The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (17 page)

She snatched the brassiere from him and backed against the door-jamb, her eyes raking him up and down. “Now,
look,
” she said. “I've had
enough
of this. Are you gonna start acting decent, or not? Are we going to the movies, or not?”

And suddenly she looked so pathetic that he couldn't stand it. He grabbed his coat and pushed past her. “Do whatcha like,” he said. “I'm goin' out.” And he slammed out of the apartment.

It wasn't until he swung onto Queens Boulevard that his muscles began to relax and his breathing to slow down. He didn't stop at the Island Bar and Grill—it was too early for the fights anyway, and he was too upset to enjoy them. Instead, he clattered down the stairs to the subway and whipped through the turnstile, headed for Manhattan.

He had set a vague course for Times Square, but thirst overcame him at Third Avenue; he went up to the street and had two shots with a beer chaser in the first bar he came to, a bleak place with stamped-tin walls and a urine smell. On his right, at the bar, an old woman was waving her cigarette like a baton and singing “Peg o' My Heart,” and on his left one middle-aged man was saying to another, “Well, my point of view is this: maybe you can argue with McCarthy's methods, but son of a bitch, you can't argue with him on principle. Am I right?”

Fallon left the place and went to another near Lexington, a chrome-and-leather place where everyone looked bluish green in the subtle light. There he stood at the bar beside two young soldiers with divisional patches on their sleeves and infantry braid on the PX caps that lay folded under their shoulder tabs. They wore no ribbons—they were only kids—but Fallon could tell they were no recruits: they knew how to wear their Eisenhower jackets, for one thing, short and skintight, and their combat boots were soft and almost black with polish. Both their heads suddenly turned to look past him, and Fallon, turning too, joined them in watching a girl in a tight tan skirt detach herself from a party at one of the tables in a shadowy corner. She brushed past them, murmuring, “Excuse me,” and all three of their heads were drawn to watch her buttocks shift and settle, shift and settle until she disappeared into the ladies' room.

“Man, that's rough,” the shorter of the two soldiers said, and his grin included Fallon, who grinned back.

“Oughta be a law against wavin' it around that way,” the tall soldier said. “Bad for the troops.”

Their accents were Western, and they both had the kind of blond, squint-eyed, country-boy faces that Fallon remembered from his old platoon. “What outfit you boys in?” he inquired. “I oughta reckanize that patch.”

They told him, and he said, “Oh, yeah, sure—I remember. They were in the Seventh Army, right? Back in ‘forty-four and-five?”

“Couldn't say for sure, sir,” the short soldier said. “That was a good bit before our time.”

“Where the hellya get that ‘sir' stuff?” Fallon demanded heartily. “I wasn't no officer. I never made better'n pfc, except for a couple weeks when they made me an acting buck sergeant, there in Germany. I was a B.A.R. man.”

The short soldier looked him over. “That figures,” he said. “You got the build for a B.A.R. man. That old B.A.R.'s a heavy son of a bitch.”

“You're right,” Fallon said. “It's heavy, but, I wanna tellya, it's a damn sweet weapon in combat. Listen, what are you boys drinking? My name's Johnny Fallon, by the way.”

They shook hands with him, mumbling their names, and when the girl in the tan skirt came out of the ladies' room they all turned to watch her again. This time, watching until she had settled herself at her table, they concentrated on the wobbling fullness of her blouse.

“Man,” the short soldier said, “I mean, that's a pair.”

“Probably ain't real,” the tall one said.

“They're real, son,” Fallon assured him, turning back to his beer with a man-of-the-world wink. “They're real. I can spot a paira falsies a mile away.”

They had a few more rounds, talking Army, and after a while the tall soldier asked Fallon how to get to the Central Plaza, where he'd heard about the Friday night jazz; then they were all three rolling down Second Avenue in a cab, for which Fallon paid. While they stood waiting for the elevator at the Central Plaza, he worked the wedding ring off his finger and stuck it in his watch pocket.

