Going All the Way (13 page)

“Stop it!”

Sonny had stopped moving his prick and was just sitting on top of Buddie, straining his ears.

“What's wrong?” she said.

“Shhh.”

“You shouldn't listen,” Buddie whispered.

“Shhh.”

“What I mean is,” DeeDee was whisper-shouting, “I don't want to be like some teen-ager, hiding out and finding secret places to do it, and parking and going on golf courses and all that.”

“Who's on a golf course? Does this look like a goddam golf course to you?”

“We're hiding out, like criminals.”

“This is my own apartment, for Chrissake.”

“It's your mother's apartment.”

“She's gone, I told you.”

“She might come back, you never know. We'd have to hide and sneak around like criminals.”

“She won't come back till late tomorrow.”

“It doesn't matter.”

“For God sake, what is it you want?”

DeeDee began sobbing. “I want to do it in my
own
house.”

“In
your
house? Are you nuts? With your parents there upstairs?”

“
No
, you idiot, I mean my
really
own house. Goddam it, I want to get married!”

Gunner didn't say anything, and DeeDee started sobbing again. Sonny heard Gunner walking around, and a match was struck.

“Look,” Gunner said. “I just got home. I don't even know what I'm going to do. Here, take a puff.”

Sonny had withdrawn himself from Buddie and lit a cigarette of his own. With the talk of marriage, his prick had gone soft. He had been through that with Buddie, but she knew better than to bring it up anymore. She picked her blouse off the floor and spread it over her chest, like a blanket, huddling beneath it like an orphan out in the cold.

“Listen, Deeds, I love to do it with you. That's all I know right now. You like it, and I like it, and we'll worry about the rest later. Come here.”

DeeDee sort of moaned, then it was quiet, and then there was giggling and hard breathing and sounds of thrashing around, and after a while the turmoil settled into the steady, hard, rhythmic creak of the bedsprings. Sonny mashed out his cigarette, pulled Buddie's blouse off her chest, and went at her hard and fierce again. Soon he got his own rhythm going with her, pounding up and down as hard as he could, trying to make it as loud and as long as possible. It wasn't that he'd got so terrifically aroused by Buddie. He wanted Gunner to hear him doing it, wanted his friend to know that he was really quite a fucker himself.

8

Even though Gunner had gone over the apartment with a fine-tooth comb to remove any traces of evidence of what he called the “fuckathon” of Saturday night, his mother found some long strands of dark chestnut hair in her bed. She was plenty pissed, and wouldn't let Gunner use her wheels for a while. Sonny talked to him on the phone and Gunner said he was doing a lot of reading and was into a really deep book called
The Lonely Crowd
that really had a lot to say. Sonny had heard of the book but hadn't ever got around to it, and it made him feel guilty and a little bit jealous that Gunner was reading it. He couldn't get over this nasty little feeling that a guy who had all that Gunner had shouldn't be brainy, too, and know a lot of stuff that Sonny didn't know. He was ashamed of feeling that way, but he did.

After talking to Gunner he got a sudden urge to read something really worthwhile, like he promised himself he was going to do on a regular basis when he got out of service—just like the regular program of daily exercise—but he hadn't got around to it yet. He poked around the house, looking at the bookcases in the den, but he couldn't find anything that appealed to him. His mother kept buying the popular new religious books so many people were reading, and planted them around the house, in Sonny's path, like landmines. She had Norman Vincent Peale, of course, just about everyone had a copy of
The Power of Positive Thinking
, and she also had
The Greatest Faith Ever Known
, by Fulton Oursler;
A Man Called Peter
, by Catherine Marshall; and
The Robe
, by Lloyd C. Douglas. There was one she'd tried to lure Sonny into reading with the promise that it wasn't “religious” at all, called
TNT, The Power Within You
, but it sounded too much like the
Positive Thinking
of Norman Vincent Peale. Those kind of books were about the only ones they had except for real old ones that his father had inherited from his family, like
Ben Hur, Lorna Doone
, and
The Works of Lord Tennyson
. Sonny had never seen anyone reading them, but they looked good on the shelves. In his own room Sonny had some of his old college textbooks; a bunch of photography manuals; some novels he liked such as
Look Homeward, Angel
and
The Sun Also Rises;
a few intellectual paperbacks he had never finished, like
Human Destiny
, and
Philosophy in a New Key
. He had often tried to read philosophy, hoping it would answer some of the riddles of life, but he always got bogged down in it and felt himself lost in a thick, sunless swamp. He would give up in order to breathe and clear his head. Among his father's old books he found a collection of essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he read a couple of them or at least skimmed them, but he really couldn't concentrate. Little fears and doubts and memories of embarrassing things he had done and said, of mistakes he had made, buzzed and flitted in his mind like annoying little gnats, scattering his attention.

