by Oakley Hall
V looked at the bills. He saw that her face was flushed now, and suddenly she looked up at him. “Goddamn you,” she said dispassionately.
Jack’s mouth dropped open. He had heard her swear before; it had been a joke between them, because she didn’t know what she was saying. But she meant this, and it shocked him.
“Aren’t you even sorry?” she said slowly. “Can’t you…Jack, isn’t there anything in you for me at all?”
“If you need any more…”
She looked as though she were going to cry. Her face twisted to one side, her mouth was pulled down at the corners, her eyes were round. But she said, “Goddamn you, Jack,” in the same dispassionate voice, her voice shaking now, and tiredly she picked up the two bags. He watched her carry them to the door.
“Wait,” he said. “Don’t go, V.”
She dropped the bags and turned toward him. Her eyes, wide open, blazed. “Ask me to stay,” she whispered. “Go ahead and ask me, Jack.”
“Stay.”
“Do you want me to?”
“Yeah,” he said. He started to get up.
He saw her throat work and her lips jerked upward into a tight, hard smile. Then she went out. He could hear the suitcases bumping on the steps as she went downstairs.
He got up and closed the door and then he sat down on the bed again, feeling vaguely angry with himself, and then blusteringly angry at V, and then, all at once, he loathed himself.
He lay back with his hands locked beneath his head. He turned his face to one side so he could survey the empty room, waiting patiently for the feeling to leave him. After a while the thought passed through his mind that the least he could have done was carry her bags downstairs and take her wherever it was she had wanted to go.
3
He missed her. He had an immediate, sharp sense of loss, but at the same time a feeling of relief, of having got out from under. And there were plenty of other girls to occupy him.
It was a long time before he saw her again. One night he had a glimpse of her at a dance. She was with a fellow in a gray covert cloth suit and she disappeared among the other dancers without seeing Jack and Mary Ann. He looked for her unsuccessfully all the rest of the evening.
A week or so later he saw her at a baseball game eating a hot dog and laughing at something her escort had said; the escort a pimply faced Joe College with his hat brim turned up all around. The following week Jack went to the ballpark again and waited near the gate till he saw her come in with the same fellow, turning his back when they passed him, and wondering why he did it.
Then Harry told him V was working at Deterle’s, car-hopping, and Jack decided to go down and see how she was getting along. When he had parked she came out of the grill and walked across the asphalt toward him, her legs long and tan and smooth between her short skirt and white half-boots. She smiled professionally in the window at him, one foot up on the running board. “Hello, Jack,” she said. “How goes it?”
“Good. How goes it with you?”
“Just fine.”
There was a pause, and he said, “Good,” again, and nodded.
“It’s been a long time,” V said.
“Yeah. Your sweater’s too tight, V.”
She flushed, still smiling. “Is it?”
“I guess it’s just shrunk. You ought to use Lux.”
She laughed. She had on too much lipstick and she had changed the shape of her mouth, a thin line of her lips showed bare beyond the edges of the lipstick. “I guess I should,” she said.
“How long you been working here?”
“Oh, a long time. Since January.”
He nodded. The traffic light on the corner clanged and changed and cars streamed past, motors racing, gears shifting; it was Sunday afternoon and the traffic on Highway 99 was heavy.
“Lots of dates, unh?” Jack said, but the expression on her face did not change. Her smile had a confident, expectant quality. “I’ve seen you around a few times,” he said.
“Have you?”
“Who was that with you at the baseball game last week?”
She flushed again and Jack felt better. “Clyde Bryce,” she said. “He works for the gas company.”
“I thought maybe he was a college boy,” Jack said, grinning. He felt much better. He said, “What’re you doing tonight?”
But he cursed to himself when a new Chrysler swept into the parking area, and the effect of his question was lost when V turned to look at it. The other car-hop trotted out of the grill. “Why?” V asked, as she turned back.
“How about a date?”
She shook her head. “I’ve already got a date.”
“With Clyde?”
She shook her head again.
“How about Saturday night?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She bit at the inside of her cheek.
“Sunday?”
“I’m sorry, Jack. I can’t, Sunday.”
“You mean you don’t want to go out with me, unh?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t mean that at all. I’d like to.”
“Okay, let’s make it Saturday night. What time do you get off?”
“I’m sorry, Jack,” she said quietly. “I’ve already got a date.”
His stomach tightened. Talking to V this way, having to ask her for a date, seemed stupid, and he felt coldly furious. He snapped on the ignition and started the motor. V stepped back. There was a dark smudge on her forehead, over one eye, that made her look worried.
“Okay,” Jack said. “Go to hell, then.” He raced the motor. Another car came in and honked and V glanced at it.
He backed the roadster around in a tight arc, clashed the gears and tore out of the drive-in, feeling frustrated and silly. He had to stop for the light on the highway and in the rear-view mirror he could see V walking over to the car that had just come in. She had her order pad in her hand and he saw her put her foot up on the running board. She looked as though she had already forgotten him.
He cursed aloud and drove down to see if Ruth Adams wanted to go swimming. She wasn’t home and Mary Ann was in Los Angeles. He went to a bar and spent the rest of the afternoon alone, drinking beer.
