by David Malouf
After the formal hectoring of the bullring, the roars of official rage and insult that were a regular thing out there, Dave Kitchener's voice, which seldom rose above a whisper in the room, was unnerving. They felt his breath at moments on the back of their necks. Then, too, there was their nakedness. They were like plucked chooks—that's how Greg felt. Goose-pimpled with cold and half-asleep on their feet, they stood, while the voice wove round and round them.
“What I'm trying to do is wake you up to things. You're so wet behind the ears, both of you, you're pitiful! Have you got any idea how pitiful you look? Because your mothers love you and you've been to nice little private schools, you think you've got it made. That nothing can touch you. That you're covered by the rules. Well, let me tell you, lad, there are no rules. There's a war on out there, you're heading right for it, and there are no rules. Oh, I know that's not what they tell you in those jolly pep talks they give you. What I'm talking about is something different. The real war. The one that's going on all the time. Right here, now, in this room.” He laughed. Greg heard the spittle bubble on his tongue. “The one where they've already got you by the balls.” He stood back, looked them over, turned away in disgust. “You poor little bastards. You don't even know what I'm talking about, do you? You should see yourselves. You're pitiful. You're fucking pitiful. I'm wasting my time on you.”
He would go on like that for the best part of an hour, a mixture of taunts, threats, insults, concern, and blistering anger at the quality in them that most offended him, their nave confidence in things; which he was determined to relieve them of, and which they were unable to give up—it belonged too deeply to the power they felt in themselves, the buoyancy and resistance of youth. Greg discovered after a time how to handle it. You did just what you were ordered to do down to the last detail, with scrupulous precision, as you never did out there on the bullring. Not in mockery of the thing itself—that would have been to enter into collusion with him, for whom this was already a mockery— but to mock his authority with its limits. Your body obeyed to the letter. The rest of you stayed away.
Their last day in camp was a passing-out parade. Several of the older fellows were to get commissions, which would entitle them to wear their caps without the virginal white band. Three of them were getting wings.
The bullring dazzled in the sun; they sweated in their heavy uniforms. A band played. The voices of the drill sergeants leapt out and they responded. “Stand at ease, stand easy.” Dave Kitchener was there, his cap straight, his collar fastened. He saluted when the others did.
Watching from his company in the ranks, Greg was puzzled by a kind of emptiness in himself, a lack of connection with all this. Something in him had moved away, and might have been lounging off there in the shade of one of the huts, with its spine against a wall and the curl of a smile on its lips, bored now with the whole show: these movements that were so fixed and refined that the discipline they embodied seemed like another nature, the swing of their arms that brought the rifles down, the clunking of boots, their bodies aligned and responding as one to snapped commands. His own body was too constant for him not to remember that he had performed these movements smartly elsewhere. He had an impulse to make some deliberate error and break the line. He closed his lids and swallowed. “Eyes right!” The image that fixed itself in his head was of the bullring empty, lit only by the moon, with the bluish shadow of the flag-mast, also empty, falling far across it.
He saw Cam Brierly only once in the following year. They were no longer the youngest, and since that had been the only thing in common between them, they were free to keep apart. They never spoke of Dave Kitchener or made any mention of the night training. In time, those shameful episodes took on a quality of unreality that belonged to the hour, somewhere between one and three in the morning, when they had taken place: the hours of regulated dark when they, like all those others laid out in officers’ huts and barracks, should have been safe under the blankets pursuing innocuous dreams. It was almost, in the end, as if they had been. Greg's anger faded in him. So did the sense of injury he felt. When sometimes, in the following years, he thought of Dave Kitchener he understood, from the midst now of that other war he had spoken of, what it was that had fired and frustrated the man. He felt a kind of pity for him.
It was about this time that he had a dream. He was standing once again beside Cam Brierly's bed, looking down at the sleeping figure from a height, a distance of years, and with a mixture of tenderness and awe that arrested every possibility of movement in him. He could no more have leaned down and broken the other's sleep at that moment than woken himself. Some powerful interdiction was on him. He looked back over his shoulder and said firmly: "No!”
But the one who had been there in his dream was not there to hear it. He found himself staring into darkness, fully awake.
Sally's Story
Sally Prentiss was one of those girls who in the last days of the Vietnam War were known “the widows.”
For a week or ten days as required they would set up in a one-bedroom apartment—thoughtfully supplied with candles in a kitchen drawer for intimate evenings and a box of geraniums on the sill—with an American GI or marine (sometimes an officer) who, for months amid the welter and din of war, had been hoarding some other dream than the ones that were generally on offer at the Cross: an illusion of domestic felicity in the form of a soft-mouthed girl and the sort of walk-up city-style living that is represented by an intercom and a prohibition against the playing of loud music after eleven o'clock.
To lie in until midday while the sun shone in on the bedcovers, then go off to the beach or an afternoon movie, then come back and fuck— but in a leisurely way, with no need to hurry, and with the luxury sometimes, which is another sort of pleasure, of not having to fuck at all—was the ordinary bliss they had set their sights on, a rehearsal for the settled life to come, when, their term of duty over, they would have no other obligation than to get pleasurably and without effort from one day to the next.
