Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [219]
He was quite fixed now in his decision to break with May. Seeing her again had confirmed it. He was certain it was right. He estimated himself, as truthfully as he could and with no great pride in the result, as a rather mediocre middle-class intellectual. His ambition went no further than the life of a gentleman-professor at a gentlemanly university. He wanted a life upholstered with the good things that money bought, and that meant his mother’s or his wife’s money, not university money. He wanted a wife, in the dim future, of his own kind, smooth, sweet, pretty, and educated, with all the small graces of good background and a moneyed family. May Wynn was bright, yes, unbearably attractive, maybe, though not at this moment. She was also vulgar, brassy, and over-perfumed in the show-business way, and she had allowed him all sorts of liberties from the first, and had slept with him. She seemed a little soiled to him, a little cheap; and in every way jagged and wrong for his planned future. And she was a Catholic. May’s disclaimer of any devotion to her faith had not convinced Willie. He was inclined to believe the general notion that Catholics never wholly abandon their religion and are capable of sudden great plunges back into it. He was very unwilling to complicate his life and the lives of his children with such a disturbing possibility.
Whether all this might have been swept away had he come back to a girl triumphant and gorgeous, the star of a hit musical comedy, it is impossible to say. He was at her bedside now in a shabby room in a dirty hotel, and she was sick and messy and broke. The schoolbooks made her seem more pathetic, not more desirable. She had made a bid to reform herself nearer to his tastes, and it had been a feeble failure. It was all finished.
She was sleeping with her mouth open, and her breath came quick, irregular, and noisy. The gray bathrobe had pulled open, uncovering her bosom. The sight made Willie uncomfortable. He pulled the blanket to her chin, and slumped in the armchair, and dozed.
“Am I seeing things?” said Willie, when the cab pulled up in front of the Grotto Club. “Where’s the Tahiti? Where’s the Yellow Door? Isn’t this where-”
“This place used to be the Yellow Door,” said May. “The Tahiti is gone. That Chinese restaurant used to be the Tahiti. Nothing lasts long in this godforsaken street.”
“What happened to Mr. Dennis?”
“Died,” May said, stepping out into the bitter dusty night wind.
She had been subdued and listless through dinner; and listlessly she waved at Willie as she vanished from his sight through the dressing-room curtain. He was amazed when she came out to sing half an hour later. She was fresh-faced and radiant. The customers, crowded in the smoky cellar between narrow walls of papier-mâché rocks interspersed with tanks of gloomy gray fish, listened in silence, and applauded loudly after each number. She acknowledged the applause with gleaming eyes and a genuine girlish smile, and sang on. She performed five numbers with undimming verve, gathered her full green skirt, and swept off the little stage as bouncily as a gymnast. “How does she do it?” he said to Rubin, who had arrived midway in the act, and was pressed beside him on the wall seat behind an infinitesimal table.
“Well, you ought to know, Willie, the show must go on. She’s a pro. The customers aren’t paying any less for their beer because May has