Some Came Running (116 page)

And after it was over, and they had dressed themselves again, he decided to just come out with it, to get it over with—not because he had finally gotten one back up on her; it wasn’t that at all—but just simply because he didn’t want to go on this way with her any longer; he had just gotten a bellyful.

Sitting in his mom’s kitchen over another beer, Dawnie sitting staring down into her glass pensively, her soft hair against her cheek, himself wondering how he was going to go about it, bring it up, finally, he just blurted it out.

“You don’t like to go to bed with me anymore, do you, Dawnie?” he asked.

She looked up at him, coolly, distantly, not the same girl—not the same
woman
—he had known last summer at all. “Do you feel that?” she said coldly.

“What the hell else is there
to
feel? It’s obvious, ain’t it?” he said. “Don’t you enjoy it at all?”

She shrugged a little, staring at him coolly. “I suppose I enjoy it about as much as any woman does. Women aren’t made the same as men, I don’t think. Women like to be loved a little bit with their sex.”

“And you don’t think I love you enough?” Wally said.

Again she shrugged.

“Or love you at all?” he said.

“I suppose you love me as much as you are capable of.”

“But that’s not enough, you mean?”

Dawn eyed him distantly. “I give you what you want, don’t I?”

“No!” Wally said. “No, you don’t. I want your
self.
You don’t give yourself. Hell, I can get sex anywhere. I can buy that.”

Dawn smiled at him, a sad little smile. Then suddenly, she flung her head back and stared at the ceiling, before she looked back down at him, straight in the eye. “Maybe there isn’t any self of me left to give anymore,” she said.

“Then maybe we just better call the whole damned thing off!” Wally said, angrier than he meant to.

“I suppose that would be the wisest thing,” Dawn said coolly, staring him straight into the eyes.

“All we seem to do is cause each other misery and trouble anymore,” he said; “we don’t give each other any happiness at all, anymore.”

“I expect that would be the best,” she said.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t go on and get married, ain’t it?” Wally said. “Why didn’t you answer my letters?”

Dawn shrugged. “I was busy,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I did answer all of them, didn’t I? eventually?”

This was not strictly the truth; but it was the truth as far as it went. A week or so after she was gone, caught up in missing her, he had written her a very passionate love letter. He had gotten an answer right back; but it was a cool, distant little short letter that was so unlike his own that it was like a bucket of cold water in the face. He had waited several weeks before he wrote again, just to let her know he wasn’t actually dying for her, and then there was a long wait before she answered again—the same cool little letter like the first. After that was when he looked up Rosalie. And all because he wouldn’t run off to New York on some crazy junket which they would have been back from in six weeks. It was ridiculous.

“I suppose you had some man on the string up there,” he said disgustedly. “Is that what you’re implying?”

“As a matter of fact, there was an actor I met at the playhouse,” Dawn said; “a gentle kind sort of a chap.”

“You mean, not at all like me,” Wally said.

“No, not very much,” she smiled.

“Then he’ll never be a great actor,” Wally said darkly.

“Probably not,” Dawn said. “However, he might make some girl a nice husband someday. Not me, of course,” she added. “As I said, I guess there just isn’t any self of me left to give.”

“Now don’t start trying to get on my back about me taking your virginity away from you,” Wally said.

“I didn’t mean that at all,” Dawn said coolly. “You don’t owe me anything. In fact, I feel you did me a favor. You’ve taught me a great deal about men, Wally,” she smiled, that cool pitying smile.

“Yeah,” Wally said; “yeah.” He could not touch her at all. He could not even make her angry. “Well, you’ve taught me a hell of a lot about women.”

“Well, I’m glad you feel that way, Wally. I really am,” Dawnie said. “Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?”

“No. I’ll take you home,” he said, putting finality in his voice.

Without a word, Dawn got up from the table, and looking suddenly tall and regal walked into the hall and got her coat and put it on, and then turned and looked at him, expectant, cool.

