George Mills

by Stanley Elkin

  As he believed, again vaguely, in virgins. Not—he was no prude—in their moral superiority. Not in some special quality they possessed which their fallen sisters—not even, particularly, in the fall of those sisters—lacked. Not in their fitness as brides or suitability as girl friends, not in their congenial apposition to grace and tone or in their conformity to a grand convention. Not, in fact, in anything petite or chaste or delicate, prudent, pure, virtuous, discreet or even modest. In virginity, in virginity itself, in its simple mechanical cause. He believed, that is, in the hymen. In the membrane, that, he took it, air-and watertight occlusive seal like cellophane on a pack of cigarettes or the metal cap on a soda bottle that somehow shored for as long as it was still in place all the juices of need, all the sexual solutions, that endocrinous drip drip and concupiscent leak which he so expertly stanched in cars and plugged in those furnished rooms.

  And just as he shied away from the whores, he shied away from the virgins, and for much the same reason——that they had no needs. They were too much trouble. They would take seduction, courtship, the long, difficult ploy of friendship.

  [What was the point? How could I deal with someone who did not mean to be dealt with? Did I have beer money and bus fare to burn on women and girls who had an existence aloof and outside the terms of my desires? If I did not think of them as incorruptible then I thought of them as indifferent, people outside my sphere of influence. I might as well have had conversations with ladies whose language was French, who could not understand my English, who may not even have heard it.]

  Which explains why, at twenty-seven, George Mills, who’d had his ashes hauled as often as he’d felt the urgency, who’d been blown, whose flesh and buttocks had been chewed and clutched, whose back and backside raked in wanton, dissipate zest, why George Mills, bruised by delight and all the hijinks of high feeling, had never so much as kissed a maiden. It was that membrane, that cherry like some mythic grail or fortified fastness, which kept him off, not so much at bay as at home, like some frail, stiff, awkward peasant mowing in a field who sees the battlement, the walled, high, thick and ancient parapet and, behind the casement, the oppressor himself, say, taking the sun on the bulwark’s broad and open deck, defenseless, alone, who looks once, shrugs, and embraces the hay, the infested, heavy bales, to shove them about with his last declining energies.

  [It was the two free passes.]

  He wasn’t shy around these women, any more than one is shy around furniture——tables, chairs. He wasn’t overly modest or unassuming. (He had his assumptions.) It was that in their presence—the presence of virgins—he had some genuine gift for the revoked self, a redskin caution, an anonymity reasonable as a good alibi. It was only afterward that a teammate ever remembered that he had failed to introduce George to his girl’s friend, her roommate, a cousin in town on a visit. The roommate or cousin would not even have noted this much. On a streetcar or bus, in a private automobile going back to the neighborhood after a game in the park, he could sit thigh to thigh beside the strange girl without contact, his skin as nerveless as his clothing.

  [I figured why bother, and made myself as indifferent as I supposed her to be. I looked out the window. I watched for my stop.]

  He might have gone on this way forever.

  [It was the two free passes, at two bucks apiece the sixteen bottles of beer they represented, which, if you figure the woman in that tavern was already on her second bottle by the time I put my coin in the jukebox to play her song, and when you remember that I nursed mine—someone had to drive, someone had to stay sober enough to take responsibility for my erection—often drinking only one to her three or, if I ordered a pitcher, maybe a glass and a half to her four, and if you add to the equation the fact that she rarely drank more than seven bottles, two of which she’d paid for herself, and usually not more than five or six, three or four of them on me, then the two passes stood for two to three women successfully courted, successfully wooed. I’m not mean. Money doesn’t move me. I’m talking about effort, all that waiting at bus stops, listening to songs played over again again that I hadn’t liked the first time, all those strained and jumpy monologues, the patient stints at their bodies, watched as boilers, supervised as machinery. So it was the two and a half months I was thinking of—I’m a working man, I punch time clocks, I’m paid by the hour—when I made the connection between the two free passes and the trio of women. It wasn’t the money. A fifth of my working year. It wasn’t the money. Didn’t I spring for new clothes? Didn’t I pop for accessories? And it wasn’t any investment I was seeking to protect when I bought them. The poor aren’t cheap, there’d been no investment. “Bring your girl,” the manager said and gave me free passes. So it wasn’t the money and I had no girl. Hell, maybe it was the manager’s investment I was protecting. Though I still think it was the effort, that I suddenly saw all the man-hours and elbow grease that just those beers and bus rides entailed.]

  Stan David was the orchestra leader at the Delgado Ballroom. David’s was a regional band, almost a municipal one. They played at proms and weddings and, during the week, at the Delgado. They cut no records but had been often on the air. Theirs was the studio band for the local Mutual radio station, and they had been heard behind the victory celebrations in the ballrooms of many downtown hotels a few hours after the polls closed on election days.

