“He’s in the service then?” McDonald asked.
“He’s a sergeant in the ground crew and he goes overseas whenever the wing is rotated. He’s going to bring me some linens and stuff from Ireland next time he gets to England, he said. He brings me something nice every time he comes back.”
“Well, that’s nice,” McDonald said.
“I think so. You know how much I like nice, pretty things, and expensive things especially. Frank has brought me lace from Spain and perfume from France and that Royal Doulton.”
“He can get it all from any
PX
in England,” McDonald said, and was surprised at the grumbling petulance in his voice.
“Well it’s the real article to me,” she said. “I don’t know why he does it. I guess he likes me and he’s lonesome and wants somebody to talk to.”
“That’s probably it,” McDonald said.
“When he’s here at the base he calls me up all the time, wanting to take me out dancing or to dinner. He wants to spend all his money on me. I’m not going to stop him.” She was looking at McDonald, and she was trying to gauge him, he knew. “I think you’d like him a lot. He’s only twenty-four, a mere child. I keep telling him he should pick up some girl his own age and have a great time, but he doesn’t want to. He couldn’t believe I had a son
fourteen; he thought I was his age.” She laughed loudly, and McDonald smiled too. “Frank told me I was the only woman he’s met that was like European women. And he just likes me. There’s nothing more between us, he just likes me. He’s a nice boy who buys me nice things and takes me out to nice places and we have a good time. He doesn’t really mean a thing to me, but he’s lonesome, and anyway he’s too young for anything serious!” The pleased, shrill, too-loud laugh again.
There was a pause and they heard the music suddenly, the carols past, Dinah Washington singing now, and Wanda swayed her head in time to the sentimental Negro song.
“Dance?” he said, and she smiled and nodded and swiveled out of the couch and stood up and they took a step or two; her hair touched his chin and her sweater his chest. He stopped the movement and kissed her and her mouth opened a little.
“I’d like to make love to you,” he said.
“Ah ah,” she said, shaking her head and her forefinger at him. “I know about guys like you. Got an old girlfriend in a town and they visit her once a year or so, and expect her to fall over.”
He smiled at her, affectedly, out of the same concentration he had felt that first time, so long ago now, and he knew why it had come about, how it had led to this, the same want and need, the same panic at denial.
“I thought it was a good idea,” he said.
“Anyway, I can’t, because Trevor might come home.”
“He went to a movie, remember?”
“Oh Jim,” she said, “I don’t want something to start up between us again that might turn out badly.”
“I didn’t think it turned out badly before,” he murmured slowly. What else could he say? he asked himself. Somewhere deep within he heard a distant door slam, an echo of another time. The want of her unbalanced all.
“Well no, it was fine, but you got so jealous there a few times, and you’re so intense.”
“I promise not to be so intense,” he said, giving her a smile.
“Do you really want to make love to me?” she asked, putting on her incongruous little-girl face, and little-girl voice, trying to look pensively up through her eyelashes.
“Yes. Don’t you want to?”
“Yes. Only with you.”
He kissed her.
“Fix one more drink, then,” she said, and they went to the kitchen together. “Nobody can fix drinks like you can,” she said.
He wanted to say, you’ve said that, but instead they touched glasses and drank to each other.
“You want to see the upstairs as I’ve got it done new?” she asked.
He nodded and followed her up the steps. They looked perfunctorily at the boy’s room and the bath and then they went to the next room. “This is still my bedroom,” she said.
The room was spotless, for she believed that cleanliness was a great virtue, he remembered. There was a group photograph of her family on her dresser and a series of pictures of Trevor upon the wall.
“It looks very nice,” he said. “You’ve rearranged it.”
“I’ve pushed the furniture around several times since you were last here,” she said.
“That was a long time ago. You haven’t seen the room for a long time, have you?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“A little anxious, aren’t you?” she asked archly, teasing him.
“Yes.”
“What time is it?”
He looked at his watch. “A little after eight.”
“We have time then.”
She unbuckled her belt and slid down her tight slacks. There were the silk panties, the long smooth legs, marred by the slight faintly darkened beginning clusters of varicose veins which he saw and then purposely did not look at. The sweater came next, the arms lifted, the sigh of clothing, the sigh of the woman, and the careful folding of the sweater and slacks over the chair. Poised forward, her arms behind her, the hands reached for the brassiere connection.
“I’ll do it,” he said.
“Your hands are cold,” she said, startled, and let him undo her.
She turned; the sagging breasts, flattened, a flanged brownness around the nipple, and the soft sag beneath. The soft protrusion of belly as the nylon panties were slid down, and she went beneath the blanket.
“It’s a little chilly,” she said. “I’m cold. Hurry up.”
He took off his clothes and went in beside her, as she lifted the sheet and closed it again over them.
The telephone began to ring downstairs. “Damn,” she said. “I should have taken it off the hook.”
“You want to go answer it?”
“No. It’s probably for Trevor anyway. He’s in the telephone-hanging stage now, wants to talk for hours with his friends. They call him up at all hours, I can hardly get to use the phone anymore. He’s starting to go out with girls now, too, and they’re aggressive little devils these days; they call him all the time.” The telephone rang eight times (a part of his brain counted that), and she talked on about Trevor and what he was doing and how he was coming along in school and how much she loved him and she was going to make a man out of him.
While McDonald felt along the smoothness of her thighs to the crisp hair and she moved her legs to let him finger her.
“Trevor’s getting along fine with the girls,” she was saying. “They’re just crazy about him.” She moved a little. “Have you got something on?”
