Loving Women Read online

  I stared at my reflection in the window and wondered again how women saw me. My white Navy hat was pulled rakishly (I thought) over one eye, the collar of my pea jacket was up high, and I kept trying to set my mouth in the weary, knowing way that Flip Corkin used in Terry and the Pirates. To be sure, my hair was still too boot-camp short, my nose too long, my teeth in need of work. I would never be mistaken for a movie star. But I looked at myself a lot then, and it was not just some adolescent exercise in narcissism. I simply wondered how I looked to others, especially to women.

  The snow was falling steadily when the bus reached the iron of New Jersey. The boy I was then stared at the fat wet flakes and wondered how everything had gone so wrong that Christmas, with a girl named Maureen Crowley (the name living on for years in my head when so many others had joined the general blur), and why all the guys he knew had girls, even wives, and he had none. The boy wished his mother was alive, sure he could ask her questions about such matters. He couldn’t ask his father anything. My father was big and gruff and strong, with eyebrows that met over his nose; he knew a lot about electrical wiring and radio circuits and the construction of lamps. He just didn’t know how to explain anything to me about the mysteries of the human heart. Or so I thought on the last day of 1952. The old man was from Ireland and my mother was from The Bronx, a mick and a narrowback joined in holy matrimony, and if he never said anything sweet or tender to me, well, in my presence he never said anything human to her either.

  I was sure then, as only young men can be sure, that he didn’t even say much of anything when she was dying in the public ward at the hospital. The doctors wouldn’t let me watch her die, because I was only fourteen and tuberculosis was contagious and there were other people dying there too and I could never be expected to understand any of it. Not yet. Sex and death in those days were only rumors and whispers. And besides, I was the oldest and had to mind my brothers and my sister every night while my father went to visit her. I stayed with them each night, listening to Gangbusters or The Inner Sanctum or Jimmy Durante on the radio, hearing the voices of cops and gangsters and comedians, when what I most truly wanted was to know what it was I was supposed to do to make a woman love me. My mother would know. But she was kept hidden as she died, and my father was silent and I was full of questions, right up to the evening he learned that he didn’t have to visit her ever again. I do know that he cried in his bed that last night of my mother’s life. I heard him. But he never said a goddamned thing to me.

  So I sat in the dark on that empty bus, the uniform identifying me as a man prepared to die for his country, and told myself that 1952 had turned out to be rotten but maybe 1953 would be better. Neither could ever be as bad as the year my mother died. And in some way, I was happy to be on the road, going out of New York, away from Brooklyn. This had nothing to do with the new president; Dwight Eisenhower was a famous general with a baby face and a simple smile, and he told everybody he would go to Korea and end the war. But the truth was that, in our part of Brooklyn we never cared much for generals and didn’t care at all for Republicans. Even when Douglas MacArthur came back after Harry Truman fired him, and they kept playing “Old Soldiers Never Die,” and there was talk about impeaching Truman and making MacArthur president, we sided with Truman. So when the radios played MacArthur’s song in the bars, most of the men answered it with “Anchors Aweigh.” There were some soldiers from our neighborhood and a few Marines, but mostly we were Navy. When our people fought for their country, they went to sea. So it was no big deal that when I was old enough to go, I dropped out of high school and went to boot camp in Bainbridge. Like almost everybody else.

  Deep into Virginia that long-ago New Year’s Eve, the snow was still falling thickly. I remember staring through the steam-glazed windows at the white world, thinking that the storm would never end. For miles, I followed the traceries of telephone lines. And saw, off in the distance, snug houses behind screens of skeletal trees.

  Those houses. In blue icy fields. Blinking with Christmas lights. Inside, men had women who held them tight, who talked to them about life and kids and music and the weather. They slept under thick blankets while the snow fell steadily, and when the moon played its light over the frozen world, they fucked. I wanted a woman who would hold me, too. Who would talk to me. Laugh at my jokes. Fuck me good as I fucked her. The boy I was then didn’t really want the houses. Out in the country, far from the cities of the world: that wasn’t my life. But I wanted the woman.

