by James Jones
“You’ve got it all figured out. Okay, say we only have to be separated for four months. For the sake of the future. Just four months. And thats conservative. Have you forgotten that by a year from now we will be in the war?”
“Well, theres nothing I can do about that,” Karen said, thereby calmly cancelling it. “And anyway, I don’t think we will.”
“What the hell do you think all this new stuff is coming out for? Just for the hell of spending the Taxpayers’ money? I tell you we’ll be in this war a little over a year,” he said, believing it positively now in his bitterness, the very same thing that two weeks he had satisfactorily logically refuted absolutely.
“I dont think so,” Karen said.
“Okay, mark it on your calendar. On July the 23rd 1941 Milt Warden told you we’d be in the war in a little over a year. We’re hable to be in it in less than a year,” he, said, enjoying making it even worse. “Then what? Its all off then and no holts barred. They’ll probly ship the wives back to the States. And in a war everybody dies, unless they’re alive when it’s over. And out of that last year we can have together, four months of it is spend apart. And for the sake of the future.”
“Very well,” Karen said calmly. “Suppose we are in it in less than a year. Does that mean everything thats been between us is just to be marked off the slate? Does that mean we should say to hell with the future and to hell with the plans? And what’ll we do then, after the war?”
“I didnt say that!” Warden said, beginning to be angry at her lack of understanding. “What I said is its stupid to live all your life in the future when there may not be any. I say plan for the future, sure. But dont let the plans for the future that there may not be any of, displace what little life you can live now.”
“And I say,” Karen said, beginning to be angry at his lack of understanding, “that we shouldnt take chances now and do things that in themselves arent even happy and may cost us any chance at a future. I say if anything has to suffer, let the present suffer for the sake of the future.”
“And I say if we cant have the goddam afternoons,” Warden said, coming to the point they both knew he was approaching, “like we’ve planned, then we can at least have some nights, even if it is a little more dangerous. We may never get a chance at them, after a year from now.”
“You know how I feel about that,” Karen said.
“Sure I know how you feel about it. Now you know how I feel about it.”
“Do you think I give a damn, you fool?” Karen said, openly angry finally. “And I’ve got a whole hell of a lot to lose if we get caught, haven’t I? I’m only thinking of you, you damned fool. Where will you be? if we should happen to get caught in a scandal? You, an Enlisted Man involved in an affair with an Officer’s wife,—and not only just any Officer’s wife, but your own Company Commander’s wife!”
“And I say piss on that,” Warden snarled. “They cant shoot me any farther off my cross than the war will shoot me off it. When you got a war staring you in the face, you believe in living today. If you’d ever been in China, like I have, you’d believe it too.”
“Perhaps,” Karen said icily. “But let me ask you something: Is that the philosophical tenet that kept you from putting in your application for Officer’s extension course as you told me you had?”
He had been going good, and getting well warmed up, and even almost coming on to proving it. But that stopped him.
There was a considerable silence.
Karen fixed on him now the same steely-eyed look he had enjoyed so much seeing her get for Holmes, but that he did not enjoy now, as she waited for his answer.
“Yes,” he said in a strangled voice. “Thats why.”
“Then I fail to see,” she said crisply, “how I can be expected to take risks and jeopardize myself for the sake of your purely animal desires for a few nights in the bed.
“And let me tell you something else, my friend,” she said in the precise enunciations of a trained nurse talking to a worried patient. “It is all very easy for a man to talk about living in the present. Much more so than for a woman, who is liable to get knocked up higher than a kite every time the man enjoys himself in the present. Thats one thing I dont have to worry about, thank God. But there are a lot of others; such as what I am going to do when my husband kicks me out and then my lover throws me over when he has to support me, and me not being trained for anything but to be somebody’s wife and having to do all my politicing and achieving and gain what little success I can by getting behind some stupid man and pushing him.
“Perhaps that is what you meant by living in the present? That we will just do it when you want to, which apparently is all the time, and let the Officer part and the marriage part, which depends on it, take care of themselves? Or better yet, take themselves off somewhere and conveniently die? Perhaps that is what you meant?”
“I did it, I mean I dint do it, because I dint want anything to come in and disrupt those afternoons, which doing extension course lessons surely would have,” Warden said strangledly and subduedly. “Thats why I did it.”
“And why was it you didnt tell me, instead of lying to me?”
“Because I knew goddam well you would’ve reacted just like you did. Thats why.”
“But if you had been honest, maybe I wouldnt have. Did you ever think of that?”
“You would have,” Warden said.
“And so now,” Karen, who had had him coming and going either way he answered, said triumphantly, “so now you have already reached the place of the husband who only tells the little woman whatever percentage of the truth he feels she ought to know. And without even having the virtue of being the husband yet. Dont you think that is a little previous? not to say presumptuous?”
“No more presumptuous than you reading me off like the heavy-handed better half,” Warden exploded violently into flame under the lash, like a piece of paper under a very accurately focused magnifying glass.
