She only saw the side of his face. But oh, it was a lovely side of a face!
She put her hand up against the glass trying to hold him still, where he was, but he slipped right by because he wasn’t really there: Only the glass was.
“Good-bye, Bucky,” she breathed. “Good-bye, my heart.”
The side of his face went away, and only the glass stayed behind. And she didn’t want the glass; it wasn’t Bucky.
He carried it off by himself, like something precious, to be guarded against the whole world, to be kept for himself and to himself alone. He went into the barracks where there was no one at this hour. He curled up in his bunk with it. And that was the right word, curled; he lay on his side and brought his knees up until they almost touched his chin, made a protective half circle around it. Something of his own. A little luminous square in a dark dreary world. A letter from her.
My beloved, my own husband:
I’ve written you eleven letters before this one But you won’t get them. I never sent them. They keep telling us on all sides, “Lift up their morale, write only cheerful things, keep them smiling.” I know. I know all that. I tried. But it wouldn’t work. Why should I lie to you now? I never lied before.
And this is the twelfth. The true one. Let some censor frown and shake his head and scissor it all out. I don’t care.
I can’t go on. I see you everywhere, you’re every way I turn, you’re everywhere I go. God didn’t mean this to happen to anyone, so much of it all at one time. God didn’t mean eyes to cry so much. He didn’t mean insides to ache so much. He couldn’t have, or He would have built them stronger.
If I sit down to eat, you’re there across the way from me, but you won’t talk, you won’t say anything. I beg you and I plead but you won’t say anything. If I walk down the street, it feels so empty and so lonely there by my left arm. The cold wind comes nipping around the corner and I feel all open on that side. If I go shopping to the A. & P., I turn around and hand you the parcels to carry for me, and suddenly you’re not there, I’m holding them out above the empty floor.
And when I take the Sunday papers in from the door, the comics are always on top. . . . Why do they always have to be on top? But there’s no one to snatch at them, like there used to be, and rumple up all the other sections of the paper in the process of extracting them. No one’s hand to slap down, like I used to every Sunday. “Wait, can’t you? Wait. How old are you, twelve years old?” They stay so smooth all the way into the flat. No one wants the funnies, I sit holding them all morning, waiting, and no one takes them from me, no one giggles like a little boy over in the corner, all hidden behind them. I have to cram them down the incinerator at last, because funnies shouldn’t do that to you, they’re supposed to make you happy. Then I repent (“He still may come out of that bedroom, he only overslept this morning.”) but I can’t get them back. I run all the way downstairs to the basement, but it’s too late, I can’t get them out of the furnace.
You’re everywhere. You’re nowhere. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I wasn’t meant to be a hero’s wife. I was just meant to be Bucky’s wife. And they won’t let me any more. What can I do, how shall I last? Tell me, oh tell me, my darling, tell me quickly, for I can’t hold out much longer.
Sharon.
. . . I’ve taken your advice. I’ve applied for a war job. They asked me what I could do; I told them “Nothing.” They asked me what I wanted to do; I told them “Anything.” I told them I wanted to work where there was the most noise, the most glare, the greatest number of machines and people. They didn’t ask me why. They just looked at me and they seemed to understand. . . .
. . . It’s like a strange new world, but it keeps me from thinking of you. There’s such a clatter, I can’t hear your name. There’s such a glare, I can’t see your face. It’s what I wanted. We’ll wait out this war that way, you and I. We’ll fool them yet. . . .
. . . I’m a machine now. I don’t feel or think. I don’t hurt. All day long I’m numb from the noise, too numb to hurt. All night long I’m numb from exhaustion, too numb to hurt. I look like a machine too. Dark goggles, you can’t see my face. An aluminum hood, you can’t see my hair. Heavy gauntlets, you can’t see my hands. Overalls, you can’t tell I’m a woman. They all laughed at me because I wore a dress the first day I reported to work. I was the only one in the whole plant in a dress. The men asked each other, “Where have I seen one of them before?” And then they’d say, “That’s a girl; you remember. One of them soft things they used to have around before the war.” And then they’d say, “What was they for? I forget.”
At least I don’t hurt.
And time is on my side. On our side. Every day is a day longer the war has lasted; but it’s also a day shorter it still has to go. Don’t you think the halfway mark has already slipped by without anyone knowing it? Say you do, say it has! Maybe it was yesterday, maybe even the day before.
There once was a thing called Peace. Remember it? Remember? Long ago and far away . . .
. . . My bench mate looks as much like a machine as I do, but she’s still a girl underneath, very much so. (She doesn’t have to be afraid of hurting, I guess.) She loves without getting hurt. I don’t know how it’s done, but she has some kind of a system. “It’s just like crossing the street,” she says. “Go fast, and dodge a lot, and you don’t get hit.” She has dark red hair, I’ve seen it on the street, going home, and so they call her Rusty. If you call her by her right name, she doesn’t recognize it any more, she doesn’t know it’s her. “I wondered who that was,” she says. I have clocked her. They usually last about a week apiece. “Stores give you a week on returns,” she says. “Why should I take any longer? Otherwise they’re liable to show wear.” Wednesdays seem to be her days for “taking ’em back and shopping for a new one.” Don’t ask me why. Every Wednesday regularly she has a new one out “on approval.” I have to hear all about them, over our sandwiches.
