Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  “Reverend,” Sal said, in a smooth, radio announcer voice, “do I look like a drinker? A rowdy? Why, I read in the Pensacola Journal about how you’re helpin’ all the young people with your wholesome dances and I tell, you, Reverend, the things that go on in the Navy, they just would turn your stomach. My friends here, they feel like me, they want a little goodness in their lives, somethin’ truly wholesome and truly American.”

  The extra prick quivered again, as if sensing the presence of the wiles of Satan, but unable to prove anything.

  “Well,” the preacher said, “you’ve been warned.”

  He turned around and went into the hall. Sal then leaned down to the two young women. One was about fifteen, her hair tied back in a ponytail; her grin was crooked from trying to hide braces, but her breasts rose impressively beneath a dark-blue cotton dress; I had a tough time keeping my eyes off them. The other was a woman: maybe twenty-two, a strawberry blonde, thin, with a disappointed mouth and hungry eyes. “Well,” Sal said to the younger one, switching to his Rhett Butler voice, “you sure are a dee-lahtful lookin’ youngun.” And then turned in a more courtly manner to the older one. “And you must be her baby sister.” She struggled against a smile. “Can I have the honor of the fust dance with you, my darlin’?” She giggled and the younger girl flushed. “Ah do hope,” Sal said, “that it will be a waltz …”

  He took his three tickets, and turned to us. “Gentlemen,” he said and led the way into the hall. The younger one said, “Yawl have fun, y’heah?” And the older one stared after Sal.

  The hall was very crowded and there were more women than men. “Will you look at all the ginch in here?” Sal whispered. “Am I smart or am I smart?”

  “Yeah, but listen to the music,” Max said. “What do you dance to this music?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sal said. “Because the broads don’t care. All their guys are off at the war someplace, and they’re here. The guys write these stupid letters, all full of moony romantic bullshit from greeting cards, and the women are sittin’ around, living with their mothers, or worse, the guy’s mother, and so they go out … Looking … And how can they go to the Dirt Bar? Or Trader Jon’s? Where can they go where the old man won’t get pissed if he hears about it? So they go to church. I mean, just look at them: gettin’ wet just seein’ us walk in the door.”

  “I still don’t know what to dance to this music,” Max said.

  “It bothers you so much, don’t even try,” Sal said. “Just go out in the woods and fuck to it.”

  We moved along the side of the crowded hall. The band was up on a raw pine stage, the musicians dressed in coveralls and flannel shirts and straw cowboy hats: two fiddlers, a bass guitar player, a balding man on piano. There was no drummer. I remembered reading in Down Beat that for centuries the drum was banned in the South because the old slave owners were afraid the slaves would use it to send messages. Messages like “Kill the fucking owners tonight.” So for rhythm, hillbilly music depended on bass players and the strong left hands of piano players. This band was playing “Jambalaya,” with the piano player handling the singing in a nasal Hank Williams twang; he couldn’t sing, but he did have a hard left hand.

  We walked casually along the side of the hall, studying the girls. They were all sizes and shapes, big and fat, tall and skinny, short and round, and some with big-titted narrow-waisted long-legged big-assed bodies right out of the movies. The tall girls wore flats and the short girls wore heels. None of them wore makeup, the devil’s paint. They were clustered in small groups, their eyes darting in our direction, for a second locking into contact, then shying away, dissolving into giggles. And moving among their fleshiness, their hair and cheeks and breasts, their sweet milky odor, I thought about Eden Santana.

  The following night I would be with her, but this was Friday, not Saturday, and there I was, out on the town with Sal and Max, looking at other women and aching for them. What was wrong with me? How could I feel the way I thought I felt about Eden and still want to take one of these horny Baptist women off to the dark woods? And then I thought: Why not? She could be out somewhere with Mercado: right then, as I stood alone in the crowded hall. And suppose she didn’t show up on Saturday night? Suppose she treated me like some dumb kid? Another sailor, to laugh at. Anyway, I just had a date with her. I wasn’t going steady with her, for Chrissakes. I wondered how she would look here at this dance and what I would think of her among all these young women. But that image just wouldn’t come. She was from somewhere else in the world, not New York, but not here either. And then (not yet eighteen, not yet an ex-Catholic, a virgin except for Dixie Shafer’s fleshy embrace) I felt oddly guilty, as if just being there was a kind of betrayal.

