Now, though, lying sleepless and waiting for the day to pass, he felt incapable of putting together any coherent thoughts at all except the bleak and persistent idea that nothing in the world made sense. There was no sense to be made of forces and events in this house, and nothing would make sense at the parking lot tonight either, when he padded around collecting his quarters and dimes. It probably wasn’t much more than a beggar’s job anyway: if he stopped showing up there every night he doubted if anyone would notice. Drivers would park their cars in the right places; the “planning” would take care of itself; people would find their way in and out of the restaurant without the help of Phil Drake’s goofy flashlight. Still, going to work would be better than staying home.
Rachel was alone in the kitchen—it was her turn to cook—so it was she who gave him his supper there, and that was a good thing because he felt he couldn’t have put up with his mother’s company tonight.
“Well, I’m pretty sure I’ll be having the baby before you go back to school,” she said, “so at least you’ll—you know—get to know each other a little.”
“Yeah; well, I hope so.”
Maybe it was true that Rachel loved everybody; if not, or not quite, she certainly knew how to give a convincing performance.
“And you mustn’t mind if Evan seems a little abrupt and rude these days. I think it’s mostly that he doesn’t quite care for the idea of becoming a father—of becoming a father again, that is—but he’ll get used to it.”
And Phil assured her that he understood.
His time at Costello’s that night was little more than a daydreaming or sleepwalking through the job, and not long after midnight he made his first dumb mistake of the summer.
The left-hand border of the parking lot was indistinct—you couldn’t say where the restaurant’s property ended and the shadowed part of the lot belonging to a Gulf station began—and the manager had cautioned Phil about that tricky place the day he took the job. It might work to Phil’s advantage on busy nights, he explained, when you could fit three or four extra cars along the far side of the invisible line—the guys at the Gulf station would probably never complain—but Phil ought to be on the lookout for high-school couples who might want to park there just to “park.” If possible he should use the flashlight to discourage them even from pulling into that area—they all ought to know by now that it wasn’t any lovers’ lane—but once they were settled out there it was probably best to leave them the hell alone.
The trouble tonight was that he wandered too far into the tricky place and opened the passenger’s door of a car filled with sex: one couple writhing in the front seat and another in back. An open bottle of whiskey fell out at his feet and dribbled into the pebbles; there was a glimpse of a girl’s bare tits before she shrieked and covered herself, and the other girl in back called “Well, hello, Galahad,” in a voice that sounded too deep and husky for high school—all this before he shut the door again and started to walk away as if nothing had happened. For ten or twelve paces he expected one or both of the boys, or men, to rush him from behind and spin him around and beat the shit out of him, and when he made a clean getaway he guessed it was only because there’d been enough light to let them see how young and foolishly innocent he was. The car soon started up, made its turn on Gulf station property and sped away into the distance of Route Nine, but Phil was still trembling for a long time afterwards, and the flashlight was clammy with sweat in his hand. He felt stupid—the only saving grace was that nobody from Costello’s had caught him in his blunder—and for the rest of the night he forced himself to stay alert whether his memory was haunted by the girl’s tits or not.
At three thirty, half an hour before quitting time, the service-entrance door swung open to cast a yellow light across the lot, and a hoarse old voice called out to him. “Hey, kid, wanna come on in?” It was the gaunt dishwasher who’d once called him a sad case, but this was plainly another kind of occasion.
“Well, but I’m supposed to stay out here until—”
“Ah, fuck the cars. This is more important.”
Everything inside the service door was brightly and buoyantly alive: they were having a party for Aaron because this was his last night’s work before going into the army.
The kitchen and pantry were packed with well-wishers—even the night manager was there with a drink in his hand, laughing—and Aaron moved happily among them, shaking hands, pausing to kiss the girls in a decorous way. He still wore the white shirt and black bow tie of his job, but his apron had been flung into the laundry hamper for the last time.
“Well, hey there, Phil, glad to see you,” he said in passing, and Phil was pleased that he’d remembered his name.
Wooden duckboards from the kitchen floor were stacked against one wall to make a little stage; the Portuguese headwaiter climbed onto it and reached down to help Aaron up to stand beside him; then all the party sounds were hushed as the headwaiter gave an introductory speech, so heavily accented that only a few phrases of it were clear: “… our high esteem … our continuing admiration … our profound best wishes.” Next came a presentation, by one of the waitresses, of two gifts for which all employees except Phil had evidently chipped in: a silver wristwatch and a silver serviceman’s identification bracelet. And when the applause had faded again it was time for Aaron, still flushed with thanks and embarrassment, to say a few words.
“Well, I don’t quite know what to say,” he began, “except to thank you all—and I mean really thank you, with all my heart. Oh, and I’m glad my girlfriend Judy is here with us tonight, too, because I’m always trying to think up new ways of impressing her, and this is the best one yet. Up to now it’s mostly been a matter of dropping hints about what a hotshot football player I was, and the trouble with that one is it’s never been true: I was a very mediocre player. Even in my senior year I only got into two or three games when our side was ahead by about thirty-six points, but I always figured she’d never find out because we went to different high schools fourteen miles apart and we didn’t even know each other then. So anyway, there are the facts, honey”—here he turned briefly to a laughing girl at the front of the crowd—“and I can’t tell you what a relief it is that I’ll never have to fall back on that line of bragging again.
