Love and War in California

by Oakley Hall

  * * *

  Bonny told me on the phone that she and her mother were going to Stanford for the weekend, to stay with another sister of her mother’s in Menlo Park. They would drive to Pasadena, as Bonny and I had done, and ride the Owl north. Back Tuesday night.

  “See you when you get back,” I said, as coolly as I could manage.

  3

  Coming in from the parking lot at school, I was cut by a pair of my fraternity brothers, but when I went into the lavatory Pogey Malcolm appeared immediately. He stood and unbuttoned at the next urinal. He wore his usual neat Joe College clothes, but he looked bad, a pimple on his chin and blue smudges under his eyes.

  He said he was thinking about enlisting.

  “What’s the matter?”

  It was pulling teeth for Pogey to speak of anything personal, but he said, “My father and Beth fight all the time. My father can be pretty mean.”

  I said it was a cliché thing, an older man married to a younger woman.

  The corner of his mouth turned down as though that had been a stupid thing to say. “It’s not that so much.”

  I shook and buttoned as he continued.

  “She drinks sherry all afternoon, so she’s stupid by dinnertime. She’ll start crying and saying nothing’s any good, she’s no good. I guess the deal was there’d be no children. So my father shouts at her. Then she goes up to bed and takes sleeping pills to knock herself out. It’s really the cruds!”

  When I turned to wash my hands, I remembered the joke about the Stanford man rebuking the Cal man in the men’s room, saying that Stanford men always washed their hands after they took a leak, and the Cal man replied that Cal men washed their hands before they took a leak. Bonny must be back from Stanford, and I ought to call her.

  It was good that Pogey felt he could tell me his personal problems. I couldn’t tell him mine.

  He gloomily scratched the pimple on his chin. “It looks like the war’s just going on and on. Everybody’s going to have to get into it. I don’t even believe we won the Coral Sea thing.”

  Reasons for enlisting. I said I’d thought his eyes weren’t good enough for the Army.

  “Anybody can get in the Army. Listen, wait a couple of minutes before you come out, will you?” He pushed out the swinging door.

  4

  When Weezie came to see me at the brand, I took her to the White Castle for coffee. She wore a gray suit and a blouse with a white collar. She didn’t have her glasses on. I had hated her for a whole scale of reasons, and hated hard; now it surprised me that I didn’t hate my stepmother anymore.

  She had a dumpy figure but a sweet, worried face. She sipped her coffee and watched me with one open and one half-closed eye, as though sighting along a rifle.

  “Your father’s terribly worried,” she said. She drew a pack of Chesterfields from her purse, extracted a cigaret from the pack, and fumbled for matches. I took the matchbook from her and applied flame to her cigaret, as my mother had instructed me to do.

  “About Richie,” she said.

  That would be about right.

  “He’s afraid Richie’s going to get shipped out.”

  I said Richie had told me he’d be at Pensacola until summer. A June wedding.

  “I came about you and Eddie,” Weezie said. “He was so pleased when you phoned the other night. We hadn’t heard from you for so long.”

  I tried to look pleasant. Long ago the fact that my father had a young mistress had seemed big-time and exotic, even if I hated her. Weezie squinted at me through the smoke rising from her Chesterfield.

  “You are a cold bastard, aren’t you?” she said.

  That shook me. Was that how I seemed? Was that how I was? Bonny had complained about somebody who was supposed to love you and just didn’t.

  “If you say so,” I said.

  “Do you think he doesn’t care about you?”

  “I’ll bet he thinks he does.” I tried to say it coldly.

  “A lot of the trouble between you has been my fault,” Weezie said. Her eyes looked suddenly swollen. “I was only twelve years older than you when I married your father. I didn’t know how to handle a big boy.”

  “You didn’t want a thirteen-year-old stepson, that was for sure.”

  She picked a curl of tobacco from her lips, started to speak but did not.

  “It’s okay, Weezie,” I said. “It’s over. I’m grown up now.” I thought that I had not yet transcended my gender, however.

  “I want to tell you I’m sorry, Payton. I was selfish. I was jealous. I’m grown up now, too.”

