The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (47 page)

If there had been a mirror behind the bar he would certainly have sneaked a happy glance into it on his way to the men's room; he had stamped twice on the old floor in the regulation manner for making his trouser legs “blouse down” over his boots, then walked away from her through the smoke-hung crowd in the new devil-may-care style, and he hoped she was watching.

“. . . What does Disbursements mean?” he asked when he got back to their table.

“Oh, nothing much. In a business firm I suppose you'd call it the payroll office. I'm a payroll clerk. Ah, I know,” she said then, with a smile that turned wittily sour, “Mother's told you I'm ‘with the American Embassy.' God. I heard her saying that to people on the phone a few times, when I was still living there; that was about the time I decided to move out.”

He had been so concerned with himself that he didn't realize until now, offering a light for her cigarette, what a pretty girl she was. And it wasn't only in the face; she was nice all the way down.

“. . . I'm afraid our timing's been rather awkward, Paul,” she was saying. “Because tomorrow's the last day before my vacation and I had no idea you were coming, you see, so I arranged to spend the week with a friend up in Blackpool. But we can get together again tomorrow night, if you like—could you come up to the flat for supper or something?”

“Sure. That'd be fine.”

“Oh, good. Do come. It won't be much, but we can sort of fortify ourselves by having a real dinner tonight. Jesus, I'm hungry, aren't you?” And he guessed that a lot of English girls had learned to say “Jesus” during the war.

She took him to what she called “a good black-market restaurant,” a warm, closed-in, upstairs room that did look fairly clandestine; they sat surrounded by American officers and their women, forking down rich slices of what she told him was horsemeat steak. They were oddly shy with each other there, like children in a strange house, but soon afterwards, in the next pub they visited, they got around to memories.

“It's funny,” she said. “I missed Daddy terribly at first, it was like a sickness, but then it got so I couldn't really remember him very well. And lately, I don't know. His letters seem so—well, sort of loud and empty. Sort of vapid.”

“Yeah. Well, he's a very—yeah.”

“And once during the war he sent me a Public Health Service pamphlet about venereal disease. That wasn't really a very tactful thing to do, was it?”

“No. No, it wasn't.”

But she remembered the electric train and the paper dolls. She remembered the terrifying jump from the maple tree—the worst part, she said, was that you had to clear another horrible big branch on the way down—and yes, she remembered waiting alone in the car that afternoon while their parents shouted in the house. She even remembered that Paul had come out to the car to say goodbye.

At the end of the evening they settled into still another place, and that was where she started talking about her plans. She might go back to the States and go to college next year—that was what their father wanted her to do—but then there was also a chance that she might go back and get married.

“Yeah? No kidding? Who to?”

The little smile she gave him then was the first disingenuous look he had seen in her face. “I haven't decided,” she said. “Because you see there've been any number of offers—well,
almost
any number.” And out of her purse came a big, cheap American wallet of the kind with many hinged plastic frames for photographs. There was one smiling or frowning face after another, most of them wearing their overseas caps, a gallery of American soldiers.

“. . . and this is Chet,” she was saying, “he's nice; he's back in Cleveland now. And this is John, he'll be going home soon to a small town in east Texas; and this is Tom; he's nice; he's . . .”

There were probably five or six photographs, but there seemed to be more. One was a decorated 82nd Airborne man who looked impressive, but another was a member of service and support personnel—a “Blue-Star Commando”—and Colby had learned to express a veiled disdain for those people.

“Well, but what does that matter?” she inquired. “I don't care what he ‘did' or didn't ‘do' in the war; what's
that
got to do with anything?”

“Okay; I guess you're right,” he said while she was putting the wallet away, and he watched her closely. “But look: are you in love with any of these guys?”

“Oh, well, certainly, I suppose so,” she said. “But then, that's easy, isn't it?”

“What is?”

“Being in love with someone, if he's nice and you like him.”

And that gave him much to think about, all the next day.

The following night, when he'd been asked to “come up for supper or something,” he gravely inspected her white, ill-furnished apartment and met her roommate, whose name was Irene. She looked to be in her middle thirties, and it was clear from her every glance and smile that she enjoyed sharing a place with someone so much younger. She made Colby uneasy at once by telling him what a “nice-looking boy” he was; then she hovered and fussed over Marcia's fixing the drinks, which were a cheap brand of American blended whiskey and soda, with no ice.

The supper turned out to be even more perfunctory than he'd imagined—a casserole of Spam and sliced potatoes and powdered milk—and while they were still at the table Irene laughed heartily at something Colby said, something he hadn't meant to be all that funny. Recovering, her eyes shining, she turned to Marcia and said, “Oh, he's sweet, your brother, isn't he—and d'you know something? I think you're right about him. I think he
is
a virgin.”

There are various ways of enduring acute embarrassment: Colby might have hung his blushing head, or he might have stuck a cigarette in his lips and lighted it, squinting, looking up at the woman with still-narrowed eyes and saying, “What makes you think that?” but what he did instead was burst out laughing. And he went on laughing and laughing long after the time for showing what a preposterous assumption they had made; he was helpless in his chair; he couldn't stop.

“
. . . Irene!
” Marcia was saying, and she was blushing too. “I don't know what you're
talking
about—
I
never said that.”

“Oh, well, sorry; sorry; my fault,” Irene said, but there was still a sparkle in her eye across the messy table when he pulled himself together at last, feeling a little sick.

Marcia's train would leave at nine, from some station far in the north of London, so she had to hurry. “Look, Paul,” she said over the hasty packing of her suitcase, “there's really no need for you to come along all that way; I'll just run up there by myself.”

