Pete Hamill - Loving Women

But it turns out that running away and joining the Navy was a terrible mistake. The Navy was just too tough for me. I’d see bodies in the showers — muscles and asses and cocks — have you stopped reading this? have you thrown it down in disgust? — and I’d want to touch them — kiss them — hug them — and have them hug me back and make love to me as if I were one of those women whose bodies were taped inside their lockers. To tell the truth, I’d see you like that sometimes. Do you understand why I could never go with you to O Street? I didn’t want to see you dancing with your sluts. And I was afraid that I’d have too much to drink and then I would do something or say something that I’d be sorry for later. I loved you. But you were my friend too. Maybe the only one I had in this goddamned Navy. I didn’t want to love you so much that I lost the friendship. Do you understand?

So I was a coward and that’s why I went with You Know Who. He was small and beautiful and didn’t care about anything except money. He couldn’t find a girl in the great American South. Too dark. Too small. So he found me. Or I found him. I’m not sure now who started it, but it doesn’t really matter anymore. He let me draw him at first (and how jealous I was of your woman when I saw your drawings of her). He posed for me for money, of course. And then he let me take photographs of him, for money (Cannon must have those now). And then later he let me do what I wanted to do with him, and that was for money too. I had a crush on him in some ways, because he was so perfect — so small — like a doll.… But he didn’t love me and I didn’t love him. I couldn’t — because I loved you. Does that embarrass you? Will you burn this letter? I guess you’d better.… But you knew it, didn’t you? You’re a damned innocent in a lot of ways, for all your Brooklyn crap, but you aren’t a fool. You must have seen …

But I knew that it was never to be. Nothing ever was to be. I had poor little amoral You Know Who. And what broke me — after Cannon took away everything — was that I would be disgraced over a tart. Someone I didn’t even love.

Well, I just don’t want to live anymore in a world without love.

I don’t want to live alone.

I used to tell myself that maybe art was enough. That I’d put everything into my painting and that would give me a life. But the truth is — my work just isn’t good enough. I have craft, but no art — an eye, but no vision. There’s always been something missing right from the start — some center — something that would focus the vision — bind all the elements … and I guess that the name of that thing is love.

So I’m going out of this. I want you to have all my stuff — my paints — pads — books — if the Navy will give them to you. If you ever get to Atlanta, go to see my mother. But don’t tell her everything you know and don’t show her all of my work. You know what I mean.… I’ve written to her to explain everything in a way that she will accept.

But I can’t give you anything else. You know what you have to do. You have to go and get love. Any goddamned way you have to do it. You have to get it and hold on to it because that’s what makes art art and a life a life. I go. But I hope that some day, years from now, when you’re a famous painter or a father of six, when you have met ten thousand new people and seen the great cities of the earth, you will pause on a summer morning when there’s a wet wind like the wind off the Gulf and you’ll remember me.

Love,

Miles

Aw, Christ.

Aw, Miles.

I slipped the letter back into the envelope, folded it, thought about tearing it into a thousand pieces but didn’t. I opened my locker and slipped it into Miles’s copy of The Art Spirit . Then I lay down. Wanting to answer him. Wanting to go to his bunk and wake him up and tell him to take some more time, to outlast the Navy and then go to New York or Paris or some other gigantic place where nobody cared what he was and he could find someone to love.

I wanted to say some magic words to him that would save his life.

But it was too fucking late.

I fell into a deep, exhausted, trembling sleep.

I slept through breakfast. I slept through lunch. I woke at last around three, my hands and head hurting. I was in the shower before I remembered the letter. And thought: What if someone finds it? Suppose they came to search all the lockers, looking for evidence of something or other? A board of inquiry. An investigation. And I felt instantly ashamed, as if I were betraying Miles even after his death. Then, still showering, scrubbing my teeth under the nozzle, letting the water drill into my mouth, the fragments of the night moved through me. Red Cannon in the endless Pacific at the end of the war, with dead men everywhere. Dixie Shafer’s abundance. Madame Nareeta. The fight in the parking lot of the Miss Texas Club. You have to go and get love . There were too many men without women in this world, fighting and hurting one another. And I’m one of them again.

I dried myself and dressed in clean whites and hurried out. I was very hungry. I went to the EM Club. Becket was sitting at a corner table. He looked up in a grim way aand told me that Sal, Max, Dunbar and six Marines were all in the brig. There were seven Marines in the Mainside hospital and the scuttlebutt said that one might die. A guy named Gabree. If he did, everyone would be charged with manslaughter.

“Manslaughter?”

The word sounded huge, scary.

“I’m going to Mass,” Becket said. “Wanta come?”

“No.”

“You’re a Catlick, right?”

“Retired,” I said.

Becket smiled and tapped me on the shoulder and went out through the door into the hot afternoon. I ate a burger and drank a Coke and added a cup of coffee. I wondered if the Marine guards were banging around Sal and Max and Maher. The way I’d booted and stomped Gabree, who had called me a niggerloving swabbie. I thought about Bobby Bolden in the ice hills of Korea and the way the Marines marched back, hurt and wounded and crippled with frostbite, and how much Bobby loved them for that and how stupid the endless rivalry was between sailors and Marines. It was a fight between uniforms. If we’d gone to the Miss Texas Club in civvies, the brawl might never have happened. It would have been a simple fair one: me and Red Cannon.

I looked out through the screened windows and saw Captain Pritchett staring at his flowers. I didn’t want him to see me. I didn’t want to talk to him about what happened the night before or what was going to happen. I got up and slipped out the door and walked across the base, my T-shirt clinging to my back in the heat.

Back in the barracks, I read the letter from Miles again. You have to go and get love , he whispered from the grave. Any goddamned way you have to do it. You have to get it and hold on to it because that’s what makes art art and a life a life . I went outside and glanced into the brightly lit chow hall. Red Cannon was sitting alone, staring at his soup, his face lumpy, the skin shiny from the Pacific sun.

It was time to go.

I packed a small flight bag with the Thomas Craven book, The Art Spirit , The Blue Notebook, socks and underwear and shaving stuff. Nothing except my shoes would say Navy. I left the packed bag in the locker and waited until everyone was asleep. Then I slipped out the side door. The base was very quiet. I crossed to the Shack and went along the side of the building and stopped just before the window that opened into the secret studio where Miles Rayfield had tried to live his life. For a moment, I hoped that none of this had happened and if the shade was up I’d see the stacked paintings and the brushes and tubes and tins of turpentine laid upon a sheet of glass. I’d see Miles Rayfield’s furrowed face. I’d see an orange filling a room.