Two Weeks in Another Town (29 page)

But the last bonds of the chastity of his youth were loosed and he made love to all the eager girls who thronged London in that culminating season of the war. He made love to the beautiful ones with an extra thrill of aesthetic delight and to the plain ones with a touch of pity, but he made love to them all with hunger and pleasure and was much sought after when his change of attitude became known, although he refused to say to any one of them, however beautiful or dear or satisfactory she was, that he loved her. That, and only that, he reserved. And when the invasion came and he had to go off with the Signal Corps camera unit to which he had been assigned because he had been in the movies in civilian life, he left London with a huge sigh of regret, because there were still three or four hundred girls he hadn’t slept with.

On his fifth mission, Jack heard, the young lieutenant’s plane blew up over the Ruhr. No parachutes were seen.

Table stakes. You can only bet what you have in front of you…

The ward was quiet, the night light burned dimly over the door at the far end of the room, the maroon bathrobes hung in a neat line behind the beds, a man snored softly, another man turned uneasily and mumbled something that sounded like Savannah. Jack was awake. The pain was now solid and omnipresent. Large hammers seemed to be beating in rhythm within his head, in his throat, down the middle of his body, in the air around him. When he moved on the pillow, he had the feeling that his head was made out of thin transparent plastic and that it was being slowly and brutally inflated with a burning gas. He would have liked to scream, but he didn’t scream. There were fifteen other men sleeping in the ward and he didn’t want to wake them up. He waited. If it doesn’t stop in five minutes, he thought, I am going to ring again. Two minutes later, he pressed the button.

It seemed to be two or three hours before the nurse came. He didn’t recognize her. She was new in the ward, young and pretty and nervous about not doing things correctly.

“You’ve had your pill a long time ago, Lieutenant,” she whispered. “Why don’t you sleep, like a good boy?” She touched his pillow compassionately.

“I’m dying,” he said.

“Now, now,” said the nurse. “You mustn’t give in to yourself like that.” She touched the pillow again. Somehow, she must have gotten the impression that touching a pillow made her more nursely.

“I think you’d better call the doctor,” Jack said, “and tell him I think I’m dying.”

“The doctor saw you at eight o’clock, Lieutenant,” the nurse said, trying to be patient, but sounding annoyed. “He said it was just a small inflammation and that he’d look at you again in the morning.”

Now Jack realized that he knew the nurse. She had been in three times already that night, in answer to his calls, and he remembered that she had reminded him of a secretary in his father’s office who always filed important papers in the wrong drawers. He seemed to be looking at her through a red mist, but now he remembered her, because he remembered that she had said the same thing all three times that night. It was a Saturday night and the hospital was only half staffed for the weekend and she was too new to want to take the responsibility of seeming to contradict the doctors. If the doctor had said at eight o’clock that the inflammation was nothing serious and would wait till morning that took on the authority of a direct order for the nurse. Besides, this ward was filled with men who were theoretically convalescing. They were not supposed to die, especially in the middle of the night, on her tour of duty.

So she patted the pillow one more time and went out.

Jack lay there for another minute, then moved slowly, using his one good hand to help him, and sat on the edge of the bed. But when he tried to stand up, his legs collapsed under him, and he fell, or rather diminished-floated, to the floor. He lay there, trying to think through the red mist. After a while he raised his good hand and tugged at the blankets of the bed next to him. “Wilson,” he whispered. “Wilson.”

He heard the stirring in the bed as Wilson awoke and looked for him. “Wilson,” he whispered.

“Where the hell are you?” Wilson said. Then Wilson’s head appeared over the edge of his bed, and a moment later, very carefully, because they were still picking bits of metal out of his legs below the knee, Wilson was on the floor next to him.

“Listen, Wilson,” Jack said, “if I don’t get to a doctor, I’m going to die.”

Wilson was not like the nurse. For one thing, he had been in hospitals longer than she had, and he knew what could happen in them. He nodded and walked slowly toward the far end of the room, where there were two invalid’s rolling chairs, and brought one back to where Jack was lying. It took ten minutes, with both of them sweating and their hands greasy, to get Jack into the chair. Then, barefooted and grunting with the effort of walking, Wilson pushed the chair in front of him, out of the room, into the long, empty corridor.

