Finding a Girl in America (28 page)

Hank does not call Edith Sunday night because he does not know whether or not his turning to her will hurt Lori, and he does not have the energy to ask her. When he realizes that is the only reason, he then wonders if he has the energy to love. He does not remember the woman he was with, or the specific causes, or even the season or calendar year, but he remembers feeling like this before, and he is frightened by its familiarity, its reminder that so much of his life demands energy. He imagines poverty, hunger, oppression, exile, imprisonment: all those lives out there whose suffering is so much worse than his, their endurance so superior, that his own battles could earn only their scorn. He knows all this is true, but it doesn't help, and he makes a salty dog for Lori and, after hesitating, one for himself. Halfway through his drink, as they lie propped on the bed—he has no chairs except the one at his desk—watching
All in the Family
, he decides not to have a second drink. He has become mute, as if the day-long downward-pulling heaviness of his body is trying to paralyze him. So he holds Lori's hand. At nine they undress and get under the covers and watch
The New Centurions
. When George C. Scott kills himself, they wipe their eyes; when Stacey Keach dies, they wipe them again, and Lori says: ‘Shit.' Hank wishes he had armed enemies and a .38 and a riot gun. He thinks he would rather fight that way than by watching television and staying sober and trying to speak. He goes through the apartment turning out lights, then gets into bed and tightly holds Lori.

‘I still can't,' he says.

‘I know.'

He wants to tell her—and in fact does in his mind—how much he loves her, how grateful he is that she was with him all day, quietly knowing his pain, and that as bad as it was, the day would have been worse without her; that she might even have given him and Sharon the day, for without her he might not have been able to get out of bed this morning. But silence has him and the only way he can break it is with tears as deep and wrenching as last night's, and he will not go through that again, does not know if he can bear that emptying again and afterward have something left over for whatever it is he has to do.

Some time in the night he dreams of him and Sharon lying on the blanket at the beach, the fetus curled pink and sweetly beside him, and asleep he knows as if awake that he is dreaming, that in the morning he will wake with it.

Monday night he eats a sandwich, standing in the kitchen by the telephone, and calls Jack and asks him to go out for a drink after dinner. Then he phones Edith. When she asks what happened he starts to tell her but can only repeat
I
three times and say
Monica
; then he is crying and cursing his tears and slapping the wall with his hand. Edith tells him to take his time (they
are
forever married, he thinks) and finally with her comforting he stops crying and tells the whole story in one long sentence, and Edith says: ‘That little bitch. She didn't even let you
know? I
could have taken it. I would have taken your baby.'

‘
I
would have.'

‘You would?'

‘You're Goddamned right. I didn't even get a fucking shot at it. That's why she didn't let me know. She knew I'd have fought it.'

‘You keep surprising me. That's what happens in marriage, right? People keep changing.'

‘Who says I changed?'

‘I just didn't know you felt that way.'

‘I never had to before.'

‘I'm sorry, baby. I never did like that girl. Too much mischief in those eyes.'

‘It was worse than that.'

‘Too many lies deciding which would come out first.'

‘That's her.'

‘I really would have taken it. If things had gotten bad for you.'

‘I know.'

‘Is there anything I can do?'

‘Forgive me.'

‘For what?'

‘Everything.'

‘You are. Sharon was very happy when she came home yesterday.'

Hank's drinks are bourbon, beer, gin, and tequila, and he knows where each will take him. Bourbon will keep him in the same mood he's in when he starts to drink; beer does the same. Either of them, if he drinks enough, will sharpen his focus on his mood, but will not change it, nor take it too far. So they are reliable drinks when he is feeling either good or bad. He has never had a depressed or mean tequila drunk; it always brings him up, and he likes to use it most when he is relaxed and happy after a good day's work. He can also trust it when he is sad. He likes gin rickeys, and his favorite drink is a martini, but he does not trust gin, and drinks it very carefully: it is unpredictable, can take him any place, can suddenly—when he happily began an evening—tap some anger or sorrow he did not even know he had. Since meeting Lori, who loves tequila, he has been replacing the juniper with the cactus.