He knew she had him. Worse, he knew she knew it; that was what stung him. He’d humbled himself trying to get a date with V. He’d made a fool of himself, and he had failed. She must know he would come back again, begging for a date; when he had prior rights to her, when she had been his and had been discarded. He sat drinking beer and feeling lonely and bored and angry, and wondering how hard she was going to squeeze it.
4
It was a month before he got a date with her, and after the dance he drove out the north end of town on Highway 99. The moon was showing over the Sierras, bright on the mountaintops. V’s face was serene and cold in the cold moonlight, and the wind that swept over the windshield blew her hair around her face. She had bent the rear-view mirror askew when she had made up her mouth; it was what she had always done, and he had never been able to make her remember to turn it back again. He felt a strong emotion made up of nostalgia and a hundred other indefinable things, and he forced his attention on the road ahead.
They had driven the other way on this road the night they had left the ranch. V had been crying, without making a sound she had cried all the way into Bakersfield. Jack grimaced and reached up to straighten the mirror, and then he swung the car out of the traffic and onto a side road. The Ford coasted down a slope, he stepped on the accelerator to take it over the railroad levee, then guided it down two rutted, winding tracks that led across a field. At the end of the tracks a grove of eucalyptus trees loomed against the sky. He parked in their shadow, and, still bent over the steering wheel with his fingers on the ignition switch, watched V out of the corners of his eyes.
She was staring at the mountains. Her face was cleanly profiled, her hair a tangled, ghostly white, and beyond her, headlights from the highway cut across the fields, sudden swaths of white light that bathed the grou
nd and illuminated the blonde, splotched trunks of the trees. V sat neither close nor far from him, sitting at an uncomfortable, halfway distance, and Jack pushed the spadeshaped ignition switch up and down, listening to its metallic clicking.
She didn’t speak when he put his arm around her. She didn’t move, didn’t resist in any way, but she was merely something soft and vaguely warm under his arm. He had the angry thought that this was mechanical with her, that she was doing only what was expected; he was merely one of her friends, nothing more, he had no special qualifications, no special rights. He felt his lips tighten painfully over his teeth. He pulled his arm down hard against her neck, tensing it, forcing her against his shoulder, but she seemed not to notice.
“V,” he said. He cursed her silently for not noticing the pressure of his arm, for not speaking. He wanted her to look at him. “V,” he said again.
When she turned, the dark of her lips framed a calm, sure smile. She said, “Did you ever get your radio fixed, Jack?”
He waited patiently for the anger to leave him. Finally he said, “No. It’s all shot.”
She put out her hand and turned the knob. The dial glowed yellow. Jack quickly turned it off. “V,” he said. “Come back.”
“What?”
He tried to press her closer but her body seemed heavy and unwieldy. He lifted his arm and pushed her away and she looked off at the mountains again. After a moment he squeezed his eyes closed. “I guess somebody’s told you you look like Carole Lombard,” he said thickly. “It’s a good profile, all right.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s great. How do the others like it? I’ll bet it creams them too.”
“What?” She looked at him coolly.
“Skip it. Well, you really learned how to get along, didn’t you, V?”
“You taught me, you know. I had a fine teacher.”
“I did, didn’t I? Well, you got to be a hell of a lot better than teacher, didn’t you?”
He saw her lick her lips and she looked down at her watch.
“Well, now you’ve shown me,” Jack continued. “You want to go on and play some more, or you want to quit now?”
“It’s late, Jack,” V said. “We’d better go.”
He snapped on the ignition and pushed his foot down on the starter. The wheels spun in the dirt when he let the clutch out and he raced the car up the rutted tracks to the highway.
When he skidded to a stop in front of the three-story building where she roomed, V opened her door and got out before he had shut off the motor. Her heels rapped sharply on the sidewalk with their own familiar rhythm. Jack followed her up the steps. At the front door she turned. “Thanks for a nice time, Jack.”
He stopped on the step below her and they stood looking at each other. When he kissed her the step made them the same height and he kept his eyes open; he looked into her open eyes. Her hand brushed the nape of his neck, and she kissed him in return. Her kiss was as impersonal as a new pair of shoes. She was just kissing someone on the front porch after a date. Dozens of girls were doing the same thing on dozens of porches all over town, and afterward they would say good night and go inside and undress and get into bed and go to sleep.
Her lips opened under his, but abruptly he moved away. He heard her say, “Good night,” as he walked down to his car, but he didn’t look back. Anger and humiliation made him feel incredibly lonely, and he felt as though he had been given a drink of ginger ale when he needed a straight shot. He wondered what she was thinking now. Did she feel completely indifferent? Did she pity him? He wondered if she were laughing at him, getting undressed and into bed and laughing softly, and that night, unable to sleep, he told himself he was through. He was through with her for good.
5
He stayed away from her for a month. But then, swallowing his pride, making excuses to himself, he went back to the drive-in again. He got a date with her for two weeks away, and she didn’t even seem to realize it had been a month since she had seen him. She acted as though he were someone she had just met and wasn’t very interested in.
