Pete Hamill - Loving Women

I couldn’t stop myself. The words just kept coming, the foolish and pathetic words. The words of an eighteen-year-old boy who was far from home. She listened in silence, never moving; if anything, her body seemed slowly to stiffen. Then at last I ran down and finally I stopped talking. I turned to kiss her and saw that her face was wet with tears.

Nobody ever said things like that to me before, she whispered (she who had once forced me to tell her I loved her, in the woods beyond the railroad track). You damn crazy child.

I love you, I said, as if maybe she didn’t yet understand me completely, and as if that ancient phrase explained everything. I love you …

She was silent. The insects droned. A loon made a crazy laughing sound.

I said, When your hair grows back — down there —it’ll be mine. That hair, that new hair, that fresh-grown hair: nobody in the whole world will ever see it except me.

And she laughed.

Oh, Michael, child, of all the people in the whole wide world, only you would ever think such a thing.

I smiled, trying to be cool. But I was embarrassed, pleased only that it was too dark for her to see me blush. She had laughed at me!

But it’s true , isn’t it? I said. Nobody else will ever see it.

As soon as I’d said it, I was sorry. It was as if I were forcing her to say what I wanted so much to hear.

Who knows? she said casually.

I want it to be true, I said.

Then maybe it will be.

She was up on one elbow now, staring at me.

You ain’t a man yet , she said. But you’re gettin there, child.

I love you, I said one final time.

She sighed and touched my mouth with cool fingertips and said, I guess I love you too.

S he lets me enter everything except her mind .

Red Cannon was in a fight somewhere. When I saw him in the chow hall this morning, his hands were raw and skinned, but his face was untouched. Whoever the guy was, he never laid a hand on Red. Sal said the gouge on the base was that Red beat the shit out of some cracker down at Trader Vic’s. After Red finished beating him senseless, the Shore Patrol came. They were all friends of Red’s, so when the cracker came around, the SPs beat the shit out of him too. Will I have to fight Red some day? I have to admit, it scares me; Red is a man, tough and hard, and there’s something dead in his eyes, like he’s seen too many people die. I don’t know if I can go up against that kind of man knowing I might have to kill him if it looks as if he’s going to kill me. I guess if I ever fight him, I have to get off first; can’t give him time to get set, to gather up all his craziness and anger and hatred. Take it out of him real fast. Still, it’s scary .

E.: a stubble returns. She says it’s itchy .

Stories about Dodgers going to Los Angeles in newspaper clippings sent by my father. Horace Stoneham is mumbling about taking the Giants. The majors won’t let one team go because it wouldn’t be worth all the cost of flying out there on the road to play one team. So the Giants gotta go with the Dodgers. Possible, they could both be gone: just like that. Next year, year after. O’Malley wants the big television bucks, the papers say. Can’t believe it. In the papers here, the sports news is all stuff from Associated Press (that’s where Caniff worked when he first came to NY, drawing cartoons). The Los Angeles Dodgers? Sounds ridiculous .

But …

Great pictures by a guy named Titian in a book MR owns. You can see the figures glow. All old cardinals and popes, with cruel faces; but the glow, like gold, comes off them. How does he make that happen with just paint and oil and turpentine? Gotta ask M .

I made 46 bucks this month drawing pictures. MR suggested I switch to chalk and charcoal, so the women’s faces would be softer. He’s right. I love smearing the chalk with my hands, grading it. It’s almost as if you were rubbing your hand on a woman’s face. With the money, I bought two more shirts, and a book called The Great Gatsby for E. I read the book when Dunbar told me about it and it’s a great book, even though I don’t understand people like that, except Wolfsheim, the bootlegger. I was going to buy E. some earrings, but I couldn’t do it at the end, because I didn’t trust my own taste. Actually ran out of the store …

The comics go on, but I don’t care much about them anymore. I’d rather see red shoes .

The Navy went on like a lumpy road beside a swift river. Routine and habit made it easy; my true life took place at night. I still visited with the blacks, doing their portraits for free and eating when I wanted. I even made a point of entering the chow hall with them, knowing it would drive Harrelson nuts. But I didn’t go into town with them very much anymore. I made excuses about being too busy with my drawings or needing to see my girl or having the duty.

But the truth was I didn’t want to see Winnie.

The truth was I didn’t want to hear that she was pregnant, or in love with me, didn’t want her to start hanging around the gate, the knocked-up black girl crazy for a white man. Most of all, I didn’t want her confronting Eden. I didn’t want her to throw a scene, didn’t want to have to sit down with Eden later and explain what happened that one night when she was in New Orleans. I was also afraid of my own feelings.

The truth was that sometimes, making love to Eden, Winnie’s syrupy body came into my head. I was on the floor again in her little house, betraying Eden while Winnie betrayed her husband. I could hear her furry innocent voice, the sense she gave me of being abandoned. At least once, making love to Eden, I came again in Winnie. And I was afraid that if I saw her I would want her again, in some powerful way that seemed to transcend my feelings for Eden. I loved Eden, I was sure, but Winnie’s hot desperate body wouldn’t leave my mind.

And there was one further truth: I was afraid that if Eden found out about Winnie, she would use the knowledge like a permit, and would go out and play around with other guys the way I had with Winnie. I had convinced myself that there was an unspoken agreement binding me and Eden Santana. I didn’t want it to break. I told myself that I needed her the way I needed food and sleep and air to breathe.

Meanwhile, the war in Korea was grinding down and so was the activity at the base. The Navy had stopped all new enlistments, so there were no new arrivals among us, no sudden transfers to sea duty in the waters of Asia. We were trapped at Ellyson Field: officers and enlisted men, Yankees and Shitkickers. Each of had to deal with the increasing boredom. Max and Sal applied for sea duty and were told they’d have to wait. Dunbar filled out the forms for an early discharge. I started going to the gym each afternoon with Max.

My hair filled out. I did a lot of drawing and some awful painting (the colors muddied up and I could never get the light right). I read more books. I weighed myself one afternoon in Bobby Bolden’s office in the infirmary and was certain the scale was wrong; I’d gained twelve pounds without getting fat. At night sometimes, Eden would dig a thumb into my biceps, and when it began to hurt, I’d grit my teeth and harden the muscle and pop her thumb out of my flesh. I even grew a half inch taller.

Late one afternoon, I was walking with Miles Rayfield along Copter Road on the base. He started talking about his wife. I remember feeling that I had a part in some play and Miles was really an actor reading some other guy’s lines. He talked about her in a bitter way. She hadn’t written to him in two weeks, he said, maybe three, he wasn’t ever sure anymore; maybe he should just get a divorce. It was as if he were asking me to support him, to advise him. I was trying to sort this out, when we heard someone tap a car horn. It was Mercado, in the tan full-dress uniform of the Mexican Army. He was behind the wheel of his convertible, the top down, the back seat full of suitcases.