He started sleeping late again, hanging around the house in his undershorts, eating sticky pies with whipped cream and watching television quiz shows that burst into trilly organ music when anyone got the right answer. He was really glad when Gunner called that Wednesday afternoon and said he really had to get out of the house and wondered if Sonny could borrow some wheels. Sonny said he would. He showered and shaved and put on a clean sport shirt and the slacks of his summer seersucker suit. He felt clean and light.

He heard his mother roar into the driveway while he was dressing, and he went downstairs and found her sitting on the couch in the den, her legs spread wide apart, fanning her skirt up and down. It was something she did in hot weather a lot, and it made Sonny queasy. He didn't say anything, but tried not to look at her.

“Well,” she said brightly, “you're dressed up fit to kill.”

“No I'm not.”

“Come here a sec,” she said.

Looking down at the floor, he walked over to her. She reached up and patted back the wave of his hair, getting it in place. He winced and backed off.

“Can I use the wagon?” he asked.

“I guess. Where are you going?”

“Just out. Around.”

“With Buddie?”

Sonny clenched his fists, then worked them open and shut, open and shut. “No,” he said.

“Who's the big date then?” she asked cheerily.

“There isn't any big date! There isn't any kind of date! I'm going to pick up Gunner and go have a beer or go to a movie or something!”

“There's no need to yell. I just asked.”

He let out a deep breath. “O.K. I'm sorry.”

Mrs. Burns opened her purse and fished out the car key. It dangled from a chain with a bright plastic daisy on it.

Sonny started to reach for the key but then pulled his hand back, not wanting to grab. Instead of handing him the key, she held it in her open palm, staring down at it.

“Sonny?”

“Yes.”

“I know you're in real thick with that Casselman boy. I just hope you influence
him
, instead of letting him—”

“For Christ sake! He's not a ‘boy.' I'm not a ‘boy.' Don't give me that crap!”

Mrs. Burns bit her lip and her head jerked to the side, as if she'd been slapped. Her eyes squeezed shut so hard it contorted her whole face. Sonny fought back a scream. He wanted to tell her to mind her own fucking business and keep her goddam nose out of his life.

But he needed the car.

“I'm sorry,” he said.

Tears slid down from her squeezed eyes.

“Don't,” he said. “Please.”

Her hands fumbled blindly in her purse and came up with a wadded Kleenex that she dabbed at her eyes, without opening them.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Take the wagon.”

The key was lying in her lap, and Sonny reached down and plucked it out, the way you would reach in and pick a coin from a fire. He stuck the key in his pocket and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.

“Thanks,” he said.

Sniffling, she dug in her purse again, pulled out a wadded bill, and pressed it into his hand. He stuffed it in his pocket, not looking at it. Almost every time he went out, she gave him a five- or a ten-dollar bill. They never spoke about it, and Sonny tried not to think about it. He just took it.

“Thanks,” he said.

He stood for a moment more and then walked to the door. When his hand touched the knob, his mother's voice, not quite steady yet, called, “Sonny?”

“Yes?”

Sniffing and sobbing, she called through her still-trickling tears, “Have a good time!”

“Thanks,” he said and walked out.

Gunner said he really had a thirst on him and suggested they go tip a few at the Topper, down on Illinois Street. The Topper had a combo but it didn't come on until around nine, and in the early evening the place was pretty quiet. Gunner told Sonny all about
The Lonely Crowd
, and how he realized he had always been “other-directed” most of his life, and hoped now he was getting more “inner-directed,” doing what he believed in himself and not giving a shit what the crowd thought. He said Sonny had probably been more of an “inner-directed” kind of guy right from the start, and he wished that he had too, he wouldn't have wasted so much time on Mickey Mouse crap like fraternities. Sonny accepted the compliment, just as if it were the truth. He really figured he wasn't any kind of “directed,” he just got blown along by things.

