Going All the Way (16 page)

Sonny saw the girl catch Gunner giving her the onceover, and she shot him a glance that would have staggered a charging bull. Then she strolled out, sliding on her sunglasses, her tight little ass twitching sassily.

Talk about Art.

Gunner was watching her with the studied appreciation of a connoisseur, and as she went out of sight, he started moving after her, as naturally and unhesitatingly as if he already had a date to meet her. Sonny drifted along behind, digging his fingernails into his palms. It not only terrified him to try to pick up a girl himself, it even made him nervous to see another guy try. If the other guy failed, it somehow seemed to Sonny like a slap in the face of all men, himself included, and he cringed to see it.

Gunner was halfway to the sidewalk, pursuing his prey, but Sonny stopped as soon as he got outside. He leaned back against the door, looking down at his feet and trying to blank out his mind. In moments like that he was tempted to pray, but since he had lost his belief he resorted to repeating scraps of nursery rhymes, which was almost as good. If you didn's really think about the words they sounded a little like prayers, their rhythm supplying the comfort of incantation.

Little Jack Horner

Sat in a corner

Mumbledy-mumble pie …

Stuck in a thumb

Pulled out a plum

Blackberry juice in the eye.

Taking a deep breath he sneaked a glance toward the sidwalk and saw Gunner casually standing with the girl, talking, as if it was the natural thing. He motioned to Sonny, impatiently, as if Sonny should have known all along it would be all right. Feeling his heart accelerate to high, Sonny walked up to them, not looking directly at the girl. Gunner introduced Sonny and said he had just asked Marty—that was the girl, Marty Pilcher—to have a cup of coffee with them over at the drugstore across the street. Sonny fell in on the other side of the girl, but a little behind her and Gunner, like a kid who was tagging along.

The drugstore was one of the old-fashioned kind that had big wooden booths and was sort of dark and musty inside, with an odor of camphor and cough syrup. There was a tall electric fan that buzzed complacently but didn't affect the temperature. It was hot as blazes, and Sonny didn't feel like drinking any coffee, but he knew that was what to order. You didn't invite a sophisticated girl to go have an icecream soda with you. Coffee sounded more mature and worldly.

Marty scooched into one side of the booth, next to the wall, and Gunner moved in opposite from her. Sonny sat down next to Gunner, sort of on the edge of things. It really was discouraging being so nervous when it wasn't even him who was trying to operate with the girl.

“I thought you looked familiar,” Gunner said to the girl and explained to Sonny, “She went to Shortley, too. Couple years behind us.”

“Oh,” Sonny said, adding his sparkling bit to the conversation.

“I don't think we actually met,” the girl said pointedly to Gunner, “but then we wouldn't have. You were a Big Rod.”

She blew a stream of smoke from her nostrils and with a mocking sort of smile said, “Isn't that what they called you Golden Boys?”

Gunner shifted uncomfortably and stared into his coffee. “That was high school,” he said, like it didn't really mean anything.

“And college, too,” the girl said in the same mocking tone. “DePauw, wasn't it? Football star. Big Man on Campus.”

Gunner winced, and scratched at the back of his head.

“B.M.O.C.” the girl said with a grin.

“Come on,” Gunner said, sounding like a kid who was being picked on. Marty just smiled and delicately picked a little fleck of tobacco off her bottom lip.

It really was something. There was Gunner having to be embarrassed about all the stuff that had made him a hero, a star, a rod. But it was obvious that those things were the opposite ones to anything that would impress this particular girl. She was playing it cool and a little bit mean. Sonny thought how great it would be to fuck her, and he suddenly felt dizzy and weak.

“Weren't you in the Annual Varieties at Shortley?” Gunner asked, desperately trying to throw some prestige thing back at
her
. The Annual Varieties, an elaborate, original show put on by the students, was pretty big stuff at Shortley. It was said that you never could tell when scouts from Broadway or Hollywood might be in the audience.

“Sure I was in the Varieties,” Marty admitted; then added, “Jews were allowed.”

“Hey!” Gunner said, like he'd caught her in a foul. “Don't give me any discrimination stuff. Jews were in everything at Shortley, even the best clubs, even in—well, the Big Rod cliques. In every class, all the time I was there, anyway. In my year there was Sue Ann Glick, and Sammy Katzman.”

