Go Naked In The World

by Chamales, Tom T. ;

  As long as Nick had known him, it was one of the few serious things that Boomer had ever said. For a moment it startled Nick. He stared at Boomer, suddenly curious, intrigued in a way, realizing almost shockingly at the same moment how very little he really knew about Boomer.

  But now it was too late. The train began to come jerkingly to a halt. Boomer shouldered his duffelbag and Nick took his case, and they walked up the aisle and stood in the line of departing passengers. There were no civilians on the train platform with the exception of those always privileged few. The train stopped jerkingly. They got off the train, stood on the platform staring at each other for a moment, awkwardly. Then Nick set Boomer’s case down.

  They shook hands.

  “Don’t forget to keep in touch,” Boomer said.

  “Don’t you,” Nick said.

  And then the man who had twice saved his life walked away. Nick knew he wouldn’t turn around.

  CHAPTER II

  NICK sat for perhaps an hour in his compartment. He was relieved that the tension of the farewell was over. And once sitting there looking at the dismal gray almost black of Pittsburgh as the train pulled out, he thought that Boomer was probably relieved, too. Well, if they met again, he told himself, he would ask him.

  But now Boomer was gone and Nick didn’t feel anything. You don’t. Not when you become as resigned to this business of farewells as a soldier does. Maybe sometime later on, over the years, he thought he might feel something—but once you became resigned to something it made it entirely different.

  Like that time in Greece, outside of Sparta, when he was picked up by the rebel Commie troops. He had been sleeping off a trail and suddenly he was awakened by a light in his eyes and as he tried to raise up there was a bayonet tip resting on his throat. He had, then, suddenly resigned himself to dying, and it all became so very simple. There wasn’t anything he could do, he had realized. He just decided he was to die. And there was no fear, there was no thought of wailing or crying out, there was only a second to think how his family would miss him, and he them, but because he was resigned to it the fear had gone. He would just die. Simply.

  He did not die, of course, not then, but there were so many times, he remembered now, when he was not resigned to die but was suddenly faced with death. It was not so simple then.

  Without the resignation there were a multitude of emotions. The strongest and most prevalent of all was, of course, fear.

  Maybe that was why he didn’t want to go home. Because he had feared going home.

  Then suddenly he wasn’t thinking about that (fear) any more. The fact of the matter was that he was going home. Whether he stayed or not didn’t really matter, didn’t really have anything to do with it.

  He just sat there looking at the tall narrow dirty red and white houses packed tightly together, covered with the dismal coke gray of Pittsburgh, letting the loneliness seep in slowly, so slowly that until it had mounted to considerable proportions he did not even realize that it was there.

  At first he just sat there with the loneliness itself, not thinking about what had been, or what was to come, just sat there with the loneliness that welled and welled up, the inexpressible inarticulate hollowness, stillness, quietness, that enveloped you, making you want to put out your arms, to feel and know of love of some sort; of land, of woman, of being understood (finding love in that which you did not understand yourself).

  This was not a new thing to him.

  This was not some furrow the war had driven into him. He had known this since he was a child. Since that time when he could remember his own first emotions.

  And it was not guilt

  Nor fear.

  Only that inarticulate wanting, that longing, that need to give or receive of love—it had to be love. What else? How often he had asked himself that question.

  The really terrible thing about it, he thought, after sitting with it half an hour, the really terrible thing about it was that you couldn’t convey it because you don’t know what it is exactly and, besides, I suppose it’s one of those things that somehow (he grinned suddenly sardonically) you think that no one in the world could possibly feel as deeply and as painfully as you have, therefore it would be an impossible thing for anyone to understand to begin with.

  That paradox again. The very thought (paradox) looming up hugely in front of him like the head of the Great Sphinx; forever there. Alone. Solitary. I am here, the Sphinx said, and you must learn to live with me.

  No matter how rotten it sounded, Nick thought, it was a truth that it takes shit to fertilize a rose.

  I wonder if Old Pete—I should think of him as Father. Mother wouldn’t like me to think of him as Old Pete. That is, unless they had just had an argument. I wonder if Old Pete ever felt lonely. Or did he ever have the time? Or, more important, is that why he wouldn’t give himself the time?

  I wonder if they’re still arguing like they used to. Hell, the war wouldn’t have put a stop to that. It would take more than a simple war.

  Maybe that’s why he always had his tail in a sling with one of them or the other. Because he always ended up on the wrong side of one of them; the one who didn’t get to him first. That is, he always ended up on the wrong side if he hadn’t known the argument was coming. He had learned by the time he was fourteen that when there was one coming to get out of the house on one pretense or another. But most of the time he always came back, before the argument ended. Probably because they never seemed to end it until one of them got some sort of sympathetic reaction from someone who was not involved in the argument, in actuality didn’t know what it was all about, and after hearing them explain their respective sides, couldn’t possibly know what it was all about—as most of the time later they couldn’t remember how it had even started.