There was nobody to be seen, either in the corridor, or in any of the service rooms. Everybody was either off for the weekend or asleep or having coffee or taking care of crisis cases in other wings of the building.

“Do you know where you want to go?” Wilson asked, breathing heavily, leaning over the back of the chair. He was a Texan, with a slow drawl. His family owned a ranch near Amarillo, and you could tell, watching him as he lay on his bed staring down at his ruined legs, that he was wondering what it was going to be like when he tried to get on a horse again. His jeep had gone over a mine in Italy and everybody said that he was lucky to be alive at all.

“No,” Jack said, trying to focus on the dimly lit, reddish, expanding and contracting tunnel. “Just find the nearest doctor.”

Corridors went off at different angles from the one they were on, labyrinth-like, mysterious, cleverly planned. The hospital was newly built, and conceived with great ingenuity, but you had to know the key. After a while they both had the feeling that they could roll on forever, the rubber wheels of the chair hissing on the dark linoleum floor, roll on to the accompaniment of Wilson’s painful barefooted shuffling and agonized breathing, past the miles of closed doors or deceptive lights from empty bays and washing rooms and deserted kitchens, roll on forever, unnoticed, lost, spiraling through the hushed, unpopulated hospital night.

Finally, there was a door with a frosted pane of glass and there was a light behind it. The light seemed tiny to Jack, far away, clear, and ringed in red. With a last, grunting push, Wilson sent the chair against the door and it opened. Sitting behind a desk facing the door was a man with colonel’s eagles on the shoulders of his open shirt. He was small and gray and grizzled, hunched over papers on his desk, reading through steel-rimmed glasses.

Wilson sat down on the one chair near the desk, exhausted. “Colonel,” he whispered, “Colonel…”

The Colonel didn’t say anything. He looked quickly at Wilson, then came over to Jack and, with light, swift fingers, began to unwind the bandage from around his head. He examined the wound along the jaw for a few seconds, touching Jack gently. Then he whistled softly, under his breath, and went over to the telephone on his desk, dialed a number, and said, “This is Colonel Murphy. Prepare Operating Room Two. We’re going to operate in twenty minutes.”

The plastic balloon was now stretched to the utmost with its burning gas, but Jack smiled at the Colonel, because the Colonel had believed him. The Colonel believed, too, that he had been about to die. And now he was in the Colonel’s hands and he wasn’t going to die. And in the long run, that had finally been Jack’s War Aim—not to die.

“She’s more than thirty, Lieutenant. She’s thirty-two.”

“It would never ’ave ’appened if I ’ad slept in me own bed…”

“I don’t know why they can’t transfer you out to California,” Carlotta was saying. “After all, they have hospitals there, too. I could see you all the time then. Virginia! Good Lord! How often can anyone get to Virginia? The only way I managed it this time was because I’m doing a personal appearance in Washington.”

It was another season now. The war had been over for what seemed like a long time. With the other men who were still in the hospital, Jack sensed that the civilians who came to visit them were impatient with them for being so stubborn, for clinging so long to a period that was finished and done with, like spoiled children who refuse to grow up and accept their adult responsibilities. Wilson had phrased it for them all after a visit from a relative. “Son,” he had said, “we are messin’ up the American premises. We all are just unwholesome debris that somebody imported from Europe by mistake.” They were still taking chunks of metal out of his legs.

Jack and Carlotta were sitting under a tree on the hospital grounds. It was green and warm and pleasant, if you didn’t mind the maroon bathrobes, and there was a view of distant bluish hills and it hadn’t become too hot yet. Jack could walk all right now, and his jaw, although twisted and raw-looking, was more or less healed. There were still two operations on his jaw to be gone through, for what the doctors called cosmetic reasons—and he had just been told that the first operation was scheduled for the next morning. But he didn’t say anything about it to Carlotta.

He didn’t want to spoil the afternoon. Carlotta had only two hours to spend there and he didn’t want to spoil them. She looked older, of course, and she was putting on too much weight, and she was sliding down the Hollywood hill, getting bad parts in bad pictures, and taking big cuts in salary, and complaining about the young girls coming up.