  “Okay well I’m sorry, too.”

  “You wrote Richie your side of it. Why did you have to come to Eddie to make it up? Why didn’t he come to you?”

  I had written that to my brother.

  “It’s because he knows he’s in the wrong,” Weezie said. She scrubbed out her cigaret and promptly produced another. I went through the lighting-up procedure again. Waving at the smoke, she said, “Do me a favor and come and see your dad.”

  “Okay.”

  “Come to dinner tonight! I’ll get some steaks.”

  I couldn’t face this without some days of dreading it. If you dreaded something enough, it would turn out to be not so bad. We could talk about Richie. I would reassure my father that Richie was not being shipped out. We could recall how good Richie had been at everything he tried, class president, basketball star, up-and-comer in the movie industry.

  Strikebreaker. Throat-cutter.

  We settled on Friday night.

  “We’ll celebrate Eddie’s commission!” Weezie said.

  “He got it!”

  “Ninety percent certain, Captain Mahoney says.”

  “Terrific!”

  “He’s so excited about being in the Seabees! But of course he won’t admit it. There’ve been so many disappointments.”

  That cut the cold bastard’s heart like a knife.

  Weezie stuffed her pack of Chesterfields back into her purse, straightened her jacket, and rose to leave. I realized that she was proud of her achievement of bringing father and errant son back together. Mission accomplished!

  That evening the headline was NAZIS TAKE 100,000 RUSSIAN PRISONERS.

  5

  Wednesday evening I took Bonny to dinner at an Italian place in La Jolla so she could tell me about her trip, which I didn’t want to hear about. She had loved the Stanford campus. It was old. She had talked to some students, and to a professor who was a neighbor of her aunt Honey.

  I thought she was tuning down her excitement so as not to turn the knife in the wound.

  When I brought her home, she neither moved close to me beneath the pale canopy of Ol Paint’s top nor opened her door to get out. So there was more to be said. No doubt it was bad news. “Blue Champagne” played mutedly on the radio.

  “Mother thinks I’m seeing too much of you,” she said in a small voice.

  Mrs. B., my enemy, was using Stanford to pry Bonny away from an unsuitable suitor.

  “I have to stop seeing you, maybe just for a while. I have to do what she wants because of Charley. I just can’t not!”

  “Sure,” I said in a rusty voice. “And they want you to go out with Brandon Porter.” Brandon Porter was the son of a big-deal doctor friend of Dr. Bonington’s. Probably Brandon Porter would be going up to Stanford, too.

  “We had a big fight,” Bonny went on. “I told her I’d do what she wants. I’ll go to Stanford and pledge her sorority. And I’ll get engaged to somebody she can brag about to the other ladies at the Yacht Club. She slapped me. And Daddy told me to shut my face. She’s never slapped me before, and he’s never told me to shut up like that. I must be grown up! I told them I’d do what they want, but I’d never come back to stupid San Diego.”

  “Just like Charley,” I said.

  “Don’t you start in on me, too!” I could hear her breathing. “I’ll marry someone really rich and live in Pasadena, and we’ll have a better boat than a stupi
d Rhodes—” She sounded hysterical. And she said, “And I told them after you got to be a famous writer I’d divorce my husband and marry you!”

  “The hell you will!” I said through my teeth.

  There was a silence then, like cotton batting stuffing the car around us. In a calmer voice, Bonny said, “You have to try to understand. They are no different from Chinese peasants. I’m not worth as much as Charley because I don’t have a penis. I can’t take their money to go to Stanford and buy the clothes I need and join a sorority and live at a whole different level than I do here, then when I’m through tell them how much I hate them, what jerks they are, how I always hated them. Like Charley. They’re my parents! I just can’t break their hearts like Charley.”

  “You’d better watch out that you don’t turn out just like your mother,” I said.

  I already wished I had not said that when she slugged me. Her fist glanced off my shoulder and cracked me above the eye. A mist of rage congealed in my head.

  “Beat it!” I yelled at her. “Go have a great time at Stanford! To hell with you!”

  She jammed open the door and slammed it behind her. She ran up the walk to the porch.

  I guess I said, “Wait!”