“Well, you may not have to put up with it very much longer,” Karen threatened crisply.
“And you wont have to put up with the masculine foibles.”
“And so they got married and lived unhappily ever after,” Karen smiled.
“Thats it,” Warden said. He grinned back crookedly, feeling the woman-generated guilt spreading all through him like the slow groping tentacles of a fungus.
“Dont look so goddamned guilty,” Karen said distastefully.
“Who the hell looks guilty?”
“Well, at least you wont have the excuse of our lovely afternoons anymore,” she said cruelly, “to keep you from putting in your application.”
“And I’ll put the son of a bitch in, too, dont think I wont,” he said, stung again. How they could do it, on and on, one after the other, each a new climax of sharpness, it was unbelievable, even for a superior race.
Karen was not willing to let him off that easy.
“Well, you had better. Because I can always find out from Dana whether you have or not, and if you havent you’re liable not to see me very soon again.”
“I’ll put it in, baby,” he said furiously, “dont worry. But its not because I’m afraid of you finding out I didn’t.”
“I dont know whats happened to you,” Karen said, less classically, going down under the crust a little. “You were honest once. That was the thing that first caught me about you. You were honest, and if you thought it by god you said it, and to hell with the consequences. I admired that. You were harsh and strong and unwavering like—” she halted, searching for an adequate comparison, “—like a GI blanket on a cold night. But you’ve lost it. I was looking for something when you came along, something proud, and I thought I’d found it. I thought you were it.
“Well, it appears I’m still looking for it. It seems you have developed into being only a reasonable facsimile. Perhaps I’m a perfectionist, but I dont seem to care much for reasonable facsimiles.
“I’ve made a pompous ass out of Dana, and now it
seems I’m making a pompous ass out of you. You werent like that when I met you. Apparently thats what I always do to men. I touch them and they all start to crumble.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing myself,” Warden said. “And I dont like the way it feels either. You were tough and solid as a rock at first, and as proud as a lion. And now you’ve developed into a goddam whining crybaby that I cant tell the truth to, because you cant take it. That first day there at the house—” he said.
“I’ve always said,” he said, “that I was looking for a woman who was resilient enough that I could go up to her and ask her to sleep with me and she would say yes, or say no, and let it go at that. Without all this simpering female euphemism. But if she had the sensitivity I wanted, she wouldnt say no, she’d say yes, because she would be able to see the other sensitivity there reaching out to her. —
“That first day there at the house—” he said inexpressively.
“And so they got married and lived unhappily ever after,” Karen said bitterly.
“Amen,” he said.
“You think its easy,” Karen said, “you think theres nothing to it. Your mistake was that you ever let me trust you. How many times I’ve seen you mentally undress every young flip we pass on the street—even if we shoot past her at fifty in the car, while I sit there knowing as well as I know my name you’ve forgotten me entirely and are mentally taking her to bed.”
“But Jesus Christ!” Warden protested horrifiedly, “I dont do that!”
Karen smiled.
“What I mean, its not the same thing at all. Honest. The two things have nothing to do with each other. With them its like going to a whorehouse, like a—”
“I dont know what going to a whorehouse is like,” Karen said acidly.
“Its like riding a horse,” Warden said earnestly, with sudden inspiration. “I mean you see a bright sharp new filly in a pasture, and you want to throw a saddle on her and see what she can do. Thats all it is. With you its like going out to ride your own pert three year old mare that you are used to and that knows your every touch exactly so that the two of you arent horse and rider but one single animal.”
“It makes me want to tear your eyes out,” Karen said. “And I dislike being compared to a horse, no matter how much of a privately owned thoroughbred.”
“Oh,” Warden said. “You dislike it, hunh? It pains you. How many times do you think I’ve watched you drive off home knowing you were going to sleep in the same room with that son of a bitch, maybe in the same bed for all I know? While I go home to my bunk and imagine every last little physical detail and picture? I dont guess you got to worry much about being privately owned.”
“Why, you silly damned fool,” Karen raged, “how could you of all people ever think I’d have anything to do with Dana again? I dont feel that way about him. I dont know if either of us ever did. I could be friends with him, close friends, if he’d let me; but as for that—why its just out, I never go back to a man once he’s let me down. If I’m not chaste, at least I have that much pride. The thought of another man makes me physically sick.”
“And that makes it a lot easier on me, dont it?”
“I dont think your lot with me is too very much harder on you than my lot with you is on me,” Karen said precisely.
“And so they got married and lived unhappily ever after,” Warden grinned at her viciously.
“Yes,” Karen said. “That seems to be the traditional procedure.”
They sat looking at each other absolutely inarticulately furiously, every argument that could have been offered already postulated, every protest that could be framed already charted, overwhelmingly aware that they had reached the absolute end of sane verbal conversation without having explained a single damned thing to the other, overwhelmed by the eternal semantics of the sexes.
