Studs Lonigan (112 page)

“You get one hundred percent for this,” she said when he meekly handed her the apron he had worn.

“Sure, I go to the head of the class.”

“You're so funny,” she said, kissing him, and they walked arm-in-arm from the kitchen.

“Let's take in a show.”

“Oh, let's not. We're going to be alone. Let's just sit and pretend that it's our own home,” she said with an inviting smile.

He wasn't certain what it meant, and if it meant more than he usually hoped for from her. He looked at her nonplussed. She seemed to grow a little vague and almost misty before his eyes, and he liked her, and the way she looked at him left him happy but uncertain, just as Lucy had done sometimes.

“It's nice here, isn't it, when it's just getting dark and it is so quiet,” she said when they were seated on the parlor couch.

“Yes,” he said dreamily, hearing an automobile pass outside, thinking how the quarrel had given him again a real appreciation of her.

“Bill,” she exclaimed moodily.

“What?” he replied absently.

“Let's not ever fight again.”

She placed her head against his shoulder, and toyed with his hand. She seemed soft, white, nice, and he was made tender by her nearness, and by the way she glanced up at him, coyly, wide-eyed. He kissed her. Her lips were feverish, and they excited him so that he roughly clutched her, clenched her firmly, and their bodies strained in an awkward embrace. Unable to check himself, he pushed her down on the couch, and pressed against her. Their excitement lapsed and they lay peacefully, side by side. Suddenly she kissed him sensuously, and his hands eagerly strayed over her dress.

“Please.”

He disregarded her words and she stifled her protest, opened her mouth when he bore against her, holding his kiss, while he ran his hand along her hot thighs beneath her dress. She became like an instrument in his hands, quivering to his touch, panting from his heedlessly indelicate pressures and nervous hands.

“You're getting your dress all mussed,” he said in uneven breaths.

“That's because of you, but I love you,” she said, clenching her arms around him and straining herself until she lay on her back with him above her. Her body was strong, hard. He touched her, kissed her. He thought, as if through the voice of conscience, that she would hate him, turn from him in disgust for this. But he had gone too far to stop. And then she scratched his neck, pulling his face down to kiss him. She bit his lip. Acting, as if with an inspiration, he fumbled, trying to remove her dress.

“Just a minute,” she gasped.

Studs sat beside her, humiliatingly empassioned, his hands almost trembling, and he felt that he must look like a fool to her. She sat up, smiling painfully. He sank back limply. He was thirsty, his hair was mussed, and he had lost all control of himself. Perspiration dripped under his armpits, making the hair in that spot stiff and sticky.

She arose and he felt it was goodbye. She pulled her dress over her head. He leaped to her and pulled it off. He quickly removed his coat, tie, shoes, socks, and shirt, and looked at her, partially nude in the semi-darkness. He choked with pride. She was doing this because of him, passion for him, because of his kisses, his touches, himself. She lay down wantonly, and like a grateful puppy he kissed her gently. She held him against her, and he could feel the warmth of her flesh. He tore wildly at the straps of her undergarment.

“No,” she feebly protested.

“Come on,” he muttered with hoarse impetuosity.

She sat up, and permitted him to strip her. She turned her head aside, shyly, and sat beside him, naked.

“I better save the press in my trousers,” he said seriously.

She smiled. Suddenly he was beside her, feeling ridiculous in B .V. D.'s.

“No, we can't do that, please, please, darling,” she begged, almost frantic.

He disregarded her. She sighed, moaned in pain. Clumsy, impatient, uncontrolled, he sensed that it was all a mess. She moaned again, and he winced. And then they lay together, their bodies warm and moist, and she trembled, sobbing quietly.

Darkness was covering the room like a cloak, and he felt as if they were off alone somewhere in space or the sky, away from all the rest of the world. A kind of lassitude filled him. He remembered what had happened, the way he had so messily hurt her, and shame, like the conviction of and contrition for, sin, grew in him as the weight of sins had often grown burdensome before he would go to confession. He kissed her gently.

“Catherine,” he said huskily.

“Bill, I did this because I couldn't help myself, because I love you, and oh, you hurt me so much,” she cried.

“Kid,” he muttered, patting her arm, sitting up, gazing down at her in a state of helplessness.

