One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey [82]
He tries to laugh, and his two slim ivory fingers dip into his shirt pocket for cigarettes, fidget around getting the last one from the package. The cigarette shakes as he places it between his lips. He and his wife haven’t moved toward each other yet.
McMurphy heaves up out of his chair and pulls his cap off as he walks over. Harding’s wife looks at him and smiles, lifting one of her eyebrows. “Afternoon, Miz Harding,” McMurphy says.
She smiles back bigger than before and says, “I hate Mrs. Harding, Mack; why don’t you call me Vera?”
They all three sit back down on the couch where Harding was sitting, and he tells his wife about McMurphy and how McMurphy got the best of the Big Nurse, and she smiles and says that it doesn’t surpise her a bit. While Harding’s telling the story he gets enthusiastic and forgets about his hands, and they weave the air in front of him into a picture clear enough to see, dancing the story to the tune of his voice like two beautiful ballet women in white. His hands can be anything. But as soon as the story’s finished he notices McMurphy and his wife are watching the hands, and he traps them between his knees. He laughs about this, and his wife says to him, “Dale, when are you going to learn to laugh instead of making that mousy little squeak?”
It’s the same thing that McMurphy said about Harding’s laugh on that first day, but it’s different somehow; where McMurphy saying it calmed Harding down, her saying it makes him more nervous than ever.
She asks for a cigarette, and Harding dips his fingers in his pocket again and it’s empty. “We’ve been rationed,” he says, folding his thin shoulders forward like he was trying to hide the half-smoked cigarette he was holding, “to one pack a day. That doesn’t seem to leave a man any margin for chivalry, Vera my dearest.”
“Oh Dale, you never do have enough, do you?”
His eyes take on that sly, fevered skittishness as he looks at her and smiles. “Are we speaking symbolically, or are we still dealing with the concrete here-and-now cigarettes? No matter; you know the answer to the question, whichever way you intended it.”
“I didn’t intend nothing by it except what I said, Dale—”
“You didn’t intend anything by it, sweetest; your use of ‘didn’t’ and ‘nothing’ constitutes a double negative. McMurphy, Vera’s English rivals yours for illiteracy. Look, honey, you understand that between ‘no’ and ‘any’ there is—”
“All right! That’s enough! I meant it both ways. I meant it any way you want to take it. I meant you don’t have enough of nothing period!”
“Enough of anything, my bright little child.”
She glares at Harding a second, then turns to McMurphy sitting beside her. “You, Mack, what about you. Can you handle a simple little thing like offering a girl a cigarette?”
His package is already lying in his lap. He looks down at it like he wishes it wasn’t, then says, “Sure I always got cigarettes. Reason is, I’m a bum. I bum them whenever I get the chance is why my pack lasts longer than Harding’s here. He smokes only his own. So you can see he’s more likely to run out than—”
“You don’t have to apologize for my inadequacies, my friend. It neither fits your character nor complements mine.”
“No, it doesn’t,” the girl says. “All you have to do is light my cigarette.”
And she leans so far forward to his match that even clear across the room I could see down her blouse.
She talks some more about some of Harding’s friends who she wishes would quit dropping around the house looking for him. “You know the type, don’t you, Mack?” she says. “The hoity-toity boys with the nice long hair combed so perfectly and the limp little wrists that flip so nice.” Harding asks her if it was only him that they were dropping around to see, and she says any man that drops around to see her flips more than his damned limp wrists.
She stands suddenly and