Boys and Girls Together Read online

  The table was all set and the chili was in the bowls. He’d bought the bowls especially for chili because he’d always liked it, and you could get it out of a can any time you liked, but it ought to be eaten out of a bowl, the way it had been long ago when he used to step into a chili joint and put away a bowl, crumbling half a dozen crackers into the red greasy juice. He had eaten it regularly from the time he’d been thirteen to the time he’d been eighteen, and he’d eaten it after that as often as he could find a place where they had it, and then he missed it for years, but all of a sudden it began to come in cans, and he had it back, beans and pieces of slobbery meat and the thick red greasy juice.

  She was covered up now in a peach-coloured robe that was made so you could see through it, and she looked sad, like a little girl who’s thinking sad thoughts, something about how strange life is, so he knew what was coming.

  ‘Do you love me, Dick?’

  That was what was coming.

  He began to eat the chili.

  ‘There’s two kids inside there sleeping. We’ve been together six years. We were together a year before that, before we got married.’

  ‘Yes, but do you love me?’

  ‘O.K. I love you.’

  ‘You crook!’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you love me?’

  ‘We’ve talked about this just about every night for seven years. I’ve told you all about it. You’re welcome to lies if they make you happy. You’re welcome to the truth if you insist on having it. Thanks for fixing the chili. You’d better have some.’

  The woman began to eat. She wasn’t acting now, she was as serious as anybody could be, he would like to be as nice as possible, but she was always asking him the questions you have got to try to answer honestly and that meant that even if he tried to be nice she would know he wasn’t telling the truth, and she wouldn’t like it. She wanted lies to be true, that’s all.

  ‘Well, then, why isn’t it possible for anybody really to love anybody?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s certainly one of the things a man ought to try to get straight. Now, when you ask somebody if he loves you, you make it impossible for him to love you. The lousy question does it. And it’s not that somebody can’t love somebody sometimes. He can. He can really love somebody, but he can’t say he loves somebody because somebody asks him if he does. I mean anything he says at that time is either a lie or meaningless.’

  ‘When do you love me?’

  ‘When you shut up for a while. When it seems to me that something’s going on in your head that is quiet and lonely and straight and maybe even lovely. Maybe no such thing is actually going on, but I love you when there is only no evidence that it isn’t. I really love you, then. I love you tenderly, then. I almost forgot all about the red and raw body you’ve got that I enjoy so much, and I really love you, then.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want you to forget the body, either.’

  ‘Neither do I want to forget it, but when you shut up and go about fussing with the kids in a nice way and quiet down and think about something besides the things you’re always thinking about, then I really love you. And I love you when you bawl. That’s the truth. That’s the only thing in the world that has ever made me helpless, the way you bawl, because you bawl like all the stupid little girls of the human race bawling. I swear to God it breaks my heart when you bawl. I never saw anybody bawl that way, not even kids, except our own, both of them bawl that way.’

  ‘I’m going to bawl all the time. I’m going to bawl right now while I’m eating this awful chili.’

  ‘Go ahead. And don’t think I don’t know you’re smart enough to do it any time you feel like it, too, because I do. Even so, even then, the way you bawl breaks my heart and makes me love you, makes me want to protect you, take care of you.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, anyway. Do you want the rest of my chili?’

  ‘You eat it. You’ve had nothing to eat since lunch. Christ, it’s almost two, and the kids are going to start running all over the place at six.’

  ‘Ignore them. I’ve told you to ignore them or spank them and put them back to bed.’

  ‘You’re so God-damn smart. They can’t be ignored. They’ve got to be washed and dressed and given breakfast and turned loose in the yard, so they can live.’

  ‘I don’t want any more of it. You finish the rest of mine. I don’t know how you can enjoy something so awful so much.’ She pushed the bowl across the table, and he finished what was in it before he spoke again.

  ‘It’s good food. Especially now that it comes in cans. Is there any beer?’

  The woman fetched a can of beer from the refrigerator and he slapped her bottom when she moved past him so she’d know he was still thinking about how she had it. She poured beer into a glass and then she said, ‘It’s too late.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘It really is too late. Don’t think I don’t appreciate your letting me sleep in the morning while you get the kids out into the yard. I just can’t get up in the mornings. You need all the sleep you can get.’

  The man got up and finished the beer and walked into the dark living-room.

  ‘Just shut up. And come here.’

  ‘No. In the bedroom.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’ve got it all fixed up. It’s nice and clean in there.’

  ‘O.K.’

