Роберт Паркер - Love and Glory

“C’mon, Boonie, explain the goddamn poem, will you?”

“He’s saying if you wait too long to come across, you’ll die and then the worms will eat you in the grave.”

“Jeez, what a nice poem,” Billy Murphy said.

I shrugged. “And he says worms, rather than, say, ants, which also eat corpses, because a worm is like a schwantz, you know. It’s an appropriate image.”

Nick Taylor said, “Wait a minute. Wait just a fucking minute. I know what that is. That’s a goddamned phallic symbol.”

I nodded.

“Sym-bo-lism,” Guze said, dragging the word out. “Symbo-fucking-lism.”

“Terrific, Guze. Put that down on your exam.”

“Are you shitting? In the exam I’m going to cheat off of Boonie.”

“You better.”

Jennifer was looking at us. Nick Taylor, I suppose. She could hear most of the talk because she was close. But everyone knew she wasn’t bothered by swearing.

“Before that,” Billy Murphy said, “what’s this shit about a chariot?”

Jennifer took her cigarette from her mouth and flicked the ashes onto the floor outside her booth with a shake of her hand. There was a wonderful carelessness about her. A kind of arrogant disinterest in some of the most elementary proprieties, the way I always imagined a princess might act, first in line to the throne, adored by the king and queen, worshipped by the people, she could shake the ash from her cigarette without looking where it would land. She could do whatever she wanted. Her wanting it made it right. And yet she was very polite, she always called professors sir. She dressed exactly the way she should; she was always a complete expression of the received look at Colby in 1950. Exactly sloppy enough, exactly enough makeup, exactly right roll in the cuffs of her jeans. It would have confused me in someone else, this seeming discontinuity, both careless and careful, but I applied no mortal categories to her. I saw her in great detail, and clearly, but I saw her as if through a projected overlay, which imposed upon the real contours of her attraction, the ornate illuminations of my dream. It was as if a real person had walked in the path of a movie projector. My imagination played upon her face until the reality was neither she nor the projection, but the fusion of both. In those days, just turned eighteen, her carelessness seemed to me, breathless in adoration, the identifying gesture of breeding and style. She was never careless with me.

“Boonie, what’s this fucking chariot? If I flunk this test, they’ll draft my ass.”

“In a lot of classical myths and stuff the sun was seen to ride across the sky in a chariot,” I said. “And so Marvell uses it to suggest time.”

“What’s time got to do with the sun?”

“The sun is the basis of time. Why the Christ do you think there’s twenty-four hours in a day?”

“Oh, yeah. Why the hell doesn’t he just say it?”

I shrugged. “The idea of a chariot bearing down on the two lovers is also threatening, you know, like a war chariot.”

Billy Murphy said, “Guze, don’t try to figure it out, just remember it.”

“Whyn’t they have us read stuff we can understand?”

“If you understood it, what would the fucking English teachers do every day in class?” I said.

“I’m going to work the meat counter at my old man’s market when I graduate,” Billy Murphy said. “I wonder what good Crosbie thinks this will do me.”

“Liberalize your views of life,” I said. “Make you a better human.”

“Like Crosbie?”

“Yeah. That’d be good in the market, huh?” I put on a fruity accent. “Perhaps a slice of boiled ham, madam?”

The laughter rolled around the table. In the booth behind us I saw Jennifer smile. Her mouth was wide and bright when she smiled, making a broad crimson slash across her face. Her front teeth were white and slightly uneven, one of the canines barely out of line. The effect of the laughter on her face was to emphasize her cheekbones.

Nick Taylor said, “Come on, come on, we only got an hour left. How about this next poem? How do you pronounce the guy’s name?”

“Donne,” I said, “rhymes with gun.”

“Jesus, why doesn’t he spell it right?”

“Never went to Colby,” I said. “Doesn’t know shit.”

Guze was a tough kid, a fullback on the football team, with biceps that made his shirt sleeves tight, and the intensity of a wolverine when he got in a fight. We were the only two college kids in the Arena Café, and that made me nervous. If you were drinking with Guze, the odds on winning any fights you got into went up. The bad part was that the odds on getting into a fight went up too. I was uneasy. This was a town bar, full of lumberjacks and mill workers. I was uneasy, too, because we were waiting for two girls.

“They fuck like bunnies,” Guze said, “both of them.”

I felt the excitement bore into my solar plexus. It mingled with anxiety. The prospect of being with a girl who fucked like a bunny was a little scary, especially since I’d never actually done it at all, exactly. I felt awkward and sweaty. I dragged on my cigarette.

“Where we going to take them,” I said.

“We’ll take them in the car. You get in the back with the sister, me and the Shark up front.”

“The Shark?”

“Yeah, it’s her nickname. I don’t know why. Maybe sharks are supposed to fuck a lot.” Guze shrugged. “Anyway, I haven’t seen her sister, but the Shark says she’s good-looking and hot.”

“Like me,” I said. I drank some beer. “You got any safes?”

“Sure.” Guze fumbled in his jacket pocket and came out with a handful of Ramses. He skidded one in its small cardboard box across the tabletop. I picked it up quickly and put it into my shirt pocket.

“You always have a supply handy, Guze?”

“Bet your ass,” he grinned. “Big G man from the west, Boonie.” He looked across the room. “Here they are.”

I wished I hadn’t come. I looked at the two girls as they slid into the booth with us. One beside Guze, the other one beside me. The one with Guze looked a little like a shark: dark and smooth and not exactly sharp-featured but sort of a streamlined face. Her hair was black and cut short and brushed back like Doris Day wore hers, with a pompadour in the front.

“Boonie, this is Shark.”

I said hi.

“Hi, Boonie, this is my sister, Barb.”

“Hi, Barb, how ya doing?”

“Nice to meet you.”

Barb was smaller than Shark and younger. It was hard to tell. Maybe she was pretty young. But she had tits; you could see them. She had slid her coat back off her shoulders and her sweater was tight. Her hair was lighter than her sister’s and she wore it shoulder length. Her face was like Shark’s but less complete, more tentative. She had on very red lipstick. Her nails were short, as if she bit them.

I said, “Want a cigarette?”

Barb said, “Sure.”

I shook one out of my pack of Camels and she took it. I lit a match, cupping it inside one hand, and lit her cigarette. She held it out near the tips of her fingers and I don’t think she inhaled. I was in a panic. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“So where you from?” Barb said, moving her cigarette in front of her face, waving the smoke away.

“New Bedford, Mass.,” I said.

“That’s a long ways.”

“It’s not a long way,” I said. “This is a long way.”

“Huh?”

“You go to school?” I said.

“Sure,” she said. She puffed on her cigarette.

A big waitress shuffled over. Her arms, in her short-sleeved dress, were fat and solid looking. She wore old fleece-lined bedroom slippers.

“Four beers,” Guze said, making a circular gesture with his right hand. The waitress shook her head.