“Sure.” Marty smiled. “And in my year there was Roberta Tallon and Norm Siedenbaum.”

“So?”

“So, in every year, in every class, one male and one female Jew are taken in at the top. That's what the quota allows.”

“
What
quota?” Gunner demanded.

Marty sighed and then said, as if she were only repeating the obvious, “The quota that allows two Jews, one of each gender, to be among the top social caste at Shortley in each new class.”

Gunner snorted. “That's crazy,” he said and turned to Sonny, looking for help. “Tell her, will ya? You're an objective observer. Was there a ‘quota,' did you ever hear of any ‘quota' like that?”

Sonny chewed at his lip. “Not that I ever heard of,” he said.

That was true, but the funny thing was when he started thinking back, it seemed like Marty was right. In every class there turned out to be a dozen or so boys and a matching number of girls who were really the top, the real rods and roddesses, and in each group there was just one boy and one girl Jew. Sonny had never really noticed it before, but when he thought about it, damned if it didn't seem to be the case.

“Well?” Marty asked.

“It seems like that's what happened,” Sonny said.

Gunner slapped a hand on his forehead and looked from Marty to Sonny. “But
how?
” he insistently questioned them. “
How
did it happen?”

Marty blew a neat little smoke ring at him. “Natural selection,” she cooed.

Gunner's hand tightened on his forehead, pressing the brow.

“No, but really. How did each top group in each class always have two, no more and no less? Always one boy and one girl who were—” his voice trailed off—“Jewish.”

“To show that all men are created equal,” Marty said brightly, “regardless of race, creed, or color.”

“But listen,” Gunner pleaded, “nobody ever said that. I mean, I was on the inside of that stuff, and I swear to God, nobody ever sat down and said, ‘O.K., who'll be the two Jewish kids to make it this year?' You don't believe that happened. Do you?”

Marty shrugged. “Probably not. That would have been embarrassing.”

Gunner looked to Sonny, but he wasn't any help. “Son of a bitch,” Gunner said softly. He kept holding his hand pressed to his forehead, as if he was keeping his brains from falling out. Finally he let out a long breath and said, almost like he was talking to himself, “Wow. The stuff people do. And don't even know they're doing it.”

Marty reached over and touched his hand, not so much with affection, but rather, consolation, as if she were comforting a little kid.

“We did it too,” she said. “The Jews had their own vicious social thing going, their own clubs and in groups and nasty little hierarchies.”

“Besides,” Sonny found himself saying aloud, “you didn't have to be Jewish to be on the outside.”

Marty gave him a sympathetic smile that made him look away and wished he hadn't said it. It would have sounded even more like asking for sympathy if he added the thing he so often thought about, the feeling he had that it might in a way be lucky to be a Jew or something so you'd have a real reason for being shut out of things and it wouldn't really be your fault, the fault of the actual person you were. It seemed to Sonny to be even more humiliating to be a regular WASP and still be left out, because then the only reason for not being accepted was yourself, the way you were. You got to wondering whether you had B.O. or something, like in the ads where even your best friends wouldn't tell you.

“I was a snob,” Marty said, “in my own circle. I was in Hadassah Debs. That was very big for the Jews.”

“Hadassah Debs,” Gunner said. “Yeh, I remember that. Did you join a Jewish sorority? In college?”

“I went to Wellesley. At least the cliques there didn't have badges.”

“You went East, huh?” Gunner said with that certain edge of awe that the fact commanded from those who got their higher education nearer home.

Marty nodded and mashed out her cigarette with a determined jab. “I'm going back, too.”

“When?” Gunner's question had a note of urgency about it.

“When I serve my time here. Daddy'd let me go now, but Mother thinks if I stay a year I'll meet a nice boy at the country club and grow up to be just like her. So I'm taking courses at Herron and painting, and if I stay a year I get my freedom. This time next year, I'll be gone.”

“Where?” Gunner asked, leaning forward a little.

Marty looked puzzled, as if he ought to know. “New York, of course.”

“Oh, right.”

“Is there any place else?”

Gunner shrugged. “I might end up there myself,” he said casually. “I've got the GI Bill coming. I could use it anywhere. Columbia, maybe.”

