Loving Women

by Pete Hamill

  “Can we talk about this downstairs, Mister Cannon?” she said quietly.

  “Suits me.”

  We went down in the elevator and out through the main lobby to the parking lot. A gray U.S. Navy car was parked near the entrance. It was empty, so I was certain that Red had come alone. I looked out at the streets beyond the lot.

  “Don’t even think about runnin, sailor,” Red said.

  I shrugged, and stared at the ground, feeling small and trapped and vaguely ashamed. I’d made a mess of things. Eden put her arm around my back. When I looked up, Red was lighting a cigarette and staring at some giant magnolias beyond the lot.

  “Tell you what,” he said, still not looking at me. “I’ll give you till tomorrow morning. Sunday. Ten o’clock. You meet me in Jackson Square, right at the foot of that statue of Jackson, you hear me? We’ll go back together …”

  Then he looked at me, took a drag, let the smoke leak from his mouth, and said: “If you don’t show, I’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

  Chapter

  72

  Eden had seventy dollars and I had thirty-five, an immense fortune; we pooled the money and checked into the Royal Orleans Hotel. She handled everything. She registered us and paid cash in advance and led us across the hushed lobby under the crystal chandeliers to the elevators. All the while, she acted as if she were escorting a prince instead of a malarial AWOL sailor in filthy clothes. At the door of room 401, she slid the key into the lock and looked at me in an odd way and then opened the door and waved me in first.

  The room was large and dim with a huge double bed and French doors leading to a small balcony. She turned on one muted light and then pulled down a corner of the bed coverings. On the walls, there were dark-brown landscapes in gilt frames and whorling velvet wallpaper out of another century. Then she took my face in her cool hands and kissed me gently. I held her tightly for a long time, trying not to cry, and then we fell together to the bed: everything in me entering her, midnight bus rides, beaches, nights at the shrimp place, the trailer, the woods; again we were on the flat rock in the middle of a nameless stream, the water Alabama red and flowing around us; again we were in the time before she taught me the names of birds and trees, animals and clouds; we were among thorns, smoke, vines, sand, petals, stones, clay, in blood too and kisses and magnolia and fear.

  Eden, I said, mouth to her ear, sweat of my belly mixed with sweat of hers. I want you forever, Eden.

  And she said, No, digging nails into my flesh, No, there’ll be nothing after this, biting my lower lip, saying This is all this is everything there is only this and this and this.

  Until we rose and fell and twisted, hissing each other’s names, and dug heels and nails into silk sheets; and fell back.

  Empty.

  Cool.

  Drained.

  We ate shrimp and steak from room service and drank a bottle of champagne (my first) and she laughed at the way I held the dainty glass and then she belched loudly for a joke and I laughed too and we didn’t talk, didn’t say what we had to say, didn’t accuse, account, define; and then were in bed again, more desperately than ever, full of loss and departure. I wanted to drink the darkness, the champagne darkness of Eden Santana.

  You must go, she said. You must find out. With me you would live only a retreat. My retreat.

  Then I was lost again, in some gray and chilly corridor, with the piss-colored fog seeping into my skull, hearing music, Charlie Parker and Gregorian chant, Webb Pierce and Little Richard, bagpipes from the Antrim fields and drums from the Cane River, and I knew what was beyond the fog: the endless cemetery where love was buried.

  You must go.

  Fear shaped itself in the fog, fear with the same dense volume as desire, fear that could grip me and smother me, and I was afraid then of dying the way love dies, to be placed in some stainless-steel drawer where there was no loving woman. The fog advanced.

  You must find out.

  And almost dying, I rose in final anger, and grabbed life.

  It’s all right, child. Don’t you worry none.

  Eden Santana: with a cool cloth to my brow, kissing me, handing over tablet and water, the glass cold in my hand. Gray light leaked through the shutters. I heard the thin distant sound of a saxophone, announcing closing time in a honky-tonk. She eased back into bed beside me and held my hand. Her dark skin felt very cool.

  Don’t die, she said. Don’t die on your own. Don’t die of fear or doubt or darkness, child. You got too much living to do yet. You gotta go from here, from me, and remember that the going is the easy part. It’s the living that’s hard. I’ll be with you wherever you go now. You know that, don’t you? But you must go. Not go back. Go on. Put your hair beside the hair of a thousand women. Kiss a thousand mouths. Give them all what we gave each other. Love them all and let them love you back. Then you’ll know I’ll always be there. They won’t know, but you will. Because when it’s over and you have made love and she has got what she wanted and you have got what you wanted, you will still be alone, Michael. Still loving me. As I love you. Wherever we are.

  Her voice was a whisper in the dark high-ceilinged room. She was certain: with me she’d finished things. I was no longer what I was the night I first saw her on the bus, and wanted her, and felt her hands in the dark. I wasn’t that boy anymore. But I was still only a perhaps.

  So you’ll go from here like a man, she whispered. And you won’t be afraid. Not of the world, not of the Navy. They can’t do anything permanent to you, Michael, no matter how hard they try, just as long as you’re alive. So kiss me one last time now. You gotta go all too soon. Gotta go like a man. Got to go on and live.

  Chapter

  73

  I am driving through the Gulf night, the radio playing in its permanent present tense. It is four in the morning. Pensacola is behind me. The news announcer says that the Attorney General of the United States has appeared before still another grand jury. The Challenger space shuttle has been delayed again because of shoddy work. A new strain of AIDS has arrived from Africa. The weather will be hot with scattered showers. Suddenly, the news is over and Frank Sinatra is singing. In the South once ruled by Hank Williams and Webb Pierce.

