Pete Hamill - Loving Women

“Sure don’t feel like New Year’s, does it?” she said.

“It sure doesn’t,” I said, wondering What does my voice sound like? “How’d you get stuck on this bus tonight, anyway?”

She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were dark brown and lustrous and she looked straight at me. Really looked at me. None of that flirting stuff that a thousand generations of women had been taught back home. “How did you ?” she said, a little annoyed curl in her voice. I smiled and told her I was assigned to Pensacola. That they gave me a Christmas leave but insisted I report to Pensacola on New Year’s Day. She smiled and glanced at my body and turned away and took another drag on the cigarette. I was right: she wasn’t wearing lipstick.

“Who knows?” she said. “Who ever knows?”

She tamped out the cigarette and put her head back and closed her eyes, holding the purse tightly. When her face relaxed, the lines at the side of her eyes widened. Under the eyes, there were bluish smudges. Fatigue. Or age. I couldn’t tell. The bus was moving into open country now and I could see her only in glimpses of light from passing cars. Suddenly, I wanted to draw her, defining her hair with a million pen lines, all curling, twisting, moving, making the shadows with a brush fat with ink. I wanted her to take off the turtleneck and stand before me and let me draw her. On paper, she would be mine. Her eyes opened.

“Why are you starin at me, child?”

“ ’Cause you’re beautiful. I guess.” And wished I hadn’t added that “I guess.” I didn’t need doubt. Or qualification.

She was quiet for a moment, and then said, “How old are you?”

And I said (taking it from a movie or a story or from somebody else), “Old enough.”

She smiled again, showing those teeth.

“Old enough for what ?”

She giggled when she said that, and I thought of Turner: People laugh at sailors .

“Old enough to tell you you’re beautiful.”

She fumbled for a fresh cigarette and sighed. “Well, I sure don’t feel beautiful. But I guess I’ll take the compliment. Thank you, child.” She lighted another Lucky and offered me the pack and when I shook my head, she tucked them away. She held the cigarette in her left hand, which was bent almost at a right angle to her arm. “You got any vices, child?” I hated that “child.” It sounded as if she was playing with me. Keeping me at a distance by treating me like a kid. And I thought: Give her the worldly look, the Flip Corkin set of the mouth . I assumed it, and shrugged off her question in a weary way. She said “You got somethin wrong with your mouth?”

Shit.

“No. Why?”

“Never mind.” She took a deep drag and leaned back and blew a perfect smoke ring, then a second smaller one. Just like the Camels sign in Times Square. And I thought, She’s performing for me. Maybe she’s trying to act as cool for me as I am for her .

“Where’d you learn to do that ?” I said.

“A sick damn cousin of mine. And I mean sick in the head. That girl knew everything bad there was to know. Started me smokin when I was eight.”

“You’re kidding. Eight?”

“Well, I tried it when I was eight. Just puffin and like that. I really started serious when I was nine.”

I laughed and so did she.

“Where you from?” I said.

She paused. “Down here. From the South.”

“Any special place?”

“No.”

She was avoiding an answer, pushing me back. She stared at her cigarette. Then in the back of the bus someone started to sing: “Should auld acquaintance be forgot …” She turned, as if to listen, then took a small nervous drag. “And ne’er be brought to mind?…” Others were joining in, and I was humming, and she started to sing too, very quietly, and tamped out the cigarette and closed her eyes. “For auld lang syne, my dears, for auld lang syne …” The bus was loud with the song now, with New Year’s Eve, with the sadness of the old words in a sad bus heading south. “We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet …” She opened her eyes. They were brimming. When she closed them, tears slipped down the sides of her face. “For auld lang syne …”

She didn’t open her eyes again. Her hands clenched and unclenched. Then they were still. The bus grew quiet. We passed through an endless region of blackness. Then, on a long wide turn, she fell gently against me. Deep in sleep. And didn’t move. I could smell her hair. Clean and washed. She smelled a lot better than I did. There was a slight snore coming from her. Her right arm was flat and still on my thigh, lying there for a while, and then her hand took hold, hugging my leg in the dark. My heart moved quickly, pumping excitement through me. I was sure this was a signal, a moment of intimacy, a display of confidence and safety. I was desperate for the love of a woman. And here she was. We’d met in the dark on a New Year’s Eve and she was telling me from sleep that there were joinings that did not depend on words. I could feel her breath against my arm, the rhythmic rise and fall of her body. Old enough, I thought.

Almost as soon as she had appeared in my life, she was gone. I woke up suddenly in a world full of morning green. The woman’s seat was empty. I turned and saw other empty seats on the bus, and a black man with gray hair looking at me in a knowing way and Turner four rows in front, sleeping with his head against a window. But the woman wasn’t on the bus. She’d talked to me and slept against me and had gripped my flesh and now she was gone. Like that. While I slept. I didn’t even remember falling asleep and cursed myself for weakness. And then thought: Maybe it was a dream. Maybe I made this up. Maybe my desperation for a woman had invented her, brought her on board this bus on a lonesome New Year’s Eve, with her oval face and rough veined hands and wild hair . But I checked the ashtray. And like one of those scenes at the end of a fairy-tale movie, there was physical proof of the angelic visitation: her crushed Luckies.

So I gazed around, full of her leaving (even now, all these years later, I fear a woman’s departure during sleep). And angry with myself. I was such a goddamned kid that I didn’t find out where she was from and where she was going. I hadn’t even found out her name. I stared at the passing country, my eyes drowned in a billion shades of green. Dark, bright, rich, glossy. On all sides of the road as the bus rushed along on its ribbon of tar. She’s out there somewhere , I thought, as the meshed greens rose like walls when we picked up speed on a downslope, and then separated as the bus settled. I could see foliage at the edge of the road and beyond that a swampy river, and, away off, a haze hanging in the branches of the forests. She’s here in the green southern world .

This was before I knew the names of the natural world. But I was looking at broom grass and blackjack oak, elder and sassafrass, honeysuckle and sycamores and water oak and willows. And in a blur I felt her hand move in the drowsing dark, holding my cock, her voice small and fearful, my hand led under the black turtleneck to the fullness of her breasts. That was real. Or it was a dream. I’m uncertain even now. I looked for reassurance to the Luckies in the ashtray. And turned away to see the river moving sluggishly in its swampy channel, and saw (but did not recognize) banks of abandoned sugar cane, Spanish moss draping live oaks, sudden movements in the darker green, insects hovering like helicopters and then suddenly jabbing the surface of the opaque water. Her veined hand, her breasts . I saw abrupt saddles of dry land covered with shivering grass as her voice shivered in the blur and then we were again in the darkness of the swamp. Trees rose monstrously, blocking the sky. There were mangrove trees among them, their roots plunged into the water, gnarled and knuckled, like huge hands frozen while searching for some smooth and agile quarry. I will find her .