Dress Gray

by Lucian K. Truscott

  He gazed around the familiar bedroom. Against one wall was a desk stacked with letters and unopened bills and family photographs and old magazines and used airline ticket envelopes. A blond Art Deco dressing table with a huge circular mirror was clean, save for a hairbrush, silver with natural bristles, and matching hand mirror. Atop the night stand on the opposite side of the queen-size bed was a glass of water and two aspirins. Hanging on the cut-glass doorknob was a nightgown, ankle-length pale gray silk with hand-embroidered lace around a square neckline, low-cut. On the floor, partially obscured by the nightgown, was a white telephone. A long twisted white cord snaked through the door and disappeared down a hall. Above him, yards and yards of steel-gray satin were gathered into a tent, peaking at the center, draped to the ceiling above the corners of the bed, falling to its edge in four perfect fabric columns. A cathedral of gray satin. Outside, the street snarled with the impatient sounds of Madison Avenue traffic.

  “Ry? Ry? Are you awake? Are you up?” Her voice was high, strident—a morning voice. The shower had stopped its insistent beat against the tiles, and he could hear her padding around, out in the hall. It was a long hall, leading from the living room to the bath, bedroom on the left, a long row of closets and built-in storage to the right. The closets were mirrored, full-length, and fit tightly together so the hall appeared to have a wall which was one huge mirror. Behind every mirror—opening at the touch of a finger on the left edge—was a vertical stack of drawers, notched, of white Formica, shiny, like they’d been hand-lacquered. A thick white carpet ran from one end of the hall to the other, parquet flooring showing on either side. The ceiling was high, maybe twelve feet originally, but dropped a foot and inset with spotlights which could be controlled with a rheostat. Somebody had done one hell of a job on that hallway, Slaight remembered thinking when he first saw it.

  “Yeah. I’m awake,” he said. “Still in bed. Man, I’m worn out. Beat.”

  “Stay there,” she commanded. He did. The bed felt good, a damn sight better than the web-seating of the C-141 Starlifter Air Force cargo plane he’d flown in the day before, on the way back from Fort Bliss, Texas. No air conditioning, stuffy, smelly, guys sleeping with heads leaning forward against duffel bags between their legs: Nightmare.

  “What will you have for breakfast?” she asked from the hall. “I have … for you, I have toast and coffee. Will that suit you?”

  “Fine,” he said, flopping back against a pile of pillows, trying to remember what had happened when he came in late the night before. He couldn’t focus, mind slipping and sliding back and forth in and out of fatigue-induced semi-consciousness. His eyes drifted. Between the pillows next to him was the small pillow. As she slept, she clung to it, a six-by-six-inch square of fine linen, flat, almost completely empty of feather stuffing. He remembered watching her before she fell asleep one night … it seemed like a long time ago. She cuddled the little pillow. The sight of her would have been pathetic, he remembered, but she was so content the square of linen against her bosom, a thin bandage of a smile on her lips. She had been unashamed, explaining she never slept without it. He touched the little pillow, picked it up, held it against the stubble on his cheek. It was soft. He tossed it on the bed and closed his eyes, hoping to nap. The small linen pillow was only one of the things he couldn’t figure about Irit Dov. Never could. Made him feel … nervous. He scratched around his ankles, pulling the gray satin quilt up around his shoulders. She heard him.

  “I said stay where you are.” She bit off the words like biscuits, her voice reaching toward that peculiar lilt, almost British but not quite. Slaight drew the quilt around his shoulders, warding off the chill from the air-conditioner, purring away behind one of the curtains. His underarms stank, an odor like swamp gas, the body’s mix of fatigue and sex. It smelled good. He inhaled deeply. Decomposing pits. He chuckled.

  Summer leave. Fuck. Am I ever gonna chow-down for a month. Slaight’s eyes dropped closed, and his mind drifted again….

