“You git to be an officer,” Quillen said, “you git all the nooky you want.”
Perrone looked at Wood—the slightly abstracted look that meant he was thinking basic thoughts about Wood’s character.
“Neither of us can figure you out, Whip,” he said.
“Well, I can’t either,” Wood said.
“Don’t you want to get laid?” Perrone said.
“I don’t know. I figure I’ve got a lot of that to do later, and I don’t want to get dosed up now because of some prostitute.”
“Maybe later if you don’t get your ass shot off first,” Perrone said.
“It’s more than that, I suppose,” Wood said.
“What’s more than that?”
“Love,” Wood said. They were startled, but didn’t laugh, as he’d half expected them to. Their looks were somewhat skeptical, ironic but thoughtful.
“I’ve got to go see Lenore Stefan and tell her some lies about Pop,” he said. He’d thought of the Stefans’ precarious little nest, and that was real.
“Oh my,” Quillen said. “How about that?”
Perrone grinned, then seemed to think better of that line of thought.
“What I meant,” Wood said, hearing sternness in his voice, “was that they love each other. It’s real. That’s all I meant.”
“Okay, okay,” Perrone said. “If it was anybody else I’d laugh my ass off, but you’re too good to be true.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Wood said.
Perrone looked at him. “I don’t mean to say you can’t be a pain in the ass sometimes.” A little bit of steel had entered Perrone’s voice; he was worried about Wood’s reaction, but prepared for anything.
“I know,” Wood said. He liked them, and wanted to tell them what he really thought, but of course he didn’t know what he really thought. “Look,” he said. “I don’t want to be anybody’s nursemaid. I don’t want to be an officer, or even a goddam squad leader. But every time I open my eyes some pitiful little creep is about to get in trouble. What am I supposed to do? I don’t want to take care of Stefan. Do you understand? I’m younger than Stefan, for one thing. Why do I have to take charge? Captain Jones more or less told me, just before chow, he’d let Stefan rot in the violent ward if I don’t go through with this OCS business.”
“Hey, hey!” Perrone said.
“Yeah, Whip,” Quillen said. “Don’t you git all upset.”
“Well, God damn it!” Wood said. They were concerned. Their rugged faces were full of sympathy. He had startled them very much; but wasn’t the whole thing futile? Why blow off to Perrone and Quillen? They couldn’t do anything about it. He turned quickly, afraid of their concern, and left the barracks.
Yesterday he’d heard from Horace, and on the bus into town he read the letter again. Somehow he couldn’t make it out; he could hardly see the big boy, and found it hard even to remember what had happened that last night. Had he actually lost his temper and hit Horace? How many times had he hit him? They had never mentioned it again—not the next morning, or in any of their letters. Horace’s cracked lip had been noticed, but that was not too strange a wound for him to carry around. The tough skin of his face had recovered quickly. Perhaps Horace had been as much ashamed of his panic as Wood was of his. For a moment on that last night their weaknesses had combined to cause that violence. Sure. The real fact was that he had hit that fragile person who loved him, and done it to get him off, to get away from him.
Dear Wood,
Things are going pretty good here, and hope you are having a good time down south. I guess it is warm in Georgia now. I mean too hot, but it is not too bad here. I have been mowing lawns and make a quarter an hour. Not bad. When are you coming home on your furlow(?)?
Bob Pacquette dove in the scrape and cracked his head on a rock. He was not hurt bad but Dr. Winston had to put two clips in the top of his head.
Ben Caswell is still in the hospital, and he is uncontious. They feed him through a tube. Peggy got a letter from her mother saying she is fine and saving up to send for her. Peggy cries sometimes. She looks like it, any way.
Everybody sends you their love.
Love, Horace
P.S. Peggy does not want to go with her mother. That is what she cries about. Can’t we keep her?
H.
The low sun shone across the tired, dark city, and in the long shadows the soldiers walked toward nothing, away from nothing. In their walking were those qualities, dangerous and enervating to watch, of boredom, of the true hatred of themselves and their possibilities that came from not wanting to be where they were.
He walked toward the Stefans’ apartment. Pop Stefan had once told him that he ached for his wife. Ached for her. Wood had felt such a pang of jealousy for that pain, he’d turned away from Stefan to hide his face. He tried to imagine aching for Lois, but the fact was he didn’t ache for Lois at all. They signed their letters “Love,” but the word was not magic, and caused no pain.
He came to the wooden fire-escape stairs that climbed toward the Stefans’ apartment. The unpainted stairs and platforms listed dangerously, so much that he thought of the whole staircase sliding out and down away from the punky wood of the building, and he had a moment of vertigo. It seemed hardly any safer when he stood at the door. If the stairs began to bend and slide downward he could grab the doorsill, but he then had a vision of the sill crumbling off, and then the clapboards, and finally the whole building would crumble down into dust and disaster.
Lenore came to the door with Georgie in her arm, his bottle in his mouth. She knew Wood was coming, and she was all dressed up in a flowered print dress of shiny material, summery and pathetically gay, silk stockings and thin low shoes with little white tassels on the lacings.
“George’s letter says he’s all right. Is he all right, Wood?” She let him in and made him sit down.
