Studs Lonigan (121 page)

“Come on, I'll race you around the beach.”

“I'm too tired, and I couldn't beat you anyway.”

“Come on. I'll give you a head start.”

“Please, no, Bill.”

He became gloomy. He didn't want all these things to happen. He did not even seem to know her. . . . And did she really understand him?

“Where did we leave our things?”

“Around here some place. I know that much,” he said, thinking that he was a bastard to be having thoughts so unfair to her.

He felt himself trapped like a rat in a cage. All this life around him, the sky, everything, were bars, and here he was, and here she was in this cage.

“Here we are,” Studs said, finding the rolled-up bundle of their clothing.

He dug through it and found a package of cigarettes in his trouser pockets. Lighting one, he sat beside Catherine. He looked around the beach, as if looking through the bars of a cage, and he saw all these people in swimming suits, so many girls, so many fellows, and he wondered how many of them were trapped as he was, or would be trapped in the same way? He leaned back, supporting himself on his arms with his palms flat in the hot sand, and the sun was warm on his exposed neck and shoulders. Around him was the ebbing and rising of talk, and constant eruptions of laughter. All this was not serious, and he wanted not to be serious, and he had something facing him that he had to be serious about. And right beside him was Catherine, who had to be serious about the same thing. She sat quiet, brooding unhappily, and his feeling for her was one of being very sorry. But he had to admire the guts she was showing. There was something! How many of these cuties on the beach here had as much guts as Catherine?

“Come on, let's take another plunge.”

He looked wistfully over the lake at the horizon, where the merging of sky and water was like some mystery. He was struck with the desire to swim out to it and reach the center of where the sky fell into the water, and he knew there was no such place, and if he swam out, he would finally just sink, and this wish was like so many others that he had had all along. He was like a swimmer going out and out, and the farther he swam the more tired he got and the harder he had to swim.

“A penny for your thoughts, Bill.”

“Oh, I was just looking at the lake. It's kind of nice to look out over the lake on a day like this.”

They stared again at the horizon, but Catherine's eyes were more attracted by a child hobbling on unsure bow legs to the water to fill a small tin pail.

“Cute, isn't it?”

“What?” Studs asked.

“Darling, and our child is going to be more cute, isn't it, and it won't be bow-legged, either,” she said, pointing as the child bent down with its pail.

He nodded mechanically. Her words brought back to him, with too much clarity, what was ahead of him, the problems and responsibilities he would have to face. He felt weak and powerless before them, and with his face clouding he began to pity himself, to feel almost as sorry for himself as he did for Catherine. Christ, what was he going to do? Himself, a father! How would he act, and what did he know about bringing up a kid? And the dough. Yes, goddamn it, he knew now what money meant. And while he began to understand such things, there were all those people here having a good time, all these fellows and girls flirting, some lads breaking the ice with girls they would lay and leave, and maybe others starting off with them on a road that would lead to the same place as Catherine's road and his own had led to. Why couldn't he have just made her, and then left? But how could he? Jesus, he couldn't take a run-out powder on her. And he didn't know if he wanted to, either. But he was out here at the beach to forget and have a good time.

“Yes, well, I'm nineteen,” an almost flat-chested, pertly attractive girl was saying nearby to a group of three fellows.

“And wouldn't I hate to hang until you reach seventeen.”

“Well, hang then.”

“Yes, Nellie, he's just a cynical old dope, isn't he?”

“If he tries hard and studies late at night, he might be a dope. He's not even that yet,” the girl said, throwing sand at one of the fellows, jumping up to run screaming toward the water, pursued by them.

Hot little teaser, Studs thought, imagining how those fellows would grab and handle her in the water. His eyes met Catherine's, who also had been watching and listening. They smiled knowingly.

He laid his face downward in her lap, his right arm slung under his closed eyes. She toyed with his hair, and he liked the caressing touch of her fingers. So often he'd seen other fellows at the beach with their heads in girls' laps this way, and he had envied them. Well, some guys would be plenty dumb to envy him now.

