“All right, Mother,” he said. “I’ll do it.” He shuddered. He hung up the telephone from a foot and a half above the receiver. It fell off, but he must have felt he had made his point because he picked it up from the bed where it had bounced and put it gently into its cradle.
“That was my mother,” he explained to Mardell. “I wish I knew what else I could say to describe her in front of a nice girl like you.”
He walked to the locked door. He leaned against the crack in despair and said, “I’ll be in the lobby in about an hour.” There was no answer. He turned toward the bed, untying the belt of his new blue robe, as a massive column of smoke began to spiral upward inside his head, filling the eyes of his memory and opaquing his expression from behind his eyes. Mardell was spilled out softly across the bed. The sheets were blue. She was blond-and-ivory, tipped with pink; lined with pink. It came to him that he had never seen another girl, named Jocie, this way. The thought of Jocie lying before him like this lovely moaning girl excited him as though a chemical abrasive had been poured into his urethra and she was assaulted by him in the most attritive manner, to her greater glory and with her effulgent consent, and though she lived to be an old, old woman she never forgot that morning and could summon it back to her in its richest violence whenever she was frightened and alone, never knowing that she was not only the first woman Raymond had ever possessed, but the first he had ever kissed in passion, or that he had been given his start toward relaxing his inhibitions against the uses of sex not quite one year before, in Manchuria.
Two
A CHINESE ARMY CONSTRUCTION BATTALION arrived at Tunghwa, forty-three miles inside the Korean frontier, on July 4, 1951, to set under way the housing for events, planned in 1936, that were to reach their conclusion in the United States of America in 1960. The major in charge of the detail, a Ssu Ma Sung, is now a civilian lawyer in Kunming.
Manchuria is in the subarctic zone, but the summers are hot and humid. Tunghwa handles industry, such as sawmilling and food processing with hydroelectric power. It is a city of approximately ninety thousand, about the size of Terre Haute, Indiana, but lacking a public health appropriation.
The Chinese construction battalion set up the job near a military airfield nearly three miles out of town. Everything they put up was prefabricated, the sections keyed by different colors; this, when the pieces were scattered around the terrain, made the men seem like toy figures walking among the pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle. When these were assembled into a building, they were sprayed with barn-red lead paint to banish the quilted effect. By July 6, at seventeen-nineteen, the battalion had completed a two-story, twenty-two-room structure with a small auditorium. The building was called the Research Pavilion and had some one-way transparent glass walls. It also had a few comfortably furnished guest rooms without glass walls on the first floor; these had been reserved for the brass from Moscow and Peiping.
Each floor held different-colored, varipatterned asphalt tile as a guide for furniture and equipment placement. Each wall, as it was erected, had decorations riveted into it. The windows, cut through each outer wall, had curtains and drapes fastened to them. The thousand pieces of that house gave the impression that it was a traveling billet for political representatives of the allied People’s Governments: a structure forever being built, struck, then sent on ahead to be built again for the next series of meetings and discussions. All of the furniture was made of blond wood in mutated, modern Scandinavian design. All of the interior coloring, except the bright yellow rattan carpeting on the second floor, was the same green and apricot utilized by new brides during their first three years of marriage.
The second floor of the building held one large corner suite of rooms and ten other compact cubicles that had three solid walls each and one building-long common wall of one-way transparent glass facing a catwalk that was patrolled day and night by two Soviet Army riflemen. Each cubicle contained a cot, a chair, a closet, and a mirror for reassurance that the soul had not fled. The large apartment had similar fittings, plus a bathroom, a large living room, and an additional bedroom. All of the walls here were opaque. The invigorating scent of pine-tree incense pervaded the upper floors, subtly and pleasantly.
The marvelous part of what they were doing several hundred miles to the south of Tunghwa was that every time Mavole moved, the girl moved, and every time Mavole bleated, the girl bleated. It was really a money’s worth and after Mavole came downstairs he told the guys that the classy part about the joint was that when he took the broad upstairs in the first place, there had been no jeers or catcalls. Mavole’s co-mover and bleater was a young Korean girl who had adapted to prostitution a variation of the Rochdale principle on which had been based the first cooperative store in 1844, in that she extended absolutely no credit but distributed part of the profits in the form of free beer. Her name was Gertrude.
Freeman had left to check gear, but Mavole and Bobby Lembeck sat around and drank a few more beers while they waited for the corporal to get finished upstairs. They tried to explain to the two little broads that it was not necessary to smile so hard but they couldn’t speak Korean, except for a few words, and the girls couldn’t speak American, so Bobby Lembeck put his two forefingers at the corners of his mouth and pulled an inane prop smile down. The girls caught on but it looked so funny the way he did it that Bobby and Mavole started laughing like crazy, which started the girls laughing again so that when they stopped laughing they were still smiling.
To the extent that wartime zymurgists imperil the norm, the Korean beer was about as good as local Mississippi beer or Nebraska beer, which is pretty lousy, but it was hot. That was one thing you could say about it, Mavole pointed out.
“Eddie, why do we have to spend all of our time off in a whorehouse?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah. Rough, ain’t it?”
“I don’t mean it’s hard to take, but my hobby is birds. There are a lot of new birds around this part of the world.”
“We spend our time off here because it’s the only place on the entire Korean peninsula that Sergeant Raymond Shaw doesn’t walk into.”
“You think he’s a fairy, or very religious?”
“What?”
“Or both?”
“Sergeant Shaw? Our Raymond?”
“Yeah.”
“What are you? Out of your mind? It’s just that Raymond doesn’t give to anybody. And it’s a common vulgar thing—sex—to Raymond.”
“He happens to be right,” Bobby Lembeck said. “It sure is. I’m only a beginner but that’s one of the things I like about it.”
Mavole looked at him, nodding his head in a kind of awe. “It’s a very funny thing,” he said slowly, “but every now and then I think about you coming all the way to Korea from New Jersey to get your first piece of poontang and it makes me feel like I’m sort of a monument—part of your life. You know? And Marie Louise too. Of course.” He nodded equably to indicate the small Japanese girl who was sitting beside Bobby Lembeck, holding his right wrist like a falcon.
“She certainly is,” Bobby agreed. “What a monument.”
“It’s kind of a very touching thing to me that you have never had a fat broad or a tall broad, say.”
“It’s different?”
“Well—yes and no. It’s hard to explain. These little broads, while very nice and with lovely dispositions and with beer included, which is very unusual, they are very little—spinners, we used to call them—and although I hate to say this even though I know they can’t understand me, they are very, very skinny.”