Adultery & Other Choices (18 page)

‘
Very
well. I was his S-3 on my last tour.'

‘I was in his battalion in the Fifth Marines. In fifty-six. I see in the
Gazette
where he's made bird colonel.'

‘Now
that's
a Marine officer,' the First Sergeant said—

But Ellen didn't hear the rest. She didn't hear anything distinctly now, only the sound of their voices, for at that moment a dark grey seaplane appeared to her left, descending toward the water. Her first reaction was anger: the plane had probably been on patrol since morning and, now that Christmas was over, the men were coming home. In the enlisted quonset huts and officers' houses, women had been alone all day; watching the children with their toys, taking pictures, receiving phone calls from home. The plane smoothly struck the water and moved westward, toward the Seaplane base, and now Ed Williams was talking: ‘—dropped four points all the way, then he got to three hundred rapid and put on the wrong dope, and got seven maggies and three deuces—' then laughter, and First Sergeant Rosener now, starting another story about rifle ranges. Watching the seaplane, she clasped her hands and squeezed until the fingers reddened. Then she looked at the table in the dinette, at the stacked cookies and sandwiches, and thought of the troops: some would be in the barracks, lying on bunks and talking about women or what they would do when they got out of the Corps; others would be in bars, playing bowling machines: losers buy the beer.
They should be bachelors
, she thought.
They should all
—Then she had to raise her hands to her face and quickly wipe her eyes.

She was going to the punch bowl when she heard a knock on the front door. She turned quickly, immediately angered by her speed and the leap of hope in her breast. Before going to the door, she paused to fill her glass and light a cigarette. But when she opened the door, she looked over the shoulders of the lone Marine standing there and scanned the front lawn and the street before the house. Then she looked at him. It was Anderson, and for an instant she thought of slamming the door and leaving him to stand there, cold and puzzled, before returning to the barracks to tell the others.

He was a tall nineteen year old boy with a round, pleading face which was now smiling at her. The width of his belly and hips was more than even an old officer or Staff NCO could bear with any sort of pride. He had his own car, he received money from home, and he was the only private in the barracks. Joe was thinking of giving him an Undesirable Discharge, because of repeated minor offenses. Ellen smiled.

‘Merry Christmas, Anderson. I'm glad you could come.'

In spite of herself, she nearly was. For she spent the next hour controlling her face and voice, adding to the conversation, smiling and nodding and passing platters and filling glasses, knowing that no one else was coming.

Captain Flaherty was the first to leave. Anderson left when the First Sergeant and Paula did; Ellen watched him from the door, walking on the First Sergeant's left, nodding his head and laughing. Then Gunny Holmes glanced at Ed, who nodded, and all three of them stood at once. At the door Ellen told Katie to drop by some time. She didn't watch them walk to their cars; she firmly closed the door, and went to the living room, where Joe was looking out the window and biting his pipestem.

‘I wish Ed wouldn't do that,' he said.

Ellen went to the window. On the sidewalk Ed and Gunny Holmes were talking angrily.

‘Is Holmes arguing?' she said.

‘Agreeing. Ed's probably telling him he wants a piece of the Staff NCOs tomorrow. The ones that didn't come.'

‘Good for him.'

Joe flushed, but she didn't care.

‘And Holmes will probably take the troops to the drill field tomorrow and chew them out,'Joe said. ‘Then he'll harass them for a few days.'

‘I hope he does.'

He flushed again and started to say something, but instead he knocked the ashes from his pipe.

‘Bad for morale,' he said.

‘Mo
rale
. Oh, Joe—Joe,
look
at that food!'

She pointed at the table, where sandwiches and cookies were piled. Only the punch bowl was nearly empty.

‘And there's more in the kitchen. They don't even
care
about you. You bring their problems home at night, you get them out of jail and make them write to their mothers and you patch up their marriages. You even work out their
budgets
and you don't do that in your own home—'

He interrupted her. He only said her name, very quietly, but his face was stern.

‘I know,' she said. ‘I'm not complaining, but they don't
care
, Joe. You give them everything and they don't care if you're even alive.'

