Some Came Running (39 page)

It was Bob French whom he got on the phone in Israel, when he called. His first reaction was one of intense guilt, and an inability to decide what he should call him—Professor, or Mister, or just Bob. Of course, Gwen wouldn’t be there, she’d still be out at school. He hadn’t thought of that.

“Is Gwen there, Mr French?” he asked. He didn’t know whether to try and disguise his voice and lie about his name, or whether he should have just hung up, without speaking.

“No, she isn’t,” Old Bob’s cultured gentle voice came back. “Who is this speaking?”

“This is Dave Hirsh, Mr French,” Dave said. He hoped the guiltiness didn’t sound in his voice.

“Oh, Dave!” Bob French said delightedly. “We’ve been wondering what had happened to you. When are you coming over to Israel? And what’s all this Mister business?”

“Well, nothing, Bob,” Dave said, feeling even worse. “I just— Well, Gwen invited me over, you know. And I thought I might run over a while tonight,” he said. “If that’s all right, of course.”

“Of course, it’s all right,” Bob French said. “You must come for dinner. I’ve been wanting to talk to you myself, too, anyway. Gwen isn’t home yet, so I don’t know what we will be having, but whatever it is you can be sure it will be all right. I’ll tell her you called and that you’re coming. We usually eat at six-thirty or seven. That’s a little early for sophisticated dining, I know, but—”

“I wouldn’t know,” Dave said.

Bob laughed. “Of course not. Or care. Come around six and we will have a drink or two before, eh?”

“Okay,” Dave said, “if you’re sure it’s all right.”

“Of course, of course! See you then.” He hung up.

Dave replaced the receiver in the hook, and went back into the dismal little room with its one old-fashioned window. He couldn’t help wondering if Bob’s signing off hadn’t been a little abrupt, sort of a dismissal, and he chided himself for this feeling, but it didn’t help him much. There was always this feeling of guilt whenever you talked to the father of a girl you planned on making—or already were. It was always work to make yourself look them in the eyes, too. You didn’t feel that way about the girl herself, and you didn’t feel that way with her mother. But you always expected the father to be mad at you. It must be the old Southern Gentleman horsewhipping myth, he decided.

Feeling like a real son of a bitch, Dave pulled the single chair in the room to the window and put his feet up on the sill and sat looking out at the winter afternoon light that was swiftly dwindling. He had to plan his campaign about Gwen. He was on the second floor, and way back here at the back where you could look out behind the building alongside you could see trees. Minus their leaves, except for one or two oaks he could see, they spread their etched black filigree against the gray of the sky, moving with astonishing resilience in the wind that was rising.

If they would just understand that he had to do it, he burst out painfully in his mind. Why he had to do it. And what it meant. His whole self-respect and integrity was at stake. If they just knew that. But that wasn’t it, either. At all. He didn’t want her to just give it to him, to just let him have it to save his integrity. That wouldn’t save it. That would lose it.

There were two things he knew of that he could use on her with powerful effect. One was his writing. Not what he had written, but what he might write. She would give a good bit, he felt, to be able to feel it was she who had got him back to writing. And he still had this idea for this comic combat novel. Which he did not intend to write. But he could let her think he did. He was even willing to actually do some work on it—for a while—if it would help any. And it would give him an excuse to spend a lot more time with her. If she actually felt that she was responsible for him going back to work, it was going to have such a powerful effect on her affections for Dave Hirsh that even she the sexually blasé might have a hard time to keep from falling in love with him.

Because he was going to have to make her fall in love with him. He was convinced of that. Had been all along. Excitement welled up in him. It had been a long time since anybody was in love with him, desperately in love with him. It was a wonderful feeling, to have someone in love with you like that. And she was capable of it, of that kind of love. And after all, it wasn’t as if he were hurting her any.