“Yes,” he said, thinking that there was not even a cursory inspection, that she would demand care and cleanliness if he were to probe her ear orifice with his finger, but no demand at all to probe this part of her.
She slid toward him as he moved over her.
“It’s been a long time for us, hasn’t it?”
“Two years,” he said.
There was a little pressure at first and then it was all right.
“You’re very nice and warm,” she said. “God, has it been cold here. Is it this cold in Columbia?”
“Not quite,” he murmured.
“Um, you feel good,” she said. She looked at his body, him lifted over her.
“This was always nice. Like old times.”
“Yes.”
She put her arms under his and her hands felt his hips. She moved her hips gradually, quickening a little, and shortly and easily, as she always could, he remembered, she went, clenching her teeth and eyes, giving a sort of subdued groan, and then she relaxed, opened her eyes and smiled at him.
“You could always make me do it easily,” she said, and gave a sigh, as if they had recently finished a passably good dish of ice cream, he thought. “Now you do it,” she said.
Beneath him the flaccid body waited, the shoulders moved a little each time upon the sheets, the calm, impassive, pretty face looked placidly past his shoulder. Gradual quickening. Two minutes, three, and she lifted her legs to accept him, gauging him expertly he thought; and then drawing himself together to push, not energetically, it was over.
They were not even perspiring, he thought.
“That was nice,” she said.
They dressed and went downstairs to finish their drinks.
“How is your writing going?” she asked in the composure of the living room, the Christmas carols afresh on the record player.
“I’m not doing much,” he said. Like many men who had gone into literature he had thought at one time that he could write and he had even gotten a couple of stories into little magazines. She had been terrifically impressed by the printed page with his name on it, had even bought copies of the magazine for herself, although as far as he knew she had read only one story he had ever written and that one had depressed her.
(“You’re so
intense
about everything, Jim,” she had said. She had liked that adjective, intense, had used it often thereafter. “Why do you write about such dark and unhappy things? You should take things more lightly.”)
“You should keep writing, Jim,” she said now. “You’re really talented.”
“I wish I were,” he said.
“You are talented,” she cried. “You should write.” She had always liked that idea, he thought, along with the intellectual side of him, the thought that perhaps he would someday write a successful novel. “You must keep writing.” She laughed and in enthusiasm struck his shoulder. “You should write about me. God, that would be a best seller.”
Her story, she called it. She felt that “her story” was something unique, somehow enormously interesting if it could be written down; just to do “her story,” farm girl come to the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, to take a course in a business college, after the wedding in wartime and the divorce, to become a secretary and live in a duplex, shoddily rear a son, and be seduced by men. Although Wanda could never bring herself to say it, McDonald knew that
the excitement of “her story” revolved around the men she had known and slept with; it was a secret pride with her.
In those first days of their love-making, in their sophisticated detachment and disinterest, they had talked about men and woman, and with bland inquisitiveness, not really caring, not as he cared in the sharper inquisitions later on, he had asked her about the men, and always she had lied, or so he presumed from the variations in her stories. First there had been but three, the husband who had robbed her of virginity, a school principal from Albion who had helped her recover from loneliness and divorce, and after several years of a growing virtue came McDonald; another time there had been eight, again there had been eleven, and once in acute honesty, for she could never remember her lies about that, she had said “about fifteen” but she could not remember the names of one or two. “It was kind of like brushing teeth, the importance of it,” he said to her in half-jest, and she was irritated by that, and the next time he called for her she had put him off, saying, “If I’m no more important than brushing teeth to you, I guess you don’t want to go with me,” but later she came around to his cajolery, and whimpered a little and said she had made it all up about the men she had known, it was all a lie, a little white one, and she was hurt that he hadn’t realized that, for didn’t everybody like to exaggerate a little? So she reverted to the story of but three men in her life, with a fourth and most important—Trevor, of course. It was then McDonald began to feel a nagging hurt in his belly, a distemper hot and unpredictable, as if some ancient and honest pain had risen and fastened itself upon him.
McDonald shook his head at that hurt that he felt again, and she, misinterpreting it, said, “Don’t give up on your writing now. Keep at it.”
The virtue of hard work, he thought. Perseverance will bring
you through to success and especially fortune (which can buy such nice, expensive things) is what she always believed.
Suddenly somber, he drank his drink and went to fix another. He wished to get drunk and knew he could not, not that night.
“Where’s the good feeling we’re supposed to have?” he asked suddenly and sharply.
“What do you mean?” she asked, looking queerly at him.
“Where’s that gaiety, that spirit, that life tonight? We’ve had our drinks, danced our dance, made our love.” The knot of that old distemper grew hotter and harder.
“Have things been so bad tonight?” she asked with female defensiveness. “I’m sorry if after two years there isn’t the red carpet. You’ve gotten a lot for nothing. What do you expect?”
He shook his head. “Nothing,” he said.
They were in it together, he thought, together they had reached this conclusion, together had formulated this hypocrisy in the desert of their dead hearts, in this grotesquery of passion and of feeling; the heart bursting with love and clutching for love, the body writhing in the soft agony of lustful energy, wanting love, all succumbed to the heartbreaking most common ordeal of her bed. Passionless, passionless, he cried to himself. The dull embrace, the plodding ritual, absent the feeling, absent the bond. They had made themselves what they were. With haughty dreams of sophistication they had found each other, with sham they seduced each other, used each other, in this parody of love their hearts had become gargoyles, blandly reducing all to this commonplace ordeal.