Studs Lonigan (104 page)

“Gee, is that all it is?” he smiled, but carefully so as not to give her grounds for thinking that he was laughing at her.

Catherine pouted, and stabbed at her pie with her fork. Studs concentrated on his pie and milk, and felt a tenseness hanging between them like a curtain dividing two sides of the table.

Studs looked up at her prepared to smile if she did, or if she gave a sign. She held her eyes on her pie, sipped coffee with the pout remaining on her plumply pretty face. He shrugged his shoulders and thought to himself, the goddamn women, how in hell could a guy please and satisfy them, and what the hell did they expect? Didn't he have enough serious stuff on his mind without this silliness?

“You're unbearable and insufferable,” she said with excessive spite.

“What's eating you?” he countered, stunned by the unexpectedness of her remark.

“Eating me? What's eating me? I'll tell you what's eating me without any waste of words. You!”

“Oh, I am, am I? Well, isn't that just too bad?” he said, unwittingly raising his voice, attracting amused glances from the counter and other tables, flushing because they were putting on a show for strangers.

“You needn't tell the whole world, either. First, you insult me. Then you try to make a public disgrace of me,” she said in a muffled but angry voice.

Hell, he guessed women just couldn't listen to reason. He finished eating in silence and sat waiting for her, smoking in assumed nonchalance.

He smirked fatuously, and, catching him, she looked back in disgust, and he hadn't really meant it, either. With her last drink of coffee, she flounced up, grabbed her coat and stamped out of the restaurant. Feeling like a fool, he arose, laid a quarter under his cup. He could notice that the lads at the counter were laughing quietly. He laid another dime on the table, and put on his coat with determined nonchalance.

He paid the bill.

“Goodnight,” the proprietor said cheerfully.

“Goodnight,” he said, hurrying out, seeming almost to feel eyes and laughter on his back.

Catherine was energetically walking along Seventy-first Street, her high heels rapping on the sidewalk. Hastening, he caught up with her and strode along at her left, breathing rapidly.

It was clear and pleasant out, and he glanced absently up at the skies, seeing star galaxies as if he were discovering them. It was nice. But he'd get a stiff neck and look like a sap walking along with his hands in his pockets and his eyes raised this way. Ahead, he saw the sidewalk, the red lanterns hanging from the railroad gates which pointed almost vertically from the street, buildings with darkened stores along the street. His mind wandered to his stocks. He forgot that she was beside him. A frail breeze tickled his neck pleasantly. He became aware of her clicking heels again. Christ, she was sore, all right, and that was just so much added to his grief.

“Listen,” he exclaimed, trying to be forceful, this quarrel dragging too intolerably on his nerves.

“You needn't talk to me in that tone of voice. I don't have to stand for it.”

“Well, come on, let's be sensible. There's no use in us going on like this.”

“You're not talking to me, because anything you say goes in one ear and runs out the other.”

“Oh, all right,” he shrugged.

An electric train passed them with mechanical gruntings. Accompanied by the sound of warning bells, it rolled into the Stony Island Avenue station. Studs watched the lifting train gates. Automobiles and a surface car shot over Seventy-first and Stony Island Avenue. It struck him how queer it was that he should at this moment be walking along this street, past a block-long prairie, and of how, five or six years ago, he had never thought that his life would turn out this way, and he'd have laughed at anybody who'd have predicted that it would. Life was queer, funny, and most of the things that happened to you came without your ever expecting them.

“I suppose you consider yourself clever.”

“I thought you weren't talking to me,” he answered, his voice as illtempered and cruel as hers.

“I'm not. Only you're walking along here, so self-satisfied, acting as if you were so pleased, with a head like a big balloon full of false pride, acting as if you thought yourself so . . . indispensable. You men, you think a girl falls head over heels in love with you, and it makes you begin to think that you are the only and the best possible thing that comes walking along. You and your conceit.”

Her remark hurt Studs, made him feel as if he had been socked in the jaw unexpectedly by his best friend, or as if he had suddenly discovered people talking about him behind his back.

“You're trying to act wise,” his voice cracked, but he continued, “Listen, baby! Don't start getting top-heavy opinions about yourself, either.”

A rush of blood seemed to charge to his face and he got more hot because he knew he wasn't carrying it off right. To appease his stricken pride, he silently exclaimed, Why, you goddamn bitch.

“Is that so?” she countered to his last spoken remark, uncontrolled tears running.

He wished they weren't quarrelling. He didn't want to hurt her and make her cry. But she made him goddamn sore, and what did she think she was, trying all this high-hat stuff on him, going off the handle the way she had, over nothing at all? And just at a time when he was worried over the money he had risked for their marriage? Just now when he felt he needed to depend on her, she pulled this trick. Goddamn nerve.

“I'll never forgive you for what you said,” she sobbed as they came to Stony Island Avenue.

“You said nothing. You were just a sweet angel, the beautiful rose of no-man's-land, full of charity.”

“I was in the right, and I've got a right to expect some consideration from you, and when you take me out you should show some interest in me, and some politeness.”

“Well, I do,” he whined defensively.

“Where? When do you give your demonstrations? I'd like to be present at one.”

“Hell, you just don't understand,” he said with melodramatic dejection.

“I guess I don't,” she replied with dragging weariness. “I just don't understand why you act so mean and hateful. To understand that a person must have as much meanness and hate in them as you have in you. And I haven't, thank goodness, so I just can't understand. I know now. I learned something tonight. I learned your real value. And William Lonigan, I can never forgive you for the things you have said to me tonight.”

Jesus Christ, when she sprang such goddamn silly chatter, he just ached to haul off and smack her down.