“No, but the main thing I feel tonight, apart from great friendship for all of you—oh, and apart from knowing how much I’m going to miss you all, the whole time I’m away—the main thing is I couldn’t have dreamed of a nicer goodbye.
“I don’t suppose any man knows what to expect in the army. There’ve been plenty of movies about it, but the movies don’t even pretend to show the truth about the army and the war, any more than they ever show the truth about love.
“I hope I’ll be assigned to the infantry because I’ve always liked the idea of it; then if they ever do make an invasion of Europe I hope I’ll be sent there, instead of the Pacific, because all my people are Jewish. Still, you never know; I might wind up as a supply clerk or a payroll clerk in Nebraska or someplace like that.
“Well, I know I’m talking too much, but I’m almost finished. The only other thing I want to say is—I want to say God bless you. God bless you all, dear friends, and goodnight.”
A few of the girls were crying as they helped to swell the long, cheering ovation, and young Judy climbed up on the platform to embrace him and to press her face against his sweated shirt.
With the party ringing all the way home in his head, Phil Drake was almost ready to believe once again that things could make sense in the world; and if nothing else he knew he was going to sleep like a fool.
Rachel was alone in the living room that evening, seated comfortably under a good lamp with a sewing basket that might have been chosen as a prop to make her seem the very picture of a contented young wife, when Phil came downstairs.
“Evan go out?” he asked her. “Where’d he go?”
“I don’t know,” she said, and then after snipping a piece of thr
ead with her teeth she gave him a more complete reply. “I don’t know where he’s going because I didn’t ask. Not even married couples have to know everything about each other all the time, you see. We all deserve a little privacy now and then, don’t you think?”
“Oh, well, sure,” Phil said quickly. “I didn’t mean to sound as if I—well, sure, I know. Of course.”
Then their mother came in from the kitchen, absently touching up her hair, and said “Has Evan gone out, dear? Where’s he going?”
Even with occasional traffic lights turning against him, Evan made excellent time across the great flat width of the Island. He was almost to the intersection of Route Twelve before he stopped to make the necessary call at an outdoor telephone booth.
“Would it be ‘making a habit of it,’ ” he inquired, “if I come over to your place tonight?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say I’ve had more than my share of men,” Mary was saying as they lolled conversationally in her bed a few hours later, “but I wouldn’t want to say I’ve had less than my share either.”
She was lying on her back with the top sheet drawn up an inch above her nipples, not even seeming aware of what a tantalizing sight that made, and Evan was a little sorry he’d gotten her started on this particular line of talk.
“And I think I’ve done about my share of the dumping, too,” she said, “rather than being dumped. No, but the only one I might’ve married was this young lawyer I worked for, in the first job I had after college. We were together about a year and I thought it was really wonderful until he came home from a trip to Kansas City and told me he was in love with an airline stewardess. The funny part was I didn’t believe him—I thought he was kidding—but he wasn’t, so there wasn’t anything to do but get out of that office and take the first job I could find, with some dumb little chain of drugstores in Hempstead; that only lasted a few months before I went to work at Bailey’s, so now you know practically everything.”
In exchange for that information she wanted, pleasantly, to hear more about the time of his engagement to Rachel, and soon he had blundered into letting her know the most regrettable part of the story.
“Oh,” she said when his voice had faltered and stopped. “So you didn’t get laid until after the wedding.”
“Well, I mean we sort of did. Yes and no. Look, it’s hard to explain, okay?” And now he was stuck with having to explain it. “Our first time was when I took her to some lousy old hotel on West Twenty-fifth Street, and I think the hotel was a bad mistake in itself. She was so shy and frightened and terrifically nervous up in that room that I got very nervous too, in some funny way that I couldn’t even figure out, and we didn’t really—you know—we didn’t do very well together. Then the other times were when I borrowed an apartment in Jackson Heights from this guy I know at the plant, only neither of those times were a hell of a lot better. So by then I was ready to think Well, okay, what the hell? Why not get married right away, then, and let the sex part of it take care of itself in time. Do you see?”
“Sure.”
“So that’s what we did. I think everything took care of itself within a couple of nights, and we’ve been perfectly fine ever since. And I mean we’re perfectly fine now, except I keep wishing we could’ve made a stronger start. I think she does too.”
And if Mary were really a tough girl she might have laughed then, but there wasn’t any laughter in her thoughtful face.
“Well, I think it’s sad when anyone feels this pressure to get married,” she said. “Even if I were pregnant again I don’t think I’d feel any extra-special need to get married. I like being single, you see. I like the freedom of it and the way it keeps teaching me new things about myself. I suppose that’s an attitude I learned in college.”
“Yeah, well, and so what the hell else did you learn in college? How to read all these fucking books? How to make your bed six inches off the fucking floor?”
He rolled heavily away from her, got up with some difficulty, and made for the kitchen to get more beer. He was furious without quite knowing why: maybe because he’d told her all that embarrassing stuff—it was never a good idea to spill your guts to a girl—or maybe because she’d spent a year in love with a lawyer.
