“It’s an extended metaphor, for Chrissakes. Don’t you know what that is?”
“What?”
“It’s what you and Nora Kramer aren’t. That’s what it is.”
“Jesus Christ,” I shouted back at him. “You’re drunk, Fliegelman. You’re from Chicago and you’re drunk and you’re full of shit.”
“Like hell,” he said. He sat up straight from the picnic table as if I’d said something which offended him. “It’s beer. And I’ve done all I can for you, Arbuckle. I’m going to go liberate my bladder. It’s my right as a citizen.” Then he stood up from the table and made his way drunkenly back across the dirt floor toward the rest room, moving through the dense pack of student bodies as if he were some redheaded gnome at a bacchanal.
Well, our generation was full of talk of rights and liberation then and of music too (though more about electric guitars than of violins), and as it turned out, although I paid no serious attention to him at the time, Stewart Fliegelman was right about Nora Kramer and me. There wasn’t any music there. Nor much that resembled liberation. And as for Fliegelman himself, his first attempt at marriage wasn’t exactly Beethoven’s Ode to Joy either.
5
Jack had been home from the Army for almost two years by the time Nora and I moved to Holt. After graduation in June we were married in Boulder in the Episcopal church. Stewart Fliegelman stood up with me and Nora had a friend of hers as attendant. Then when it was time for Dr. Kramer to escort his daughter down the aisle toward the altar he did so without once looking at her — it was as though he just happened to be passing through the church on his way to work, or as if he were still deep in thought about Milton and Bunyan — and Nora looked lovely too, in her white veil and white dress and with her dark hair pulled away from her face like a young girl’s. Afterward, though, perhaps as an offering of consolation to her (for the old man certainly felt she deserved consolation, marrying me), he insisted that we take a week’s honeymoon in New York at his expense.
So we flew to New York, attended a play on Broadway, saw the sights, ate in restaurants with male waiters in white jackets standing over us, and we held hands under the table — all as you’re supposed to do — and it was in New York that we began those icy exchanges in bed which not only characterized that first week of our marriage but the next eighteen years as well. Then in the middle of that week Nora got sick with something, a summer cold or the flu, so we cut short the time in New York and flew home again. The change in air pressure in the plane caused her ears to pain seriously, I remember, and her face was chalk-white when we walked down the ramp. We stayed that night in Boulder with her father and the next day when Nora felt better we drove the three hours east to Holt. The day after that I went to work at the paper and Nora began to plant rosebushes behind our house in the dirt along the garage. It was not a pleasant beginning for either one of us.
But Jack Burdette seemed to be doing very well. He was home from the Army and it was obvious that he still thought of himself as having had a very good time for those two years while he had been in the service. That is, being a soldier, he had perfected his beer drinking and his poker playing and he had seen something of the nightlife in the towns near the bases he was sent to. Also, he had discovered that money, if he had enough of it, would buy many things that he hadn’t known before that it would buy, not excluding the temporary services of other human beings. He told us that he had developed a respectful view of the healing powers of penicillin. We heard all about it once he was home again. There was one story in particular that he told. It involved three German girls and two bottles of champagne and one hotel bed, the kind of arithmetic Jack said he understood. “Them German fräuleins won’t refuse you nothing,” he said. “You ought to try one yourself.”
Thus the Army had served as a kind of finishing school for Jack, a form of postgraduate work in the essential life skills. They had even given him a diploma in the guise of an honorable discharge to prove that he had passed, to show that he had learned their fundamental lessons.
Late in 1962 then, after spending his last paycheck in a final protracted binge, he had returned to Holt. He was heavier and stronger now, beginning to spread out and to take on mass, to develop a heavy gut which daily beer drinking had something to do with, and certainly he was more experienced than he was when he left, but he was probably not any wiser. That didn’t matter, though; Wanda Jo Evans was still here and so was his job at the Co-op Elevator. In short time he had taken up both.
In the meantime Wanda Jo Evans had undergone some changes herself. She had reached full bloom now. She had attained a kind of pinnacle of home-grown loveliness. I do not mean that she had become sophisticated in any way; it was not that at all; it was simply that she was even more beautiful than she had been before and that she was still warmhearted and utterly devoted to Jack. At twenty-one she had reached that brief moment of physical perfection. The baby fat was gone, her strawberry blonde hair grew long and full to her shoulders, and now each morning when she walked to work at the phone company she wore nylon hose and heels and a nice skirt and blouse. Consequently it was at about this time that some of the men in town began to make it a point to be drinking coffee at the front tables at the Holt Cafe so they could stare out the windows and watch her walk across Main Street. The men hoped that a sudden gust of wind would rise and lift her skirt to reveal more of her legs, or that a sudden breeze would come up and blow her skirt tighter against her thighs. Failing these, they were there every morning anyway, to watch her mount the curb when she reached the other side of the street. For she was something to see. But she was still a very nice girl, still entirely innocent and guileless, and she herself cared only about seeing Jack Burdette.
When she had begun to earn money as a secretary after she had graduated from high school, she had moved out of her mother’s home and had rented a tiny one-bedroom house of her own. It was over there on Chicago Street on the east side of town where there are mainly small one-story frame houses painted white and yellow and sometimes pink, with little gray slap-sided toolsheds in back along the alleys and vacant lots between the houses, with here and there an old wheelbarrow or an old car, a DeSoto or a Nash Rambler, say, rusting on blocks among the pigweed and redroot under the stunted elms. She worked steadily, efficiently, at the telephone office every day, and she kept her little house clean, mowed the lawn on summer evenings, shoveled the snow off the walks in winter, and for two years while Jack was gone she composed letters to him, following him from El Paso to San Francisco and then to Germany, all by mail, by letters — letters which Jack himself only rarely answered and then only to allow, as he would, I suppose, that he was in California now or that he had arrived in Germany, or perhaps (and this is more likely, knowing Jack) simply to complain that he had lost his weekend pass for some minor infraction of military rules and so had nothing better to do with his time than to scribble her a brief note on Army paper while he waited for the other men to come back so he could begin to play cards again.
But finally in the winter he had returned to Holt once more and it was all right again. Or perhaps for Wanda Jo it was better than all right, since for the next eight years she continued to go out with him, believing all that time that he would marry her yet.
Well, it was an abject kind of love. And it took many forms. But clean socks was at least one of them.
I think it must have been a matter of barter to Wanda Jo, a kind of romantic transaction. It was as if she believed that washing his socks and laundering his shirts was not only the obvious and logical progression from making crib sheets for him when they were in high school, but that now doing his laundry each week was also the fair means of exchange for the privilege of going out with him on Saturday nights. Because for eight years, Jack would park his car in front of her house on Chicago Street, on those Saturday nights, and then he would get out and saunter up to her house and under his arm he would carry to her front door a brown paper bag — a bag which would never contain roses or carnations or even a handful of daisies but which instead would always be stuffed to overflowing with another week’s accumulation of his dirty clothes, his dirty socks and his greasy shirts. Then Wanda Jo would open the door to him and take that paper bag from his hands. It was as if she thought he’d brought her a gift, a present, a romantic offering, as though she believed he’d given her something which was actually valuable and considerate. And of course in return she’d have something to give him too; she’d hand him that other paper bag, the one with his clean clothes in it — his sour socks and his old work shirts and his soiled jeans transformed now, sweet-smelling, washed and tumble-dried and still fragrant of soap, as though in the intervening week she’d managed to perform some miracle or magic. And in truth she had: she had accomplished a kind of domestic and loving alchemy.