On Green Dolphin Street

by Sebastian Faulks

  Frank felt sorry for Godley because he knew what it was like to be lonely, poor, not there, where the warmth of life was. Yet he felt that he had figured something out for himself: like the other men in the platoon, like Billy Foy, for instance, he had discovered there was a road to friendship and acceptance and that it lay not in caring what others thought, but in finding your own dignity. While he did pity Godley, it was impossible not to dislike him; like the others, he recoiled from him because he embarrassed them: he vulgarly displayed the cravings and the weaknesses that they had learned to hide.

  In their foxhole, Frank saw Godley unravel as the intensity of the Japanese fire increased; he learned the smell of his body, of its skin and its excretions. He saw that there was a void in him where the affections and the self-respect belonged; it was not just that he had been driven frantic by the bullying: it seemed to Frank that he could never have been valued by anyone. He jabbered at the sound of gunfire, clasped hold of Frank’s arm, and it was clear that the emptiness in him was total, that any arm about the shoulder, any reassurance would be the first occupant of that vacant space of unlove.

  They received orders to advance to a new position. It was a day of awful heat and Frank welcomed the idea of any movement that might help them refill their water bottles and escape from their inadequately buried waste. They climbed over a ridge of sand and ran for cover in some dense tropical vegetation at the top of the hill. There was rifle and machine-gun fire from the left, where the temporary Japanese positions had been alerted by American ground support aircraft that movement was imminent.

  As Frank pulled Godley down beside him, they had a clear view of a Japanese machine-gun post, dug in about fifty yards below, toward the beach. Frank shot the gunner through the cheek; Godley hit the man feeding the gun, also in the face, causing a spill of brain and blood over his shoulder, and turned to Frank with a delighted expression that implored him to concede that now, surely, he was acceptable.

  The platoon dug in where it was, waiting, since the enemy had retreated, for the order to advance. It rained hard in the night, and Frank slept with Billy Foy, who had joined them with a battered ridge tent. They awoke in the morning sun to an unfamiliar splashing sound. Godley’s dead Jap was wedged against the gun, still upright, though with the top part of his skull missing. Into the water-filled cavity, from ten paces away, Godley was tossing pieces of coral.

  Three weeks later, on leave in a steamy North Australian town, Frank and Godley were in a group of six who went to a brothel. It was with relief that the five of them watched Godley being escorted down a dim corridor by the madam of the house. At last Godley did not need one of them to hold his hand; the girls, mostly refugees from the Philippines, were used to all kinds and conditions of men, and he would not feel threatened; perhaps he would even emerge with some self-esteem. Frank’s girl took him to a small bedroom where a large three-bladed fan in the ceiling stirred the clammy air and a window overlooked a market where chickens squealed in wooden cages. Frank, who had never previously visited a whore, was not sure to what extent the normal rules applied. Was he meant to kiss her, for instance, to imitate affection? Should he put her pleasure before his own? Or would that provide an unwelcome distraction in her work? Was she in fact capable of pleasure in her professional circumstances? She could have been no more than eighteen years old, but she smiled and undressed with a swift confidence that was not arousing.

  To each encounter he carried the sum of all such previous experiences. Others in the platoon talked of girlfriends at home, girls they’d picked up on the road, of what they had done to them, and how; the anatomical details were garish, if not always convincing. Frank found himself touching his Filipina in a certain way that a previous lover had liked. Each act was a summary or palimpsest of what had gone before, the lives of vanished lovers and their bodies visible for a moment through the years, reincarnated: the kiss on Mimi Lever’s sensitive ear, the circular caress enjoyed by Anne-Marie Warshansky, and by her sister Donna, the rotary movement that Sassie LaSalle had most liked and which always made him envisage, to his private shame, a ship’s turbine.

