by Irwin Shaw
“All right,” she said, and stood up. Once more he followed her to the door. The car stopped and the door wheezed open. They stepped down to the wet pavement. The car pulled away, a mass of protesting bearings, clashing at the meager sleep of the natives, packed into their leaning houses. Noah and the girl walked away from the trolley tracks. Here and there along the mean streets there was a tree, fretted with green in surprising evidence that spring had come to this place this year.
The girl turned into a small concrete yard, under a high stone stoop. There was a barred iron door. She opened the lock with her key and the door swung open.
“There,” she said, coldly. “We’re home,” and turned to face him.
Noah took off his hat. The girl’s face bloomed palely out of the darkness. She had taken off her hat, too, and her hair made a wavering line around the ivory gleam of her cheeks and brow. Noah felt like weeping, as though he had lost everything that he had ever held dear, as he stood close to her in the poor shadow of the house in which she lived.
“I … I want to say …” he said, whispering, “that I do not object … I mean I am pleased … pleased, I mean, to have brought you home.”
“Thank you,” she said. She was whispering, too, but her voice was noncommittal.
“Complex,” he said. He waved his hands vaguely. “If you only knew how complex. I mean, I’m very pleased, really …”
She was so close, so poor, so young, so frail, deserted, courageous, lonely … He put out his hands in a groping blind gesture and took her head delicately in his hands and kissed her.
Her lips were soft and firm and a little damp from the mist.
Then she slapped him. The noise echoed meanly under the stone steps. His cheeks felt a little numb. How strong she is, he thought dazedly, for such a frail-looking girl.
“What made you think,” she said coldly, “that you could kiss me?”
“I … I don’t know,” he said, putting his hand to his cheek to assuage the smarting, then pulling it away, ashamed of showing that much weakness at a moment like this. “I … I just did.”
“You do that with your other girls,” Hope said crisply. “Not with me.”
“I don’t do it with other girls,” Noah said unhappily.
“Oh,” Hope said. “Only with me. I’m sorry I look so easy.”
“Oh, no,” said Noah, mourning within him. “That isn’t what I mean.” Oh, God, he thought, if only there was some way to explain to her how I feel. Now she thinks I am a lecherous fool on the loose from the corner drugstore, quick to grab any girl who’ll let me. He swallowed dryly, the English language clotted in his throat.
“Oh,” he said, weakly. “I’m so sorry.”
“I suppose you think,” the girl began cuttingly, “you’re so wonderfully attractive, so bright, so superior that any girl would just fall all over herself to let you paw her …”
“Oh, God.” He backed away painfully, and nearly stumbled against the two steps that led down from the cement yard.
“I never in all my days,” said the girl, “have come across such an arrogant, opinionated, self-satisfied young man.”
“Stop …” Noah groaned. “I can’t stand it.”
“I’ll say good night now,” the girl said bitingly. “Mr. Ackerman.”
“Oh, no,” he whispered. “Not now. You can’t.”
She moved the iron gate with a tentative, forbidding gesture, and the hinges creaked in his ears.
“Please,” he begged, “listen to me …”
“Good night.” With a single, swift movement, she was behind the gate. It slammed shut and locked. She did not look back, but opened the wooden door to the house and went through it. Noah stared stupidly at the two dark doors, the iron and the wood, then slowly turned, and brokenly started down the street.
He had gone thirty yards, holding his hat absently in his hand, not noticing that the rain had begun again and a fine drizzle was soaking his hair, when he stopped. He looked around him uneasily, then turned and went back toward the girl’s house. There was a light on there now, behind the barred window on the street level, and even through the drawn blinds he could see a shadow moving about within.
He walked up to the window, took a deep breath, and tapped at it. After a moment, the blind was drawn aside and he could see Hope’s face peering out. He put his face as close to the window as he could and made vague, senseless gestures to indicate that he wanted to talk to her. She shook her head irritably and waved to him to go away, but he said, quite loudly, with his lips close to the window. “Open the door. I’ve got to talk to you. I’m lost. Lost. LOST!”
He saw her peering at him doubtfully through the rain-streaked glass. Then she grinned and disappeared. A moment later he heard the inside door being opened, and then she was at the gate. Involuntarily, he sighed,.
“Ah,” he said, “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Don’t you know your way?” she asked.
“I am lost,” he said. “No one will ever find me again.”
She chuckled.
“You’re a terrible fool,” she said, “aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said humbly. “Terrible.”
“Well,” she said, very serious now, on the other side of the locked gate, “you walk two blocks to your left and you wait for the trolley, the one that comes from your left, and you take that to Eastern Parkway and then …”
Her voice swept on, making a small music out of the directions for escaping to the larger world, and Noah noticed as she stood there that she had taken off her shoes and was much smaller than he had realized, much more delicate, and more dear.
“Are you listening to me?” she asked.
“I want to tell you something,” he said loudly, “I am not arrogant, I am not opinionated …”
“Sssh,” she said, “my aunt’s asleep.”
“I am shy,” he whispered, “and I don’t have a single opinion in the whole world, and I don’t know why I kissed you. I … I just couldn’t help it.”
