Entrapment and Other Writings (21 page)

It had passed, it had passed, it had gone for good …

“You’re going to need me more than you think,” she had warned him that night now gone. “For your own sake, don’t let me go.”

“For your own sake I’ll damn well
send
you,” he had matched her in self-sacrifice and turned on his side away from her.

“We both want to thank you for letting me go”—
now why throw in a thing like that?
A receding pang, like a pang of sick delight, made him put the back of his hand to his head and picture Virgil as some little fellow with pencils stuck behind both ears who studies the shoeboard between twelve and two—if you got too close he’d take you behind the paddock and sell you Native Dancer’s right foreshoe for five dollars.

Some Virgil.

The same little fellow you could see again, between the eighth race and the ninth or when the ninth was done, flipping castoff tickets as he walked, pretending he had lost a good one. But actually looking for ones thrown away by mistake. Stuffing his pockets with thrown away mutuels.
Baby, you picked yourself a dilly, sorting racetrack culls … Virgil throws you the sack and if you find a place ticket for eight dollars there’s groceries in the house and, if not, there’s nothing. Baby, as the hillbilly remarked, you’ve made a slight error
.

Yet, even as he watched, the Virgil of his sick imagination lengthened and turned into somebody who never stooped for any man’s throwaways. This Virgil looked like Marlon Brando and owned a yacht and a stable, and the life he led her, the happy times, lushing on the open sea, the moonlight, the music
—Baby, no wonder you never wrote
.

He fitted his finger into a crack in the dresser mirror where a shot-glass once had splintered and thought wistfully,
Sweetheart
,
you could throw real straight. I should never have let you go. You had an arm like Alexander and I made love like Jesus Christ—I know because you told me so
.

Beauty, you wouldn’t say it if you saw me now
.

Always some damn Virgil or other banging out of the barrier, always some sleeper no
Form
could ever figure, the eight-year-old maiden staying in front all the way. Always some damned Virgil
.

It’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t have mattered if it had happened when I was nineteen
, he decided again
 … but at forty-four it has really started something. Everything had always gone my way right up to the day she left. Then I developed a hitch in my swing and everything I did had some sort of reverse English on it. Everything I tried, that had always worked like a charm, kicked back
.

Years in the rain, and now the rest of the way by the stars
.

Peering cautiously, he saw the rain that rained on all the roofs about. And thought of the many things a man can be in forty-four years, from medical corpsman to piano-man at the first-rate, second-rate, third- and fourth-rate clubs until the clubs were taverns and the taverns were dives, and what do you sell when the tambourine is empty to get the money to buy sleep?

Two stories above Enright’s Southsea Isle, six dollars in debt to a man sure he had no habit worse than the horses …

And now it has been raining for how long in his heart?

Six years since he got discharged from the service. Six years since he’d said he was going to do something besides mutuel tickets. Eighteen since he’d gotten on the side of the house. Four years at a desk wearing a first lieutenant’s bars. Two outfits to which he’d been attached had gone overseas and left him stateside. He was not the sort of man who would have deserted in the heat of battle. He was only the sort of man who happens to be where the fighting is lightest.

What makes a corpsman perspire?
he wondered as if recalling a question from some forgotten book.

It isn’t standing up to fight or lying down to fire …

The rain paused as though to hear the rest.

They’ll run in the mud at Sportsman’s Park
, was what he told the rain.
They’ll run in the mud at Gulfstream too. Tell me the old sweet story, Rain … they’ll run in the mud at Suffolk again. If I can get up a deuce between now and post-time I’ll be all right, for I’ll have something going for me till tonight
.

The fifth stood at attention. He denied the bottle’s accusation: “It wasn’t a cheating operation. Give me
that
much. Give me this—that I meant it like never, not even once before. Give me this much, that she said those twenty years made no difference to her. Give me this much—that it was
her
that said, ‘Don’t let me go.’ ”

Why did you let her go then?
he and the bottle asked together.

Well, it’s like this
, he stalled.
It’s a very simple question. It’s like just one of those things. Once in a hundred years comes up a certain combination nobody can anticipate. Nobody in the world can anticipate it. Take the sour with the sweet. Every cloud has a silver lining. Everybody has a certain number of daily doubles he hits in his life and, like with me, some use them up earlier than others. I used mine up early—that’s why I got on the side of the house. That’s why I haven’t stood at a daily-double window in fifteen years
.

Pretending twenty years doesn’t make a difference until I can’t pretend any longer—it’s like being robbed of a Purple Heart you got for cutting yourself on a C-ration can … how do you play the injured hero?

But I got the blues all the same
, he acknowledged glumly.
That C-ration cut hurts like a battle-wound …

Down the hall the morning’s first chambermaid knocked discreetly at a door.

It wasn’t a cheating operation at all. In fact, it was the only operation you ever played straight from beginning to end
.

And the first one you lost that you took this hard
.

The way you start toughing out a bad deal is to know in your heart you got a bad deal. So I didn’t hit the daily double two days in a row
.