“He’s fine,” Wood said.
“Oh, good! That’s wonderful!” she said, and only then turned shy. “It’s so nice of you to come see us. You don’t know…” At that moment Georgie came to some impasse with the bottle he gripped in both pudgy hands, and a dribble of white appeared on his cheek. She wiped his face with his bib, and held the bottle up. “Georgie’s got to burp,” she said, expertly put him over her shoulder and patted his back. He burped throatily, and she took him and the remainder of the bottle into the other room. He complained once, and then Wood heard the sucking again, the avid valving of the baby’s mouth. Lenore came back, smiled widely and shyly, her lips so big and red she seemed all black hair and bright red, like a flag.
“I just wanted to let you know he’s fine,” Wood said.
“Oh no! Don’t go yet, Wood!” she said. “Do you want a beer?” She knelt at the icebox, and he knew that she was all dressed up just for him, for the formality of his visit. Playing grown-up, she maintained the Stefan hospitality. She blushed and said she’d join him in a beer. As she stood up he saw that she was conscious of her body, that she made some attempt at grace in her posture. Through the sheer material of her dress he could see the lines of the little hems and straps that circled her, that pretended to be necessary.
She poured the beer, expertly tilting the glasses so they wouldn’t foam over, then sat down across the wooden kitchen table from him. She took a small sip, left a vague smudge of lipstick on her glass, and offered him a cigarette from a crushed pack of Camels. He took it, and as he held a lighted match to her cigarette she started to take his hand, to steady it, then took her hand away and placed it in her lap, out of sight, as though it had done something wrong and should be hidden.
“Oh, poor George,” she said. “You saw him?”
“Yes, I saw him.”
“And he’s going to be fine? He has this trick thing in his back, you know. Every once in a while, it doesn’t matter what he’s doing, it goes out somehow or other and he can’t do a blessed thing until it gets better.”
He had wondered at first if it might not be a good thing
for Stefan to remain in the violent ward—at least he wouldn’t have to go into combat. That was before he’d seen the terrible exhaustion in Stefan’s face. It was a dangerous place for him, and the danger was certain; they would keep him as long as he was sane and could do their work for them, because Stefan would never have the talent or the authority to convince a doctor over the medics’ recommendations. What would happen was that Stefan would really break down. By the time they got around to giving him a section-eight discharge it might really be too late for him.
Lenore was telling him again how glad she was he could come to see them.
“I don’t know anybody down here and I’m so lonely, Wood. Sometimes I wish so much Georgie was old enough to talk. Sometimes I talk and talk to him anyway even though he can’t understand a blessed word of what I’m saying.” She blushed. “My, how I go on! Do you mind if I talk and talk, Wood?”
“I don’t mind,” he said.
“It’s so nice of you. You’ve been a good friend to George, I know. He never talked much, but I know. Oh, I’m getting to know you too now. It’s so nice to have someone to talk to!”
She stood up and smoothed her dress down over her hips. “It’s like a prison sometimes.” She walked to the window and moved the oilcloth curtains aside. “This town seems so old, like it was always full of soldiers and soldiers. There was a terrible fight in the alley last night. I heard bottles breaking, and cursing—you never heard such a sound. Like a lion roaring, right down in the alley. When I went out with Georgie to get the beer and groceries this morning there was blood on the cement, there, and later on, somebody, I don’t know who, came and threw a bucket of water on it. I was scared silly. I’m still scared, except that you’re here now.”
He had no answer because he had the same fears for her, and even worse ones. Now she wouldn’t let him go, yet she kept herself ill at ease with him. This tension grew with each gesture; she faced him and put her hands beneath her hair and lifted it from her shoulders.
“Oh, dear.” She sighed. “How I wish the war was over and George had a good job, so he wouldn’t worry.” And yet her actions didn’t seem to say this. She preened before him, and seemed languorous, as though she felt some inner joy. Perhaps she didn’t know how to act in any other way. She was embarrassed to be alone in this room with him, the baby asleep in its crib in the dark bedroom, yet she was afraid he might go away.
“Then we’ll be back in Ohio, in a real house. I try to keep this place clean, but I told George it’s just like scrubbing a cardboard box. The more you scrub, the more it sort of peels off. The paint, that Beaverboard, the wallpaper—it all sort of gets spongy and peels off.” She looked at him, worried that he didn’t speak, and he saw her eyes. Their eyes held for the smallest moment, then shied off, full of knowledge they could not decipher. Outside, the dark orange of the sunset faded from the railings, and the room grew dim.
“Don’t go yet, Wood,” she said. “Georgie’ll sleep for another hour or more. I don’t know why, but this is the worst time.” She opened two more bottles of beer and turned on the bridge lamp beside the sofa. “Sit here. It’s more comfortable. George said you never get to sit in soft chairs. Come and sit here.”
He sat deep into the sofa, which breathed its musty, used smell around him. Lenore brought him an ashtray and his beer. “There,” she said. “Isn’t that more comfortable?” Suddenly she looked unhappy, and her thin hands came together as though she were praying. “Oh, I suppose you want to go do something more interesting than keep me company. I don’t blame you. I guess I’m not very entertaining, am I.”
