Short Stories: Five Decades (133 page)

“Ah, I’m not so queer,” Crane said, wiping ketchup off his chin. “I don’t behave like this ordinarily. This is the first time I ever flirted with a waitress in my life.”

Steve laughed. “Do you call that flirting?”

“Isn’t it?” Crane looked annoyed. “What the hell is it if it isn’t flirting?” He surveyed Steve appraisingly. “Let me ask you a question,” he said. “Do you screw that girl I always see you with around the campus?”

Steve put down his fork. “Now, wait a minute,” he said.

“I don’t like the way she walks,” Crane said. “She walks like a coquette. I prefer whores.”

“Let’s leave it at that,” Steve said.

“Ah, Christ,” Crane said, “I thought you wanted to be my friend. You did a friendly, sensitive thing this morning. In the California desert, in the Los Angeles Gobi, in the Camargue of Culture. You put out a hand. You offered the cup.”

“I want to be your friend, all right,” Steve said, “but there’re limits …”

“The word friend has no limits,” Crane said harshly. He poured some of his beer over the fried potatoes, already covered with ketchup. He forked a potato, put it in his mouth, chewed judiciously. “I’ve invented a taste thrill,” he said. “Let me tell you something, Dennicott, friendship is limitless communication. Ask me anything and I’ll answer. The more fundamental the matter, the fuller the answer. What’s your idea of friendship? The truth about trivia—and silence and hypocrisy about everything else? God, you could have used a dose of my brother.” He poured some more beer over the gobs of ketchup on the fried potatoes. “You want to know why I can say Keats and name my brother in the same breath?” he asked challengingly, hunched over the table. “I’ll tell you why. Because he had a sense of elation and a sense of purity.” Crane squinted thoughtfully at Steve. “You, too,” he said, “that’s why I said you would be the one to ask, out of the whole class. You have it, too—the sense of elation. I could tell—listening to you laugh, watching you walk down the library steps holding your girl’s elbow. I, too,” he said gravely, “am capable of elation. But I reserve it for other things.” He made a mysterious inward grimace. “But the purity—” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe you don’t know yourself. The jury is still out on you. But I knew about my brother. You want to know what I mean by purity?” He was talking compulsively. Silence would have made memory unbearable. “It’s having a private set of standards and never compromising them,” he said. “Even when it hurts, even when nobody else knows, even when it’s just a tiny, formal gesture, that ninety-nine out of a hundred people would make without thinking about it.”

Crane cocked his head and listened with pleasure to the chorus of
Downtown
, and he had to speak loudly to be heard over the jukebox. “You know why my brother wasn’t elected captain of the football team? He was all set for it, he was the logical choice, everybody expected it. I’ll tell you why he wasn’t, though. He wouldn’t shake the hand of last year’s captain, at the end of the season, and last year’s captain had a lot of votes he could influence any way he wanted. And do you know why my brother wouldn’t shake his hand? Because he thought the man was a coward. He saw him tackle high when a low tackle would’ve been punishing, and he saw him not go all the way on blocks when they looked too rough. Maybe nobody else saw what my brother saw or maybe they gave the man the benefit of the doubt. Not my brother. So he didn’t shake his hand, because he didn’t shake cowards’ hands, see, and somebody else was elected captain. That’s what I mean by purity,” Crane said, sipping at his beer and looking out at the deserted beach and the ocean. For the first time, it occurred to Steve that it was perhaps just as well that he had never known Crane’s brother, never been measured against that Cromwellian certitude of conduct.

“As for girls,” Crane said. “The homeland of compromise, the womb of the second best—” Crane shook his head emphatically. “Not for my brother. Do you know what he did with his first girl? And he thought he was in love with her, too, at the time, but it still didn’t make any difference. They only made love in the dark. The girl insisted. That’s the way some girls are, you know, darkness excuses all. Well, my brother was crazy about her, and he didn’t mind the darkness if it pleased her. But one night he saw her sitting up in bed and the curtains on the window moved in the wind and her silhouette was outlined against the moonlight, and he saw that when she sat like that she had a fat, loose belly. The silhouette, my brother said, was slack and self-indulgent. Of course, when she was lying down it sank in, and when she was dressed she wore a girdle that would’ve tucked in a beer barrel. And when he saw her silhouette against the curtain, he said to himself, This is the last time, this is not for me. Because it wasn’t perfect, and he wouldn’t settle for less. Love or no love, desire or not. He, himself, had a body like Michelangelo’s David and he knew it and he was proud of it and he kept it that way, why should he settle for imperfection? Are you laughing, Dennicott?”

