by Pete Hamill
That changed everything, I knew it, and I cried myself to sleep that night in late June when the war began. I felt such a goddamned fool. I’d tried to plan my life. The Depression was over, the war was over, and now we’d have peace forever and live like human beings again. I had it all in the plan. I even wrote it down: art school, then Paris for a year or two, then on to Florence, to embrace the work of the Renaissance masters, learning their secrets. I’d get brown in the sun of Rome. Then, around 1962, I’d return in triumph to the Village and the New York galleries and see my pictures in the museums and the art magazines … I had a plan. Only a stupid romantic fool ever does that.
By winter, men were dying by the thousands and I was ready to be drafted. I started to think about the Navy. I’m not sure why. Probably from looking at all those paintings by Winslow Homer and Turner. Once the notion got into my head, I couldn’t leave it alone. I would lie awake in Marietta, and hear my mother playing the piano (for herself now, the students gone, the money not a problem) and start creating seascapes in my mind. Out at sea, on the bridge of some sleek ship, I would examine the architecture of waves. I would memorize the tones and colors of the sky. Miles Rayfield: on the deck of a great ship.
But it wasn’t just fear of the infantry and the Yalu that pushed me to the Navy. There were other things going on. Some trouble with people at school. And my wife. The details are none of your goddamned business. But one morning I joined the Navy, thinking that it was better than the infantry. Thinking it would get me out of the goddamned South. Thinking I would end up on the bridge of that great ship. It was the stupidest fucking thing I ever did. Now I paint like a pack rat. Hiding in a dark hole. I don’t think I’ll ever see the sun of Rome.
Chapter
31
About four o’clock that afternoon, it started to rain. The sky darkened, all helicopters were grounded. I wrapped my pad and the chalks in some butcher paper and sealed the package with masking tape, and then hitched a ride to the locker club with Larry Parsons. He was big and blond and friendless; he was married and lived off the base and seemed always to be about three beats behind everybody else.
“Where you going with the package?” he said.
“A friend’s house.”
“You have friends down here?”
“Sure, don’t you?”
“Well, yeah, I guess I do,” he said, in a puzzled way. “To tell the truth, my wife has more friends than I do. She’s real active in the church, so there’s always something doing. Baking contests and clambakes and stuff like that.”
“Sounds great,” I said, and hurried away from him when he stopped at the locker club. I changed clothes quickly and combed my hair in front of the mirror above the sink. I waited inside the door, watching the rain come in from the Gulf in great slanting sheets. Across the highway, Billy’s neon sign seemed to sizzle. Eden Santana. I started rehearsing what I would say to her and what I would do. And then cut myself off. I couldn’t come to her with a lot of rehearsed lines and moves. She’d know. She’d been around longer than I had and she was just too damned smart for me to play-act with her. I remember thinking then about drawing, and how it might make her just an object of my skill, and therefore less scary and unpredictable. I think Miles had shown me how to use the side of the chalk to create form and volume, how to lay out the figure. But I’m really not sure. Had he told me those things before I went to meet Eden? Or was it after? Now: years later: sitting in a parked car, watching the sky darken and older trees heaving and settling in a wet Gulf wind: am I remembering the feeling of that young man standing inside the locker club, or am I inventing him?
There was a sudden honk. Of that I’m certain. I peered out through the rain, and Eden Santana was waving at me through the steamy windows of the Ford. That sight of her still thrills me. She had kept her word. I held the pad close to my body and ran through the spattering mud.
“I didn’t really expect you to be here,” she said, smiling as she opened the door. “This kind of weather … But I decided to come on by anyways. No way to call you. No way for you to call me.”
“I’m glad you came.”
She drove up onto the highway, heading away from the city. It was hard to see. Out beyond the city limits there were no lights on the road and the car’s high beams seemed to bounce off the rain. The Ford’s engine coughed, stammered, but kept going. Eden was smoking hard, and in the gray light her face looked tired. She was wearing the black turtleneck she’d worn in the bus on New Year’s Eve.
“My hair must look like I stuck a finger in an electric socket,” she said, and glanced at me and smiled. When she smiled, she didn’t look tired. Her hair was all wiry and curly.