  When he made love to Mary, he was anxious not to appear indelicate, as though he had some bestial expectation; yet at the same time, with no way of telling what her experiences of the act might be, he wanted not to disappoint. At the beginning the figure of Charlie hung comparatively over his every action; later he felt the need to transgress fully, to make the crime fit the punishment.

  In life Godley had returned from his room down the corridor of the brothel with a look of smug bravado; in Frank’s dream, Godley’s girl turned out to be Mary.

  He awoke with sweat on his upper lip and his heart plodding in lumpy protest against his sternum. He remembered what had taken place the night before and looked across the bed; but where Mary should have lain asleep, the sheets were corrugated and empty. Frank pulled on his robe and went through to the living room, at the far end of which, at the kitchen counter, he saw her making tea.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  Mary had made love to only two men before, and had not discussed with female friends the details of the act. For her it had been a physical expression of an abstract emotion: an emblem, almost a metaphor, even if it was a confusingly blunt one that produced auxiliary emotions of its own. It had also carried with it a sense of surrender, or at least a statement of trust; there was after all nothing more of herself that she could offer.

  With Frank, she was anxious that she was not doing things the right way, but rather was drafting him into a ritual that had developed long ago between her and Charlie. She worried at first that the limits of her marriage and her life were transparent to him and could be deduced from her staid or unsatisfactory movements. Then, later, she stopped sensing the ghost of David Oliver or Charlie because she became too intent on Frank, on the illicit excitement of this new sensation at a time in her life when almost everything was familiar.

  “Good morning,” she replied.

  Where on earth, she was thinking, can I go from here?

  Chapter 10

  Mrs. van der Linden called. She’s still in New York. She said she told you. She’s coming back tonight.”

  “Thank you, Benton. I expect she did tell me. I’d forgotten.” Benton put some telegrams from London onto Charlie’s desk. “We have a date for opening the new building,” she said. “September twenty-fourth.”

  “Who’s cutting the ribbon? The Queen?”

  Benton consulted a memorandum on her desk. “No, it’s Mr. Selwyn Lloyd.”

  “The Chancellor of the bloody Exchequer! God, you’d have thought they could have done better than that.”

  “What’s Mrs. van der Linden doing in New York?”

  “She’s writing a book, I believe.”

  “A book? Like a mystery story?”

  “Complete mystery to me, Benton. I think she misses the children. I think that’s the problem.”

  “How do you manage at home on your own?”

  “It’s only been a day or so here and there. She just takes off when I do. When I’m in town she comes back. And I have Dolores. If you like chili con carne. Apparently she picked up the recipe when she was making her way through Mexico. Illegally, I presume.”

  “How did you get along in Oregon?”

  “Very well, thank you.”

  “And Boston?”

  “Not so well. I think I may have missed a lunch appointment.”

  “With Senator Kennedy?”

  “Among others. You sound appalled, Benton. I think you have a soft spot for him.”

  Benton crossed her legs with a fierce nylon crackle. “I guess he is kinda cute.”

  “He’s a politician, Benton. That means he spends his time calculating how much he lies to whom and trying to prevent different factions from discovering that he has made them incompatible promises. Imagine the nervous stress.”

  “Mrs. Kennedy’s attractive, though.”

  “Unden
iably.”

  Charlie looked down to his desk, where a telegram from the Foreign Office was asking the Ambassador to respond to a story in the London Times about Vice President Nixon’s projected defense policy and how it would affect NATO. The Times article was itself a development of a piece in the previous day’s Post to which no one, least of all Charlie, had paid much attention.

  A note from the Head of Chancery was attached to the telegram. “In view of your brilliant fire-fighting operation last week (complete silence from London) I wondered if you could let me have a draft reply to this? By 3.30 p.m.?” Charlie groaned quietly and reached for the telephone.

