The Naked and the Dead (83 page)

            Lovemaking on the stairs.

            Beverly's profanity in heat.

            Experimenting with costumes.

            -------------------. (He will not give it a name because he has heard it in places he would not mention to her. She will not because she's not supposed to know it.)

            And of course there are the other things that seem to have no relation. Eating meals together until it gets boring.

            Hearing each other tell the same stories to different people.

            His habit of picking his nose.

            Her habit of adjusting her stockings on the street.

            The sound he makes when he spits into a handkerchief.

            The way she gets sullen after an evening of doing nothing.

           
There are mild pleasures too:
Discussing the people they meet.

            Relating the gossip about their friends.

            Dancing together. (Merely because they are good dancers. A random phenomenon.)

            Telling her his business worries.

           
There are neutral things:
Riding in their automobile.

            Her bridge and mah-jongg club.

            His clubs: The Rotary, the High School Alumni Association, the Junior Chamber of Commerce.

            Going to church.

            The radio.

            The movies.

            At times when he is restless he has a bad habit of spending an evening with his bachelor friends.

            Bachelor Folklore: The only thing I got against marriage is people are just too disinteresting to be forced to spend their lives together.

            Brown: You don't know what you're sayin'. Wait'll it's there for you, nice and steady, an' not worryin' about gettin' caught. The thing to do with women is to try it. . .

            Folklore (dirty jokes): Sacrebleu, the ninety-eighth way.

            The middle of the night: Now, go 'way, leave me alone, Willie, I thought we agreed to lay off for a couple of days.

            Who did?

            You. You said we were getting too used to it.

            Forget what I said.

            Ohhhh. (Exasperation and submission.) You're just an old hound dog, that's all you are. Always wanting to put it in something. (The alloy of tenderness and irritation, unique to marriage.)

            There are external shocks. His sister, Patty, gets a divorce, and he hears talk, merely the faintest suggestions, but he is worried. He asks her, subtly he thinks, but she flares at him.

            What do you mean, Willie, Brad coulda had the divorce instead of me?

            I don't mean anything, I'm just asking you.

            Listen, Willie-boy, you don't have to be looking at me thataway. I am what I am, that's all, you understand?

            The shock enters, burrows deeply, and explodes sporadically for months to follow. There are times in the middle of the day when he halts in the middle of a report, catches himself looking at his pencil.
You're not such a roughneck,
Patty says, slim and crisp and virginal, the older sister -- half mother.

            Memory as the flagellant. I don't understand it a goddam bit. What the hell makes them change that way, why can't a woman stay decent?

            You'll never be like that, will you, Beverly? he says that night.

            Aw, no, honey, how can you even think it?

            They are very close for the moment, and his troubles spill out. Honestly, Bev, keeping up with everything makes me go so goddam fast; I get so I just want to take a breath, you know what I mean. A man's own sister, it puts quite a stir in you.

            In the barrooms, in the smoking cars, in the locker room at the golf club they are talking about Patty Brown.

            I swear, Bev, I ever catch you in anything like that, I'll kill you, so help me I'll kill you.

           
Honey?
You can trust me. But she is thrilled by the sudden burst of his passion.

            I feel a hell of a lot older, Bev.

            On the eighteenth he lines up the putt, estimates the roll of the green. It is a five-foot shot and he should make it, but he knows suddenly that he's going to fail. The handle of the putter thonks dully against his palms as the ball rolls short a foot.

            Missed again, son, Mr. Cranborn says.

            Just not my day, I guess. We might as well get back to the locker room. His palms still hold a numb uncertain feeling. They stroll back slowly. You come to Louisville, son, and it'll be a pleasure to take you out to my club, Mr. Cranborn says.

            I might take you up on it, sir.

            As they shower, Mr. Cranborn is singing
"When you wore a tulip and 1 wore a. . ."

            What're we doin' tonight, son?

            We'll just do the town, Mr. Cranborn; you don't have to worry, I'll show you around.

            I've heard a good deal about this town.

            Yes, sir, well, most of it's true. (The lewd cackle from the adjacent shower.)

            In the night club they talk business. Every time he leans back he can feel the potted palm against his hair so that he finds himself leaning forward breathing the smoke from Mr. Cranborn's cigar. Well, you got to see, sir, that we're entitled to a little profit, I mean after all that's what makes the wheels of business go round, and you wouldn't want us to be working for you for nothing with our product any more than you'd want to work for someone else. That'd hardly be business, now, would it? The fifth drink is almost empty, and his jaws clamp spongily. The cigarette is a little remote from his lips. (I gotta slow down on the drinking.)

            A good point, son, a good point, but there's also the question of making something cheaper than the next feller, and that's business too, competition. You're out for yourself, and I'm out for myself, and that's the way things work.

            Yes, sir, I see what you mean. For a moment the whole thing is in danger of revolving and revolving in his head, and he thinks of flailing out, breathing some air. Let's look at it from this angle.

            Who's that little blonde girl in the show, Brown? Know her?

            (He doesn't.) Well, yes, sir, but frankly you wouldn't be wanting to know her. She's gone to the well a little too often and, well, frankly there's doctors involved. I know a place though, sir, decent respectable.

            In the lobby the hat-check girl can hear him phoning. He leans against the wall in danger of supporting himself with his face against the phone. The line is busy, and for an instant he wants to cry.

            Hello, Eloise? he asks. The woman's voice crackles at him from the other end.

            It's more fun being out with the gang from the office on a tear.

            I tell ya I never saw anything like it, picking up a half dollar like that, why, she just picked it right off the edge of the table. I suppose if it wasn't the place where I saw it you'd have to go to Paris or a nigger whorehouse anyway.

