Go Naked In The World

by Chamales, Tom T. ;

  And out there suddenly to the west he saw in his mind a vast panorama of the land, the flat land sloping gently downward for miles from the edges of the city toward the Fox River valley and the tall com growing between the city and the river, and the ducks on the river; the tall green com and the manicured lawns of the gentleman farmer estates out near St. Charles, where the land near the river suddenly dipped and rolled, and the earth was black rich from the river. And suddenly the fall and the stacks of wheat, the rough edge trenches of the com fields, the stiff abandoned stalks, and the color all color of a cluster of trees; the sudden crispness of the first cold night coming quickly darkly in the late afternoon and with the darkness the strange melancholia of fall. Then the overcast of the sky, the snow, the big house in Winnetka and the fireplace, the big stone fireplace and the log burning slowly in the winter as the snow clusters gathered on the window; and you and your sister and the collie in front of the fire and the pillows on the floor, you reading to her Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Would she remember that you had stolen from Byron to call her your black eyed darling

  he was home

  there was a barren hill and on top of the hill was a monastery there were huge rocks on the hill and a road twisting up the hill and goats grazing and it was Italy in the fall halfway up the hill on the road was an ambush from behind the big rocks and Jerry died in your arms all six foot seven of Jerry his hands between his legs where his testicles should have been say goodbye to my wife but for God’s sake don’t tell her this for God’s sake Nick and save your goddamn morphine you’ll need it before you get out of this

  he was home

  there was snow a foot deep that was dry and whiter than any he had ever seen and dry cold and gray overhead and they had not seen the sky in days in this the north of Greece and there were no trees except the lone tall dead tree near the crest of one hill they could see in the distance only the hills and the white snow and the blackpowder smoke of the artillery and his own blood in the snow and Boomer dragging him through the snow leaving a trail of redness and Boomer telling him later on how he Nick had laughed-cried hysterically laugh-cried as Boomer dragged him I’m-tinkling-red-in-the-snow.

  he was home

  there were hills always hills and somehow it seemed someone else was always on the hills

  it was hot and wet and the green of the jungle sweated as .a man sweats and for days there had been only rain and the earth was a blanket of ooze and on top of the hill was a village and it took three days to get the two hundred yards from the stream bed to the crest of the hill and the village abandoned except for Scottie’s body tied to a post and the vultures sat on top of the bashas and watched as you cut him down what was left and remembered the fine flavor of his accent and the night you had stolen the jeep together in Calcutta and he had shot up the mirrors in the lobby of the Great Eastern Hotel and it took you two days to find him and when you did married to a half-caste whore and you did not know whether to mail his letter to his real wife in Wales or not

  on the Avenue they did not know

  there were sand dunes down by the Lake and in the late summer the week before they were to start frosh football they had a war with BB guns in the dunes which was not for real and this time he had the hill by himself and they were attacking him up the sand hill and his BB hit the Jew kid Wizenburg in the eye and blinded him and there wasn’t anything he could do that would make the eye see again

  So they had trained him for it. They did not know it and he did not know it but they had trained him for it. They had all worked on it together: the joke was that none of them knew they had been working on it.

  Two paratroopers winging down the Avenue saluted him briskly.

  Maybe now I can get rid of the guilt of Wizenburg’s eye, he thought. Maybe I can convince myself, he half-laughed sardonically to himself, that because of the eye he was kept out of the war and probably, by now, has made a lot of money which was his only ambition anyhow. No more guilt: I saved Wizenburg’s life because he certainly would have died or at least been maimed had I not blinded him.

  There were no rooms at the Palmer House. Or the Brevoort. Or the Bismarck. Or the Sherman.

  At the Sherman he went down into the Inn to have a drink. Jimmy Dorsey was there as he had been there the night Nick had graduated from high school. The headwaiter did not recognize him when he had entered though he had known him well because in the old days he had worked for Old Pete at his Club. There was not a good room in the city where there wasn’t someone that hadn’t worked for Old Pete in the old days.

