Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  “Thank you, sailor,” he said.

  It was a dismissal.

  “And, sailor? If you say a word about any of this to anyone, I’ll ship your ass to the Fleet Marines.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  I started to leave.

  “Professor Longhair and the Shuffling Albanians,” he said and chuckled. “Jesus Christ …”

  “Hungarians, sir,” I said, and saluted again and went out into the night.

  PART

  THREE

  Chapter

  35

  Then began the time of my education. Miles Rayfield taught me the secrets of drawing. Bobby Bolden taught me about music. And Eden Santana taught me about everything else. Sitting here now, on a motel balcony facing the enormous Gulf evening, I try to reconstruct those hours, and although many have vanished into the blur, all seem accounted for, too. I know that I worked every day at the Supply Shack and stood my watches at the dumpster and was soon trusted with being the duty storekeeper. I know I did what I could to be a four-oh sailor and keep out of the way of Red Cannon. But I don’t have a series of sharp pictures of all those moments: What I saw and what I did are still at war with the way I felt.

  And most of those feelings are tangled up with the time of Eden Santana. All those Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. And some sweet and timeless Sunday afternoons. I was always with her on Tuesday and Thursday nights, too, unless I pulled duty at the Supply Shack, because Eden didn’t work on those nights; even today, there is something oddly thrilling and poignant to me about meeting a woman on one of those weekday evenings. Eden worked late on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and though I could have spent each night with her, waiting at the trailer, she told me early on that it would be better if we didn’t fall into too rigid a routine. “You’re special, child,” she said. “I don’t want you ever to become ordinary.” And then touched my face and added, “Or me to be ordinary for you.”

  That was never to happen. On some of those nights when I wasn’t with her, I began to feel the presence of what I called The Boulder. The true word was jealousy, but I couldn’t admit then that I could be shaken by a feeling that made me laugh when I saw it in movies or comics, or read about it in books. A real man wasn’t supposed to feel jealous of a woman any more than he could admit to being afraid. But on some lonesome nights I could feel The Boulder pressing up out of my guts, or coming down upon me from outside, filling the room like the giant orange in Miles Rayfield’s painting. I would hear a scrap of music, the rattle of the palms, smell the odor of the captain’s flowers, and Eden would appear in my mind. I would wonder what she was doing at exactly that moment. Sometimes I wondered if she was seeing Mercado, leading him (or someone else) into the holy precincts of the trailer. I would get physically sick then: nauseated, pouring sweat. I saw myself scaling the fence, heading into the night, jerking open the trailer door, confronting the two of them, the pictures of all this as vivid as a front-page photo, while my guts coiled and knotted until I fell into exhausted sleep. Then it would be a Tuesday or a Thursday or a Saturday night or a Sunday morning, and I would see her again, and it would all go away.

  One night I told her that I loved her, meaning it, blurting it out. And she smiled and said that was the sweetest thing anyone had said to her in a long long time. I said it again, expecting an echo, and again and again. But all through those first weeks and months, she wouldn’t say that she loved me. She said everything else: You be good, child. You sleep nice, child. You sure are good to me, child. But never I love you, child. And I knew then that this was more complicated than it seemed, that it wasn’t like Steve Canyon or a movie, where you said the words and the women said them back and you lived happily ever after, more or less. She was as close to me as skin to skin, but there were places inside her that I couldn’t touch.

  She wouldn’t talk about her life in any detail. If I pressed her, trying to discover where the line was beyond which I could not press, I heard a few things. The most important I learned early on: there was a husband somewhere. She was still married to him, but she said that was just technical. I’m here with you, ain’t I, child?, she said and smiled. But after she told me this, there would be times, even when I was with her, when The Boulder would push up and out of me, and I’d ask her why she didn’t just divorce him, this man, this husband, and she’d say, “You can’t divorce a ghost.”