“Well,” Steve said, trying to control his mouth, “the truth is, I’m smiling a little.” He was amused, but he couldn’t help thinking that it was possible that Crane had loved his brother for all the wrong reasons. And he couldn’t help feeling sorry for the unknown girl, deserted, without knowing it, in the dark room, by the implacable athlete who had just made love to her.

“Don’t you think I ought to talk about my brother this way?” Crane said.

“Of course,” Steve said. “If I were dead, I hope my brother could talk like this about me the day after the funeral.”

“It’s just those goddamned speeches everybody makes,” Crane whispered. “If you’re not careful, they can take the whole idea of your brother away from you.”

He wiped his glasses. His hands were shaking. “My goddamned hands,” he said. He put his glasses back on his head and pressed his hands hard on the table, so they wouldn’t shake.

“How about you, Dennicott?” Crane said. “Have you ever done anything in your whole life that was unprofitable, damaging, maybe even ruinous, because it was the pure thing to do, the uncompromising thing, because if you acted otherwise, for the rest of your life you would remember it and feel shame?”

Steve hesitated. He did not have the habit of self-examination and had the feeling that it was vanity that made people speak about their virtues. And their faults. But there was Crane, waiting, himself open, naked. “Well, yes …” Steve said.

“What?”

“Well, it was never anything very grandiose …” Steve said, embarrassed, but feeling that Crane needed it, that in some way this exchange of intimacies helped relieve the boy’s burden of sorrow. And he was intrigued by Crane, by the violence of his views, by the almost comic flood of his reminiscence about his brother, by the importance that Crane assigned to the slightest gesture, by his searching for meaning in trivialities, which gave the dignity of examination to every breath of life. “There was the time on the beach at Santa Monica,” Steve said, “I got myself beaten up and I knew I was going to be beaten up …”

“That’s good,” Crane nodded approvingly. “That’s always a good beginning.”

“Oh, hell,” Steve said, “it’s too picayune.”

“Nothing is picayune,” said Crane. “Come on.”

“Well, there was a huge guy there who always hung around and made a pest of himself,” Steve said. “A physical-culture idiot, with muscles like basketballs. I made fun of him in front of some girls and he said I’d insulted him, and I had, and he said if I didn’t apologize, I would have to fight him. And I was wrong, I’d been snotty and superior, and I realized it, and I knew that if I apologized, he’d be disappointed and the girls’d still be laughing at him—so I said I wouldn’t apologize and I fought him there on the beach and he must have knocked me down a dozen times and he nearly killed me.”

“Right.” Crane nodded again, delivering a favorable judgment. “Excellent.”

“Then there was this girl I wanted …” Steve stopped.

“Well?” Crane said.

“Nothing,” Steve said. “I haven’t figured it out yet.” Until now he had thought that the episode with the girl reflected honorably on him. He had behaved, as his mother would have put it, in a gentlemanly manner. He wasn’t sure now that Crane and his mother would see eye to eye. Crane confused him. “Some other time,” he said.

“You promise?” Crane said.

“I promise.”

“You won’t disappoint me, now?”

“No.”

“OK.” Crane said. “Let’s get out of here.”

They split the check.

“Come back again sometime, boys,” the blond waitress said. “I’ll play that record for you.” She laughed, her breasts shaking. She had liked having them there. One of them was very good-looking, and the other one, the queer one with the glasses, she had decided, after thinking about it, was a great joker. It helped pass the long afternoon.

On the way home, Crane no longer drove like a nervous old maid on her third driving lesson. He drove very fast, with one hand, humming
Downtown
, as though he didn’t care whether he lived or died.

Then, abruptly, Crane stopped humming and began to drive carefully, timidly, again. “Dennicott,” he said, “what are you going to do with your life?”

“Who knows?” Steve said, taken aback by the way Crane’s conversation jumped from one enormous question to another. “Go to sea, maybe, build electronic equipment, teach, marry a rich wife …”

“What’s that about electronics?” Crane asked.

“My father’s factory,” Steve said. “The ancestral business. No sophisticated missile is complete without a Dennicott supersecret what-do-you-call-it.”