  By noon, the heater had surrendered to the storm and it was very cold in the bus. And I remember saying to myself: Pensacola. Then again. Pensacola, Pensacola, Pensacola, like beads on a rosary. I had never even heard of the town until the Navy assigned me there in a thick packet of orders issued before Christmas leave. But when I got home, I looked up the town in Nelson’s Encyclopedia (worn red bindings, double columns of tiny type, bought a book at a time by my mother, clipping coupons from the New York Post) and tried to imagine the place from the volume’s few lines. Sitting in the living room, on the frayed couch beside the kerosene heater, I felt Pensacola come to me across 1,536 miles in bright pastel colors.

  Pen-sa-co-la I whispered on the bus (and repeated it now, in the Datsun 280-ZX, following myself South). And saw rounded forms, brown and glowing from the sun, smooth, polished. Pensacola. Brown breasts and brown thighs and brown bellies, too. Women glistening with oil. Hot to the touch. For surely Pensacola was a woman’s name. Pensacola Brown. Yeah. The name was full of lazy hills and the Pensa seemed buttered to the cola, not locked hard and bolted tight, like Stuttgart or New York. It was a name very much like Florida. Hi, I’m Florida Brown and I want to fuck you … Except that Florida was green with drooping palms and the sounds of spring training on the radio and blue with the sea. And it was too short and smooth and familiar to be a woman’s name. Pensacola had hard little bumps in it, like tits.

  I looked out at the blizzard and closed my eyes, and saw palm trees withering under the snow and a gigantic glacier shoving the beaches into the sea and heard the north wind howling, claiming victory over the sun. I opened my eyes in a moment of panic. There were a half dozen other passengers in the bus, most of them sleeping. I remember the driver’s back. He inhaled deeply, then exhaled in a weary way. And I closed my eyes again, and invented a world of heat—to help the driver, to defend Pensacola, to warm myself. I was on the beach at Coney Island, on Bay 22, under a hammering sun. I was on the rooftop of our house in Brooklyn, gazing at the Manhattan skyline in a sweltering August stupor. It was too hot to sleep, and down on the street old people sat in folding chairs, fanning themselves with the Daily News, drinking hot tea because they all believed that it cooled you off and its leaves cured sunburn. I thought of The Desert Song, the movie that made me volunteer in boot camp for the naval air station at Port Lyautey in Morocco. I was Dennis Morgan. The Red Shadow himself. Riding across the sun-baked desert. Leading the Riff against the hated French, singing:

  “You’d better go, go, go,

  Before you’ve bitten the sword …”

  In my tent, a masked woman in silky pajamas. Deep black eyes. Huge golden earrings. Jeweled rings on her toes. Her toenails painted. She opened her arms and touched my face. “Michael,” she whispered in some exotic foreign accent. “You must do it to me now.…” Later, I fell asleep in her arms.

  Ah, youth.

  When I woke up, everything had changed. The snow was gone. Purple light spilled down valleys. I could not afford a watch, so I had no idea what time it was or how long I’d slept, but the land was black now, and there were few lights. The bus was fuller, too, although the seat beside me was empty. I heard a woman’s phlegmy snoring in the dark. And then smelled the thick fatty air of the bus, a mixture of farts, cigarette smoke, and engine fumes. I felt vaguely sick. Then addressed myself: You are Michael Devlin, USN 4640237. You are almost eighteen years old, not a child. You cannot get sick in a bus. And I didn’t.

  But I could see Maureen again. I
stared out at the dark forests, trying to get rid of her. But there she was, pale and beautiful, standing among the trees. She would not go away. I was far from Brooklyn, but I could see her (as I see her now) wearing a maroon coat and turning around, her back to me, snow melting in her hair. Oh, Momma, let me talk to you. I was calling her name as she walked quickly down the snow-packed path in Prospect Park. Her head lowered against the wind. Hands jammed in her pockets. Maureen, I called. But she chose not to hear me. Maureen. And once more: Maureen. My voice was muffled, but I knew she could hear me. And then at last she turned. I came closer, moving clumsily in the snow. And saw the fear in her eyes. Fear, for Christ’s sakes. Her face trembled. And then she started to run. Out of the park. Out of my life.

