Ervin Krause - You Will Never See Any God - Stories

After he studied and taught and graded papers and after her work, in the evenings they bucked to the old rhythm, in his apartment or hers, on beds or on couches, in his car, and he liked it, he remembered, he thought it was great, and she liked it too, she enjoyed his love-making, his love and enjoyment of her. The bed was their meeting ground, the sheets their conciliation and pleasure, the pillows their love.

He liked the idea that she was a kind of mistress, one he could not afford to keep, to be sure. He was proud, too, of the easiness and confidence he felt now that a woman was his.

They were sophisticated and casual about their other dating, as they liked to call it, he going with the bird-faced women instructors to affairs of the department and she going dancing with old men friends who called her up occasionally. He brushed shoulders and moments with bland-faced businessmen and gross-faced sergeants from the air base, and he believed he knew but did not question too much. Once, when he had protested her desire for a visitation to Omaha to see an old friend of hers, a man, he surmised, she had screamed at him, “Go to hell then, we’re not married, you don’t own me, you can’t tell me what to do,” and she had swept up her coat and flung out of his apartment, where she had ten minutes before lain on his bed. There had been a compensation: the next day the always inevitable hotly breathing splendid reconciliation.

They had talked with the word “love” upon their lips constantly, indeed it seemed every third word was “love”: “I’d love to go with you,” and “I love this steak,” and “I love it like this,” and “I love to do it with you,” and “I love the way you look,” and “I love you.” In those last few months, after he got the job offer from Missouri, after she came to witness the Ph.D. getting and the handshake with the university chancellor, after the kiss upon his cheek she talked of love and marriage, how they could live on his salary and she could work too and save some money, and she never thought after all the trouble with her ex-husband (that bastard, as she usually called him) and the way he had treated her that she would ever be interested in marrying somebody else; “but I really love you, Jim,” she said with a soulful look up into his eyes (that look denoting honesty).

He, well used to her by then, felt the loneliness of those first few months in Columbia, and they wrote often and feelingly, he pouring out his desire and that something akin to love to her; and thus he had rushed to her two years before.

The warehouses glided by, the sooty station emerged and slowed as the train clicked in with painful metal sounds.

There was a gleaming brightness to the sky and to the snow where the sun gave back diamond-hard glints of light.

McDonald descended with the herd of people and in an open space he set his suitcase down and opened it and took out one slender package wrapped in a Christmas paper with red bells and a red bow. He slipped the package into his topcoat pocket and checked in his bag at the lockers in the station. He looked around for a phone booth, his hand pleasantly playing with the package in his pocket, the package holding a pair of tan suede gloves, quite expensive, that he knew she would like, for she liked expensive things, gifts of any kind really, but especially expensive ones.

He called but there was no answer at her number, so he took a try at the office.

Her voice was unmistakable, and he felt again that queer little stir in his chest, a palpable motion of that which felt good, whether he might want it to feel good or not.

“Hi,” he said. “This is Jim…” and in the fragment of the pause that followed, thinking that she would not know which Jim, “… McDonald. Hello, Wanda.”

“Why, Jim!” she said, her voice coming to him pleased. “How are you?”

“Fine.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve heard from you, stranger.”

“About two years, Wanda.”

“Has it really been that long?” (She was not much for remembering dates, he thought.)

“Yes, that long. I’ve thought about you a lot.”

“And I’ve thought about you. You’re here in town, aren’t you?”

“Yes, at the train depot.”

“Wonderful. You going to be here long?”

He hesitated, not quite expecting that question. “Just tonight, I guess. I’m on my way home.”

“Sort of passing through then?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Can you get away from work? I’d like to see you tonight.”

“Oh,” she said, “I really have a date tonight.” She paused, and in the moment of her silence he heard muted telephonic clicks and buzzes and voices as from far distant places. “But I’ll break the date,” she said.

“Good,” he said with greater relief than he could have thought possible.

“I’m really busy right now,” she said. “So I’ll come pick you up in about an hour. I have a car now you know.”

“A car! Really? You must be prosperous these days,” he said, and they laughed without knowing why. “Pick me up at Hermie’s, can you?”

“Sure thing,” she said sweetly.

He went out into the clean December air. The cold was sharp but he didn’t mind, for the sun was bright and the sky a magnified blue. He walked up the street to the little tavern and had a beer and two cigarettes. Nobody knew him there, not even the corpulent gray bartender who had cashed his personal checks freely in the time before. He felt it again, the old unease of loneliness, and how bitingly it came upon him, speaking past chills and emptiness, and a woman could lift that all from him, a woman, a love, a connection. The little Falcon pulled up in the slush outside the blue bar windows, and McDonald went out without finishing his second beer. He felt good because she was his woman again, everybody could see that if they wanted to look, that she was there waiting for him. He thought he could see through the darkened window that she was still a good-looking woman, and the men in the bar would surely notice that, those lonely men would see that he was not lonely any longer.

The first moment was halting as he opened the door and stooped to get in. The large dark eyes, the white skin seeming whiter now, the high cheekbones, the careful deft coloring of lips and cheeks, the long slender neck, the deep brunette hair. And too he noted the hints of olding, the more pronounced hollow of the cheeks, the hardness of the jaws, the little compression around the mouth, and more than suggestion of wrinkles by the eyes, the dark hair too dark.

She was near to thirty-five, he thought, as he slid in, smiling brightly at her. She was still a good enough looking woman, but somehow not quite as he had imagined, and he thought perhaps he had been imagining too long, all the way from Columbia, how it would be.

“You look very good, Wanda,” he said.

“Thank you, Jim,” she said, smiling. “I need somebody to say that to me after a day at work.”

“You’re as good-looking as you were five years ago when we first met,” he went on, hearing himself turn casually to glibness and lies and excusing himself instantly by acknowledging that he too was five years older and what difference did a little flattery make?

She touched his hand with hers. “You look pretty good yourself. College teaching must agree with you.”

He laughed, a sudden, skittish sound. “Yes. I gained ten pounds.”

“It looks fine on you.”

She drove slowly and carefully, for the streets were filled with slush beginning to freeze again. He asked about her job and she told him her complaints, how she should be getting paid more, and about all the things she had to do, and how she had heard some elevator operators say she was the best secretary in the whole building and her boss knew it too; her voice became petulant and peevish, and he remembered hearing that voice and that similar complaint many times, and he wished she would talk of something else.