With Faye crushed against him, he drove between the flat hot fields to Lodi or Tracy or Modesto, where they turned around to come back. He threw her into Oak Park Pool, swam to her underwater with lascivious fingers, stood on his hands with only his long white feet above the surface, ran off the high board and belly-flopped from the low, and with eyes stinging from chlorine, lay down panting beside her on the hot wet cement. When she walked between the pool and the dressing room his was not the only head that turned to watch. Coming home from these swims he was often ill-tempered and taciturn. One afternoon a car cut in front of them, the driver looking back as Ernie, brandishing a middle finger, filled the intersection with curses.
“You better be careful,” Faye warned.
“Careful of him? He’s just a sack of shit!”
“Stop doing that! He’s liable to see you.”
“I want him to see it! He’s the one better be careful.”
In the apartment, Ernie continued to brood over the incident, wondering: who does she think she married? And it seemed that she neither knew nor respected him, that she denied the very basis of his personality.
By the next day the occurrence had lost its significance. She was a girl, after all, and could have no sure sense of who he was. He forgave her, for that incomprehension itself attested to the uncommonness of his kind. It was enough that she love the part of him she knew; the other needed nothing from anybody. I don’t give a rat’s ass, was his motto. It was not comprehension he wanted, only her awareness that he was not like anyone she had known before. But it was as if what distinguished him was what she did not perceive. At times as he lay in bed listening to her breathing, a fear came over him that after marriage death was the next major event.
Sometimes he was euphoric; he rewarded her with bouts of ardor, gaining energy as hers was depleted. At meals he jiggled his legs. In the midst of a conversation he might suddenly drop to the floor and begin doing pushups.
“You’re the most nervous guy,” Faye said as Ernie was absorbed in rolling his neck while thoroughly masticating a raw carrot. “When you relax you really relax, but when you’re just sitting around you’re always moving.”
“I’m exercising,” he stated through the uproar in his jaws. “Most people neglect their necks.”
“I don’t mean just that. Look how you’re chewing.”
“That’s how to get the most out of a carrot.”
He was stimulated, he was pleased, yet at times he gazed at her for long moments, as if to gain by concentration some final elusive dominion. He would reach out and fondle her, amazed still at the breadth of his license. He buried his face in her, explored, examined, turned her about. I’ve liberated her, he told himself, yet was sometimes assailed by a strange sickening excitement and wondered if it were he who deserved the credit.
“I don’t want anybody but you,” he declared.
“I don’t ever want anybody but you,” she responded.
But Ernie felt no different. “I really mean it.”
“I do too.”
“I mean I never will.”
“Me neither.”
But he wondered if she would have said it without his saying it first. Often she told him she loved him, but that was not enough, even if it were true. She must have loved others before him, and where were they now? She had married him, but had there been any choice? What if she had never met him? Would it all have happened the same way with somebody else? When she amused herself one day with his hair, parting it and combing the sides down instead of upward and back, he felt he was not the man she wanted, and respected her less for her taste.
Alone in the bedroom he shadowboxed before the mirror, but with no desire to return to the gym. All that seemed impossible now; there was not enough time in a day. Though he was up for hours before going to work, still he was usually late, because he could not leave Faye until the moment when he had to leave in frantic haste.
He was broody, he was amorous. While reading, he noticed a minute blizzard falling before his eyes and found himself massaging his scalp in a frenzy. He fell asleep with leaps and twitches and dreamed of being rushed off unprepared for a bout he had forgotten. He saw no one from the Lido Gym, and Ruben Luna never phoned, as Ernie had feared he would. A sense of safety, comfort, luxury, took possession of him. Only to be with Faye, to work, sleep and make love was like a reprieve, an indulgence. At times he wondered if he were losing his nerve.
When Faye bathed, he soaped her with a sense of privilege. Drying her off, he caressed her in admiration. Her short sturdy body showed no sign of pregnancy; her belly was flat except for a tilting of pelvis, a slightly rearward slope from the navel to the tuft of black hair. “You’re in great shape,” he said. “Only you’re wide open.” And squaring off, he tapped her belly. At first she responded with a tolerant smile, soon with impatience, and once with the cry: “Don’t,” her hands at her sides, her heavy breasts, nipples dark and thick, hanging incongruously before his poised fists. Hurt, he turned away thinking she had no sense of humor. That she was already growing bored with him seemed indicated by her occasional disinclination for the daily sexual regimen. He wondered if he was adequate to her needs. One day he did two hundred consecutive sit-ups.
The summer passed in waves of worry and concupiscence, until Faye took employment with the Pacific Gas and Electric Company. Ernie then slept later than ever, ate breakfast with his jaw propped in his palm, and looked out the kitchen window at oiled female neighbors lying back in the lawn chairs, their crying babies filling him with dread. He went out to his Ford and drove along the hot streets.
One day at Dick’s Drive-Inn he walked over to a low maroon car. Slumped behind the wheel, his wan pinched face barely above the door, sat Gene Simms.
“What say, man?”
“What’s happening?”
“Nothing. Where you been keeping yourself?”
“Around. What’s new?”
“Nothing.”
Gene Simms was working nights at the box factory, and the two began passing afternoons together. Driving his car or riding in Ernie’s, haggard, frowning, yawning, smoking with yellowed unsteady fingers, a blond oily lock hanging over his forehead, Gene talked mostly on the same subject, his descriptive powers arousing in Ernie a curious agitation and a fear that what he had with Faye might be of a quality below the possible or even the usual.
“There isn’t a one that don’t want it,” said Gene.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“But you got to know what you’re doing.”
“That’s right, sure, they won’t go for just anybody.”
“If the right guy comes along he can score.”
“Everybody’s got a mate somewhere.”
“I don’t care who it is. You know Eleanor MacDonald? I plugged her.”
“I know, you told me.”
“You got to understand their minds. If you can get your knee between their legs you’re usually on your way.”
Home from work in the first hours of morning, Ernie tried not to wake Faye, knowing she needed rest. Slowly he slid into bed, and as she turned to him he slipped his arm about her neck. Until she quieted he stroked her back or hair, her leg if it had fallen over him, then as her breathing settled he held her against him with a protectiveness so tender he was saddened because she was not awake to perceive it.
One afternoon, cruising Main Street with Gene Simms, he saw standing on a corner at parade rest a swarthy soldier in khakis and boots.
“By God, that’s Bonomo,” said Gene, who then yelled: “Bonomo, Bonomo! Hey, man, when’d you get back?” while Ernie drove on without a sideways glance. “Hey, stop, stop, that’s Bonomo. He must be on leave. Stop, for Christ’s sake. Hey, why didn’t you stop, man? What’s the matter?”