Some Came Running (22 page)

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Gwen said, her eyes flashing. She turned to stare at him.

“I guess you’re right,” Dave said, startled. In love with a dead war hero, he thought bitterly. He would like to have said it.

“You seemed to have learned quite a bit about me,” Gwen said.

“We talked about you,” he said. “That was all. There was nothing disrespectful. Wally thinks the sun rises and sets on you.”

“He’s a dear boy,” Gwen said. “I think a lot of him. He’s liable to turn into a very fine writer someday.” It was as if this was the highest compliment she could pay.

They were pulling up the hill to the square. There was a very real warmth in her, as she spoke about Wally Dennis, and Dave could not help feeling a pang of childish jealousy.

“You know,” she went on, “I’ve really enjoyed talking to you tonight. There aren’t very many adult people around here whom one can talk writing with. If you ever feel like coming over to see us in Israel and spend a few days before you leave, you have a carte blanche invitation.”

Dave’s heart bounced once. Here was the opportunity. “If I do, will you sleep with me?” he said casually.

“Certainly not,” Gwen French said.

“Why not?”

“Why, I hardly know you.”

“Then there’s not much point in my coming, is there?”

“No. Not if that’s what you’re coming for.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“What’s wrong with you! Why, nothing.” Then she laughed, the first time he had ever actually heard her laugh, a trilling little nervous laugh, quite suddenly come and gone, then a silence. “It would take me a lot more time than I have to spare right now to tell you.”

“I mean, as far as sleeping with me. That makes me unattractive.”

“Nothing.”

“I mean, you’d sleep with Casper Milquetoast, and all these guys in New York you’re telling me about, what’s wrong with me?”

Gwen turned the corner off of North Main Street onto the one way square in front of the corner drugstore and a line of business houses. “By the way, where do you want me to let you off?”

“Right here is good enough,” Dave said. He should never have asked her. He felt like a fool. She slanted the coupe into one of the diagonal parking spaces in the thickening snow, and he stared out at the drugstore’s lighted display window. Gwen French leaned forward and switched off the lights and the motor, then leaned back and turned to face him.

“I realize it may sound strange to you, and I have no idea what kind of women you’ve been used to,” she said, “but I can’t sleep with a man without getting personally involved with him. I’m just made that way. And right now, I don’t want to get personally involved with a man.”

“You’re still in love with the dead war hero?” Dave said, still looking out.

“For your information, I was never in love with him. He was just convenient. And also, I never slept with him.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“I don’t care whether you believe it or not,” she said. “And as for you. If I were going to get involved with a man right now, I certainly wouldn’t pick you. In the first place, you’re not in love with me; you’re still in love with that girl in California. And probably always will be. You’re a cripple. And in the second place, you’re only going to be here for a week; I heard you tell Frank. If I wanted a love affair now, which I don’t, you’re just about the worst bet I could pick.” She smiled at him.

“What if I should stay around longer?” Dave said, still looking out. Why should it have become so important to him? Hell, he hardly knew her. And she was obviously a jerk anyway. And now he was beginning to plead with her! That was the one thing he would
not
let himself do.

“No.” She shook her head. “It wouldn’t make any difference. Anyway, in the end, it would be the same: You would leave. Why, you’ve only known me three or four hours!”

“You may have missed something very valuable,” he said arrogantly. “Even if it only did last awhile.”

“I doubt it. I doubt if there’s anything you could teach me I haven’t already experienced. After all, there are only so many ways to have sex and so many feelings you can have about it,” she said. “And once you’ve had them all, anything else is repetitious.”

“Maybe you should be teaching me,” Dave said sourly.

“Excuse me,” she said; “you’re wrong. Any teaching I do I get paid for by the college, and at the present time, they do not have any courses in sex. Someday they may have.”

“You’re a very unusual woman, you know it?” Dave said.

“Not so unusual as you might think. Not nearly so. Oh, Dave!” she cried. (He enjoyed hearing her use his name like that, valued it immensely,) “You’re in love with love. I understand you so well. I’m the last one you should pick. Besides, I have my own problems,” she said darkly.