Sally Prentiss was an actress. That is, she was preparing to audition for NIDA. She had taken up this work because it paid better than anything else she had been offered. At just nineteen she was very aware that she had no real experience of life and she thought this might supply it. She was a down-to-earth person who knew how to stick up for herself; she did not think it would be damaging. She would only be doing it for a few months, and the men who wanted this sort of arrangement— or so she thought—would be nicer than the average, and since they would be pretending while they played house that everything was normal, would make fewer demands. They were nice for the most part, but she was wrong about the damage, and she was wrong about the demands as well.
They came in every variety, these boys, these men.
Some of them were barely house-trained. They licked the flat of their knives when they were eating—she pretended not to notice; they did not know how to wash properly or when they should change their socks. “Oh Delilah,” she said to herself in a voice of commiseration, "not another one!” She had a whole cast of voices that she used for bucking herself up or giving herself a good talking-to, or for commenting, in a half-mocking way, on the irony of things and the rebounds and reversals that made up her world.
As for the demands—of course, all some of them wanted, or thought they wanted, was sex, laid on and guaranteed at any hour of the day or night. A wife out of the porno magazines. But even these boys wanted sometimes to just hang in the doorway and, in a proprietorial way, watch her do something as simple as make her face up in the bedroom mirror or wriggle into her jeans.
They would come up behind her while she was washing dishes at the sink, shoes off, hair damp with sweat, and, slipping their arms around her waist, rock her gently against them to an unheard tune—a moment, sweetly evocative, out of an old movie they had seen on TV. Or, with an ease that suggested an intimacy so long established that it no longer vibrated with even a hint of the provocative, walk in while she was in t
he bath, lower the toilet seat, and have a good old-fashioned talk.
What many of them wanted was to have reinforced the illusion of mastery. To a point sometimes just short of brutality. But there were times when even these fellows wanted to be relieved of all that and just lie back and be petted.
Then there were the ones—she got to recognise them after a bit— who just sat around all day in their undershorts and never left the flat. They were uncomfortable with air and sunlight, or had seen too much of it. One big foot up on the edge of the coffee-table, eyes glued to the TV, downing can after can of beer, they ignored her; but at every moment, whatever she was doing, kept her in view. However far off she might move, she was never quite out of reach. Idly, almost abstractedly, without taking their eyes off the game they were watching, they would put a hand out, and with the same easy affection for the body's demands with which they might shift themselves more comfortably in their undershorts or scratch their heel, take possession of her neck and push her down.
They were almost completely cut off from speech, these fellows. Their denial of words, like their body smell, was something they imposed, on the room, on her, with a satisfaction they were barely aware of since it had to do entirely with themselves.
She put up with it but was filled with rage. This pleased some of them, though they might also use it later as an excuse for complaint, then violence. The blows were real enough, but the words they found to spit out at her, the routine obscenities, were half-hearted, a formula for keeping them excited, for reminding themselves that she was there.
God, she thought, what a nightmare! Imagining years of marriage on such terms.
Then there were the ones who felt an obligation to teach her things. Very solemn and little-mannish, their freshly scrubbed faces intent on the task of relieving her of some aspect, suddenly revealed, of female ignorance, they would deliver long, sometimes incomprehensible lectures on politics or the Market or the workings of some bit of equipment they had fallen in love with, while she, barely attending, sipped at a Coke or did her nails.
Usually this sort of boy did not care to be interrupted. All she had to do was keep nodding. But one or two of them wanted her to repeat what she had learned, and there were others who liked her to argue, but when she did would get mad and shout at her. This aroused some of them. To the point where they would all of a sudden forget that they were engaged in the business of instruction and want to fuck—right there on the living-room rug.
There was no way of guessing beforehand the quite ordinary things that would turn them on.
One moment they would be as still as a pond, everything would be relaxed and easy between them. The next they would have dived into themselves and be staring. Some gesture she had made, something she had said or done, had made her suddenly alive to their senses, provoked in them a rush of blood. What alarmed her was that for her there was no connection; she had felt nothing herself and almost never knew what it was.
There were times, faced with this impersonal power she possessed, when she wanted, quite simply, to run. But mostly what she felt was a kind of pity. They were so utterly at the mercy, these boys, of their needs; and they hated it, some of them, and could convince themselves, even while they were fiercely pushing into her, that she was the source of this fever they were afflicted with, this animal dependency without which they might have been hard and pure and self-sufficient.
They were just boys, she knew that, but they made her mad. She often quarrelled with them and said things that were mocking and cruel, but only in her head. Laying the responsibility for their failings on her, making her responsible for their weakness, was unfair. They did not play fair.
But the quality in them that she found hardest to live with was their restlessness. They were always looking at their watches and could not settle. Something was always missing. And this was just what they had feared. That having survived and come so far, the thing they had come for might still be out of reach, or be happening elsewhere, and at every moment time was passing. “Peter, Paul, and Mary,” she whispered, "save our souls!”
But she saw at last that this was only part of a larger fear, and she learned after a time never to look, never to really look, into their eyes. What she saw there when she did was scary and might be catching. She wanted to keep clear. But there was no way of touching them and keeping clear.
