“Well, how did you like the movie, Mr. Beckford,” asked Amy, pulling on her gloves and slowly ambling toward the exit.
“The movie wasn’t bad. Better than I expected. Especially the scene when he threw her across the bed, though he probably could’ve been gentler with her…”
“Don’t you think? That roughness was totally unnecessary. I thought the same thing when I saw that.”
In the meantime, they had reached the street and she took his arm. “Do you agree with many others and especially the clergy, who claim that it is one of the most immoral movies shown in New York in the last few years?”
“No, I don’t think so at all. On the contrary, I think it is a rather tame movie. Nothing immoral about the whole story. This is what life is like.”
“That’s what I say. The movie isn’t immoral at all. It’s rather educational. Every day you can read more about immorality and rape in the newspaper. Did you know, Mr. Beckford, that it is illegal to screen the movie in Massachusetts and Connecticut under penalty of six months’ imprisonment?”
“I really pity the people who are not allowed to partake in this educational film.”
Beckford tried to speak in the monotone of a preacher thinking it would most impress Amy. Though he had barely seen half of the movie and had only been interested in Amy’s restlessness, his suspicions had been confirmed: this film was trash of the cheapest and most miserable kind.
Nevertheless, he enthusiastically corroborated whatever positive thing Amy said about the movie. If you wish to conquer a woman, don’t argue with her, he thought. You will only lose precious time, and nothing will come of it. Your life is complicated enough. When it comes to women, agreeing with them will get you to your goal faster and with fewer detours.
However, he failed completely. In this particular case, his philosophy did not hold true. He did not know enough about the independent character of an intelligent girl like Amy, who stood on her own two feet and earned her daily bread honestly.
8.
After Beckford’s interminable years in Korea, where he had had to ask himself every hour whether he would live to see another day, he was living in a furious frenzy upon his return home. He imagined that a healthy, normal young man who was finally released from the tough discipline of his military service should live it up, so as to reassure himself that he had returned from hell. For him, his regained freedom meant that he should have his way with any and all women in uninhibited and uncritical fashion. An inexplicable urge drove him to regain his inner balance, which he thought he had lost in Korea. Without exception, the girls Beckford had been with since his return from Korea had been easy conquests. He did not choose carefully. Usually he did not choose at all, but took whichever girl crossed his path. Tall and short, fat and skinny, blond, brunette, and indeterminate, black and white, young and barely sober enough to remain standing. Nothing mattered to him as long as she possessed the only thing that mattered to him.
In the lecture halls of the Technological Institute, he had planned to become a useful member of society instead of a destructive one. But he found he could only concentrate on the lessons with great effort. His thoughts often digressed far away from the formulas and hieroglyphics written on the chalkboards. He saw instead the dismembered bodies of his compatriots and of others, who were not. He saw the long rows of miserable human beings: men, women, and children dressed in rags, collapsing from hunger, forced to flee their homelands.
To avoid these terrible images, his thoughts turned to sex. Thinking about sex was the only thing that gave him relief. Sometimes he looked for girls or met them randomly, and they’d smile invitingly at him. If such an evening proved successful, he felt that he had finally come back to life. It was not an anesthetic per se, nor a narcotic, but for him, it had become the only tranquilizer that freed him from his memories.
In the first weeks after his return, he had tried to use tobacco to self-medicate. But tobacco did not work at all for that purpose. It caused insomnia and affected his nerves to such an extent that he sometimes had to stop himself from screaming in the middle of the street. He swore never to touch tobacco again for he feared that he might irrevocably become its slave. He ran into a former comrade who invited him to get drunk. The comrade told Beckford that nightly blackout drunkenness was the only way he found he was able to resist committing suicide.
Beckford followed his advice and got drunk every day. Not in a bar. That was too expensive. He bought a bottle and drank all of it in his cheap hotel room in the evenings. The only thing this achieved was a terrible headache until about ten the next morning. But it did allow him to better focus on his studies.
Mostly, after half a bottle, he felt as if he were back in Korea and he’d begin to cry like a baby, grieving his fallen comrades. And again, he would endure the terrible images.
“No more! I can’t stand it anymore! Help me, Lord, help me!” he would scream in this state. Then he would down an entire glass and the nightmare would let up a little.
Religion could not save him, either, since he had lost his childhood faith in Sunday school, where they had hammered the catechism into his head. Whatever had remained in terms of faith, he had lost on the battlefields of Korea, where Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant men of faith blessed the soldiers, their machine guns, flamethrowers, hand grenades, and tanks before battle. Often, they blessed them all again after the battle to convince the farm boys from Minnesota, Idaho, Indiana, Nebraska, Dakota, and Wyoming that theirs was a holy war, and that God was on their side.
The only anesthesia that worked eventually was his exploits with women. A woman brought him relief and erased the memories of Korea without the side effects that tobacco and alcohol had. All the women he sought out and collected gave him what he needed. But nothing more than that. Nor did he ask for more.
He never spoke of love. Not even in his thoughts. “Love” was only a word to him. A mere word and nothing else.
And now Beckford and Amy were sitting in an elegant restaurant that he had chosen to impress her. He hoped it would make the conquest easier. She was supposed to think that he dined in restaurants of this caliber every day, as if he were at home here. The prices were high. They were purposely high to keep away a certain kind of undesirable guest since their patronage could damage the restaurant’s reputation significantly. Judging by the prices, the food had to be exquisite.
Back in the movie theater as they were watching the film about despair, Beckford had quietly calculated how much the evening with Amy would cost him. She was not the kind of girl one could tell in a pinch: Sorry, I don’t have a lot of money with me tonight. Two burgers and two beers are good enough.
Not Amy. Not her.
He had realized tonight that although she was a secretary, outside of work she was a lady. You had to treat her as a lady if you wanted to get anywhere with her.
The waiter bowed slightly when he handed Amy the menu, then seemed to remember suddenly that he was an American and stopped in the middle of the bow. Only his head remained slightly bowed, which made him look as if he were glancing at Amy’s hands.
Without reading the menu, Amy placed it back on the table, pulled off her gloves, and said with a gentle smile: “I’d just like a ham sandwich and a coffee.”
“Is that all you’d like, Miss Amy?” asked Beckford with surprise, as if he had expected she would buy the entire restaurant. He was disappointed as he increasingly realized that she would not be as easy as he’d thought that afternoon in the office. Suddenly he felt as if he were meeting her for the first time.