by James Jones
But then, as she was setting down still another drink for him, he had taken hold of her wrist in a manly way to let her know he was really serious. It was the signal for a miniature explosion. She had quietly got one of his fingers with her other hand and bent it back until he had to snatch his hand back or she would have broken his damned finger.
For a moment, he was half of a mind to just haul off and bust her in the jaw. But then from the corner of his eye, he saw Old Eddie wink at him and shake his head, and he desisted. Old Eddie was right, of course. After all, it was a public place. And by then, she was gone, of course, anyway.
Frank was as shocked—and infuriated—by her change in attitude, as he had been with what the other woman had said when he had only politely asked her to go out to dinner.
“What the hell?” he protested. “What got into her?”
“Oh, you know how women are,” Eddie said.
“You go over and talk to her, Eddie. Tell her, hell, I didn’t mean nothing. Tell her we’ll meet her after they close up.”
He watched while Eddie went over to the bar and talked to her. But when he came back, he said:
“I can’t do a thing with her, Frank. You made her mad when you took hold of her.”
“But, hell,” Frank said. “Well, maybe I better go over and talk to her myself.”
“No, I wouldn’t do that, Frank, if I were you.” Eddie grinned. “She’s too mad. She’d be liable to call cops on you.”
“Hell, I didn’t know she was some kind of a anti-feminist,” Frank protested. “I don’t know what the hells gettin into American women anymore. They don’t want men, they all want kids. That they can handle.”
“They all got it too easy, Frank,” Eddie said. “They think they got everything coming to them on a silver platter.”
“Well, I for one got a bellyful of it,” Frank said. “Well, let’s have another drink,” he said.
“Let’s have it at the hotel instead,” Eddie said. “I want to blow this firetrap. That gal’s got me disgusted.”
“Okay, Eddie,” Frank said, “if you say so. I guess she’s got me disgusted, too.”
But at the hotel, his stiff anger gone, Frank could not escape a deep sense of horror. The shocks both women had given him had not dissipated, and he was filled with an almost frightening embarrassment. And he could not get over this feeling that something was happening to American women anymore. They all seemed to be turning into Geneve Lowes or Dotty Callters. They had no softness or understanding anymore. And, in fact, it seemed to him that the only single person he had met all night who understood him at all was Old Eddie, Clark’s friend.
“You know, you’re quite a guy, Eddie,” he said when they were in his rooms and Eddie was mixing them both a drink. “Quite a guy.”
The wiry young man grinned. “We had us quite a time tonight, didn’t we, Frank?” he said. He handed him his drink.
“We sure did, we sure did,” Frank said. He took a gulp of his drink. “Christ!” he said. “You made this pretty strong. What the hell did you put in it?”
“Just whiskey,” Eddie said. “And a little water. Don’t you like it?”
“No, no. It’s all right. Just sort of strong is all.”
Eddie laughed. “Good healthy nightcap, Frank, old boy.”
“You wouldn’t be tryin to knock me out, would you?” Frank grinned.
“Knock you out! This late at night? Hell, it’s almost two o’clock,” Eddie smiled. “Come on,” he said. “Help you get to bed if you want.” He took off his suit coat and came over to help Frank and Frank saw a snub-nosed .38 in a shoulder holster hanging from his left armpit.
So that was his trouble! Poor little guy. He was so small that he carried a gun around to protect himself with. Well, you couldn’t blame him much, in a town like Springfield. Probly he had a complex about his size.
“Come on,” Eddie smiled, “I’ll help you up.”
Frank suffered himself to he helped.
“You sure you all right now?” Eddie said. “You sure you can sleep? You want another drink?”
“No,” Frank grinned. “Hell, I’ll sleep like a log. Though I wouldn’t mind another drink.”
“I’ll mix you one if you want,” Eddie grinned. “Man, you sure can put it away!”
“No, I don’t want one I guess.”
“Well, you go on and get in bed then.” Eddie put his coat back on.
