Robert B. Parker (7 page)

I always signed them,
I love you
, and I put the date at the bottom each day.

I just dated today’s when the weather report started coming in from I Corps. They sent it in clear text, which meant I had to pay more attention than usual, but even then so much of it was boiler plate that I could write out the word after I’d heard the first letter most of the time, and I only really had to pay attention to the wind direction and the numbers—velocity, temperature, that stuff.

In a poker game in early March, dePietro won more than the battalion sergeant major had. He traded the IOUs for R&R for him and me. The sergeant major TDY’d two radio operators in from Division and dePietro and I went to Tokyo.

We were taking showers and drinking daiquiris and smoking cigars in a hotel near Shinigawa station, the water cascading over us in hot plenitude. We took turns.

“First shower in a year,” dePietro said. “Good as getting laid.”

I drank the daiquiri. It had seemed the thing to drink, as unlike military life in Korea as we could think of. The lemon was tart and cold under the deceit of sugar, and both sugar and lemon masked the rum entirely until it settled in my stomach and the warmth spread out. I finished the rest of the glass and took another. There were ten more on the tray.

“Your turn,” dePietro said, and stepped out of the shower. I got in. It was the third time. I worked some Prell shampoo into my hair again and rinsed it off, watching the lather plane along my wet body and swirl into the drain. I lathered all over my body again with Lifebuoy soap and scrubbed my nails with a brush, and rinsed again and got out. I looked at dePietro. He shook his head and I shut off the shower. It had been running for more than an hour.

Wearing government issue white boxer shorts with the little tie strings at the side, we sprawled in the western-looking hotel room and finished our daiquiris.

“Tomorrow I’m going to get drunk on wine,” dePietro said. “And then I’m going to do maybe bourbon and then vodka and then we’ll see how I feel.” He started to dress while I finished the last daiquiri. “Want to find some broads?”

I nodded. I put the empty glass back and sat on the bed. Tears began to run down my face. Tony was looking at himself in the mirror and didn’t see me. I got up quickly and splashed on cold water and they stopped.

The whorehouse was near the Sugamo train stop. It was probably near the prison, too, but I never saw the prison. The beds were pallets on the floor. The walls were paper and the doors were sliding. There was a deep hot
tub in the bathroom and I sat in it with the water to my neck while a smiling Japanese girl with small breasts and not much body hair massaged my neck and shoulders.

“R and R G.I.,” she said. “Korea G.I.”

“How do you know,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose. “Smell,” she said, and smiled.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “I took three showers.”

She didn’t understand. She smiled and shook her head. When we were through she dried me in a large towel and gave me rubber clogs and a kimono and took me back to her room. We lay down on the pallet.

“No suckahatchie girl,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I lay on my back and she sat astride my thighs and rubbed my body. After a while she moved slightly forward and with an economical movement of hands and hips she put me in her and still sitting astride me moved her pelvis cleverly.

Later that night the girls made sukiyaki on a hibachi. DePietro and I drank rice wine with it, the four of us sitting on the floor in the bedroom, the girls serving us pleasantly, saying their few English words and giggling. Almost domestic. The sex and the dining and the foursomeness was a kind-hearted and honest imitation, a decent copy of domesticity, an artful and well-intentioned replica of happiness which made my loss more incisive.

It cost 2500 yen.

Jennifer Grayle became Mrs. John Merchent in a gray stone Episcopal church on a small hill in Marblehead in August of 1954. I was there, the recipient of a civilized invitation in formal engraving. Two weeks home from Korea and I wore my white linen jacket and gray slacks and a black knit tie. Only the tie fit, the rest was too big because I was down under 150 pounds, wiry and thin from carrying a radio and a rifle for long distances at a time. The collar of my button-down shirt was about a size big. My belt was pulled three notches tighter and made the tops of my slacks bunch. I still had a G.I. haircut, and looking at my reflection in a car window as I walked toward the church, I thought I looked consumptive. The back of my jacket stood away from my neck.

