Naked Came the Stranger (4 page)

Ernie had picked the University of Indiana. It had been a tough
choice because there were forty-six schools competing for the
pleasure of educating him. He picked Indiana for a simple reason:
They paid more than anyone else. Still, Ernie would have flunked out
after that last season if he hadn't joined the Marines before
exams.

The war was the best thing that ever happened to Ernie Miklos.
Better than the football games and better than getting laid by a
cheerleader named Donah. Once, knee-deep in mud at Cape Gloucester,
sharing his foxhole with six dead land crabs, he said to himself
– and Ernie always spoke the truth when he spoke to himself
– "There are days when I'm sorry this war has to end."

Ernie loved that war and he loved what his drill instructor at
Parris Island had told him: "Boy, I'm gonna make a paid fucking
killer out of you." And the sergeant would have been proud. Ernie won
the Silver Star at Bougainville by wiping out three Japanese strong
points with a handful of grenades and a BAR. He was wounded twice and
his face still bore the scar of a jap bayonet. But when Ernie was
telling war stories, that wasn't the one he liked to tell. He liked
to tell about the time he broke into a hut and found a Japanese
lieutenant about to commit hara-kiri. Ernie helped him along, but he
performed the ceremony by inserting the knife eleven inches into the
lieutenant's rectum.

Ernie's wounds on Bougainville got him returned to Honolulu
– something he considered worse than a Section 8. It was in
Honolulu that Ernie got the scar that no one saw, the scar he carried
on his brain. It was in a slop jar off Hotel Street that Ernie found
his absolution. The whores had been thick along Hotel Street that
night; but they always were. It was like Piccadilly in London or
Pigalle in Paris except that the women sat in bars instead of under
street lamps or in doorways. Whores, Ernie discovered, were wonderful
when you felt the need of dying quickly with the reasonable assurance
you'd rise again from a quick grave. Ernie didn't actually survive
that night, not wholly. He had really been buried, and so he still
felt, forever. And his executioner was a half-caste little girl with
bad teeth, a girl who couldn't have been more than eighteen. In a way
Ernie felt it was retribution for what he had done to the Jap
lieutenant. He'd known that was wrong, but he couldn't help himself.
And while the lieutenant had been fortunate enough to look forward to
his Imperial Heaven, Ernie would spend the rest of his life looking
forward to absolutely nothing.

Even now he sometimes woke up screaming. Laverne assumed it was
the sound of guns and the calls of dying men that echoed through his
sleep. But Ernie heard only his own screams – his screams and
the sound of water falling on a bare wooden floor in a dingy room in
Honolulu.

The perspiration even now was rolling off Ernie's forehead. He
hoped his shuddering there in the dark night would not awaken
Laverne. Laverne. Ernie had married her because she was one of the
few women he could remember saying no to him. Maybe, he reflected, it
was because she was one of the few women he had ever bothered to ask.
"Not until you marry me," she had said. Ernie didn't believe her, not
at first, but he soon learned that Laverne was a threshold girl, able
to stop repeatedly just this side of fulfillment. He couldn't stand
it any more and, out of curiosity, agreed to marry her.

She wasn't bad looking then and not much worse now. She had
maintained through two births a pair of breasts that Ernie counted
among the finest in Christendom. She was an Italian-Irish mixture
who had somehow managed to capture the worst characteristics of both
nationalities. She didn't like to drink and she didn't like to stay
up late and she always chastised Ernie when he did either.

The best thing about Laverne had been a father old-fashioned
enough to believe in a dowry, which meant a partnership in a
construction company specializing in swimming pools. And when
suburbanites found they could dig themselves even deeper into debt
with a pool, Ernie and his father-in-law were there to help with the
digging. Ernie was vice president in charge of pools, which had made
him affluent enough to settle in King's Neck rather than Levittown or
Huntington. Ernie had been happy in a Bayside apartment with a
breakfast balcony. But Laverne wanted to become part of a community
– to have roots, as she put it. So Ernie bought a waterfront
lot with a seven-bedroom, split-level ranch. They still had no
roots, but now they had a mortgage that would grow old with them. The
one thing they owned free and clear was the pool.