  She disappeared inside. The porch went dark.

  I let Ol Paint drift down the hill. The engine caught and purred. I coasted on down to park under the trees in Presidio Park, where Bonny and I had often gone to neck when it was too late to drive out to Point Loma. With the ignition and the lights off, I sat gripping handfuls of my hair, my forehead pressed against the steering wheel. I touched the place above my eye where she had hit me.

  A prowl car halted beside Ol Paint, and a blinding light was turned into my face. The cop asked what I was doing there and told me to go do my thinking somewhere else.

  6

  The papers were full of low-key bad news. A dim-out was ordered for the beaches of Southern California as a precaution against the submarine attacks on tankers silhouetted against city lights that were so devastating on the East Coast. Gasoline rationing was already in effect in the East and would extend to the Pacific Northwest on June 1, with California to follow.

  What was I going to do about Bonny?

  On the Mission Hills route I had been taking the Emmetts earlier. Today there were the usual two big grocery boxes. I guided them in under the SERVICE sign and made my balancing, skipping progress through the service yard with Bitsy worrying my ankles and, inside, Mrs. Sims waiting like a wounded water buffalo. Bitsy fled with a yelp when I kicked out. I knocked on the back door, waited a beat, called out, “Perry’s!” and maneuvered my load inside.

  Mrs. Sims glowered at me from the kitchen table, where she had a magazine open before her. I set the boxes down and swiftly stacked cans, bottles, cartons, and brown paper sacks of fruit and vegetables on the counter. I stored the meat in the Frigidaire and nested the boxes, preparatory to leaving.

  “Mr. Perry used to have courteous drivers,” Mrs. Sims observed. Her face was fat and unhealthy, high patches of color on her cheeks.

  I said I’d got here by two thirty.

  She stared at me with her mouth turned down. “If you were any kind of a man, you would be serving your country instead of delivering groceries,” she said.

  I felt my face contort into an expression similar to hers. I managed to keep my mouth shut, but I let the door slam when I went outside. Red-hot needles fastened onto my ankle.

  I dropped my load of boxes.

  Bitsy emitted about half a yelp, mashed under the boxes like the Wicked Witch of the West under Dorothy’s Kansas house.

  When I lifted the wooden containers, the shaggy little mutt lay motionless. I prodded him with the toe of my shoe.

  I set the boxes down on the bottom step, knocked, called “Perry’s!” and stuck my head inside. Mrs. Sims stood big-assed at the counter, scowling back over her shoulder.

  “Your dog’s dead,” I said.

  Back in my truck, I wheeled around the corner, light-headed.

  After my last stop, my last Perry’s stop for sure, I rolled on down Presidio Drive, swinging past the Daltreys’ onetime house sitting up off the street, white walls, red tile roof, green lawn, that had no connection to me anymore. I dropped on past the Boningtons’ two-story white-walls and red-tile house to see if Brandon Parker’s convertible was parked there. Nope. I headed on down into Old Town, lowlife, poor people, Mexican town, where I remembered a bar with a beat-up wooden stoop and a neon sign for Budweiser. I sat alone drinking a beer I didn’t want and trying to get my thoughts and my future together.

  How now would I pay my rent, pay for meals, pay for books, pay for gas to take Bonny out? When I thought about Bonny it was as though I had a cold in my head.

  Maybe I didn’t even have to see Lois. Leave the truck in the loading zone with the keys in the ashtray. But there would still be a last paycheck to pick up.

  There was no sign of Bitsy’s bite on my ankle.

  I nursed my beer to pass the time until everyone but Lois would have gone home.

  She was waiting in her glass cubicle, her apron off. She shook her head at me as I passed her station carrying empties. When I leaned in her door, my grin felt as though it had been cut from sheet metal.

  “Am I fired?”

  “You’re going to have to go out and explain to Mrs. Emmett about her dog.”

  “He bit me and I dropped my boxes on him.” I bent to rub my ankle. “I’ll probably get hydrophobia.”

  “Show them the bite.”

  I thought she looked very pretty and not angry at all, with her smooth makeup and her freshly brushed hair.

  “I guess I don’t want to go back out there,” I said.