She sobbed. Her naked body again trembled. He lay back, falling into a half-doze, with her warm beside him. As if in a nightmare, he began to see himself clumsily soiling her. He opened his eyes, and felt self-disgust. He became aware that she was breathing more calmly. He buried her face against his chest.

“I'm afraid.”

She's my woman now, he told himself with pride. And again he remembered the act, visualizing himself like a goddamn bull. And all the mess it was, too. Ugh. He had hurt her, done something to her that could never be undone. It had not pleased him. It had been pain to her, a mess to him, and maybe in the morning she would hate him for it and only remember him on her like a goddamn, wheezing bull. Ugh. . . . Jesus Christ. . . . He was disgusted with himself as he had sometimes been when he had a hangover and remembered how the night before in his drunkenness he had been a chump and a clown.

He looked around the darkened room as if to fasten his attention on something that would make him forget what he couldn't just now forget. He heard footsteps outside, a telephone ringing in the flat upstairs, and he felt, again, removed from all the world with her burying her head against him, his skin wet from her tears. Would he ever be able to look her in the eye again? He had acted with her the same as with a whore or that Jackson bitch. And Catherine had been decent. This was the same way, the same way, too, it seemed with any girl, except that Catherine had been hurt, and she had been so stirred and excited by him that she had trembled and quivered. Never before had he done that to a decent girl. It made him proud, and again his pride left him.

“Kid,” he said gruffly.

“Yes, darling.”

“I'm sorry.”

She lay against him, stroking his legs. They fell asleep for a while. She awakened, jumped up, ran to the dining room, returned.

“Bill, Bill. It's nine-thirty. Hurry up or the folks will find us like this.”

She pressed the wall electric button, and they saw each other naked in the light. Mutually embarrassed, they dressed. Studs thought of love songs he was always hearing on the radio.
Secrets divine I am sharing
with
you.
Like love,
you gayly
come
and
go
. And this was the way it had turned out. He turned away from her in her slip, so that she would not see him buttoning his trousers.

Ugh. Jesus Christ.

“Goodbye, darling,” she said, kissing him possessively.

He left, still in a state of uncertainty. She would get up in the morning knowing that she was no longer a virgin. And all because of him. No girl had ever cared that much for him before. She had proven she cared for him. Or had it been that she'd gotten too excited? Girls were only human beings, and Catherine was twenty-five, and by this time she should have been curious to know what it felt like.

It was clear out and he sensed a hanging darkness in the atmosphere. He saw himself as a man with experience, and he felt that the things he had just gone through these last few days had been dramatic, things that might have happened in a movie. Experiences that would make plenty of fellows envy him.

But his pride suddenly went out of him like a punctured balloon. He remembered the way Catherine had squirmed, strained in pain, moaned. He had ruined her, taken from her something very precious that was lost forever. Gee, he felt kind of rotten about it and then he didn't feel so rotten, because he was glad. A virgin. And now Catherine, who had never been made, was his woman.

But Jesus, what if she got sore and hated him? He shrugged his shoulders, thinking that he should worry. The cards were now stacked on his side. If she got tough now, or they had another fight and it got serious, he could always say, well, baby, I know everything you got. Getting sore wouldn't get her any place.

But that was not how he felt, either, and he didn't mean such thoughts. He could not get out of his mind the memory of her, naked and hurt, warm and moist, her little gestures, burying her head against his shoulders. He wanted her again, goddamn it. Once she got used to it, and it didn't hurt her any more, it would be swell. This time hadn't been so much as it should be, but it was going to be more. And it was different from going and getting a whore. Falling asleep, forgetting everything, awaking, dozing, hearing her breathing, her heart beating, feeling her beside him.

He crossed Stony Island Avenue, walked on past a gas station, a vacant lot, buildings. He wanted to tell someone about it, wanted people to know that Studs Lonigan had just copped a cherry, and that she was his girl, and his woman only. Somehow or other, things that you had to keep to yourself weren't enough, and you wanted others to know. But Catherine wouldn't want that. Still it was fun, thinking of telling guys about it.

He wished that he could have slept all night with her and had it again. But he would when they got married. He was going to get his just as regular as he damn well pleased. Still, when he got married, he would be getting damaged goods. But no, it had been only himself. He was sure of that. But he had been a goddamn brute hurting her, and it was almost like pain to think back about it, her wincing, moaning, begging him please to stop. And she had been snow white, too, and warm in the darkness when she had moaned like that.