“It looks great.”
“I always wanted hair like that actress? Lizabeth Scott? Know her? Hair like that. But I guess I lost the hair lottery and there’s nothing’ I can do about it. And when it rains, this damned hair shoots all over the place. Doesn’t matter if I cut it long or short. It just ups and shoots off my head.”
She laughed (and now I hear the nervous trill in her).
“Dumbest damn thing,” she said. “Hair.”
We crossed a bridge over a dark river and then she made a right and the car started kicking up gravel and we were between trees on a one-lane road. The car jerked, rose, fell, slowed, spun its wheels, then moved again, Eden Santana setting her mouth grimly, her hands tight on the wheel. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Son of a goddamn bitch.” Then glanced at me and said, “Sorry.” And pulled into a cleared place, with tall trees rising high about us. “I’ll get as close as I can,” she said, pulling around to the left, then jerking gears, backing up. “This is the best we can do.”
She turned off the engine, and I could see better now. We were in front of a long house trailer. The body of the trailer was blue, the trim silver. Flowers sprouted in pots out front, bending under the rain.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ll make a run for it.”
She ran through the mud to the trailer, the Sears jacket over her head, stood on a step and unlocked the door. We went in, and she reached behind me to slam it shut, then turned the lock and flicked on a light.
“It’s not much,” she said, “but it’s cozy.”
There were flowers everywhere: in dirt-filled earthen pots, in ceramic jars, in glass milk bottles filled with water. They were on the counter beside the sink, and on top of the small regrigerator and on the window shelves, pressed against drawn blinds. There were geraniums in a jar on top of a small table that jutted out from the wall. The smell in the trailer was sweet and close, full of the rain.
“Some sailor bought the trailer after the war and then got sent to sea duty when Korea happened and he’s been rentin’ it out ever since,” she said. “Only thirty-five dollars a month. They wanted more but I got it cheap ’cause this is, well, mostly a colored neighborhood out here.” I felt thick, large, as I watched her take a hanger from a shallow closet, slip the wet Sears jacket on it, then carry it into a small john and hang it up to dry. I thought If I try to help, if I dare to move, I will knock down a flowerpot and make a mess.
“Hey, almost forgot …”
She turned a knob on the gas stove and moved a fat iron pot over the low flame.
“Made some gumbo for you last night,” she said. “Thought you might be hungry for some good home cookin’, after all that Navy stuff. Gumbo’s always best the second night.”
She looked at me awkwardly, and that relieved me; she was probably feeling as clumsy in her way as I was in mine. Then she excused herself and went into the bathroom. I stood there, waiting, uncertain; all I could hear was the rain drumming on the roof—a steady, lulling sound that was mixed with the drowsy odor of the flowers. I ran my hands through my hair, trying to make it stand up (I see that boy now, hair pasted to his skull, dripping, without sideburns or a beard, entering for the first time this special world). She came back from the bathroom and motioned me into a chair. Then she went to the smal
l refrigerator and took out lettuce, onions, and tomatoes and started making a salad, her hands quick and strong, pulling the lettuce leaves apart, slicing the tomatoes, adding oil, vinegar, salt. She popped two slices of whole-wheat bread into a toaster. Her hands never stopped moving, and she talked briskly, even nervously (thus relaxing me more), now tossing the salad, then stirring the gumbo, while I looked at her bare feet.
She was smaller than I had first thought, and she had wide feet. I felt vaguely aroused by the padding sound they made on the linoleum floor. She fired questions at me, quickly, breathlessly, making me talk. She wanted to know where I went to school and what my parents were like and the names of my brothers; she was sorry about my mother. She seemed pleased that I was brought up a Catholic (“They sure do have beautiful music …”). She ladled the gumbo into white bowls, and the aroma was pungent, strong, thick with crab and shrimp and rice, and she pushed the toast down into the toaster and brought the salad to me on a plate, then did the same for herself. I waited until she sat down facing me and then began to eat in a greedy way. “Don’t use salt, child,” she said. “Everything’s salted. And besides, I noticed you use too much salt anyway.”
