Recapitulation (30 page)

In this unbreathable atmosphere, made worse since they shut the door and windows against the night cold, and growing more
unbreathable with every butt they add to the overflowing saucers on the floor, they are sitting cross-legged around a blanket playing strip poker. They have been playing for some time, for all are partly undressed. All are shoeless. Bailey has both socks, Bruce only one; the girls are barefoot. Both boys are bare to the waist. Nola still wears her skirt, but has lost her blouse. She manages to look modest in what he thinks he remembers was called a teddy.

But Muriel. Well, Muriel has not been holding good cards. She is a large, well-padded girl even in her clothes. Now she sits, a creature out of a Turkish dream, in the puddle of her own flesh, held in from deliquescence only by her arms, crossed over her breasts, and by her straining panties.

Leaning against the proscenium arch, the stage manager who has revived and is directing this period piece, he can read her mind. Why not? She is playing the part as he directs her to. She is conscious both of her charms and of the interest they arouse, but she would like it a lot better if Nola wasn’t sitting over there with her back straight and her face expressionless and everything covered up.

Muriel doesn’t like Nola, or think she is so good-looking. She is willing to bet that when the time comes to peel, Nola will chicken out. And she is annoyed at the way Bailey, dealing a new hand and singing as he deals, raises his eyes to Nola at every card and puts a burbling emphasis into the words of his song.

What does he have to keep looking at
her
for? There’s plenty to look at here, for God’s sake.

Deep my eye. She came up here to sleep with Bruce Mason. Where does she get off, trying to be demure? And where does Jack get off, watching her with that smirk on his face and his mustache twitching like a rat’s whiskers?

Muriel has trouble picking up her cards without exposing herself. She has to lean over and scrape them up with her fingertips, not uncrossing her arms for a second. She sees Bruce’s eye wandering her way, and shoots him a look like a butcher knife. Let him watch his own girl, if he’s so hot to see something.

Something is tickling the side of her breast where it bulges out under her arm. She jerks away with an exclamation from Jack’s stockinged foot. “Keep your old feet to yourself!” she says, and hugs herself tighter, the cards in her fingertips right in front of her nose. Her skin twitches as if the eyes on her were flies. She reminds Bruce of the kind of postcard for sale in places like Medicine Bow, Wyoming—an old cow stepping on her dragging udder, over the caption “You think
you
got troubles!”

Next to her Bruce is studying his cards, but his mind is readable, too. He is a chemical machine, and every gland in his body is pumping into his blood the stimulants that the species has evolved to ensure its perpetuation. But if a machine, how complicated a machine! Assuming that the others are as complicated as he, this powwow across a gray army blanket is as intricate as anything in the universe.

Muriel is hard to ignore. If he doesn’t keep his eyes open, he might miss something spectacular. Also she has a large, loose mouth, and some folklore rumor floating in his head speaks of the sexual apparatus and appetite of women with large mouths. Though he knows this is probably as reliable as the folklore about Chinese women, still he is intensely curious. He wishes he were sitting across from her, rather than next door, so that he could see without appearing to look.

Standing by the door, qualmish with distaste, Mason tries to remind himself that this is Utah, 1930, long before
Playboy
, skin
flicks, and the porno revolution made the female body as exciting as a meat market and sex as momentous as blowing your nose. This boy has never seen a naked woman, even Nola; their lovemaking has taken place in darkness or illusory moonlight, and in a blind fog of adoration. He never had a sister to surprise or spy on. Except for a few French postcards he has probably never seen a completely revealing photograph. And he is only a few years removed from the hilarious hormone-tormented shrimp who was tempted into copping feels in a Saltair crowd. But he has read books. The literary word that bulges in his mind is “pneumatic.” To his eyes, casually slanted in quick glances, Muriel looks as pneumatic as a pile of graduated inner tubes. Like the Michelin ad. When she moves, she afflicts him with all the symptoms of detached retina.