“Oh? What would you study?”

Gunner shifted uneasily in his seat. “I dunno, exactly. Philosophy, maybe. Maybe something in art. Something to do with art.”

“Oh,” Marty said, obviously unimpressed. Sonny felt embarrassed in Gunner's behalf, something he would never have imagined could happen. Marty yawned and said, “Well, thanks for the coffee. I have to run.”

She slid from the booth, a set of keys jangling in her hand, and started off.

“Wait!” Gunner almost pushed Sonny onto the floor as he scrambled out of the booth. Marty turned and looked at him with her eyebrows slightly raised, questioning, as if she couldn't imagine what in the world Gunner might have to say to her. Sonny thought she looked exotically arrogant.

“Well,” Gunner said and cleared his throat. “Why don't we, uh, get together sometime? I mean, you know, I'd like to talk to you again. There's some stuff I'd like to talk to you about.”

“Oh?”

She damn well wasn't making it easy. Sonny felt downright sorry for Gunner.

“Do you have a phone?”

“My father does. It's in the book.”

She turned again, twitching off in that teasing walk. Gunner stood watching, in a kind of trance.

“Some girl,” Sonny said.

“It won't be easy,” Gunner said, mostly to himself. Then, as if snapping awake, he looked wildly at Sonny and said, “Holy shit! What's her father's name?”

“She didn't say.”

“Come on!”

Gunner dug in his pocket, pulled out an assortment of coins, and flung them all on the table. He ran out the door and looked desperately up and down the street. Then he started running and Sonny trotted behind, wanting to help. A new Chevy convertible was pulling out into traffic, and Gunner spotted Marty at the wheel, ran out in the street dodging a truck, and caught up to the convertible just as it halted for a stoplight on the corner.

“Hey!” he yelled.

She turned her big dark sunglasses on him.

“What's his name? Your father?”

“Solomon,” she said, and with just one corner of her thin lips curling almost imperceptibly upward she added, “As in the Old Testament.”

The light greened, and she gunned off with tires screeching, leaving Gunner in a gassy cloud. He turned and trotted back to the sidewalk, noticeably limping. Sonny figured he must have twisted an ankle dodging the truck in his rush to Marty's car.

“What's wrong? You hurt your ankle or something?”

“Hell, no,” Gunner said quietly, sweat beads showing on his brow, “I've got such a goddam hard-on I can barely walk.”

2

Sonny walked around the block with Gunner—slowly, of course, like you'd walk with a guy who was just getting over a leg injury. Gunner kept slamming his fist into the palm of his other hand and saying, “Son of a bitch.” Sonny suggested they might have a nice cool brew somewhere, but Gunner didn't feel like sitting still. He was nervous as a cat. He lit a cigarette and threw it into somebody's yard after just a couple puffs.

“C'mon,” he said, “let's roll out to Little America and bash a few balls.”

Gunner didn't say a word on the way. Sonny was thinking it was sort of funny—not funny ha-ha, but funny strange—how their good intention to get some real first-hand culture turned out. It seemed like everything led to pussy, even Art. He didn't mention that to Gunner, though.

Sonny looked on and chain-smoked while his buddy took things out on an innocent bucket of golf balls.

“She thinks I'm a stupid jock,” Gunner kept saying, and then he'd wind up and knock another ball to hell and gone.

“No, she doesn't,” Sonny would answer, but it didn't sound very convincing, probably because he wasn't really convinced of it. Besides, he felt silly, trying to reassure one of the town's great cocksman about a broad!

Gunner was sweaty after just one bucket, and he said what the hell, they might as well go tip a few. They went into Broad Ripple to the Melody Inn, which had the virtue of being the closest place to get a beer. It was getting on toward five and there were some businessmen already gathered—not big businessmen, but guys who probably sold roofing or air-conditioners or some other door-to-door kind of thing. Sonny figured that must be a real bitch of a way to make a living. It wasn't bad for college guys on summer vacations, but these were guys with thinning hair and spreading waistlines, guys with slack, puffy faces who wore wingtip shoes with ventilation holes and white-silk socks with arrows up the side. A couple of them had broads along, probably gals they picked up in an office, the kind with those big, shellacked hairdos and double chins and laughter that was loud without being happy.