She didn’t seem to care whether she went out with him or not. She never noticed, or if she noticed, did not care, whether he was angry or not. But he took her out more and more often and finally she promised him she would always see him on Saturday night. He saw her other nights too, whenever he could, but Sunday night was reserved for someone else. Sunday was reserved for someone else or for the field or for herself, he could never find out which, and he was too proud to ask.
At first, except for kissing him good night, she would not let him touch her. He was tempted to force her, but something stopped him. He realized that if he did, he would have lost completely, and not only would he have lost, he would have admitted his defeat. She would not go to his room, and after being rebuffed he did not ask her again. When finally she let him have her, it was in the car, letting him undress her and sitting close to him, white and long-legged and perfect, her face dark in the shadow of the eucalyptus trees. And he had almost told her then. He almost told her how he felt, that he had been a fool, that he wanted to marry her.
But he did not, for even then she was punishing him. She was completely passionless. She might have been made of white marble; even when she helped him put the crumpled blanket under her hips, even holding him to her with the strong arms he remembered, she was completely passionless. And when he was trembling and unsure of himself and lost, she guided him with hands that might have been old at this when he was first hearing of it in the dirty-boy talk behind the gym in school and at the CCC camp. The whore he had had once in Fresno who smoked a cigarette all the while, had not been this insulting, and afterward when he reviled and cursed V, she took that too, with the same emotionless understanding with which she had taken him.
And with that came the jealousy. From that time on there was the black, rotten jealousy that he was not the only one; the being sure, the wondering who. From that time on there was the jealousy and the strain of keeping from V the fact that he was jealous, that he cared that he was not the only one, the humiliation of knowing he could not keep it from her, and this doubled because he was sure it must be known to others that she was public property, and so he must face down the humiliation and hide his jealousy from his friends, not knowing if they knew, wondering what they thought, wondering what they said about him among themselves.
He wondered too if they considered V a whore. He wondered if they blamed him for making her one. But he saw the hypocrisy of his own thinking that he must save her from this. He wanted to have her, not to save her. Maybe the saving was part of the having, but he wanted all of her, not just her body once a week. He wanted her to belong to him again.
To make it worse, Ben had come back. Ben had to see what he had made of V. Ben would be hearing the stories and rumors about her he himself had never heard but knew must be going around. Ben would see she had learned the ropes and how well she had learned them, and would hold him responsible. And Ben would see what she was doing to him.
It had been raining lightly the night V told him she was going out of town for the weekend and wouldn’t be able to see him on Saturday night, and immediately a picture came into his mind of V and a faceless man, a man he hated as he had never hated anyone in his life. Who, he wondered desperately; who? They were sitting in the roadster in front of her apartment house, the street was wet and blackly shining, and there were wide, shining pools of yellow on the curbs below the streetlights. The air smelled of rain.
Finally he said, “Going up and see your old man?”
V shook her head.
He was glad he had thought to mention her father, and he said, “You ought to go see the old guy, V. Tell him how you’re getting along. I’ll bet he gets lonely out there.”
She didn’t say anything. She turned the mirror toward her, opened her purse and took out her comb and lipstick. Jack watched her paint her mouth. Who, he wondered; who? He wanted desperately to know, but just as desp
erately he didn’t want her to know it mattered to him.
“What’s your Sunday night boy going to say?” he asked. “He’ll be pretty hard up by next week, won’t he?”
She turned toward him. She was combing her hair and her mouth looked black in the darkness of the car. “Why do you have to say things like that?”
“Hell, it’s so, isn’t it? I get mine Saturday nights, he gets his Sunday, and the rest of the week you kind of spread it around.”
“Does it make you feel any better to think that?”
“Sure,” he said. “Share the wealth.” He puzzled over the phrase, wondering where he had picked it up. Someone was always saying it—Red was. He scowled and said quickly, “No use being a hog.”
She looked at him. She made a face as she combed through a snarl.
“Say,” he said. “Who is this Sunday night boy, anyway? Maybe we ought to get together this weekend.”
V leaned forward to turn on the radio. After a moment music blared, then was muted and fuzzy as she tuned it down. The music crackled with the electricity in the air.
Jack took a deep breath. He knew he was talking too much but he couldn’t stop himself. “Maybe there isn’t anybody on Sunday nights,” he said. “Maybe you’re just putting one over on me. Why don’t you ever go out with anybody I know, so I can check up?”
“I’ve been out with someone you know,” V said. “You didn’t like that, either.”
“Ben?” he said, and tried to laugh. She must mean Ben, he thought. He knew she’d been out with Ben. She’d made sure he knew. He wondered if she’d been out with Petey Willing, or Harry. But Harry would have told him. Then he thought of Red, and he began to swear.
He told himself she wouldn’t do that. He knew she hated Red as much as he did. She wouldn’t go out with Red; but the thought sickened and obsessed him. He saw Red’s thick, obscene body and V’s long white one. He almost sobbed aloud.
“By Christ, if you did,” he said, and stopped. Something in his voice made V’s face jerk toward him. “I’d kill you if you ever went out with Red!” he said hoarsely. “I’d…”