  The bar was packed tight with soldiers and sailors and the room was crowded with soldiers and sailors about equally divided between the enlisted level and the officer level, only a smattering of male civilians. There was a Wave alone at the bar, he saw, and he edged over near her but when he saw her skin in the blue bar light he did not approach her. He did not see anyone he knew. He could not remember ever having come here before when he hadn’t seen at least one person he knew.

  There was excitement in the room. It was the same excitement that began the day of Pearl Harbor. It did not seem an excitement on the wane, he thought. He had four drinks at the bar. He could not feel the drinks but some of the loneliness went away and he no longer thought of the war. Or of home. He was drinking in a bar, with women in the bar, and an orchestra was playing music. You did not think of war or home under those conditions usually.

  But he had no room.

  He would take a cab back to the Blackstone and bribe the clerk. By God he was going to stay at the Blackstone. The clerk would not give him a room. He went to the manager after talking to and tipping the bell captain. The manager did not have a room but a suite, he said. Twenty-five a day. He took the suite.

  It was one o’clock when he went up to the suite. In the suite the loneliness began to return. He looked out the window at the lights of the cars on the outer drive across the park, and saw the moonglow on the Lake, and with the music of the radio playing softly the loneliness became so unbearable that he knew he would not be able to sleep. From his duffle bag he took a bottle and poured a huge shot, then went out.

  There was little traffic on the Avenue now. He stopped in two bars having one drink of scotch and soda in each. But the bars were dead. He would go down to Rush Street he decided. There was always something going on down there. The hoods ran the majority of places around Rush Street. It was odd but nobody but a hood seemed to be able to run a club right. Maybe that was why Old Pete was so good at it, he thought making a joke to himself.

  Hy Dennis ran the Four Winds. He’d go there. Hy wouldn’t say anything about Nick being in town. Those kind of guys never said anything about anybody, though occasionally after he had gotten to know Hy, Hy had told Nick stories about the days when Old Pete ran his Club which was known as The Mill, and had a big windmill on top of it just like the Moulin Rouge in Paris and sat three thousand people in the summer when the gardens were open.

  If you ran a place in Chicago, Nick knew, you just naturally did business with the hoods. They controlled the distribution of liquor since back in the days of Capone, through prohibition, and after it. That was a talent in itself, knowing how to do business with them without getting involved or obligated. Old Pete knew how though, Hy had said. Remembering the story Hy had told him about the time during prohibition when Old Pete had the whisky for The Mill stashed in a building across the street: Thirty thousand dollars of it. And how one night it was all hi-jacked and Old Pete had called Capone as soon as he heard about it, and Capone said he was sorry he didn’t know it was Old Pete’s booze, and how the very same night trucks pulled up to the old building across the way from The Mill and the next day all the whisky was back, with a couple of hundred extra cases thrown in.

  He got in a cab: “How’s the Four Winds going?” he asked the driver.

  “It blasts, soldier. But it’s a little early for over there.”

  “How about the Chez? Who’s there?”

&nbs
p; “Durante, I think.”

  “The Chez,” Nick said. Well, there went that part of his plan: Going to places where he might run into someone. You spend twenty-five a day for a suite at the Blackstone so you won’t be in a neighborhood where you might run into someone you know, then blithely, only two hours after you’ve been in town, get into a cab and blithely say ‘the Chez’ where you are liable to run into half the people you know in this city.

  Hell, he hadn’t been recognized by any of the staff at the Sherman. Who was going to recognize him the way he looked. Even Boomer said he looked thirty-five. He began to feel a slight numbness from the drinks. I shouldn’t drink so fast, he told himself. What was wrong with him, belting like that. For him the war was over. He hadn’t come off a mission, wasn’t unwinding from anything. He wasn’t going to make a jump. Oh God, he felt the ugly fear wing through him, those jumps. What was wrong with him to begin with? why had he insisted on going to jump school just because he was so terribly afraid of height?

  “Shut your window, will you cabbie?” he asked.

  No, he realized suddenly, the war wasn’t over for him. Not yet. What was it that Edna St. Vincent Millay said in Conversation at Midnight. Anselmo said it, I think. “The bullet that passes a soldier’s head nevertheless leaves a furrow in his head.”

