Роберт Паркер - Love and Glory

“What’re you doing about that short story, Guze?”

“I’m getting my buddy Boone here to churn one out. How many you written so far this semester, Boonie?”

“Twenty-two,” I said. “It’s the dumbest fucking thing I ever heard of, making the whole freshman class write a fucking short story.”

“You write one for me, Boonie?”

I nodded. “So far I got a B average. It woulda been higher, but Billy Murphy rewrote the one I did for him and got an F.”

“How much you want?”

I made a rejecting wave with my left hand. “You can buy me a few beers some night.”

“You got an A on yours, Boonie?”

“Yeah. Really piss me off if I got a worse mark on the one I handed in than the other twenty-one.”

“You think they’ll get wise? How about Guze passes in a terrific short story? Think they might get suspicious? Guze can’t even fucking talk.”

Jennifer had shifted in the booth and had her feet tucked up under her, sitting half sideways. She was smoking a Pall Mall with the red crescent of her lipstick impressed on the tip. Taylor walked two fingers along the back of her left hand and up her arm as it lay on the table. Then he said something and got up and walked to the men’s room.

“Hey, Boonie, how about the time you wrote a paper for Jackovich and Markham calls him in and asks him to explain it. Jackie about shit. Did he read it even before he handed it in?”

“Jackie can’t read,” I said. “You know that.”

Jennifer took a compact from her purse, opened it, and looked at herself in the small mirror. She turned her head a little to the left and then a little to the right, tilting the mirror to get the overhead light. She took a small gold tube from her purse and applied more lipstick, then looked again in the mirror, touched it up slightly, touched her hair in several places.

“What happened to him?”

“Markham flunked him.”

“You shouldn’t sound so smart, Boonie.”

“I try, Guze. But I can’t sound as dumb as Jackie, for crissake.”

Taylor, on his way back from the men’s room, looked over at me and said, “Hey, Boonie, come over and sit down. I’ll buy you a beer.”

A sharp sensation flashed up from my buttocks and tightened my throat. I sucked in half my Camel and held the smoke in my lungs and then blew it out the way you blow out a candle. My beer glass was empty. I picked up my cigarettes and walked over toward the booth where Jennifer sat.

I slid into the booth on Taylor’s side. “I’ll sit with you, Nick, so your date won’t be all over me.”

“You know Jennifer, Boonie?”

“Seen her around,” I said. “Aren’t you in my English class?”

“Mr. Crosbie?”

“Yeah, that’s where I’ve seen you. When I make it.” I lit a cigarette. “Which is not often. Unless something goes wrong I still have a hangover at eight in the morning.”

“I remember you quite well.” Jennifer’s eyes glinted again. “So does Crosbie. How is he treating you these days?”

“I got an F on my first paper, but after that I’ve done okay.”

“What you gotta understand is that Boonie’s smart as a bastard,” Nick Taylor said. “I know he don’t look it, but he is. Did you have to write a short story for English?”

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “Wasn’t it awful.”

“Boonie wrote half the ones in the freshman class. How many’d you write, Boonie?”

“Twenty-two,” I said, “but who counts.”

“Do you want to be a writer?” Jennifer said. She looked really interested. The way she had when I danced with her, as if what I said really mattered.

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s not something you can just interview for, is it. Does the uncertainty scare you?”

“I don’t know, I guess so. But you have to assume you can make it, I guess, or you wouldn’t try.”

“What do you want to do besides write?” Jennifer said.

“Drink beer,” I said. And lie beside you in a spring meadow forever .

She laughed, “And you’re down here practicing.” She was interested. “Would you want to work at a newspaper, or in advertising?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I could stand the office and briefcase bit. I don’t want nine to five for the rest of my life in some goddamned white clapboard suburb.” Unless with you. I’d do anything to be with you . “I thought I might write the great American novel.”

Jennifer puffed on her Pall Mall. There was reserved appraisal in her eyes. Nick held her hand across the table. “I hope you do,” she said.

“I’m a business major,” Taylor said. “I’d like to get into sales, work my way up to sales management maybe.”

Her attention shifted from me to him and I could feel slackness, a kind of ebbing, as Taylor traced small patterns on the back of her hand. Mixed with the smoke and the malt smell of spilled beer, her perfume persisted, and as I became aware of it, the smell of it overpowered everything else. I felt disseminated, as if I eddied, commingling with her sound and the smell of her in the loud and smoky room.

Nick looked at his watch. “Better get you back, love,” he said to Jennifer. “You have to be in in an hour and we need some time for parking, right?”

She smiled. “Good to see you, my dear,” she said to me. “Maybe I’ll see you in Bing’s class someday.”

“Tell him to sing ‘When the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day’ for me. I might come for that.”

Jennifer laughed. She and Nick got up to go out. As they edged down the narrow, crowded aisle between the booths, Nick patted her companionably on the fanny. She looked back at me and winked and then leaned her head against Nick’s shoulder. Get up to the campus for a little make-out time. The press of her wide mouth, the taste of her lipstick, the smell of cigarette smoke faintly mingled with beer on her breath. Her perfume. The tousle of her hair. The smell of fresh autumn air about her... with Nick; but there had been the wink and the moment of shared knowledge. Knowledge of what I didn’t yet know.

I was alone in the booth, smoking my cigarette. Her glass with the lipstick circle on the rim stood three-quarters full across from me. I took in a lungful of smoke and picked up her glass and drank the rest of her beer. Then I let the smoke out slowly and watched it drift and eddy and disappear into the larger haze of the barroom.

We were in the spa drinking coffee and smoking and I was explaining a poem.

“Think about it,” I said. “Why worms?”

“Which line is that,” Billy Murphy said.

“Down here,” I said, “line twenty-seven.”

“My echoing song then worms shall try that long preserved virginity,” Nick Taylor said, running the words and lines together without pause or comprehension.

“A worm’s gonna screw her?” Guze said.

“Screw who?” Billy said.

“I don’t know, this is some sick poem, Boonie. A worm screwing a virgin?”

“It’s about you. You’d screw a worm, Guze, if someone would hold it.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t no virgin.”

“So you say.”

“Shut up,” I said. “You want to pass this fucking test or not?”

“Yeah. How much time we got?”

“Hour and a half.”

I saw Jennifer across the spa. She was barely visible talking with three girls in another booth. The ripe thrust of her lower lip and part of her chin were all that showed among the other heads in the booth. I shifted a little and caught her eye. She smiled. I winked at her. There were six of us crowded into my booth and the smoke was thick. It is hard to think of that time now without seeing it through the glower of cigarette smoke that hung in hot, crowded places.