They must have sat that way for almost half an hour, each wanting sympathy but refusing to give sympathy and boiling indignantly at the other’s lack of sympathy, as if there were at least one room between them and they were lying each in his own bed in the darkness tensely, until finally the indignation of not being understood boils over into another emotion which is the tragic sorrow of not being understood. And all around them the yelling haole highschool boys ran on chasing the shrilling haole highschool girls who also ran on.
“You know what?” Warden said stifledly, “we’re just exactly alike. We’re absolute opposites; and yet we’re just alike.”
“We both imagine the other one’s trying to throw us over,” Karen said, “and neither one of us thinks the other appreciates us as much as we appreciate him.”
“We curse and storm at each other for doing the same identical things,” Warden said, “and we’re both of us so goddam jealous we cant hardly stand it.”
“We imagine all sorts of horrible things,” Karen said, “and we know the other one isnt near good enough for us.”
“I’ve never been so miserable in my life as I have since I met you,” Warden said.
“Neither have I,” Karen said.
“I wouldnt trade a minute of it,” Warden said.
“Neither would I,” Karen said.
“You’d think we were old enough to know better,” Warden said.
“We ought to,” Karen said.
“I still wouldnt change it,” Warden said.
“Loves like ours have always suffered,” Karen said brighteyedly ardently. “We both knew that when we went into it. Loves like ours have always been hated,” she said, looking at him with the half-parted mouth and warm-shining eyes of a Joan of Arc that made him suddenly want terribly to take her to bed. “Society does everything it can to prevent love like ours and what it cant prevent it destroys. Securely married American men dont like to think their wives have the right to leave them—not for love, which has never bought anything yet. And securely married American women who have been talked into believing it, know they’ve been duped, thats why they hate that kind of love worst of all because they have all had to sacrifice it for security and hate themselves for doing it so much they dont want anybody else to have a chance at it. Because if they ever once admit its true, then both their lives and their men’s have all been for nothing. Two or three years of foolish adolescent love in their youth—that they gave up and convinced themselves they had outgrown.
“Thats why its so important we dont lose ours; thats why we have to fight so hard to keep it; fight all of them, and fight ourselves too.”
“Yes,” Warden said.
“And theres only one way, Milt. The only way we can defeat them is to make our love conform to their conventions—outwardly. We can keep the core of it private and clean, but if we dont conform it outwardly they’ll end up by not only killing our love but us too.”
“Yes,” Warden said. “And the only way we can conform it is for me to accept the customary hogwash of success so we can give it the security. Its easy for you, whose job is to handle the core. But I’m the one who has to do the outside conforming. I have to make the living, that the security depends on. I’m the one who’ll have to agree with them and do things their way.
“All my life, from the time my goddam brother became a priest, I’ve fought their beef-eating middleclass assurance. I fought everything it stood for. I’ve made myself stand for everything they were against.
“Who do you think it was put Hitler up? The workers? No, it was the same middleclass. Who do you think gave the Communists Russia? The peasants? No, the Commissars. That same goddam middleclass. In every country everywhere that same middleclass holds every rein. Call it Fascism or call it Individual Initiative or call it Communism, and you still dont change it any. Each country calls it by a different name so they can fight all the other countries that look liable to get too powerful. I’ve stood up against all of that, I’ve stood up for me Milt Warden as a man, and I’ve made a place for myself in it, by myself, where I can be myself, without brownnosing any man, and I’ve made them like it.
“And now I’m supposed to go on and become an Officer, the symbol of every goddam thing I’ve always stood up against, and not feel anything about it. I’m supposed to do that for you.
“You’re the bait in the trap. They know how to work it, dont think they dont. What does dear mother do when sonny comes home from college all full of revolt and dissatisfaction with the way the world has always been run?
“They find him a sweet young thing thats around handy that he can get his gun off on and relieve himself and they finagle till they got him married to her, and then sonny quiets down to his duty and lets his revolt run off out through the head of his penis and accepts the status quo.”
“I’m not the bait,” Karen said. “I dont want to be the bait. I hate it as bad as you do. You must know that.”
“Do you think the pig tied in the trap for the tiger wants to be bait? And how much good does it do him?”
“Is that really the way you feel about it, Milt?”
“Thats the way I feel. All my life I’ve had to fight for one thing, the one thing nobody wants a man to be, to be honest. And now, to become an Officer— Did you ever see an honest Officer? that stayed an Officer?”
“Then you cant do it.”
Warden grinned at her combatively. “Yes, I can. And I will.” If she had told him he could do it, instead of letting him tell it to her, he would have been indignant and angry. But now, with her looking at him brimmingly admiringly, he felt a great sense of power that comes with accomplishment. “I’ll shove it up all their asses,” he told her, “and steal the bait out of the trap without springing it and to hell with them,” and he believed every word of it with her watching him proudly and he felt Milt Warden swell up stronger in Milt Warden then he had ever felt Milt Warden.
“We are just alike,” Karen said. “We’re just alike.”
“And I wouldnt trade a minute of it,” he said.
“Oh, Milt,” Karen said. “I dont want to be bait, Milt. I love you, Milt. I want to help you, not hurt you.”
