Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [47]
After two weeks of it Jack was ready to quit. He could feel the tone deserting his body each morning when he got out of bed—a dull ache here, a thickness there—and he was tired, aw-fully tired, of the way their lives were going: a constant round of movies, dinners, long afternoons in the poolhall or across the bay at the track; bouts of lovemaking that by their very sameness destroyed any desire in him to make them different, coupled—practically glued—to Mona, whose only contribution to the act was to hook her legs around his and give her hips an occasional jerky thrust; who, during the few times he tried to investigate her body with his mouth, cried out in frozen anxiety and pushed his head away, leaving him with the choice of either quitting entirely or going ahead with what now seemed so unattractive; thinking, magnifying, Sue’s response to their one night together, until at last his mind was making a distinction between what he was doing with Mona and what he wanted to do with Sue, as the difference between satisfying an itch and making a discovery. He had never thought about sex in quite that way, and it gave focus to an otherwise endlessly empty round of days, and kept him involved with Denny and the girls when otherwise he might have checked out of the hotel and left them, gone off and done the serious thinking he had come to San Francisco to do in the first place—or so he sometimes thought.
To live intimately with any person, however, is to pursue understanding, and after two weeks Jack felt that he knew more about Mona than there was to her, and since he was not going to release any of the hidden parts of himself to her, there were not even the satisfactions of being understood. Mona was a crafty girl but she was not intelligent in any real way; she had a line of patter to cover almost any situation she could expect, but when the unusual happened, she hid quickly behind a barrier of sarcasm, or a comically old-fashioned morality.
She might come home from an afternoon of movies and shopping on Jack’s money, to find him on the bed naked, a can of beer in his hand, reading Ring Magazine. Nudity offended her.
“My God,” she would say, standing there with an armload of packages, “were you born in a barn or something?”
Jack would not bother to reply, and she would tap her foot angrily for a moment, and then begin undoing her packages.
“Look what I got on sale at the City of Paris,” holding up a forty-dollar cashmere sweater or a cocktail dress.
“Try it on,” Jack would suggest.
“Don’t you even care what it cost me?”
“I gave you a hundred, you spent it all.”
Triumphantly, she would waggle a handful of bills in front of his eyes. “I did not! I’ve still got eighteen-fifty left for tomorrow!”
“Try it on.”
“Close your eyes, now.”
“Oh, Christ.”
She would flounce into the bathroom to try on her new clothes, shoes, gloves, or whatever, and then make an entrance. Jack would stare at her. “That’s very nice on you,” he would say without conviction.
“You don’t like it. Screw you.”
She was right; he didn’t like it, or her. He did not think she looked good in anything. On the other hand, he thought—Sue looked better and better every day. He wanted her. He did not know why he did nothing about it. He wondered why Sue herself did nothing about it. Although they were friendly, Sue made a point of never being alone with him, or giving him secret looks, or even addressing remarks at him.
One morning he woke up to see Mona sitting in the chair by the window, crying into her handkerchief.
“What’s the matter?”
“Oh, never mind.” She was wearing only a slip, and her long hair was hanging down in front. Without makeup, her face looked plain and childlike, but her mouth was twisted in bitterness. “You’ll kick me out,” she said.
“Come on, what is it?”
She admitted tearfully that her period had begun. “You won’t let me stay with you now. I’ll smell bad for a week and you won’t be able to make me.” She