by Pete Hamill
I got off at Garden and Palafox. The sun was high and not very hot and a salty breeze was blowing in from the waterfront. I stared into the window of a men’s store on the ground floor of the Blount Building, across the street from the San Carlos Hotel. The clothes there were too expensive. I looked across the street at the hotel, thinking I’d like to walk around the lobby. Then, like a scene in some old movie, Tony Mercado, the Mexican pilot, came out on the steps. He had a blonde woman with him. He kissed her on the cheek and she disappeared in a taxi. The tall colored doorman in his white uniform said something; Mercado smiled and then another colored man drove up in a shiny blue convertible. He got out and backed up a step. Mercado handed him what must have been a tip, slipped behind the wheel and drove away. It was all done with ease and command and I envied him. I wondered what it would be like to spend a night with a woman in a big hotel. On silk sheets. With drinks in a bucket beside the bed. And enough money to order food brought to the room. Just like in the movies.
“Hey, sailor.”
Two Shore Patrol were standing there, each holding a club, each with a pistol strapped to his hip. One was tall, with square shoulders, dark sideburns. The other was short and compact.
“Let’s see your Liberty Pass, sailor,” the tall one said.
I gave it to him, and he studied it in a suspicious way, making me nervous. I knew what it said. I’d practically memorized it. Armed Forces Liberty Pass. With the name of the service, the date, my name, my service number, the card number, my rate and the name of the organization. Signed by Donnie Ray. I was here legally. But still, the SPs made me nervous. The tall one nodded to the shorter one and then handed me back the pass.
“Just checkin,” he said.
I asked them where I could buy civvies at a decent price and they directed me to Sears, down on South Palafox. I saluted and walked away. When I glanced back, they were strolling into the lobby of the San Carlos. Maybe they had some women stashed there too.
Sears was a long, narrow, badly lit store with signs everywhere advertising bargains. The men’s department was just inside the door. I bought a ghastly green Hawaiian shirt that wasn’t as loud as Sal’s but still made me feel as if I were in Florida. It cost $2.50. A pair of chinos went for six bucks. I told the man at the counter that I wanted to wear them out of the store and he showed me a dressing room. I took off the uniform and folded it neatly. Then, dressed in civvies at last, I brought the uniform back and asked the salesman to wrap it for me. The man nodded silently; his face looked permanently unhappy.
On the way out, I saw an area that displayed art supplies. I went over and looked at the pads, hefted some of the heavy tubes of oil paint, examined various chalks and pencils. I thought that on the long dead days and in the slow evenings I could start to draw again. Maybe I’d buy a sketchbook. Some pencils. I looked for a salesman and my eyes wandered and then, five aisles away, I saw her.
The woman from the bus.
She was behind the counter in the lingerie department. Right there. Across the room. She was wearing a gray Sears jacket over her street clothes and her hair was pulled back tightly in a bun. It was her all right. I hadn’t imagined her that day. When I rolled past on the truck, she must have been going to work. She was talking to a fat woman in a blue dress. The fat woman had a pair of panties in her hands, and as I drifted closer (my heart beating faster, my face damp), I could see my woman stretch the silken garment at the crotch, explaining its wonders.
I drifted closer, looking blindly at other counters, glancing at her as she waited on the fat woman. When she’s finished and the fat woman’s gone, I thought, I’ll just go over and say hello. Casual. Without showing that I care too much. Suddenly, a black man in his forties came up to me and asked if I worked there. No, I said, I didn’t. Damn, he said, looking frustrated, glancing at a cheap wristwatch. What’s the problem? I said. I got to get me some thread over by that notions countuh, he said. There was a thin pale woman behind the counter. I said, why don’t you just ask that salesgirl? You crazy, man? he said. That woman’s white. I must have looked like some dumb immigrant, just off the boat. The black man explained, No white woman’s ’lowed to wait on no cullid in this town. He walked away, looking for a white man who could wait on him. I thought: Jesus Christ.