From the beginning Laverne had never been anything less than a
dutiful wife. And not much more. Ernie realized, of course, that
Honolulu was a tough act to follow. It could be said of Ernie and
Laverne that their marriage started off in low gear and then bogged
down. Ernie's feelings about most of his neighbors were generally
expressed in simple terms. "Pushy goddam Jews" – that was one
of his favorite appraisals. He took great delight in padding his
neighbors' bills when they came to him for a pool on the erroneous
assumption that geographical proximity might save them a few
dollars.

The Civic Association, the Save Our Schools Committee, the
Republican Club, the Young Americans for Freedom – the only
thing that meant a good goddam to Ernie was a party. Last night's
blast was one of the best. Gillian had been standing beside the pool
when he first saw her. She was wearing that low-backed green dress
with high heels to match. He was talking to someone, Melvin Corby it
was, and he'd just said, "Show me the guy who doesn't eat it and I'll
steal his girl," when Gillian walked across his line of vision. Corby
had told him that everyone on King's Neck wanted a slice of that butt
– only those weren't the words Corby had used (pushy goddam
Jew) – Ernie could understand why. Then, later, she had come on
with him at the bar.

It was hard for Ernie to believe he had scored with her so
quickly. She was class. But it all confirmed what he had always
maintained, a broad is a broad.

Ernie fell asleep then. And less than an hour later Laverne woke
up to hear him screaming. He woke up screaming something about ice
cubes, and when she tried to wipe the perspiration from his brow he
begged her not to touch him.

Ernie didn't see Gillian until the following Friday. He was at the
Plaza having a sandwich and Gillian was having a late afternoon
martini. Apparently she was not having her husband because Bill was
sitting at another table talking to several men in business suits.
The Plaza was next to the King's Neck Railroad Station and, unlike
most restaurants near railroad stations, it was reasonably sanguine.
At night there was a darky piano player, and it was known as the
launching pad for those who planned to swap mates for the evening.
This, to Ernie, made excellent sense, but it also made excellent
sense never to broach the subject to Laverne. In the afternoon it was
reasonably quiet and Ernie, a man who always looked out of place in a
white collar, would sometimes stop off between checks on his work
crews. He had been scoring for eight months with one of the
waitresses who had to quit when her husband changed jobs.

"Hello there." Gillian carried her martini to the bar and took the
stool to his left. Her hair was up. Ernie put his notebook away and
took a long look.

"Like another one?" he said.

"Why not?"

Ernie had been debating which stop to make next. Seeing Gillian
again, he knew which one he wanted to make. He excused himself and
telephoned his foreman. He said there would be no need to check the
Freeport job unless there were problems. No sweat, no sweat at all.
He went back to Gillian. She was at the table again. Her husband
hadn't seemed to notice anything. Ernie had once played against a
quarterback who looked like Bill – no chin at all –
Michigan, it was – and he got hit once and that was it for the
afternoon.

"Would you join me in one?" Gillian was asking.

Ernie didn't like martinis. He didn't trust them. Anything that
looks like water and tastes like fire – he knew he couldn't
handle them. But that was the challenge and he nodded assent. He
watched the new waitress as she walked away. Maybe there was
something there, too, he thought as he watched her posterior
stretching the white nylon skirt. Ernie was always working on the
next one, even when he was in the middle of drumming up action. He
had never discovered that man has relatively little to say about
it.

"We just got in from New York," Gillian was saying. "Do you ever
listen to our show? I don't blame you – it's basically for
women anyway."

When the martinis arrived they were on the rocks. Gillian jiggled
the glass and noticed the expression in Ernie's eyes. She jiggled the
glass again and again it happened. It was as though his eyes had
turned to ice. It was the same look she had seen Saturday before he
turned into a raging animal. Gillian had minored in psychology at
Bard, but the psychology she relied on now was something she had been
born with.

"The ice cubes look nice, don't they?" she said. "Nice, just
floating in the glass."

Ernie could feel the dampness on his forehead. He reached for his
glass and took it in a single burning swallow. Better, better now.
Gillian watched the small scene with mounting academic interest, as
though once again she were observing from a concealed vantage point.
She said that it might be wise to go slow on the martinis,
particularly if he were not used to them.