  The Greyhound was moving with fresh power now, and I thought: That was only nine days ago and it seems like ancient history. I didn’t run after her. I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t beg. Not for her. Not for anybody. But I saw her again on crowded beaches, on the empty slopes of summer hills. She was on the subway with me, coming back from a movie in Manhattan, her head burrowed against my shoulder. “Maureen,” I whispered on the bus, and thought about her skin. And then, hundreds of miles from her and going farther away by the minute, she gave me what she had given me so many times in that long ripe crazy summer before I joined the Navy. Off to the side along my thigh, forced there by the tight crotch of the Navy blues. Once, when I was still an altar boy at Holy Name Church, I imagined God in possession of a hard-on counting machine. That was the beginning of the loss of faith. He was up there in heaven, seeing all, knowing all, and He would spot my hard-ons, logging them in His gigantic counting machine along with billions of other impure hard-ons all over the world. In His rage, He looked to see if I touched myself. Or far worse, whether I played with myself. And certainly He would need another, much larger counting machine to keep track of all the jacking off, one that would have to handle billions of entries in Brooklyn alone. And thinking about this (on the altar of the 8:30 Saturday Mass) I laughed. That was the way faith must always end. After all, if there was a God, why would He care about my hard-ons anyway? Was he nuts, or what? A grown man, counting hard-ons? But I was also still a Catholic, and naturally, after I laughed, I felt guilty. For about a minute. And then felt certain that I’d never stop burning in Purgatory and was already too far behind to ever get even with God, so I might as well enjoy sin. I was fourteen. The year my mother died.

  So within a few weeks I went forward to the worst sin of all. I was serving as altar boy at a Saturday afternoon wedding. The bride was a hot-eyed Italian, with creamy skin and gigantic tits and I could see when she looked at the groom (as Father Kavanaugh was rattling on about sickness and health until death do you part) that she wanted to fuck him right on the spot. And I realized that within a few hours he’d have his cock in her, and those huge tits in his face. And I got a hard-on right there on the altar. I was wearing a cassock and surplice, so nobody could see it, but it wouldn’t go away. Even when I thought about Jerry Lewis. Or a Spanish Main movie. I kept seeing the bride’s hot eyes. And after the wedding, when the priest went down the aisle to say good-bye to the happy couple and pick up his tip, I hurried into the empty sacristy, lifted the skirt of my cassock, trembling with the certainty that God would blast me with a lightning bolt, and jerked off down the flower chute.

  There were no lightning bolts. Not that day. Nor on other days and nights. But I couldn’t do that now. Not in a bus. Not in Navy blues, for Christ’s sakes. So I laughed then, and the hard-on vanished and so did my image of Maureen. She was part of my most shameful secret. I was old enough to die for my country, but I was still that most rare and suspicious kind of sailor: a virgin. I could tell this to nobody. But it was true: I’d never slept with a woman. Any woman. I’d fallen in love with a few girls, most terribly and drastically with Maureen Crowley. But because I loved them, I couldn’t sleep with them. And I couldn’t sleep with anyone else, because that would be a betrayal. So I looked out again at the countryside, plunging into America, a sailor without a ship, assigned to shore duty when all my friends were going to sea, a warrior without a war, now that Eisenhower was in and the generals were meeting in Korea to end the fighting. And I felt like a child. But after a while, I felt better: Somewhere down this road, somewhere in the mysterious South, lay my salvation. Here, far from home, I would find my woman.

  Chapter

  2

  I remember waking up in the dark, with the bus stopped outside a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. I used the john. I sipped a cup of coffee. Nothing else. I had nineteen dollars left after Christmas leave, and they would have to last me all the way to Pensacola and for a couple of weeks after that, until I’d get paid. At the counter, I tried to get a red-haired waitress to look at me by wearing a wounded look on my face. Like Bogart. But she was too busy for my secret wound, so I picked a newspaper off a stool and read the comics.

