Goodbye, Darkness (22 page)

In those days hotel clerks gave couples a hard time if the woman wasn't wearing a wedding ring. She said she could borrow one. I stammered something about reserving a room at the Grant right now, and after a telephone call there, we were all set for Saturday night. There was a bad moment when I came out of the phone booth. She was nursing her elbows. She bowed her head and mumbled, “I feel dirty.” But when I kissed her she kissed back, hard. I was elated. I knew Powers would cover for me. We would have the whole night. As we parted her eyes widened, then looked heavy. Her mouth softened. Her lips silently said, “Slim.” She rose and left, her walk slow and swaying.

Back at the camp, in the NCO slopchute, Bareass leered and demanded, within hearing of a half-dozen other sergeants, a full report on my patrol. I was angry, which was unreasonable of me. He, after all, had made my assignation possible. And although I was trying to keep my romantic feelings on a lofty plane, on another level they were quite primitive, even exploitive. Part of me wanted to tumble the girl out of sheer lewdness and male vanity. I wanted to be in like Flynn. Try as I might to suppress it, a crude tabloid headline kept flashing across my mind:
manchester gets ashes hauled / puts blocks to knockout coed
. I wanted to take out bragging ads, rent billboards, buy air time to announce that I had hit the mother lode.

Nevertheless there
was
more to our relationship than that. I believed that I had adored her at first sight, that I wanted more than carnal knowledge of her. I felt sure that each of us could live joyously in the other. Subconsciously, I suppose, I wanted to leave my seed in her before sailing. Subconsciously, perhaps, she wanted to receive it. Our time together had been cruelly brief — though thousands of others had made wartime marriages after a few hours' acquaintance — but already I had an idealized image of her, and I believed that was true of her image of me, too. I had to be tender with her, and selfless. Coupling would mean more to her than it meant to, say, the lioness. I was right. To my everlasting sorrow, I was right.

Paydays were erratic in the Marine Corps, but liturgical. The paymaster sat behind a little desk in the company compound, and we formed a line in front of him. I thought he would never get to me. I was at the end of the line; I had been packing my gear. Taffy and I were to meet three hours later, outside the uniform shop, as soon as she could leave work and take the Ramona bus to Dago. Actually I had no idea how much dough I would get. My sergeant's pay was seventy-eight dollars a month, but because the paymaster's visits were irregular, and there were deductions for war bonds, I had never given cash much thought. I only knew that since my mother's visit I had been stone broke; I'd had to borrow to take Taffy to the pictures. Had I been better informed, I might have anticipated the monstrous injustice which was about to be visited upon me. It happened, from time to time, that the Marine Corps would discover that it had been systematically overpaying a man. In that event, the account would be squared on the next payday. The paymaster patiently explained this to me as I stood, baffled and then apprehensive, before him. At last I said, “How much do I get?” Wordlessly he slapped a quarter on the desk. “That's
all?
” I cried. He nodded. And I knew that there was no appealing a paymaster's decision.

Frantically I ran around the camp, trying to lay the sleeve on friends. All the Raggedy Ass Marines were gone. There was Bareass, but he and his girl had a date at the Grant, too. In his tactful way he suggested I take it up with the chaplain. So I was left with an erection and two bits. Twenty-five cents bought exactly three minutes of conversation between Linda Vista and Ramona. I called Taffy, but it was impossible to explain such a situation to a girl, any girl, in three minutes. She was at first startled, then subdued — her voice so low that I could hardly hear her. I promised to get the money together somehow. Would she meet me outside the uniform store next Saturday? She mumbled; I didn't understand her and said so, and she said in a slightly higher register, “No, Sunday. At the zoo, where we were.” I was about to tell her I would change the reservation at the Grant, but then my time was up. The line went dead.

During the next week I raised every nickel I could. I borrowed shamelessly from the Raggedy Asses when they returned from liberty that night. I would have robbed a bank if I had known where one was. Altogether I amassed over a hundred dollars, enough to rent the hotel's honeymoon suite. In the zoo I waited a long, long time. Darkness was coming down upon the park when she arrived in a dull frock, with a haggard, heartbreak look and eyes which avoided mine. She wore no ring. I studied the dress. “Did you molt?” I asked with hollow cheeriness. Then I tried to take her in my arms. She turned her cheek and let me peck it. She was standing stiffly, her elbows at her sides, clasping her purse as though she were afraid someone might snatch it. Someone did; I did. Again I tried to embrace her. She folded her arms high over her shoulders and pivoted away in that way girls did then when they were embarrassed, or caught off balance. “Let's sit on the bench,” she said. The weight of unshed tears hung in her voice. Feigning confidence, I told her I had made another reservation at the Grant and felt stunned when she shook her head decisively. We really didn't know each other, she said; we had been crazy to think of such a thing; she wasn't that kind of a girl; she didn't want her name to become a barracks joke. The words made no sense, but the bleak, funereal music was clear. She had been ready the other day, but she wasn't now. The wine had passed its point. She finally said that we mustn't see each other again.