Jack saw the thickening of the throat, the deadish, overdyed color of the hair, the artificially pinched-in waist, the look of complaint in her eye and the sound of failure in her voice, and he remembered the voice of the young lieutenant in London saying that she was old, she was thirty, but she was stacked and artful. But he didn’t say anything about any of these things, any more than he had said anything about the operation in the morning.

All he did was sit on the bench beside her, not even touching her, thinking, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

Stubbornly, he was sure that he hadn’t been spared from death in the burning farmhouse, he hadn’t survived the months of morphine and the hours on the operating tables and the journey in the invalid’s chair with Wilson, to lose Carlotta or lose the heart of his feeling for her. He would return to the garden, to the heraldic leaves of the avocado orchard, with the fruit like a child’s drawing, to the fragrance of the lemon and orange trees. In the new, forgiving, peaceful mornings of California, they would remake the pleasure they had created for each other.

“It’s so unfair, your getting hit like this,” Carlotta was saying. “Everybody else is home by now and nobody even
remembers
the war. It’s not as though you were in the Infantry or anything like that, people expect you to get hit. But in the Signal Corps! What were you doing up so close?”

Jack smiled wearily. “Sleeping,” he said. “The situation was somewhat confused.”

“I can’t stand seeing you like this, darling,” Carlotta said, her voice trembling. “So thin, so tired, so—so acquiescent. I keep remembering how cocky you were, how arrogant…” She smiled tremulously. “So nice and impossible and telling everybody just what you thought of them.”

“I promise,” Jack said, “to be impossible again, when I get out of here.”

“We had some good years, didn’t we, Jack?” Carlotta said, and she seemed to be pleading for his assent, as though without his assent the years wouldn’t have been real, wouldn’t have been good, wouldn’t have happened. “Five good years, before you went off to the godamn war.”

“We’ll have a lot more years,” he said. “I guarantee.”

“I don’t know.” She shook her head uncertainly. “Everything’s so changed. Even the climate. The fog doesn’t seem to burn off till noon most days, and I’ve never seen so much rain…I never seem to make the right decisions any more. I used to be so sure of myself…and I’m beginning to
look
so raddled…”

“You look beautiful,” he said.

“Tell that to my public,” she said bitterly. She hitched at her skirt, where it was bunching up at her waist. “I must lose weight,” she said.

“Have you seen Maurice?” Jack asked. “How is he?”

“There’s a rumor the studio’s buying out his contract,” Carlotta said. “His last two pictures’ve been bombs. Did he say anything about that when he was here?”

“No,” Jack said. Delaney had visited him twice in the hospital, but their meetings had been uneasy and constrained. Early in the war Delaney had applied for a commission but he had been rejected, for a reason he had never disclosed to Jack, and the hospital full of wounded men had seemed to have a disturbing effect upon him. He had spoken disjointedly, had avoided any mention of his work, had asked questions about Jack’s war and then hadn’t seemed to listen. Although he had come all the way from New York especially to see Jack, he had seemed hurried and absentminded all during his two visits and had appeared grateful when it was time for him to leave.

“You know what he had the nerve to suggest to me?” Carlotta said. “He told me I ought to move here close to the hospital so I could be available for you whenever you could see me. Those were the very words he used. Available. I told him that’d be the last thing in the world you’d want.” Carlotta took out her compact and peered dissatisfiedly at her face. “I was right, wasn’t I?”

“Of course,” Jack said.

“Then I asked him for a job. He said for me to come back when I lost ten pounds and had been on the wagon for two months. Once you begin to go in that town,” she said bitterly, “people think they can say anything that comes into their heads to you.”

“How’s Buster?” Jack asked, trying to change the subject, get Carlotta away from her grieving self-contemplation.

“He’s dead,” Carlotta said. She began to cry. “I didn’t have the heart to write you. Somebody poisoned him. I tell you, California isn’t what it used to be. It’s filling up with the most horrible, vicious people…”

The fanged witness dead, Jack thought sadly, watching his wife dab at her eyes. Dead the wolflike voyeur, with his memories of the joyous flesh of better times.