by James Jones
“Goddam it!” he said.
Agnes was looking at him. “He’s not going to take your offer, is he?”
“If you hadn’t invited Bob French and his daughter, I might have had some chance to at least talk to him!” Frank said. “As it was, he and Gwen were holed up on the loveseat all damned evening!”
“Yes, and I wonder what kind of a pleasant evening it would have been if I hadn’t invited them!” Agnes said. “He and Gwen certainly did seem to take to each other, didn’t they? You suppose she’s really attracted to him?”
“I couldn’t care less,” Frank said.
“You don’t think he’ll take your offer?” Agnes said.
“How do I know! He might. You never can tell. I wouldn’t be at all surprised, if he took it.”
“I don’t see why you ever offered it to him in the first place.”
“To get his money out of the Second National and in with us! And get you and me out of this embarrassment! What else.”
“I don’t know,” Agnes said. “I just felt you might have had some other reason.”
“Sure, I did it because I love him.”
“Well, it seemed to me an awfully great length to go, just to get his money out of the Second National Bank,” Agnes said. “He might be a lot more trouble as your partner. You heard what he said. He’s going out and get drunk with those drunken loafers and gamblers. God only knows what they’re liable to do. He didn’t even say goodby to me. I couldn’t for the life of me see what she could be attracted to him for,” she added.
“Please,” Frank said. “I really don’t want to talk any more about it, dear. I’m tired. I want to relax.”
“I only wanted to try and show you you shouldn’t worry,” Agnes said gently. “This way, he’ll be gone in a week and it’ll all blow over after a while. Don’t worry about it.”
Agnes got up from the divan. “Well, I’m going to bed. Are you coming?”
“No.”
She stopped in the hall doorway a moment and looked back. “Good night, then.”
“Good night,” Frank said.
But she didn’t go. And they stayed that way almost a full minute, looking frankly into each other’s faces, he from the chair across the glass in his hand, she in the doorway, somehow caught, and held. And for that near minute, both their faces were wide open and without disguise. It was a rare thing with them anymore. It was almost as if each was waiting for the other to say something, or else each himself wanted to say something but either had forgotten what it was or else how to say it. Forgotten it all. It was a look of rare understanding.
“Please don’t drink any more, Frank!” she said irritably.
Then she went on across the hall into the master bedroom with its oversize twin beds, separated by a big bed table, which they had had put in in place of the double bed years ago.
Frank waited till she was gone, then turned off all the lights except the floor lamp beside the buffet where he mixed himself still another stiff drink. He was getting pretty tight. But to hell with it. He took the new drink back to the living room and sat down in the dark.
His wife. Agnes. Goddam her, she had divined like she usually did that there was something more he hadn’t told her. But he couldn’t tell her the dreams he’d had for using Dave and the taxi service to build a Hirsh dynasty in Parkman. Especially now. They even seemed silly to him now. She would have been angry and sarcastic. Or else would have hooted laughter at him, which would have been even worse. He couldn’t tell her the dreams any more than he could ask her to go to bed with him when she stood waiting in the doorway. He wished he had a son.
He could not figure where it had gone wrong, what it was he had not done right. He had not thought anyone alive would be fool enough to turn down a deal as nice as that. Especially a man like Dave with no investments or prestige or connections and damn small chance of getting any. It was the best possible deal he could have offered him. Maybe he should have offered him a full partnership, after all? Well, if he came back around, he would, by God.
Dave wouldn’t have accepted anyway. And somehow he knew it. He couldn’t understand it. And at the moment, his mind was too numbed by liquor, fatigue, and failure to even try. A kind of deep fright at the inconsistencies of things, at the complete unreliability of human beings, at his own inadequacies, came over him. He wished they’d had a son.
The judge was going to be unhappy as hell. Well, the hell with the judge. He knew a lot of people in Parkman who’d be happier than hell.
He got up to mix himself another drink. It had been some day, and he found with a feeling of strangeness that he could hardly remember what yesterday had been like, as if it were another life.
He had already drunk a lot, and now he drank fast, thirstily, going back and forth to the buffet. Consequently, he was still sitting there some little time later, defeated and waveringly drunk and aware that shortly he would be sick, when the phone rang and he got up to answer it and discovered that it was Dave calling to say that he was going to take him up on his offer and go into the taxi service.
Chapter 11
WHEN DAVE LEFT Frank’s house with Gwen French, he had felt sad momentarily. Especially when the door closed as they were going across the yard. It seemed to him to be a symbol of all finality. One moment it was open, its yellow rectangular beam bearing on them, the next it was closed, the beam cut off suddenly and the latch clicked in the stillness: locked out. He wished he had not started this whole thing about the banks. He did not expect to see Frank again before he left, and for a moment he half-felt like weeping. Inside, Frank had put both hands on his shoulders in the hall. And he had felt that sudden rush of warmth he always felt when he had that sort of physical contact with people that he liked. Or wanted to like him. And at the same time, he had been making his loud, arrogant pitch about refusing the deal. Deliberately to break it off in Frank. He did not understand it and walking across the yard in the thickening snow he wished that he had done something else, and felt sad, while at the same time an egotistical triumph flamed in him at having out maneuvered Frank.