This wasn’t no daily double, Bookie
, he corrected himself. And
now the bitter taste of last night’s gin came back on his tongue, deep in his throat …

She will, however, write occasionally
.

And he would answer too, if he had nothing else to do.
In a year or two she’ll come through town, we’ll have a drink together, and I’ll find out I’m well out of it. Virgil will be with her, of course, looking haggard from two years of trying to keep up, keep the inside rail on a very fast track indeed. The sonofabitch looking more like fifty-six now … and it won’t be the booze that’s killing him slow
(the bookie saw with satisfaction):
you look like somebody cracked your screen, Pops … he’d jive the old boy with jokes that were just between her and him. Wait till she dents your screen, Pops. Wait till the sky comes down on you. You may put it up again but it won’t look the same; it will look like it had been tacked up there, Pops
.

He himself would be all right. All
he
had to do was get used to the sky being tacked up. It would be like one of those TV romances where the lovers who have gone separate ways meet by chance between trains … he on his way to Hollywood to sell a novel, of course, because that was where all bookies went when they were trying to forget what they had written. She is pleased that he is a writer now. She’s heard all about his success, but frowns when he asks about Pops. “Virgil is in the East on business,” she would explain, and just by the way she said it you’d know what kind of business the devil was in the East on. Just the way she says it, you know she is terribly unhappy but still has her pride. She’ll say she thought
he
had married years ago …

Darling, never let me go
.

“Baby, Baby, the half-wild look that you had in love,” he moaned softly to himself.

If only I could talk my way out somehow. You know it’s all I’m trying to do, talk my way out, Baby
.

As sure as writing mutuel tickets was his trade, he’d never desire a coy girl, a demure girl, a good girl, a nice girl again.
The hell with the coy girls, the nice girls. How could I get to forty-four thinking
they
were the good kind? Baby, I never knew the good kind till I met you, and you were the best of your kind …

The least I can do is let go of the note
.

III. Night of the Iron Rain

But he couldn’t let go of the note. He was a man who was always crumpling something he hadn’t read and tossing it off because he had some kind of resentment against the kind of man with usually two pens and a memo book in his pocket, who always took notes. He himself was a man who didn’t need to take notes, he had long ago decided, and he himself was a man who traveled light, and if he had been the kind who let himself keep a scrapbook of self-pity, he could have it filled by now. Because he was a man who had always believed in women, from the first little freshly scrubbed schoolroom chick who had turned him down. “All you want to do is kiss me,” she had told him. They were thirteen, and he hadn’t kept any notes on how badly he had felt, and he’d felt bad for two whole days.

All this is the same operation
, he assured himself now, thirty-one years later, and in this there was no self-pity. Then he saw how the eyes in the mirror were sunken and the overnight stubble had gray in it. It was the face of a man usually confident that he could pass for thirty-six, a man who had never not surprised anyone, as yet, when he said he was actually forty-four.

I wouldn’t say that no one on your side of thirty couldn’t hold you
, he made terms with her.

Why not “my side of forty” something whispered, but he didn’t hear it clearly.

What’s the matter with you, Baby
, he wanted to know immediately, impatiently, as if that were the answer to everything,
that all you can go for is men in their forties?

Or had it been simply that she was so far ahead of any male under forty, and none over that age could give her back the unreckoning kind of love she gave?

At least nobody named Virgil
.

The man in the mirror didn’t feel so good. Yet he didn’t really feel bad. He just felt a little low. He knew he’d get through the barrel all right. He could deal blackjack and handle his own nerves, he could deal out love or poker or three-card monte, and nothing could make him say “be with me” when there was nobody to be with.

“Baby,” he asked, suddenly impatient with all her whims, “how come you can’t go for anyone but men in their forties?”

I was scared of twenty years
, he acknowledged soberly,
and some Virgil comes along is not scared of twenty. Some Virgil. If he were just on your side of thirty, Baby, I could reconcile myself
.

If I have to reconcile myself, I might as well start now. Here I go, reconciling myself. All right …

Just like going to Mass, he would reconcile himself.

He stood up and took a deep breath.

“Here I go, reconciling myself. Here I am all reconciled. A stranger is marrying my wife tomorrow and I’m reconciling myself,” he mumbled like a drunk whose last dime is over the bar and knows it but fumbles in his pockets all the same.

Love in the long forenoon, love by moonlight, he knew now, is for the movies.

But love past eleven and not yet twelve remembers the step of the chambermaid just the other side of the open transom telling someone, “I’m still in the land of the living, Charlie.”

His legs went suddenly weak and he sat down on the gray bed’s edge, making a gesture as if a fly had buzzed him.

He heard a light knocking at the door but sat quite still. He didn’t want company. He looked at his watch for no reason he knew of except perhaps that it was knocking time. And the knocking came again, more lightly now, but no footsteps went away.

His eyes went to the crack in the mirror.
Wait till she starts
throwing things, Pops
, and recalled the glass that had missed him by a hair.