“I’ll stay with you if you want,” he said. “I’d just go drink beer somewhere else.”
She still looked sad. “It’s just to have somebody to talk to. Just being lonely is all. I suppose it must seem funny to you, but you know we’re not used to having friends. We never really had any. Hardly anybody ever came to our house, and then they didn’t ever seem to stay very long. I guess we sort of bored people.” She arranged a kitchen chair for their glasses and the ashtray, then sat down on the sofa herself. The sofa moved, and breathed out its history of use. Her perfume, or powder, or whatever it was, moved around him, and beneath it another odor, her deeper one, he supposed, a pleasant warmth with hints of…what? Calluses, shaving soap, skin—alive and nervous.
She was telling him about her family. She was a farm girl. Her father was killed by a Fordson tractor when she was seventeen…
He no longer listened to her words. He watched her. Her little voice with its hesitations and certainties was part of what he perceived of her, yet he no longer followed any strand of meaning. She was forgetting herself, part of herself, and grew calm and even happy. She smiled often, and occasionally laughed, red lips quivering over the bright teeth, her eyes unself-consciously meeting his. It all seemed familiar, and with a small shock he identified the painted lips. How different she was, really, from the girl in his recurring dream. Her dress had moved above her knees, and the round of beginning thigh hovered like a sharp light, though it was soft and dim—a light he hardly dared to glance upon. He was alone with this woman, in a far country hardly less foreign than the violent world of his dreams. Should he object to such a fantasy, or not? He was still here, this was no dream, and he was in control. She had asked him to stay and listen, and he would pretend to listen. In the dream she raised her dress to reveal a darkness he had never actually experienced awake. There was the connection, like warm water in the dark, and the flash, but the actual mechanics remained vague, always separated from the diagrams in books—that kind of knowledge. She was here, complete, and so was he. He had grown enormous, and he held his arm on his lap to shield it from her. She mustn’t see that opinion, how it had crudely overtaken him. If she saw it, everything he really meant to feel towards her would be wiped out, and that engorged imperative would define her, though it was not really him.
She had asked him a question, and her words came slowly back, as though they had remained in the air where he could read them.
“How old are you, Wood?”
“Eighteen.”
“Is that all? Really? My goodness, I thought you were older than that!” She laughed. “Eighteen! You know how old I am, Wood? Twenty-three!”
Suddenly she was looking at him differently. Her voice had changed too. It took on the confidence of those years, and was deeper, more knowing—a voice that might even presume to advise. “Eighteen,” she said. “I thought you were at least my age. You seem to be more—experienced, in a way. I don’t know.”
“Well, I’m not,” he said. “I’m just a kid.”
“I thought maybe you’d even been married or something. Really. Isn’t that strange. Eighteen.” She looked at him searchingly, as if to find evidence of his absurd youth.
“Nope,” he said.
“And you have to go fight in the war.” Her face darkened and her hand moved toward him, quickly, really, but with each smooth inch of its light thrust documented in his mind. Her hand rested on his arm, light but firm, on the arm that shielded him. Each of her fingers seemed to go deep into his arm, deep as the heavy nonfeeling of a needle. She pressed his arm down upon that evidence with what seemed to be concern, and at that moment he came to believe that she was aware of it. She knew all about it, he was certain; but he was not quite certain. He was not certain, but whatever she said or did now was changed. She rose to look in on Georgie, and then turned back toward him, her eyes gleaming in the lamplight.
“He’s sound asleep,” she said, and he seemed to look into her mind, where his rigid tuberant sex had printed itself. She knew what it wanted, else why had it grown? But she might not even be aware of it. His intelligence, what little he could still command, seemed rooted down there. He could not command that center; it disobeyed all orders, and pulsed against the taut cloth. Tiny diamonds and triangles of light shimmered at the periphery of the room. She stood for a moment, her thin hips tilted, her dark hair falling along her cheek.
With a little-girl strut, somehow an imitation, she came back and sat beside him again. She pulled her legs up beneath her, aware or not aware. The dusky hairs on her forearm were golden-tipped.
“But you must have a girl at home, Wood. Haven’t you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Are you planning to get married someday?”
“I’m not sure,” he said.
“Oh, you’ll get married. George and I’ve been married three years. George’s family wondered whether something was wrong because I didn’t get pregnant, but there was nothing wrong, we just wanted to wait awhile. Actually we wanted to wait even longer but one time George ran out of those things, and the drugstore was closed, and so we had Georgie. That was all right, because we wanted Georgie and all, but now George keeps those things all over the place.”
She laughed, and touched his arm. “But don’t worry, Wood, you’ll get married. A man has to live with a woman, and a woman has to live with a man. It’s not natural to live alone. It’s awful to be alone. I think it’s very wrong—I mean even for a little while.”
She looked at him seriously, wisely.
“Well, I’ve managed,” he said.
“But isn’t it hard? How can you stand it?”
“I guess because I never…” His voice trembled slightly as the word, whatever it was, or ought to have been, didn’t come. “I guess because I never began,” he said. “I mean I’ve never been married.”
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