  And I would think: The ghost who walks. Like The Phantom in the Sunday Journal-American. Her husband is The Ghost That Walks, this mysterious husband, out there somewhere, haunting us, haunting me, able at any time to come back. Because I could not see him, could not peer into his eyes (as I did with the photographs I now was copying in ink and wash for other sailors at two dollars each), he grew in importance and became more ominous, more of a threat. If I could look into his eyes, I could see whether there was fear there or uncertainty, swagger or evil. But in my mind he had no face and no eyes, and I was afraid of him.

  The toughest times were when I was stuck on the base and the worst of all were when I was alone. Eventually I learned the trick of warding off fear with activity: If I just did something, if I got up off the bed or drew pictures in a fury, or ran slowly around the perimeter, I could drive away the phantoms. Sometimes I would simply walk over to the infirmary and hang out with Bobby Bolden or go up to see him in the evenings at the Kingdom of Darkness.

  He loved talking about music; he did so with almost ferocious concentration, illustrating the complicated points on his horn. But it wasn’t always just talking. Every week or so, on a night when Eden Santana was working, I’d go down with Bobby Bolden to the black joints around West Cervantes Street. Places with names like Patti’s Bar and the Talk of the Town and the Two Spot and My Club and Mary Lou’s Tavern. They were hot and packed and sweaty, their doors open to the street, ceiling fans churning lamely at the Gulf air, the black faces gleaming in the heat and eyes darting suddenly at me and then at Bobby Bolden and the messcooks who came with us. Almost always there would be a wary, frozen moment, then recognition, and then it would be all right. There were almost never any live bands, but there were jukeboxes. Immense monstrous jukes, the biggest I’d ever seen, with 45s falling steadily off spindles, and bubbles and lights careening through tubes up and down the sides and always some woman with a small waist and a big ass and sturdy legs staring at the lists and someone shouting, “Honey, play B-four.”

  “Watch these niggers move,” Bobby Bolden said to me on one of those nights. “Least you might learn to walk better, white man. You aint ever gonna learn to dance.”

  The music pounded, the bass lines ramming into me, so that I’d be moving to them the next day and through the night too, moving even with Eden Santana to the dark and dirty song of Cervantes Street. The jukes were loud with a few of the same singers I heard in the Kingdom of Darkness: Lloyd Price, Professor Longhair, Roy Brown. But there were others, too: big-voiced black men, shouters, honkers, bluesmen: Lowell Fulsom, Percy Mayfield, Jimmy Witherspoon, Amos Milburn, Cleanhead Vinson. The names were all as new to me as Hank Williams had been when I landed in Pensacola, and yet I felt as if I now knew Hank Williams, had been drowned in his songs, and now I had to learn about another whole platoon of musicians. Back home, I thought I was hip. Hey, I listened to Sid. I knew Bird from Dizzy. But I’d been suddenly dropped into a world where I didn’t know anything, a dark dense gleaming world, where men at the bar first asked about New York and the Dodgers before asking if I wanted some pussy; big black men, grave men, surly men and sad men. All the while their music was pounding, and I was looking at their women.

  “Chick over there got eyes for you,” Bobby Bolden said one night, six of us packed together at the bar of the Two Spot, his nod directed at a girl in a tight yellow dress at a table with two others. “But if her ole man catch you wid her, he cut you three ways, mothafucka: long, deep, and con-tin-uously!”

  He laughed and slugged down some beer and I looked at the woman and she looked at me. She h
ad cinnamon skin and full lips, an elegantly thin neck and squared shoulders, and I could see the shape of her full breasts, undressing her with my eyes (taking small short glances, not staring), drawing her in my head, wanting to paint her, wanting to get the color right, wondering all the while what her skin felt like, a black woman’s skin, wondering what color her nipples were and whether the hair on her pussy was straight or kinky and whether she’d laugh at the size of my dick.

  “Ever sleep with a colored girl?” Bobby Bolden said.

  “No.”

  “Shit, you the first white man ever told me the truth on that one.”

  “I tell a lie in here, I’m dead,” I said, sipping a beer, thinking of Wajeski’s line: I thought I fucked a colored girl until I saw a colored guy fuck a colored girl. “And I try to do anything about it, I’d be dead before I hit the sidewalk.”

  “Here she come.”

