“The old man was an old man, no high priest but a stranger with a good wish no stronger than my own, but it made me uneasy. There’s something terrible to have it assumed that one needs luck. And, remember, we were at a crossroads.
“And, indeed, when I returned to the restaurant where none now knew me, my foreignness seemed gone. No longer an object of interest to my fellow passengers, I was just one more weary pilgrim with all the pilgrim’s collateral burdens — his sour taste, the beginning of sore throat, a sense of underwear and standing oppressed by his luggage in an open place, feeling the attention divided and a touch of panic.
“Today with an hour to kill in Des Moines I would call up the big radio station, introduce myself and accept whatever professional courtesy was offered. But not then.
“In a few hours I was traveling again, comfortable and safe now that it was dark, snug, aware of the glowing dials on the driver’s console, relaxed by the long moist hiss of the tires.
“Somewhere along its route a girl had boarded the bus and sat down beside me. I saw her when I woke. Her eyes were shut but facing my lap. I turned on my haunch and closed my eyes again. I do not like to fall asleep in public because of the erection. I had one now — piss and lust — and I turned away to hide it. Something about my breathing must have put her wise, and I sensed that she too only pretended to sleep. We traveled like this for a time, both of us ever more wakeful. That she had come aboard some time after eleven o’clock from some small town, or even from beside the road perhaps, made her tremendously sexy to me. Somehow, even more than her proximity, her isolation and the lateness of the hour — which suggested that she was in trouble — made her seem available. It excited me that she had seen my hard-on, and our mimed sleep, of course. My God, I don’t know what I might have done, but just when I could stand it no longer, just when I was capable of doing something for which they could have thrown me off the bus, just then her hand moved, made a suicide leap from its place in her lap to the narrow space between us. No, not a leap; it was one of those great surrenders from an enormous height, this lovely Acapulcan plunge. The edge of her hand grazed my hip as it fell, took a wee nip of my buttock. Ah, I was on fire. Oh, I was hot. From this I took hot heart and turned blindly, still feigning sleep, boldly forcing my erection into her palm.
“She shrieked and slapped me. Was I wrong about her? ‘Don’t give me that,’ I said. I shook her shoulders and pulled her to me and maneuvered the whole works into her hand again. And you know what? She took it.
“What a lesson! What a lesson! So much for your timidities and reservations, so much for your doubts and reluctances, your equivocations and hesitancies and shields of decorum more heavy than the world. She held me, I tell you. Then I held her. We grabbed at each other like drowners grasping at spars. (We sparred all right: sparring partners!) But she had been sleeping, there was no question about it. It was like something in a charm: one smash of passion and poof went the world. There is more rape than ever gets into the papers, and madness is the common cold of the emotions.
“So we hugged and we kissed. Right there in the bus I put my hands up her skirt and down her panties and in her crotch. We hadn’t yet spoken, nor had either of us seen what the other even looked like. She unzipped me and pulled me off and collected my come and patted it on my prick like butter. In the bus. She squeezed it for luck and locked her legs around my hand when I started to withdraw it. These were her first words to me: ‘Not so fast, not so fast. Do me. Do me or I’ll scream again.’
“I did her. I thrummed her parts like rubber bands. Right there in the bus where they could throw you off for lighting a cigarette or talking to the driver. Then, when it was over and I was thinking, well now we can relax, she still held on. She did me again and I did her again. Then she started to tell me jokes, and that was the way we traveled through the night — me with my hand in her pants and her playing with my cock and ears and touching my teeth lightly with her fingers so that I could taste my own semen, and telling me jokes. Dumb little jokes like a kid might know, not even dirty, just silly riddles and ‘Knock Knock’ stories and dopey limericks and one-liners about ‘the little moron.’ She knew them all and whispered them to me as if they were love words. After a while I thought she might be in show business. I asked her that.
“She put her head down shyly. ‘I thought that’s the way people speak.’
“‘Maybe it is,” I said.
“When it grew light I sat with a newspaper across my lap until my pants dried. I put the paper down and saw that some of the print had come off on my fly. People stopped to read my crotch as they passed by.
“‘We’ll get off the bus,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll find a tourist cabin. We’ll make love properly. You’ll tell me all your best jokes.’ “‘We’re miles from anywhere. We have no motorcar.’ “‘Then let it get dark. I can’t stand sitting next to you and not being able to touch you.’ “‘Shh.’
“‘I mean it. This daylight is a bad business.’ “We introduced ourselves. ‘Marshall Maine,’ I told her. “‘Miriam Desebour,’ she said, ‘pleased to meet you.’
“Miriam was on her way to a convalescent home in Morristown, New Jersey, where she had taken a job as a practical nurse. I had intended to go home to Pittsburgh, but I went on with Miriam instead. She told her employers we were married, that I had been one of her patients, a sort of invalid who would never recover, and they accepted this.
“Do you know about Morristown? It’s a very peculiar place — the languishment capital of America, maybe the world. It’s the major industry. There are no famous clinics or hospitals, but there are schools for the deaf and the famous Seeing Eye Institute. There are convalescent homes like the one that hired Miriam, and old people’s homes, and a farm for crippled children, and a sort of plantation where the retarded children of the wealthy spend their whole lives. There were people whose plastic surgeons had botched their operations and who felt they were too ugly ever to go home. There were ‘training schools’ from which few ever graduated, and old gassed soldiers from the First World War. There were other veterans, men who came to Morristown to learn how to use their artificial limbs but never got the hang of it somehow. To my knowledge there were no lepers, but one of the persistent rumors was that a colony of them lived somewhere in the hills around the city. (I think the occasional appearance in the streets of the failed plastic-surgery patients gave rise to these rumors.) Many had lost limbs. There was lameness of all sorts, and it occurred to me that to be without a finger or an arm or a leg was a stunning kind of nakedness. (I thought of public exposures, emergencies of bust zipper and collapsed elastic. The needles and pins industry in Morristown must have been enormous, great patch fortunes might have been made there — fabulous thread mines in the Morristown hills. Indeed, the town did seem to have more shoe-repair shops and tailors than one would see in a city its size, and now that I think of it, it seems to me that something in the hearts of these people caused them to carry about all the scissors and thimbles and spot sewing equipment I saw.) It seemed to me that all the afflicted people of the world were stuffed into Morristown. It had all it could handle, a cornered market of gimps, a secular Lourdes, but not, withal, ungay. We were a community of arrested diseases, patient patients, developers of fortitude and resignation — all the loser virtues, all the good-sport resources.
“It was something to sit in those Morristown drugstores and see the doting purchases of the healthy, magazines for the relatives they were soon to abandon, cosmetics to make them presentable, pens, stationery, portable radios — all the sick man’s sick-room detritus. It may have been a sign of my lassitude at this time that sitting in those drugstores as the cash register rang up the sales I thought no more about it than that it ultimately takes very little to live, that the desert isle and the beachcomber are worthy fictions. I owned a radio myself, of course, and listened to the Morristown stations. I wonder why I never realized while I was there that they were the same as radio stations anywhere. Probably the station managers thought the shut-ins wanted the world on normal terms. But nobody does.