  They pulled up in front of the Chez. Durante wasn’t there. It was Joe E. Lewis. Well he was better anyhow. At least for my dough. Joe E., Old Pete’s pal from the old days. He took the elevator upstairs. It was crowded. He went through the smoke dark of the thickly richly red-carpeted main room that had fewer soldiers and sailors in it than any room he had been in in years. The show was not on but the dance floor was charged crowded and the band was playing a rumba. He went to the bar.

  The headwaiter had not recognized him. In the bar he ordered a scotch. There was a civilian standing next to him at the bar. He was obviously a salesman and when Nick noticed that he was in a conversational mood Nick turned away abruptly. His scotch came. For a few minutes he did not touch it. Damn it, there was no reason to belt now.

  The bar was glassed in from the main room. He saw Mike Trezel, the owner of the Chez, come walking through the bar; sixty-ish, tall, thin, somber, the familiar long Havana in his mouth as he greeted his guests. He had not changed. Nick stared at him wondering if Mike would recognize him. Certainly Mike would. Mike had come to their house at least once every two months ever since Nick could remember. Mike passed him. Nodded. He had not recognized him. God, Nick thought, do I look that bad. That old. He turned to the bar mirror running his hand over the scar on his cheek.

  He drank half his drink slowly then went to the men’s room. In the men’s room he ran into Jack Lombard who was a neighbor of theirs when they lived in Wilmette before they moved to Winnetka.

  “Aren’t you Nick Stratton?” Jack asked.

  “Sorry,” Nick said. “You must have me mixed up with someone.”

  “God, boy, you look enough like him to be his twin. Maybe a little older. His brother.”

  “Sorry,” Nick turned around.

  After that he decided to leave. Christ, he didn’t have to lie about who he was. He didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. He went back to the bar and finished his drink and paid. Coming out of the bar into the main room he paused in the dark by the wall and his eyes searched the room apprehensively; the sudden ambivalence of his feelings striking him with a kind of dumb terror. On the one hand not wanting to be seen or known and on the other an overwhelming desire, a craving really, to see if only for a moment someone that he really knew.

  Standing there against the wall, more a soldier flattened along an enemy occupied building than a man in a cabaret fourteen thousand miles from any war, standing there with the dumb terror that made the perspiration pour from his forehead and armpits and crotch feeling dumbly inane and insignificant and pointlessly split down the middle as if somehow suddenly the soul of him had gone away, was castrated, as a man was castrated...he saw big as life Pierro dancing.

  It was Pierro all right, the dumb terror fleeing as suddenly as it had struck, but the dumb numbness evaporating slowly as the perspiration evaporated. It was one of the few places where he would never expect to run into Pierro: though what his cousin was dancing with was exactly what Nick would have expected to find him dancing with: young, very young and wide-eyed. Stylishly thin, pithy, pensive, with long golden hair straight and rolled under, a twentieth century Cleopatra, including bangs to cover up a forehead that was undoubtedly too high. She was society all right. From the tight black peau de soie dress and the plain black pumps and the single strand of pearls she was society from sole to crown.

  I wonder when he got home, Nick half-grinned in that lazy-sardonic way of his. Well, he took up right where he left off. The snob. The poor stupid snob. No, a war wouldn’t change him. You should have known that not even a war could change him. He didn’t even look any different, Nick thought rubbing his forefinger over his own battered nose. Not even any older.

  Identically the same, with the same identical kind of women. And he with the same identical acquired pose of the head; tilted and high and aloof. The same self-patented snobbish expressionlessness of the face. The gentle pitter-patter way he danced, as if he were truly bored.

  I wonder if he’s ever been laid. He was no faggot. Somehow Nick knew that. At least had always assumed it. But somehow he believed Pierro still to be a virgin. Kind of neuter sexually, maybe. Well, there wasn’t anything wrong with that as long as he had the drive he had and the drive continued to go into his work. Maybe he was a lot better off than a lot of people, if that was the way he was. I wonder if it had anything to do with his father being sick. I never thought of that.