‘They probably don't, during peacetime. But that doesn't matter. It's combat that counts, and when the shooting starts they look for a leader. Even Rosener and Holmes would. I remember—' He paused, staring into the fire place, and when he spoke again his voice was impassioned with memory ‘—when I took over that company in Korea, it was up on the lines. There weren't any platoon leaders left and the exec was running the show. I don't think he even had a year in the Corps and he was so confused that he got tied down to the CP, looking at maps and talking to battalion on the radio. I got there about noon—'

She turned her back and went to the punch bowl, then past it, to the kitchen where the bourbon was. He followed her.

‘Are you listening?'

‘Yes.'

‘Here: I'll make you an Old Fashioned. Anyway, I wanted to get oriented, so I crawled up to the perimeter—' He went to the sink, looking out the window. ‘—I went to different foxholes, checking out the terrain with binoculars, and pretty soon I could feel the effect I was having, and I stopped crawling. They hadn't seen an officer for a day or so, I guess. I walked up and down the line and stopped at each hole and chatted with the men—' He chuckled, and gave her the drink. ‘—pretty soon I drew some incoming, but it didn't matter: they knew where we were anyway.'

‘I wish they could need you without getting shot at.'

‘Oh, there's more to it than that. Most of them didn't come because they'd be uncomfortable or because it would look like brown-nosing.'

‘Like Anderson.'

Joe smiled.

‘He came for an Honorable Discharge. But he won't get it. The others came because they're professionals.'

‘I should have known it would be that way.'

‘I should have warned you.'

‘No: I should have known.'

She called Posy, who had been watching television in a bedroom. Ronnie was playing at a friend's house.

‘Would you like to have some friends over tomorrow?' Ellen said. ‘You'll have plenty of refreshments.'

She waved toward the sandwiches and cookies on the table. Posy watched her quietly.

‘But there's still enough for eighty hungry Marines, so let's give most of it to the neighbors.'

Joe kissed her cheek and hugged her, then went to the bedroom. Posy covered a platter of sandwiches with waxed paper, and took it outside. When Joe came to the kitchen, wearing a sport shirt and slacks, Ellen asked him to make an Old Fashioned. He touched her shoulder.

‘I'm sorry,' he said.

‘Don't worry about it. I just to have to figure out what to do.'

‘Looks like Posy's taking care of it.'

‘That's not what I mean.'

‘What
do
you mean?'

‘I don't know yet.'

During the short dusk and the beginning of night, Posy delivered all but a hundred cookies and twenty sandwiches. Sometimes Ellen stood at the living room window and watched her: a platter held in both arms, walking straight-backed under the streetlights. When she had finished, she called friends and asked them to come over the next afternoon. Once Ellen heard her say: We have a few left-overs from this big open house Mother had. Ellen brought her a glass of sherry.

‘It'll make your feet warm,' she said.

At nine o'clock, when she was kissing Posy goodnight, the phone rang. Joe answered. Ellen went to Ronnie's bedroom and pulled the blankets over his shoulders. Near his face on the pillow was a half-eaten oatmeal cookie. She dropped it in the wastebasket. In the hall, Joe was chuckling into the phone.

‘Okay, boy,' he said. ‘Then we can get a battalion from Lejeune and occupy.'

He laughed again. Ellen was putting on her coat and scarf when he hung up.

‘I'm going to Becky's for a minute. Who was that?'

‘Larry Sievers. He says we'll steal that A
₃
D next week and bomb Castro.'

‘Where's he drinking tonight?'

‘At home.'

‘That's nice, for a change.'

She stepped outside. The wind was strong and, walking against it, she turned her face and clenched her hands in her pockets. She hadn't told Joe goodbye, and that bothered her. When she got to Becky's she knocked fast and loud, her back to the wind.

‘A flop,' she said, when Becky opened the door.

She had three drinks. With the first one she was still controlling herself, telling them very calmly why no one had come. After the second she was complaining bitterly, and she knew it, but she couldn't stop.

‘Goddamnit,' she said to Becky, when she was finally ready to leave, ‘we don't have ranks and service numbers. We're
wo
men.'

‘Bless you for that,' Pete said, and he put his arm around her waist as they walked to the door. She forgot to draw in her stomach muscles.