I couldn’t wait any longer, and ambled over to the lingerie counter. I went to the right of the fat lady, my head down, stealing glances at the woman in the Sears jacket. A nameplate was pinned above the swell of her breasts. Eden Santana. A name. Her name. The name that would work its way into me for the rest of my life. Eden. Like a promise of paradise. The overhead fluorescent lights made her hair look darker, the highlights tinged with green. She had thick black eyebrows. And that aquiline nose, with a small bump in the middle, was the way I’d remembered it. Her upper lip was thin, but the lower lip was thick and pouty. She smiled at the fat woman as she handed her a bag and change and I saw dimples in her cheeks. In the harsh overhead light, she looked at least twenty-eight. Maybe even thirty. I wasn’t even old enough to drink in New York. And then she touched her face and I saw a wedding band on her left hand. Plain. Gold. And I thought: aw, shit. For a moment, I wanted the fat woman to come back, get involved in some complicated transaction, give me time to slip away.
“Can I help you—?”
It was too late for flight.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m the guy from the bus.”
“The what?”
“Remember? New Year’s Eve? You got off in Palatka.”
She squinted at me, and then smiled. That beautiful smile. “Oh, the bus. And you are the guy, awnt you? Sure enough. I didn’t recognize you in the Harry Truman shirt.”
“Just got it,” I said. “Right here in Sears.”
“And you got a bit more hair, too.”
I kept trying to sort out words in my head, to say things that were quick and witty and what was the word? Charming. And I wanted to do more than make brilliant remarks. For just a second, I wanted to reach over the counter and kiss her hard on the mouth and then lay her among the slips and panties. Just like that. Just do it. And be quick and witty and charming later.
“What can I do for you, child?” she said.
I turned my head. A few counters away, a heavy-set, balding white man was waiting on the Negro. I couldn’t tell this woman, this Eden Santana, that I’d gone on certain evenings to the highway near Ellyson Field hoping to see her pedal by. I couldn’t explain how hard I’d worked to erase her face from my mind. Child. She called me child.
“Well, I uh, well—” Get to it, just get to it. “I was wondering if you wanted to, well, go for a cup of coffee after work? You know, should auld acquaintance be forgot, and all that. Maybe we could even catch a movie at the Rex …”
And thought: Please don’t laugh.
Eden Santana looked at me and smiled in a warm sad way.
“Sure,” she said. “That’d be nice.”
Chapter
23
When she walked out of Sears that evening, the church bells of the entire town were tolling seven and for a long moment I just stood there looking at her. All afternoon I had rehearsed words, actions, scenarios: if she said this, I would say that. I wanted to be with her immediately and wondered what she was doing at precisely this moment or that. But I also was riddled with fear and trembling; I wished for some great sudden disaster, an earthquake or a hurricane, anything that might postpone our appointment.
I had a paper sack in my hand, and inside were pencils, chalks and a sketchbook. I didn’t even remember buying them. The blur was total. But I sat down by the waterfront, made sketches of the blackened stumps of some piers that had burned the year before and threw them away. I counted seagulls. I wandered streets where old Victorian houses were sealed against the day, all of them large and grand and facing the sea. I said her name, over and over again: Eden Santana. Like decades of the Rosary. Eden Santana. Like music. It didn’t seem possible that she was there, in Pensacola
, and that she had agreed to meet me after work; at the same time, she filled me with dread. Perhaps she would make fun of me, toy with me, stand me up as her friends watched.
And then, suddenly, she was there, in the fading gray Gulf light. She was smiling at me. And then beside me, holding the strap of her bag with both hands, seeming almost shy. I don’t know what I said to her, the first words, the initial greetings: Hello and how are you?, I suppose. But I remember how she looked: about five six, with thin arms and a yellow blouse and legs hidden by slacks. I must have stammered out my name. She must have suggested The Greek’s. I remember looking at our reflections in a window, as we walked to Garden Street. I was taller than she was. She looked beautiful. As we crossed Garden Street, she took my arm. My muscles tensed.