That is one element of his complexity, that sexual excitement over a girl he is contemptuous of, that alertness to catch the most fleeting moment of revelation if Muriel should drop her arm. He is ashamed of his excitement even while it is as wild in his blood as an eel in a washbasin, for on his left, within two feet of him, her knee touching his, sits Nola, also partly undressed and in full jeopardy. If they were alone, he would be worshipping her calm brow and her golden arms and the hair that falls in dark waves down her back. But as it is, his interest in her is postponed or suppressed, almost denied, and is certainly secondary to his interest in the gross provocations of Muriel. In fact, he is glad that Nola is neither as undressed nor as sensual as Muriel. He feels toward her a protective, fatherly-brotherly-husbandly concern.

At first, he was as enthusiastic as Bailey about this game, and he has cooperated with Bailey’s outrageous cheating. The girls are pathetically easy to cheat. Neither knows the least thing about poker; they don’t even know the value of their hands. Right under their noses he and Bailey have dealt off the bottom, drawn extra cards, and picked up cards they wanted from the discard pile. In the interest of mere plausibility it has been necessary to cheat themselves now and then, and lose a shoe or a shirt with roars of dismay.

But the closer Muriel comes to the naked truth, the more complex Bruce’s response has become—all the more eager to get on with it, troubled at what is happening. Much as it arouses him to
think of them sitting under the one hanging bulb as naked as newborn mice, and avid as he is to examine all of Muriel, it makes him stern and gloomy to think of Nola undressing in front of Bailey. Intimations of his own bad judgment and treachery bother his mind.

Bailey has been working on Nola, not by being pleasant and trying to charm her, but by a steady, bright-eyed, knowing attention, ironic compliments, baitings, innuendos, dares. He makes her pay attention by exaggerating precisely what she least likes in him. Every word is suggestive, every smirk a dirty joke. But he has been very John Gilbert about it: his mustache twitches like an eyebrow. What his effect has been it is hard to say. When he calls her Brown-Eyes, she gives him a smoky glance of contempt. When he sings to her one of his double-meaning snatches of song (“Mine in May, his in June”), she ignores him. But this afternoon, when they rode up to Solitude, and Bailey started racing her on the trail, she would not let herself be passed, and half killed her rented horse beating him to the lake.

As she gathers her cards she ignores his Quakertown crooning, and there is a smolder like resentment in the olive skin of the cheek turned toward Bruce, and her eyes are veiled. She looks resentful, yet Bruce is uneasy. Outrageous as Bailey is, he gives off sparks. Things happen around him. He is wild in something like the way of Nola’s brother Buck, whom she adores.

The truth is, it is Bailey, not Bruce, who has called the tune throughout this excursion. Bailey brought that color into Nola’s cheekbones and that set to her jaw. She came to be private with Bruce, but she has spent her whole time fending off Bailey’s kidding or ignoring Bailey’s off-color remarks. Now here she is in danger of undressing in front of him—and it is she for whom the strip poker was proposed, Bruce is sure. Bailey doesn’t have to go to all this trouble to get the clothes off Muriel.

Muriel twitches like a horse, and Bruce’s eyes shift. Nothing but the extruded side of her water-balloon breast and her instant hostile glance. His own glance is opaque and indifferent as he turns it to Nola.

By their rules, any item of clothing equals any other. Right now, she would have to risk her skirt to win one of Bailey’s socks. What else has she got on? The teddy, a brassiere, perhaps
underpants. Or does the teddy take care of those? Three items, at most four. One loss will have her in trouble. Two, and she will be right where Bailey wants her.

Will she strip, if it comes to that? As it will?

The tip of her tongue is against her upper lip as she arranges her cards. Her eyes meet Bruce’s, and she smiles lightly. She has the exhilarated, heightened look that she sometimes has while singing.

“Cards,” Bailey says. He holds the deck in his left hand and with the thumb and forefinger of his right he riffles the edges. They are new cards, and the sound is peremptory. Like a self-conscious shark, he smiles. “How many, Muriel m’love m’love?”

Without moving her arms from their cross on her breast, Muriel sticks out three fingers, letting three unwanted cards dribble onto her thighs.

“Three,” Bailey says. “For your sake, Sister Snow, let us pray they’re good ones.” Deadpan, he inserts the three cards into her extended fingers, and then with a sudden thrust is inside her fingers, under her hands. She shrieks and bends away. “Get
out
of there, you …!”