The other thing was the poem. He had not thought about it in quite a while—not since France in fact, where he had been in the hospital awhile after the Bulge and had used it on one of the Red Cross girls. It was the best of all the poetry he had ever written and had been written in 1939 in Los Angeles. It was called “Hunger” and had been written to Harriet Bowman, during one of his last desperate efforts to seduce her before she married her goddamned lawyer, and it hadn’t worked. But it had worked a lot of times since then. It had never been published because he had wanted to keep it private, and then later, when he discovered how really valuable it was, he decided to keep it instead of publishing it someplace for five dollars and taking a chance that some woman he pretended to write it for later might already have seen it somewhere. Take Gwen French, for instance; if he had ever published it she would certainly have seen it.

It was funny, Dave thought, looking out at the trees, but it seemed that everything he had ever written in his life had been written to impress some damned woman or other.

It had always worked, and he had used it exactly seven times. Probably, he thought, it was the sincerity in it. He didn’t use it oftener because he didn’t want to waste it, like a rifle with a clip in it and there were only so many shots in the magazine.

He couldn’t write a new poem like that about love now, he told himself somberly. He couldn’t do it because he didn’t have the sincerity. You had to be young to have that sincerity about love, he told himself. Wally Dennis could write a poem like that.

Quite suddenly he was frightened again, a deep fright amounting almost to panic, at what he was doing, preparing himself carefully to attempt to seduce a woman whom he was not even interested in, who he was already more than half convinced was far too sophisticated for him, who had slept around so much it would take a much smoother sharpy than himself to interest her. The whole thing was insane. He was insane. If Frank didn’t come through with this taxi service thing now, he wouldn’t even have a job.

He wasn’t sure which way to go about using the poem on her. There were two, and he could not decide which. She was a pretty smart woman. The more powerful and dramatic method was to seem to write the poem right in front of them; get thoughtful, ask for paper and pencil, and—with proper hesitations every now and then for thinking—pretend to create the poem right there. But this called for a certain acting ability, and he was not sure he could bring that off in front of her. He had used this method four of the seven times, and it always created a very powerful effect; but Gwen French was smarter than most of the other women he’d used it on. The other way was to—usually after some evening of heavy lovemaking which ended in frustration—to show up with the poem next day and say he’d written it that night when he got home, had sat up all night writing it; but she was so damned smart—and skeptical—she would probably assume he had had it all along. He could not make up his mind which to do. He copied the poem over three times, and then said it over in his mind until he was sure he had even the punctuation, and the nearer it got to time for him to go the more nervous and upset he got. Outside, it had got completely dark by five o’clock, and he could not see the trees anymore.

All he could see was the tailend of the next building, on his right, on whose second floor the lights were on. It was apparently an upstairs apartment. He ought to unpack. And he hadn’t bathed today. But here the bath was up at the other end of the hall, so instead he turned off his own light and stood by the window, his heart giving a little jump when he thought he might see something sexual. What he saw instead was a woman with a fairly nice figure but stringy hair cooking supper in a stark unornamented room. As he watched, her husband came in and made a kissing motion at the side of her head and sat down at the table and looked at her expectantly. Dave could not help thinking of Thoreau’s great line.

Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.

Yeh. Most men lead lives of desperate crappiness. He turned his light back on.

It was five-thirty and he decided he should call them at Israel again. He did not know why. Something just told him he should, and he went out in the hall. The moment the phone was answered at the other end he wished he hadn’t. It was Gwen who answered this time, and when she said hello with that quiet childlike eagerness that lay just under her voice, he suddenly remembered her. Remembered how she looked and the way her face moved and what she was like inside. It was as if he had forgotten her all this time.

“This is Dave,” he said.

“Yes? What is it. Is something wrong?” Gwen said.

“Oh no,” Dave said lamely. “But I— Well, I— I just wanted to
call
and see if it was all right with you if I came over.” It didn’t sound reasonable, even to him.

“Why, of course, it’s all right!” Gwen said in a surprised voice. “Didn’t Dad tell you it was all right?”

“Yes. He told me. But I wanted to be sure it was all right with you.”

