Ervin Krause - You Will Never See Any God - Stories

He sipped on his drink.

“Wouldn’t I have been good?” she prodded.

“Yes,” he said, looking into the pale amber of ice cubes and whiskey in his glass.

“I know I would have been,” she said. “God knows where I’d be if I’d had a little education, you know, like people get nowadays.” She drank a little. “How do you like teaching now?” she asked.

She had never quite understood what colleges or college teaching were about, he thought, saw it somewhat like an extension of her recollection of high school, and so he abbreviated his duties for her.

“What I especially wanted was to get in some faculty wives club,” she said. “I’d like to punch their noses, the bitches. They’re all so snobbish and they think they’re so good.”

“I didn’t know you knew any,” he said.

“Oh, I see them all right. They come hotsy-totsying down to the office, teetering on their high heels, looking down their noses at everybody. They don’t see me, though. They just pretend they can see right through a secretary. If they only knew what I know about them!”

He fondled the glass and thought, it was a victory for her, too, to seduce me, to have her period of going with someone supposedly intellectual, to go with “a professor from the university,” as she had always liked to refer to him to her easily astonished friends.

“They spell out their names for you as though you’re illiterate. They act as if you can’t read, for god’s sake.”

“Have you read any books lately?” he asked, wanting to change the subject.

“I haven’t had time. Good heavens, I’ve been so busy at the office and getting Trevor off to school and keeping him going and making all the payments it’s almost more than one person can do. I’ve thought about getting another job to go along with the one I’ve got, but I don’t think I could do it all. This summer Trevor’s going to work a little and earn some of his own money. You don’t know how lucky you’ve got it, being a free and easy bachelor without a care in the world. You should try raising a son sometime, seeing that he’s properly dressed and has money and a good home. A young person needs an education and nice things and a nice place to bring his friends, and I’m doing that for Trev.”

The phone rang and Wanda got up, patting his shoulder and smiling at him. She talked very softly and briefly and she said she had company and couldn’t go out, and no she couldn’t go out later in the evening either and was very sorry but would you call back later in the week? McDonald felt the quick charge of jealousy, seeing in his long absence the succession of men, seeing now that young man hunched over a phone perhaps in a booth in a downtown barroom, the young man speaking persuasively, laconically, McDonald seeing himself too and the same conversation he had had on occasion with Wanda, his impatience, his want, and how he too had been put off at the times of her assignations — everything always vigorously denied by her, and couldn’t he trust her more? she asked in that wistful, little-girl voice she assumed at times like that — but assignations nonetheless. He felt the spirited surge of anger jump through his belly, and he calmed himself immediately, telling himself it was foolish to feel that now of all times, knowing what his own purpose was. No, no, he said to himself, there was more than that here, an affection, something good and lasting, perhaps even a love of a sort, there really was… He very casually lit a cigarette and drew on it, and calmly cupped the drink in the other hand.

All the careful disconcern to show he had not listened, and that it had not affected him, made no difference for she blandly told him when she returned.

“That was Frank Wykoff,” she said, taking up her drink as she reclined upon the couch. “He brought me that Royal Doulton, those three mugs up there (pointing to the mantle), from England when he was there a couple of months ago.” The mugs grinned fat and hideous from among the plastic planters.

“He brings me nice, expensive things. I don’t know why he does it.”

“He’s in the service then?” McDonald asked.

“He’s a sergeant in the ground crew and he goes overseas whenever the wing is rotated. He’s going to bring me some linens and stuff from Ireland next time he gets to England, he said. He brings me something nice every time he comes back.”

“Well, that’s nice,” McDonald said.

“I think so. You know how much I like nice, pretty things, and expensive things especially. Frank has brought me lace from Spain and perfume from France and that Royal Doulton.”

“He can get it all from any PX in England,” McDonald said, and was surprised at the grumbling petulance in his voice.

“Well it’s the real article to me,” she said. “I don’t know why he does it. I guess he likes me and he’s lonesome and wants somebody to talk to.”

“That’s probably it,” McDonald said.

“When he’s here at the base he calls me up all the time, wanting to take me out dancing or to dinner. He wants to spend all his money on me. I’m not going to stop him.” She was looking at McDonald, and she was trying to gauge him, he knew. “I think you’d like him a lot. He’s only twenty-four, a mere child. I keep telling him he should pick up some girl his own age and have a great time, but he doesn’t want to. He couldn’t believe I had a son fourteen; he thought I was his age.” She laughed loudly, and McDonald smiled too. “Frank told me I was the only woman he’s met that was like European women. And he just likes me. There’s nothing more between us, he just likes me. He’s a nice boy who buys me nice things and takes me out to nice places and we have a good time. He doesn’t really mean a thing to me, but he’s lonesome, and anyway he’s too young for anything serious!” The pleased, shrill, too-loud laugh again.

There was a pause and they heard the music suddenly, the carols past, Dinah Washington singing now, and Wanda swayed her head in time to the sentimental Negro song.

“Dance?” he said, and she smiled and nodded and swiveled out of the couch and stood up and they took a step or two; her hair touched his chin and her sweater his chest. He stopped the movement and kissed her and her mouth opened a little.

“I’d like to make love to you,” he said.

“Ah ah,” she said, shaking her head and her forefinger at him. “I know about guys like you. Got an old girlfriend in a town and they visit her once a year or so, and expect her to fall over.”

He smiled at her, affectedly, out of the same concentration he had felt that first time, so long ago now, and he knew why it had come about, how it had led to this, the same want and need, the same panic at denial.

“I thought it was a good idea,” he said.

“Anyway, I can’t, because Trevor might come home.”

“He went to a movie, remember?”

“Oh Jim,” she said, “I don’t want something to start up between us again that might turn out badly.”

“I didn’t think it turned out badly before,” he murmured slowly. What else could he say? he asked himself. Somewhere deep within he heard a distant door slam, an echo of another time. The want of her unbalanced all.

“Well no, it was fine, but you got so jealous there a few times, and you’re so intense.”

“I promise not to be so intense,” he said, giving her a smile.

“Do you really want to make love to me?” she asked, putting on her incongruous little-girl face, and little-girl voice, trying to look pensively up through her eyelashes.

“Yes. Don’t you want to?”

“Yes. Only with you.”

He kissed her.

“Fix one more drink, then,” she said, and they went to the kitchen together. “Nobody can fix drinks like you can,” she said.