“Look,” she said more calmly. “In the first place, I couldn’t trust you; you’re an artist, a writer; whether you believe it or not, you are; and always will be; you might have the best intentions in the world, but the moment some little thing upset you you’d take off for God knows where. And in the second place, you don’t want to love; you want to be loved; you go around making all these women fall in love with you; you suffer if they don’t; and the moment they do, you get frantic and leave them, and what? immediately begin looking for another.”

“That might not be such a bad life,” Dave said, “if it were only true.”

“If it isn’t, it’s only because up to now all the women you’ve met have been smarter than you are.”

Dave opened the door of the coupe. “Well anyway, it would make me a great epitaph,” he said. “True or not.” He got out. “Like Stendhal’s.”

Gwen leaned over in the seat.

“You’re not angry, are you?” she said anxiously. “Don’t be angry at me?”

“No. I’m not angry.”

“The invitation still holds?” she said, “if you want to take it?”

“Maybe I will,” Dave said. “I wanted to talk to your father, anyway.”

She straightened up. “Come anytime,” she said. “Call first.” She started the motor. Dave stepped back up on the sidewalk, and stood in the shoe-deep snow, and watched her drive off.

It was ten o’clock by the old courthouse clock with its Roman numerals. The drugstore was already closed. Almost everything was closed. Everything except the three bars and the two poolrooms. There was only one other set of tracks in the snow, he noticed. Then the anger began to hit him.

Standing there, he was satisfied that she could be had. He was sure of that. It was, therefore, just a question of time. It might take six months, it might take a year. Long enough to convince her that you loved her exclusively. But it could be done.

That lover hunger that was in her eyes—hidden, she thought?—had showed up again in that last remark she made, was he angry? Why the hell should she care if he was angry? That in itself proved she was insecure, he thought coldly. Insecure meant ripe.

All right so what if it took him six months, or a whole year. A kind of wild, indignant enthusiasm swept through him. He could go into that taxi business with Frank. It would cost him the fifty-five hundred dollars, but who cared? A man ought to be willing to pay that much to make a woman he really wanted to make. The hell with the money. Come easy go easy. It would be worth it. It would be more than worth it, it would be something to be proud of.

The melting drizzle that had slacked off earlier in the day had fled on to the eastward, and it had begun to really snow, just about the time they sat down to dinner. It was a real snow, the first one of the winter.

Walking along in it, he put out feelers of sensation to taste the excitement of it. Large clusters of flakes caught in his lashes and licked wetly at his unprotected face under the overseas cap. He was reminded of Europe, how it had snowed like this in Belgium during the Bulge, how it had snowed this way all on through the forests. And the dead bodies lying half covered in it. Fresh blood was electrifying when spattered in snow, but afterwards it turned brown. Oh, it was a shame, a shame.

Did you know it was a shame, Gwen French? Or would you, Gwen French, be scientific about it? Gwen French. Gwen French Gwen French! You and your writers.

He had had an idea for a combat novel once, he remembered all at once. In France. He had not thought about it for a long time. His combat novel was to be a comedy. The writers after the last war had all written and written about the horrible horrors of war until it had become a literary tradition. But nobody had ever thought of writing a comic combat novel. And really, if you could divorce yourself from imagining it was you, there was nothing funnier in the world than the way a man who’s been shot tumbles loosely and falls down. Unless it’s watching someone slip on a banana peel and fall and break their arm. Besides, he knew why the old ones had written like they did. They pretended that horror stuff. It was not because they especially hated war. And it was not particularly because of fear, either, everybody was afraid when he was being shot at. The comical thing was how unafraid it made you to do the shooting. No, they had written like they did because their egos could not support this hated indignity of personal death, any kind of death, which they feared they might have to suffer. That, and also because they were starved for sympathy. He knew, because he had felt that way himself. But your typical Infantryman’s vanity took quite another form. He had got a glimpse of that, too, when he killed his first three Germans and felt so pleased and powerful and Godlike. Once you’d killed a couple, war wasn’t nearly so horrible. He wanted to write a delighted comical novel about killing and combat and bust up their old monopoly on war and at the same time force the human race for once to take an unsugarcoated look at itself for a change. He would enjoy that more than anything else in the world. They would recoil in such shock and horror at themselves that never again would the name of D Hirsh be mentioned in polite society.