“You’re a great guy, Eddie. You’re the only person I saw tonight who understands me, by God!”
“Anything for a friend of Clark’s, or the old man’s,” Eddie grinned. “Anybody that’s a friend of theirs is a friend of mine.” He went to the door. “You go on and get in bed now.”
“Right!” Frank said and dropped his pants and hung them on a chair and stepped into the bedroom and climbed into the bed. “There! You see? Good night, Eddie. And thanks again, old pal.”
“I had a good time. Well, good night, Frank,” Eddie said, and went out and shut the self-lock door.
And as soon as he was gone, Frank was back up, and went stealthily to the door and listened at it, grinning to himself. They were not going to catch him napping! What did they think they were trying to pull? He’d show them, he thought slyly, by God.
But then, standing there—hearing nothing, and gradually becoming convinced that he was really alone—he suddenly thought again of those two women, and the feeling of sick horror that he had had before began to come back to him, seeping slowly from nerve to nerve. The conversation with Eddie after they got up here had stifled it.
But now—alone—it slid back even stronger. Horror about women—American women—and horror about himself. He knew what a colossal ass he had made of himself. They thought he didn’t know. Drunk, partially befuddled, his mind was nevertheless clear as a bell and had been all evening. And now he was gripped by an embarrassment so powerful, it amounted to outright terror. Why, he could have fallen flat on his face! And probably would have if it hadn’t have been for Eddie.
Women!—American women. They just didn’t play fair. They didn’t act like women are supposed to act. How the hell could you handle them when they didn’t give you the opportunity to? But there was more to it than that; and in his terror he faced the rest of it: Other men handled them. But he was a weakling. Because he couldn’t handle them. Like an American man should. Women! American women. They weren’t women. They were men or something. He was the woman.
Almost creeping, Frank hobbled away from the door and over to the chair where the liquor was. He poured himself another stiff one and sat down in the chair with it. The clear part of his mind knew he was liable to get sick again—that gastritis that Doc Cost said. And yet he wasn’t drunk. Something had happened to him apparently, maybe the emotion. But he wasn’t drunk. He clutched the glass and drank from it greedily, as if it were salvation.
Gradually, after a while, the sick horror and terrified embarrassment and hatred of himself left him, leaving in its place something else: excitement. A kind of sudden secretive excitement. Which made him want to do something dangerous and self-destructive. He began to feel better. Perhaps you could only feel an emotion that strong for just so long. Or perhaps it was because he was alone. Alone, and free, and unobserved, and—and his own master. They thought they could outsmart you all the time! Hah! And suddenly, he knew what he was going to do. Feeling a high, intense sexual arousal, he got up and went over to his clothes. He was going for a walk.
A walk, at two-thirty in the morning, and in a strange city, where he was practically unknown, a walk!
Who knew what strange things might happen to him, or that he might see? what adventures?
For a moment, picking up his shirt, he wondered what Eddie had wanted to knock him out for? He wasn’t just an ordinary troublesome drunk, who wanted to get right back up and go out and cause trouble. Eddie should have known that.
Almost shaking with his burgeoning excitement, he got back into the rumpled suit. And then,
and for some reason he could not have named, he began emptying all his pockets, putting everything up on the dresser, everything that could have identified him, everything except some money. Then he stood looking down at the jumbled mess feeling dangerous and destructive and tough. God, the crap we had to carry with us through our lives. Why? He turned and walked out of the room.
Frank nodded to the elevator man when he got in, his heart beating loudly, and downstairs he made his way sedately across the half-dark lobby where nothing save the night force behind the registry desk moved. Leaving his room key—last vestige of any identification—on the desk, he marched on across toward the doors. If they found his body in the morning, he thought thrillingly, there would be no way at all to know who he was. Drunk, thick-tongued, partially befuddled, but with his mind functioning as clear as a bell and walking as straight as a string line, he made his way outside to the street strangely aroused.