  I didn’t see Steve Canyon, which I was sure was the greatest comic strip in the world. But the paper did carry Buz Sawyer, the other great one. I’d clipped Canyon and Sawyer from the Mirror and the Journal-American since I was twelve, filing them neatly in #10 envelopes. I filled sketchbooks with copies of the characters, trying to use a brush the way Milton Caniff did on Canyon (and on Terry and the Pirates, which I’d collected in the comic-book editions), trying to draw women the way Roy Crane did in Buz Sawyer. Crane used a special paper called Craftint that I’d read about in a book about cartooning. You used one chemical on the special paper and got a gray tone made of lines going one way. You used the other chemical and the lines came out crosshatched and darker. So Crane’s panels were beautiful, with the two shades of gray, the dead whites, the juicy blacks. But Caniff had better characters. His dialogue was hipper. His women were smarter and sexier, real women who knew the world. Not just the Dragon Lady from Terry, who everybody knew about. Or Burma, singing the “St. Louis Blues.” But Copper Calhoon and Deen Wilderness and April Kane and Feeta Feeta and Fancy, too. Oh yeah, I loved the girl called Fancy. I wanted to go to a movie or a dance with Crane’s women or give them a feel on a beach somewhere. But I wanted to fuck the women drawn by Milton Caniff.

  I sipped my coffee at the counter and stared at Buz Sawyer, and tried to enter the story. There were no newspapers in boot camp, so I’d lost track of most of them. I’d asked my father to save the strips for me, but he couldn’t understand why a man old enough to be in the United States Navy would care about such things, so he didn’t bother. He couldn’t even imagine why I wanted to be a cartoonist. That was something like aspiring to be the Pope or the president of Argentina. He didn’t get it. I was Irish. I should be a cop. A fireman. An ironworker. Like the sons of every other donkey who ever landed in Brooklyn.

  So I looked at Buz Sawyer as if I were engaged in a monumental act of defiance, hoping that somehow my father would walk into this diner in the middle of America and get furious at the sight. The comics were what we had instead of rock ’n’ roll. I didn’t know the story, but I did recognize the character in the first panel. His name was Harry Sparrow. He had a large bald head, like Doctor Huer in Buck Rogers, and a monocle hanging from his right eye and he was dressed in a cutaway tuxedo complete with striped pants. Harry Sparrow was an international crook. A hustler. A guy who dealt in guns. Somehow he was now involved in a plot to run guns to a Central American country called—I remember the name—Salvaduras. Crane was always putting Sawyer or Easy in some Central American country and owned the region the way Caniff owned China. And in 1952 Central America was still a comical place made up of banana republics, where the revolutions were lots of fun. Nobody called the bad guys the moral equals of the Founding Fathers. Nobody shot peasants or nurses or schoolteachers and called it liberation. Certainly not in Buz Sawyer. In the strip (which I tore out and slipped into The Blue Notebook, where it yellowed for thirty-five-years), Harry Sparrow was listening and smirking as a sexy woman named Fifi talked on the telephone to one of the Salvaduran l
eaders. Behind them was the gilt frame of a painting.

  “More sugar, Fifi,” Harry said to the girl. “More! More! Pour it on!”

  “I am ZO unhappy, Adolfo, chèri,” she was saying to the guy on the other end of the telephone line. Fifi. Chèri. She must be French. “DINNER,” she said. Her right hand was playing with her blond hair. The left hand caressed the telephone. She had a star on her left cheek. Her breasts rose fiercely off her round compact body. “Just the two of us.…”

  Then I heard the horn honking outside and I finished my coffee and folded the newspaper and hurried back to the bus.

  “Happy New Year,” the driver said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Happy New Year.”

  That year we still called black people Negroes, and there was a Negro soldier with pomaded hair sitting in the aisle seat beside mine. He stood to let me in and I nodded at him. He looked like an old welterweight named Tommy Bell, who once knocked down Sugar Ray Robinson. Five other Negro men were dozing on the wide back seat. Two leaned against each other. Another sat with his arms folded. The bus was now full.

  I looked up and saw the driver standing beside the steering wheel, looking down the aisle. His lips moved as if he were counting passengers. He leaned forward and said something to the sleeping Negro in the first seat. There was no reaction. The driver squeezed the man’s shoulder, and when the soldier didn’t move, the driver shook him, and then the soldier was suddenly awake, backing away with his hands up, like a fighter. The driver shook his head sadly and whispered to the man. He stood up, blinking, and looked down the aisle. Now the driver was waking the large black woman in the third row. The soldier jerked a duffel bag off the overhead rack, slung it onto his shoulder and came stomping down the aisle.