Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“Why, hello, Miss Thang!” he said, and pranced toward me, and raised his eyes as the room laughed, and then abruptly turned around, furrowed his brows, stared into the darkness and started another song:

Winnie had a room on the first-floor right of Miss Harper’s Boarding House on East Dancer Street. We lay together on the small bed.

Where you learn to do such a thang? she said.

I said I just learned, but I didn’t say where.

She said, No black man ever did that.

No?

She said, He just be worryin bout his own sweet self.

I said she was beautiful. But she knew that. Beautiful women always do.

She said, You do such a thang, word get around , black ladies be lining up side yo house , boy.

I said she must have men lined up at her house too.

Winnie said, No, they all know mah man. Caint do nothin round here.… That’s why when Ah saw you, Ah said, him , Winnie, grab him .

I asked her if she’d ever slept with a white man before.

She said, Hell, no.… Not that these crackers don’t come own to me.… Oh no, they come own . But Ah wunt sleep with one of them, if they paid me a hunndid dollahs.

She looked at me, her breast dark against my chest. Her hand was playing with me.

Winnie said, It ain’t really white anyway, is it? More like pink .… Hey, what about you? You slepp with a black woman before?

No.

That’s not whut Ah hear, boy, she said, and laughed in a dirty way. You damn sailors.

I said, Don’t believe every thing you hear about sailors, Winnie. She sat up and dragged the tips of her breasts across my face. She said, Kin you do that thang again?

All day Sunday, I ached with shame. Not guilt. This was old-fashioned shame, as raw and pulsing and systemic as a toothache. In a way, of course, making love to Winnie was a corporal work of mercy, as they called it in the Catholic catechism. She’d been alone too long, trapped in a neighborhood where everybody knew her and her husband, growing old every minute. Or so I told myself (a lie I would tell myself all my life). I had given her pleasure in the here and now, while Winnie was young, while she needed it. We hadn’t hurt anyone. Her husband didn’t know and probably never would, unless that winter Winnie presented him with a blue-eyed boy. And yet I was ashamed of myself. The shame wasn’t about screwing the wife of another guy, a sailor I didn’t know. Nor was it about sleeping with a black woman, becoming at last, for a couple of hours, what Harrelson called a “nigger lover.” No, the shame was about something else. Out of weakness, in a moment of opportunity, I had betrayed Eden Santana.

Yes, she had gone away and I didn’t know when she’d be back. Yes, we had no deal, no verbal or written contract. But I knew that I couldn’t tell Eden what I’d done. I was ashamed of that. And I hadn’t used a rubber. Suppose Winnie gave me the clap? Suppose she’d given me a good dose of something her husband picked up somewhere? I could give it to Eden. And what if Winnie was pregnant? Nine months from now, her husband would show up at the hospital and a nurse would bring out the baby, which would have my eyes and skin that was lighter than Winnie’s and lighter than his and the smile would shift into rage. And if the child was mine, wasn’t that my responsibility too? A son. A daughter … my flesh and blood. I couldn’t go around and say to Winnie, I’ll give the child my name, I’ll send some money. If I did, the husband would cut me (in Bobby Bolden’s phrase) long, deep, and con tinuously. But if Winnie did have a baby, and it was mine, then all my life I’d wonder how that kid was doing, my kid, raised black in the back end of a small town on the Gulf of Mexico. I couldn’t tell Eden about that either. Or anyone else.

And the odor of my shame would cling to me all my days.

On Monday, I drifted into routine and the shame began to ease. Harrelson wasn’t talking to me. Not since the night I’d slammed him into the wall. I always said hello when we passed each other, but he kept walking, his eyes not even seeing me. It was as if I were black. Sometimes he and Boswell would look across at me and Miles Rayfield and something would be said and they’d giggle. I asked Boswell about this once, and he said, “Aw, you know Harrelson. He’s just a redneck. Don’t take his boolshit too serious.”

“ I don’t,” I said. “But he does. He thinks Miles and I are queer or something.”

“Shit, he thinks Eisenhower’s queer. Don’t let it bother you none.”

At lunch time that day, I walked over to the hangars to see Sal and Max, and there was Mercado just inside the hangar, looking dashing in a flight suit. He held a cup of coffee and was staring at a large blackboard that listed pilots and flight times.

“How are you?” I said.

“Ah, Mister Devlin. ¿Como estas? ”

“How was your trip to Mexico?” I said.

“Ah, hell, I didn’t go,” he said. “The last minute, I hear there was a flight to New York. From Mainsi’. So I take that instead. But you know what? I end up in Philadelphia. I think I am the first Mexican in history to ever go to Philadelphia. I wait three hours for a plane, then at last I give up and got a bus to New York …”

“What did you think?”

“I was there before with my father, when I was twelve,” he said. “So I have seen it before, New York. My father was then working for the Mexican government. It’s a great city, no? Life! Energy! But now, it looks a little more bad. More dirty. More crowded. And expensive ¡Ay, caray! ” He smiled. “I should have gone to Mexico.”

My stomach was turning over. He took her to New York! That’s all Eden ever wanted to see and he took her ! Anger shoved my shame away. Anger at her, anger at myself for being such a goddamned jerk. Go ahead (I said). Ask him. Ask him did he take her there !

“You go alone?” I said (trying to be casual, gazing off at the list of flights and landing strips and aircraft numbers) …

“Yes, what a sin! You ever try to get a girl on a Navy plane? Easier to get a Russian to come with you. But there were plenty of girls there, oh, boy. They got some beauties in New York, no kidding.” He laughed. “All giants, too. What the hell they feed those women in New York? All big, like lampposts, those girls. And one disgusting habit: they all chew gum.”

“ ‘Meet me in New York some time,” I said. “I’ll introduce you to some short girls that don’t chew gum.”

“They got any medium size?” he said, and we both laughed.

I was near giddy as I walked to the mess hall. Captain Pritchett’s flowers were rioting happily against the walls of all the buildings on the base, red, yellow, violet. Sprinklers played brightly on the lawns and the grass looked green and plump with spring.

“Hey, lover man.”

Bobby Bolden came up beside me, the two of us moving toward the mess hall.

“I don’t know what you did Saturday night, man, but that Winnie done gone crazy.”

I was scared for a moment, then saw Bobby Bolden’s dirty grin, and smiled in what I thought was a cool way. That was one of the moments in my life when I truly felt abruptly older, as if some ability of mine had been ratified and granted approval. And I felt somehow bigger. I said (trying to underplay it), “She’s some woman.”

He looked at me and shook his head. It might have been in pity.