‘A lot of good it does,' she said, and kissed them both and left. The wind struck her back now, pushing her forward.

Joe was asleep in his chair in the living room, an open book on his lap; the fire was dying. She poked the coals and put another log on the andirons. Then in their bedroom she undressed and put on a silk kimono. Joe had brought it from Japan and once, when she was wearing it over her naked body as she was now, he had reached inside the wide arm and touched her breast. She had wondered how he learned that. At the mirror she combed her hair and freshened her lipstick and dabbed perfume on her wrists and throat. Then she was ready. She did not even look at the drawer where her diaphragm was. She walked past it, and into the living room where she turned off the lamps and arranged throw-pillows on the carpet before the fire. With the cover flap, she marked Joe's place in the book,
Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin
, and set it on the coffee table. Then she started waking him up. He was annoyed at first, but soon she was taking care of that.

A
T THE DINNER
table two days after Christmas, Joe told her about the pressure chamber. They had simulated forty thousand feet and taught him to use an oxygen mask. They also taught him to bail out. There were three seats in an A
₃
D, he told her, two facing forward and one aft. The escape hatch was opposite the seat facing aft; it opened onto a chute in the belly of the plane. A horizontal bar was at the top of the hatch and you had to grab it with your arms crossed and pull yourself into the chute. Ellen watched him across the table as he held up his arms, the forearms crossed and the hands grasping an imaginary bar. Then he stood up to show how his body would turn as he uncrossed his arms, and he would slide out of the plane on his belly.

‘There's not much time,' he said. ‘Everybody's got to move out fast.'

But no one did. She told him goodbye four days before New Year's and he said he'd be back for the party. On New Year's Eve they flew back from California and, minutes away from Whidbey Island, they went down.

When her doorbell rang in mid-afternoon Ellen was in the bedroom checking her social calendar. She found the date of the wives' club luncheon in December; that was when her last period had begun. Then she counted days on the calendar, until her finger touched Christmas. She counted them again, and decided she had probably not conceived. Now she wasn't sure whether she wanted to or not.
It's up to you
, Joe had said Christmas night and a couple of times since then. But she was thirty-five and she had gained weight and maybe a pregnancy would ruin her figure forever. When the child was five, she would be forty; fifteen, fifty; twenty, fifty-five. That was all right. But her weight… . And if Joe got orders in June she would be—she counted on her fingers—six months pregnant and travelling perhaps across the country: motels and those weary distorted days of emptying one house and filling another: packing boxes and wardrobes and scratched furniture and confusion.

But she was thirty-five. She'd be forty soon, and she had two children (
a boy and a girl
, people said,
such nice planning
) and she was the president of the wives' club and she was the Major's wife. Gunny Holmes might have marched the troops to the drill field and chewed them out, but it wouldn't have been for her and even if he had mentioned her name, it wouldn't have mattered to them. Ed Williams might have admonished the Staff NCOs about courtesy and loyalty to the Commanding Officer. No one, though, would be told:
You hurt Mrs. Forrest
. There was no recourse, either. She couldn't scowl at the Marines as they saluted her at the gates; they would only smile at her and joke about it in the barracks. There was nothing, nothing at all, and she was again counting the calendar days since the last wives' club luncheon when the doorbell rang.

She waited for Posy to answer it, but heard nothing; then she rose, still trying to decide, wishing it were already decided for her, that she had already conceived, but size twelve, she'd have to diet and exercise…. Going through the living room she saw Posy out the back window, getting two logs from the wood pile, and as her hand went to the doorknob she glimpsed the dying fire:
sweet sweet Posy
. Then she opened the door and Pete was standing there, his white cap in his hand—that was the first thing she noticed—and the collar of his blue topcoat turned up: six feet of somber dark blue and beyond his anguished face and bare head was the grey sky. Her hand tightened on the doorknob and she opened her mouth to speak but couldn't, silenced by a welling urge to be suspended here forever, to be deceived and comforted and never to know anything at all. But he was looking at his cap, then at her, and a hand went up and through his hair, and he said: ‘Ellen. Ellen, baby—'