Роберт Паркер - Love and Glory

“Knowledge is power,” dePietro said to me one day after we’d frightened away an NG captain from S-2 with a blast of Q and Z signals that sounded vital and signified nothing. He was leaving and I was coming on. He hung around and drank coffee with me before he went to sleep.

“New batch of magazines from the Red Cross,” dePietro said as he finished his coffee. “Movie magazines, True Romance . Who the fuck do they think is over here?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I got letters to write.”

“Your girl?”

“Yeah.”

DePietro nodded and picked up his rifle and went out of the bunker. I read the new call letters for my station, checked in with an any-traffic-for-this-station call just to limber up, and settled in to write Jennifer. I did it in a kind of notebook now, a journal, I suppose you could call it, but always I addressed her, and as I wrote I imagined her and felt her presence and the force of her, the richness and energy. Writing her, I could remember what her mouth felt like and what she smelled like.

My Darling Jennifer ,

The army is good for keeping you from falling apart. There’s enough organization to sort of push all your pieces together. My fatigues are tailored and starched, my pants have a blousing ring and are bloused stylishly low on my shiny combat boots. The boots are jump-laced. My fatigue cap has a fifty-missions crush to it and is kept stiff by soap. I keep my bunk made so tight you can in fact bounce a coin on it (except there aren’t any coins, just paper scrip — mpc). When I salute I have a nice honor-guard flourish to it. I can carry a rifle and a prc-10 for 15 miles in full battle dress and swagger when I’m through. I got the second highest score in the battalion, last week, at the range. If there’s a fight at the NCO club, there’s twenty guys will jump in on my side. I’m the only guy in the battalion who’s been to college and they think I’m a genius (except the officers). I run the radios on auto pilot and think almost not at all. I pay attention to detail. I do what I’m told. I go when they say go and stop when they say stop. I initiate nothing. At night I get drunk. If it weren’t for missing you, it’s not such a bad life. Time passes and I can walk through it without having to feel anything or decide anything. Good place for a hollow man .

I always signed them, I love you , and I put the date at the bottom each day.

I just dated today’s when the weather report started coming in from I Corps. They sent it in clear text, which meant I had to pay more attention than usual, but even then so much of it was boiler plate that I could write out the word after I’d heard the first letter most of the time, and I only really had to pay attention to the wind direction and the numbers — velocity, temperature, that stuff.

In a poker game in early March, dePietro won more than the battalion sergeant major had. He traded the IOUs for R&R for him and me. The sergeant major TDY’d two radio operators in from Division and dePietro and I went to Tokyo.

We were taking showers and drinking daiquiris and smoking cigars in a hotel near Shinigawa station, the water cascading over us in hot plenitude. We took turns.

“First shower in a year,” dePietro said. “Good as getting laid.”

I drank the daiquiri. It had seemed the thing to drink, as unlike military life in Korea as we could think of. The lemon was tart and cold under the deceit of sugar, and both sugar and lemon masked the rum entirely until it settled in my stomach and the warmth spread out. I finished the rest of the glass and took another. There were ten more on the tray.

“Your turn,” dePietro said, and stepped out of the shower. I got in. It was the third time. I worked some Prell shampoo into my hair again and rinsed it off, watching the lather plane along my wet body and swirl into the drain. I lathered all over my body again with Lifebuoy soap and scrubbed my nails with a brush, and rinsed again and got out. I looked at dePietro. He shook his head and I shut off the shower. It had been running for more than an hour.

Wearing government issue white boxer shorts with the little tie strings at the side, we sprawled in the western-looking hotel room and finished our daiquiris.

“Tomorrow I’m going to get drunk on wine,” dePietro said. “And then I’m going to do maybe bourbon and then vodka and then we’ll see how I feel.” He started to dress while I finished the last daiquiri. “Want to find some broads?”

I nodded. I put the empty glass back and sat on the bed. Tears began to run down my face. Tony was looking at himself in the mirror and didn’t see me. I got up quickly and splashed on cold water and they stopped.

The whorehouse was near the Sugamo train stop. It was probably near the prison, too, but I never saw the prison. The beds were pallets on the floor. The walls were paper and the doors were sliding. There was a deep hot tub in the bathroom and I sat in it with the water to my neck while a smiling Japanese girl with small breasts and not much body hair massaged my neck and shoulders.

“R and R G.I.,” she said. “Korea G.I.”

“How do you know,” I said.

She wrinkled her nose. “Smell,” she said, and smiled.

“Jesus Christ,” I said, “I took three showers.”

She didn’t understand. She smiled and shook her head. When we were through she dried me in a large towel and gave me rubber clogs and a kimono and took me back to her room. We lay down on the pallet.

“No suckahatchie girl,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

I lay on my back and she sat astride my thighs and rubbed my body. After a while she moved slightly forward and with an economical movement of hands and hips she put me in her and still sitting astride me moved her pelvis cleverly.

Later that night the girls made sukiyaki on a hibachi. DePietro and I drank rice wine with it, the four of us sitting on the floor in the bedroom, the girls serving us pleasantly, saying their few English words and giggling. Almost domestic. The sex and the dining and the foursomeness was a kind-hearted and honest imitation, a decent copy of domesticity, an artful and well-intentioned replica of happiness which made my loss more incisive.

It cost 2500 yen.

Jennifer Grayle became Mrs. John Merchent in a gray stone Episcopal church on a small hill in Marblehead in August of 1954. I was there, the recipient of a civilized invitation in formal engraving. Two weeks home from Korea and I wore my white linen jacket and gray slacks and a black knit tie. Only the tie fit, the rest was too big because I was down under 150 pounds, wiry and thin from carrying a radio and a rifle for long distances at a time. The collar of my button-down shirt was about a size big. My belt was pulled three notches tighter and made the tops of my slacks bunch. I still had a G.I. haircut, and looking at my reflection in a car window as I walked toward the church, I thought I looked consumptive. The back of my jacket stood away from my neck.

Jennifer was in white, her bridesmaids in yellow. The groom and his party wore white dinner jackets and black watch cummerbunds. Everything fit them. I was afraid, sitting blankly in the back nearly anesthetized. What if I fainted? What if I went crazy when I saw her? What if I cried? When she came down the aisle she looked as she always had, tanned, perfectly made up, poised, and full of controlled power. My deep numbness worked. I sat without expression and almost without feeling; the part of me that could feel was already beginning to dwindle, more and more of me was callus tissue. Inside my thickness I watched them meet at the altar, watched them kneel, watched them rise, watched him take the ring from his brother and put it on her finger, watched her brush her veil back, watched them kiss, and watched them walk up the aisle together.