Tonight, with Jack, he drank gin rickeys, and it is not until he is lying in bed and remembering the fight he has just won that he can actually see it. Timmy's is a neighborhood bar, long and narrow, with only a restroom for men. Beyond its wall is the restaurant, with booths on both sides and one line of tables in the middle; the waitresses in there get drinks through a half door behind the bartender; when customers are in the dining room, the door is kept closed on the noise from the bar. Students rarely drink on the bar side; they stay in the dining room.

Tonight the bar was lined with regulars, working men whose ages are in every decade between twenty and seventy. Two strangers, men in their mid-twenties, stood beside Hank. Their hands were tough, dirty-fingernailed, and their faces confident. Hank noticed this because he was trying to guess what they did for a living. Some of the young men who drank at Timmy's were out of work and drawing unemployment and it showed in their eyes. After the second drink Jack said: ‘It's either woman-trouble or work-trouble. Which one?'

‘Neither.'

‘It's got to be. It's always one or the other, with a man. Or money.'

‘Nope.'

‘Jesus. Are we here to talk about it?'

‘No, just to shoot the shit.'

Johnny McCarthy brought their drinks: in his mid-twenties, he is working his way through law school; yet always behind the bar, even when he is taking exams, he is merry; he boxed for Notre Dame five or six years ago and looks and moves as though he still could. Hank paid for the round, heard ‘nigger' beside him, missed the rest of the young man's sentence, and asked Jack if he ran today.

‘No, I got fucked into a meeting. Did you?'

‘Just a short one by the campus. Let's run Kenoza tomorrow.'

‘Good.'

‘I'll pick you up.'

The talk to his right was louder, and he tried not to hear it as he and Jack talked about teaching, punctuated once by the man bumping his right side, an accident probably but no apology for it; then more talk until he heard ‘Lee' and, still listening to Jack and talking to him, he also listened to blond big-shouldered cocky asshole on his right cursing Hank's favorite man on the Red Sox, that smooth pitcher, that competitor. In his bed he cannot count the gin rickeys or the time that passed before he heard ‘Lee,' then turned and no longer saw the broad shoulders. Drunk, he felt big and strong and fast and, most of all, an anger that had to be released, an anger so intense that it felt like hatred too. As a grown man he had come close to fighting several times, in bars, but he never had because always, just short of saying the final words that would do it, he had images of the consequences: it was not fear of being hurt; he had played football in high school and was not unduly afraid of pain; it was the image of the fight's end: the bartender, usually a friend, sober and disgusted as he ejected Hank; or, worse, cops, sober and solemn and ready for a little action themselves, and he could not get past those images of dignity-loss, of shame, of being pulled up from the floor where he rolled and fought like a dog. So always he had stopped, had felt like a coward till next morning when he was glad he had stopped. But this time he turned to the man and said: ‘You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.'

The man stepped back to give himself room.

‘What's that?'

‘Lee's the best clutch pitcher on the staff.'

‘Fucking loudmouth spaceman is what he is.'

‘Oh that's it. I thought I heard nigger a while back. You don't like what he
says
, is that it?' He could feel rather than hear the silence in the bar, could hear Johnny across the bar talking to him, urging, his voice soft and friendly. ‘It's bussing, is that it? You don't like Lee because he's for bussing? Pissed you off when he didn't like the war?'

‘Fuck
him
. I was
in
Nam, motherfucker, and I don't want to fucking hear you again: you drink with that other cunt you're with.'

‘I'm glad you didn't get killed over there,' Hank said, his voice low, surprising him, and he turned away, nodded at Johnny, then he reached for his glass, confused, too many images now—and in his bed smiling he can understand it: dead children and women and scared soldiers and dead soldiers; and in Washington he and Jack quietly crying as they watched the veterans march, old eyes and mouths on their young bodies or what was left of some of them: the legless black with his right arm raised as a friend pushed his wheelchair, the empty sleeves, empty trouser-legs on that cold Inauguration Day; in his bed he can understand it: the man had given him a glimpse of what might have been his long suffering in Vietnam, for a moment he had become a man instead of an asshole with a voice. Then Hank surprised himself again: his rage came back, and into his drink he said: ‘Fuck you anyway.'