  I ought to go talk to him. He’d get a hell of a kind of gratification over knowing I was in town and Old Pete not knowing. He might not show how he felt, though. But maybe he would at least give one of those amused little laughs that made you feel for a moment like you were naked seven inches tall standing before a superior breed of man.

  Still standing against the wall Nick lighted a cigarette a little nervously, waiting for the set to end. His eyes followed his cousin as Pierro came down the three steps to the floor level, throwing one foot out sideways and limping down; remembering now that Pierro had caught his at Anzio—well, he’d play that wound out to the hilt—and out from the bright lights shining down over the small floor into the murky blue smoke becoming darkly an obscure silhouette for a moment as he followed the society girl knifingly between tables his head held unusually high and tilted slightly above all the wine-filled liquor-filled still-warcharged gaiety of the room that somehow could not hide with all its adornments and embellishments and decor—Dior dresses—Chapman dresses—Carnegie dresses—strapless dresses and exposed shoulders and half exposed breasts—the hungry eyes of the men strip it down and there was the same declining wildness and thirst and underlying sense of lust and sex and wanting-to-be-seen-a-unique-a-separate-entity as there was in any bar or club in Oran or Cairo or Bombay or Calcutta

  sisters under the skin

  and brothers too

  Pierro worked his way across the room in the murkiness following her the Golden Cleopatra of his society as if she were pulling him along in his ancient chariot too preponderate to be bothered or even care where he was going.

  Where they went was to a large table of ten or twelve, the women all looking like other versions of the Golden Cleopatra. One naval officer and an assortment of eastern type Midwesterners with their Brooks Brothers clothes that in some Midwestern way they could not quite wear. They were young men with the exception of the naval officer who was partly bald and had braid and enough ribbons for four footsoldiers with five campaigns.

  Well he wasn’t going to get involved in that, Nick thought slightly dejected. But maybe he ought to go over and have at least one drink, he thought craftily. He could talk about Old Pete and the Greeks. That would surely make Pierro uncomfortable. Maybe that’s why Pie
rro never went to popular places, it occurred to Nick. Maybe he was afraid he was going to run into some of the Greeks he had grown up with, or one of his overly groomed relatives who had not Americanized their names. What, he wondered suddenly, caused this immeasurable shame Pierro had for being Greek. For anyone that carried the strain. Could it have been because in high school he had been tagged Greasy Greek. Not that, really. That was par for any school in the city. Like DIRTY KIKE. Or Shanty Irish. Could it be perhaps that it was because his father was sick? could it possibly be for that reason. Certainly Pierro was broader than that: to know that the sickness was not an exclusively Greek one.

  Slightly dejected he decided that Pierro’s table wasn’t for him tonight. He walked away from the wall across the room, sure that Pierro would never turn his head in this direction. He was too much of a snob to ever turn his head and stare in a public room. But snob that he was he had talent, real talent.

  Perhaps, it occurred to Nick suddenly, maybe that’s why he has the talent: because he lives and acts the way that he does; because he doesn’t spill everything he’s got all over every place he goes to every person he knows. You never hear him speak of architecture either generally or technically or whom or what he admired in his field. Maybe that whole damn attitude of his was put on like a protective coat of cosmoline on a rifle; to protect the working parts from outside contamination. And maybe too what he showed for society was put on so that he could get to the people who had the power and influence to eventually allow him to work as he wanted to work, to create what he wanted to create.

  This whole new conception of Pierro struck Nick with a high voltage current like a sudden unexpected revelation, as if he had finally entered a house that he had often passed and found its interior a complete antithesis of what he had visualized it to be. Standing there waiting for the elevator Nick examined the logic of this sudden revelation which was each second becoming more logical; a truly feasible explanation of why Pierro lived as he did and acted as he did. Then just as suddenly the revelation became a reality and Nick felt the teasing prick of jealous anger spread out over him. His forehead furrowed slightly. He stormed onto the crowded elevator not noticing anything or anybody; held, directed, and governed momentarily by the gnawing jealous anger that this new train of thought had provoked in him, the anger and jealousy and humiliation of somehow being bested intermingled with a sincere respect and admiration for Pierro—if that was the way it was with Pierro.