Jennifer was in white, her bridesmaids in yellow. The groom and his party wore white dinner jackets and black watch cummerbunds. Everything fit them. I was afraid, sitting blankly in the back nearly anesthetized. What if I fainted? What if I went crazy when I saw her?
What if I cried? When she came down the aisle she looked as she always had, tanned, perfectly made up, poised, and full of controlled power. My deep numbness worked. I sat without expression and almost without feeling; the part of me that could feel was already beginning to dwindle, more and more of me was callus tissue. Inside my thickness I watched them meet at the altar, watched them kneel, watched them rise, watched him take the ring from his brother and put it on her finger, watched her brush her veil back, watched them kiss, and watched them walk up the aisle together.

The reception was in a long, rambling, wasp, white country club on the Marblehead-Swampscott line. The orchestra played things like “The Anniversary Waltz,” and the leader sang “Because God made thee mine,” with his mouth very close to the microphone. There was an open bar. I ordered a shot and a beer. Jennifer stood with her husband in a receiving line. I didn’t go near it. I drank my shot and washed it down with beer and ordered another one. Merchent was tall and blond with a golden tan and athletic shoulders. Someone told me he’d been captain of the tennis team at Cornell. He had blue eyes and a cleft in his chin like Cary Grant. The diamond he’d given Jennifer looked like a paperweight. All the guests looked like their clothes had been made in Paris, and all the older women talked with that Northshore honk that distinguished broads whose husbands were successful. I had another shot.

“Friend of the bride?” the bartender said.

“What makes you think so?”

“I work a lot of weddings. Most people drink champagne. A shot and a beer ain’t happy drinking.”

I didn’t answer him, I just held out the empty shot glass. He shrugged and put some blended whiskey in it. The bottle had one of those little chrome spouts in it, and he turned it nicely when the glass was full so none dripped.

There were flowers banked around most of the room—huge arrangements spilling out of big vases, roses, and a bunch of others that I didn’t know the names of. The bridesmaids in their yellow and the ushers in their white splashed among the crowd. The bride and groom danced. The son of a bitch danced so well that he was able to make Jennifer look good. I knew she couldn’t dance a step. Or she didn’t used to be able to. Things change. I leaned my back against the bar. Without looking, I stuck my shot glass back at the bartender. No one else was at the bar. They were all drinking champagne and nibbling canapés from trays that circulated.

“ ’Nother beer too,” I said.

The hot booze was insulating the small feeling part, layering in more protection. I felt full of novocaine.
Here comes the fucking bride
, I murmured to myself.
All dressed in white. Christ, I never even fucked her
. As they danced, Jennifer looked up at her husband. She looked at him just as she had looked at me, and I knew he felt just like I had, that he was all that Jennifer was interested in. She must have looked at Nick Taylor that way.
Poor bastard, no wonder he’d been walking around with a ring in his pocket. Like me. He believed her
. Even drunk I knew it wasn’t quite fair to Jennifer. We were talking about different things when we talked about love, my definition didn’t have to prevail.

There were tall windows around the open dance
floor. Outside, trees moved in the summer wind and beyond them people played golf on a green rolling course that seemed eternal. The room was air-conditioned and cool, and high-ceilinged.
The rich are different than we are. Yeah, they’re cooler
. The colored dresses and the flowers were beginning to blur and the room was starting to look like an impressionist painting.
I better stick to beer. No more shots
. The beer had lost most of its taste. I sipped it from the bottle.

“Boonie, how nice of you to come,” Jennifer said. She was in front of me with the groom. He hadn’t loosened his tie. His jacket was buttoned.
Neat
, I thought.
The fucking asshole
.

“Thanks for inviting me,” I said. I drank some beer.

“Boonie, this is John Merchent. Boone Adams.”

He stuck out his clean, strong, tan hand. “Glad to meet you, Boone, I heard a lot about you up at school.”

I shook his hand briefly. “Yeah,” I said.

“Understand you were in Korea,” he said.

“World safe for democracy,” I said.

“My roommate at the deke house was in Korea.”

“You a deke?”

“Absolutely. I was a deke at Cornell and when I transferred I moved right in. Great house.”

“Cornell,” I said, “a deke, and a perfect asshole.”

