Authors: James Jones
When she had first told him about it, the first person that popped into his mind had been her own granddaughter, Edith Barclay—but hell, Frank was twenty years older than she was. And now he looked at Janie. Dave suddenly did not want to become involved in it, any of it. “Yeah, that’s probably what it is,” he said.
“Well, it’s the ony thing I can figure,” Jane said.
“Otherwise, somebody’d be sure to know about it.”
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she said. Then she grinned. “But I’ll be willin to bet you five bucks that Frank and Agnes are goin to be red-hot lovers again before long, or I’ve missed all the signs.”
“I wouldn’t bet with you on your own game, Janie,” he grinned.
She had laughed, from behind those haunted-looking eyes. “That goddam ’Bama’s taught you too goddam much,” she said. “Well, I got to get back to work, or you guys liable to fire my big ass.” And he had watched her trundle away out of the kitchen into the dining room. Losing part of that enormous weight had probably been good for her, as well as making her look better. Later, he had thought about what she had said about Frank and Agnes, and laughed about it. The two-faced sanctimonious little bastard.
Sitting in the kitchen alone, savoring his drink and the smell of his frying hamburger, Dave could not suppress a smile of affection. Jane had made a tremendous change in their house. It did not even seem to be the same house at all. She had given it to them as her considered opinion that they had done a great deal with this house in their redecorating. She had, it seemed, worked here once before, back before those damn know-nothing Albersons whom she would not work for though they had asked her to stay on had bought it. Life was too damned short, she told Dave, to work for people who were so damned ignorant that they had no human feelings at all and bored you. “At least, your damned brother and his wife got enough human feelings and emotions to fight a little,” she said.
Jane herself, it appeared, had almost entirely stopped her running around lately. He had never mentioned the Old Man to her; nor had she to him. She still held her court at Smitty’s, and all the old duffers still came sniffing around. He had seen the Old Man there once or twice and had slipped him a five or ten. But apparently she wasn’t going out with any of them now, for some reason nobody understood. “Christ! we gonna start havin a crime wave of octogenarian sex crimes in this town,” Dewey had grinned. “You suppose she’s turnin into a moralist on us?”
Dave got up from the table, grinning to himself, and slid his hamburger off onto a plate and then mixed himself another martini and got two pieces of fresh white bread and sat down to eat.
Of course, it wasn’t only the coming of Janie that had changed the house; there was something else, too. The second thing was the advent of ’Bama’s new girlfriend, Doris Fredric, onto the premises.
But neither of these things really had half as much to do with it as the change that had happened in himself. For the past month, he had been happier than he had ever been in his life. He didn’t understand it, but he nevertheless had to admit it. It appeared to be much simpler than it actually was. And something about it even seemed to actively attract him. He had Gwen, and his love for her—on the one hand; and on the other he had his “sexual life.” If he got hard up for sex, he could always find a piece around someplace, although it was never as nice as in Miami, but even that he didn’t mind—and if he couldn’t get it anyplace else, he could always go and pick up Ginnie Moorehead. Although this last had been happening less and less often.
But all that wasn’t what was puzzling him so. Dave had read somewhere once about the theory that a man should keep his “Love” and his sexual satisfaction separate, and not sully the idealism of the first with the second—and had laughed at it at the time. But now the same thing seemed to be happening to him, and not only that, was making him happy! He was loving Gwen French—desperately—and was getting his sexual satisfaction elsewhere—and it seemed to be actually good for him! It was making him happy, and it seemed to be helping his work.
But, of course, a lot of his happiness was also due to the fact that he knew for sure now that Gwen really loved him. If she didn’t, she would never have refused to sleep with him like she had. She would have gone ahead and tried him, like she had all those other men without caring if she hurt him. But with him, she couldn’t do that.