  Mary waited for Frank in a bar, a typical Frank rendezvous between Park and Broadway, a few blocks up from Union Square. It was a long room whose ceiling was the color of New York brownstone with cracked fleur-de-lis motifs in the plaster and a four-lamp glass-shaded chandelier. Three men in hats sat staring upward at the blank television screen mounted on a bracket at the end of the bar, their faces averted equally from their own reflections in the long mirror behind the stepped rows of bottles and the steady photographic gaze of Theodore Roosevelt. A door at the far end of the room was marked MEN.

  Mary ordered a 7UP and opened her paper. It was twelve-thirty and her train was due to leave in two hours; she had been back to the hotel to find a message from Dolores that Charlie had been trying to reach her in Washington. She viewed 1064 and All That with a mixture of feelings: fear, that she had tainted something sacrosanct, and hope, that the house would still provide a refuge from the turmoil of her feelings.

  “How ya doin’?” She felt a hand on her shoulder.

  Frank was suddenly at her side. “Let me have a beer, will you, Ray?”

  “Fine, fine,” said Mary.

  “You like a real drink?” said Frank.

  “No, this is okay, thanks.” Mary saw the rings on her left hand and slid it down beneath the rail; she felt that everyone in this man’s bar was looking at her. She had changed her clothes back at the hotel and washed with scrupulous care, but a physical reminder of the night before had made itself felt as she leaned forward to take a cigarette from her purse.

  “Still shouting for that bunch of losers?” said the barman as he pushed the beer over to Frank.

  “Listen, we have the most valuable player in the National League.”

  “Ernie Banks? He’s just a big black slugger.”

  “Oh yeah? And the Yankees? You’re nothing without Yogi. Think you’re still so great?”

  “We are great, mister, that’s the truth. Mickey Mantle, he’s the best you ever seen.”

  “More speedy than a slugger, more sluggy than a speedster and less of both than either. Was that what the boss said?”

  “Hey, don’t give me that Stengel crap. Pardon me, ma’am. He don’t talk good, but he can sure manage a team.”

  “Do yourself a favor. Get over to Chicago and see a real game.”

  “Hey,” the barman chuckled as he turned away. “Chicago. That’s a good one.”

  Mary waited for someone to speak English again.

  “So,” said Frank, turning to her. “You sure you have to leave?”

  “I do. Charlie’s back home and I ought to go and look after him.”

  Frank nodded, saying nothing.

  “But I could come back if you like,” Mary wanted to say; but she judged it wiser not to.

  Frank put his hand on her arm. “Are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. And you?”

  He nodded. “I’m all right. I’m glad you could come along. I’m sorry I had to leave in a rush this morning. I slept too late. I was tired. You know, after all—”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “All that campaigning, I was going to say. I have a break now. For a coupla days.”

  Mary felt a twist of anguish. “Just when I’m not free,” she said. “And then what?”

  “California, New Mexico, Minneapolis. I have one day back in New York—on the seventeenth, I think. Then two or three days at the end of the month. Then there’s the convention in Los Angeles. And after that, at some stage, I’ll switch to Nixon for a while.”

  “I don’t think I can live without seeing you,” she managed also not to say. She looked away, but remained calm. She had been in love with David Oliver, a great passion that had grown slowly; she had also been in love with Charlie van der Linden, and the easy nature of their superficial exchanges deceived no one as to the force of their mutual reliance.

  But Frank. Good God, she thought as she looked down to her hands twisting in her lap beneath the mahogany rail. Everything had come at once, the tenderness, desire, the sublime simplicity of happiness that depended only on his presence and his face, the fierce knowledge that told her it was him or nothing but the void. And that it should have come at this time in her life, when she had thought such things were past. Let the more loving one be me … Wasn’t that a line that Charlie used to quote? In God’s name, she thought, let the more loving one be someone else: for me it is beyond endurance.

  “So what happens now?” said Frank.

  Mary puffed at her cigarette and ground out the stub in the ashtray. The thing about being forty, she thought, was that while you had the feelings of a twenty-five-year-old, at least you had some dignity.

  “I don’t know, Frank.”