For the next two hours, he walked up and down the deserted streets of Springfield, his body alive to the night and silence and sense of adventure. In all that time, he did not speak to a living soul. Once a night cop, walking his beat, eyed him but went on. Once a cruising homosexual fell in step with him a few feet away, but after several moments when Frank did not look around or speak, turned off and sadly went away. A couple of times, he passed tough-looking backstreet joints that were still serving drinks and into which people were still crowded, but he did not go in. He had no desire to, and drifted more and more toward the darker more-deserted slum-type streets. Several times, he passed other people. Another time, he saw a light in a third floor window above a fire escape, and though he went right on walking, he debated sneaking back and climbing on up and looking in. Maybe it was a man and woman, or maybe two women, or two men. He could stand and watch them, without them ever knowing he was there. The thought excited him as he walked on. At four-thirty, he returned to the hotel and calmly picked up his key and went upstairs to bed having seen nothing and done nothing and not spoken to a soul. He had not spent a cent.
Only when he was undressed again and in between the sheets did the terror strike him, and he lay with his ear pressed down into the pillow while the nerve ends of his body quivered inwardly.
What if the policeman had stopped him? Or if he had suddenly insulted him and made him arrest him? What if he had spoken to the homosexual? And the man had beaten him up and rolled him? What if he had gone into one of those tough joints and picked a fight? What if he had climbed the fire escape and the man had shot him off of it? All of these terrified him and excited him and he lay thinking in terror and sexual arousal: What if I had been caught? But he was too exhausted, both emotionally and physically, to do more. And clutching the pillow, he went to sleep.
When the phone woke him at eight-thirty, almost immediately the terror returned—without the sexual arousal—when he remembered all of last night. He had difficulty keeping his voice from quivering when he answered the ringing phone.
It was the Greek, who had all the papers ready for him at his office. It was like a reassuring, sane voice—and therefore even more terrifying—from a world of which he had only a dim faint memory.
“I’ll be right there,” he said. “Soon’s I shave and shower.”
“You boys must have had yourselves quite a time last night,” the Greek said amiably.
“We did,” Frank said “I got pretty drunk and Eddie put me to bed. He’s a good boy.”
“Yes, he is,” the Greek said. “Well, you hurry on down.”
“I will,” Frank said.
The terror did not leave him, even at the Greek’s office when they signed the papers, although gradually it diminished. After all, he hadn’t been caught. And anyway, he hadn’t done anything to be caught for. As soon as he was done at the Greek’s, he went back to the hotel and checked out and lit out for home without even stopping for lunch, and pausing only long enough to go in a bookstore and buy a copy of that new book The Kinsey Report. He would have to go by the store and lock it up in his desk, he reminded himself, before he went on home.
He had a terrible hangover to be driving, but he didn’t mind. Frank wanted to get home to Agnes.
Chapter 48
WHEN HER HUSBAND RETURNED from Springfield, Agnes Hirsh could tell the moment he came in the house that he had been doing some heavy drinking while he was gone. She could also tell, in some subtle fashion of her own, that he had not had a woman while he was gone. Frank, when he had been out with some woman, had a way of acting coy and smugly cocky and flitting around the house as though he had gotten away with something. He acted “cute.” He acted somewhat that same little-boyish way after having been exposed to some criticism or other, too, but there was a difference between the two, although she could not say exactly what. Perhaps it was that after he’d had a woman he was always a little more smugly cocky, a little more condescendingly “masculine,” than the cute way he acted after being criticized.
Anyway, Agnes could tell he had not had a woman this trip to Springfield. The last time he had been up there, he had. And, at least, the two times before that.
