Entrapment and Other Writings (22 page)

Old Pops, rounding up his cows at dusk, pumping water for the cows … for God’s sake
, he stopped himself,
the man is probably a Standard Oil executive and looks twenty-eight
.

I want a drink now
, and he would have gotten up and gone out and gotten one except he didn’t want to get up and couldn’t have gotten it down. He lay a finger across his lips as if to see whether they had been moving all this time.

Don’t do it, Baby
, he told the dull green ceiling, told the drawn curtains, told the knocking at the door.
The girl asked you to marry her and you stalled. “Don’t let me go,” she told you, and you let her go all the same
.

If she ever calls, coming through town, he would answer. If he had nothing else to do. They would have a drink together and he would be well out of it. Virgil would look pretty haggard. That Virgil boozed too much would be plain to see, and he would say to himself confidently,
Man, you are well out of it
. And sure enough, there would be a crack in Virgil’s mirror, too.

Maybe he should get up, get his mail, open it. Or get a drink, turn on the TV, go to the door.
Nobody was knocking
, he thought foggily. Then,
I didn’t hear anybody go away
.

The least he could do was let go of the note.

He knew that he would have no heart for the game again because the last game had turned out to be the real thing. But nothing at all for her.

“I can hear your heart beating”—that one had been his.

“No one ever held me like this before”—that had been hers.

“I never held anyone like this before,” he had come right back.

“Your little room feels like home to me.”

We weren’t very good at thinking up new ones, were we, Baby?

“Never let me go”—
now there’s an innovation. I think it’s showing tonight at the Bijou
.

“Your little room feels like home to me”
 … if it hadn’t been this room it would have been one down the hall. If it hadn’t been you it would have been somebody else for me
.

Then he wouldn’t be sitting on the edge of the bed instead of going downstairs to pick up the late bets.
Would I, Baby?

“I’ve never been so in love”—that had been his, and the one that had made her throw the shot-glass at his head. “In love! In love!” she had raged. “You’ve been in love twice a year ever since you were in short pants and you’ve never loved another human being yet. I
hate
you.”

You always were a nutty little broad
. He still didn’t get it.

A silver-blonde brat who wasn’t even born till I was twenty tells me a thing like that. Tells me the reason I got such good control in bed is because I’m dead inside. She knows because her bug-doc told her so. The bug-doc knows everything
.

Lucky I’m not vain
.

I need a shot right now, but if I told her that right now, she’d say all I really need is black coffee, get my suit pressed, and go see her bug-doc
.

Baby, that’s all right when you’re twenty-three, that may work when you’re twenty-three, but not at forty-four
.

He went to the window again and saw rain on all the roofs about and thought,
What makes a soldier’s heart?

The rain paused as if it, too, would like to know.

It isn’t standing up to fight or lying down to fire
.

Now we’re getting somewhere
.

They’ll run in the mud at Sportsman’s. They’ll run in the mud at Jamaica. Baby, let tell me you the old sweet story: they’ll run in the mud at Bowie
.

Forty-four up against twenty-three
.

Let them run in the mud. I need a shot because I got a petty heart
.

His head sought rest on his chest, fingers hanging without
strength. As suddenly as the fight had been joined, it was done: let the fighter rest.

The mermaid drifted past, and he tried turning to follow, but now the waters were against him, heavy as some terrible door. He gathered all his strength, and in a single effort awakened once more—an old man on the nod on a rented bed, weak, blind, sweating, disappointed and cold, saying
you
with a fading smile.

Then saw the note had fallen to the floor.
Are you still in the land of the living, Baby?

His heart gave a slow, sick roll.

Everything was as it had always been. Except that the night-lamp, which had burned with such a steady fury when yesterday’s races had all been run, now burned on wanly …

He couldn’t throw the note away.

Don’t do it
, he begged her.
Just don’t do it
.

But she was going to do it
.

You didn’t trust me enough … It was why I didn’t … It wasn’t the twenty years, Baby, it was your holding out on me, as you’ll hold out on Virgil. If you’d meant everything you said before you said, “Don’t let me go,” I never would have let you go. But when you said, “Don’t let me go,” you were only telling me half the story. I waited for the other half, and all you added was “never let me go.” When I took my arms from around you that night, it wasn’t because I wanted to let you go, Baby. It was because you didn’t trust me enough to be straight with me
.

That’s telling her
, he congratulated himself.

