho!” Mr. Winston pushed past Jerome toward the front stairs.

  “After him! He may fall.”

  “He may jump,” Chief Rickert said.

  “He maybe ought to,” Amos Clearwater said.

  Jerome pursued Mr. Winston. Araby, Brendan, and Johnwayne followed excitedly. The others ran outside to the back lawn where the roof sloped above the solarium.

  Mr. Winston and Jerome stood for a moment eye to eye at the bottom of the attic stepladder. They heard the children coming up behind. “You better tell me, old-timer. What’s the plan here?”

  Somberly, clearly, Mr. Winston replied, “I have a chance here, son. One bitty window that could shut any second and put me back on the tit. So please . . . ”