A stranger passed. Studs wished that the fellow could look into his head, see his thoughts. He wondered, though, wasn't he just thinking like a clown.

He saw Pat Carrigan and some other lads at the counter of that same restaurant where Catherine and he had fought. He entered, self-consciously returning the proprietor's smile.

“I say there, Studs.”

“How's tricks, Pat?”

“Can't complain.”

“The kid brother was around earlier tonight, but he dragged off to a show,” Pat said.

“Coffee and apple pie. . . . I was down to see my girl tonight,” Studs said, tempted to say more.

“Seeing your girl, huh, Studs?” Pat said.

“Yeah.”

“Hello, boys. Hello, Lonigan, how they hanging?” said Bryan, seating himself at the counter.

“Oh, Studs, by the way, I saw Long-Nose Jerry Rooney the other night,” Pat said.

“That's the Big-Nose himself,” Allison called down the counter.

“If noses were gold, thousands of people would be shoving pans up that boy's nose and prospecting for gold in his snot,” pimply Don Bryan said, and they looked at him in disgust.

“Oh, Jerry's singing the blues like everybody else because he ain't getting as much pay as he used to,” Pat said.

Studs thought that some guys had a hell of a lot of guts singing them over a measly five bucks a week less when here he was out over a thousand bucks and not batting an eye. He felt like saying so, very casually.

“Well, boys, congratulate me,” Allison said.

“How come?”

“I copped it. I copped that little dame's cherry. I'm putting her through an intensive course in the Allison Training School.”

“Lucky rat,” Bryan said.

“Lucky, hell! I worked two months before she came across.”

“Is she nice?”

“Nice is the word for what she's going to be. Listen . . .”

A couple entered the restaurant and Bryan nudged Allison. They spoke low.

“How you feeling these days, Studs?”

“Pretty good,” Studs said, but he was getting damn tired of being asked how he was feeling, as if he was a cripple.

He finished his pie and coffee and noticed Allison and Bryan still talking in whispers. Well, he had things he could talk about, too.

“Nothing much happening, huh, Studs?” Pat said.

“No, Pat.”

“Same here, Studs.”

He sat for a while.

“Guess I'll be going home and turning in,” Studs yawned.

He arose, paid his bill, waved a final so-long, left the restaurant.

He walked home feeling pretty good.

STUDS walked slowly to the center of the Bryn Mawr station platform, eyeing the scattering of people who waited for a downtown train. He hoped that some of these people would notice him and think that here was a fellow who didn't have to get up early to go to work but had time to himself. He stopped near the small waiting-room and dramatically stuck his hands in his trouser pockets.

“What else can I do? If our roles were reversed wouldn't he drive me into bankruptcy? He says it's not his fault. Well, is it my fault? So he's got until next Monday to pay up or my lawyer institutes bankruptcy proceedings,” a stout, puffy-cheeked man said to a friend as they stood a few feet from Studs.

Tough tiddy for someone there, Studs thought. Anyway, over the telephone, Catherine's voice had sounded sweet and friendly. She wasn't sore. It was just that he had been the right guy and last night had been the right time. His eye caught a girl, neat, all right, walking past the restaurant on the north side of Seventy-first Street. He hoped she would be getting on the train, and he'd happen to sit next to her and they'd get to talking. He was kind of a bastard, and yet, she was damn neat. He lit a cigarette and let his glance trail wistfully after her. Last night had made him think of broads, and he'd had them on his mind all morning, naked broads, and he had kept thinking of making them, harems of them. And it was all damn dirty and unfair to Catherine. But a guy couldn't always help himself. Thoughts popped into his bean, and anyway he hadn't done anything but think about them. She was turning around the bank corner, gone. The world was sure full of broads. And this week, he'd had that Jackson bitch and Catherine. He must have some sex appeal to Catherine. He was going to marry her and he liked her, and other girls, they were just umm, nice orders of pork chops on the side, as poor Paulie Haggerty used to say. He saw himself when he was an old man, fondly remembering all the girls he had laid, from Iris down the line. And suppose he still had it in him when he was seventy? He still had years of it to go anyway and that was something sweet.