Some Came Running (44 page)

Gwen sat looking at him, waiting for an answer.

“You’re making me mad,” Dave said, trying a diversion.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen said, “but it can’t be helped. You’ve got to face yourself. All this feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help you one bit. The raw, cold truth is you just barely got started, you just served your apprenticeship with those two books, and then quit, just as you were getting ready to get in on the gravy. Now isn’t that so?” she demanded.

Dave just looked at her.

“Sugar and cream?” she said, pouring into his cup.

“No sugar, just cream,” he said.

“Here,” she said, and handed him his cup.

Dave took it and set it down on the coffee table, misjudging the distance and sloshing a little over the saucer, in his irascible haste.

“All right, goddam it,” he said, “I
have
got an
idea
for a novel. It’s—”

“I thought as much,” Gwen smiled smugly.

“Yes! It’s a comic combat novel,” he blurted. “You know what that is? And you won’t believe me anyway. So the hell with it!”

“A what?” Gwen said.

“A comic combat novel,” he said. Then he saw he wasn’t getting across, by the look of disappointment on her face. “No, no,” he said. “A war novel. A war novel in which
death
is comic, and
mutilation,
and
war itself
are comic; instead of horrible.”

Gwen’s face began to look delighted as she got his point. “Oh, I thought you meant another
humorous
war novel,” she said, “like the correspondents write.” Then she laughed. “Oh, that’s wonderful! That’s marvelous! And we need it so badly. After all these two-bit horror catalogs. They’re all so smug and self-righteous, these war writers, when they say so solemnly how they hate war. And all the time they can hardly wait till another one starts somewhere, so they can all go there in a body to ‘hate’ it.” She caught herself up short. “How long have you been working on it?” she demanded.

“I haven’t worked on it any,” Dave said, his voice coming back down into what had apparently become his normal state anymore, sullenness. Sullenly, he reached out for his coffee and poured the sloshings from the saucer back into the cup.

“You ought to be ashamed!” Gwen said. “Why haven’t you?”

“Because I haven’t had time!” he said. “I only got out of the Army a week ago! What do you think I came over here for?” he said sullenly. “You’re a critic, ain’t you? I want you to help me.”

Gwen didn’t answer at once, and rubbed her cheek thoughtfully with her fingertips. “I suppose I could do correspondence work with you,” she said. “You could mail me the chapters. I don’t like correspondence work. But I could do it.”

“But, you see,” Dave said, “I’m not leaving Parkman.”

“You’re not?” Gwen said looking at him with astonishment. “But you said you were! So that’s why you moved to the Douglas Hotel!!”

“I decided to stay,” Dave said. “I put my five thousand dollars in that taxi service with Frank and I’m staying. I go to work for him as dispatcher as soon as we get the thing operating.”

Gwen was looking at him disbelievingly. “Oh, not in that deal!”

“Sure.”

“But why!”

“Goddam it, because I’m falling in love with you!” Dave cried angrily, and set his cup down again, spilling some more. He didn’t really believe it, when he said it; but at the same time the wrought up, actor’s half of him felt it was true, and that made it convincing. And, after he said it, suddenly he did believe it.

Gwen did not say anything but merely looked at him as if he had spoken in Persian or Arabic. Then the expression of her eyes seemed to withdraw inward, leaving them veiled and blank.

“Oh, you fool!” she said. “You real fool! You
must
be a writer, you’re such a fool!”

“I’m sorry I spilled the coffee,” Dave said sullenly. “Where’s a rag? I’ll wipe it up before it drips on your Indian rug.”

“I’ll do it,” Gwen said, and was suddenly up and walking to the sink where she snatched up the dishrag and came back and began sopping the coffee up off the coffee table.

“You’ve never been in love with anybody in your life except yourself,” she said. “How would you know whether you were falling in love, or not? You ‘fall in love’ with whatever female happens to be nearest at any given time. Don’t talk to me about love!”

Dave didn’t say anything. He only wished he was gone, back in the miserably peaceful loneliness of that damned barren little squeegy hotel room.

“You really like Daddy, don’t you?” Gwen said without looking up.

“Yeah,” he said. “Sure.”

