The Ultimate Egoist (9 page)

Florence slipped to the door. She leaned out and said softly in his ear, “Terry doesn’t feel so well tonight, Ben …” That was enough. He came in, was three steps across the room before he saw her.

“Terry—” he swallowed awkwardly and stared at her. “I—I’m so sorry. I had no idea, or I wouldn’t have come. I’ll c-come back
again. Please take care of yourself … well, I—that is—well, goodn—”

“Ben,” said Florence clearly, “You have the tickets already, haven’t you? I’ll go with you.” She threw off her smock, tossed a coat over her arm. “I’m ready.” She steered a bewildered Ben Pastene under the blue light. She looked sweet under its daylight rays, and she knew it. “Terry’ll be happier by herself. Don’t worry.”

“If you say so …” The poor young man was badly shaken.

That’s the end of the story. He proposed to Florence that night. On the borderline anyway, he needed very little persuasion. Florence never told him, of course, or Terry either, what had happened. The lamp was sodium vapor; its light is the cruelest in the spectrum. It illuminates every microscopic blemish, every inevitable wrinkle invisible in ordinary light. What choice had he, with that picture in his mind, the picture of a once-lovely Terry with black lips, dull hair, brown-rouged cheeks, blemished, lined skin, jaundiced flesh?

A shabby trick? Possibly. But all’s fair—Terry would have tired of him; she only wanted what she couldn’t have. She was enormously resilient. She was happy again very soon. Florence too. Florence is so happy with her husband today that she hasn’t time for a hypothetical conscience …

T
HE STEEL RAILS
stretched back and back, closing steadily, following her like shears, great shining shears pursuing her. But they never closed on the train as they had closed on her life with Leo. Now that she could see it detachedly, she realized that the thread that bound them together had been doomed to be cut from the start. Funny …

A man stepped out on the observation platform and sat beside her. She resented it a little; she had been enjoying her sole possession of the cool retreat. Oh well—

She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He was staring back at the flying roadbed, his face a little flushed as if he had been embarrassed. She smiled a little. Nice-looking guy, in his way, she thought objectively.

He said to her, out of the corner of his mouth, “The road from Reno. Hah.” That “hah” can’t really be spelt; it was just a sound, a wordless question, answer, excuse.

Well, why not talk to him? She could take care of herself. Meet a stranger on a train, talk to him, forget him. It was done every day. But she was still naive enough to get a little thrill of excitement out of it. What a world of hitherto unspoken things could be said by a stranger to a stranger!

“You, too?” Her tone was joking, but he looked at her understandingly. “Don’t tell me you’re sorry already!”

He joined her brief laugh. “No, not so you’d notice it.” He looked at her quizzically. “You look happy yourself,” he cracked.

“I’m not, particularly,” she said gravely. “How can one be? I’ve got to undo what it took me years to build up. I don’t think it will take me quite as long to do that as it did to build it all.”

He said, with a shade of shyness in his voice, “You’ve got your
divorce, haven’t you? That’s the finish, isn’t it? What is there left to break down?

Her eyes stopped seeing the whizzing ties as she spoke, and her mind brought words out of the past. “There’s lots left. I did what any woman does. I spent my teens growing up into the woman that would marry her man some day. Every minute of my life led upward and onward until the day I met him, and he went beside me along the same road. It went upward and onward too, until a few months ago. How silly!” she said suddenly. “I’m talking like a popular song!”

“Keep on singing.” His face was turned away.

“Well, that’s what I’ve got to tear down. The divorce means the end of those few months; that’s all. But the years that we walked upward together … well, I’ll just have to walk back down them, alone, until I come back to the place where I met him. It will take a while, I imagine. But not as long as the last time I travelled it … anyway, when I get there I suppose I’ll turn around and start back. By myself.”

He looked at her as if she were something strange. “You talk a mean talk, stranger.”

She returned the look. “Bad habit. What’s your story.”