“My darling little boy,” Catherine whispered into his ear.

The world closed out of his mind, and the beach with its noises seemed far away. He was only half-awake, and he felt her fingers twining through his hair. Christ, if only life could be forever like this, no worries, no thinking of money, duties, responsibilities. If he had never to lift his head from her lap, and could just go on forever and forever feeling just like he did now.

He sat up blinking, squinting his eyes as he glanced around the beach. A girl, full and sexy, passed in front of him, kicking sand as she walked heavily, and he wondered how she would look naked. A bald-headed man sat in a family group about ten yards in front of him, and he watched the sun reflecting on the man's dome.

“Say, tell me now, no kiddin', you're a Polack, aren't you?” a fellow on Catherine's right was saying.

“Say, I don't catch your meaning.”

“Meaning, baby, I know some meaning.”

“I ain't that kind of a girl. Ha! Ha!”

A bitch. Still, he'd like to be lining her up. But what a lousy thought to have, so unfair to Catherine. Putting her in this jam and then wishing he was lining up some bitchy broad who sounded like the kind that favored only friends and had no enemies in pants. Wanting girls who wouldn't walk two steps for him, when he had Catherine who would go to hell for him. He must have the streak of a real bastard in his make-up.

He looked covertly at Catherine, and a horror like a cold sweat came over him. He saw her again as if she were a stranger. He didn't know her. Didn't know what went on in her head. He didn't feel that he would ever know her. He wondered how he could ever love her, and was this all what love really was?

“I wonder what time it is?” she asked moodily.

He shrugged his shoulders, and then noticed that she was looking thoughtfully ahead at those in the water and hadn't seen him shrug his shoulders. Was she having the same kind of thoughts that he was having?

“I don't know what time it is, but it must be about four o'clock.”

“I was just wondering what time it was,” she said abstractedly, and her voice, too, impressed him as the voice of a stranger.

“Come on, Hal, let's go in,” a female voice behind him was saying.

“Darling, please,” a man said.

“What's the matter, Connie, did Hal soak up too much moonshine last night?” another male voice asked.

“That wasn't all. We went to a party at Joe's and he and Joe's wife, Martha, hit it off swell. So he took her to his bed and board for the night, and Martha must be more wearing on a man than I am.”

“Well, now, darling, it isn't that. It was just the liquor.”

“Say, Connie, how about you and I trading off our mates for a night?”

“All right. But I'm taking a plunge now.”

Studs and Catherine watched the one called Connie, a heftily constructed woman in a black bathing suit, run by them, followed by a bronzed-shouldered man in a two-piece blue-and-white suit.

“Terrible people, if you ask me,” Catherine said, frowning disapproval.

“It's a funny way they talk,” Studs said, puzzled by the conversation he had heard.

What the hell kind of a guy was it who'd let his wife play like that? Boy, he'd sock such a wife's teeth out and slam the crap out of the guy.

“That talk was just terrible. Why, I never even thought that there were people like that in the world. They ought to be arrested,” Catherine said in a low but shocked voice.

“Yeh.”

“The idea of it,” she added with growing indignation.

He shook his head and asked himself how was it now, and how did it come about that he was marrying Catherine when she seemed to him suddenly like a stranger he could never know. And that a child of his was, at this very minute, growing inside of her. He scratched his puzzled head. He felt alone, so completely alone that it seemed as if there were no one near him. All these people, too, strangers. He closed his eyes and held in his mind the naked image of Catherine, and he imagined her with him in that act that was supposed to make a guy and a girl so close, and still she seemed a stranger, and he still felt all alone. His thoughts and feelings were padlocked, completely padlocked in his mind, and when he talked, most of the time, instead of expressing them he was using words to prevent himself from letting them out, fooling people by putting into their minds a picture of himself that was not at all Studs Lonigan.