“And you have a friendly warm relationship with him. Already. Why the
hell,”
she said, straightening up, her eyes blazing, “can’t you have that kind of a relationship with a woman, too?” Holding the sopping rag so it would not drip, she carried it down to the sink and dumped it, and then turned around to face him.

Dave had stayed silent.

“I told you what I would do, Dave,” she said, “And that’s what I will do; and all I will do. I’ll be glad to help you with this book, and criticize it for you, if you want. Not so much because I’ll be of any help to you—in that way; but because if you don’t have somebody around to keep pushing your nose to the grindstone you’d never do any work. The only way you’d ever do any work on your own would be if they put you in jail where you couldn’t chase women and get drunk and were so bored you’d have to work. Or else if you got old like Stendhal and got stuck off in some boring out-of-the-way place,” she said, pausing for breath. Despite the reasonableness of her tone, there was a sort of strange tautness on her rawboned face.

“That’s not fair,” he muttered. “I need a drink. Do you mind if I have a drink?”

“Help yourself,” she said. “And the reason I’ll do it,” she said as he went to the countertop bar, “is because I’d like to see that book get written. It’s a book that ought to be written. We need it. And besides it’s a brilliant idea. But if I have to sleep with you to get you to write it,” she said, “you’d better get some other woman to help you with it.”

Dave downed the stiff drink he had mixed, straight from the mixer, and began to mix another.

“You have to drive home yet, you know,” Gwen said.

“What’s wrong with me?” he said, without looking up.

“What’s what?” Gwen said. “
Wrong
with you.”

“Sure. What’s so different from me than other men? What’s so wrong with me that ain’t wrong with them?”

“Nothing,” Gwen said. “Nothing at all. I told you before; it’s just that I’m not interested in sex.”

Dave swung around to look at her, holding the mixer in one hand the bar spoon in the other, his face contorted. He drank from the mixer. For a moment, he felt he could not stand it, actually physically could not stand it, the thought of refusal. As if he would have to smash the glass mixer and slash his wrists, or something equally wild and stupid, just to get back in the lead again. This was the way it always went with him. “But you slept with all those other guys?” he said.

“That was a long time ago,” Gwen said, the strange tautness of her face growing even stronger. “And besides, there wasn’t an
entire
regiment of them. And I wasn’t as smart then as I am now. “I thought I could still find an answer there. In sex, and in love. But what do you have when you have it? Two people, fighting each other in bed and out, each trying to dominate the other in order to make him love him the most, each trying to hurt the other because if he hurts him and he
still
comes back, he knows he is
really
loved. Is that the purpose of life? To procreate more of us just like us? We are taught that it is,” she said. “You’re thirty-seven years old, Dave, you ought to have learned all that yourself by now. You talk like Wally Dennis. Wally’s only twenty.”

“You hate to hurt me,” Dave said. “Well, thank you for all the advice about life. Women always give me advice about life. Look,” he burst out, “they weren’t
all
handsome, were they?”

“What?” Gwen said.

“At least
one
of them was just ordinary looking maybe, wasn’t he? maybe even ugly?” He drained off what was in the mixer and set it down hard on the countertop. “Well, it’s not as if it was something that never happened before,” he said. “I mean, it’s not as though it’s something that had never happened to me. It’s just that sometimes you’re inclined to forget about it, almost, for a while,” he said, looking at her.

“Oh, Dave,” Gwen said, shaking her head. “Dave, Dave.”

“Oh, I don’t mind,” he said, grinning. “Not really.”

“Dave—” Gwen started.

“But I do want to tell you something,” he said. The two stiff drinks were beginning to hit him, and would be he knew hitting him more later. Sort of instinctively, at the thought of “drink,” he turned around to start mixing himself another; but then he turned back instead and leaned against the countertop and folded his arms. “You know why I decided to stay in Parkman? You know why I put all my money into this damned taxi-stand deal with Frank? I don’t give a damn about the taxi stand. I did it on account of you.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said, nodding. “You.

“You told me in the car that night that I wouldn’t stay, that I’d run away if I did stay. I wanted to show you. That’s why I put all my money in the taxi stand. That’s why I decided to stay.”