“Mine?… Well, life’ll go on, I guess. I’ve got a good job, that’s something. I’ll save money, invest it, get more, lose it. I’ll keep myself busy, keep myself worried. Not so tough for me.” He glanced at her again; her face was impassive. That face … In repose, it was like something carven. It was smooth, pastel-tinted, and her translucent eyelids were veils. One could imagine that face with its eyes wide open. There was an enchantment about her, a deep, provocatively mysterious quality. What a woman, he thought impulsively;
what
a woman!

“Oh, there’ll be details,” he supplemented. “I’ll have to move—”

“Why?”

He flushed. “Oh, I don’t know … I’ve got to shift gears. I’m not keyed to batching it.” He paused, then tried again, seeing her slow smile. “It’s just that I don’t want to live in the same place where I—” He shrugged. “Let’s put it this way; I’m not a sentimental person. Never was. And I don’t want to give myself the opportunity to be. See?”

“Yes. I quite understand … I’m giving away everything I had—clothes, gifts, everything, and I’m getting new ones, for the same reason. Not because I hate the sight of them and what they represent, but because I’d rather not have them around. Tell me. How do you see your wife now?”

The question startled him a little. She thought he looked a little angry, too. “Well, really, I can’t—I mean, you don’t expect me to—I mean—”

“Don’t be silly,” she said firmly, quite taking his breath away. “I’m no relation to you; we’re two strangers talking about this and that. When this train stops you and I will never see each other again, except as strangers. Besides—” and the little smile quivered wickedly about her lips “—it’s your own doing. You’ve aroused my woman’s curiosity. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have never seen her straight until now that it’s all over. Go ahead; I’d like to hear a man telling something like the truth about a woman.”

He raised his eyebrows and smiled broadly at that. Then, laughing, “All right. You asked for it!”

He offered her a cigarette and lit one himself, watching her. She had leaned back, quite relaxed, her eyes apparently closed, though you never could tell about those eyes … It was almost a pity to have the stranger status forced on him by such a woman. Oh, well. Better that way.

“She was very lovely. When I married her she was the answer to all questions. We shared everything, and yet we both had our own lives and led them. She wasn’t possessive or jealous; she had sense enough to realize that to give a sense of freedom is the best way to hold a man.”

“Or a woman,” she murmured.

His eyes flashed toward her, then away. “Yes,” he said slowly. “I guess it is …” He was quiet for so long that she thought he had forgotten what he was saying—or that he had been saying anything at all. She overcame an impulse to make him go on, and sat waiting.

“Funny it had to be a stranger to tell me that,” he said finally.

“What?”

“That business of freedom. She gave it to me so willingly that it
never occurred to me that she might want some too. I guess I
was
a bit of a dictator. There were some pretty rotten scenes … I said once that if I ever tripped her up on one of her accounts of where she had been and what she had done there, that I would horsewhip her. I don’t think she ever forgot that. She was very honest with herself and with me; so much so that I sometimes thought it was an act. It wasn’t.” He flicked his cigarette over the railing. It fell slowly until it hit the ties, and then was whisked out of sight.

“Well,” he went on. “Life was pretty nice until she blew up one night. Soon afterward I met her in a nightclub, with a very good-looking youngster on her arm. That was the finish for me.”

She told her story, then, quietly. “I married a man who shared everything with me—that he felt like sharing. But he cut me out of a great deal of his life. That hurt a little, although he never knew it. He had the old-fashioned double-standard; he could do as he pleased, but I couldn’t. I didn’t, either, for the two good years we were married. But in the last few months it got a little too much for me. He was never really unfaithful to me, just inconsiderate. He loved me, I think; but he had never suffered because of someone else, and he couldn’t understand why I was hurt. It was my fault. I never let him know I
was
hurt until things had gone too far, and then it was too late to talk it over quietly. He couldn’t understand me, so I found someone who could. It was a case of choosing between someone who I could love without understanding, and someone who could understand me without love. I chose. I made no effort to hide it from my husband, and of course he found out. He took it the hard way.”

“The damn fool.”

“No!” she cried, gripping his arm, speaking with a vehemence that almost frightened him. “He was right! I was wrong. It was wrong of me not to present myself to him, my true self, so that he could adjust himself to me, as I did to him! It was wrong of me not to tell him he was hurting me! It was wrong of me not to let him give me the understanding he would have, if I’d asked for it!”