“Not so loud,” she said. “My aunt.”
“I was trying to impress you,” he whispered. “I don’t know any Continental women. I wanted to pretend to you that I was very smart and very sophisticated. I was afraid that if I just was myself you wouldn’t look at me. It’s been a very confusing night,” he whispered brokenly. “I don’t remember ever going through anything so confusing. You were perfectly right to slap me. Perfectly. A lesson,” he said, leaning against the gate, his face cold against the iron, close to her face. “A very good lesson. I … I can’t say what I feel about you at the moment. Some other time, maybe, but …” He stopped. “Are you Roger’s girl?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m not anybody’s girl.”
He laughed, ah insane, creaking laugh.
“My aunt,” she warned.
“Well,” he whispered, “the trolley to Eastern Parkway. Good night. Thank you. Good night.”
But he didn’t move. They stared at each other in the shadowy, watery light from the lamppost.
“Oh, Lord,” he said softly, full of anguish, “you don’t know, you just don’t know.”
He heard the lock of the gate opening, and then the gate was open and he had taken the one step in. They kissed, but it wasn’t like the first kiss. Somewhere within him something was thundering, but he couldn’t help feeling that perhaps, in the middle of it, she would step back and hit him again.
She moved slowly away from him, looking at him with a dark smile. “Don’t get lost,” she said, “on the way home.”
“The trolley,” he whispered, “the trolley to Eastern Parkway and then … I love you,” he said. “I love you.”
“Good night,” she said. “Thanks for taking me home.”
He stepped back and the gate closed between them. She turned and padded gently through the door in her stockinged feet. Then the door was shut and the street was empty. He started toward the trolley car. It didn’t occur to him until he was
at the door of his own room nearly two hours later, that he had never before in all his twenty-one years said “I love you” to anyone.
The room was dark and he could hear Roger’s measured sleeping breath. Noah undressed swiftly and silently and slid into bed across the room from his friend. He lay there staring at the ceiling, caught in alternate waves of pleasure and agony as he thought first of the girl and the kiss at the gate, and of Roger and what he would say in the morning.
He was dozing off to sleep when he heard his name.
“Noah!”
He opened his eyes. “Hello, Roger,” he said.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
Silence.
“Take her home?”
“Yes.”
Silence in the dark room.
“We went out to get some sandwiches,” Roger said. “You must have missed us.”
“Yes.”
Silence again.
“Roger …”
“Yes?”
“I feel I have to explain. I didn’t mean to … Honest. I started out by myself and then … I don’t quite remember … Roger, are you awake?”
“Yes.”
“Roger, she told me something …”
“What?”
“She told me she wasn’t your girl.”
“Did she?”
“She said she wasn’t anybody’s girl. But if she is your girl. Or if you want her to be your girl … I … I’ll never see her again. I swear, Roger. Are you awake?”
“Yes. She’s not my girl. I won’t deny, from time to time the thought’s crossed my mind, but who the hell could make that trip to Brooklyn three times a week?”
Noah wiped the sweat off his forehead in the dark. “Roger,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I love you.”
“Go the hell to sleep.” Then the chuckle across the shared dark room. Then silence again.
In the next two months Noah and Hope wrote each other forty-two letters. They worked near each other and met every day for lunch and almost every night for dinner, and they slipped away from their jobs on sunny afternoons to walk along the docks and watch the ships passing in and out of the harbor. Noah made the long, shuttling trip back and forth to Brooklyn thirty-seven times in the two months, but their real life was carried through the United States mails.
Sitting next to her, in no matter how dark and private a place, he could only manage to say, “You’re so pretty,” or “I love the way you smile,” or “Will you go to the movies with me on Sunday night?” But with the heady freedom of blank paper, and through the impersonal agency of the letter-carrier, he could write, “Your beauty is with me day and night. When I look out in the morning at the sky, it is clearer because I know it is covering you, too; when I look up the river at the bridge, I believe it is a stronger bridge because you have once walked across it with me; when I look at my own face in the mirror, it seems to me it is a better face, because you have kissed it the night before.”
And Hope, who had a dry, New England severity in her makeup that prevented her from offering any but the most guarded and reticent expressions of love in person, would write …“You have just left the house and I think of you walking down the empty street and waiting in the spring darkness for the trolley car, and riding in the train to your home. I will stay up with you tonight while you make your journey through the city. Darling, as you travel, I sit here in the sleeping house, with one lamp on, and think of all the things I believe about you. I believe that you are good and strong and just, and I believe that I love you. I believe that your eyes are beautiful and your mouth sad and your hands supple and lovely …”
And then, when they would meet, they would stare at each other, the glory of the written word trembling between them, and say, “I got two tickets for a show. If you’re not doing anything tonight, want to go?”
Then, late at night, light-headed with the dazzle of the theatre, and love for each other, and lack of sleep, standing, embraced in the cold vestibule of Hope’s house, not being able to go in, because her uncle had a dreadful habit of sitting up in the living room till all hours of the morning reading the Bible, they would hold each other desperately, kissing until their lips were numb, the life of their letters and their real life together fusing for the moment in a sorrowing burst of passion.