They were standing side by side, nearly touching: they turned together. Hank's left fist already swinging, and his right followed it, coming up from below and behind his waist; then he seemed to be watching himself from the noise and grasping hands around him, felt the hands slipping from him as he kept swinging, and the self he was watching was calm and existed in a circle of silence, as if he were a hurricane watching its own eye. The man was off-balance from Hank's first two punches, so he could not get his feet and body set, and all his blows on Hank's arms, ribs, side of the head, came while going backward and trying to plant his feet and get his weight forward; and Hank drove inside and with short punches went for the blood at the nose and mouth. Then the man was against the wall, and Hank felt lifted and thrown though his feet did not leave the floor; the small of his back was pressed against the bar's edge, his arms spread and held to the bar by each wrist in Johnny's tight hands. Then it was Jack holding his wrists, talking to him, and over Jack's shoulder he watched Johnny push aside the two regulars holding the man against the wall. The man's friend was there, yelling, cursing. Johnny turned to him, one hand on the blond's chest, and said: ‘I'm sick of this shit. Open your mouth again and you'll look like your friend there.' Then he turned to Jack: ‘Will you get Hank the fuck
out
of here.'

Then he was outside, arm-in-arm with Jack, and he was laughing.

‘Are you all right?'

He could feel Jack trembling; he was trembling too.

‘I feel
great
,' he said.

‘You tore his ass. You crazy bastard, I didn't know you could fight.'

‘I can't,' Hank said, sagging from Jack's arm as he laughed. ‘I just did, that's all.'

He is awake a long time but it is excitement and when finally he sleeps he is still happy. The dream is familiar now: it comes earlier than usual, or Hank feels that it does, and next morning at ten he wakes to that and much more. He is grateful the sun is coming in; it doesn't help, but a grey sky would be worse: he lies thinking of Johnny's anger last night, and he wonders who the man is, and hopes that somewhere he is lying with a gentle woman who last night washed his cuts. Then he is sad. It has been this way all his life, as long as he can remember, even with bullies in grade school, and he has never understood it: he can hate a man, want to hurt him or see him hurt; but if he imagines the man going home to a woman (as the bullies went to their mothers) he is sad. He imagines the man last night entering his apartment, the woman hurrying to his face, the man vulnerable with her as he is with no one else, as he can be with no one else, loving her as she washes eachcut—
Does that hurt? Yes
—the man becoming a boy again as she gently cleans him, knowing this is the deepest part of himself beneath all the layers of growing up and being a man among men and soldiering: this—and he can show it only to her, and she is the only one in his life who can love it.

‘I hope he finds me and beats shit out of me,' Hank says aloud. Then he can smile: he does not want the shit beat out of him. He drives to Jack's house. In the car, when Hank tells him how he feels now, Jack says: ‘Fuck that guy; he wanted a fight all night. And after school we'll go see Johnny. He'll start laughing as soon as he sees you.' Immediately Hank knows this is true. He wonders what men without friends do on the day after they've been drunken assholes.

At Lake Kenoza he parks at the city tennis courts and locks his wallet and their windbreakers in the car. They start slowly, running on a dirt road, in the open still, the sun warm on Hank's face: he looks at the large pond to his left. The purple loose-strife is gone now; in summer it grows bright purple among the reeds near the pond. The road curves around the pond, which is separated from the lake by a finger of tree-grown earth. As they leave the pond they enter the woods, the road sun-dappled now, deeply rutted, so he has to keep glancing down at it as he also watches the lake to his left; the road is close to it, just up the slope from its bank lapped by waves in the breeze; to his right the earth rises, thick with trees. He and Jack talk while they run.

He wishes Lori ran. He has never had a woman who did. Edith started after their marriage ended. Running is the most intimate part of his friendship with Jack. Hank does not understand precisely why this is true. Perhaps it has something to do with the rhythm of their feet and breath. But there is more: it is, Hank thinks, setting free the flesh: as they approach the bend marking the second mile, the road staying by the lake and moving deeper into the woods which rise farther and farther to their right, he is no longer distracted by anything: he sees the lake and road and woods and Jack's swinging arms and reaching legs as he could never see them if he were simply walking, or standing still. It is this: even in lovemaking the body can become a voyeur of its own pleasure. But in the willful exertion of running, nothing can distract the flesh from itself.