Pete Hamill - Loving Women

There was a sudden honk. Of that I’m certain. I peered out through the rain, and Eden Santana was waving at me through the steamy windows of the Ford. That sight of her still thrills me. She had kept her word. I held the pad close to my body and ran through the spattering mud.

“I didn’t really expect you to be here,” she said, smiling as she opened the door. “This kind of weather … But I decided to come on by anyways. No way to call you. No way for you to call me.”

“I’m glad you came.”

She drove up onto the highway, heading away from the city. It was hard to see. Out beyond the city limits there were no lights on the road and the car’s high beams seemed to bounce off the rain. The Ford’s engine coughed, stammered, but kept going. Eden was smoking hard, and in the gray light her face looked tired. She was wearing the black turtleneck she’d worn in the bus on New Year’s Eve.

“My hair must look like I stuck a finger in an electric socket,” she said, and glanced at me and smiled. When she smiled, she didn’t look tired. Her hair was all wiry and curly.

“It looks great.”

“I always wanted hair like that actress? Lizabeth Scott? Know her? Hair like that. But I guess I lost the hair lottery and there’s nothing’ I can do about it. And when it rains, this damned hair shoots all over the place. Doesn’t matter if I cut it long or short. It just ups and shoots off my head.”

She laughed (and now I hear the nervous trill in her).

“Dumbest damn thing,” she said. “Hair.”

We crossed a bridge over a dark river and then she made a right and the car started kicking up gravel and we were between trees on a one-lane road. The car jerked, rose, fell, slowed, spun its wheels, then moved again, Eden Santana setting her mouth grimly, her hands tight on the wheel. “Son of a bitch,” she said. “Son of a goddamn bitch.” Then glanced at me and said, “Sorry.” And pulled into a cleared place, with tall trees rising high about us. “I’ll get as close as I can,” she said, pulling around to the left, then jerking gears, backing up. “This is the best we can do.”

She turned off the engine, and I could see better now. We were in front of a long house trailer. The body of the trailer was blue, the trim silver. Flowers sprouted in pots out front, bending under the rain.

“Come on,” she said, “we’ll make a run for it.”

She ran through the mud to the trailer, the Sears jacket over her head, stood on a step and unlocked the door. We went in, and she reached behind me to slam it shut, then turned the lock and flicked on a light.

“It’s not much,” she said, “but it’s cozy.”

There were flowers everywhere: in dirt-filled earthen pots, in ceramic jars, in glass milk bottles filled with water. They were on the counter beside the sink, and on top of the small regrigerator and on the window shelves, pressed against drawn blinds. There were geraniums in a jar on top of a small table that jutted out from the wall. The smell in the trailer was sweet and close, full of the rain.

“Some sailor bought the trailer after the war and then got sent to sea duty when Korea happened and he’s been rentin’ it out ever since,” she said. “Only thirty-five dollars a month. They wanted more but I got it cheap ’cause this is, well, mostly a colored neighborhood out here.” I felt thick, large, as I watched her take a hanger from a shallow closet, slip the wet Sears jacket on it, then carry it into a small john and hang it up to dry. I thought If I try to help, if I dare to move, I will knock down a flowerpot and make a mess .

“Hey, almost forgot …”

She turned a knob on the gas stove and moved a fat iron pot over the low flame.

“Made some gumbo for you last night,” she said. “Thought you might be hungry for some good home cookin’, after all that Navy stuff. Gumbo’s always best the second night.”

She looked at me awkwardly, and that relieved me; she was probably feeling as clumsy in her way as I was in mine. Then she excused herself and went into the bathroom. I stood there, waiting, uncertain; all I could hear was the rain drumming on the roof — a steady, lulling sound that was mixed with the drowsy odor of the flowers. I ran my hands through my hair, trying to make it stand up (I see that boy now, hair pasted to his skull, dripping, without sideburns or a beard, entering for the first time this special world). She came back from the bathroom and motioned me into a chair. Then she went to the small refrigerator and took out lettuce, onions, and tomatoes and started making a salad, her hands quick and strong, pulling the lettuce leaves apart, slicing the tomatoes, adding oil, vinegar, salt. She popped two slices of whole-wheat bread into a toaster. Her hands never stopped moving, and she talked briskly, even nervously (thus relaxing me more), now tossing the salad, then stirring the gumbo, while I looked at her bare feet.

She was smaller than I had first thought, and she had wide feet. I felt vaguely aroused by the padding sound they made on the linoleum floor. She fired questions at me, quickly, breathlessly, making me talk. She wanted to know where I went to school and what my parents were like and the names of my brothers; she was sorry about my mother. She seemed pleased that I was brought up a Catholic (“They sure do have beautiful music …”). She ladled the gumbo into white bowls, and the aroma was pungent, strong, thick with crab and shrimp and rice, and she pushed the toast down into the toaster and brought the salad to me on a plate, then did the same for herself. I waited until she sat down facing me and then began to eat in a greedy way. “Don’t use salt, child,” she said. “Everything’s salted. And besides, I noticed you use too much salt anyway.”

She had been watching and found a flaw; you use too much salt anyway . I’d never thought about salt before; I just used it, on eggs and meat and salad. I slowed down, glancing at her, trying to match her movements; I didn’t know much about what was then called etiquette. At home, it didn’t matter how I used knives and forks; in the Navy they had too many other rules and regulations to inflict upon us first. So I decided to follow her lead. I watched the way she ate the gumbo. I didn’t touch the salt. Somehow a faint odor of her perfume got mixed in with the fragrance of the soup, and the trailer turned all female and closed and lovely, the flower scents filling the air too and the rain hammering at the roof. She wanted to know about New York, and whether there really was a chance there for everybody to make good. I tried to answer, tried to sound casual; I didn’t tell her that I’d only been to two Broadway plays in my life, that Brooklyn was different from Manhattan, and that I didn’t know what chance anybody had to make good, since it hadn’t happened to anyone I knew. Including me. Instead, I started talking about the Paramount and the Metropolitan Museum and Lindy’s and Toots Shor’s, places I’d read about in Walter Winchell’s column in the Mirror or heard about on the radio. She listened to my vaguely fraudulent answers and asked more questions, and all the time I was thinking about what would happen if she posed for me, and when I should begin the session by taking the drawing pad out of its wrapper. I wanted the meal to last for hours so I wouldn’t have to deal with the next move and its astonishments.

“I guess New York has just about everything you’d ever want to see,” I heard myself saying. “Everything.”

“Well, not everything ,” she said. “I’d like to see the pyramids in Egypt.”

“Yeah?”

“Wouldn’t you?” she said. “Imagine what it would be like to see where they found King Tut and all his treasures. See the Spinx.” That’s how she said it: The Spinx. She wiped her mouth with a napkin. “You know, I’d like to see all the Seven Wonders of the World. All of them !” She paused. “I guess that’s pretty far-fetched. But I saw them in an encyclopedia once, all the Seven Wonders, and I couldn’t even name them now. But I could read up on them again, make a list, and even if I never saw them, I sure would like to dream about them …”