Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

Sonny was sitting on top of Buddie, with his prick going in and out, like it could go on forever, when the record ended, and he could hear the voices of Gunner and DeeDee coming from the bedroom. They were kind of shouting in whispers, and you could hear everything.

“Dammit, we’re not in school anymore. We’re supposed to be adults ,” DeeDee said.

“So? You mean adults don’t fuck?”

“No!”

“Are you crazy?”

“No! I mean, I didn’t mean what you said.”

“Which?”

“That adults don’t—don’t do it. I wish you’d stop using that word.”

“What word?”

“Fuck!” she shouted.

Gunner laughed, and DeeDee said, “Dammit, I’m serious.”

“You used to like me to say it,” Gunner insisted. “You used to like to say it yourself. While we were doing it, you used to say, ‘Know what we’re doing? We’re fucking.’ And I’d say—”

“Stop it!”

Sonny had stopped moving his prick and was just sitting on top of Buddie, straining his ears.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Shhh.”

“You shouldn’t listen,” Buddie whispered.

“Shhh.”

“What I mean is,” DeeDee was whisper-shouting, “I don’t want to be like some teen-ager, hiding out and finding secret places to do it, and parking and going on golf courses and all that.”

“Who’s on a golf course? Does this look like a goddam golf course to you?”

“We’re hiding out, like criminals.”

“This is my own apartment, for Chrissake.”

“It’s your mother’s apartment.”

“She’s gone, I told you.”

“She might come back, you never know. We’d have to hide and sneak around like criminals.”

“She won’t come back till late tomorrow.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“For God sake, what is it you want?”

DeeDee began sobbing. “I want to do it in my own house.”

“In your house? Are you nuts? With your parents there upstairs?”

“ No , you idiot, I mean my really own house. Goddam it, I want to get married!”

Gunner didn’t say anything, and DeeDee started sobbing again. Sonny heard Gunner walking around, and a match was struck.

“Look,” Gunner said. “I just got home. I don’t even know what I’m going to do. Here, take a puff.”

Sonny had withdrawn himself from Buddie and lit a cigarette of his own. With the talk of marriage, his prick had gone soft. He had been through that with Buddie, but she knew better than to bring it up anymore. She picked her blouse off the floor and spread it over her chest, like a blanket, huddling beneath it like an orphan out in the cold.

“Listen, Deeds, I love to do it with you. That’s all I know right now. You like it, and I like it, and we’ll worry about the rest later. Come here.”

DeeDee sort of moaned, then it was quiet, and then there was giggling and hard breathing and sounds of thrashing around, and after a while the turmoil settled into the steady, hard, rhythmic creak of the bedsprings. Sonny mashed out his cigarette, pulled Buddie’s blouse off her chest, and went at her hard and fierce again. Soon he got his own rhythm going with her, pounding up and down as hard as he could, trying to make it as loud and as long as possible. It wasn’t that he’d got so terrifically aroused by Buddie. He wanted Gunner to hear him doing it, wanted his friend to know that he was really quite a fucker himself.

Even though Gunner had gone over the apartment with a fine-tooth comb to remove any traces of evidence of what he called the “fuckathon” of Saturday night, his mother found some long strands of dark chestnut hair in her bed. She was plenty pissed, and wouldn’t let Gunner use her wheels for a while. Sonny talked to him on the phone and Gunner said he was doing a lot of reading and was into a really deep book called The Lonely Crowd that really had a lot to say. Sonny had heard of the book but hadn’t ever got around to it, and it made him feel guilty and a little bit jealous that Gunner was reading it. He couldn’t get over this nasty little feeling that a guy who had all that Gunner had shouldn’t be brainy, too, and know a lot of stuff that Sonny didn’t know. He was ashamed of feeling that way, but he did.

After talking to Gunner he got a sudden urge to read something really worthwhile, like he promised himself he was going to do on a regular basis when he got out of service—just like the regular program of daily exercise—but he hadn’t got around to it yet. He poked around the house, looking at the bookcases in the den, but he couldn’t find anything that appealed to him. His mother kept buying the popular new religious books so many people were reading, and planted them around the house, in Sonny’s path, like landmines. She had Norman Vincent Peale, of course, just about everyone had a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking , and she also had The Greatest Faith Ever Known , by Fulton Oursler; A Man Called Peter , by Catherine Marshall; and The Robe , by Lloyd C. Douglas. There was one she’d tried to lure Sonny into reading with the promise that it wasn’t “religious” at all, called TNT, The Power Within You , but it sounded too much like the Positive Thinking of Norman Vincent Peale. Those kind of books were about the only ones they had except for real old ones that his father had inherited from his family, like Ben Hur, Lorna Doone , and The Works of Lord Tennyson . Sonny had never seen anyone reading them, but they looked good on the shelves. In his own room Sonny had some of his old college textbooks; a bunch of photography manuals; some novels he liked such as Look Homeward, Angel and The Sun Also Rises; a few intellectual paperbacks he had never finished, like Human Destiny , and Philosophy in a New Key . He had often tried to read philosophy, hoping it would answer some of the riddles of life, but he always got bogged down in it and felt himself lost in a thick, sunless swamp. He would give up in order to breathe and clear his head. Among his father’s old books he found a collection of essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he read a couple of them or at least skimmed them, but he really couldn’t concentrate. Little fears and doubts and memories of embarrassing things he had done and said, of mistakes he had made, buzzed and flitted in his mind like annoying little gnats, scattering his attention.

He started sleeping late again, hanging around the house in his undershorts, eating sticky pies with whipped cream and watching television quiz shows that burst into trilly organ music when anyone got the right answer. He was really glad when Gunner called that Wednesday afternoon and said he really had to get out of the house and wondered if Sonny could borrow some wheels. Sonny said he would. He showered and shaved and put on a clean sport shirt and the slacks of his summer seersucker suit. He felt clean and light.

He heard his mother roar into the driveway while he was dressing, and he went downstairs and found her sitting on the couch in the den, her legs spread wide apart, fanning her skirt up and down. It was something she did in hot weather a lot, and it made Sonny queasy. He didn’t say anything, but tried not to look at her.

“Well,” she said brightly, “you’re dressed up fit to kill.”

“No I’m not.”

“Come here a sec,” she said.

Looking down at the floor, he walked over to her. She reached up and patted back the wave of his hair, getting it in place. He winced and backed off.

“Can I use the wagon?” he asked.

“I guess. Where are you going?”

“Just out. Around.”