"You mean you’ll be jumping out of airplanes?" Mrs. Marshall asked.
"Yes, Ma’am."
"Really?" Dianne asked. When he looked at her and nodded, she added, "I’ll be damned."
"Dianne!" her mother said. "Try to remember you’re a lady."
Steve sensed that Leonard wished he would leave, and while Steve thought Leonard was a candy-ass, fair was fair. If he had a date with some girl, he’d want to get her alone and away from her family and neighbors, too.
He refused Mr. Marshall’s offer to freshen his drink, and then left.
He called the Danielli house again, thinking that maybe Vinny had come back; but Mrs. Danielli said she hadn’t heard from him and didn’t expect to, as late as it was. He apologized for calling so late and turned the radio on.
He quickly grew bored with that. From his living room window he could see the candy store on the corner of Eighteenth Street and Park Avenue but it was closed. So there was no place he could go without a car.
He had a damned good idea where Vinny was. He was up at The Lodge, on the mountain in West Orange, where you could get a drink even if you weren’t twenty-one. But getting one around here was an impossibility. They all knew who you were and how old you were. And you needed a car to get to The Lodge.
But then he remembered hearing that if you were in uniform you could get a drink, period. The idea began to grow on him. There was a bar by the Ampere station. His mother and her husband never went there, so the people there wouldn’t connect him with them.
It was worth a try. It was a shame to waste a seventy-two-hour pass sitting around listening to the radio all by yourself. If they wouldn’t serve him, he’d just leave. He’d turn red in the face, too; but that wouldn’t be too bad.
He put on his overcoat and his brimmed cap, turned the overcoat collar up against the cold wind, and walked to the bar by the Ampere station.
It was crowded and noisy. He pushed his cap back on his head, unbuttoned his overcoat, and found an empty seat at the bar.
"What’ll it be?" the bartender asked.
"Scotch and soda," Steve said.
The bartender said, "You got it," and went to make it. Steve took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and laid it on the bar.
When the bartender delivered the drink, he pushed the five-dollar bill back across the bar.
"On the house," he said.
Steve took a sip of the whiskey. It still tasted like medicine. Not as bad as the first one, but still bad. It was probably, he decided, another brand.
The bartender set another drink on the bar in front of Steve.
"From the lady and the gentleman at the end," the bartender said. Steve looked down the bar to where a middle-aged couple had their glasses raised to him.
"My privilege," the man called.
"God bless you!" the woman called.
Steve felt his face flush, and desperately hoped he wasn’t blushing to the point where it could be seen.
"Thank you," he called.
It was the first time in his life that anyone had bought him a drink in a bar.
"You meeting somebody?" a male voice asked in his ear. He turned and saw that it was Leonard.
"No," Steve said. "I just came in for a drink."
"Whyn’tcha come sit with us?" Leonard asked, with a nod toward the wall. There was a wall-length padded seat there and tiny tables, eight or ten of them, in front of it. Dianne Marshall was sitting on the bench, smiling and waving at him.
"Wouldn’t I be in the way?"
"Don’t be silly," Leonard said. "If we knew you were coming here, you could have come with us."
Steve picked up his five-dollar bill and followed Leonard over. Dianne patted the seat next to her.
"You should have said something, Steve," Dianne said, "about coming here. You could have come with us. What did you do, walk?"
"Yeah."
"I guess you get a lot of that, walking, in the Marines, huh?" Leonard asked.
"Try a thirty-mile hike with full field equipment," Steve said.
"Thirty miles?" Dianne asked.
"Right. It toughens you up."
"I’ll bet it does," Dianne said, and squeezed his leg over the knee.
She wasn’t, he saw, looking for any reaction from him. She was looking at Leonard, smiling. She relaxed her fingers, but didn’t take them from his leg.
She doesn’t mean anything by that,he decided solemnly. She has a boyfriend and I’m just the kid friend of her little sister. I mean, Jesus, she was married, and has a kid!
He was not used to drinking liquor; he started to feel it.
"It’s been a long day," he announced. "I’m going to tuck it in."
"You haven’t even danced with me yet!" Dianne protested.
"To tell you the truth, I’m a lousy dancer," he said, getting up.
"Ah, I bet you’re not," Dianne said.
"You better dance with her, kid, or she won’t let you go," Leonard said.
"Don’t call me ‘kid,’ " Steve said, nastily.
Jesus Christ, I am getting drunk I better leave that fucking Scotch alone!
"Sorry, no offense," Leonard said.
"What’s the matter with you, Lenny?" Dianne snapped. She got up and took Steve’s hand. "I’ll decide whether you’re a lousy dancer."
She led him to the dance floor and turned around and opened her arms for him to hold her. And he danced with her. He was an awkward dancer, and he was wearing field shoes. And he got an erection.
"I think we better call this off," he said, aware that his face felt really flushed now, and that it was probably visible, even in the dim light.
"Yes, I think maybe we should."
He didn’t sit down again with them, just claimed his overcoat and brimmed cap and put them on. After that he shook hands with Leonard and left.
It was a ten-minute walk back to the apartment. Snow had started again, but it was still cold enough for him to feel that he was sobering up. He told himself he had made a mistake leaving, that maybe Dianne had meant something when she didn’t take her hand off his leg. And then came the really thrilling thought that she had felt his erection, and it hadn’t made her mad.
By the time he got to the apartment, however, and was shaking the snow off his overcoat and wiping it off the leather brim of his cap, he had changed his mind again. Dianne was twenty-what? Twenty-two at least, probably twenty-three. She was an ex-married woman, for Christsake. She had a boyfriend. His imagination was running wild, more than likely because he had had all those medicine-tasting Scotch-and-sodas.
The telephone rang.
It had to be Vinny Danielli. The sonofabitch had finally come home, and his mother had told him he had called.
"Hello, asshole, how the hell are you, you guinea bastard?"
"Steve?"
"Jesus!"
"It’s Dianne."
"I know. I thought it was somebody else."
"I sure hope so," she said.
"I’m sorry about that."
"What are you doing?"
"Nothing."
"We left right after you did. Leonard lives in Verona and was worried about getting home in the snow."
"Oh."
"Your parents get home?"