She has a new one now. He came up to her just outside the gates, as she was leaving the plant with the rest of the crowd. . . .
When she saw that he was corralled, cut out from the rest of the herd, and practically pleading to be branded, she gave him an armful of rope. She practically gave him a whole lariat. Let him step into it and then tugged the knot closed.
“What do you know?” he said. A question that wasn’t to be taken literally. He didn’t care about her mind.
“What do you know yourself?” she replied. She didn’t care about his mind either.
He tipped his hat, that outdated, forgotten prewar custom in these circles, and that pleased her. It was almost like having your hand kissed.
She just kept going, and he trotted along beside her, fast to her saddle now.
Demureness was even more outdated than hat-tipping. It would have been about like throwing a curtsey.
Nobody kidded anybody else. There was no time. You came to the point.
“You taking me anywhere?” she wanted to know.
“You name it.”
She did. “All right. Harry’s, down by the Square.” And then, just so there wouldn’t be any financial obstacle, she added, “Don’t let it throw you. I’ll go Dutch if it worries you; I’m making ninety a week, and the damn stuff ’s getting in my way. I gotta kick it under the mattress at nights.”
“Who said it worries me?” he said. “It’s just on account of looking like I do. . . .”
“Everybody goes in there looking like us. What’re we supposed to do, change clothes? There’s a war on.”
On the way he said, “Where’s your friend tonight?”
She said, “Oh, her.” Then she said, “Oh, you noticed her, hunh?”
He quickly said, “Only because she was with you.”
“You can’t get her to go out,” she said. “She’s one of these war widows. Just sticks around the room all night. Y’ought to see her. She even changes to skirts when she gets back home.”
They went into Harry’s dine and dan
ce joint, and they fought their way to a table. They had to share it with another couple, but though their elbows grazed and their smoke drifted into one another’s faces, the two parties were as isolated from one another, as exclusively self-contained, as though they were a thousand miles apart. Neither one existed in the other’s awareness.
They had a warm-up drink. They gave each other their names. His, he told her, was Joe Morris.
“Have another,” he said, when that stage was past.
“Do you want me drunk, or do you want me to know what I’m doing? It don’t have to make any difference, because I can be just as easy to get along with when I know what I’m doing.”
They had another. Then she said, “Let’s limber up. It’ll help make the drinks go down.”
They got up and went out where the dance floor was. You could see flashes of it at times under people’s feet, but only very briefly.
The eighteenth century had the minuet. The nineteenth had the waltz. The nineteen forties had arrived at a state of delirium tremens, which could be turned on and off, however, without the intervention of straitjackets and attendants.
He spread his legs and shot her through to the other side, like a mail sack going down a chute; then braked her and jerked her back again, and she—miraculously—found her feet once more and stood upright before him. Then he bent down and rolled her across his back, from the left side to the right, and dropped her down to the floor.
Nobody collided with anybody else. Or if they did, it was just like another dance step anyway, you couldn’t tell which was the mistake and which the intent. Except that the accidents looked a little better, maybe.
They got through and they complimented one another.
“You’re good,” she said.
“You’re all right,” he said.
They had two more drinks. Then they each had a sandwich, to soak up some of the liquor. Then, with the room this gave them, they had a final round. Then they got up and went out. They’d had a quiet, pleasant, completely average wartime evening together. A little on the slow side, maybe. No fights or anything.
He walked her home to the door of her rooming house.
There he took his arm away, and left hers hooked around an empty space. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said.
She gave him a blank look. Not a resentful one so much as a completely puzzled, uncomprehending one.
“Then what the hell was the whole evening’s build-up for? Just nice sisterly companionship?”
He took a moment to answer, looking at her steadily the while as though wondering ahead of time how she would take a projected answer he intended giving her. He smiled at her with an odd mixture of candor and sheepishness.
“I wanted to get to meet your friend,” he said.
Her slam of the door was like the explosion of a cartridge shell.
He withdrew one foot from the doorsill, but that was the only move he made. As though he had read her deep and unerringly, in that look of a moment ago.
The door reopened. He was still standing there. Her bray of laughter split the night. She thrust her hand out in proferred partnership.
“I never could stay sore at anything in pants longer than thirty seconds. Come around tomorrow night. I’ll fix it for you.”
She said to Sharon the next night, about a quarter to eight. “Come on downstairs to the company-room, I want you t’do something for me.” She seized her arm, tried to propel her forward with windmill energy.
Sharon said, “What?”
“I want you t’meet a friend of mine.”
“Can’t she come up here? What’s the matter with that?”
“It’s a fellow, it’s a guy.”
Sharon drew back, dug her heels in. She couldn’t budge her after that.
“Look,” Rusty pleaded, “I want you t’do something for me, I want you t’do me a favor.” She spread out her hands in excited expostulation. Then she dragged a chair out into the middle of the room and sat Sharon down on it, by pressing against her shoulders; as if there were a better chance that way of getting her to listen to reason. Then she dragged another chair over, set it face to face with the first, and sat down on that one herself.