“Well, Evan,” she said quietly, “I think college might help broaden your own perspectives quite a lot; or would you rather be a mechanic all your life?”
He turned on her in the kitchen doorway. “I’m not a mechanic,” he told her with a fierce pride of trade. “I’m a machinist.”
But after making that one important distinction (and she should have known better than to say “mechanic,” for Christ’s sake) he found he wasn’t angry any more. Bringing two cold beers back into the main room, he said he was sorry; then he told her he fully intended to go to college as soon as he could afford it. “And I may have enough by next year this time, because we’ve been saving money on a regular basis right along—every week; every month.”
Her bed looked too low to sit on, so he took his beer to one of the only two chairs in the room and tried to settle there instead; but he wished he had a bathrobe because it felt funny to be sitting bare-assed in a chair.
“Oh, I hope it does work out for you, Evan,” she was saying. “And I know you’ll love the life of it, once you get started. It sort of opens up whole new worlds for you, in ways you couldn’t possibly have imagined before.”
“Yeah, well, I’ve heard that part. Every college graduate I’ve ever met wants to tell me about the new worlds opening up. You people all have the same line, whether you know it or not. It’s like talking to a member of the Communist Party.”
And that seemed to strike her as funny enough to elicit a sweet, bright ripple of laughter. He had almost forgotten how nice it could be to see Mary laugh like that, with her eyes dancing. Then he was back in bed with her, where he belonged: he had flipped the top sheet down to her knees and he was having her again, as if she were the only girl he had ever known.
Sometime later, when he was getting dressed to go home, she said “Oh, it’s such a pleasure just to watch you walk and turn and move around; it always has been. And you know what else I used to love? I loved to watch you get into your car and drive away—just because it meant you knew exactly what you were doing, and because you always did it so well.”
“Charles?” Grace Shepard said at lunch one day. “I suppose I might as well go and meet Mrs. Drake this afternoon, if you’re still determined to take me there.”
And her statement sounded so deceptively casual that he didn’t trust it at first. He tried to look as though he were thinking it over; then he said “Well, as long as you’re willing, dear, I can just as easily arrange it for tomorrow, or for sometime over the weekend; wouldn’t that be better?”
“No, let’s do it today,” she said, “and get it over with.”
She had ignored her breakfast and only picked at her lunch, while smoking heavily all morning; that was one way he could tell she’d had to fortify herself before making her decision, and now the early hours of the afternoon would require her to fortify herself still further.
But it was almost the first of August now; he had long grown tired of his own argument, and he knew he’d better take advantage of her rare social bravery while it lasted.
He helped her get settled on the sun porch again—“Now, then; why don’t you just think about the nice clothes you’re going to wear this afternoon, and I’ll come and get you in plenty of time to go upstairs and change”—then, after the table was cleared and the dishes scraped and stacked for washing, he called Gloria Drake and told her they’d be over sometime after four.
He found other things to do in the kitchen when the dishes were done—you could always find work in a kitchen if you wanted it to work for you. Once he nipped into the dining room and checked the liquor supply in the sideboard, just to see if he’d made the right assumption about all that fortifying, and he had. A quart of bourbon, placed here last night with its seal still unb
roken, was now less than half full. Well, it might be a tricky afternoon, but there was no getting out of it now.
In another section of Cold Spring Harbor, a world away, Harriet Talmage was seriously vexed with her grandson for what seemed the first time in years. He was pacing back and forth in front of her chair and making wide, theatrical gestures with his arms as if she were impossible to reason with, while it seemed increasingly clear to her that he was the one beyond reason.
“Well, because I don’t especially like the woman, Gerard, that’s why,” she said. “I found her rather tiresome that day, as I must surely have told you at the time, and I saw no point in having any further—any further connection with her.”
“But isn’t that kind of rude, though? Just dumping a person that way?”
“I don’t see any element of rudeness at all,” she told him. “I was perfectly pleasant when she asked us over there last month, or whenever it was; I simply said I’d made other plans for the afternoon but that I hoped we’d keep in touch.”
“So? Won’t this just be keeping in touch? Dropping in for an hour or two? Where’s the harm in that?”
“Well, it’s hardly a question of ‘harm,’ Gerard. And I can’t imagine why you’re persisting in this argument. If it’s so terribly important to see the Drake boy, why can’t you simply ride over there on your bicycle?”
“Because it’ll be nicer this way, is all, don’t you see? Like the time they came here? Going there alone would be too obvious.”
And his saying “too obvious” gave it all away. He was still at an age when an unpopular boy might need to pursue other boys as craftily as if they were girls, and his long unhappiness at school must have taught him, harshly, that being too obvious was the worst mistake you could make. It was almost enough to break her heart.
Very seldom, in raising her daughter’s only child, had Harriet felt any real confidence that she was doing it well—there had been so many unexpected difficulties and so many hasty settlings for the easiest way. Now that he’d become a courteous deep-voiced adolescent she often felt she could take some pride in her earlier judgments after all, but at moments like this she knew better.
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