The wide, high ballroom was jammed with young men and girls; hundreds of them sat listening or laughing around pitchers of beer; another hundred danced wildly in a cleared space between banks of tables. On the bandstand, far away, a sweating group of colored and white musicians bore down, their horns gleaming in the smoky light.

Fallon, to whom all jazz sounded the same, took on the look of a connoisseur as he slouched in the doorway, his face tense and glazed under the squeal of clarinets, his gas-blue trousers quivering with the slight, rhythmic dip of his knees and his fingers snapping loosely to the beat of the drums. But it wasn't music that possessed him as he steered the soldiers to a table next to three girls, nor was it music that made him get up, as soon as the band played something slow enough, and ask the best-looking of the three to dance. She was tall and well-built, a black-haired Italian girl with a faint shine of sweat on her brow, and as she walked ahead of him toward the dance floor, threading her way between the tables, he reveled in the slow grace of her twisting hips and floating skirt. In his exultant, beer-blurred mind he already knew how it would be when he took her home—how she would feel to his exploring hands in the dark privacy of the taxi, and how she would be later, undulant and naked, in some ultimate vague bedroom at the end of the night. And as soon as they reached the dance floor, when she turned around and lifted her arms, he crushed her tight and warm against him.

“Now,
look,
” she said, arching back angrily so that the cords stood out in her damp neck. “Is that what you call
dancing
?”

He relaxed his grip, trembling, and grinned at her. “Take it easy, honey,” he said. “I won't bite.”

“Never mind the ‘honey,' either,” she said, and that was all she said until the dance was over.

But she had to stay with him, for the two soldiers had moved in on her lively, giggling girlfriends. They were all at the same table now, and for half an hour the six of them sat there in an uneasy party mood: one of the other girls (they were both small and blonde) kept shrieking with laughter at the things the short soldier was mumbling to her, and the other had the tall soldier's long arm around her neck. But Fallon's big brunette, who had reluctantly given her name as Marie, sat silent and primly straight beside him, snapping and unsnapping the clasp of the handbag in her lap. Fallon's fingers gripped the back of her chair with white-knuckled intensity, but whenever he let them slip tentatively to her shoulder she would shrug free.

“You live around here, Marie?” he asked her.

“The Bronx,” she said.

“You come down here often?”

“Sometimes.”

“Care for a cigarette?”

“I don't smoke.”

Fallon's face was burning, the small curving vein in his right temple throbbed visibly, and sweat was sliding down his ribs. He was like a boy on his first date, paralyzed and stricken dumb by the nearness of her warm dress, by the smell of her perfume, by the way her delicate fingers worked on the handbag and the way the moisture glistened on her plump lower lip.

At the next table a young sailor stood up and bellowed something through cupped hands at the bandstand, and the cry was taken up elsewhere around the room. It sounded like “We want the saints!” but Fallon couldn't make sense of it. At least it gave him an opening. “What's that they're yellin'?” he asked her.

“‘The Saints,'” she told him, meeting his eyes just long enough to impart the information. “They wanna hear ‘The Saints.'”

“Oh.”

After that they stopped talking altogether for a long time until Marie made a face of impatience at the nearest of her girlfriends. “Let's go, hey,” she said. “C'mon. I wanna go home.”

“Aw,
Marie
,” the other girl said, flushed with beer and flirtation (she was wearing the short soldier's overseas cap now). “Don't be such a stupid.” Then, seeing Fallon's tortured face, she tried to help him out. “Are you in the Army too?” she asked brightly, leaning toward him across the table.

“Me?” Fallon said, startled. “No, I—I used to be, though. I been outa the Army for quite a while now.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“He used to be a B.A.R. man,” the short soldier told her.

“Oh, yeah?”

“We want ‘The Saints'!” “We want ‘The Saints'!” They were yelling it from all corners of the enormous room now, with greater and greater urgency.