“Boonie,” Jennifer said.

“Line from
The Naked and the Dead
,” I mumbled.

“You’re drunk, fella,” Merchent said. “Better get yourself under control.”

“Whyn’t you get me under control, twinkletoes?”

Merchent’s brother walked over and two of the
ushers. They all looked like Merchent. Everybody at the wedding looked like Merchent. Except me.

“A whole collection,” I said. “A quartet of perfect assholes.”

Merchent jerked his head at me and his brother said, “Come on, fella, I think you should leave.” He put his hand on my arm. I yanked my arm away.

“Whyn’t he throw me out,” I said, and lunged at Merchent. He slid me past him almost negligently and his brother and the ushers rushed me out through the hall and into the parking lot. I sprawled on the pavement and scraped my hands.

“Don’t come back,” Brother said. “We’ll have you arrested.”

“How ’bout one at a fucking time,” I said. I was on my feet, but the parking lot seemed insubstantial. I was having a little trouble standing steady. Brother and the two ushers laughed a little, shook their heads, and walked back into the reception.

I stood alone in the parking lot. The sun was setting. The knee of my pants was ripped. I had gotten blood from my scraped palms on my white jacket. There was nothing to do and nowhere to go. I started walking. Behind me, I heard Jennifer say, “Boonie.” I stopped and looked back. She was standing in the door of the club in her wedding dress. “Boonie,” she said. “I’m sorry.” I nodded and turned back toward the street and kept walking.

She called after me. “Boonie, I know it’s corny, but we could be friends.” I shook my head and didn’t look back.

I arrived in New York wearing jeans, loafers, a blue oxford-weave shirt with a button-down collar, and an army field jacket with the twenty-fourth division taro leaf patch on the shoulder. I had no luggage except a gym bag with the collection of unmailed letters in it that I had come to call my journal and a couple of new notebooks. In my wallet was seventeen hundred dollars in mustering-out pay. I was twenty-two.

The one-room apartment I rented on Thompson Street had been freshly painted. But whoever had done the painting hadn’t scraped the old paint, so the walls were lumpy. Around the old four-footed tub and pull-chain toilet, paint had slopped and dried into thick white scabs. The porcelain surfaces were ineradicably stained, like the soul of man, and no absolution would ever clean them. I didn’t care.

Dear Jennifer
,

I think about you most of the time. Drinking seems to help some, but the world seems painfully laughable to
me, and it’s hard to concentrate. It’s not just that I’ve lost you, I’ve lost me as well. I can’t seem to feel that there’s anything important, including myself. Even suicide seems not worth the effort. I don’t especially want to kill myself. I don’t especially want to do anything. That’s the real ball buster. I don’t, simply, know what to do. I bought a typewriter. I suppose I should try to write, but I don’t seem to have anything interesting to say. I’ve got enough money for about four more months. According to an ad I saw in Life magazine, my life expectancy is 72 years. Fifty more to go. It seems long
.

I love you

Except for the daily journal entries to Jennifer my writing didn’t happen. I sat every day for a couple of hours at my kitchen table and looked at the cheap white paper in the typewriter. But I didn’t type anything. I was spending a lot of money on beer and by December I was up to 180 pounds, all of it fat, and I was almost out of money.

I went down to Robert Hall and spent forty-five dollars for a blue blazer and some gray flannel pants. I bought a tie in Times Square for a buck, then I got the
Times
and started reading help wanted ads. Some kind of writing job, advertising maybe.

It was my twenty-third interview. I’d been doing about five a day, every day. I didn’t have a job, but I was getting good at interviewing.
No sir, I didn’t finish college. I felt my military responsibility came first. Yes sir, I know that advertising’s a tough business. The war left me needing action. I couldn’t go back to school like a child. Oh
absolutely sir, I’ve given it a lot of thought. I assessed what I could do that would help me and help my employer. What did I have to market, I asked myself. Writing skills, I decided, and a desire to be where there was action
.

I had the patter down quite well now, when I got a chance to use it. Most of the time the interviewer told me about the company and himself and his philosophy of advertising and employment and things.