Bailey withdraws. “Oh boy,” he says with utter unenthusiasm. “Hot dog.”

Furiously Muriel stabs him with her eyes. She holds her cards against her collarbone and is dignified.

“Brother Mason,” Bailey says.

“Give me three, Bishop Bailey, and give them your blessing.”

“
Three?
Too bad, pal. It pains me to see you brought so low. Here’s some extra-heavy ones.”

He whacks the cards down on the blanket so hard that two of them jump face up. Before the others have settled back from their startlement at his violence, Bailey is as inert as the Buddha.

Confirming that the cards which fell face up will not help his hand, Bruce refuses them and demands two more. After an argument, Bailey passes him two, which turn out to be four. They don’t help his pair of nines either.

“And now we come to Sister Gordon,” Bailey says. “Sister Gordon is sitting there hiding something. What can Sister Gordon need to make her even happier?”

She gives him a level glance and slides one card onto the blanket.

Bailey clasps his brow in consternation. “One? Brown-Eyes, what are you doing to us? What have you got there? Two pair? Possible straight? Possible flush? Four of a kind? Oh, Brother Mason, hang on to your pants!”

Nola picks up the card he conspiratorially deals her, looks at it, and folds it into her hand.

“It suits her!” Bailey cries. “God, Mason, we’re ruined. She’s sitting there with a Farmer Brown and she’s got designs on our most per-sonal and pri-vate garments.” His black widow’s peak moves down and then back, his eyes are bright and full of glee. He looks over at Muriel’s quivering flesh with compassion. “Kiddo, what are you gonna do when she comes on with a straight flush? We’ll be looking up your old address.”

Muriel crosses her eyes and sticks out her tongue. Bailey reels, and then stiffens with resolve. “Unless the Great Bailey can catch.”

“What difference does it make who I lose to?” Muriel says. “Anyway, who says I’m gonna lose?”

“Ah,” Bailey says sadly. “She caught, too, Mason. We’re surrounded. All right, boy, the old spirit. Better death than dishonor.” He consults his hand. “The Great Bailey will take two.”

With his eyes closed, he lays his cards down on the blanket without discarding any, and gropes until his hand finds the deck. How many cards he takes is not clear-three or four. Keeping these palmed, he picks up the original hand and fuses it with the new one. Immediately he begins to laugh silently, bending his forehead clear to the blanket. His fist holding the cards pounds the floor. In a single motion he comes out of his cross-legged squat. A certain number of cards hit the discard pile, but only Bruce sees them. The girls are watching Bailey leap for the two-by-four above him. His shadow heaves on the wall as he chins himself furiously—three, four, five, six, ten times. Dust shifts down, so that Nola leans away, protecting her hair. Bailey goes on chinning. His biceps bulge, his chest is luxuriant with black hair, spittle comes out of the corner of his mouth, he chortles as he chins.

Bruce watches, hating what he sees. Three times during the poker game Bailey has exploded into one of his spasms of energy and challenged him to an arm wrestle. Three times Bruce has waved him off. He tells himself that he can beat Bailey at practically
anything, from tennis to pitching pennies, but that truth abides in him sullenly and without satisfaction. As Bailey’s legs go up and down, as his swollen neck is hauled up to the brace for the fourteenth, fifteenth, sixteenth time, the old clammy inferiority comes on. He could not match Bailey in chinning any more than in arm wrestling. His chest is ribby and hairless, he has little of Bailey’s wadded muscle. The old cold self-knowledge of the runt suggests to him that as a lover he may not match up either. Muriel, he is sure, thinks so, and somewhere in the middle of her self-contained quiet Nola may suspect it, too. Perhaps she feels protective about him, as he feels about her. The thought makes him die a little.

And this is another element of his complexity. He no more wants to strip in front of Bailey and Muriel than he wants Nola to. He wants no comparisons. Mason, his survivor, watching from the doorway, shares his inadequacy and self-contempt. They understand, as the strong and beautiful do not, that though clothes may serve important functions of warmth, ornament, and modesty, their principal function is that of disguise.