“C'mon, hey,” Marie said again to her girlfriend. “Let's go, I'm tired.”

“So
go
then,” the girl in the soldier's hat said crossly. “
Go
if you want to, Marie. Can'tcha go home by yourself?”

“No, wait, listen—” Fallon sprang to his feet. “Don't go yet, Marie—I'll tell ya what. I'll go get some more beer, okay?” And he bolted from the table before she could refuse.

“No more for me,” she called after him, but he was already three tables away, walking fast toward the little ell of the room where the bar was. “Bitch,” he was whispering. “Bitch. Bitch.” And the images that tortured him now, while he stood in line at the makeshift bar, were intensified by rage: there would be struggling limbs and torn clothes in the taxi; there would be blind force in the bedroom, and stifled cries of pain that would turn to whimpering and finally to spastic moans of lust. Oh, he'd loosen her up! He'd loosen her up!

“C'mon, c'mon,” he said to the men who were fumbling with pitchers and beer spigots and wet dollar bills behind the bar.

“We—want—‘The Saints'!” “We—want—‘The Saints'!” The chant in the ballroom reached its climax. Then, after the drums built up a relentless, brutal rhythm that grew all but intolerable until it ended in a cymbal smash and gave way to the blare of the brass section, the crowd went wild. It took some seconds for Fallon to realize, getting his pitcher of beer at last and turning away from the bar, that the band was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

The place was a madhouse. Girls screamed and boys stood yelling on chairs, waving their arms; glasses were smashed and chairs sent spinning, and four policemen stood alert along the walls, ready for a riot as the band rode it out.

Fallon moved in jostled bewilderment through the noise, trying to find his party. He found their table, but couldn't be sure it was theirs—it was empty except for a crumpled cigarette package and a wet stain of beer, and one of its chairs lay overturned on the floor. He thought he saw Marie among the frantic dancers, but it turned out to be another big brunette in the same kind of dress. Then he thought he saw the short soldier gesturing wildly across the room, and made his way over to him, but it was another soldier with a country-boy face. Fallon turned around and around, sweating, looking everywhere in the dizzy crowd. Then a boy in a damp pink shirt reeled heavily against his elbow and the beer spilled in a cold rush on his hand and sleeve, and that was when he realized they were gone. They had ditched him.

He was out on the street and walking, fast and hard on his steel-capped heels, and the night traffic noises were appallingly quiet after the bedlam of shouting and jazz. He walked with no idea of direction and no sense of time, aware of nothing beyond the pound of his heels, the thrust and pull of his muscles, the quavering intake and sharp outward rush of his breath and the pump of his blood.

He didn't know if ten minutes or an hour passed, twenty blocks or five, before he had to slow down and stop on the fringe of a small crowd that clustered around a lighted doorway where policemen were waving the people on.

“Keep moving,” one of the policemen was saying. “Move along, please. Keep moving.”

But Fallon, like most of the others, stood still. It was the doorway to some kind of lecture hall—he could tell that by the bulletin board that was just visible under the yellow lights inside, and by the flight of marble stairs that led up to what must have been an auditorium. But what caught most of his attention was the picket line: three men about his own age, their eyes agleam with righteousness, wearing the blue-and-gold overseas caps of some veterans' organization and carrying placards that said:

“Move along,” the police were saying. “Keep moving.”

“Civil rights, my ass,” said a flat muttering voice at Fallon's elbow. “They oughta lock this Mitchell up. You read what he said in the Senate hearing?” And Fallon, nodding, recalled a fragile, snobbish face in a number of newspaper pictures.

“Look at there—” the muttering voice said. “Here they come. They're comin' out now.”

And they were. Down the marble steps they came, past the bulletin board and out onto the sidewalk: men in raincoats and greasy tweeds, petulant, Greenwich Village-looking girls in tight pants, a few Negroes, a few very clean, self-conscious college boys.