“She is not religious either, at least not in the ordinary sense.”
“What is she doing in a religious order?”
“I don’t know. Anyhow that is not what I’m interested in.”
“What are you interested in?” asked the engineer, sniffing the old rook cards. They smelled like money.
“I thought she might give me a job.”
“Doing what?”
“Anything. Teaching, minor repairs. I am feeling very good physically.”
“I’m sure it’s a wonderful work she is doing.”
“I’m not interested in that either,” said Jamie irritably. “I’m not interested in the Negroes.”
“What are you interested in?”
“Anything she wants me to do. Her place is down in Tyree County in the piney woods, ten miles from nowhere. I thought it wouldn’t be bad to live there as we have been living, in the camper. We could teach, give her a hand. You may not want to. But I am feeling very strong. Feel my grip.”
“Very good.”
“I can put you down hand-wrestling.”
“No, you can’t.”
“Let’s see.”
The engineer, who never faked with Jamie, put him down quickly. But Jamie was surprisingly strong.
“Why don’t we work out together, Bill?”
“O.K.”
“What do you think of going down to Tyree County?” asked Jamie, hiding behind his rook cards.
“I thought you wanted to go to college.”
“What I don’t want is to go back home to the same thing, see Mother and Poppy every morning, watch the same golfers pass on number 6 fairway.”
“O.K.” Then he’s changed his mind about Sutter, thought the engineer.
“O.K. what? You mean you’ll go?”
“Sure,” said the engineer, who in truth saw how it stood with Jamie and did not think it such a bad idea himself, going to the end of nowhere, parking in the pines and doing a few humble tasks.
Jamie laughed. “You mean it, don’t you? You’re telling the truth, you’re ready to go.”
“Sure. Why shouldn’t I tell the truth?”
“I don’t know,” said Jamie, laughing at him.
Before he left the hotel, he picked up an old crime-club selection in the library, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a light pulpy book gnawed by silverflsh and smelling of the summer of 1927. Kitty saw him and wanted to go to the camper with him. He saw that she was exhilarated by the storm, and since she was, he was not. No more for him the old upside-down Manhattan monkey business of rejoicing in airplane crashes and staggering around museums half out of his head and falling upon girls in hurricanes. Henceforth, he resolved, he would do right, feel good when good was called for, bad when bad. He aimed to take Kitty to a proper dance, pay her court, not mess around.
Accordingly he proposed that they stay in the bird room and play mahjong with Poppy and Jamie and Rita but she wouldn’t hear of it.
Once they were outside in the storm, however, he felt better despite himself, though he had sworn not to feel good in bad environments. It was going to be a bad storm. Under the dirty low-flying clouds the air was as yellow as electric light. His spirits rose, he told himself, because it might be possible for them to enter here and now into a new life. If they were trapped by the storm in the Trav-L-Aire, they could sit at the dinette and play gin rummy, snug as children, very like many another young couple who came down here in the days of the great Bobby Jones and had a grand time. Sit face to face and deal the cards and watch the storm, like a chapter from Mary Roberts Rinehart entitled “Trapped in the Storm: Interesting Developments”; perhaps even steal a kiss or two.
The camper was hove to in a hollow of the dunes. He had snugged her down with a hundred feet of nylon rope which he wound around cabin and axle and lashed to iron rings set in some broken beachworks. Inside the cabin he pumped up the butane tank and lit the little ashen mantles. Soon the camper leapt against its tether; the wind sang like a harp in her rigging. She creaked in every joint like the good prairie schooner she was and wouldn’t leak a drop. The sand scoured the aluminum skin like birdshot.
He got Kitty across the table fairly enough but she was not onto the game he wanted to play. Instead of dealing the ancient honorable Bicycle cards he’d brought from the hotel and playing gin rummy in good faith for itself (That was it! Ordinary things such as gin rummy had lost weight, been evacuated. Why?) and worrying about the storm in good faith and so by virtue of the good faith earning the first small dividends of courtship, a guarding of glances, a hand upon the deck and a hand upon the hand — most happy little eight of clubs to be nestled so in the sweet hollow of her hand, etc. — instead she gazed boldly at him and used up their common assets, spent everything like a drunken sailor. She gazed like she kissed: she came on at him like a diesel locomotive.
“Oh me,” he sighed, already in a light sweat, and discarded the jack of clubs.
“Aren’t you picking up jacks?” he reminded her.
“Am I?” she said ironically but not knowing the uses of irony.
Look at her, he thought peevishly. She had worn leotards so many years she didn’t know how to wear a dress. As she sat, she straddled a bit. Once in a Charleston restaurant he had wanted to jump up and pull her dress down over her knees.
Abruptly she put her cards down and knocked up the little Pullman table between them. “Bill.”
“Yes.”
“Come here.”
“All right.”
“Am I nice?”
“Yes.”
“Am I pretty?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, how would I look to you if you saw me in a crowd of girls?”
“Fine. The best, in fact.”
“Why don’t I think so?”
“I don’t know.”
She stretched out her leg, clasping her dress above the knee; “Is that pretty?”
“Yes,” he said, blushing. It was as if somehow it was his leg she was being prodigal with.
“Not crippled?”
“No.”
“Not muscle-bound?”
“No.”
“I worry about myself.”
“You don’t have to.”
“What do you really think of me? Tell me the literal truth.”
“I love you.”
“Besides that.”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Oh darling, I didn’t mean that. I mean, do you also like me? As a person.”
“Sure.”
“Do you think other boys will like me?”
“I don’t know,” said the engineer, sweating in earnest. Great Scott, he thought in dismay. Suppose she does have a date with another “boy.”
“I mean like at a dance. If you saw me at a dance, would you like to dance with me?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know that I’ve danced all my life and yet I’ve never been to a regular dance?”
“You haven’t missed much,” said the engineer, thinking of the many times he had stood around picking his nose at Princeton dances.
“Do you realize that I’ve hardly ever danced with a boy?”
“Is that right?”
“What does it feel like?”
“Dancing with a boy?”
“Show me, stupid.”
He switched on the Hallicrafter and between storm reports they danced to disc-jockey music from Atlanta. There was room for three steps in the camper. Even though they were sheltered by the dunes, now and then a deflected gust sent them stumbling.
She was not very good. Her broad shoulders were shy and quick under his hand, but she didn’t know how close to hold herself and so managed to hold herself too close or too far. Her knees were both workaday and timid. He thought of the long hours she had spent in dusty gymlike studios standing easy, sister to the splintery wood. She was like a boy turned into a girl.
“Will I do all right?”