  Each time I see a crowd of people

  Just like a fool, I stop and stare

  I know it’s not the proper thing to do

  But maybe you’ll be there …

  The song is old. Out of the fifties. When Sinatra was aching for Ava Gardner and proving that even artists can be fools. I begin to sing along, as if old dead skin is being peeled away, and for the first time in years, I can feel the emotions behind the banal words. The window is open to the warm night. I see houses, shopping centers and factories where there was once only emptiness. And I fill with the woman I loved across all the years, the woman who went with me to all those other beds, and into three marriages, the first and best loving woman among all the women I’ve loved.

  I say her name out loud.

  And again.

  And once more.

  Eden.

  On this road, years before, Red Cannon took me back to the Navy. I went without struggle. For the first hour out of New Orleans, he drove in silence, the .45 slung to his hip. In Gulfport, I looked out at the pine woods and the little streams and the great stretches of swamp. I felt forlorn. As we turned down to the beach, we could see thunderheads over the ocean. Then Red said, “Need to take a leak?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  “Figured. Those goddamned malaria pills do it to you.”

  He pulled across the highway into a gas station and sat there while I went around the side to the men’s room. For a moment, I thought about running. But I’d given Red my word. And I knew that if I ran, I’d be running for the rest of my life.

  When I came out, Red was leaning on the fender of the car, drinking a Coke. His back was to me. He must have known I wouldn’t run. I came around to his side. He was staring out past the beach at the sea. The SP
band was off his arm and the cartridge belt and holster were gone from his hip. They were lying on the front seat, the .45 still in the holster. We had become two sailors heading back to base. He drained the Coke bottle and dropped it in a trashcan, still gazing at the Gulf.

  “Wish I was out there now,” he said.

  I smiled. “Me too.”

  Red looked at me for the first time, and shook his head.

  “You’ll get there,” he said. “Soon enough.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Not from where I’m going.”

  He curled his lip.

  “Where in the hell you think you’re goin, sailor?”

  “Portsmouth prison?”

  “Shit,” he said, and sneered. “You ain’t important enough for Portsmouth prison.”

  He got in behind the wheel and I slid in on the passenger side. He lifted the gun and cartridge belt into the back seat, then started the car and pulled out onto the road. He glanced at me in a disappointed way, as if I were just another one of the people who had failed him.

  “You’re lucky, sailor. That jarhead’s okay. Just a busted head, which won’t ever do a Marine no damage. You’re lucky for another thing too: the captain likes you, for some goddamned reason that’s beyond mah ken.”

  Someday when all my prayers are answered

  I’ll hear a footstep on the stair …

  I shut off the radio.

  Remembering that Red was right. Pritchett called me before a captain’s mast, which was less than a court martial, allowed me to blame the malaria, restricted me to the base for a week. I shipped out a few weeks later and truly began my long hard run through the world. I don’t know what happened to Red Cannon. I never heard another word about Bobby Bolden. I don’t know what became of Becket or Harrelson or Boswell, Captain Pritchett or Chief McDaid. Max and I wrote to each other for a while, and I saw Sal once when I was on leave in New York. But then the addresses changed, as they do when you’re young, and we moved around some more, and we lost all contact. I started three different letters to Miles Rayfield’s mother, but never could get the words right and gave it up. Out at sea, waiting to go ashore in Cannes, I got one letter from Dixie Shafer saying she was selling the Dirt Bar because it just wasn’t as much fun anymore. I sent a card back, but she too vanished into the darkness. I suppose some of them are dead, casualties of the cigarettes or the whiskey or the Nam. The others live on, full of golden stories.

  But as the years slipped by, I would sometimes hear a fragment of a forgotten song, or feel a breeze on a deserted beach; I’d see a river on a summer morning or a house trailer at the side of a road or a woman in red shoes—and I’d want to know what happened to Eden Santana. And across all those years I was afraid to find out. I never went back to New Orleans. I didn’t want to learn that she had grown old. I didn’t want to hear that she had made her peace with James Robinson. I didn’t want to believe that she was dead. But in a thousand places and a thousand dreams she lived on in me as she had said she would one fevered morning long ago, under the chandeliers of the Royal Orleans.

  O Eden!

  Suddenly, illuminated briefly in the high beams, I see a sailor in dress whites. I haven’t picked up a hitchhiker in twenty years, but I slow down, the car’s momentum taking me past him. I stop and wait and see him in the rearview mirror, running toward me, an overnight bag in his hand. I unlock the door on the passenger side.

  “Hey, thanks, man,” he says. He has the two pathetic stripes of a seaman deuce, a sunburned face, crooked teeth. A kid.

  “Where you going?” I ask, pulling onto the highway.

  “New Orleans,” he says.

  “It’s a good town.”

  “The best,” he says. “My girl’s there.”

  “So’s mine,” I say, driving fast across the dark tidal fields of the Gulf. My heart is racing. My palms are damp. I am no longer old.

  FICTION

  A Killing for Christ

  The Gift

  Dirty Laundry

  Flesh and Blood

  The Deadly Piece

  The Guns of Heaven

  The Invisible City

  NONFICTION

  Irrational Ravings

  To the Memory of

  SAL COSTELLA

  NICK OCHLAN

  AND

  MILTON CANIFF

  About the Author

  PETE HAMILL was born in Brooklyn in 1935. He has been a professional writer since 1960, when he gave up a career as a graphic artist to become a general assignment reporter for the New York Post. He has since published six novels, one collection of short stories, one collection of journalism, and has written many movie and TV scripts.

  He is the father of two daughters, Adriene and Deirdre, and is married to writer Fukiko Aoki. They live in New York City.