Quite suddenly, she found his arms around her, and he found her clinging to him, sobbing madly against his rough coat. It was the first time he had ever seen her cry …

“Leona, Leona, why did we do it? Oh, my darling, why didn’t you tell me? I’ve tried to be what I thought you wanted me to be … I love you! Believe me … would I have followed you to Reno if I didn’t? Would I have sat there in the courtroom, seeing them take you from me, if I didn’t love you, want to give you what you wanted?”

“Courtroom … Leo! Were you there? I saw you get on the train …”

“Try again, darling?”

Her kiss was her answer.

W
ELL, A PORPOISE
is like that. He isn’t a fish, but he swim. He isn’t a bird, but he flies. He lives for the hell of it and he’s nobody’s fool. Ask Whacker. He was a porpoise once. Still is, sometimes.

Whacker was 12 to 4 AB on the
Seabreeze
. There wasn’t much of the average about Whacker. He could talk a blue streak when he wanted to, which wasn’t often. Moody sort of man; well-read, wellschooled and as haywire as they come.

The
Seabreeze
was an old ship, but she was tight and she was clean. She was taking a load of casing-head from Texas City to Boston. Know what casing-head is? Aviation gas; plenty high-test. Throw a quart of it up in the air and nothing comes down. A bucket of it set on the deck will be empty in forty minutes. You can see the vapor rising out of the tank-vents like heat-haze off hot asphalt. You spray the decks to keep the temperature down, and you keep your cigarettes below. Low-flash, they call it, which means that it makes explosive vapors when the weather’s hot enough to make you sweat. It isn’t often carried in a gasoline-tanker like the
Seabreeze
. Casing-head ships have all the tank-vents enclosed and leading to an escape high up on the mast, while the
Seabreeze
had individual vents for her twenty-eight tanks. But it was a juicy contract for the company and they risked it.

She made it across the Gulf and through the Florida Straits, and then got away from the coast and slid up close to the Bahamas. Around Great Isaac light a heavy sea started running, with a fair wind. The smoke from the stack stood straight up, and it was stifling hot.

When she got out from the lee of the islands, the old hulk really started to go to town. You don’t often see a sea like that; not much wind, but the sea like a running relief of the Rockies. Pitch? Why, she stood on her counter and wheeled slowly, as if she had eyes in her belly and was curious; then she’d bury her nose and put the sky back aft.

The smell of that vapor got into everything, because it wasn’t blowing away. The crew ate it and slept with it. When she put her snout down that invisible mass of vapor swept aft and gagged them; when she came up again it would drift forward a little. That kept up for thirty-six hours.

The Maritime Commission, in its inquest, said the
Seabreeze
blew up because of mechanical failure; the cargo supposedly seeped through the seams of No. 9 tank into the fireroom. Hogwash. She exploded because of the carelessness of a man they called Tortugas.

He was on the 4 to 8 watch, and before he knocked off for chow at 5:00 he took some buckets down to the shelter deck. She was a well-decker, with a high poop and midship house, and an enclosed shelter deck under it. Pitching the way she was, taking seas the way any tanker will, the main deck was deeply awash. Tortugas threw the buckets in, swung the watertight door shut and ran back up the ladder to the flying bridge. He didn’t take the trouble to force the dogs home on that door, because he didn’t want to get wet. A very little thing, eh?

When they called Whacker that night at 11:40 he went up on deck to have a look at the weather. You know, a ship at sea is the loneliest thing in the universe. You don’t need much imagination to feel that there is nothing on earth but you and the ship and the sea. That’s why so many sailors are screwy, and Whacker was no exception.

He stood at the break of the poop feeling maudlin. He
was
alone in the world; the twenty-eight years of his life had deprived him of everything but his present trade and a startling number of memories … he’d been around. As he stood there in the still air, riding the deck and gaping at the moon, his mind drifted back over the years, pausing casually on impressions of a couple of years in college, a couple of years on the bum, flitting purposefully past memories of
a home that was gone, and of five or nine ex one-and-onlys … The vagrant and persistent gas fumes didn’t help any. Breathing too much of gas vapor affects you like eating canned heat.