"I'll drink what I fucking please," Ernie snarled at her.

"I was drinking when you were still using candles on
yourself."

Gillian knew then she should get up and leave. She looked over at
her husband's table – the men had all disappeared. She felt
uneasy then, but didn't protest when Ernie ordered the last round of
martinis.

"Do you want to tell me about it?" she said.

"Where's your husband?" Ernie said. "Where's old shithead off to
now?"

"Is there anything you want to tell me, Ernie?"

"Why did you marry a shithead like that?" Ernie said.

"You've got to have a screw loose, marrying a shithead like
that."

"Go ahead," Gillian said.

"Broads," he said. "I've fucked more broads than the sultan of
Baghdad or somewhere. And I've fucked your kind before. You broads
who think your ass is made of gold because you went to college."

Gillian took a drink from the fresh martini. She opened her
compact and studied her lips. She knew it was time to go but, even as
she thought it, she chided herself. Chicken. What can happen now?

"I've had things with broads," Ernie was saying, "things you
wouldn't believe."

"How do you know, Ernie?" Gentle now. "How do you know unless you
tell me?"

"I had a thing with a broad in Honolulu…." He stopped and
looked around. The main room of the Plaza was all but deserted. The
waitress with the nice ass was polishing glasses at the bar, laughing
at something Benny the bartender was saying.

"You were telling me about Honolulu," she said.

"Mind your own fucking business," Ernie said. "You want to know
what they're gonna put on my tombstone. Here lies Ernie Miklos, yes
sir, here lies Ernie Miklos, he got his in Honolulu."

"Tell me about the ice cubes, Ernie," she said.

"Up my ass," he said. "That's right. That little cunt shoved it
right up my ass just as I was blowing my load. She took a chunk of
ice and jammed it there. She took me, all of me, and I came for it
seemed like three days. 1Ithought my teeth were going to be sucked
right through my prick. Oh God…."

Ernie slammed his head down against the table. The bartender and
the waitress stopped the giggling and looked around as Ernie screamed
again, "Oh my sweet God!" His head fell back against the wall and his
eyes were closed tight. Gillian was unprepared for this display and
her purse slipped off her lap onto the floor.

She reached down, and the dregs of her drink spilled down the
front of her gray suit.

"Right up my ass," Ernie said softly. "What do you think of that,
huh, bitch? Right up my ass with the ice cube."

"Are you all right, Ernie?" she said.

"Are you all right, Mr. Miklos?" the bartender called.

"You want someone should take you home?"

"Is he some kind of a nut?" the waitress whispered.

"It's all right, Benny," Gillian called back. "I live near Mr.
Miklos and I'll see him home."

Ernie felt her hand on his arm, felt himself being led toward the
door.

"Yeah," he was saying, "right up my ass."

It was a patio but it wasn't his patio. Next to him there was a
cold Bud and he reached for the can. He could see the Sound through
the trees. He could see the umbrella. He could see Gillian sitting in
the next chaise.

"Drink it," she said, "you'll feel better."

"Why did you let me drink that shit at the Plaza?" he said.

"I didn't know what would happen," she said.

"Well, aren't you the hot shit," he said, drinking the beer. "You
know it all now."

"Yes," she said, "even about the Japanese lieutenant."

"Fuck you," he said.

Ernie threw the empty beer can onto the patio and listened to it
clatter. Gillian moved over toward him and sat on the ground beside
the chaise.

"It might be more comfortable in the bedroom," she said.

"I'm too smashed," he said. "I'm bombed out."

"Not for me," she said. "Not for what's waiting for you." Ernie
felt himself coming apart. He could feel the martinis in his stomach
like hot coals. He followed her through the plate glass doors to the
poolside bedroom. Unglued. He fell onto the bed and managed to reach
up for her. Her hair was still up. Like some goddam Egyptian
princess. Like Liz Taylor in that movie. She wasn't even looking at
him as she reached down and began stroking him. He could feel it
happening again, even this drunk, goddam!