  “Get’em while they’re wet!” Sal whispered, and hurried to a group of girls, peeled off a small stocky blonde and led her to the dance floor. “He’s nuts,” Max said. “Committable.” Sal was dancing with the blonde in a wild foot-stomping hee-hawing style that made the girl laugh and forced other dancers to clear some room. A brown-haired girl came over to Max. “Come on,” she said, “we’ll show your friend!” And then a tall redhead took my hand, and said, “Hi, I’m Evelyn” and we were all out on the floor, dancing and yelling, and following Sal’s moves, mixing them with Lindy Hops and jitterbug and a little bit of mambo, cutting one another with sudden moves, putting on a New York street show (I thought proudly) until the number ended. Evelyn was breathless. “Well, than kyew,” she said, and looked scared. I said, “A pleasure.” And she hurried away. I wasn’t sure whether it was my dancing or the word “pleasure” that scared her, but she vanished into the crowd.

  I stood against the wall while another tune played, and Sal and Max exchanged girls; I wondered if this was the way people lived all over America, meeting in these places where nobody smoked or drank, where they all danced to corny music and drove home later or walked, where after a month or two they kissed and worked their way up to feels in parked cars before they got married and lived happily ever after. Maybe that was the way the whole goddamned American thing really worked. The scene made me feel sad, knowing that I should want it, like all good red-blooded Americans did, but also knowing that somehow I might never be a part of it, or even truly want it. I could spend my life the way I was on that night: standing there watching the women, with their excited eyes and their soft and succulent asses and tits, full of mystery and power, able to put out, as we said, or to withhold, while I tried so desperately to find the words or the moves that would unlock the mysteries between their thighs. And if that was my fate (I used such words then), I might end up as I was at that moment: alone.

  Then, for the first time, I noticed the men. Maybe the same thoughts were moving through them; maybe they too were in thrall to the power of cunt and had no defense except to surrender to the power of God. If you had a fever in the blood, you could console yourself with life after death by postponing your life; heaven or hell might cool the flood. Gazing at them, I started drawing them in my head. They would be easy to draw, with their bony angular faces, no fat to disguise cheekbones or blur the jaws. Their mouths were mostly slits, turned down in resentment—of me and Sal and Max, maybe, or the Communists who were subverting America, or of women: women who’d gone off, women who’d said no, women who’d taken their money or their hearts: and if not women, maybe the resentment came from life itself. Drawing their eyes would be harder. Most of them were squinty, but the eyes themselves were hidden behind the squint, and I’d read somewhere that eyes were the windows of the soul; how could I draw them right? But as I looked closer I did find eyes buried in the squints, and saw coldness, anger, above all certainty, as if something had given them a faith I’d never found in New York; and that would be harder to get right. I watched them until they looked at me and then I shifted my eyes to the door, where more people were still arriving. The older ticket seller was now dancing with Sal. And then I saw a young woman across the hall and I wanted her.

  She was stan
ding alone, wearing a yellow dress, her hands entwined in front of her. Her hair was dark brown, her oval face very white and she seemed lonelier than anyone else in the hall. Except possibly me. I moved toward her, edging my way around the side of the hall. I tried to look casual, didn’t want her to see my interest, didn’t want to give her the power to say no. I wanted her to think I was as cool, say, as Clifford Brown, without the shades (knowing that she had never heard of Clifford Brown or his golden trumpet, but not knowing who she thought was cool). I would be—what was the word?—aloof. Hell, I was a man from the biggest city in America. And she was from Pensacola, Florida.

  As I drew closer, I saw that she was one of the few women at the dance who was wearing makeup and the reason was obvious: beneath the powder, her skin was pitted with acne scars. The band rose into a Western swing groove, and she shifted her eyes to look at the musicians. And then turned back directly to me. Her eyes seemed to say: Please ask me to dance. Please. You’ve come across the room and if you see my skin and walk away, I’ll be humiliated. Dance with me. Please.