Except that he wasn’t going to write it. Why should he?

He walked along looking in the store windows, the big snow playing upon him as if it were a musician, drawing from him not one or two successive emotions, but whole chords of them.

Wally, if you and I love the world too much, remember, it’s not the world’s fault; it’s our own. Why the hell should he write it? He was going to make this woman, if it took him every last dime he had, and then he was going out to the West Coast and live it up a little. The world didn’t ask us to love it that way, Wally, did it?

He passed one of the old-fashioned cast-iron water fountains, its basin filled with snow, and he loved it. The windshields of the late parked cars were plastered with it, too, and he loved them, too, and he loved the people who owned them.

He was not tight anymore, and the skin of his face felt drawn around the eyes from the liquor. Like your fingers when they’ve been left too long in water.

The courthouse and its square of yard were completely dark save for the four faces of the clock in the tower and the public toilet night-lights at the basement entrance under the stairs, and across the square he could make out the dark figure of the night cop making his rounds.

Gwen French. We will see, Gwen French, we’ll see.

The awareness of his physical unattractiveness, which he never thought about unless he had been drinking, flooded over him like the curling waters of an upriver cloudburst creeping over a delta swamp. He did not itemize them.

It was really all only sex. Everything. The game and the profession of the universe. Money was made, and music written, books were written, statues, poems, governments fell. All for sex. Love me, love my horse. Here, Trigger.

He stopped before the Athletic Club poolroom and looked inside. It was a huge place that he remembered had once been a bank, the Prairie Farmers & Growers Bank & Trust Company, but had gone under in the Depression. The light from the windows cast yellowish pools on the white mat at his feet where only two other sets of footprints showed. Inside, a bunch of men holding cues stood around one of the tables near the back. He could recognize the tall ’Bama in his hat. One of them said something, and they all laughed heartily. They had evidently been there a long time, playing. Since before the snow, by the footprints. He went inside. It had been a long walk.

I
N THE POOLROOM,
two old men with tobacco-stained whiskers sat on the mahogany-stained benches against the wall, reading the papers. The owner—or manager, whichever he was—stood behind the glass cigar counter turning the pages of a motor sports magazine. All three looked up when Dave came in. Dave took off his greatcoat, suddenly self-conscious about his ribbons that he’d worn to impress Frank and Agnes, and hung it on one of the coatracks and went directly to the telephone on the counter to do it now. He might forget it later. Besides now that he had made up his mind, he wanted to be committed. He dialed Frank’s number and cupped his hand around the mouthpiece so the man behind the counter could not hear him. It was several long moments before there was an answer.

“Frank?”

“’Lo?” His brother’s voice sounded thick.

“This is Dave.”

“Dave?” Frank murmured.

“Yeah. I’m downtown. Listen, I’ve been thinking about that deal, you know? And I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided to take you up on it.”

“Tha’ good,” Frank mumbled. “Tha’ fine, Dave. But I knew all ’long you’d take it. A’ you needed was a chance to think it over’n see wha’ a good deal i’ was.”

“Fifty-five hundred, that right? That was what we said.”

“Tha’ right,” Frank mumbled.

“And course I suppose the job has to go with it,” Dave said. “Okay. I’ll stop by the store and see you tomorrow about the details.”

“Tha’ right,” Frank mumbled. “Job go wi’ i’.”

“Say, are you drunk?”

“No,” Frank mumbled. “Lor’, no. A’ this time o’ night? You jus’ woke me up, tha’s all.”

“Okay,” Dave said. “I’ll see you tomorrow then.”

He hung up and turned toward the single pool game at the back, feeling satisfied. He walked on back to the table, threading his way amongst the empty darkened ones. He did not know any of them except ’Bama. And while he used to be a good pool shooter in his youth, he knew he was not in their class. He suddenly felt embarrassed, and felt his face set itself in that stiff look of elaborate expressionlessness.