  “I didn’t think you would. You can pick up your check tomorrow.”

  She snapped off the light in her cage and came outside. I had forgotten how small she was. She reached up to unhook my bow tie and stuff it into my breast pocket. Her hand lingered on my chest for a moment.

  “The only time you smile at me is when you fire me,” I said.

  “I’ve smiled at you plenty!”

  “Would you come and have a drink with me?”

  She cocked an eyebrow. “Why don’t we have a drink at my house? Ray’s in Bakersfield. Do you know where I live?”

  She lived on 47th Street. I’d driven past her house several times months ago, when I’d had fantasies of her asking me over. Lois in the bedroom doorway in a black negligee. It was going to come true!

  She preceded me up the steps to the street with what might be a little extra swing to her girdled bottom. Once she glanced over her shoulder at me, close behind her.

  “In a hurry?” she asked.

  * * *

  It was not so steamy and exotic or even romantic as my Lois-fantasies had been, and I didn’t think that, written as fiction, it would inform Mr. Chapman as to the Human Condition. Lois went right into the bathroom “to wash Perry’s off,” but instead of coming out in a negligee she called to me to ask if I wouldn’t like to take a shower, too. At last I dug my condom out of its slot in my wallet. I joined Lois in the shower.

  She said, “We don’t need that!” stripped the rubber painfully off, and tossed it in the toilet.

  My first uncomplicated copulation took place in Lois Meador’s shower, with Lois straddling my hips and kissing my ear, and I came like my childhood gone in an ecstatic rush.

  Afterward we drank rum and Cokes in the living room with the curtains drawn, I in my shorts and Lois wearing her peach-colored panties, surprising breasts with big aureolas like blossoms around the nipples. A kerosene heater stood before the blocked-off fireplace, an antique rocker that had belonged to Ray’s grandmother, and the couch was covered by a black and chartreuse spread. Ray spent most of the time on the road, Lois said. She knew that he had girlfriends in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Fresno.

  We made love on the couch. After the first time I didn’t prematurely ejaculate. Lois showed me positions
she knew, very different from examining drawings in Sexology, and taught me how to please her. When I helped her along, she panted wildly and twisted her head from side to side in a violent way that half frightened me.

  It seemed to me that I was being prepped for an examination I had already failed.

  She cooked hamburgers and fried potatoes for dinner, and after dinner we went back into the bedroom. I didn’t need to use a condom because she had her diaphragm in.

  I was home by ten o’clock.

  The Buttons were still up, listening to the radio. Mr. Button ignored me, but Mrs. Button greeted me with the elaborate surprise that she affected whenever I came home early.

  I was sitting at my typewriter with a clean sheet of newsprint curling out of the platen when Mrs. Button knocked. I was afraid I smelled of Lois. Standing in the doorway, she said in her overefflusive way that her Jim was making so much money at the shop cutting sailors’ hair that they no longer needed to rent their spare room. Could I find another place to stay, say, next month?

  I said I thought they felt I should be in the service.

  Mrs. Button blushed violently. “Well, it is important to Jim, you see. Because he was in the other war.”

  How was I going to go on paying rent, anyway? I said I would miss them.

  “Oh, Payton, how could you miss us when we never see you! Except this week when you’ve had a fuss with Bonny. Or else you are in here banging on that typewriter like killing snakes.”

  Guilt like a scratchy shirt had come on me for screwing Lois Meador when I loved Barbara Bonington. Who had kissed me off, however. Dates with Lois had been made.

  “You know, Payton,” Mrs. Button confided, “my Jim and I couldn’t have any children, and Jim thought you might be a kind of son to him. We’d go to movies sometimes, and he’d take you fishing. But you’re so busy.”

  A Jewish movie producer had wanted to think of Richie as his son, and an Indian barber had wanted to think of me that way. I told Mrs. Button I’d move out as soon as I could find another place.

  7

  At school no one was speaking to me. I had a glimpse of Bonny in the Caff, in conversation with Mike Phelps, blond and pretty, chin up, color in her cheeks, not even a glance in my direction. I couldn’t seem to gather my thoughts about her.