This time, however, Frank came in the house wearing only that sagging look under the eyes, which came from that kind of driving, exhausting, almost uncontrollable drinking bouts that she had seen him get on and that Doc Cost had warned him about. But this time, there was nothing else there on his face. Except perhaps a kind of scared look, as though the drinking might have frightened him. But there was no flippishness, no smug little-boyishness, no cuteness. The knowledge—that this time he hadn’t—filled Agnes with a sudden warmth of affection for him, as he kissed her and went on back to unpack, that was stronger even than the warmth she had been steadily growing for him these past three months. Perhaps he was actually finally growing up a little, she thought, feeling almost maternal. Maybe those people up in Springfield were really good for him.
Agnes was not nearly as much in the dark about Frank’s Springfield venture as she knew he thought she was. She knew, for one thing, that he was working on a deal about something that was immensely bigger than anything he had ever been involved in before. He had told her almost nothing about it, and he had minimized its importance to her; that much she had sensed, and that was how she knew how big it was. Because any ordinary deal—like that taxi stand fiasco—he always made sound far bigger than it was. So this deal must really be big.
She knew also that Clark Hibbard was involved in the deal some way. This she had had from Betty Lee the several times she had seen her around, and when, standing talking to the dreamy-eyed strangely haunted-looking girl, Betty Lee had always mentioned having seen Frank this time or that in Springfield. Betty Lee had never mentioned anything about the “deal”—and indeed, Agnes was sure, she didn’t know anything about it—but there was in her attitude toward Agnes this change which could only be described as the attitude of one wife toward another when both know their husbands have become partners in something.
And it was from this, plus the knowledge that the old man practically ran one of the banks in Springfield, that Agnes had finally become convinced that Frank had mortgaged the house and the store to him. Frank had been for some time converting just about everything he could into cash; so what would be more reasonable than to assume he would mortgage the house and store, too?
The knowledge disturbed her somewhat, naturally; and she knew it had been disturbing Frank, too; but she did not really care. When you went into something with men the caliber of Betty Lee’s father, you should put into it every damned thing you could scrape together. Because those men didn’t go into anything unless it made money. And everything you could put in would be just that much more profit coming back.
She wished that Frank had asked her for her signature on it, too, so she could have given it gladly and let him know how much she trusted him. Whatever his other shortcomings, and he had plenty, Agnes knew he had phenomenal business sense and was proud of both him and it. He had taken her own father’s store
, which had been only a cheap little novelty store, and built it into one of the very best businesses in Parkman. And Agnes was fiercely proud of this accomplishment.
She understood why he couldn’t tell her about the house and store. It was almost some kind of a psychological fixation with him. The house itself with all the things and appliances he had bought for them was a sort of private symbol to him; it was his way of making up for—and freeing himself from—the guilt he felt for all his infidelities, and also his silent way of showing them that the inconstancies, which he could not even bring himself to admit even when confronted with them, did not really mean anything. Naturally, he could not bring himself to admit he had mortgaged it. While the store, which she had just signed over to him when her father died—although he often told people he had bought it from her dad—the store was an even stronger source of guilt since he did not really feel he had ever owned it. Naturally, he could not bring himself to admit he had mortgaged it either. She understood it.
Still, she wished he had trusted her enough to know she would not throw a tantrum, and in another mood than the one she knew now it would have angered her that he hadn’t. But for the past three or four months, Agnes had been steadily acquiring a warmth for her husband that she could not remember having had since they were first married. And now on top of all that other warmth, there had suddenly come this. He had returned from Springfield this trip without having had a woman. She could only think of it as a sort of inevitable, foreordained culminating point. She had always known it would happen. Someday. And it filled her with such a suddenly shy, brimming affection for him that she was doubly glad now she had never mentioned the mortgages, had shown her faith in him by letting him work it out himself.
When she had first broken him off from Geneve Lowe last year, she had known beforehand it was going to take him a long time to get over it. It always had before. So she had been prepared. He had hardly spoken a word to her for over two months, but she had accepted it without a word. She had even suffered for him, and what he was going through. Then, as he began very slowly to come around and she had seen no signs of any new alliance forming, hope had begun to grow in her. Maybe this time was the one.