  David was a small man, prematurely gray and responsible-looking. He looked more like the orchestra’s business manager than its conductor and, when he sat down at the piano to lead his band, he somehow seemed someone from the audience, the father of the bride, say, or the high school’s principal being a good sport. Indeed, he’d joked with the man who’d hired him for the Delgado and who’d commented on the fact that Stan wasn’t dressed like the other players. “I know this town. It’s a conservative town. I’m as much a master of ceremonies as a musician. These people will take more from a gray-headed guy in a business suit than they would from some boob in a yellow show biz tux.”

  On the Saturday night of George Mills’s free passes it was not yet an orchestra when Mills walked in. Unaugmented by strings or woodwinds, it was barely a band. They were still setting up.

  George glanced at the small group, at their odd displacement on the commodious bandstand, at the gap, greater, Mills judged, than the distance between home plate and pitcher’s mound, between the trumpet and the drummer. He looked at the arrangement of the vacant, freestanding, streamlined music stands like big phonograph speakers, at the sequin flourish of their initials.

  Gradually the band fleshed itself out, but the dance floor seemed as unoccupied as the bandstand had, the handful of couples dancing there as reluctant to move next to each other as the musicians. They swayed skittishly to the temperate brass, the long, queer beat of the piano.

  George is aware of his new clothes, the creamy fabrics like an aura of haberdash, a particular pocket like a badge of fashion, the vaguely heraldic suggestion of his collar, his lapels like laurels, his cuffs like luck. He strolls across the dance floor and, absorbed in all the flying colors of his style, already it is like dancing. He moves in the paintbox atmospherics of the big glowing room, the polished cosmetics of light.

  Chiefly he is aware of his shoes, his elegant socks, his smooth, lubricate soles like the texture of playing cards. Always before the earth has resisted, stymied his feet, and he has walked in gravity as in so much mud. There has always been this layer of friction, of grit. Now he moves across glass, ice, the hard, flawless surface of the dance floor packed as snow. He feels swell.

  Stan David, his voice augmented by saxophones and clarinets, by drums and bass, calls the room to attention. He is neither seductive nor peremptory but matter-of-fact as someone returned from an errand. He breaks into their mood seamlessly. “The boys and I are awful glad to be playing for you folks tonight. It’s an important date for us because it’s the first time Mr. Lodt has asked us to do a Saturday night at the Delgado, so first off we want to thank those old
friends who’ve so loyally supported our week-night appearances and who Mr. Lodt tells us have been requesting our engagement for the big one.”

  Most of the people applaud Stan David’s announcement. George, on the strength of his good mood, applauds too.

  “Well, thank you,” Stan David says, “thank you much. God bless you all.” He turns momentarily to the band and brings the song they’ve been playing to a conclusion. It is, George guesses, their theme song, though he does not recognize the melody. Immediately they begin another, softer, slower, as unfamiliar. “While we were jamming,” Stan says, turning back to them, “I noticed a few unfamiliar faces in the room, a few new friends, I hope, I hope.” There is additional, louder applause for David’s familiar tag line.

  “You know, it’s funny, the lads and I have been doing gigs in this town since almost just after the war and, you have my word, I never forget a dancer. If a couple comes by the bandstand and I happen to spot them I have their style forever. I can recall all the different partners they dance with and know even the kinds of songs they sit out. That’s what our music’s about, you see——dancing. That’s our bread and butter, that’s what pays the rent. If just listening to music is what you prefer, better get yourself a high hat and a box at the opera. Buy records, a radio, tickets to concerts. Go with the highbrows when the symphony plays. That goes for the chaperones, that goes for the shy. Mr. Lodt thinks so too. He doesn’t want any wallflowers blocking his fire exits. We don’t get paid for our fancy solos and hotsy-totsy musicianship. It ain’t Juilliard here, it’s a dance hall. Now it’s a big floor…What’s that Mr. Lodt? Right. Square foot for square foot the biggest in the Midwest. So there’s no need to bump into anyone. We want you to enjoy yourselves but expect you to behave at all times according to the international rules of ballroom etiquette. If you’ve come to show off or act like a rowdy you might just as well leave right now, I hope, I hope.

  “Okay? Okay. Now, you gals who are here for the first time, who came with your girl friends to see what it’s like, it’s a scientific fact, it takes forty-eight muscles to frown and only half a dozen to smile. You guys remember that, too. But everybody pay attention——we might just be playing your song when you fall in love!”

  George has seen the bar, more like a soda fountain than a bar, more—though he has no firsthand experience of this—like the sinks and Coke cupboards in rec rooms, finished basements. He has a forlorn sense of other people’s families, of uncles and dads in sports shirts, of daughters who babysit one and two years after they have graduated high school, a notion of these girls in baby doll pajamas, rollers, furry slippers, of brothers called out for swim practice, track, even during vacation. They run punishment laps.

