Evan Hunter - Sons

So the room situation at old Eli was somewhat confusing, as was the situation with The Rhinoplasticians (Jesus, I really dug that name!) because we were trying to develop a unique and original sound that was far-out and divorced from hard rock, but at the same time we knew we couldn’t get too experimental or we’d never get any jobs, and I needed the job-money to keep up the Providence apartment, but I couldn’t get to use the apartment if we played too many jobs, which we wouldn’t play if our sound got too shrill or unintelligible.

“Now this is what I call providence,” Dana said the first time we used the apartment, and then sat shyly on the edge of the bed, her hands folded in her lap, as demurely and expectantly as a bride. And though we had made love before, several times in the back of the station wagon and once in her bedroom on Park Avenue while Dr. Castelli and his wife were at the opening of I Had a Ball, this was in a sense the first time for us.

She studied me with a solemn brown-eyed look, as though aware that something memorable was about to happen, that we were really about to commit to each other here in Lenny Samalson’s apartment on Lenny Samalson’s bed, about to share an intimacy that would be infinitely more binding than our previous hurried and awkward couplings had been. She stared at me for several moments, as though trying to read on my face the knowledge that I, too, knew this was extremely important. And then she rose silently and fluidly from the bed and walked toward the john at the other end of the apartment, near the kitchen, and came back to me naked not five minutes later.

Her body was a contradiction, I observed it at first with all the professional aloofness of a gynecologist. She had large breasts with pink-tipped nipples. I had touched her often, I knew the feel of her by memory, but this was the first time I’d seen her naked, and now she seemed too abundant somehow, as though her mother-earth ripeness, her bursting fullness had been designed for another girl and not her. The triangle of her pubic hair was thick and black. An equilateral tangle of Neapolitan density, it sprang from the whiteness of her belly and thighs like some unexplored jungle, promising fecundity, combining with the lush womanliness of her breasts to deny the girlishness of her narrow hips and long legs. She did a self-conscious model’s turn for me, and her backside came as another surprise, hinted at before in skin-tight jeans, but nonetheless startling now in its swelling nakedness, an unsubtle echo of her breasts. Her body advertised its erogenous zones in billboard blatancy, refusing secrecy to her sexuality, brazenly inviting what her downcast nun’s eyes sought to conceal.

She had learned some things from Max that I had never learned from Cass, but she taught them to me only subversively in the weeks that followed, never once indicating they were skills acquired in another man’s bed, pretending we were learning everything together for the first time ever on earth. There was a gleeful exuberance to the way she made love. Cass Hagstrom had approached sex with all the joy of a mortician, her brow covered with a cold sweat, a tight grim look on her face, her eyes widening in frightened orgasm as though she were looking into her own open coffin. But Dana entered our Providence bed with nothing less than total abandon, an attitude I naturally and mistakenly attributed to my own great prowess until I learned she took the pill religiously each and every morning and, thus liberated, could fearlessly express and expose herself. When we began making love each time, a small pleased smile would light her face and her eyes, lingering as we crossed those separate male-female boundaries to that suspended genderless territory where we each became the other. It was then that something else moved onto Dana’s face to replace the smile, drifting into her eyes and swiftly, smokily stretching them out of focus. Reason, intelligence, conscious will drained from her features as an utterly wanton look took complete possession, flushing onto her face, rising there directly from the hungrily demanding slit between her legs. In those few mindless moments before she came, she was totally and recklessly female, completely trusting my maleness, paradoxically fortifying our oneness, our commingled identity, receiving and demanding and responding and succumbing until everything surrounding me and containing me was Dana, this cloud, my love, this sweet sweet Dana. In January, we found each other, and in the discovery found ourselves as well.

But in February, the confusion began.

In February, the way Dana and I later reconstructed it, everybody in Vietnam decided it was time for a little truce, little wine-rice break in the heat of battle, get these troops out of the hot sun, Captain, don’t you know it’s time for the Year of the Dragon to become the Year of the Snake? Let’s get some of these lads back to Saigon for some fun there, hey Captain? Charlie wants a seven-day cease-fire, why, fine, we’ll give him a seven-day cease-fire.

Dana: Oh, Colonel, it was nasty! Those wily Orientals, they was all the while hiding ammunition and putting up they mortars, sir, while we was guzzling beer in Saigon bars with Hello, Joe, you likee fig-fig girls, oh, sir, I can tell you it was terrible. Where they was heading for, sir, was Pleiku, down around Ouinhon, Phumy, Kontum and Hanna-Kribna, I swear that boy is a witch, sir! And what they done, they pound the hell out of us, sir.

Me: Well, sir, the cease-fire ended at midnight, and we was sitting around having a last smoke ’fore we hit the sack when all of a sudden Charlie come running out of the high grass either side of the air strip, musta cut a sizable hunk thu the barbed wire to get thu that way with them satchel charges, sir, and he begin blowing up everything he could lay his hands on, he hits the choppers, he hits the recon planes, he just determined, sir, to blow Camp Holloway clear off the map.

Me again, different voice: They opened up with the 81s along about the same time, they musta been hiding oh six or seven hundred yards from the compound, and them mortars come banging in, man, they musta fired fifty, sixty rounds of them. Knocked down a quarter of the goddamn billets, killed seven of our guys, and wounded about a hundred.

Dana, doing her now world-famous President Johnson imitation: The worst thing we could possibly do would be to let this go by. It would be a big mistake. It would open the door to a major misunderstanding. I want three things: I want a joint attack. I want it to be prompt. I want it to be appropriate.

She got what she wanted.

Or rather, he did.

The United States aircraft carriers Ranger, Hancock, and Coral Sea, cruising in the South China Sea launched forty-nine Skyhawks and Crusaders twelve hours after the Vietcong attack on Pleiku. The planes roared over Donghoi, a hundred and sixty miles above the seventeenth parallel, and bombed and strafed the staging area there. The next day, Vietnamese Skyraiders joined United States jets from the Danang base and flew north to bomb Vinhlinh, a Red guerrilla communications center.

Dana: He come striding across the field, you dig, man, and he ain’t bad-looking for a gook, he got this real pretty girl gook with him, she look like the Dragon Lady. He got this black mustache and these six-guns slung on his hips, man, he look like a real marshal, ’stead of a gook marshal. His name Nguyen Cao Ky (man, I’m positive now that boy a witch!) and he wearing this all-black fly suit and a white crash helmet, man, he going to shoot every motherless Cong clear off the face of the earth.

Me, assuming the role of the President’s Press Secretary: Today’s joint response was carefully limited to military areas which are supplying men and arms for attacks in South Vietnam. As in the case of the North Vietnamese attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin last August, the response is appropriate and fitting.