  Dignity? She had no dignity at all. She thought of what she had done and it was not dignified. So maybe she had … Self-control. Not even that: as soon as she had heard his voice on the telephone, she had leapt on the train to New York; as soon as he was unconscious she had more or less assaulted him. Self-control in public places. Yes, she would allow herself that: she was not going to cry or faint, like poor Franny in the story, but it didn’t seem much of an achievement for twenty years of adulthood, childbirth, raising children and all the wisdom and serenity that that was meant to bring.

  She felt his gaze, looking down because he stood while she sat, and she thought of him on the first night they had met, slouched in their armchair, with his insanely distracted enthusiasm for some jazz trumpeter, dripping blood onto her maple parquet.

  Through her mind were going all the possibilities, rapidly flipping over, like cards on a Rolodex. Stop this now and leave; never see him again: she could picture the scene quite easily. Explain to Charlie what had happened; make arrangements for a compromise. She could visualize responses and consequences; she could see arms raised, heads lowered; she could see these and many other sequences in stark dramatic outline, lit and ready to be shot. They flickered through her mind, but she could not light on one of them, because none had integrity. The only real possibility was to be passive, to endure, and see what happened; the feeling itself was the master of them both and they would have to yield to it.

  Still she needed something from Frank.

  “I have to go soon,” she said. “I have to settle up with the hotel.”

  “I thought you were keeping the room.”

  “There doesn’t seem much point. You’re not going to be here and I can write the book at home while I look after Charlie.”

  “I thought he was supposed to be following Kennedy as well.”

  “Not all the time. He’ll go to the convention, I suppose, and—”

  She felt her wrist being squeezed violently. “Keep the goddamn room, Mary. I’ll come back. Every chance I get.”

  “That hurts, Frank.”

  “So did this.” He pulled back the cuff on his shirt and pointed to the long scar that he had cut with his knife, leaving his crimson trail through the curbside snow.

  Mary looked into his eyes, which were shining with some white intensity, like the eyes of a teenage boy in a desperate neighborhood. She felt the immense loosening warmth of relief.

  He let go of her hand. “Sure you don’t want a drink?”

  She looked at her watch and worked rapidly back, calculating what time was left to her. She could squeeze the minutes; with seconds of such intensity, she
could knead them into days.

  “All right,” she said.

  From the hotel she took her bag and walked to Pennsylvania Station. She could not rid herself of the feeling that everything she did was being done by a stranger who temporarily inhabited her skin. She presumed that her mind was deluding her; that to protect her from the roar of experience it was offering her this illusion that someone else was in control, as people in shock or grief are separated from their too-harsh reality.

  She went into Penn Station through the main entrance, on Seventh Avenue, between the repetitive line of Doric columns, out of the sun, and down a long arcade of steel-framed shops, separated by honey-colored marble. Each store had its own cast or pierced decoration, and with its orderly profusion of high-quality goods, the arcade reminded her of Naples or Milan, a kind of national boast beneath the domes of electric light suspended at intervals in spherical clusters, like ripe glass fruit. In Italy she would have lingered to buy a straw donkey or plaster Colosseum for the children, but there was nothing about her transit through Penn Station that she wished to remember.

  At the end of the arcade she descended the stone staircase into an enormous space that had been modeled on the Roman baths at Caracalla but which reminded her, in its superfluous, ballroom grandeur, of St. Peter’s in Rome. From half-moon clerestory lights at each end, broad rivers of light poured down into the monumental space, illuminating the towering Corinthian columns around the buff-marbled walls and the iron lamp standards on their plinths. Mary thought for a moment of the thousands who had passed beneath the coffered ceiling of the seatless waiting room throughout the war: people of the West returning to ancestral Europe through this stone gateway. The six-story columns and marble walls, ecclesiastical and permanent, made the passing appointments with the trains below seem insignificant; in this cathedral no anxiously desired connection made any real difference to the travelers as they panted on toward their little destinies.