Then we were holding menus and facing each other in a booth along the wall in a bright side room of The Greek’s. A dumpy waitress waited with her pencil poised. I said, You must be hungry, and Eden said, Damn sure. I read the menu from right to left, from prices to food, and decided on a hamburger. Eden said she’d have a bacon-and-tomato sandwich and a Coke, and the dumpy woman wrote down the order and went away. Eden Santana looked at me and smiled.
“Dutch treat, okay?” she said. “You can’t be makin’ all that much in the Navy.”
“No, no,” I said. “I got paid today. It’s on me.” I smiled. “I mean, I asked you.”
I glanced away from her, trying to look casual. The two Shore Patrol men sat together on stools at the counter. A guy in a Jax beer jacket was two stools away from them. Four teenagers on a double date were drinking ice-cream sodas in a booth. Apart from them, The Greek’s was empty.
“They’ll go broke in here if this is all they get for customers,” Eden said, looking around.
“Everybody’s probably waiting to get paid,” I said.
She fumbled in her purse, took out the Luckies. She pulled a match from one of those “Draw Me” packs of book matches. I took it from her, struck the match. She leaned in and sucked on the flame.
“I thought I’d never find you,” I said. Like that. Blurting out some of the words I’d rehearsed all afternoon.
She exhaled, then smiled. “You don’t even know me, child.”
“I know I saw you on that bus and I know you were beautiful and I know I wanted to see you again,” I said. “I know how bad I felt when I woke up and you were gone.”
I couldn’t look directly at her after saying the words, afraid she would laugh. She didn’t. “Had to get off,” she said in a flat voice. “I—well, I wasn’t feelin’ too good.” Then I looked up. Her color deepened and she opened her mouth as if to say something else, then bit her lower lip.
“You should’ve woke me up,” I said. “I’d’ve stayed with you. I’d’ve gotten off the bus if you needed me.”
She looked at me in an amazed way. “You know, I think you just might’ve done that.”
The food came and she asked me what base I was at and I told her and she said that she lived out past there a few miles, out past Ellyson Field, you know, over the bridge, by the bayou. She asked me why I joined the Navy and I said, Oh, you know, to see the world. So you could have a girl in every port? No, I really wanted to see what was out here. There’s people out here’d like to see what you saw every day. Brooklyn? Sure, New York, all those buildings, Broadway. She ate quickly, but in a dainty way, cutting up the sandwich with knife and fork and using the fork to pick up the sections. And she asked me questions: Where was I from and did I have a girl and how many were in my family and what did I do in the Navy and what did I want to do with my life. I’ve heard these same questions from many women since then, the diligent and wary assembling of a profile; but Eden Santana was the first to ask me such things. She said all this in her low voice with its hoarse burr, eating as I was talking, never speaking with food in her mouth. She kept her left hand in her lap.
And at her urging, I talked too. Didn’t talk, rolled, great tides of nouns and verbs flowing out of me, in combinations that surprised me, phrases I hadn’t rehearsed in my wandering afternoon. I tried to explain about Brooklyn, how I loved it and missed it and sometimes longed for it but hated it too, hated the stupidity of some of the people, the insistence on conformity, the worship of the ordinary, the surrender of themselves to the Church: telling the truth because if I tried to fake it, I’d never be able to remember the lies later. I told about Prospect Park and the Dodgers and my father (but left out my mother’s long and painful dying); asked her if she’d ever heard of Charlie Parker and when she hadn’t, I said I’d try to get her one of his records and then talked about Hank Williams as if I’d grown up listening to him. No, I told her, I didn’t have a girl. Well, I had one, I said, but that was before I went in the Navy, that was long ago, that was last summer, and besides, she’s gone. And then (quickly, smiling, tentative) said I wanted to be an artist. Really? Yeah, when I get out. Why wait? Well, I didn’t want to be an artist, I wanted to write and draw a comic strip, be a comic-strip artist, telling stories and drawing pictures; I wanted to live in Paris or Rome or somewhere like that, using all those foreign places as backgrounds to the story. Oh, like Terry and the Pirates? Yeah, exactly. Maybe you can make me into the Dragon Lady. I was thinking exactly that. You’re lyin, now, child. Telling all this, I hoped she wouldn’t laugh.