  “Dance?” I said.

  “Sure.”

  Aloof.

  I started doing a Lindy, but she was awkward, not knowing what to do with her hands, trying to keep up, watching my feet. But then the music changed again, this time to a ballad: “I Can’t Help It If I’m Still in Love with You.” The girl’s hands were damp and she used them to keep me at a distance, not pushing me off, but holding me back from her. I glanced down and saw that she had full round breasts.

  “Sure was a shame about Hank Williams,” I said.

  “That’s the truth,” she said. “He just didn’t live right, I reckon.”

  “I reckon not,” I said.

  “Hope he got himse’f straight with the Lord.”

  “Yeah.”

  I told her my name was Michael (and glanced again at her breasts) and she said her name was Sue Ellen. I tried to press closer, just to feel the edge of those tits against my chest, and failed, and she looked up at me in a doubtful way. When I returned her look (thinking: her face, not her tits, look at her face) she averted her eyes. When I tried again to move her closer to me, she gave a few inches until I could feel the warmth of her flesh; she said nothing, but her hands were wet. I couldn’t see Sal or Max now on the crowded floor. The piano player was trying hard to sing like Hank Williams.

  “This is some sad song,” I said.

  “Yeah, it is. ’Course old Buddy Jackson up there, he ain’t no Hank Williams.”

  “No, but he’s doin’ his best,” I said, trying to get into a southern rhythm. What did I call her? Sue? Ellen? Swellen? “You live around here?”

  “Up the road a piece,” she said. She took a deep breath, as if trying to get up courage. “You in the Navy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Navy man, that’s me.”

  “My daddy’d kill me, he knew I was dancin’ with a sailor.”

  “That so?”

  “Same with all the other girls here,” she said. “Sailors ain’t too popular in these parts. Hope I don’t hurt your feelin’s, but I reckon you know that anyways.”

  “No,” I said, “I guess sailors aren’t ever too popular. Except when they’re dying in some war.”

  It was shameless bullshit. But she looked at me and frowned.

  “I’m not sayin’ I feel that way, Michael. I’m saying’ some folks, well, they—”

  “I’m not just a sailor, Sue Ellen. I was a regular human being until I joined up.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess people should keep an open mind.”

  “And I won’t be a sailor all my life either,” I said. Thinking: Come on, man, be cooler than that. Leave it alone. Go for the pussy. Don’t lay this Navy crap on too thick. The tips of her tits are brushing your chest.

  “No, I reckon that’s the truth, Michael. Still, you’re a sailor right now and if my daddy walked in this minute he’d have me whupped.”

  “No!”

  “He sure would.”

  “Can’t believe he’d whup someone pretty as you,” I said. “A grown-up woman.”

  She paused, then her eyes examined me, a puzzled furrow on her brow. Maybe grown-up woman was the password. She was about five four, and when I glanced down at her, I could see her breasts heave anxiously as she hit me with the big question.

  “You a Christian?”

  I smiled. Cool. The man from New York. Experienced. A traveler. Aloof. “Well, not really,” I said. “I mean, I was raised as a Catholic, but—”

  “You were raised as a Catholic?”

  Fucked.

  She backed up, as if I’d told her I had the mange. “Yeah,” I said, “anything wrong with that?”

  “Uh, well, I don’t know. Yeah. I mean, uh—I never did meet a Catholic before.”

  I’d fumbled, then tried to recover. The band played harder now. I heard nothing, saw nothing; I needed words.

  “Well,” I started to say, “I was raised one, but I don’t think I’m one anymore. You a Baptist?”

  “Methodist.”

  “See, I can’t tell the difference,” I said. “Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Anglicans, First Reformed, Second Reformed …” I suppose I was trying to give the impression that none of these distinctions mattered to me, and the only distinction being made was by her. “It’s all a little nutty to me …”

  She stopped dancing and squinted at me, her eyes vanishing the way they did in the slits of the men.

  “What’d you say?”

  “I said it all seems a little nutty to me. You know, religion.”