  Most of the time at West Point, you were so goddamn lonely you lived in your own head in a fantasy world constructed of safe racktime and dangerous dreams. But you didn’t live up in your head really. You lived down in your belly, down there inside you where all your reactions come from. It was … necessary.

  All day, every goddamn day at West Point, everything was hit … react … hit … react, a hell of a lot like boxing, an endless series of blows to the solar plexus, the face, the neck, the stomach, with no time-out to back off and relax. Breathe, reach out, and grab air. Absorb. Never relax.

  They used to scream it, yell it like marching cadence in plebe boxing. Hit. React. Hit. React. Some little OPE bastard named Malloy; with a face like a river rat and a body like cast-iron sewer pipe, he was about sixty-five years old; and he’d stand there in those black pants with gold stripes down the legs and shiny black leather ripple-sole coaches’ shoes and his T-shirt with “OPE” and the academy crest over the left tit, he’d stand there with his face coming just under the top rope of the boxing ring and he’d scream at the top of his bloody Irish lungs: Hit. React. Hit. React. You never forgot that face or those words and it never ended.

  The closest you ever came to leaving that little spot down in your belly, the closest you ever came to relaxing, really relaxing, was fucking. Even then, it was only half-release. Parole instead of freedom. For this reason, because they wanted it so much, because they needed it so goddamn much, cadets were really good at fucking. It came natural like taking a leak after a reveille run and feeling that cold shiver run up your spine; fucking was just something you did because you knew you needed to fuck the way you knew you needed to piss. Release. Let it fuckin’ go.

  Cadets fucked for fun, fucked for love, fucked for sport, fucked to satisfy the humid animal lust of goddamn barracks life all week long, fucked for money even, like male hookers, betting their bodies and their hard-ons against the streets of New York City on a five-dollar weekend they’d find a body and a bed before the bars closed. Most of the time it was charged with tension, quick and hot and sweaty and tinged with a smoldering, smoky smell, like you seared the hairs on the back of your hands getting too close to a heat stove on a cold night in the field, sex so fast and hot it burned. Getting laid by a cadet, Slaight used to guess, must have been for a girl what a wet dream was like for a guy: You couldn’t remember what had happened when it was over, but you knew it felt good.

  Girls were kind of … functional. They fit into the machine like an idler wheel, taking up the slack and keeping everything running more or less smoothly, and when somebody put the hammer down, they were always there to … flex … absorb … take the shit when the guys just plain couldn’t take it any more. They were different, like another species—like cats, maybe. Soft where guys weren’t soft … bony, angular, where guys were muscled, hard … wide, padded with extras, where guys were stripped down like hot rods, efficient. They looked different and they acted different and they talked different. More … grown-up.

  Cadets were always punching each other in the upper arms and saying stuff like … hey, say hey, big fella, c’mon let’s toss a couple down on the Plain … say wha? … say, fuckit man, let’s get us some rack … when them plebes spose’t come round for SI, anyways … getting fuckin’ tired of those zit-faced little pingers … oughtta bottle ‘em up and ship ‘em out with the Japanese fuckin’ current…. Cadets talked like high school football coaches with perpetual hangovers. Girls talked nice all the time, like they understood what a shitball place West Point was and all they wanted to do was make you feel better. Used to piss a lot of guys off, all that nice-ness, because it was hard to figure where it was coming from, and at West Point, you were taught the ancient male dogma that if you couldn’t figure where something was coming from, best to duck and wait and listen and watch before assuming it was friendly.

  So girls had their function, but they didn’t … fit exactly right, like a pair of socks too small, always sliding down into the heel of your shoes
, having to stop, reach down, yank up the socks, looking and feeling like some kind of dufus fool couldn’t afford to buy himself a good pair of socks. That was the way a lot of cadets felt around girls, like they didn’t quite fit together right, because they just weren’t used to them, they were never around, and when they were, it was always awkward and strained….