She had thought, since they had been through so much and were boys, were men, that they would by now have learned to deal with it; or that being here in the quietness of the city, with a glint of sunlit water at the end of the street, they might forget. But they did not. It wasn't a mental thing. So long as their body was there, big and pulsing with heat, so was the fear. They brought it to bed with them, in dreams from which they woke shouting, and the only thing then that might drive it off was sex. Terrifyingly possessed, they thrashed and sweated in the effort to push their body through to the other side, gasping at the limit of their breath, crying out into her mouth. And when they subsided and lapsed immediately into unconsciousness, it was a dead man's weight that was on her, a dead man's sweat she was drenched with.
All this, she came to understand, was why so few girls were willing to do this work and why those who did the same work, but on a onetime or one-night basis, held them in contempt. They gave too much of themselves: it was indecent. And “widows,” they carried with them the taint of death.
She had thought this was ridiculous when she first heard it. Mere superstition. She thought she could outface it. But more and more now she had her doubts, especially in the last days of an engagement, when she had to deal with the ways—different in each case—in which these boys came to accept that their time was at an end. The war wasn't over. All they had done was step for a while out of the immediate line of it.
They paid the price then for their escape into make-believe, and she for having let herself, as she did at times, get too close. But how could she help it?
In a moment when her guard was down, when one of them was tickling her ear with some breathy story of the small town he came from, she would get a glimpse—that's all it took—into the odd, individual life of him; at the small naked creature in there, beyond the boastfulness and swagger, that was helpless and soft as a worm.
Often enough it was something physical that did it, the mother-of-pearl whiteness of an appendix scar, or some blemish she had not seen before, and which close up filled the whole of her view. Suddenly a body she had managed till now to touch without touching was there, heavy with its own meaty poundage, and hot, and real. It made their last moments together, if she did not deal sternly with herself, very nearly unbearable. As if, in allowing his body to lay itself bare to her, in her touching of it, there, and there, it was death itself that he had made himself open to, and what she was feeling out in him was the entry-place of a future wound.
As for the partings themselves, they too could take any form, and though they were final enough, were not always the end.
In some cases, the boy had already begun to leave a day or more beforehand, moving away in his head. All she had to do then was stay quiet and small while he got on with it. Others avoided the actual moment. Leaving her curled up in bed, they would pretend to be slipping out as usual to get the paper or a packet of cigarettes. She would lie there waiting to hear him lift his bags, which had been sitting all night in the hallway, then hold her breath for the last clicking of the latch.
But some wanted to believe that this was only the beginning. They would write, they would be back. She smiled and nodded, stirring her coffee with too much vigour. She hated to lie, but let herself cry a little, and her tears after a moment were real.
Then there were the ones who put on a turn. Like spoiled kids, toddlers. Big-shouldered in their freshly laundered shirts, they would sit beside their bags looking so plaintive, so stricken, that she had to pull the sheet over her head to save herself from the awfulness of it. You saw so nakedly what was being snatched away from them.
/> With the sheet pulled close over her head she would hear him deep-breathing out there, pumping himself up. Huh huh huh, on ten now!
She began to feel haunted. By so much that remained unfinished, unresolved in her relations with this or that one of them.
A phrase would come back to her, or a look, that was so sunny, so touched with ease and well-being, that she thought it must belong to some boy she had known back home. Then she would remember. It was one of them. Jake, or was it Walt, or Kent, or Jimmy? So this is what it means, she thought, to be a widow. She felt as if she had already, in just a few months, discovered things that made her older than the oldest woman alive. She had used up too many of her lives, that is what it was, in these phantom marriages.
At school last year their English teacher, Miss Drury, had given them a poem to crit. “To speak of the woe that is in marriage" it was called. It was American. Modern.
She was good at English. It was her best subject. “Woe,” she had argued, was old-fashioned and melodramatic, a poet's word. Now she saw that the feeling it carried, the weight in it of all that was human and hopeless, made it utterly right. She knew now what it meant. Pay a fine of one hundred dollars, she told herself, and return to Go! She considered writing to Miss Drury and telling her of this late enlightenment, though not the means by which she had come to it.
Perhaps it was a recollection of simpler days, of HSC English and Miss Drury, that made her decide to take time off and spend a week or two at home.
But by the second day she remembered again why she had left.
Her mother worked at a check-out counter in the one-storeyed main street of the little country town, where all the cars were angle-parked to the kerb and everyone knew one another and there was nothing to do.
Boys, as soon as they were old enough, congregated at the pub, spilling out barefoot in stubbies and football jerseys on to the pavement, which was lined with empty glasses. The girls, overdressed and with too much make-up, walked up and down from one of the two coffee-shops to the other, much preoccupied with their hair, too brightly on the lookout for occasions they feared might never occur. At home, after work, her mother took photographs of little kids in their school uniforms with slicked-down wetted hair or all decked out in white for their first communion, then, at the weekend, of wedding groups. She had a studio and dark-room on the closed-in back verandah and rented a window in the main street, full of examples of her work: smiling couples, good-looking boys in uniform, cute tots.