She had been watching and found a flaw; you use too much salt anyway. I’d never thought about salt before; I just used it, on eggs and meat and salad. I slowed down, glancing at her, trying to match her movements; I didn’t know much about what was then called etiquette. At home, it didn’t matter how I used knives and forks; in the Navy they had too many other rules and regulations to inflict upon us first. So I decided to follow her lead. I watched the way she ate the gumbo. I didn’t touch the salt. Somehow a faint odor of her perfume got mixed in with the fragrance of the soup, and the trailer turned all female and closed and lovely, the flower scents filling the air too and the rain hammering at the roof. She wanted to know about New York, and whether there really was a chance there for everybody to make good. I tried to answer, tried to sound casual; I didn’t tell her that I’d only been to two Broadway plays in my life, that Brooklyn was different from Manhattan, and that I didn’t know what chance anybody had to make good, since it hadn’t happened to anyone I knew. Including me. Instead, I started talking about the Paramount and the Metropolitan Museum and Lindy’s and Toots Shor’s, places I’d read about in Walter Winchell’s column in the Mirror or heard about on the radio. She listened to my vaguely fraudulent answers and asked more questions, and all the time I was thinking about what would happen if she posed for me, and when I should begin the session by taking the drawing pad out of its wrapper. I wanted the meal to last for hours so I wouldn’t have to deal with the next move and its astonishments.
“I guess New York has just about everything you’d ever want to see,” I heard myself saying. “Everything.”
“Well, not everything,” she said. “I’d like to see the pyramids in Egypt.”
“Yeah?”
“Wouldn’t you?” she said. “Imagine what it would be like to see where they found King Tut and all his treasures. See the Spinx.” That’s how she said it: The Spinx. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “You know, I’d like to see all the Seven Wonders of the World. All of them!” She paused. “I guess that’s pretty far-fetched. But I saw them in an encyclopedia once, all the Seven Wonders, and I couldn’t even name them now. But I could read up on them again, make a list, and even if I never saw them, I sure would like to dream about them …”
Do I see the boy relaxing at last? Michael Devlin has eaten, he is full, he has avoided all additional use of salt. And listening to her he thinks: She isn’t that much older that I am, is she? There she was in the trailer, talking straight to me, not performing on some date, not angling for some extravagant trip to a prom, certainly not trying to look like a movie star. She pushed her chair back, relaxed, crossed one leg over another, lit a cigarette.
And I had discovered I could hold my own with her in conversation. She was older than I was, but I was sure there were things I knew that she didn’t. I couldn’t name the Seven Wonders of the World either, but I felt as she talked about them that I was sitting with someone my own age, the two of us in awe at the unknowable mysteries of the world. She got up and made coffee and then I started feeling nervous again. She cleared the table, laid her cigarette in an ashtray and ran hot water over the dishes, her face very concentrated. She dried her hands on a dish towel and waited a long moment, her back to me, staring into the sink. Then she took a deep breath, exhaled, turned to me and smiled.
“Well, I guess I’d better get ready for the posing,” she said.
“Good,” I said, and reached for the package. “I have my stuff.” Panicking. “But you know, if you’re too tired or something, you don’t—”
“I never done something like this in my life before,” she said quietly. She turned and looked around the small crowded trailer, at the couchlike bed at the far end. “That’s why I want to do it.”
“Look,” I said nervously, “if you don’t want to—”
“You’re more nervous than I am, ain’t you, child?”
“Well, no, I just—”
“You ever done this before? The truth …”
“No.”
“Then I guess we both better go ahead, huh?”
She turned then, padding on her wide bare feet into the bedroom area. She closed the drapes behind her. I took out the pad and chalks and laid them on top of the counter that separated the dining area from the sleeping quarters. I had to dry my hands on my trousers. The rain hammered down and the air felt wetter and thicker. I thought: We’re using all the oxygen, we should open a window. Better: We should leave. We might smother. I can do this some other time. Suppose I can’t draw her? I could freeze, could lose what I think I can do, could botch it, could be exposed as a fraud. Before I even got to really know her, she could find me out. I certainly couldn’t draw her the way Miles could. But then, what does she look like? If I. If she. What if.