  The woman had to pass the length of the bar to get to the jukebox. Louis Jordan was singing “Somebody Done Changed the Lock on My Door,” while a half dozen couples danced in a small area behind the juke. The woman stood at the jukebox and slipped in a quarter and started punching tunes. Six of them. Thinking about each one. Standing on one high heel, curling the other foot around her ankle. She had beautiful tapered legs that came right off her ass. I wanted to draw her. No, that was a lie. I wanted to fuck her.

  And then thought about Eden Santana. Where was she right then, at exactly that moment, while I stared at the ass of a strange woman? Home, I insisted. In the trailer. Alone. Maybe she was even thinking about me, imagining me in the barracks. She had no way of knowing where I was. And I thought: If I went with this woman, I’d betray Eden. I would be doing to her what I was always afraid Eden might be doing to me. That would be a betrayal. And then thought: No. It wouldn’t be a betrayal because there wasn’t anything to betray. We didn’t have a deal, did we? I’d told Eden I loved her but she’d said nothing back. I was with her when I was with her: that’s what she always said. What I did the rest of the time was my business, right? What she did was her business, too. That’s what she said. But if she knew, what would she think? Probably the same thing I’d think, if she slept with a colored guy. Why was it such a big deal anyway? Skin is skin. White people and black people must have been doing it together for centuries in the South. Otherwise, where’d Bobby Bolden’s green eyes come from? Not from Africa, for shit sure. And this girl at the jukebox, with her light skin: there was some goddamned white in there too.

  She came back down the length of the packed bar, waved at a woman at one of the tables and then bumped into me.

  “Uh, sorry, scuse me,” she said in a furry small girl’s voice. She was about my age. Maybe a little older. Maybe twenty.

  “My fault,” I said. “Blockin the way.”

  She looked at Bobby Bolden. “Whatchoo dune bringin this poor white boy here, Bobby Bolden?”

  “To meet you, Little Mama.”

  “You such a bad ole boy,” she said.

  “What you drinkin?”

  She asked for a rum and Coke and I looked at her face: curved nose, small hard nostrils, full lips. Her dress was cut low and her breasts looked solid and full. She was wearing perfume. Sweet perfume. Dark perfume. She asked me my name and I told her and she said her name was Winnie and where was I from and I said New York and she smiled and her eyes got brighter, and Bobby Bolden looked at the ceiling and the messcooks gave me a deadpan look and then laughed together. Winnie gave them a killer glare.

  “Ahm jes trying to make the boy feel welcome and yawl ack like chilrun.”

  “We jus admirin yo style, Winnie,” Rhode Island Freddie said. “Dats a lie,” she said. “Yawl is thinkin I want to take this boy home.”

  “It snow the second time this wintuh if you do,” Bumper said. “White stuff in the chicken shack.”

  “See the lowlife yuh bring here, Bobby Bolden? You and the white boy and six dumbass zigaboos.” She turned to me and shook my hand. “Well, please to met you, Michael. Come back sometahm, ’thout the lowlifes.”

  “Hey, Winnie,” Bobby Bolden said. “Don’t—”

  But she walked away and went back to the table.

  “Saved,” Rhode Island Freddie said, draping a big hand on my shoulder.

  And in a way I was. When Winnie walked away, I didn’t have to choose to go with her or even to try. I didn’t have to choose a betrayal.

  Chapter

  36

  The truth was simple: after a few short weeks, Eden Santana had become a presence in almost everything I did. I filled pads with drawings of her. I sometimes had to stop myself in the middle of drawing the wives and girlfriends of sailors because I kept making them look like her: blondes, brunettes and redheads acquired her hair or her eyes or the mole on her cheekbone. When I read a novel from the base library, the women all resembled her, even Daisy Buchanan and Catherine Barkley. On those nights when I was the duty storekeeper, alone in the Supply Shack listening to dramas on Harrelson’s radio, the women characters all appeared to me as Eden. I drew her so much, in so many different positions, that I could recall her body at will, sitting at my desk, doodling on scrap paper with an Ebony pencil, and had to keep hiding the drawings so the others wouldn’t see her. They knew I had somebody out in that mysterious world called “off the base.” But they didn’t know who she was and I wouldn’t tell them.