“Nah,” Crane said, shaking his head, “you won’t do that. And you won’t teach school, either. You don’t have the soul of a didact. I have the feeling something adventurous is going to happen to you.”

“Do you?” Steve said. “Thanks. What’re you going to do with
your
life?”

“I have it all planned out,” Crane said, “I’m going to join the forestry service. I’m going to live in a hut on the top of a mountain and watch out for fires and fight to preserve the wilderness of America.”

That’s a hell of an ambition, Steve thought, but he didn’t say it. “You’re going to be awfully lonesome,” he said.

“Good,” Crane said. “I expect to get a lot of reading done. I’m not so enthusiastic about my fellow man, anyway, I prefer trees.”

“What about women?” Steve asked. “A wife?”

“What sort of woman would choose me?” Crane said harshly. “I look like something left over after a New Year’s party on skid row. And I would only take the best, the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most loving. I’m not going to settle for some poor, drab Saturday-night castaway.”

“Well, now,” Steve said, “you’re not so awful.” Although, it was true, you’d be shocked if you saw Crane out with a pretty girl.

“Don’t lie to your friends,” Crane said. He began to drive recklessly again, as some new wave of feeling, some new conception of himself, took hold of him. Steve sat tight on his side of the car, holding onto the door, wondering if a whole generation of Cranes was going to meet death on the roads of California within a week.

They drove in silence until they reached the university library. Crane stopped the car and slouched back from the wheel as Steve got out. Steve saw Adele on the library steps, surrounded by three young men, none of whom he knew. Adele saw him as he got out of the car and started coming over to him. Even at that distance, Steve could tell she was angry. He wanted to get rid of Crane before Adele reached him. “Well, so long,” Steve said, watching Adele approach. Her walk
was
distasteful, self-conscious, teasing.

Crane sat there, playing with the keys to the ignition, like a man who is always uncertain that the last important word has been said when the time has come to make an exit.

“Dennicott,” he began, then stopped, because Adele was standing there, confronting Steve, her face set. She didn’t look at Crane.

“Thanks,” she said to Steve. “Thanks for the lunch.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Steve said. “I had to go someplace.”

“I’m not in the habit of being stood up,” Adele said.

“I’ll explain later,” Steve said, wanting her to get out of there, away from him, away from Crane, watching soberly from behind the wheel.

“You don’t have to explain anything,” Adele said. She walked away. Steve gave her the benefit of the doubt. Probably she didn’t know who Crane was and that it was Crane’s brother who had been killed Saturday night. Still …

“I’m sorry I made you miss your date,” Crane said.

“Forget it,” Steve said. “She’ll get over it.”

For a moment he saw Crane looking after Adele, his face cold, severe, judging. Then Crane shrugged, dismissed the girl.

“Thanks, Dennicott,” Crane said. “Thanks for coming to the tree. You did a good thing this afternoon. You did a friendly thing. You don’t know how much you helped me. I have no friends. My brother was the only friend. If you hadn’t come with me and let me talk, I don’t know how I could’ve lived through today. Forgive me if I talked too much.”

“You didn’t talk too much,” Steve said.

“Will I see you again?” Crane asked.

“Sure,” said Steve. “We have to go back to that restaurant to listen to
Downtown
real soon.”

Crane sat up straight, suddenly, smiling shyly, looking pleased, like a child who has just been given a present. If it had been possible, Steve would have put his arms around Crane and embraced him. And with all Crane’s anguish and all the loneliness that he knew so clearly was waiting for him, Steve envied him. Crane had the capacity for sorrow and now, after the day Steve had spent with the bereaved boy, he understood that the capacity for sorrow was also the capacity for living.

“
Downtown
,” Crane said. He started the motor and drove off, waving gaily, to go toward his parents’ house, where his mother and father were waiting, with the guilty look in their eyes, because they felt that if one of the sons had to die, they would have preferred it to be him.

Steve saw Adele coming back toward him from the library steps. He could see that her anger had cooled and that she probably would apologize for her outburst. Seeing Adele suddenly with Crane’s eyes, he made a move to turn away. He didn’t want to talk to her. He had to think about her. He had to think about everything. Then he remembered the twinge of pity he had felt when he had heard about the fat girl erased from her lover’s life by the movement of a curtain on a moonlit night. He turned back and smiled in greeting as Adele came up to him. Crane had taught him a good deal that afternoon, but perhaps not the things Crane had thought he was teaching.