But he insisted—he wanted to get away from Irene—and so they rode nervously together, without speaking, on the Underground. But they got off at the wrong stop—“Jesus, that was foolish,” she said; “now we'll have to walk”—and when they were walking they began to talk again.

“I'll never know what possessed Irene to say such a silly thing,” she said.

“That's okay. Forget it.”

“Because I only said you seemed very young. Was that such a terrible thing to say?”

“I guess not.”

“I mean who ever minded being
young,
for God's sake—isn't that what everyone wants to be?”

“I guess so.”

“Oh, you guess not and you guess so. Well, it's true—everyone does want to be young. I'm eighteen now, and sometimes I wish I were sixteen again.”

“Why?”

“Oh, so I could do things a little more intelligently, I suppose; try not to go chasing after uniforms quite so much—British
or
American; I don't know.”

So she had been laid at sixteen, either by some plucky little RAF pilot or some slavering American, and probably by several of both.

He was tired of walking and of carrying the suitcase; it took an effort of will to remind himself that he was an infantry soldier. Then she said, “Oh, look: we've made it!” and they ran the last fifty yards into the railroad station and across its echoing marble floor. But her train had gone, and there wasn't another one due to leave for an hour. They sat uncomfortably on an old bench for a while; then they went out to the street again to get the fresh air.

She took the suitcase from him, placed it against the base of a lamppost and seated herself prettily on it, crossing her nice legs. Her knees were nice too. She looked thoroughly composed. She would leave tonight knowing he was a virgin—she would know it forever, whether she ever saw him again or not.

“Paul?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Look, I was only sort of teasing you about those boys in the photographs—I don't know why I did that, except to be silly.”

“Okay. I knew you were teasing.” But it was a relief to hear her say it, even so.

“They were just boys I met when I used to go to the Red Cross dances at Rainbow Corner. None of them ever really did propose to me except Chet, and that was only a kidding-around sort of thing because he said I was pretty. If I ever took him up on it he'd die.”

“Okay.”

“And it was silly just now to tell you about chasing uniforms when I was sixteen—God, I was
terrified
of boys at sixteen. Have you any idea what it is that makes people of our age want to claim more knowledge of—of sex and so forth than they really have?”

“No. No, I don't.” He was beginning to like her more and more, but he was afraid that if he let her go on she would soon insist she was a virgin too, to make him feel better; that would almost certainly be a condescending lie, and so would only make him feel worse.

“Because I mean we have our whole
lives
,” she said, “isn't that right? Take you: you'll be going home soon and going to college and there'll be girls coming in and out of your life for years; then eventually you'll fall in love with someone, and isn't that what makes the world go around?”

She was being kind to him; he didn't know whether to be grateful or to sink even further into wretchedness.

“And then me, well I'm in love with someone now,” she said, and this time there appeared to be no teasing in her face. “I've wanted to tell you about him ever since we met, but there hasn't been time. He's the man I'm going up to spend the week with in Blackpool. His name is Ralph Kovacks and he's twenty-three. He was a waist-gunner on a B-17 but he only flew thirteen missions because his nerves fell apart and he's been in and out of hospitals ever since. He's sort of small and funny-looking and all he wants to do is sit around in his underwear reading great books, and he's going to be a philosopher and I've sort of come to think I can't live without him. I may not go to the States at all next year; I may go to Heidelberg because that's where Ralph wants to go; the whole question is whether or not he'll let me stay with him.”

“Oh,” Colby said. “I see.”

“What d'you mean, you ‘see'? You really aren't much of a conversationalist, you know that? You ‘see.' What can you possibly ‘see' from what little I've told you? Jesus, how can you see anything at all with those big, round, virginal eyes of yours?”

He was walking away from her, head down, because there seemed nothing else to do, but he hadn't gone far before she came running after him, her little high-heeled shoes clicking on the sidewalk. “Oh, Paul, don't go away,” she called. “Come back; please come back. I'm terribly sorry.”

So they went back together to where the suitcase stood against the lamppost, but this time she didn't sit down. “I'm terribly sorry,” she said again. “And look, don't come to the train with me; I want to say goodbye here. Only, listen. Listen. I know you'll be all right. We'll both be all right. It's awfully important to believe that. Well; God bless.”

“Okay, and you too,” he said. “You too, Marcia.”

Then her arms went up and around his neck and the whole slender weight of her was pressed against him for a moment, and in a voice broken with tears she said, “Oh, my brother.”

He walked a great distance alone after that, and there wasn't anything devil-may-care about it. The heels of his boots came down in a calm, regular cadence, and his face was set in the look of a practical young man with a few things on his mind. Tomorrow he would telephone his mother and say he'd been called back to France, “for duty,” a phrase she would neither understand nor ever question; then all that would be finished. And with seven days left in this vast, intricate, English-speaking place, there was every reason to expect he would have a girl.

“
WELL
,
I KNOW
it seems funny,” the young man said, getting up from his drawing board, “but I don't think we've been formally introduced. My name's Dan Rosenthal.” He was tall and heavy, and his face suggested the pain of shyness.

“Bill Grove,” I told him as we shook hands, and then we could both pretend to settle down. We had just been hired at Remington Rand and assigned to share a glassed-in cubicle in the bright, murmurous maze of the eleventh floor; this was in the spring of 1949, in New York.

Dan Rosenthal's job was to design and illustrate the company's “external house organ,” a slick and unreadable monthly magazine called
Systems
; mine was to write and edit the copy for it. He seemed able to talk and listen while executing even the subtlest parts of his work, and I soon fell to neglecting mine for hours and days at a time, so there began an almost steady flow of conversation over the small space between his immaculate drawing board and the ever-more dismaying clutter of my desk.