  They felt the same way about weekends. Weekends were longed for, always too late to arrive, too quick to leave … there was an equation in the minds of cadets between girls and weekends. Weekends meant freedom … or parole anyway … but a weekend always ended, Sunday night at 1800, dinner formation: a lot of shuffling and horsing around and goosing and yelling at one another across the area … guys would stand around and clap their hands together … clap clap … clap clap … not because there was anything to applaud, anything to celebrate, but because there was nothing else to do at dinner formation on Sunday night. You clapped your hands together the way a football or baseball or basketball coach is always clapping his hands on the sidelines … clap clap … clap clap … nervous, frustrated, because he’s standing there, just standing around, and there’s nothing he can do.

  So weekends ended, parole ended, and so did girls. They weren’t all present and accounted for, SIR, at the Sunday dinner formation. They were temporary. What it amounted to was the plain fact that they were gone for another week. Cadets wrote letters to girls, lots of letters to lots of different girls, maybe a half-dozen letters to a half-dozen girls at a time. It was a form of contact with the outside world. At West Point, the feeling of writing a letter was just as good as the feeling of receiving one. Guys would labor over letters, work on them, etching each word carefully, like it was evidence they existed or something. You were reaching out with a letter, reaching out and touching someone … you could feel it there in that little spot in your belly as the words went down on paper, a warm sensation, molecules stirring, brushing up against one another down there in the place where you lived. Letters went out from zip code 10996 to all different kinds of cadet girl friends.

  There was the Girl Back Home. Some guys entered West Point going with the girl back home, and it never changed; they’d write her damn near every night for four long years, and they’d marry her the day they graduated, and nobody ribbed them. There was a special place in the cadet heart for the girl back home. Just about everybody had one, sometime.

  There were the Irish and Italian Princesses from the Catholic girls’ schools which surrounded West Point like outposts around a night defensive perimeter. It seemed like cadets couldn’t move in or out of the place without noticing, or being noticed by, one of those precious little things from Ladycliff, Seton Hall, Marymount—the list went on. It was like a conspiracy hatched somewhere in the bowels of the Vatican to wed the cream of American Catholicism to the cream of the American military.

  There were those snobby, snappish liberals from Vassar, the West Point of the Seven Sisters—arrogant, elitist, they were as bad-assed as goddamn cadets. It was probably because they were so much alike that more cadets didn’t go with Vassar girls, being as they were only a few miles away across the Hudson in a little town called Poughkeepsie. But Vassar just sat over there, a feeding trough for Ivy League preppies. Cadets were advised by upperclassmen from the time they were plebes to keep their distance from Vassar girls.

  There were College Girls, which is to say, girls cadets would meet at “away” football games at mixers and post-game parties. These girls tended toward sororities. If an upperclassman in a company was going with a Delta Gamma from Northwestern, it wouldn’t be long before a plebe in his company would be going with a freshman rushee from the same sorority at the same school. Sometimes college girls were traded around, used as currency within the social structure of the academy … fix you up with this fox my girl friend knows, man, if you’ll take my guard duty next week … gotta poly sci paper due, man, c’mon, I’ll even throw in a fin for the weekend….

  Then there were the Working Girls. They were usually from New York City, and they ranged from the East Side (stewardesses and the occasional Playboy bunny) to the West Side (secretaries and receptionists) to the Village (downtown ladies of questionable means). To a certain breed of cadet, in whose ranks Rysam Parker Slaight III found himself, the working girl was found treasure for any number of good reasons.

  She did not attend college and was thus not subject to dormitory hours and rules. Nor did the working girl indulge in the penny-ante social game playing which so thickly permeated cadet and college life in the 1960s. Working girls were capitalists, past masters at the you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-scratch-yours school of emotional algebra.

  She often had an apartment, sometimes one of her very own without roommates (such a girl was Irit Dov), this removing one thorny expense on weekend leaves: the hotel room. She might even cook. This was a truly rare find. Most working girls were bachelorettes with refrigerators containing the obligatory quarter pound of butter, two eggs, a two-week-old container of raspberry yogurt, the 55¢ size jar of instant coffee, and one can of beer.

