Loving Women (5 page)

My second wife’s name was Ginger, and right off I shoulda known better. You fuck girls named Ginger. You don’t marry ’em. She was a hostess in a dancehall in Honolulu when I met her. A long-legged high-hipped woman in a flowered dress like they all wear out there, and small titties and a big ass and skin that glowed like gold. I think maybe there was a little Jap in her, the way she had them high goddamned cheekbones and small little titties, but if that was so, well, her ass sure wasn’t Jap. No sir. She tole me she was nineteen and I believed her and she sure looked great in that dim light in the hall with the smoke and everything and Glenn Miller playin and all of us sailors drinkin hard and the weather so damned hot that her dress with the flowers on it stuck to her ass like a tattoo. Oh I was in love, boy. Right there. Took me about nineteen minutes and I wanted that woman for the rest of my life. Later on, I learned she was really twenty-seven (I was twenty). Later on, I learned she’d been married once before and had two kids she never tole me about. Later on, I learned she had the goddamned clap, too—this while I was two months out at sea and married for three, and I knew this because she gave it to me. I had some dose, boy. I was dripping with it during the battle of Midway and after I talked to the medics in sick bay I went to the yeoman’s office and told him I wanted to stop sendin checks to dear wife Ginger and I filled out all the forms and sent her a letter with one damned sentence it. Dear Ginger, I said. I got yore clap, bitch. Sincerely. I put that in. Sincerely, and signed my name. The next time I was in Pearl was 1943 and she was workin in a whorehouse and I had her blow me for three dollars before talkin about the de-vorce. A real sincere woman, Ginger
.

There was a lot of other women too. Yeah. Young girls and old girls, and colored and Chink. But the third wife was the one. I thought she’d make the whole damn thing come together. Her name was Susan and I met her in San Francisco after the war. Small dark-haired girl who worked in a bank and lived alone and wore glasses cause she was nearsighted. Lived in this small house on Mission Street. She didn’t want to have nothin to do with me, me bein a goddamned sailor. She just give me the brush. Right off. When I went into the bank to get change for a twenty-dollar bill. I aint no Errol Flynn but I had my share and so when she gave me the brush naturally I wanted her so bad I hurt. So I stayed on her, every day, sometimes twice a day, while the ship was in drydock, and I plain wore her down. I married her, I guess, just to prove to her I was serious, not some horny damned swabbie. Why not? Hell, she didn’t have no sheriff, she didn’t have the clap. So I tried one las’ time to live the life of a married man
.

Right off I seen she was a nut about neatness. She had a million rules for everything, all that shit about a place for everything and everything in its place. At first this didn’t bother me. Hell, I was Navy. I’d lived a long time in little tight spaces and I obeyed the rules cause sometimes the rules saved your life. So at first I thought it was terrific. She was kinda military, you know? But then I found out she was a Christian too. A Godfearin Bible-readin black-hearted Christian. And that type of a Christian is all rules, boy. She wouldnt let me smoke cigarettes in the house cause it stunk up the wallpaper. She wouldn’t drink whiskey with me. She got mad if I didden go to church with her and if I was late for dinner. If I got stuck at the ship or stuck in traffic or stopped for a few whiskeys with a couple of sailors, she’d go nuts. In the closets in the house in Mission Street, she put everything in little cellophane bags and gave them all labels, like panties or slips or bras. The inside of the refrigerator looked like something in a supermarket with everything in rows. And if I put a milk bottle on the vegetable shelf, she’d scream at me. She wouldn’t have sex during her period, of course, and for four or five days before her period she was nutty and pissed off and I wasn’t interested. Naturally, she thought a blow job was a sin. Naturally, using a rubber was a sin too. She would only fuck me in the bedroom, with the light out, between nine and eleven at night. She wouldn’t fuck any later than that cause she needed her rest to get up on time for the bank. I said to her, You don’t work at the bank on Saturday or Sunday, baby! But on Friday night she was too tired from the whole week of workin and on Saturday night she was restin to get up for church on Sunday
.