He lay back, resting his head in cupped hands, looking at the sky, almost pale blue, while clouds floated so slowly, the sun glaring through it. He became light-headed, and thought of what a big place the world was after all, and he was sort of lost in it. He felt that he had always been like this. Ever since he had been a kid, he had wished and waited, and there had been no change except for the worst. He tried to laugh at this thought as if it were a wisecrack, but he couldn't, because it was too important to him. He had met lots of new people, become almost thirty years old, lost his health, and now he was getting married and going to have a kid of his own. And what change would there be after he got married? He'd already gotten it enough from her to know what it was like, and maybe after the kid she might get fat and. . . . He glanced sidewise at her. He liked it with her, though, and wished it was dark now and they were together, and still . . . oh, Christ Almighty! He was just a goddamn chump trying to figure too much out.

“Let's go in,” he said after jumping up sprightly.

She offered him her hand and laughed while he pulled her to her feet. He dragged her swiftly to the water edge, determining to make her get exercise, and he was thinking that, all things considered, she was a damn good egg. They stopped with their feet in the water, breathing quickly. Still holding her hand, he suddenly asked himself who the hell he was, wanting so damn much, and thinking she wasn't enough for him. He was small and became ashamed of his body and his size, and he wished he were a six-foot handsome bastard, built like a full-back, attracting the attention of the crowd of bathers. He splashed into the water.

With pain, he sensed a world that was black and twirling, and with grooves which curved around and downward and around and downward, and blackness shot through these grooves. A great pain seemed to pulse and throb in this blackness, and at its ends, somewhere, there seemed to be a sense of distant noise and excitement. He was somehow aware of spinning around and down and around and down these grooves, as if on a roller coaster. The blackness seemed to contract, and he felt himself growing smaller and smaller within himself, and it narrowed, and he narrowed, and he was shooting straight now toward a point in the center of the blackness, and a greater pain coiled in his mind, and out of this pain there grew the word death.

And he opened surprised eyes to find himself lying on the beach, weak, his head, light and throbbing, resting on Catherine's knee, while a man in a reddish swimming suit with a close-cropped mustache worked over him, and a policeman drove back a gaping, circling, shoving crowd. He closed his eyes, felt Catherine's hand on his forehead, moaned in weakness and fright, and heard someone shout:

“Give him air!”

“Bill, darling, are you all right?” Catherine asked, her voice almost frantic.

“Take it easy, Mr. Lonigan,” the man with the close-cropped mustache said.

“I'm all right. What happened?” he asked, opening his eyes, still weak and dizzy, with a nausea arising from his stomach.

“Rest now a minute, Mr. Lonigan, and you'll be able to get up,” the doctor said, touching Studs' forehead.

Shame mingled with surprise in him, and he felt like a circus with all the damn gapers crowding around to look at him. He remembered diving into the water, and nothing else. Jesus, he could have died! And the goddamn gapers. Jesus Christ, go way, go way, you bastards! He became more aware of his wet body lying on the sand, so tired, the wet suit clinging to him, the sand sticking uncomfortably to the suit, his arms and legs.

“You fainted in the water,” Catherine said.

Catherine covered his face with a handkerchief, and he could feel the burning sun. He had just caved in, that was all, and his heart was pounding on him like a racing machine. He wanted just to lie where he was and fall asleep, forever. But he was ashamed of the weakness he had shown before so many people. Now they gaped at him as if Studs Lonigan was a monkey in a zoo. He tried to think of himself arising and walking off with a brave I-don't-give-a-good-goddamn air about him, while they gawked their pants off after him. But he was too weak, and he had a sick headache. He didn't want to move, but, ah, if he was only home lying between clean white bed-sheets, lying there for days with nothing to do, no worries. He heard voices, people still around him, what happened, who was it, is it serious, goddamn them. A flush came to his pale cheeks.

“Just rest a little longer, Bill, and we'll go home,” Catherine said, petting him.