“Of course, it’s all right with me. I invited you to come over, didn’t I?” She paused. “What are you doing? Are you sitting over there stewing yourself into something? If you are, stop it right now.”

“Oh no,” Dave said.

“You writers!”

“I just got through moving from the Parkman, you see,” Dave said, “and I just wanted to call and see if it was still all right with you if I came.”

“You moved from the Parkman? Where are you staying?”

“The Douglas.”

“Oh no! Not that place!”

“And what’s wrong with the Douglas?” Dave demanded.

“Well, it’s shelter,” Gwen French said. “But that’s about all you can say for it.”

“Do you like poetry?” Dave said suddenly.

There was a pause. “Of course. I love poetry.” Another pause. “Though maybe not quite as much as when I was younger. I never seem to have time to— Why?”

“I thought I might bring some of my poetry over to show you,” Dave said, some strange compulsion working in him to tempt fate; give fate a hostage; but the moment he said it, he was sorry.

He was proud: If he could still work the poem on her after giving himself a handicap like this, he would know he was good. But he was also sorry: because he might not be able to.

“I didn’t know you’d written very much poetry,” Gwen said. “I’ve scrounged up a few in old West Coast magazines but not many.”

“I haven’t,” Dave said, casting around for some way to save himself; maybe he could turn it to advantage? “And only a little bit of it was ever published. I just, you know. Every now and then when something hits me I just write it down—or used to—just so I can get rid of it,” he said, and added, “It’s not very good poetry.”

“And you still say you’re not a writer!”

“I’m not.”

“No. I can see clearly that you’re not,” Gwen said. “Well, bring it along, by all means. Dad and I would both like to see it.”

“I’ll see how I feel when I come,” Dave said. “Maybe I’ll bring it and maybe I won’t.”

“I don’t know what’s eating on you,” Gwen said. “But something is.”

“I just remembered your dad was a poet,” Dave said.

“It’s more than that. Now don’t you just sit over there and work yourself into some miserable stew. It’s foolish. And it never does any good. How soon are you coming?”

“In just a little bit.”

“All right,” Gwen said. “I’ll see you—in half an hour? Drive carefully.”

“Do what?” Dave said. “Oh. Oh, I will.”

He hung up and went back in the room and took an old spiral Steno notebook from one of the zippered pockets of the B-4 bag, and stood, riffling through it. It was pretty battered, and only a few pages short of being full. He did not know whether to take it now or not, now that he had mentioned it to her. Finally he decided not to.

He put the notebook back in the pocket and zipped it shut. Here was almost all the poetry he had written in his life. All his other stuff, including copies of all his published work, he had left with Francine in Hollywood. Except the one poem, “Hunger.” He stood looking at the bulging zippered pocket for a moment, and then went and got the typed copy of the love poem off the rickety little table.

Standing in the center of the room, his eyes closed, he said it over to himself one last time and then checked it against the paper. It checked. He folded it back up carefully and tucked it back in the Hemingway Portable between
The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber
and
The Snows of Kilimanjaro
. He put the book back with the others. Then he got his topcoat and turned off the light. Across the way, his friends were through with supper, the dirty dishes on the table where they had left them.

He locked the door behind him and went down into the freshening wind to his car, which he had had to park across the street this afternoon, facing back toward Wernz Avenue. Everything else had been full then.

S
LOWING GRADUALLY,
he drove up the long earthen ramp that approached the new bridge. The towering supports caught the light from the little Plymouth’s headlights, looming high above it into the dark. Down below him on the south side to his right, he could see the miniature lighted windows of the houses in the town.

Behind him was the five miles to Israel from Parkman, which he would come to know so well, running out across the low, sandy river bottom plain flat as the palm of your hand from the hill where Parkman sat to the long-sweeping rise where Israel perched on its bluff above the river. The Route 40 highway ran straight as a string across it, and the big diesels labored roaring over it, belching at the richness of their fuel, sighing disgustedly when they had to brake, a perpetual never-ending shuttle of goods and merchandise. He passed three of them on his way over.