“I know you're a martyr, a poor stepped-on little girl, and I'm a big brute, a hairy ape of a low-brow. I know,” he said sardonically.

“William Lonigan, I hate you,” she sobbed, facing him with a compressed face.

“Well, if you do, and I'm everything you say I am, why do you go with me?”

“I shan't. I've learned my lesson. I learned my lesson,” she said like a movie actress in a dramatic scene.

She looked at him, her facial muscles contracted, the lips firm and locked as if glued together, the eyes cloudy and wet with the tears which dribbled down her cheeks. Her look told him that she had said her last word, that her dislike and anger had become unspeakable. With a forced calmness and deliberation, while her tears choked her, she removed his engagement ring from her finger and handed it to him. Accepting it, he felt that he perceived a sign of weakening in her, and he thought that maybe she was hoping he would say something to break up the quarrel. But he wasn't sure, and he was afraid to seem weak to her. And Jesus Christ, he didn't want this.

“All right, baby,” he said with a mask of exaggerated coldness for the tumbling feelings within him, taking the ring in his closed hand.

“I never want to see you or hear your voice again. Don't call me up. Don't ask me to forgive you, or to make up and forget this!” she said throbbingly.

“Jesus, ain't you acting a bit previous, as if I was going to come crawling around? Who do you think you're talking to?”

“A beast.”

He left her in tears, thinking that at least he had carried out his bluff and not backed down. He walked slowly, evenly, his shoulders flung back theatrically. And he knew he wished it had never happened and he was glad she couldn't see his face, because he was moody, and it would give him away. He counted his steps. He was tempted to look back, turn, follow her home. He couldn't, and he heard her heels racketing as she walked. If she'd come back after him. If girls were different so that he could go to her and say come on, let's drop this, and still not be afraid of seeming weak in her eyes for doing it. Hearing footsteps behind him, he slowed down against his will. But they grew fainter. Going home alone. Crossing the street, he again heard feminine footsteps behind him. But it couldn't be her. A strange girl, tall and slender and neatly dressed, swiftly passed him. He looked after her. He thought of Catherine brooding, regretful.

He had won the quarrel by leaving her alone at night, sobbing in the street, and it was a victory which now impressed him as not having been worth the winning. He could tell anyone about it, and stand before them as one who hadn't backed down, or taken any crap. And he liked the idea of people seeing him as that kind of a guy. And yet, he had to pay the cost of it now, he had to think of her crying, walking home alone, never seeing her again. That was an idea he didn't like so well.

He lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he'd been smoking. He felt a sudden sense of freedom, and realized now that after becoming engaged to Catherine, he had thought of her in almost everything he had done or planned to do. He'd had to consider not only himself but also Catherine in his ideas about the future, and that had been a change he hadn't even noticed in himself. And now he was free to think only of himself, and not of how she'd fit into the picture. And he didn't have to worry the same way about money. It was like being released from a kind of jail, he told himself, the same way he used to feel as a kid when the last day of school was over and the summer vacation had really started.

He remembered her sobbing voice. He had said things that had cut her deeply. A girl had her vanities, all girls, and a guy ought to know that. He'd hurt her. He smiled, enjoying one or two of his cracks, but he knew that it was a miserable enjoyment, and he wished the cracks were unsaid. Even so, she'd had no right to go making a mountain out of a mole-hill.

He shook his head, feeling like hell, not even knowing what to think, remembering her crying, her face when the angry tears had come against her will. Would she go home and cry all night in bed, not able to sleep? He was sure that she did care for him, no matter what she'd said. Poor kid, she must be feeling in the dumps this minute as she walked home. What the hell, if he had taken a little, just to straighten things out! He should have shown himself the stronger. But then, if he had taken crap, she might have lost her respect for him. He couldn't make up his mind, that was all there was to it.

Feeling almost chained under the bed covers, Studs tossed, wishing that he could sleep. He lifted his left foot outside the covers, the breeze from the opened window cool upon it. Lying almost semi-crosswise, he perceived Martin in the darkness on the small cot across the bedroom, and he emptily listened to his brother's even breathing. He saw the blue patch of sky against the dark background of the apartment hotel across the street, with streaks of moonlight splashed on lightless windows. People asleep in all those rooms.

Christ, why couldn't he sleep?

Twisting, he pulled his foot back under the covers. He determined that he would lie still, force himself to be quiet until he sank into sleep. He lay still for a few seconds, sensitive to his own breathing and the beating of his heart. He turned on his left side and closed his eyes, holding the lids shut for several seconds. Opening them, he looked at the sky and the apartment hotel.

Was Catherine awake at this minute? He imagined her quietly sobbing, her body quivering, her pillow soaking with tears, and he was proud to think of her in such a state over him, turning her bed into a river because she was afraid that she'd lost him. Wasn't he, though, a goddamn low sonofabitch to be taking joy out of such thoughts? If they pleased him this way, he must be pretty much of an out-and-out-heel, and really, he didn't feel that way. He felt low and rotten.

He knew that he'd be better off if he forgot about it for the night. Already since coming to bed he had thought back over the quarrel detail by detail, and what was the use of continuing when it got him nowhere?

Wanting to distract himself by thinking of something else, he drew up in his mind images from his memory of the night when he had last talked with Lucy over the telephone, and she had been no soap on a date. He had walked over to the park with the boys. Barney Keefe and Shrimp had razzed each other, and he had boxed with Morgan and had been shown up. He saw himself back on that night, getting a date with Lucy, lacing Morgan, and then boxing with Hink Weber, dancing around like a streak. He commenced to feel as if he were back on that night, lying in bed now after he had made a sucker out of Hink. And on Saturday night he'd take Lucy out, and coming home with her in a cab, feeling her nearness, smell her perfume. . . .