  On three straight Sundays she took me out to the empty parking lot at the beach and taught me how to drive. “You just gotta relax,” she said. “Just understand what you’re doing and then relax. No white-knuckle jobs holdin that wheel, child.” She sat beside me while I made circles around the lot, coming to abrupt stops, shifting gears, backing up in reverse, going forward again. “That’s good, that’s fine, just do that, watch what’s behind you, don’t look at the road, look up ahead, the distance, you’ll see everything anyway …”

  There was a small hill leading over the dunes to Fort Pickens and I started up there on the second Sunday, brimming with confidence, when a truck came roaring over the rise, right at us, black, faceless. I panicked, and whipped the wheel around, driving it straight into the path of the truck, and then pulled it the other way, while Eden yelled “Right! Right!” We ended up stuck in the sand as the truck roared on. My hands shook. And I was so afraid I couldn’t move: frightened of taking this ton of rubber and steel in my hands again and ending up mashed in the grille of another truck. Eden lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She said: “Better get back on the horse, child.”

  And I did. We got the car out of the sand, pushing and heaving until we got traction, Eden laughing through it and telling me I’d remember that moment all my days. And then I took the wheel again and went up over the rise, more slowly now, thinking right, go to the right, if someone comes barrel-assing down the road, go fucking right. But the road was empty and I shifted gears more smoothly and Eden laughed out loud and hit the dashboard with the palm of her hand. “Yeah! Good! Go do it!”

  She let me drive back to the mainland across the causeway that day, and then switched seats with me for the ride home through traffic. “You got it, don’t you worry now,” she said. “You got it …”

  I had some money from the drawings, and I said (trying to sound like a man) that I would pay for the food from now on (since that’s what men did). After all, she did the cooking; and another thing: when we went off in the car for drives or lessons, I should pay for the gas. “It’s only fair,” I said, and she shook her head in an amused way and said, “If you say so.”

  Most of the time we went to Stop & Shop and picked up steaks at thirty-three cents a pound or shrimps for a quarter a pound and black-eyed peas for a nickel (ah, the fifties!) and with water, spices, salt and care, she’d turn these plain goods into food I’d never tasted before and have seldom tasted since. The process was as mysterious as art; casein wasn’t art, it was something you used to make art; peas in her hands were the same. She prepared for meals the way a painter might p
repare for a new canvas, first studying the newspaper, reading the ads for bargains and in her quest often expressing high moral outrage. Look, she’d say, at this A&P ad: round steak has gone up to fifty-nine cents a pound! That’s a damn shame! And a five-pound bag of oranges is now thirty-seven cents (her voice rising). In Florida! But then she would see a twenty-eight-pound watermelon for $1.10 and Peter Pan peanut butter for thirty-five cents and her anger would ebb and we’d go off to the A&P, instead of Stop & Shop or Plee-Zing on T Street. She said she hoped I didn’t think she was cheap. But she felt responsibility, she said, ever since I insisted on paying for the food. “People work hard for their money,” she said, “they better spend it hard. Not easy.” And when the food was back home, she would begin the magical process of changing it. Food had never been so sensual.

  As the days grew longer and warmer, she moved some of the plants and flowers outside, making a small garden beside the trailer. She bought two folding chairs at Sears, and we’d sit outside sometimes and look at the small lake that fed the River Styx, with the trailer like a silver wall between us and the bumpy dirt road that ran through the colored district.

  “I saw your friend, that Bobby Bolden, around here the other night,” she said one Sunday afternoon. She was quiet for a long moment. “He’s got a white woman in a house back there in the woods.”

  “That bother you?”

  She gave me a funny look. “Well, I wonder about it.”

  “It’s their business, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Till someone makes it their business.”

  “Like who?”

  “Oh, hell, anybody.… Some black lady jealous of a white woman. Some damned redneck. You never know …” She looked at me. “This is the South, you know.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I heard.”

  We didn’t talk about it any longer that day.