Until finally one afternoon I got so groovily lost in her warm body, so completely out of myself and away from myself, that when the world settled together again all I could think of was how much I owed her. Not what I felt for her, or what future I wanted with her or without her, but how much I owed her.
I wanted to give her something, and it seemed to me that I wasn’t giving her enough. I wasn’t even sharing thoughts with her, and I couldn’t do that, not yet, but there was one thing I could give her, one phrase I had been holding back all along for no good reason at all. There were words I could say that she had been waiting to hear, and I could say them whether they were true or not.
I turned and looked into her eyes, and she looked back into mine. And I said the three words she had been waiting so long to hear:
“I love you.”
And she looked back at me, drinking the words, her eyes widening as she heard them. And she opened her mouth hesitantly, and I heard the echo of my own words in my head and waited for her to speak.
And she said three words back to me:
Eleven
“Chip, I’m pregnant.”
Twelve
“Geraldine? There was this thing I was sort of wondering about.”
“What we talked about awhile ago? I thought you might have been thinking about it.”
“Well, I was sort of doing some heavy thinking about the business. And then this one little point got stuck in my head, and I thought I would just ask.”
“Be my guest.”
“Well, I was sort of wondering what you would do if one of the girls, if Rita or Claureen, if one of them got pregnant.”
“I’d be powerfully surprised,” she said. “Rita’s step-aunt did a knitting needle abortion on her when she was fourteen, and they had to take out some of the parts you need if you want to have a baby. And Claureen had to go to the hospital for a scraping a year and a half ago and while he was in there the doc tied off her tubes.”
“Well, Jo Lee or Marguerite, then. I mean, you know, any girl who happened to work here.”
“Just any girl.”
“That’s right.”
“Any girl at all.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Like Lucille Lathrop, even.”
“—”
“Chip, I’m an old woman. I’ve been years in the same business and seen every kind of man there is to see, and I can tell whether a man’s getting it or not, or if he’s the kind of man who wants it or not. And I know you’re getting it, and getting it regular, and I know you like what you’re getting. And you’re not getting it here where it’s all over the place for the taking, and you’re not out catting around, so where else would you be getting it?”
“You’ve known all along?”
“Took it for granted.”
“Does anyone else—”
“Claude Tyles asked what you were doing for love, and I imagine I led him to think you were alternating between Rita and Claureen. When did you find out she was pregnant?”
“This afternoon.”
“How long gone is she?”
“Almost two months.”
“She’s sure about it?”
“She seems to be.”
“Instead of stealing rubbers from around here, you should have told me and I would have gotten pills for her. You can’t count on rubbers, don’t you know that? Well, that’s under the bridge. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Marry the girl? Have an abortion? What?”
“I don’t know.”
She did something odd. She put her hand on top of mine for a minute, then gave a squeeze and took her own hand back.
She said, “Chip, if she just told you today then you’re in a bad way. You sure she didn’t tell you a week ago?”
“No. Why?”
“You didn’t suspect until today?”
“Never.”
“Because you’ve been walking round in grand confusion for better than a week, and if it’s not that it’s something else, and now with this on top of it you must be in a bad way.”
“I guess I am.”
“Chip, I’m too old to get shocked or disappointed or anything but older, and I can’t even get that too much. I’m not much for questions. But you got something that you got to tell to somebody, and I guess I can do a better job of listening than most. You can just put it straight out and not stop first to think how it’ll sound.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Or you can tell me to forget it and I will. I’m good at forgetting. I can forget just about anything.”
“No,” I said. “I was just trying to figure out where to start.”
The words were all there waiting, and once I opened the valve they poured out. A couple of times she filled in with a question but she didn’t have to do that very often. I just went ahead and talked until there were no words left. I probably said the same thing half a dozen times in different ways. If I repeated myself, she pretended not to notice. She sat there and took it all in until I was done.
Then she went to the bar and came back with a water glass full of something. She handed it to me and I looked at it.
“Just plain corn,” she said. For a minute I thought she was referring to what I had said. “Corn whiskey,” she said. “Drink it.”
“The whole thing? It’ll kill me.”
“The state you’re in, it would take a quart before you’d feel a thing. All this’ll do is settle you some. Go ahead and drink it.”
I finished it in three gulps. It went down like fire. I guess it settled me some.
“Now I’ll tell you a story, Chip. Story about a girl like Rita or Claureen, just a down-home girl who wasn’t much and wound up going with men for money. Her pa ran off when she wasn’t more than a bit of a girl and all she ever had from him was a postcard once in a while. Maybe she built him up a little in her mind but not all that much. Then one day after she’s been hustling for a time she hears from one of her aunts that got a telegram from Norfolk. My… this girl’s father was in a fight in a waterfront bar and some sailor broke a bottle over his head and he’s in the hospital with his skull fractured.
“So this girl goes to Norfolk to see her pa, and he’s in a hospital there. She visits him but he’s in a coma, and after a week he dies without ever coming out of it. And she makes arrangements to ship the body back here to be buried next to my mother.
“Now while this girl was in Norfolk… that’s two slips so far, I suspect you could put a name to this girl if you were pressed, couldn’t you? Doesn’t matter. This girl, while she’s in Norfolk, she meets this man and one thing leads to another. This man is in naval stores in Baltimore. A good family. He wants her to marry him and come on back to Baltimore.
“And it’s like a dream to her. This man, he’s rich, and he’s a good man, and he wants her to marry him. But she thinks, Now, how can I marry up with him when I’ve got all this in my past? And what if he finds out?
“So she decides to tell him, and she tells him. And he says what does he care, because that’s something that happened in South Carolina and what does it have to do with Baltimore, and as far as he’s concerned it never happened at all, and it doesn’t bother him one bit, and if it bothers her then she’s a fool, and he knows she’s not a fool.
“And she thinks, well, it’ll bother him in the years to come. But if it ever does she never knows about it, he never once throws it back to her, as it turns out.