  She did not raise a fuss about sex. While still a delicate matter, sex was something for which the working girl was often prepared, with birth-control devices, right there in her purse or medicine cabinet. Bye-bye, rubbers! Good evening, diaphragm, pill!

  The working girl was usually lonely. This was a character trait attractive to cadets for the simple reason that loneliness was like a permanent flu at West Point. There you were, surrounded on all sides by all these guys, all these friends, and they were always slapping you on the back and asking to borrow toothpaste and trading two skin mags for one stroke book and helping you decipher yesterday’s nuke problems … and yet walking along Thayer Road back to the barracks from the library just before taps, you could feel like the last person on earth. Working girls must have experienced much the same feeling on the subway on the way home from work. The lonely attract the lonely. This did not often make for profound relationships, but it made for convenient ones.

  There was of course a certain cross-pollination between the apples of cadet eyes. Some guys had a girl back home, who was visited on long leaves during the summer and at Christmas, and a working girl in the city, who was visited more frequently, for shorter periods of time. Weekends. The former was treated with care, the latter with precision. Cadets could be counted on. They were efficient. They arrived on time. They were nearly perfectly predictable. Early on, there would be sex. And sometimes they were even cordial, gentlemanly. Sometimes.

  This was Ry Slaight’s act for the first couple of years he was at West Point. He had a girl friend back in Leav-enworth, Kansas, a colonel’s daughter, Betty Jane Soah. And he was going out with David Hand’s sister, Samantha Hand, who was in his class year at Vassar and was … handy. But there always came a time when somebody wised-up … one of the girl friends, or maybe both of them at once, sometimes even the cadet. It happened to Slaight all at once, in May of 1967.

  He was just getting off the area after three hours of punishment tours. He was walking down Thayer Road, holding his rifle in his left hand, when he noticed a commotion up ahead. In front of Grant Hall, a public gathering place where cadets met their dates, a group of girls were passing out daisies and antiwar leaflets. It was a demonstration. Slaight walked faster, eager to see what was happening. When he reached the gaggles of demonstrators and onlookers, he thought he recognized a couple of the girls. They were from Vassar.

  He was tired and hot from walking the area and was about to turn the corner into New South Area, when Samantha Hand stepped in front of him and gave him a mimeographed sheet of paper. He glanced at the piece of paper in his hand. Across the top of the page in large hand-printed letters he recognized as hers were the words:

  DESERT! QUIT THE WAR MACHINE!

  Slaight stared at her disbelievingly. She thrust forward the daisy, smiling.

  “I tried to call you and tell you, Ry, but they said you were out walking the area, being punished. See wha
t I mean, Ry? It’s all wrong. You should just give up.” Slaight took the flower from her with his free hand, stuck it in his mouth, and began chewing it. He swallowed. He handed the leaflet back to Samantha Hand.

  “Stick it up your fucking ass,” said Slaight, turning away, walking back toward the barracks. If she only knew, he thought. If she only fuckin’ knew. Slaight had his doubts about the war, about the academy—about everything. Most cadets did. Nobody was completely immune from the urge to second-guess the cadet experience, digging around, trying to figure out what was bullshit and what wasn’t. He’d even thought about resigning. Walking the goddamn area—hot, depressed, all kinds of doubts rattling in his head like a bunch of BBs in a tin can … and his second year at the academy, yearling year, was coming quickly to an end. New army regulations said if you resigned from the academy after the end of your second year, you were subject to five years’ active duty as an enlisted man, a GI, a clean-sleeve grunt trooper. He was out there walking the area thinking about resigning the next goddamn week, just before the cutoff, and now this—Jesus—humiliated by his own girl friend in front of other cadets, some of them his classmates. He climbed the ramp back up to New South Area, flopped on his bunk, and made up his mind. He couldn’t resign now. He would graduate if it was the last fuckin’ thing he did on earth. Next weekend he walked his last hour off his slug. Weekend after that, he took off for New York City and met Irit Dov.