They did not go to bed with each other. First of all, there seemed to be no place in the whole brawling city, with all its ten million rooms, that they could call their own and go to in dignity and honor. Then, Hope had a stubborn religious streak, and every time they veered dangerously close to consummation, she pulled back, alarmed. “Some time, some time,” she would whisper. “Not now …”
“You will just explode,” Roger told him, grinning, “and blow away. It’s unnatural. What’s the matter with the girl? Doesn’t she know she’s the postwar generation?”
“Cut it out, Roger,” Noah said sheepishly. He was sitting at the desk in their room, writing Hope a letter, and Roger was lying flat on his back on the floor, because the spring of the sofa had been broken five months ago and the sofa was very uncomfortable for a tall man.
“Brooklyn,” Roger said. “That dark, mysterious land.” Since he was on the floor anyway, he started doing some exercises for the abdomen, bringing his feet above his head and then letting them down slowly three times. “Enough,” he said, “I feel healthier already. Sex,” he said, “is like swimming. You either go in all the way or you stay out. If you just hang around the edge, letting the spray hit you, you get cold and nervous. One more month with that girl and you’ll have to go to a psychoanalyst. Write her that and tell her I said so.”
“Sure thing,” said Noah. “I’m putting it down right now.”
“If you’re not careful,” Roger said, “you’re going to find yourself a married man.”
Noah stopped typing. He had bought a typewriter on time payments when he found himself writing so many letters.
“No danger,” he said. “I’m not going to get married.” But the truth was he had thought about it again and again, and had even, in his letters, written tentatively about it to Hope.
“Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad at that,” Roger said. “She’s a fine girl and it’d keep you out of the draft.”
They had avoided thinking about the draft. Luckily, Noah’s number was among the highest. The Army hung somewhere in the future, like a dark, distant cloud in the sky.
“No,” said Roger, judiciously, from the floor, “I have only two things against the girl. One, she keeps you from getting any sleep. Two, you know what. Otherwise, she’s done you a world of good.”
Noah glanced at his friend gratefully.
“Still,” Roger said, “she ought to go to bed with you.”
“Shut up.”
“Tell you what. I’ll go away this week-end and you can have the place.” Roger sat up. “Nothing could be fairer than that.”
“Thanks,” Noah said. “If the occasion arises, I’ll take your offer.”
“Maybe,” Roger said, “I’d better talk to her. In the role of best friend, concerned for his comrade’s safety. ‘My dear young lady, you may not realize it, but our Noah is on the verge of leaping out the window.’ Give me a dime, I’ll call her this minute.”
“I’ll manage it myself,” Noah said, without conviction.
“How about this Sunday?” Roger asked. “Lovely month of June, etcetera, the full moon of summer, etcetera …”
“This Sunday is out,” said Noah. “We’re going to a wedding.”
“Whose?” Roger asked. “Yours?”
Noah laughed falsely. “Some friend of hers in Brooklyn.”
“You ought to get a wholesale rate,” Roger said, “from the Transit System.” He lay back. “I have spoken. I now hold my peace.”
He remained quiet for a moment while Noah typed.
“One month,” he said. “Then the psychoanalyst’s couch. Mark my words.”
Noah l
aughed and stood up. “I give up,” he said. “Let’s go down and I’ll buy you a beer.”
Roger sprang to his feet “My good friend,” he said, “the virgin Noah.”
They laughed and went out of the house, into the soft, calm summer evening, toward the frightful saloon on Columbus Avenue that they frequented.
The wedding on Sunday was held in a large house in Flat-bush, a house with a garden and a small lawn, leading down to a tree shaded street. The bride was pretty and the minister was quick and there was champagne.
It was warm and sunny and everyone seemed to be smiling with the tender, unashamed sensuality of wedding guests. In corners of the large house, after the ceremony, the younger guests were pairing off in secret conversations. Hope had a new yellow dress. She had been out in the sun during the week and her skin was tanned. Noah kept watching her proudly and a little anxiously as she moved about, her hair dark and tumbled in a new coiffure, above the soft golden flash of her dress. Noah stood off to one side, sipping the champagne, a little shy, talking quietly again and again to the friendly guests, watching Hope, something inside his head saying, her hair, her lips, her legs, in a kind of loving shorthand.
He kissed the bride and there was a jumbled confusion of white satin and lace and lipstick-taste and perfume and orange blossom. He looked past the bright, moist eyes and the parted lips of the bride to Hope, standing watching him across the room, and the shorthand within him noted her throat, her waist. Hope came over and he said, “There’s something I’ve wanted to do,” and he put out his hands to her waist, slender in the tight bodice of her new dress. He felt the narrow, girlish flesh and the intricate small motion of the hipbones. Hope seemed to understand. She leaned over gently and kissed him. He didn’t mind, although several people were watching, because at a wedding everybody seemed licensed to kiss everyone else. Besides he had never before drunk champagne on a warm summer’s afternoon.
They watched the bride and the groom go off in a car with streamers flying from it, the rice scattered around, the mother weeping softly at the doorstep, the groom grinning, red and self-conscious at the rear window. Noah looked at Hope and she looked at him and he knew they were thinking about the same thing.