He got his fleece-lined jacket and his old baseball cap, and he took her home. And as he watched her go up the steps onto the Hirsh porch—the last time he would watch her climb them late at night like that—he was glad. If there was a little hollow feeling in him that he had perhaps not done right by her (about taking her virginity), he put it down. After all, she had wanted it as much as he had. And she was not the same girl—same woman; because she was a woman now—that he had known last summer. Not the same at all. She went straight up the steps, still looking tall and regal, and straight on in the house without saying goodby or looking back. Wally watched her, thinking Well, it was back to Old Rosalie for him. He put his mom’s car in gear and drove away without any roaring of the motor or skidding of the tires, so as to let her know he did not care, either.

A couple of days later—New Year’s Eve day, it was—he was uptown and saw her riding around in the Shotridge’s big family Cadillac with young Jimmy. It hadn’t taken her long, he thought grinning to himself. Well, if she wanted to trade him in on a square oaf like Jimmy Shotridge, it was all right with him. Shotridge, who was only nineteen and only a sophomore at UI. In business administration, yet! Wally was pretty damned confident
that
wouldn’t last long. Not that he wanted her back; he didn’t. And he was glad to be out of it as easily as he was. Sooooo, it was time to start redistributing life again. That night, he got hold of Old Rosalie Sansome and brought her back out to the house again.

Rosalie had never been very satisfying to him. Whenever he slept with her, it left him feeling just as empty and as irritably lonely as he had felt before. Rosalie wasn’t very bright, but she was hard as nails and she amused him. The first time, he had sneaked her into the house, she had walked all around the house, looked at everything airily and said:

“Why don’t you marry me, Wally?”

He had laughed outright, while she continued to stare at him, silently demanding an answer.

“Why the hell should I want to marry you?” he grinned.

Rosalie swung her arms around at the music room and the hall and his mom’s heavily overstuffed furniture in the living room. “Oh; I’d make you a good wife,” she said. “I could live here with your mother and cook for you and lay for you and give you material for books out of my life. I’d make you a goddamned good wife.”

“I don’t want a good wife,” he smiled. “Or any other kind of a wife, for that matter. I’m happy like I am.” This wasn’t exactly the whole truth; but it was certainly all of it he would ever tell Rosalie.

“Every man needs a wife,” Rosalie said. “That’s nature. Besides, I like this place,” she said. “Your mother has wonderful taste.”

“Yeah,” he said, masking a grin.

“This place is even nicer than my aunt’s place up at West Lancaster,” Rosalie said. “You know, my aunt’s really worth a lot of money—what with that bar and them whorehouses she use to run years ago. She’s really quite well off.”

“Yeah, but I’d never see any of it,” Wally grinned.

“Don’t be too sure,” Rosalie said, pointing her finger at him. “I think I’m in her will. I’m the only close relative she’s got, you know.”

“Well, I ain’t about to marry you anyway,” Wally grinned. “You nor no other woman. I like living by myself and I mean to keep it that way.”

“You wouldn’t say that if your mother wasn’t here to wait on you,” Rosalie said. “Anyway, it was just an idea.”

“That’s all it’ll ever be,” Wally said. Jesus! She was a whole head taller than him—and bigger, though there certainly wasn’t any fat on her. He looked her over, his breath short and his palms damp at the prospect of them both, being here, standing on the carpets and moving from room to room in his mom’s house, their two nude figures showing strangely against the shifting backdrops of the room walls with their pictures and hangings.

But she was from just about the lowest strata of society as you could get. In Parkman, Illinois, anyway. And she was older than him. Marry her! Yeah. He could just see his mom’s face.

He had had her a number of times before this of course, down at ’Bama and Dave’s house; but it was not like having her here in his own house, in his own room and his own bed. And it had been the same thing again only better, on New Year’s Eve night, when he had brought her home again, after seeing Dawnie uptown with Jim Shotridge.

The only trouble was, of course, that his mom did not go away visiting overnight often enough. Not for a man of his propensities, and needs. As Rosalie had said New Year’s Eve night: “You sure are a horny bastard, Wally. That flatters a girl.” Of course, he did not tell her about that empty, irritable loneliness that came right back afterwards.