  It was really very stupid, he thought, grinning at the picture of it. Two grown people, one a respected and I suppose by now powerful businessman, the other a beautiful, well-educated and extremely poised woman: She sitting and he probably pacing in the huge living-room, there they were, with teeth bared, about to strike, it seemed; then turning to him still in his knickers, turning to him as if, truly, he were the parent, yes, and they the children.

  It was as if soon after they were married they had each prepared briefs on which the entire pattern of their marriage was based; a basic document that they each stuck to, no matter what the conflict. Maybe, Nick thought now, the reason they did argue was so that each would have a few moments, in the process of the argument, in which to remind the other by expounding on their own merits and backgrounds how really fortunate the other was to have him or her, depending on who had the floor.

  These dissertations were always piecemeal, of course. Because it seemed that no matter how many virtues or merits each was sure they had, somewhere they had lost the merit of courtesy, so that if there was anything to be said it had to be said quickly before the other was interrupted. Old Pete was, of course, the first to sense this, and consequently got his licks in acidly quick, enabling him to cause the most frustration the quickest. The thing that Old Pete never did understand was that in spite of this initial advantage he would often lose the argument eventually simply because his wife would immediately yet so very subtly retreat, and then Pete would, savoringly, also retreat just long enough to think that he had won, then as the maleness in him bloated up and softened him, then would come the counter-attack.

  Then after several more rounds, usually more out of tiredness and complicatedness rather than victory, they would make up, each then expounding on the merits and virtues of each other. It was very much like two pugilists who had beaten the hell out of each other, then embraced. It never seemed to reduce the scar tissue on either one.

  It was very much like the war, too, Nick thought. Very very much, he contemplated, unconsciously fingering the four-inch scar along his cheek and jawbone. And like the war, no one won. My God, he suddenly felt like giggling, maybe that’s why I’m alive. In a way I’ve been in a sort
of training since the first slap I had on the backside!

  Still sitting in the compartment, his mind a void, nevertheless a lonely void augmented by that coke gray of outer Pittsburgh, those narrow houses packed as tightly together as a row of infantry in parade formation, and like a row of infantry (hard as it was to believe) each possessed of a life and love, a heartbeat and heartbreak, a focal point around which the entire world revolved, still sitting there it had not occurred to Nick where he would stay or what he would do when he got to Chicago. Or, more important, whom he would call.

  At first he thought of staying at the Stephens, not only because it was near the Twelfth Street Station, but because it was out of the Loop where he might be recognized by someone who might inform his family that he was home before he had had the chance himself to do so. Certainly knowing them as he did, he would not want to hurt them, humiliate them, in that way. Then he remembered the Stephens had been taken over by the Army. He would try the Blackstone.

  But what would he do? More and more the idea of going to Chicago, without going home as soon as he arrived, seemed a little silly and childish.

  He would have to go home eventually, anyhow, as long as he was in town. And after all, for almost three years, almost all his spare time, with the exception of that time that he spent in the hospital, had been spent doing exactly what he was going to do now: checking in at some hotel with the highest aspirations in the world—just to lay around, have good food and drink, think, regain perhaps some of the personality that had been thudded out of him on the battlefields where every man left part of his identity.

  It never worked out that way. It ended up the same way in every hotel, in every town, in every country: drinking, whoring, fighting, anything to escape the often terrifying loneliness that engulfed him; each spiritual, mental and sexual drunk accompanied by its spiritual, mental and sexual counterpart, a hangover. (The basic law of action and reaction. Loneliness was his hot water bottle, and it seemed at times that half his life he had a hangover of one sort or another.)

  Maybe all that was a habit, too, he thought.

  Well, it was the Blackstone Hotel then. He could walk down Michigan Avenue in the mornings in the spring sun. And if he was lucky he would be able to see the Lake and the park from his room.

  Then suddenly in his mind he saw the Art Institute with its two great sculptured lions standing massively on their great stone slabs, and the wide-stepped wide stone stairways (he had counted the steps once, was it twenty-seven or twenty-nine?) then recalling vividly for a moment the first time he was there as a small boy. He must have been only six or seven then, and how he had seen the statue of the nude woman and how he blushed and didn’t want to look at it, yet wanting to, too, and his mother making him, telling him that a woman’s body was the most beautiful form ever created on this earth, that no art had ever really done it justice. And he had looked at it, recalling now so vividly the shame and embarrassment that he had felt, that even now he could feel that same shame and embarrassment flooding up within him.

  Later, alone, he had spent many hours there.

  After his walks in the morning, he would go there, too. And maybe to a concert if there was one he liked. This time he would give himself that chance to think.

  Maybe he could get Ellen to do it with him. I wonder if she’s married, he thought. So many people got married, the letters had said. I shouldn’t have stopped writing to her, he thought regretfully.

  It would be hard to believe she was married. That is, unless you met her husband.

  But she wouldn’t be married, he told himself. She would have sent an announcement at least. There was that much bitchiness in her, at the very very least that much. Ellen the fair, the square, the angel-faced rich bitch with her Marywood, and her Lake Forest, and her poetry. Well, she was a damn good poet, anyhow. And damn good at other things, too. The remarkable thing was the way she had protected her reputation, he remembered admiringly. I wonder if she still has everyone thinking she might become a nun.