When Gwen had first called him up about the book manuscript, a couple of days after he had taken it over to her, he had gone over that same evening. Neither of them had mentioned what had happened the time before. And yet there was no constraint. They had sat down with the manuscript and a sheaf of notes Gwen had made on it, and while Bob sat back by the record player reading, had gone over the whole thing together. They had been very close, warm friends—nay, he thought poetically, they had been lovers; lovers in that private silent language lovers have, that is mostly with the eyes, but that is just as valuable—perhaps more valuable—than the spoken word. And yet not a word about love or anything of that sort was said. It had been a wonderful evening. And when he went home to bed celibate (for that night at least), he not only had not minded but had actually enjoyed doing it.
Since then, he had been working with her closely, going over two and often three evenings a week, and in the little over a month since that first trip after getting back from Florida he had finished one chapter and part of another. It was slow, boring, head-cracking work—not the kind of wild, quick, excited work he had done when he wrote “The Confederate” in six weeks; but he was enjoying it. It was going to be a long pull.
He would take over what he had done for her to read, and then would amuse himself playing their records or reading their books while she took the pages off in the corner, and then they would dissect them and perhaps have a drink or eat something or talk to Bob or play a game of chess. Only rarely did she have a criticism, and she admitted to him rather happily that she had been pretty worried whether or not he would be able to do this kind of work. “This is fully conscious writing,” she smiled, “you have a preconceived effect consciously in mind and are working deliberately toward it. There’s all the difference in the world between this and what I call unconscious writing—where you merely write out of the excess of your own emotions. The unconscious writer doesn’t really
know
what he’s writing or its significance. He has no criterion of judgment except his own personal emotions. That’s the way your first two books were written, and ‘The Confederate’ also, except that in ‘The Confederate,’ you showed a really first-class overall organizational sense. But that’s not the same as writing consciously.” She sighed and ran her fingers back along her temple. “Wally is still in that stage of unconscious writing,” she said, in what was a sudden new intimacy with Dave, because she never talked to him about others’ writing. “And I dread when he will have to grow and change over into conscious writing. It’s the worst period a writer can go through. And a lot of them never make it. Because once you become conscious of what you are doing, you lose the validity of
innocent
emotion. It’s no longer enough to just
feel
something, and then write it. You have to construct. So most writers never make the change. They simply avoid it, and live on, trying to imitate their old unconscious writing—which, of course, they can’t do. God knows what will happen to Wally when he becomes sophisticated and begins to see himself.”
Dave had seen Wally over at the house in Israel a couple of times, and there had been nothing but the nicest of friendliness between them both times, and yet he could not help but sense a new stiffness between them also, that had not been there until just recently. They were like two strange male dogs bristling. It seemed to date from the housewarming party, when Dawn had made her comment about “competition,” and even when Wally came down to the house in Parkman to play Ping-Pong, it was still there, although Wally never stopped coming. Hearing Gwen talk about Wally’s work had somehow done away with his own competitive drive.
Bob French himself had not read any of the book, and said he did not want to until he could read it in more or less final draft. That way, he said, he could give them both a completely fresh viewpoint. But he had read “The Confederate” and was enthusiastic about it, and had already sent it off to the New Living Literature people. He expected an answer in a month or two, and he expected it in the affirmative. They talked about this, and about all writing in general, and about people, and about pretty nearly everything else, while Dave was over there. Twice he had upon invitation stayed over for the entire weekend, writing just the same every day. He could not have enjoyed himself more. And he did not even mind sleeping two or three rooms away from her and knowing that she was lying so close, alone and undressed.
All this of course was taking a good deal of time away from his gambling junkets with ’Bama. But the tall man was all for it. After all, that was what they’d first taken the house for, wasn’t it? so as to help him out with his writin? What the hell was he worryin about, anyway? The thing was to stay with it, do whatever was necessary to get it done.
The result was that they were now only spending three or four evenings a week at poker. But the truth was, ’Bama had a good deal to occupy himself also, because he was spending a lot of time now with Doris Fredric.
Dave did not know exactly when all this had started, but a week or so after the housewarming party (which she had not been at) Doris Fredric had suddenly started showing up at the house at night with ’Bama. And it was obvious from the very first that ’Bama had been going out with her for some time before they went to Florida. Just how long, Dave didn’t know. Because ’Bama never talked about her.
