Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [55]
And she must have felt the same way, because if there was ever an easy lay she was it that day. But she said on the way home: If you ever tell anybody this I ll kill you. I mean it. And you could see she did. And she refused to see him again and told him never to call her up or try to see her. She was a little sorry, what she had done, but he could not be sure that even that was not putting on an act. He often thought of it. He thought of it now, watching her watching Dutch dancing with Emily Ziegenfuss, with his leg rammed in between the Ziegenfuss woman s legs and trying to make out as if he was just dancing like anyone else. The son of a bitch. Frannie was all right. Al liked Frannie. But that Dutch he d like to paste him one. That was the trouble: women (he did not call them women, or girls, but another name which he used for all female persons except nuns) nearly always got the dirty end of the stick. Only once in a while they got a right guy, like Fliegler, for instance. Then he began to feel a little angry at Irma Fliegler. He wondered whether she appreciated what a right guy she was married to. Probably not. She probably just took him for granted. That was the other side of it: a woman married a louse that beat her and cheated on her, and she got so she took that for granted; and another woman married a real guy, a square shooter from the word go, and she didn’t see anything unusual about that. Al almost but not quite reached the opinion that all women are so used to getting the dirty end of the stick that they took it for granted when they did get it, and took for granted they were going to get it when they didn t. The hell with them. He wanted to forget about them. But that was not possible here, at the Stage Coach. It was a woman s place. All dance places, night clubs, road houses, stores, churches, and even whorehouses all were women s places. And probably the worst kind of woman s place was a place like this, where men put on monkey suits and cut their necks with stiff collars and got drunk without the simple fun of getting drunk but with the presence of women to louse things up. Wherever there was an orchestra there were women, you could always be sure of that. Women singing the first words Of songs: I got rhythm, Three little words, You’re driving me crazy, Thinking of you dear, My heart is sad and lonely for you I pine for you dear only I d gladly surrender. Surrender my ass! said Al Grecco, and looked across his table at Helene Holman, whom he hated now a thousand times worse than he ever had hated anyone in his whole life. All evening long he had been hating. In the early part of the evening he had hated the job Ed Charney had given him, the job of keeping tabs on Helene. She knew what he was there for all right, and she took it out on him, she took it out on him that Ed was staying home with his kid. And wife. She was the only person he could think of who had open contempt for him, and tonight it was worse than ever. This is a swell way for you to be spending Christmas, she said. And went on from there; why didn’t he get himself fixed up? What kind of a life did he lead? Was he nothing but a yes-man? Was he a unique? Did he know what a unique was? A unique, she told him, was a morphadite. & And he had had to take it for a couple of hours, getting no rest from her except when she would get up to sing a song. But then along about ten or eleven she began to lose her spunk. She got a little tired of panning him and she took a different attitude. She was wearing a dress that was cut in front so he could all but see her belly-button, but the material, the satin or whatever it was, it held close to her body so that when she stood up she only showed about a third of each breast. But when she was sitting down across the table from him she leaned forward with her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, and that loosened the dress so that whenever she made a move he could see the nipples of her breasts. She saw him looking he couldn’t help looking. And she smiled. You wouldn’t want to get your teeth knocked