Well, after a while I started coming home late. And some nights I didn’t come home at all. Then I was there one Friday night and after dinner I was sittin in this big chair beside the fireplace, just like I always saw men do in pictures in magazines, and the fire was burnin cause it gets cold there in San Francisco. And she started screaming at me for leavin the newspaper on the floor. You always make a mess, she yelled. You can’t do anything without makin a mess. Yellin at me, the top of her lungs
.

So after a bit, I stood up. I lit me a cigarette and blew the smoke on the wallpaper and she yelled What are you doin and I put the butt out on the rug, mashin it in real good. Then I lit another and walked past her smokin and opened the refrigerator and messed everything up and then I pissed in it. Right into the goddamned fridge. I remember the butter meltin in the butter dish. Then I got a pint of whiskey from my coat and chug-a-lugged it and got sick and puked on the doormat. Never said a word all the time. Well, little Susan ran right outta there
.

She didden come home that night, or the next one either. So I wandered around the house with the radio blastin, smokin and drinkin and takin shits with the bathroom door open. On Sunday morning she still wasn’t back. I got drunk twice that day without leavin the house and even to me the place was beginnin to stink. On Monday morning, I took a long cold shower and got all dressed real neat in civvies and went down to the bank. She wasn’t there. Called in sick, her boss said. Lookin at me funny. Sick of me, I reckon. So I hit the bars, feelin lower than whaleshit and playin the jukes and callin home every hour. She never answered the phone and I realized that I didn’t really know much about her, didn’t know where she came from, where she might of run. I didn’t know her folks. I didn’t even know the name of the damned church. All I knew was she was gone. And I was through. By sundown, I was loaded. I couldn’t hardly walk, but I got on a bus and went to Mission Street and went to the house to pack my clothes. I kept writin a note to her in my head, all about how I was goin back to the Navy where I belonged and I was sorry I was so rotten to her and she should find a nice guy for herself and let him put the papers on the floor once in a while. And of course I was gonna sign this letter
sincerely.
I opened the door with my key. And heard a noise from upstairs. From the bedroom. Not the kind of noise a burglar makes. I tiptoed up them stairs and when I opened the door, she was naked on the bed, goin down on a fat bearded guy I’d seen one day at the bank. The fat guy looked scared shitless, but Susan didn’t stop. She looked at me with her eyes all crazy and her mouth full of dick and kept goin at it with the fat guy. I went out in the hall and packed my clothes and never saw her again. A week later I got a good-bye letter from her, typed and neat. It was like the charges in a court martial. Or a bank statement. She never said nothin in it about the fat man
.

Chapter

4

I
hear his voice now. Hear the warnings. Hear the Old Salt telling that boy something about the price of love. Or sex. Or both. And the boy thought:
That’s his story; those were Turner’s mistakes, and I won’t repeat either. I’ll find my own woman. I’ll know
. Such courage makes the young fight old men’s wars. But the woman was not far away, waiting in the shadows of the South. I remember that we changed buses outside a large, badly lit bus station in downtown Atlanta. We had about an hour to wait. And then Turner said it would be better if we got on board the second bus and found window seats. That way, he said, if it ain’t a full bus, we can stretch out and sleep the rest of the way. I thought he must be right. He had been on a lot more buses than I had. And a lot more women too. I found a seat in the seventh row, Turner in the second. There were more Negroes sitting in the rear, and a lot more empty seats. Pensacola. I was almost there.

She got on just before we left.

