“You’ll never see me again,” declared Tully, and he swayed, leaning oddly backwards, up the street to his hotel, straw cowboy hat cocked forward, his fingers discovering new mounds of muscle in the small of his agonized back.
But the pay was ninety cents an hour, and two days later he was again gripping a short-handled hoe.
12
I’m getting my share, Ernie Munger assured himself at the station on Center Street under floodlights besieged by moths. Still he felt an uneasiness, an indefinable lack. He would phone Faye, talking on sometimes after a car crossed the thin black hose between office and pumps, talking while it waited, and complaining at the departing ring that the customer had not given him a chance to get out there.
“Are you very busy tonight?” Faye would ask, and he, thinking he heard an impinging, possessive, matrimonial tone, would feel a deadening resentment. Other times her voice was cheerfully independent and he felt he was in love.
On his nights off, his arm around her in a movie, he waited impatiently for the evening’s consummation in the car. But at its approach she became somber, and afterwards was tense, petulant, glum.
“What’s the matter?” he asked late one night on a levee amid sounds of crickets and frogs and the close rustle of leaves.
“Nothing.”
In the distance, dominating the lights of the town, the red neon crest of Stockton’s twelve-story skyscraper flashed, a line at a time.
CALIFORNIA
WESTERN
STATES
LIFE
PROTECTION
“Don’t you feel good?”
“I’m all right.”
“Is anything wrong?”
“I said nothing.”
“Well, what you getting mad about then?”
“I’m not mad.”
“Okay.”
“Can’t I be quiet if I feel like it without everybody getting all worked up?”
“You’re the only one getting worked up.”
“Well, leave me alone then. I have a right to my moods.”
“All right, I can take a hint. Don’t think I don’t know what’s wrong. I’m not stupid. I know what it is. Maybe you need somebody that’s got more to give you.”
“That’s not it.”
“You’re unfulfilled. I know, I’m sorry, I’m not blind.”
“I’m fulfilled. I’m perfectly fulfilled. That’s not it at all.”
“You didn’t get real fulfillment.”
“I feel perfectly fine. I’m fulfilled. Now don’t worry about it. That’s not what’s bothering me at all. I just feel out of touch sometimes.”
“You mean you’re mad.”
“I’m not mad. I’m a little worried, that’s all.”
Ernie felt a dismal apprehension. “What about?”
“You know what.”
“We’ve been pretty careful.”
“You’ve been pretty careful. If I was careful I’d never come out here. You wouldn’t marry me now, I know you wouldn’t. Men just don’t after they’ve slept with somebody.”
“They do too. They do it all the time. What are you talking about?”
“You wouldn’t.”
Caught between prudence and expediency, afraid of committing himself and afraid of losing his rights to her, he replied despondently: “I would too.”
“When?”
“Well, when it’s right for us both. We don’t want to rush into a mess when we’ve got each other anyway.”
“Don’t you want to be with me every night?”
“Sure I do. Maybe I could get a day job.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I guess I don’t feel ready yet. I feel I need a few more fights first,” he heard himself saying. “I just don’t feel I’m ready to get married.”
“I wasn’t proposing to you. That’s a thing I certainly would never do. I wouldn’t want anybody who didn’t want me.”
“I want you.”
“That’s up to you. I wouldn’t force myself on anyone. If you don’t want to get married you don’t have to. I wasn’t asking anything about that. I just meant what if, you know, you got drafted or something — how do I know where I stand? Would you want me to wait?”
“Well, sure,” said Ernie, thinking there was no harm in that and piqued by the thought of someone else having her.
“I mean these are things I’m just asking for my own sake. I don’t want you to feel I’m obligating you.”
“I don’t, I don’t,” he assured her.
“Like what would you want if you had some more fights? What’s that got to do with it? Would that make a difference? What would you feel like doing after you had them?”
“Then I guess I’d want somebody so it’d seem worth getting my ass kicked… so I could… I don’t know… have a home. But I want to get set up first,” he said, unconvinced, afraid of what he was saying.
“I don’t want to hold you back. I want to be good for you.” She put her fingers on his cheek, her eyes only hollows in the dim starlight. “I want to cook for you.”
It filled him with panic. To such devotion, such sacrifice, he felt rejection would be unbearable, that to quibble at all would be an unthinkable cruelty. Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness.
Later, on her front porch, she looked so lovely to him, so graceful, her full lips in a smile so gentle, that he could not turn and go home. So many obstacles, so much uncertainty lay ahead in consequence of what he had been forced to say in the car, that this time of intimacy had a transitory sweetness. He would not marry her, and so she would not be his much longer. Eventually there would be conditions he could not agree to. He must cherish the present like a memory. This would be the time of Faye, this would soon be over. Her presence, her voice, the taste of her mouth would be replaced by another’s and lost forever. Or perhaps there would be no other after her and he would again be alone with his lust. He would not marry her, so felt a blissful freeing of his love, an elation that carried him after her through the doorway to a final kiss that became not the last but the first in a fevered goodbye with her skirt up and his little tin box out in the glove compartment of the car. Sitting on the carpeted stairs leading up to the room where he hoped her parents were asleep, he pulled her down onto his lap.
Afterwards Ernie was pensive. Through days of peat-dust storms he waited uneasily. When a month was up he drove Faye to a doctor and sat in the car knowing already what the answer would be and feeling a singular peace. He would quit fighting. Certainly now he could no longer take the risks. There was no decision to make. He had no thoughts of escape from her and was strangely unperturbed. There seemed to him only one thing to do. They were married in the Little Chapel of the Wayfarer in Carmel, the bride wearing a white dress, the groom expressionless in sport coat and slacks. After a dinner of swordfish steak on the wharf in Monterey, they phoned the news to their parents and rented a motel room under cypress trees. Two nights later they were sleeping in Faye’s room.
On Ernie’s second night back at work, his employer, Mario Florestano, was waiting for him in the doorway of the station, the largeness of his alerted face accentuated by frontal baldness, long ears, a slight neck and narrow shoulders.
“You left the shitter open,” he said.
Ernie, seeking an attitude, looked at him with puzzled eyes. “I did? I thought I locked it up.”
“You certainly did not. Want me to tell you what I saw when I drove in this morning? A wino coming out putting toilet paper in his pocket.”
“I’d swear I locked it.”
“Listen, didn’t you hear me? I said I saw him coming out. Now what I want to know is how he got in.”