But that was why—because his mom wouldn’t go away often enough—that he had to rely on ’Bama and Dave’s house most of the time. He had been keeping his hand in, just to make sure it would remain all right. ’Bama, of course, was always the same: one hell of a good, and smart, guy; but Wally had been more or less off of Dave for the past month or so. Getting that damned Southerner story of his (which was an excellent story) accepted had made Dave get a little pompous, Wally felt. Probably it was natural, but he did not feel that he would have been as pretentious about it as Dave obviously was. After all, it was only a story; good as it was. And, of course, there was always Gwen. Damn her.

It was a very strange thing about Dave, Wally had noted. It was as if Dave
was
two different people; two people who more or less resembled each other, physically, and who when you saw them apart, you might easily mistake one for the other but who when you saw them both together you instantly could tell them apart. The Dave who appeared to be spending almost all his spare time over at Gwen’s was totally different from the Dave who hung out with ’Bama and the guys at Smitty’s.

Wally had been down there the night of the fight between Raymond and Dewey himself, and Dave’s suddenly getting sick at his stomach had surprised and interested him. He had never thought of Dave as that sensitive a type before. Also, the idea that a
physical
memory—the sight of blood on snow out of a man’s combat experience—could just sort of come back of itself out of its own volition, after so long a time, was fascinating. It was astonishing what quirks the human mind could work up and impose on itself.

What amazed him most about the whole thing was Dewey’s unrelievable guilt. It seemed to Wally at times that guilt—eating, acid guilts—was the cause of all the evil in the world. If people could only shuck off their guilts, or better yet, not even assume them in the first place, they would cause themselves a great deal less pain and bloodshed. And he could understand why they did it.

He didn’t do it. It wasn’t rational, and it was totally unobjective. It was just plain damned foolishness, to let your emotions get the upper hand over you like that. He could have let himself go all to pieces with guilt over Dawnie—if he allowed himself to. But he wasn’t going to allow himself.

But then, of course, it wasn’t really Dawnie that he had ever really loved. It was Gwen. He realized that now. He had loved her ever since she had got him started on this goddamned writing business. The only thing that had attracted him to Dawnie in the first place was all those many qualities about her that made him think so much of Gwen: her sensitivity, her interest in the arts, her honesty about society, that square shy look in her eyes.

But it was just that very thing that could have torn him apart with guilt about Dawnie: He had really cheated her, in a way; because his heart, and his soul, and all the love there was in him, already belonged to Gwen French.

Wally had realized finally whom he really loved and wanted. The years’ difference in their ages, their distant relationship, he didn’t care about any of that. But, of course, Gwen did. She had let society and its primitive tabus blind her: She still thought of him as a kid. That one time two years ago when he had asked her point-blank to sleep with him (he still blushed with a painful embarrassment whenever he thought about it), she had smilingly turned it aside without even the decency to refuse him openly. And now she was sleeping with Dave Hirsh!

Hell, anybody could see it. He had suspected it last summer, but hadn’t been willing to believe his own intuition. But you only had to see them once together over there at the house in Israel, and watch all the loverlike smiles and looks, to know it. It was not only painful to Wally to see, it was both embarrassing and disgusting. He was embarrassed for Gwen.

Wally knew the whole story on Ginnie and all about her going out with Dave. He had seen them together down at ’Bama and Dave’s house time after time, and if he had not seen them together again lately, that did not mean that they weren’t. What he would have liked to do was slip over to Israel on the q t and put Gwen wise to just what kind of a guy she was giving herself to.

But of course, damn the son of a bitch, he couldn’t do that. However much he might like to. It went against everything he held to be his integrity. Against the ingrained code he had so carefully taught himself to adhere to, when it came to other people’s sex life. To have done a thing like that would have been to put himself in the same class with Dave Hirsh. And he would not do that.

So all he could do was stand and wait, watching the woman he loved being taken in, until someday she would find out for herself just what had been done to her. Then, and only then, he could come forward and offer himself and what he had to give, at that time when she would probably need it most.

It was all he
could
do. And at times the sheer anguish of it—especially when he had to be around Dave, after Dawnie had gone back to school—seemed almost more than he could take in silence. Thank God, he was lucky enough to have the sexual release of Rosalie handy.