I first saw her standing beside the driver, her skin almost olive in the diffused light from the terminal. In all the years since, that simple image has remained in me. I’ve photographed models standing in empty buses, bathed in that oblique light. I’ve tried to capture the same mood on buses in the hills of Nicaragua, or the highlands of Kenya, or moving around Washington Heights. It’s never worked. The pictures in your head are always more powerful than the ones on paper. But there she was, with curly black hair and an oval face and the sort of long, thin nose that I’d once seen described as aquiline. She was wearing a black turtleneck and blue
jeans and she was lugging a small, beat-up suitcase.
Come to me
, I thought, trying to send messages to her through the dark air of the bus.
Sit here, woman. Sit beside me and learn to love me and I will meet you every night and you can wear a veil and look at me with dark eyes and I will love you more than all the earth. Here. In this empty seat. Beside me. Please
. She started down the aisle, looking left and right, and stopped at the empty seat beside me.

“This taken?” she said. There was something scared in her hoarse voice. If she was wearing makeup, I couldn’t see it. Her lips were full, and she had a mole on her left cheekbone.

“No, it’s open,” I said, standing up. “Need a hand with that?”

I took the suitcase and heaved it up into the baggage rack. The bus was moving now.

“Thanks, sailor,” she said. I sat back down and she seemed to collapse in the seat beside me. She put a large leather purse on her lap. Her legs were clamped together but I could see strong thighs under the jeans.
Go ahead
, I thought.
Talk to her. Say something. Say anything. Speak. She is here. You wanted her here. Speak
.

“Goin’ to Pensacola?” I said.
Oh you dumb kid. You asshole. Asking a dumb-kid question
.

“I guess,” she said.

“Me too,” I said. “I hear it’s beautiful.”

“I wouldn’t know. Never been there before.”

Her accent was Southern, but the rhythm was odd. It wasn’t like the corn-pone accents I’d heard in the movies or on the radio. Her voice was more slurred, like the voice of Billie Holiday. I looked at her face again. There were tiny lines around the corners of her eyes and a little pad of fat under her chin. The skin was pulled tight across her cheekbones. I couldn’t tell how old she was. And that excited me even more. All I was sure of was that she wasn’t a kid.

“I never been there before either,” I said. “I’m looking forward, you know. See it …”

“Well, you’ll be comfy there, I reckon. It’s all sailors, so I hear.”

“One of the biggest bases in the country.”

“Imagine that.”

She was curt, in a polite way, but she wasn’t freezing me out. She just seemed to have something else on her mind. Then, without willing it, my eyes drifted to her chest and she must have felt my look and turned slightly to the left, pulling the leather bag close to her body. Even then, she didn’t cut me off.

“You’re a Yankee, right?” she said.

“Yeah. Well, I’m from New York. But we’d go nuts where I came from if you called us Yankees. I’m from Brooklyn and we hate the Yankees. The ball team, I mean.”

“Well,” she said, and smiled, “you’re in the right part of the country f’ hatin’ Yankees.”

Please, do that again. Smile like that again. And say “part” like it was pronounced “paht.” And smile that wide smile, with those hard white teeth. Please
.

She turned to me. “Mind if I smoke?” Saying it
mahnd
.

“No, no, go ahead.” She took a pack of Luckies from the purse and lit one. The movement was pure Ida Lupino. But in the match’s flare, I saw that she had ugly hands. The skin was raw and her veins jutted up and she had chewed her nails down close. Then she took a drag and exhaled and the smoke drifted up into the darkness and I forgot the hands and wanted her to teach me everything she knew.

“Sure don’t feel like New Year’s, does it?” she said.

“It sure doesn’t,” I said, wondering
What does my voice sound like?
“How’d you get stuck on this bus tonight, anyway?”

She turned and looked at me. Her eyes were dark brown and lustrous and she looked straight at me. Really
looked
at me. None of that flirting stuff that a thousand generations of women had been taught back home. “How did
you
?” she said, a little annoyed curl in her voice. I smiled and told her I was assigned to Pensacola. That they gave me a Christmas leave but insisted I report to Pensacola on New Year’s Day. She smiled and glanced at my body and turned away and took another drag on the cigarette. I was right: she wasn’t wearing lipstick.