Dan Wakefield - Going All the Way - A Novel

“I guess.”

Gunner said now he wanted to go home and look at everything fresh, reexamine all his old values. What the hell was the good of a damn culture built on neon lights and Hollywood movies, on Sunday church piety and weekday business hypocrisy. He sounded like a damned radical. That seemed kind of unfair to Sonny. He figured a guy like him should be the radical, fighting the Gunners of the world who had everything. But he wasn’t sure enough of himself, he was too afraid.

They had more sake, and Gunner got going on Japan again, how great it was.

“The greatest thing of all,” he said, “is the women. Even the ones that—well, that you’d call whores over here. Over there, those gals are terrific. I guess you’d have to say they’re whores, technically , in that you have to pay them. But they’re not like whores over here where it’s wham-bam-thank-ya-ma’am and you feel rotten afterward. They take their time. They treat you good.”

He finished off another cup.

“Making love, with one of those Japanese women—it’s a whole different thing. It’s a whole different kind of experience.”

Sonny felt his throat go dry, and when he spoke, his voice cracked. “How?” he asked huskily. “How is it different?”

And Gunner told him.

By the time they got to Indianapolis they had killed the bottle of sake. Gunner’s eyes seemed to have receded back into his head, as if he had seen a powerful vision. Sonny was seeing green and purple spots.

“Listen,” Gunner said when the train clanked and rumbled to a halt. “Let’s get together. No shit.”

“Sure,” Sonny said.

The sake and the flattery made him almost believe Gunner meant it, believe there was some kind of bond between him and the great Gunner Casselman. He figured he must really be stoned.

The two guys shook hands at the top of the platform, and Gunner asked, “Hey, you gotta ride home?”

“Yeh,” Sonny said, blushing. “My mother’s getting me. How about you?”

“Mine too,” said Gunner.

He made a sort of crooked smile, and Sonny thought maybe there might be some kind of bond between them after all.

The great vaulted waiting room of the station, with its stained-glass windows and dank stone walls, had a massive, cathedral-like gloom about it. The booming authoritative voice from the loudspeaker, announcing the arrival and departure of trains, sounded like it might be the voice of God, ordering the milling throngs to their appointed tracks and destinations. They pushed and hurried, obediently, through the shadows and the dust-stained motes of afternoon sunlight, meeting their appointed trains and greeting the travelers recently disgorged from the steam-belching cars on the tracks above. Through the parting wave of passengers, Sonny saw his mother, rushing toward him.

“You’re home! ”

“Yes,” he said.

Sonny stood almost immobile while his mother hugged him. He tried to raise his arms to make the return response, but they fell back stick-like to his sides. He flinched and leaned back as her warm mouth brushed his cheek. Behind her, like a shadow, his father stood, tall and embarrassed.

“Welcome home, son,” he said, trying for heartiness.

“Thank you, sir.”

They shook hands quickly, their eyes not quite meeting.

Mrs. Burns hooked her arm through her son’s and pulled him toward the newsstand, where a middle-aged woman he had never seen before was beaming at him, expectantly. She had on a lot of makeup and jewelry, and her eyes looked slightly mad beneath their mascara. Mrs. Burns squeezed Sonny’s elbow, pushing him forward toward the strange woman, and said, “I want you to meet Adele Fenstermaker.”

The woman placed a hand on each of Sonny’s shoulders and looked him over as if he were a gift.

“So this is Sonny,” she cooed. “That dear, sweet child I’ve heard so much about.”

“How do you do?” Sonny said.

Adele Fenstermaker’s brightly painted face popped toward Sonny with a cat’s quickness. He jerked his head away, but felt the sticky imprint of her lips on his right cheek.

“I just had to,” she said.

Mr. Burns, not quite looking at any of them, nervously cleared his throat. “We’re in a no-parking zone,” he said.

“Let’s go,” Sonny said.

He hefted up his duffel bag, slinging it over his shoulder on the side next to Mrs. Fenstermaker. She tripped along gaily beside him, his mother took the other flank, and his father followed behind. As they pushed out the big doors, Sonny got a glimpse of Gunner, striding along with a blonde in tight toreador pants and backless high heels. Sonny wondered if that could actually be Gunner’s mother, or maybe some show girl he’d met in Chi who had come down to meet him. The woman’s ass moved tantalizingly in the taut pink pants, and Sonny hoped it wasn’t Gunner’s mother. You shouldn’t have those kind of thoughts about a person’s mother.

Sonny’s mother was wearing a tailored suit of the type she had adopted ever since she had, as she put it, “lost her shape,” around the time Sonny went off to college and she started eating so much. She wore silk stockings with flat brown oxfords, like most of the women wore who she met in the Moral Re-Armament Movement, but unlike some of the more devout and stringent females of the MRA, she still applied makeup and regularly went to the beauty shop to have her natural reddish hair twisted into the countless tiny ringlets that always reminded Sonny of electric coils. It seemed to him fitting, somehow, as if the coils were part of some incredibly powerful electrical system that propelled his mother with breakneck speed and energy through her many good works and her dizzy ups and downs of feeling and quick, deep friendships that so often soon turned to misunderstandings and betrayals and outbursts of passionate hurt and rancor. Sonny figured that if somehow those coils of his mother’s energy could be hooked up to a generator, her emotions could power the electrical system of the whole city of Indianapolis.

Sonny had hoped his father would be driving the Chevy, but his mother had driven the church station wagon. It was a beat-up old wooden kind, and it said Northside Methodist Church on the side of each front door, and below that was a cross, and under that, in quotation marks, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” Sonny always slouched down in his seat when he rode in it or when he drove it. His mother worked in the church office and had the use of the wagon most all the time.

“You get in back,” Mrs. Burns told Sonny, “with Adele.”

He did, sitting as close to the door as he could, but Mrs. Fenstermaker slid beside him and grasped his nearest hand. With her other, many-ringed hand she pointed to Mrs. Burns, who had bustled into the driver’s seat, and with a great sigh, Mrs. Fenstermaker said, in a tone of almost sacred gratitude, “If it weren’t for that woman. Your mother.”

“Don’t be silly,” Mrs. Burns said and started the motor with a gassy, explosive roar.

Mrs. Fenstermaker turned her eyes full force on Sonny, like hot rays, and explained, “When I met that woman, I was on the verge. The absolute verge.”

The car leaped forward, rocking the passengers. Sonny felt hot and nauseous, and the sake was doing dangerous things to his head and his stomach. He wished to hell his father had driven so it would at least have been smooth. His mother drove the car like a bronco, pushing it into great bucks and sudden stops. Whenever she shifted, the car made a lurch, tossing the passengers back and forth like riders in a rodeo. Sonny leaned back and closed his eyes.

He tuned out the chatter between his mother and Mrs. Fenstermaker, concentrating on the delicate state of his stomach, as if perhaps he could keep it settled by force of will. The sake seemed to have created a high ringing sound in his head, and he had the sensation he could feel his own teeth. The voices of the women were like a shrill gabble of birds, indistinguishable, until, after a couple of miles, he heard his mother saying, “Sonny? Sonny? There it is. Good old Shortley.”