  “Religion seems nutty to you?”

  “To tell the truth: yeah.”

  “Well, I never—”

  We were near one of the poles along the edge of the dance floor. I had seen people say Well, I never in comic strips and heard the words on the radio; but she was the first live human who ever said them to me. Well, I never— I thought the next word I’d hear was “pshaw.” She looked flustered, and that made me feel like an even bigger man of the world. Something I’d said had actually made her react to me. She’d think I was sophisticated, fearless, a rebel. And instead of shutting up, or telling lies, bending my knee to Jesus the better to see up her dress, I went on talking.

  “I mean, here’s this Jewish carpenter, Jesus, who died two thousand years ago, and all over the world people are still arguing about what he said, and killing one another over it. Does that make any sense? And—”

  “You better mind what you’re saying.”

  “They’re all Christians, aren’t they? So why are they all split into a hundred different groups? It’s nuts. Jesus—”

  “You said he was a Jew! You said the Lord was a Jew!”

  “Well, he was. He was born in Nazareth, he went to the synagogue, he—”

  “He wunt no Jew! The Lord wunt no damned Jew! The Lord was a Christian!!”

  She turned abruptly away from me, pushing people aside, heading toward the front of the hall. I went after her, sorry I’d talked so much, saying: “Hey, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Sue Ellen!”

  Then I saw that some faces were turning to examine me or gaze after Sue Ellen. A few dancers stopped. I saw them talking, nodding at me, and wondered where Sal and Max had gone. Then I saw a heavyset man in a tight shiny blue gabardine suit go to Sue Ellen. I came closer, still hoping to recover my lost moment, take back the words, try to find my way to those luscious hidden tits. He took her hand, as if about to bow and kiss it. Then he turned to face me. He had small abrupt features bunched together in a large round face. Staring at me, he said to her: “What’s the problem, Sue Ellen?”

  “Buster,” she said, “this sailor said the Lord was Jew!”

  “Now, hold it,” I said. “What I said was—”

  Buster said to me, “You said the Lord God, our Savior and Redeemer, was a Jew?” Then louder, as he dropped her hand: “A Jew?”

  I tried to smile and turned slightly, keeping Buster in my sigh
t, and saw Sal coming through the crowd. The band was playing loudly now. Then I saw Max coming over too. I relaxed (or grew braver, knowing I wasn’t alone). And then saw that Buster was no longer on his own, either. Two, six, then a dozen young men were assembling behind Buster and Sue Ellen. In this sudden formation, they looked like some odd football team where the quarterback had big tits and a pockmarked face; she looked at me now as if possessed, suddenly realizing that she could call the signals. Ah, the power of cunt.

  “What’s going on?” Sal said in a flat even voice.

  “A little theology discussion,” I said, performing my cool part as much for him as for the others. “I was explaining that Jesus was a Jew. And—”

  “See?” Sue Ellen said, as if I’d just snapped the ball from center. “He said it again!”

  Then Max stepped in and raised his hands with the palms out, like a referee separating fighters.

  “Please, please, folks, please,” he said. They waited, looking at him in a puzzled way. “I happen to be an expert on this subject. And I have to say that my friend Devlin here is right. It’s a fact of history, beyond any question, that Jesus was a Jew. I know. Because I’m a Jew myself.”

  A stunned moment, and then Buster said: “You’re a Jew?!”

  “Born and bred, my friend. A card-carrying New York Jew.”

  Suddenly the preacher was there, pushing through Sue Ellen’s brawny backfield, his face ashen, and I thought: Holy Christ, his nose has a hard-on!

  “What is this all about?” he said.

  At that point, we could have bowed, shook hands and gone off to the Dirt Bar. But Sue Ellen then changed the terms of the debate. She pointed at Max, her eyes wide.

  “This boy … this boy’s a Jew!”

  Her face was all snarled up now, her eyes indignant.

  “And this one, that I made the mistake of dancing with, this one says that the Lord was a Jew!”

  The preacher turned to me, his erect nose throbbing. But before he could say anything, Sal stepped in. He began to speak in a British accent, even drawing on some secret supply of phlegm.