  ‘Will you tell me about Kharkov?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘All the time?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Every minute of the time. Tell me all about it.’

  Chapter 7

  When a man is too near his pleasure, he thought, the food and drink of his heart and hide, too near the satisfying of the gross and grand appetite—but there was never a time like this before, an appetite or a feast like this—when that is how it is with a man, then the luck of children is greater, the luck of art less, though work is best, art is best, the insatiable appetite denied is best, or so they say, they say, but whenever she’s there with eyes, hair, mouth, moisture, they don’t say it.

  ‘I do this for children,’ he said.

  ‘You dog. I do it for you.’

  ‘You do it for you, I do it for me, and to hell with lies.’

  ‘Well, it’s not my fault I’ve got to lie.’

  ‘Whose fault is it?’

  ‘Johnny’s. He started the whole thing.’

  Maybe it was the sleeping boy’s fault at that, because if Johnny hadn’t come along, it would have been another story: the hard dark man, dark the day he was born, darker every day, but the skin fair, the eyes bright with light, not bright with colour, dark with colour, bright with light, with the light that was his mother’s own light, the light of the bawling girl, the little girl stamping her feet for love, for the right to belong somewhere specific and not be loose all over the place, the right to mean everything to one man, it was her own fire that put the light in him, it was the light of the bawling girl no longer bawling but thinking: ‘I made it. I bawled for it and got it.’

  ‘Isn’t it time to tell me about Kharkov?’

  ‘Kharkov, if you say it right, is like clearing the throat, but there are those who call it Harkov.’

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Yes, it is, because hark is a fair word, as words go in English.’

  ‘Hark, hark the lark. Do you feel the fluttering of the lark?’

  ‘That I do.’

  ‘It’s his fault. When he comes in here in the morning spank him. What would I be doing now except for him? You know you can’t say you don’t love me now.’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  Chapter 8

  They listened to the streetcar banging down the street to the ocean, knowing it had no passengers at that hour of the night, or only one drunk, or an old woman who’d gone across the bay to Berkeley to visit a married daughter, the conductor up front beside the motorman, the two of them talking above the noise of the down
hill banging, and smoking cigarettes.

  ‘Shall I stick it up the way the little girl does?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like to see that.’

  ‘But don’t look until I’m ready, all right?’

  ‘All right.’

  This is what we do, the man thought, and out of it the earth is peopled.

  ‘Ready.’

  He turned and saw her stuck up the way the little girl always was when she was asleep, and it was astonishing, it was just like the little girl, the bottom gone west with womanhood, wide and thick and whiter than the little girl’s, but the head almost no different at all, the same face, the same thoughtfulness, but now the mother opened her eyes to be both the little girl and the little girl’s mother, the eyes limpid, lewd and loving.

  ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it as good as ice cream?’

  ‘Better.’

  ‘Is it true what they say about the Japanese?’

  ‘That was propaganda to make the soldiers hate them.’

  ‘I don’t mean the war. I mean the wonderful thoughtfulness of them in such things.’

  ‘I knew what you meant.’

  ‘Isn’t it wonderful of the Japanese to be so thoughtful?’

  ‘Don’t you mean experimental?’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘To experiment.’

  ‘Well, isn’t it wonderful?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t you ever have a Japanese girl?’

  ‘Yes, but she had to pretend to be Chinese because of the war.’

  ‘Well, is it true?’

  ‘She was born in California, it was just the once, I didn’t ask her.’

  ‘I didn’t mean for you to ask her. Look at you,’ she laughed suddenly. ‘Does this make a fool of you, too?’ She pushed higher and laughed. ‘If you want it so badly, if you’ve got to have it again, if you’ve got to have more, have all you want.’

  ‘You don’t have to put ideas in my head.’

  ‘I’m not looking at your head. Your head’s for art and I don’t want any part of it. If you’ve always got to have more, there’s always more to have, so why don’t you take all you want?’

  ‘I want to read.’

  ‘You don’t look as if you want to read.’ She laughed, moved the large round white slowly around, watching his eyes, and him.

  He got up, smiling with the surprise he had for her. She still didn’t know him. He watched her turn it slowly, her eyes watching him and waiting. She wanted to be quiet now, to let his thinking let her know how to be, and then she felt the sharp sting of his open hand. She screamed, felt it again, screamed again, laughing, leaped to her feet, and ran away. He caught her, and she felt it again, only harder. Again, laughing and calling him dog, and again, until she began to plead with him to stop, and then began to cry, hurt and wanting to hide, crying to herself. He lighted a cigarette and asked if she had been terribly surprised.