But these feelings only lasted until he slid into the seat of the Chevrolet coupe beside the woman, beside Gwen French. Then he promptly forgot them.
He sat watching her as she put in the key, trying to figure out the best way to approach her. It seemed to him now too sudden, to just come out and ask her to sleep with him without at least giving her some warning of what was coming.
It was cold in the car as she turned on the motor, and the snow had already begun to feather the windshield. She turned on the wipers. He sat watching her until she swung her head around to back out the drive.
“That’s a very beautiful coat,” he said, in his best seducer’s voice.
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Gwen French said, looking sort of surprised. She took hold of the wide collar and gave it a little tug. “I’ve had it an awful long time though.” His seduction tone was apparently completely lost on her.
She backed out into the street. She started off in low gear.
“I like the way you do your hair,” Dave said, making the seducing tone heavier.
“It isn’t very stylish,” she said. She shifted into second. “I bet that street’s slipperier than the devil.”
“It doesn’t matter whether it’s stylish,” Dave said, striving his best to sound Continental. “As long as it’s becoming.”
“I don’t think I’d better shift into high,” she said; it was easy to see she was a very cautious driver. “Hair’s a lot of trouble. If it wasn’t for making concessions to the damned school board, I’d have it all cut off.”
Ahead of them under the first streetlight, the snow was white on the pavement. Only a few car tracks showed on it. Dave tried to think of something else to say. Under the cone of light, the thickly falling snow made a live, undulating curtain. “Isn’t it lovely!” she said. “Yes,” he said.
“You have beautiful eyes, too,” Dave said.
This time she caught it. She turned to look at him. “They’re green,” she said. “A washed-out green. And my face irregular. And my shoulders are too high and too rawboned. And my legs too long for their size. Usually, when men compliment me, they only compliment me on my brain. If on that.”
“Maybe you don’t give them a chance,” Dave said.
“Not in this town I don’t.”
“What if they’re in this town, but not from this town?”
She looked at him again. “They’re still in the town.”
Dave suddenly felt relieved. “Well, your coat is beautiful, anyway,” he laughed. As long as there was a chance, a doubt, he had been on edge. Now that he knew there wasn’t he felt better. Relaxed. But the hunger still gnawed at him down deep in his crotch and belly. He left it gnaw. Sometimes a man almost wished he could get free of it completely, just have no sex. It would certainly save a lot of time and energy spent in chasing. And a lot of misery. Ahead of them now, he could see the street lamps lining the street up the hill on the square through the snow. It had warmed up some in the car.
Gwen French had turned to look at him again, and smiled. “Schoolteachers have to be very careful in their hometown,” she said, and it was plain that she really liked him, but there was also he noted a falseness, a subtle falseness, in what she said.
“Of course, when I’m away in the city, like in New York, it’s quite different,” she said. “Then I’m my own boss.”
“You took your PhD at Columbia, didn’t you?” Dave said.
“Yes, two years ago. How did you know that? And another thing I asked you before. How did you know about me doing this book on your group?”
“I learned them both from the same source. A student of yours,” Dave grinned. “A young man named Wally Dennis.”
“Oh, Wally. Yes,” she smiled. “Isn’t he a strange boy? But he’s a very talented boy I think. He’s doing some really excellent writing in a couple of courses of mine. He absolutely refuses to attend college as a regular student. He says it’s a violation of his ethical principles.”
“He also told me you said you weren’t interested in sex. That you’d had all the sex in your life you’d ever be interested in,” Dave said.
“That’s quite true. I did tell him that,” Gwen smiled. “I was afraid he was getting interested in me. But it’s the truth, all the same,” she added. “After all, sex is only one way of trying to escape from loneliness. After you’ve had it, you wonder why you worried about it so, and why you ever thought it would help you. It doesn’t.”
“You seem to know all about it,” Dave said.
“Oh, I’ve had my little troubles. If you let your loneliness control you that way, or any other way, you’d never get anything important done.”
“Important like what?”
“It just drives you on and on,” she said, not answering him.
“Yes. It’s driven me most of my life,” Dave said sourly.
They passed another streetlight cone of snow, the third.
“You just have to learn to stay outside of it and control it,” Gwen smiled.
“That’s great advice. But maybe it’s a lot easier to do when you have a home and a father to take care of,” Dave said. “And, if you’re a woman.”
“I won’t always have them,” Gwen said. “But it’s you we’re talking about, not me. You are the one with the gnawing loneliness.”
Dave grimaced. “You know so much about love. It’s a shame you’ve never experienced it.”
“Oh, I’ve experienced it enough times to know I’ve learned all I’ll ever need to know about it,” Gwen said. “When I said sex before, I was meaning love.”
“You have the advantage over me,” Dave said. “What about this Casper Milquetoast guy you were engaged to? Were you in love with him?”
“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 any
thing 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.