Stricken, I just sat there, 140 pounds of bone, gristle, and dismay. I felt a gray, hopeless lassitude. Looking back across the years, I yearn to tell the Sergeant:
Play for time, you jerk. Take her to another movie; get back on the campus track; let her laugh and warm up and then take her; she'll want you then
. Instead I idiotically hummed a few bars of “Something to Remember You By,” the broadest possible hint at the memorable something I wanted from her. She retrieved her purse and took a tighter grip on it. Fighting the pain in my chest, I looked over her shoulder at the night sky. A roving moon sailed through a white corridor of cloud; then a wind vexed the sky and stars were visible through rags of clouds. Taffy fell silent. I glanced down. A moonbeam rested on a long diagonal across her face, from eyes to lips. She had nothing more to say; neither did I. We left the park holding hands once more, but now as children walk hand in hand from a playground that has been closed, this one, for us, having just been closed forever. At the time I invested the scene with the dimensions of tragedy, silver rain slanting on cruel lilacs. In fact it was a temporary disappointment, like having to give up a good book before reading the last chapter. It seems merely poignant now, regrettable but remote. I knew little about Taffy, and nothing about war. At that time I wasn't even aware of the naval hospital elsewhere in the park. Certainly I never dreamed that I would one day lie there, tormented by memories of horrors which, the day Taffy and I said goodbye, would have been incomprehensible to me.

After the war, when my first book was published, I heard from her. She had become a Pan Am stewardess and was living in Paris. I was newly married, so my reply was merely cordial. But I still have flickering memories of her. As we parted on Broadway a jukebox somewhere was playing,
We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when
. It wasn't true, yet I think of Taffy whenever I hear the lyrics of those years, when the Dipsy Doodle was a thing to beware, and there was going to be a certain party at the station, when the lights went on again all over the world; when she wouldn't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me, and would walk alone, and be so nice to come home to, till the end of time. Thanks for the memory, Taffy. Here's looking at you, kid.

That left Mae. Or May. I never learned how she spelled her name, and I'm not absolutely sure she knew, either. She was very dumb: a bleached blonde in her late twenties, a borderline alcoholic who would have turned pro if she hadn't had money coming in from another source and hadn't, rightly, feared the competition. Her problem was that her orifice was tight. But I had no inkling of that beforehand. All I knew was that a gunnery sergeant in Fox Company had met her in a dance hall south of the new Camp Pendleton and shacked up with her. The gunny had made a habit of passing on this sort of information — he was known, I groan to report, as the battalion's lay preacher.

So I went from Taffy to Mae, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Mae did have a certain gargoyle charm; she was a character out of George S. Kaufman by Ring Lardner, with Al Capp acting as accoucheur. I had never known such a woman. If Taffy was upper middle class, Mae was underclass. Her complexion was purpled by past pleasures, and after my second drink in the dance hall her mouth developed a disconcerting way of seeming to wander all over her features. She was wearing about twenty bracelets — she sounded like a light machine gun when she moved. From a distance she had a sepia thirties prettiness, but her mouth had been eroded by at least a decade of promiscuity. Her voice had the timbre of a saxophone. When she raised it, it sounded as if she was telling somebody to sack Troy. She accepted my assurance that I was a friend of the gunny without batting a false eyelash, and before I could even order new setups she had yanked me to my feet with a startling flex of muscle, crying, “Let's dance!” That was her first remark. Her second, after a half-dozen clumsy steps, was: “Just because I let you dance with me don't mean I'm going to let you get into my pants.” Her third — by now her hips were really swatting me — was: “On the other hand, it don't mean I won't.”