  ‘You dog. You dirty crook, I thought you were going to be nice. You hurt me, you really hurt me, I’ll never get pregnant again from the way you hurt me, you hurt me everywhere, where I get pregnant even, you dirty dog, you’ll never have any more children from me, I thought you wanted to play, I thought you were going to be nice, I didn’t care about the first one or the second one but the others hurt me, you dirty dog.’

  ‘Take it easy. You’ll wake up the kids.’

  ‘Don’t talk to me any more.’

  She was mad now, not crying any more, just mad because he’d broken up the play that promised to be so wonderful. Mad because he had done such a thing when she had been having so much fun watching how it was making a fool of him again, done it on purpose, to make a fool of her.

  ‘And don’t come near me.’

  The play was gone out of her voice. She was going now and going fast, because he’d broken it up.

  ‘Don’t ever come near me again. I can be like other wives, too, you know.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘And don’t you dare say shut up to me again.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  The woman began to cry again, only this time it was the big beautiful baby bawling, bawling the way she had bawled when he had told her so long ago in New York to go home and not bother herself about him any more, told her he had work to do, told her to go back to the boys who didn’t have work to do, and she went, but an hour later when he stepped out of his apartment to take a walk and pick up the morning papers, there she was sitting on the marble bench just outside his door bawling and blubbering, her eyes red, her face red, her mouth wet with slobber, and he thought: Have I got this whole thing wrong? Is it possible that this girl is so much more than she seems to be? Am I so stupid as not to have found out anything about her at all after all this time?

  ‘I was going to go in a minute,’ she wept. ‘I was just going to go.’

  ‘What are you crying about?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know, but I wish you knew how it is.’

  Is it possible? he thought. I’ve treated her the way I believed she deserved to be treated, like a vagrant piece. What the devil is this?

  ‘Well, come back in here and wash your face. Then I’ll walk you home if that’s where you want to go.’

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ she wept. ‘I never want to go home again. I want to stay here the rest of my life.’

  ‘This apartment’s twenty-five dollars a day. I’m leaving it in a few days to go into the Army.’

  ‘I want to go with you,’ she wept, only she wasn’t trying to be funny, she was just sick, he couldn’t imagine how she could ever have gotten so sick. He could imagine her getting sick of him as he had gotten sick of her—until now—until this incredible unbelievable bawling that was impossible to disbelieve, for nothing seemed to stop it, not even cold water splashed on her face. What the devil was she bawling about?

  And why had she picked him to hear it? All he had wanted was another piece, a better one than most for being younger and prettier and funnier, so what was all the bawling about?

  Now, in San Francisco, seven years later, she was bawling that way again because in the midst of play he had tricked her, driven the play far back into her and brought forward the weeping to take its place.

  ‘Now, stop that bawling,’ he said.

  But the woman couldn’t stop it, it was the one thing over which she had no control, the one thing that made him helpless, the one thing that held them together, pathetically. He got in bed beside her and took her in his arms.

  ‘You dirty dog,’ she wept, hugging him quickly and kicking her feet around him, to hold him with them, too. ‘I’m so God-damn lonely, and so are you. And down the hall are the two kids we’ve got, and we’re all so God-damn lonely. God, how we must stink!’

  ‘Why don’t you try to shut up once in a while?’

  Chapter 9

  It was the little boy standing over him, he knew. He had been standing there a minute or two. He always knew in his sleep when the boy arrived, but the boy never did anything and he never said anything. He just stood there, and then his father opened his eyes and got up. His father opened them now.

  ‘Don’t you want to go back to bed and sleep some more?’

  ‘No, Papa. I want to get dressed.’

  ‘Is Rosey asleep?’

  ‘Asleep? She woke me up.’

  He found his watch on the night table between the two beds and saw that it was a little before seven, not so bad at that. He got out of bed and saw the boy’s whole face wink, all the dark of it fall away under the light of gladness.

  ‘O.K., come on.’

  The boy stopped to look at his mother. Her freckles were out, the way they always were in the morning, her hair was tangled all over, red over the white of her face and neck and shoulders, and her mouth was a little open, a little wet with the drooling she always did when she was asleep.

  ‘Do you want to get in bed with Mama?’

&nbs
p; ‘No, I want to get dressed.’

  ‘Does Rosey want to get in bed with Mama?’

  ‘She’s trying to get dressed. She’s got my pants on like a coat.’