The curtain parted. She stepped out in an oversized man’s shirt. Her hair was wild and electric. She looked at me and her face darkened into a blush. She covered one foot with the other, and suddenly seemed very young.
“What do you want me to do?” she murmured.
“Well, maybe—why don’t you just sit there on the couch, and I’ll move this stool over here, and—You want your cigarettes?”
“No, I don’t want to smoke while I’m—how’s this?”
She sat on the couch bed, and pulled a couple of pillows up beside her and leaned one arm on them.
“Great, yeah, that’s it, nice and relaxed.”
“Should I take this off?”
Cool, said Michael Devlin to himself. You’ve gotta be cool. Like Doagie Hogan, like Canyon or Sawyer, like Charlie Parker. It’s like drawing bottles or fruit or a mountain. And answered, staring at the chalk, its blackness on his thumb and forefinger: “If you want.”
She unbuttoned the shirt and wiggled out of the sleeves and let it fall behind her. There it is, skin and tits, flesh and nipples and hair, her body before me. She crossed her arms over her breasts for a moment, almost instinctively. Then she lifted one leg and let the other dangle off the edge of the bed and shrugged her shoulders as if loosening her muscles. “There,” she said. No panties bra garter-belts girdles no slip no dress no trousers just her before me in this small tight place and the rain and the flowers too. “That should be okay.”
I stopped breathing. I didn’t want to exhale, to let her hear me reacting to her nakedness, her lush woman’s body. O Catholic boy: as if it were all right to take pleasure as long as it was not expressed. This was no boyish angular body like that of the girls at home (touched smelled brushed against but never feasted upon), or the body of a fashion model in some magazine, with all her bones sticking out. Womenflesh. I started to draw almost frantically, blocking in the ripe breasts, the strong lean shoulders, trying to get the taut skin stretched properly across her belly. Her breasts and hips were much lighter than the rest of her
body. Except, of course, for her nipples. Face skin and back skin and leg skin and arm skin had been glazed by the sun. But now I was seeing clearly what I’d only glimpsed that night on the beach: the lighter skin, the indoor skin. She had a thick mat of jet-black curly pubic hair, curlier than the hair on her head, glistening in the light as if it were wet. Look boy look at her pussy her box her snatch her cunt. I was trying desperately to keep from getting an erection. Seven heads, I told my hand. Get the head right and the proportions will follow. Don’t make a big deal out of her breasts or she’ll think you’re obsessed with them. Jesus Christ her tits right here right there. Those full round breasts, with their dark-brown nipples. Get the legs right. Make it right. Make it beautiful. The arc of her instep. The long curving neck.
She was looking at me calmly now, the blush off her cheeks, watching me in a fascinated way. I used the vine charcoal for all the basics: the shape, the form, a thin outline. It broke three times in my hand, too frail for my ferocious pressure. Then I switched to the blacker charcoal, making her eyes, using the side of the chalk for shading, digging in for the black hair on her head and between her legs. I smoothed out the hard edges with my fingers, smeared her legs to try to get flesh tones, and then, looking at her, and looking at the drawing, I saw there was nothing more to add. One more mark and I would botch it. I tore the drawing off the pad and laid it on the kitchen counter.
“You can change positions,” I said, trying to sound like a cool-eyed professional. I was relieved that she didn’t ask to see the first drawing. She shifted, letting one leg fall flat, her back against the wall of the trailer now. She shivered. “Damn wall’s cold,” she said. “How’s this?” She put her head back. I could see a thin scar about three inches long under her jaw. White against her dark skin. There was another scar just above the great black V, smaller but more raw that the one on her jawbone. “Fine,” I said, but thinking that this time she was posing instead of being natural, as if remembering pinups she’d seen somewhere; still, I was afraid that if I said I didn’t like the pose, she’d take it as criticism, the way I reacted to her line about salt. Ah, the little lies … “Just swell,” I said, and she closed her eyes. I drew more carefully. She had very long lashes.