Can’t you realize
, he reproached himself,
that what the girl is thinking now is that, if she had played it straight with you, if she had given you nothing with which to stand her off, she would have been hooked to a day-to-day bookie instead of a forty-foot cruiser and a Pops?

And don’t forget the Marine
.

Only
—he got up—
of course … she has to come back to town to get her clothes and introduce Virgil to her people. Why
, he realized,
there’s only one place she could be right now—that’s why she had been so vague …

Yet she’d be expecting his ring.
Because that’s how women are. They wanted you to see through their ruses yourself. There might not even be a Virgil
.

He reached for the phone.

Are you still in the land of the living, Baby?

He heard the downstairs operator reach the suburban operator. Silence, then from out in the green fields, a voice asking, “Who will accept the time and charges, Madam?”

“I’ll accept the charges,” he told the desk.

The phone was ringing.
Baby, shine your big white light just once more on me. Baby, I think wherever you are, the daylight must be coming down through the roof. I think when you open your eyes in the morning, the sun outside your door feels stronger for that
.

“This number has been temporarily disconnected at the subscriber’s request,” the suburban operator abruptly reported. Someone walked past the door; the wind mocked the windowpanes. The heartbroken mermaid never stirred. And the man in the mirror hung up slowly.

He sat back with a fixed grin. It was fixed as hard as he could fix it because it was the only way of holding himself together.

You don’t want much, Bookie. All you want is to be trusted, without trusting. All you want is a sure thing, then you’ll bet. But it doesn’t matter …

No, it matters more than anything
, he realized.
I trusted her all the way. I trust, I …

I can buy another fifth and call that lunch. I could go back to sleep
. He laid the note carefully in the wastebasket where he could read it again in case he needed something to read. Sometime.

Just like me … can’t I get it through my head she’s feeling she just had a narrow run?

How can I still be in love with the broad, for God’s sake?

Then he heard the elevator click, knew the red diamond said
IN USE
, and knew it could never be Baby.

“We both want to thank you for letting me go.”

On the margin of his mind he saw a car trailing paper ribbons, circling around and around a city block followed by a line of honking cars, each driver leaning on his horn against the bridegroom and bride in the leading car.
Baby, when you lay against me, it was the first peace I ever had
.

And borne on the traffic’s cry, he heard the one name too dear for losing.

Belled by some wind that kept blowing from home, that had blown his way too late. And found nobody home.

Love in the iron rain going farther and farther. Taking back love-dreams that could never come true.

And he seemed at that moment to feel her arms, the fire in the sweetness and the sweetness in the fire when love went out and love came back, the way they used to hold each other. She had two fingers back of his neck and her thumb touching the dead center of his throat. He had waited, yet she did not press. Though he knew she could have pressed the life out of him.

Something has happened to her
—he had the swiftest of hunches—
Baby, it feels as if something really has happened to you. If feels as though you really have died
.

And didn’t try to hold her longer, or be held by her. By her or anyone.

Still, all the girls he’d ever meet would be named Baby in his heart.

Baby
, he told her sternly,
you were much too easy. The first night was much too soon
.

He put it to himself:
Why didn’t I say, “It’s much too soon”?

You throw that out, too
, he brought himself back to earth.
You can throw it all out …
sitting on the edge of the bed, he talked softly into his palms that had cupped the green-shaded lamp’s light.
After all, it wasn’t some childhood sweetheart deal the way you’re trying to make it out. It wasn’t so long ago you didn’t even know her name
.

And you don’t know her name again. Mrs. Virgil somebody. Making travel plans to somewhere. Will write occasionally
.

If I were on her side of thirty, I would reconcile myself and call up another number. And begin again at a different bar
.

Shall we keep trying or will you concede?
he put it again to himself. He went back to the window.
Much too easy. You were too easy
.

You didn’t think it was too soon, that first night
, he reminded himself.
You didn’t say then, “Baby, it’s much too soon.”

Love in the hub of the night-blue hours. Love by the yellow moon. Morning love was the love he now remembered best. And a lazy chambermaid’s voice. Love past seven and not yet twelve.

Now I’ll tell you something I never told you
—he tried another route
—because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. But they told me you were easy. You know who I mean
, he jeered,
the boys. If it hadn’t been me that night it would have been somebody else. Somebody else for you, somebody else for me. So all’s well that ends well and God bless you, Baby. Instead of it being you who said, “I can hear your heart beating,” somebody else would have said it. They all say that. Or did you think it was the first time I’d heard it?