  It would be good if he could get a hold of her now. She wouldn’t say anything about his being in town. And she was intelligent and good company. Very good company, he remembered vividly now.

  Suddenly, though he didn’t know it, the loneliness was gone.

  It would be a damn good thing for me too. You haven’t been out with a decent, respectable, intelligent woman since this damn war began. God, I hope she didn’t get fat. No, she was too intelligent for that. (Of course she would never let that happen; she had too much self-respect to let that happen, he told himself.)

  Well, he would have to make a plan. Get her in from Lake-Forest sometime tomorrow early; his mind began to calculate.

  CHAPTER III

  OLD Pete Stratton was sitting behind the big mahogany desk of his office in the Field Building. He hung up the phone, a half smile of satisfaction on his face, and got up and walked across the thick pale Moroccan rug pausing for a moment to glance at his own caricature framed in a gold frame on the mantel of the blue marble false fireplace.

  The caricature showed him, his short stocky body dwarfed, his head hugely exaggerated, holding a pennant in each hand. The pennant in his left hand was held down by his left side and was inscribed: Old Chicago. His right hand was inserting a pennant onto the top of a building of almost skyscraper proportions. It read: Greater Chicago.

  Over the fireplace hung a huge oil painting of the Acropolis which he had purchased for a considerable amount while attending the McCormick auction with his wife. He knew nothing of paintings when he had made the purchase. He still didn’t. And still thought that the price was outrageous: but the Acropolis was famous and was Greek. And Old Pete Stratton was Greek. He was now sixty-seven years old and had gone only as far as the third grade in a hill town above Sparta before coming to America at eleven. Since that time he had had no formal schooling but spoke well with but an occasional slight trace of accent. And had taught himself to read and write English and was very quick with figures.

  He was short, stocky, with pure white hair and did not look Greek, or even half-Greek, or foreign at all. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and in spite of a severe heart attack fourteen years before was in excellent health.

  Still standing there with his thumbs thrust into his vest pockets he looked down rubbing his shoe into the carpet feeling its richness, feeling too that inward satisfaction that he always got when he recalled the carpet hadn’t cost him a dime. Nine years before, he recalled, when he had been buying carpets for the lobby of seven of their theatres he had spotted this piece while in the showroom of one of the carpet distributors that were bidding. He finally told the distributor that the deal was his if he would throw in the Moroccan rug.

  Business being what it was then, nineteen thirty-six, the distributor had readily consented. Old Pete Stratton did not hesitate telling his two partners, who were Greek also, that he had the carpet thrown in for himself. Then he had taken it home and put it in the basement, where it stayed for seven years, along with a lot of other things Pete had acquired (he never threw away anything). Then when their operations grew so big, due primarily to the war, and they were forced to move from their old building to larger quarters, though Pete himself had objected vehemently to moving into the Field Building because he knew they would have to furnish their offices accordingly which was not only expensive, Pete had stated at the Board meeting, but would also incline to make the motion picture distributors raise the price of pictures because it would look like they were making a lot of money; which they were. But, for once, Pete was outvoted.

  They moved, So finally after seven years the carpet that had lain in the basement of the big house out in Winnetka, the carpet that did not cost a dime, was laid much to Old Pete’s satisfaction.

  On top of the carpet Pete had however placed his old roll-top desk from the old building on North Clark, which once his wife Mary had seen, and after having seen the offices of his partners, had relentlessly and adamantly insisted that he re
place, which he just as relentlessly and adamantly insisted he would not.

  Then two months after they had moved in, which was in forty-four, the present year being forty-five, Pete had gone to Florida for a two weeks’ rest. When he returned he found that his desk had been replaced, his walls papered, drapes hung, and the false marble fireplace installed, all by his wife Mary, of course, and for which he received a fantastic bill from Marshall Field which he would not pay until he was finally threatened with suit.

  He would still raise hell occasionally with his wife for taking this initiative. Inwardly however he was really very proud of the office, it was by far the nicest of the offices; not quite as large an office as one of his partner’s but nevertheless the nicest. It had been, too, his own idea of taking the painting of the Acropolis out of the basement of the Winnetka House and putting it over the false fireplace.

  From the carpet he glanced up once again at the caricature, then took a cigar from his vest pocket. Behind him the door opened. He listened but did not move. Then his secretary spoke:

  “Mr. Stratton, Mrs. Stratton’s on the phone again.”

  Old Pete turned around slowly, the cigar in his mouth now, but unlit, staring at her for a moment as if she were not really there. Miss Keith, Miss Betsy Keith, wondered why now that he was in the big money again he wouldn’t stop smoking those ten cent cigars.

  “I told you to tell her I was busy. I’ll call later.”

  “She said she’s leaving the house. She wants to talk to you before she goes,” she hesitated. “She’s on the line,” she said advisedly, using the prerogative she had acquired in being in his service for over seventeen years. She was about the homeliest woman Pete Stratton had ever seen: Middle fifties, bone-thin, slightly bucktoothed, a beak nose supporting gold-rimmed glasses.