It was clear that ’Bama was being a gentleman about her, a rare circumstance for ’Bama with a woman. And as to whether he was actually sleeping with her, Dave did not know; he had never seen any indications of it between them; but knowing ’Bama, he assumed that he was. And yet there was some quality about the girl that half-convinced you that they were not sleeping together and were in fact only just sort of “dating.” And yet she must know he had a wife; everybody did.
Dave had spent a lot of time studying them—and had had plenty of opportunity to do so. From coming to the house secretly at night with ’Bama (although neither of them acted in any way as if it might be secret), it was only a short step for Doris to start coming by in the daytime—either with or without ’Bama—and in her own car. It was as if she were intent upon either calling fate down upon her pretty little cherrywood-colored head with her own destruction, or else proving that she could (because she was Paul Fredric’s daughter) do any damned thing she wanted to in Parkman and get by with it.
In another woman, it might have made Dave admire her. But for some reason—which he could not formulate in words in any other way except to say he felt she was “false”—he had taken a strong dislike to her. And her more or less tempting of fate—or else her desire to be above it, whichever it was—just made him dislike her only that much the more. And Doris, who was obviously no fool, sensed it and disliked him equally, although she was always sweet and polite to him and you could not have told she disliked him. And yet you could.
Another thing about Doris that made him dislike her was that she was so dumb. While a long way from being a fool, she was so dumb about everything except herself that it was actually irritating. For instance, she was a teacher of English in the high school—in itself a kind of lying pose, since with her money she didn’t need to do anything; and yet she knew nothing about literature, except just the barest rote necessities which she taught her classes. This had become apparent the first time she came to the house. ’Bama had hauled all of his books up from the farm, after getting Dewey and Hubie to build and paint them some shelves, and had installed them in the house. ’Bama’s books were almost entirely on two subjects: the Civil War, and esoteric metaphysics; and while he openly did not consider himself an educated man, he had read all of them through at least twice. And in addition, there were all of Dave’s books, literary ones, which he had been collecting ever since they had gone to Florida. Doris Fredric had walked along past them, trailing her finger along the book spines, as she inspected the house. “Oh, the Civil War,” she said airily. And, “Oh, metaphysics.” And, “Oh,
Thomas Wolfe’s Letters to His Mother.”
All as if she knew everything about all of these. But it turned out, upon questioning, that she knew nothing about any of them. She had never even heard of Nathan Bedford Forrest, and she had not even read one of Wolfe’s novels, but none of this bothered her in the least. “I’ll have to borrow some of your books and start reading up again,” she said with her sweet demure little-girl’s smile to ’Bama. But to date, she had never borrowed a book.
’Bama himself did not appear to be at all violently in love with her. Indeed, he seemed merely to be amused by her. He would sit, listening to her talk, a half-humorous expression on his face as he watched her. He himself said little, and said that in a half-sneering, half-bantering way.
She would come by the house in the morning now that school was out, around noon, when they were just getting up, and park out in front on the street, and march into the house wearing a long expensive terrycloth robe over a cute little one-piece bathing suit and take ’Bama off to go swimming with her, driving her yellow convertible with the top down and ’Bama with that hat sitting beside her. Evidently, she wanted people to know, while she herself kept up the appearances of not wanting them to.
This then was the woman who, along with the coming of Jane Staley, had partially helped to change the house. She had brought out fluffy expensive towels and distributed them around the bathrooms. She had brought contour sheets for the beds. She had bought them a large, expensive table lighter and installed it on the cocktail table in the living room. She even kept it filled. She had brought out some red-and-white checkered tablecloths for the kitchen table where they usually ate and some heavy medieval-looking candles, which she liked to eat by the light of. And, perhaps the crowning and consummate gall, Dave thought, she had brought out a number of her own books, all of them third-rate romantic historical novels, and with complete aplomb and total unawareness of any difference had placed them on the shelves with ’Bama’s and Dave’s books. She had, in short, moved in and—and yet without any sense of encroachment—taken over.