  But it is the girls who choke his spirit, the peerless globes of their behinds full as geometry, their breasts scentless as health. He imagines their lingerie, the white cotton average as laundry. He knows there are virgins about, feels the concentrated weight of their incurious apathy, their inert, deadpan, ho-hum hearts. And is oppressed by obstacle, the insurmountability of things.

  Yet he knows that it is only through some such girl—he hasn’t seen her yet, has merely glimpsed her type gossiping over a soft drink, or dancing with a young man or another girl, not heedless so much as inattentive, not wanton, even when her partner tentatively divides her thighs with his leg, so much as absolved, locked into a higher modesty—that he may begin his life, be freed from the peculiar celibacy that has marked it, his periodic, furious bachelor passions like seizures. But he has seen the beerless, liquorless bar who till now has only wooed with chemicals the chemically primed. There is no jukebox. How may he cope? He is ready to leave. And is actually walking toward the exit and past the gilt chairs that line the margins of the dance floor when Stan David speaks.

  “Girls ask the boys to dance. Girls ask the boys to dance. Step up to some fellow, girls, and invite him to dance.”

  “You want to dance?” Louise asks him.

  “Me?”

  “Stan says.”

  “Sure. I guess. I’m not much of a dancer.”

  “It’s a box step.”

  “Oh, a box step.”

  “You can do a box step, can’t you?”

  “Is this a box step?”

  “That’s right. You’ve got it.”

  “Like this?”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “I’m dancing,” George says.

  “Louise Mead,” Louise says.

  “George Mills.”

  “Mrs. Louise Mills. Mrs. George Mills. George and Louise Mills.”

  “What?”

  “Oh,” she laughs, “you’re not from around here. When a girl tells a boy her name and the boy tells his, the girl gets to say what her name would be if the girl and the boy were married.”

  “I’m not really a boy.”

  “What a thing to say!”

  “I mean I’m twenty-seven years old.”

  “An older man,” Louise says. “You’re an older man.”

  “That depends,” he says, pleased with his response.

  “I’m nineteen,” she says, and he has a sense that things are going well. He’s following the conversation and doing the box step. The song—Stan David and his orchestra are playing “Getting To Know You”—has been going on for almost seven minutes.

  “Did you come with someone, George?”

  “No. Did you?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do you think I did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not very flattering. It’s Saturday night. I’m nineteen years old. Do you think I’d come to a place like this by myself?”

  “I guess not,” George says.

  “It’s still the same song,” Stan David says. “It’s still girls ask the boys, and it’s still the same song.”

  “I love your togs,” Louise says.

  “My togs?”

  “Your clothes, silly.”

  “They’re brand new. They’re brand new togs.”

  “The boys and I just might play this song right to the end of the set. We might play it all evening. Does this tell you something about the human heart? Anybody can fall in love with anybody if they stand close enough long enough.”

  “He always says that.”

  “Did you know about this? Did you know there’d be girls ask the boys?”

  “What if I did?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to sit down, George?”

  “If you do.”

  “I’m by myself,” she says, and lays her head on his shoulder. “I came with my folks.”

  The cat has his tongue. In a bowling alley, in a bar, she would have had the story of his life by now, the comfort of his theories, but like this, in the dim room, a virgin in his arms, their bodies’ curves and hollows adjusted by the dance, customized by music as by tailoring, he has no words, is adrift in a soup of contrary sensations. He is that self-conscious. He wants to kiss her. But knows that if he does—she is with her folks; where are they?—it would be a declaration helpless and humiliating as the raw need of those chemical-flooded ladies to whom he’s ministered, revealing as a stump. He feels his erection, which he manages to keep out of her way, and glances furtively at the pants of the other male dancers to see if he’s out of line. He is astonished. There are erections everywhere. It’s a logjam of hard-ons.

  “Why’d you ask if I knew Mr. David was going to make the girls ask the boys?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Was it because you thought I’d been watching you? Is that the reason, Mr. Stuck-Up?”

  “No.”

  The lights in the room are turned up and George can hear laughter, whistles, catcalls, bursts of applause. It’s the people on the golden chairs. They are appraising the swollen crotches of the men. The ballroom has exploded with laughter. The drummer peppers the hall with rim shots, great percussiv
e booms. “All right, all right,” Stan David says, “let’s have some order here,” and the music sweetens, the lights dim. “Hey,” he says when the dancers have reestablished themselves with the dance music, “you like this, don’t you? Sure. We do all the work, background your courting like music in a movie, and you get the glory. Bet you’d like us around always. Be there in the trunk of the car playing your song. Hanging just out of sight, crouched behind bushes while you’re kissing good night. Or strung out on rooftops lining your way when you walk your girl home. Some nerve. Some nerve I say. Change partners! Go on, change partners or we quit playing.——All right. I warned you. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. Lads?”