Sonny tried to remember something deep from the couple of essays of Emerson he had skimmed, just to throw something into the conversation to show he read intellectual stuff himself, but the few phrases and thoughts he could bring to mind were wispy and fleeting, nothing you could really grab hold of. Gunner ordered them another round and lit a cigarette. It had suddenly gone dark outside, and one of those quick, drenching showers came that splattered on the plate-glass windows and pummeled the sidewalk and street with streaks of silver and then, with a grumble of thunder, passed on. The guys didn't say anything for the three or four minutes of the rain, but just watched and listened to it. They were sitting at a table by the open door. No one had bothered to close it during the shower, and the fresh smell of the rain drifted in through the stale, beery air of the bar. It was like some deep, poignant perfume mixed of elemental things. Both guys shifted restlessly in their chairs. Gunner stabbed out his cigarette, half finished.

“Man,” he said, “what I wouldn't give for a nice, new piece of ass.”

“Yeh,” Sonny said. He had felt it himself with the furious rain and the moist, lingering odor it left.

“Something real soft and tender,” Gunner said.

“Ooooh, baby.”

“I'd give my left nut to be in Kyoto right now.”

“God,” Sonny said. He imagined a sweet, gentle Japanese girl, slowly and artfully removing a silken robe, beckoning to him as she spread her sweet-smelling body over a golden divan. A flickering lamp, throwing long shadows. A soft rain, washing the exotic emerald foliage outside the window.…

“But the fact is,” Gunner said, “we're at Thirty-fourth and Illinois Street, in the Topper, in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S.A.”

Sonny's dream disappeared with the very sounding of names that identified his present location. He took a drink of beer and said, “How about DeeDee?”

“No thanks. Not till she gets off that marriage kick.” Gunner poured his glass full again. “Besides,” he said, “how about Buddie, for you?”

Sonny shrugged. “I dunno.”

“See? That's what I thought.”

“What?”

“It's not just getting laid we want. A guy can get laid anytime. It's something—
extra
. More. At least new. Different.”

“Yeh, you're right.”

Gunner was always saying stuff that Sonny felt himself but never said, fearing it might sound wrong or that other people wouldn't know what he meant and would think he was a little weird or something.

“Maybe we ought to go hunting,” said Gunner.

“You want to?”

“No harm in trying.”

“Hell, no,” Sonny said and waved at the waitress to bring more beer. He had spent more evenings like that than he cared to remember, cruising around with another guy and trying to pick up some tail, getting drunker and hornier as the prizes eluded them, or scorned them, or were won by others, right in front of the eyes of the losers. Long, muddled evenings when the need filled you up like a horrible pressure that wiped out everything else and was finally relieved at home in the shameful unworld of fantasy under the covers, in the lonesome dark, shot. But maybe with Gunner it would be different. Gunner had guts and lean good looks, and success was a habit with him. That was the most important thing of all, that aura of success; the cunts could smell it on you. They could sniff a loser from here to South Bend. With their eyes closed.

“Remember Donna Mae Orlick?” Gunner asked, rubbing his chin. “Waitress at the Ron-D-Vu?”

Sonny laughed. “Who doesn't?” he said, just as if he'd fucked her himself. It seemed like everybody else had. Donna Mae was famous. She mostly liked jocks, though. Even in a literal sense. Sonny heard that Donna Mae had done it once for Rip Stolley, who was “Mr. Basketball” of Indiana in his senior year in high school and went on to be All-American at Purdue, and Donna Mae had got him to give her one of his old jockstraps. She carried this moldy old jockstrap around in her purse for a couple years, and was always whipping it out to impress somebody, though the sight of a cruddy jockstrap—even when it came from “Mr. Basketball”—was enough to make most guys toss their cookies. Some of the other waitresses swore that it wasn't Rip Stolley's jockstrap anyway, but that might have just been because they were jealous.