She leaned forward in intensity of inquiry, palms to knees and her elbows cocked out akimbo.
“Look, you like me, don’t you?”
“Yes, sure, you’re all right,” Sharon said, a little uncertainly, as if realizing that if she committed herself on this point she was probably also committing herself to more than just this.
“Well, wouldn’t you do something for me if I asked you to, wouldn’t you get me out of a fix?” And then to influence the answer, she added craftily, “I would, if it was you asking me.”
“What kind of a fix?”
Rusty dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper, though there was no more danger of their being overheard now than there had been a minute before. It made for better dramatic effect, however.
“I been going with this guy for some time now,” she rasped. She semaphored her hands violently. “He’s a nice guy, nothing wrong with the guy himself. Only tonight I—well, I made other arrangements. He’s down there now waiting for me; I don’t want to just turn him down flat.” She took hold of one of Sharon’s hands, patted the back of it coaxingly. “Take him off my hands just for tonight. I’ve got a date with somebody else, and I can’t break it. I would if I could, but I just can’t.”
“Can’t you tell him that yourself?”
“I don’t want to do it that way. I don’t want to hurt his feelings. You go out with him in my place. Will you do that for me?”
Sharon rose from the chair and stepped around to the rear of it. “I’m married. I don’t—”
Rusty squinted, in an effect intended to convey chaste abhorrence. “This has nothing to do with that. It’s not that kind of a date. I wouldn’t ask you. Poor fellow’s all alone, it’s just friendship. You don’t have to care for him. Can’t you just keep’m comp’ny for me? In half an hour you ditch him and you’re home.” She threw up her arms overhead, in dramatic termination.
“I don’t like the idea,” Sharon said, narrowing her eyes in remote speculation. “In all the time Buck’s been away, I never did that yet. I’m not going to begin it now. I don’t see why I should let you talk me into—”
“What’s the matter, don’t you trust yourself?” Rusty couldn’t resist flinging at her cattily. “All right,” she said, without giving her time to answer that, “all right.” She did some more hectic hand passing, this time before her own forehead, as if warding something off. “We won’t talk about it any more. Subjick’s closed. We won’t say another word about it. Forget I asked you.”
She slung the two persuader chairs back where she’d gotten them. Her mien was that of a thoroughly disillusioned but patiently forebearing person. “Just goes to show you,” she said. “Human nature’s a funny thing. You pick a girl to be your friend. You break her in at the plant. You speak up for her when the foreman bawls her out. You share a room with her. You do everything you know how. And then the first little thing you ask—” And then, quickly warding off any prospective appeasement, though none had been offered up to this point, she concluded, “All right, skip it. Let’s forget I mentioned it.”
Sharon shook her head hopelessly. She gave a deep sigh. She looked at her whimsically. Finally she stepped up behind the martyr and took her briefly by the shoulders.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to take it that big— All right. I’ll go. You and your social complications.”
Rusty suddenly launched into a flurry of grateful preparation and assistance without wasting time on any intermediate stage. “All right, here, this all right? Or how about this one, you want to wear this one?” She danced around her in circles, she tried to become so helpful so fast. “Want a little of my lipstick, the new shade?” She tried to apply it herself, on the hoof, but Sharon deftly averted her face.
“All right, now come on, I’
ll take you down and introduce you.” She hustled Sharon out the door before her, as if afraid she’d change her mind if given the chance.
He’d been sitting there in the downstairs room listening to the radio, carefully ignoring another man waiting for some other girl in the same house at the same time.
He stood up. He didn’t look as bad as she’d feared.
Rusty gave them a whirlwind introduction, above the radio.
“Joe Morris, this is Sharon Paige.”
“Mrs. Sharon Paige,” Sharon said quietly but firmly.
He gave her an odd look that she couldn’t quite fathom. Certainly, whatever it was, it wasn’t disappointment. Almost, you might have said, there was a grim satisfaction in it.
Rusty gave each of them, impartially, a clap on the back. “All right, you two run along,” she said. “Don’t wait for me.”
“Would you like to take a walk?” he asked Sharon deferentially.
Her acceptance was almost driven out of her by Rusty’s vigorous nudge in the kidneys, unseen by him behind her back. She didn’t answer directly, but turned and led the way out into the hall, to show him she agreed.
He followed. Rusty brought up in the rear.
After he had already gone through the front doorway, however, she brought him back to her momentarily with a surreptitious but sharp hiss. He returned to where she was waiting, and they stood there with her forehead almost meeting his chin, they were so close.
“How’s that for fixing?” she breathed.
Without a word he took something out of his pocket, in such a way that Sharon couldn’t see him do it from where she was, peeled off the top layer, and crushed it into Rusty’s unprotesting hand.
She didn’t look down. But she wasn’t surprised either. Her hand closed up like a small, voracious pink octopus feeding on something.
She gave him a portentous wink.
He winked back at her.
Somehow, there was something a little cold-blooded about each wink. They weren’t the lighthearted glancing things winks are supposed to be.
She thumped him familiarly on the chest with the back of her hand.
Rendezvous in Black Page 9