She had my riveted attention. Back at the table she chugalugged both our drinks (“Booze ain't good for a man, dear, it takes the lead out of his pencil”); then, at her instruction, I paid an outrageous price for a fifth of Southern Comfort and gripped my shrinking roll. “So much for prelims,” she said practically, seizing the bottle, taking my arm, and kissing my cheek with slack, rubbery lips. “Now I guess you want to get your end wet. I got Freddy's car outside.” Dazed, wondering who Freddy might be, I meekly followed her to a coupe in the lot behind the hall. I had hardly slipped behind the wheel when she was in my arms. Only the young and the short can achieve coitus under those circumstances; I had youth, but I was six feet tall, and after several acrobatic attempts Mae conceded that we couldn't make it here. We would have to go to her furnished room. I glided out to the highway, following her directions. “There's just this one thing,” she said, powdering her nose and rattling on as I raced toward whatever nest she had. “I've got this new bed. One of them Murphy beds? It came new last week. I think they sold me a lemon.” She patted my arm. “But you'll fix it for sure.” I heard a liquid sound. She was gulping Southern Comfort from the bottle.

Chez elle
was an incredible warren. Langley Collier couldn't have improved upon her spread: a snafu of clothes and jars and empty bottles, more bracelets, necklaces, a douche bag, shards of broken glass, unraveled toilet paper, and at least three mousetraps littered the floor. To an anal compulsive, it was shocking. The only illumination was provided by a bridge lamp which had fallen on its side. By this light I saw that Mae, between gulps from the bottle, was stripping. She looked at me with transomed eyes. She said, “Hurry up.” She was naked now, and I saw what looked like a tattoo on her lower abdomen, just above her pelt. It
was
a tattoo. I held the lamp closer and incredulously read: “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.”

She was beaming down at me, obviously proud. “Oh, come
on!
” I said, disgust momentarily mastering lust. She pouted. “It was Freddy's idea.” I asked who Freddy was. She said, “My husband.” I cried, “You've got a
husband?
” “Oh, he's over in England, in the Eighth Air Force,” she said casually. “Probably screwing one of them duchesses. Just think of it as lend-lease. The old switcheroo. Sometimes one of his buddies comes by and takes a poke at anybody I'm with. But you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs,” she ended inanely.

So that was how she lived: on an allotment. And yet, against all sense, I too had undressed. She looked and gasped: “Jesus, I don't know, I'm on the tight side. …” But in the next instant our tongues were entwined. If it hadn't been for the broken glass, and uncertainty about what else lay underfoot, I think I would have floored her there. Instead, I looked around for the bed. She panted, “In the wall,” and pointed to two straps dangling from what could only be the Murphy bed. “Take one and I'll take the other.” She had been right; it
was
defective. The strength of the springs holding it upright was almost unbelievable. I stood back, wiping my brow. “Some Marine!” she jeered. I asked, “How do you get it down alone?” She said, “I can't. I sleep down the hall with my girl friend Mabel. I complained to the company. They're sending somebody down tomorrow A.M.”

By a herculean effort, during which I expected a rupture any moment, and with ferocious tugging from Mae, the bed descended. Almost at once it started to rise again. We grabbed it. “That's the other thing,” she said defensively. “It don't lock down good. The catch was put on wrong.” She showed me. I tugged. It was like trying to pull a grenade pin with numb fingers. I skinned a knuckle and wiggled the gizmo back and forth until it held. Then, drenched with sweat and smelling of it, we boarded the mattress and I mounted her in the missionary position. I didn't fit. Mae reached around, groped in the debris below, and produced a jar of Vaseline. “We'll give you a grease job, that's what we'll do,” she said confidently. I tried again. She started to moan, but I simply couldn't penetrate her. Then the bed began to rise again. Following the law of gravity, my knees slipped from her hips to her armpits, bringing my equipment over her chin. She shrieked: “I ain't gonna eat that thing!”

I apologized, explained, and told her we'd have to start again, by which I meant the bed; the rest would have to wait. Again we brought it down on the floor and worked on the catch. Mae, who had felt horny, was beginning to feel rage. She was hanging over me, her lank hair shaking and that mobile mouth slurring obscene invective. I told her I wasn't very good at that sort of thing. She heckled: “And you call yourself a man!” “But not a mechanic,” I said, wincing as I lost skin to the damned catch. She said: “Wait a minute! I just remembered — I got instructions!” Bare, dripping perspiration, my desire slackening, I studied the leaflet she brought under the dim light bulb. It resembled the manual on detail-stripping a BAR, or the one for building the colonel's flytraps. Mae was gurgling Southern Comfort; I think she had already given up. But I felt challenged. Shafts, rods, gears — it completely baffled me. Still, I read on. Like Mount Everest for Mallory, the Murphy bed was There.