            It takes all kinds to make a world.

            Yeh, that's about the way I look at it, there's a lot of things go on in people's heads you don't know nothing about

            What do you figure goes on in the Chief's head?

            Uh-uh, we ain't talking shop tonight, that's understood. Come on, let's start a round going.

            They drink up, exhaust the circle of rounds owed.

            I'm going to tell you men something, Brown says, a lot of people think we might have a soft job selling, but the God's honest truth of it is that we work hard as any man jack, am I right?

            None harder.

            Exactly. Now when I was up at the university before I flunked out, I flunked out I want you to know 'cause I think a man's a goddam fool if he's got false pride, I don't believe in making out you're exactly what you ain't. I'm as ordinary as an old shoe and I'll admit it to anyone who asks me.

            Brown, you're a good old sonofabitch.

            Well, now, I'm glad to hear you say that, Jennings, because I know you mean it, and it means a lot. A man works his fool ass off and he wants to have some friends, people he knows will trust him and like him, 'cause if he ain't got that what's the point to his working?

            That's exactly it.

            I'm pretty fortunate, I'll say that to any man in his face, but of course I've had my troubles, who the hell hasn't, but we're not here to cry about that tonight, now, are we? I want to tell you men, I got a beautiful wife, now, that's the truth.

            One of the gang guffaws. Brown, I got a beautiful wife too, but I swear after you been married two years a woman might just as well look like a coon dog for all the good it does you.

            I can't quite agree, Freeman, but there's a point to what you say. He feels his words dribbling out of his mouth, lost in the babel of glasses and conversation.

            Come on, let's be goin' over to Eloise's.

            And the inevitable coming back.

            Freeman, you said something a while ago that kinda put a stir in me, but I want to tell you I got a beautiful wife, and there's no one could improve on her a bit. I think it's a goddam shame the way we go around screwing God knows what, and then goin' back to our wives, it's a helluva note I want to tell you that. When I think of her and then what I do I'm pretty goddam ashamed of myself. It's a hell of a note.

            Exactly. You'd think we have some sense, but the damn truth of it is we just go around screwing and drinking and. . .

            And having a hell of a good time.

            Having a hell of a good time, Brown finishes. That's exactly what I was gonna say, Jennings, but you beat me to it. He stumbles, sits down on the pavement.

            Helluva note.

            He wakes up in his bed with Beverly undressing him. I know what you're gonna say, honey, he mumbles, but I got my troubles, you just keep pushing something through, trying to make ends meet, trying to produce 'cause that's what you gotta pay off on, and it takes a long time, it's, it's a hard life, as the preacher says.

            And in the morning, massaging his headache, examining an estimate, he wonders what Beverly did last night.

            (The sly winks, the droll expressions of anguish among the men who had gone out the night before. At ten in the lavatory, Freeman joins him.)

            Oh, what a bag I got on.

            I feel rocky today, Brown says. What the hell we do it for?

            Got to get out of the rut, I guess.

            Yeah.
Oh, man!

6

            This same night, on the other side of the mountain range, Cummings was making a tour of his positions. The attack had been progressing favorably for a day and a half, and his line companies had advanced from a quarter to a half mile. The division was moving again, more successfully than he had expected, and the long wet month of inactivity and stagnation seemed to have ended. F Company had made contact with the Toyaku Line, and according to the last report Cummings had received that afternoon, a reinforced platoon from E Company had captured a Japanese bivouac on F Company's flank. For the next few days the attack would teeter from enemy counterattacks, but if they held, and he was going to see that they held, the Toyaku Line might be breached within two weeks.

            Secretly, he was a little surprised at the advance. He had prepared the attack for over a month, hoarded his supplies, revised his battle plans from day to day through all the eventless weeks that had followed the aborted Japanese attack across the river. He had done everything a commander could do, and yet he had been gloomy. The memory of the bivouacs at the front with their covered foxholes and duckwalks through the mud had depressed him more than once; it spoke with such finality of the men sitting down to rest permanently, implacably.

            He knew now he was wrong. The lessons learned from every campaign were different, and he had absorbed an obscure but basic axiom. If the men settled down long enough they became restless, ennuied to the point of courage again by the drab repetition of their days. It's a mistake to relieve a company which has not been advancing, he told himself. Just let them sit in the mud long enough, and they'll attack through their own volition. It was fortuitous that his battle orders had been launched at a time when the men were eager to move ahead again, but deep in his mind he knew he had been lucky. He had misjudged their morale completely.

            If I had a few company commanders who were perceptive, the whole process would be simpler, more responsive, and yet it's too much to ask sensitivity of a CO besides all the other things he has to have. No, it's my fault, I should have seen it in spite of them. Perhaps for this reason the early success of the attack gave him little elation. He was pleased, naturally enough, because his greatest burden had been removed. The pressure from Corps had relaxed, and the fear that for a time had colored everything -- that he would be relieved of his command in the middle of the campaign -- had retreated now, and would expire if the advance continued favorably. Still he had substituted one dissatisfaction for another. Cummings was bothered by a suspicion, very faint, not quite stated, that he had no more to do with the success of the attack than a man who presses a button and waits for the elevator. It muddied the edges of his satisfaction, angered him subtly. The odds were that the attack would bog down sooner or later in any case, and when he left tomorrow for Army, this present success was going to hurt his chances of getting naval support for the Botoi Bay operation. In effect he would have to commit himself, claim that the campaign could be won only by that side invasion, and there would be the ticklish business of having to undercut, disparage the advances he had made already.