He turned around again toward the mixer, but quite suddenly, he discovered there were tears in his eyes and he turned back to her again, and again leaned against the countertop and folded his arms.

“I wrote a poem to you tonight,” he said. “Yeah. I have flashes of insight, too. I wrote it after I talked to you on the phone, before I came over here. I was going to bring it, with the others, but then I didn’t. But that doesn’t matter. I remember it. You want to hear it?”

“Yes,” Gwen said, but meaning no.

“I call it ‘Hunger,’” Dave said, looking at her through the tears in his eyes, the unbidden astonishing, almost completely unfelt, tears. “This is the way it goes.”

Once a young man, wandering beneath the bleary

Street lamps of a town that is all towns,

Stopped at the door of a young unmarried woman.

“I am hungry,” the young man said.

“For what do you hunger?” the woman smiled.

“I do not know,” he said.

“Come,” she smiled, “and 1 will feed you.”

And she took him to her bed where she poured ashes upon his head

And laughed at his surprise.

“Ashes are good for you,” she said;

“They are full of minerals.”

There was a second’s pause, the amount of time it takes to get the punch line of a joke, and this made it seem both as if she were still waiting, and as if he were still going to go on. Then he didn’t, and Gwen stood looking at him, those extraordinarily intelligent eyes of hers wide and receptive and still listening, if eyes could be said to listen, and then suddenly her face broke into humor and she laughed a hearty spontaneous peal of laughter that was suddenly cut off in the middle before it reached climax, leaving a startling silence.

Dave looked back at her, feeling the equally startling, emotionally unfounded tears in his eyes just as unexpectedly overflow his eyelids and trickle down his cheeks. They felt surprisingly cool on his skin, and he hadn’t the slightest idea where they were coming from.

“Yeah. It’s comical as hell, ain’t it?” he grinned, his voice cracking at the end. He turned back around to the countertop and picked up the gin bottle, and discovered just as suddenly that he was no longer weeping.

“I didn’t mean to laugh,” Gwen said from behind him.

“No, I wasn’t bein sarcastic. I meant it,” he said earnestly, his voice breaking again although he was no longer crying. “I think it’s comical as hell.” He turned around holding the gin bottle and mixer and began to laugh uncontrollably, as if to prove it.

He didn’t know what was getting into him, he thought, listening to himself laugh. It wasn’t that funny. It must be the drinks.

“Stop laughing like that,” Gwen demanded.

“I can’t,” he said. But he gulped air several times and got himself stopped. But his diaphragm continued to heave with laughter inside, up against his lungs.

“It’s very good,” Gwen said, looking off and thinking. “I like it. Women are a lot like that, too. Take your vitamins, George. You’re drinking too much, Henry. Eat your potatoes, John, they’re good for you.”

“They’re full of minerals,” Dave said, allowing his diaphragm one extra snort. He turned back around and went on mixing the drink.

“And all the men really want is to sleep with them,” Gwen said. “And make them admit that they really like it,” she added, “which, of course, they mustn’t do. But where would the men be if the women didn’t act like they do? Besides, the men really want them to be that way. You really oughtn’t to drink that much,” she said, “since you still have to drive home.”

“I’m all right,” Dave said thickly.

“The men really have it tough, too, don’t they?” Gwen said wonderingly, as if this were the very first time she had ever considered such an idea. “As bad as the women,” she said softly.

Dave started to turn around and take her in his arms. It was a purely spontaneous gesture, and without what they used to call ulterior motives. A purely instinctive muscular hunger to give and receive comfort, that was all. Actually, all he did was to lay down the bar spoon in preparation for turning. That was as far as he got.

“No,” Gwen said. Just that. “No.” She had either read his mind or the bar spoon. And he knew without seeing that her eyes had gone veiled and blank again. She turned and walked away down to the other end and leaned against the mantle above the fireplace.

“You must have had a very insecure childhood,” she said, looking into the fire. “I bet your mother never loved you at all. Some mothers don’t. In fact, most mothers don’t, really. Although they put on the big act in public. I guess the trouble is all in that they feel they’re not appreciated enough. I guess that’s the trouble with the whole world. I bet even Communists think they’re not appreciated enough.”