—
The train was pulling into the station; people were getting up with their things; conductors were getting ready to work the doors. The silent soldier stood up with his pack and briefly clasped hands with the crazy soldier. Perkins fingered his packet of cigarettes.
He had been a returning hero; then people forgot the war had ever happened. Then war was evil and people who fought it were stupid grunts who went crazy when they came back. Then people suddenly went, “Hey, the Greatest Generation!” Then just as suddenly, they were the assholes who couldn’t even shoot their weapons. No, not even assholes, just nice boys who didn’t know what was real. These guys now — some people said they were killers, some said heroes, and some said both. What would they be in fifty years?
—
When people got off the train, Jim got up and wandered away, and for a moment Jennifer thought he’d gotten off. But then she saw him wandering toward the back of the car, apparently talking to himself as well as to other people as he went. She tried to pay attention to the short essay she had been working on before her conversation with him. It was by a novelist who was in love with a vegetarian and who had gone to great lengths to pretend that he was even more “vegan” than she was in order to impress her. It was light and funny, and she felt too bitter now to appreciate those things.
—
Coming out of the bathroom, Perkins noticed the couple, the woman first. She was black, and normally he didn’t like black, but she was beautiful and something else besides. Her soft eyes and full presence evoked sex and tenderness equally, and he could not help but hold her casual gaze. Or he would have, if she hadn’t been sitting next to a giant of a man with quick, instinctive eyes.
—
Old white fool look away quick — good. Shouldn’t have looked at all, and wouldn’t if they were anyplace else. Chris put one hand on Lalia’s arm and worked the game on his laptop with the other. He wasn’t mad; old man couldn’t help but look. Lalia was all beauty beside him, shining and real in a world of polluted pale shit. He killed the dude crawling at him in the street, then got the one coming out the window. He moved down her arm and put his hand over hers; her fingers responded as if linked to him. His feelings grew huge. Dudes came rushing at him in the hallway; he capped ’em. He was looking forward to tonight, to the hotel room he’d reserved, the one that was supposed to have a mirror over the bed and a little balcony where they’d drink champagne with strawberries in chocolate. He killed dudes coming out the door; he entered the secret chamber. He wanted it to be something they would always remember. He wanted it to be the way it had been the first time with her.
—
It was humiliating to be old, to shrink before the glowering eyes of a stronger man. But just mildly. He understood the young gorilla — you’d have to protect that woman. He thought of Dody, when she was young, how it was to go out with her; he’d always had to be looking out for trouble, for some idiot wanting to start something. You always had to watch for that if you were with a good-looking female, and it could become automatic. Sometimes it had made him scared and sometimes angry, and the heat of his anger had gotten mixed up with the heat in her eyes, the curves of her small body, the heat she gave off without knowing it. That was all gone now, almost. They still kissed, but not with their tongues, just on the lips. Still, he remembered….
—
It took a long time to get with her, years, but when it finally happened, it was like the song his aunt used to listen to when she sat by the window, her glass of Bacardi and juice tilted and the sunlight coming in, her knees opening her skirt — the song that made him run and hide in the closet the first time he heard it, because it was too much of something, something with no words, but somehow living in the singer’s voice and words, high-voiced sweet-strong words that made him remember his mama, even though everybody said he was too young to remember. If I ever saw a girl / That I needed in this world / You are the one for me…The words were like the poems on cheap cards, like the poems nerds wrote to get A’s in class — but the way this singer said them, they were deep and powerful, and they said things no words could say, things his mama said with her hand, touching his face at night, or his aunt, just brushing against him with her hip….A trapdoor opened; the secret chamber was flooded with dudes wearing masks.
Oh, my little love, yeah…He had her every way, with no holding back, with his shirt over the light to make it soft. She was a quiet lover, but the warm odor that came off her skin was like a moan you could smell, and though she moved like every other woman, she said things with her moves that no other woman said. When they finished, she turned around and pushed the hair off her dazed eyes, and—oh, my little love—took his face in her hands. Nobody ever touched his face, and the move surprised him so that he almost slapped her away. Then he put his hands over hers and let her hold his face.
—
He remembered that when the war ended, the Italians invited the victorious Americans to come see a local company put on an opera. They went for something to see, but it was mostly boring, too hot, everybody smelling bad up in the little balcony, the orchestra looking half-asleep, flies swarming — but then there was this one woman singing. He made his buddies quit horsing around, and they did; they turned away from their jokes and listened to the small figure on the stage below, a dream of love given form by her voice and pouring from her to fill the room. When he and his friend Bill Steed went backstage to meet her, it turned out she was older than they’d thought, and not pretty, with makeup covering a faded black eye. But he still remembered her voice.
—
In the essay Jennifer was editing, the writer claimed that sometimes whom you pretend to be is who you really are. He said that sometimes faking was the realest thing you could do.
“Bitch! What you think you doin’, bitch!”
Her heart jumped; she looked up, to see a huge black man looming over somebody in the seat behind him, yelling curses — oh no, it was him. He was yelling at Jim. A woman stood and grabbed the huge man’s shoulder, saying, “Nuh, nuh, nuh,” a beseeching half word, over and over. She meant no, don’t, but the big man grabbed Jim, lifted him up, and shook him like a doll. The woman shrank back, but she said it more sharply, “Nuh, nuh!” Ignoring her, the man stormed down the aisle to where Jennifer sat, holding Jim up off the ground as if he were nothing. Jim was talking to the man, but words were nothing now. She felt the whole train, alert with fear but distant, some not even looking. She stood up. The man threw Jim, threw his whole body down the aisle of the train. She tried to speak. Jim leapt off the floor with animal speed and put his arms up as if to fight. She could not speak. Next to her, an old man stood. “Ima kill you!” shouted the big man, but he didn’t. He just looked at the old man and said, “He touch my wife’s breast! I look over and see his hand right on it!” Then he looked at her. He looked as if he’d waked suddenly from a dream and was surprised to see her there.
“It’s all right,” said the old man mildly. “You stopped him.”
“It’s not all right,” said the young man, but quietly. “Nothin’ all right.” He turned and walked the other way. “You ruinin’ my vacation,” he said as he went. “Pervert!” He didn’t look at his wife on his way out of the car.
The old man sat down. Jennifer looked at Jim. He was pacing back and forth in the aisle, talking to himself, his face a fierce inward blank.