She didn’t laugh. She looked at me, her brow furrowed, as I talked, saying things that made sense (and knowing Terry and the Pirates, knowing the Dragon Lady) and she seemed to be thinking: You’re a strange young man.
“Do you draw real people too?” she said.
“Sure.”
“I mean, could you draw, say, that guy in the Jax Beer shirt?”
“I could try.”
I took out the sketchbook and the pencils, and my hands went damp with nerves. Nobody’d ever asked me before to perform with a pencil (and surely this was a performance); I felt the way I used to feel when my mother was alive and we’d go visiting on Sundays and all the cousins would be called to the living room and each of us would be forced to sing. I was always afraid that if I forgot the words—to “Danny Boy” or “The Green Glens of Antrim” or that other cherished Irish tune, “The Marine Corps Hymn”—I would fail my mother in some terrible, final way or give my father the satisfaction of calling me stupid. I’d talked on and on about being an artist; if my hand went dead with clumsiness, if I botched the drawing, she would think I was just another talker. And maybe that’s why she asked: to give me a test, to see if what I said could be matched by what I did. So I had no choice. I looked at the man in the Jax Beer shirt and started to draw. The bulky shape of his body. The pouchy face. Trying to imagine how Caniff would draw him. The first few marks were gray and tentative and then I started drawing with a heavier line, smashing in great patches of black for shadows, seeing the man come off the page, working very fast, adding details (an ear, the hair in the nostrils) and then, at the end, lettering the words Jax Beer in a more delicate way across his back. When I was finished, I handed her the sketchbook.
“Now that is damn good, child,” Eden said. “You really do have some talent. I mean, you have a lot of talent.”
I mumbled something and she touched my hand.
“You’re blushing,” she said.
“Well, it’s, uh—”
“I hope I didn’t make you feel embarrassed.”
“Nah,” I said. “It’s just, you know … drawing is something I usually do alone. It’s funny, doing it in front of somebody.”
“Well, you did it,” she said, and looked again at the drawing and then at the man in the Jax Beer shirt.
“Now you’ve got to sign it,” she said. “And put the date.”
I signed it and tore it out of the sketchbook and handed it to her: gift, souvenir, elaborate hello: she rolled it and slipped it into her purse. “Someday, when you’re rich and famous,” she said, “that’ll be worth a lot of money. I can always say I knew you when.”
That chilled me. Wa
s she making fun? Or was such a thing really possible? The waitress brought two coffees and cleared away the plates. Eden Santana rested her chin on the heel of her hand and stared at me for a long moment.
“Why’d you really ask me to come here?” she said.
“Because you’re so damned beautiful,” I said, then leaned forward to sip my coffee. She kept staring at me.
“You’re serious, awn’t you, child?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not some damn line.”
“No.”
She took out the Luckies, fumbled with the matches. I took them from her again and struck a match for her. As she inhaled, I examined the cover: Draw Me, it said. I could draw this woman on the matchbook with my left hand. Maybe that’s what I should do, send it in, see if I could win the free correspondence course. Didn’t Roy Crane learn from a correspondence course? But wait: I was in the Navy. Would they send the lessons to me here? And where would I work at the drawings? All this in a fraction of a second, and then I looked up at her. Something had changed in her face: she was more open, somehow younger, not quite as sure of herself, giving up some of her command.
“I haven’t felt beautiful in a long, long time,” she said.
“That’s hard to believe.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Come on—all you have to do is look in the mirror.”
She turned away and watched two sailors in civvies come in the door as the Shore Patrolmen went out. She was blushing again. Then she poked at her coffee with a spoon and took a drag from the cigarette.
“Well, I guess we better go down to that movie,” she said. And I noticed that she wasn’t wearing the wedding ring.