The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [122]
There were the hotel parties with field officers and congenital lower-level brass, the American Legion -- Washington Extension, and big small-business men with nice factories in Indiana, and call girls. A desperate boredom always lay over those things until they got drunk, and then they all had a wonderful time, and went back with refreshed loins and new Pullman tales to their desks in Washington and Indiana. Sometimes, if you could get a hold of a representative who was a regular guy he would come along, and your business would be consummated with a couple of drunken bear hugs, a sentimental cognition that everybody was a hell of a good guy, and a call girl yelling into your ear, "Break it up, honey, break it up." His father had never mentioned it, but of course he had gone to that kind of party too.
There were the parties his own friends gave, with the quiet sustained drinking and essential joylessness. All the American college intellectuals, the ones who weren't sick, with their clear logical voices, their good manners, their kindness, their tact and their miserable, dreary and lucid intelligences. They were all in government now, or they wore bars and had hush-hush jobs, and they talked of Roger who had been lost on some OSS mission, or they analyzed politics, sometimes hopefully, sometimes sadly, with a detached and helpless and intrinsically superior attitude. There was good wit, incisive but always peripheral information, and the dry dejuiced hopelessness of all of them with their rational desiccated minds and their wistful contemplation of lusts and evils they would never understand with their bodies. William Blake angels, gray and clear, hovering over horseshit.
And Dove's parties. But of course they were common to San Francisco and Chicago and Los Angeles and New York at times. The American Legion -- Washington Extension, Junior Auxiliary. Only with something more. Give it credit. In a proper light with proper glasses, these parties were sometimes magical and sad, festooned with all the echoes of all the trains that had brought them there, all the advance awarenesses of the great hollow stations that would bear them away again, And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phony. It came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn't have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them. And they did magical things like pouring whisky on each other's hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmen. Of all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too old.
". . . and damn if we didn't find out she had hair growing clear up her belly," Conn said, finishing a story.
Dove laughed. "If Jane knew the things I've done."
Their talk had ended by revolting him. He was becoming a prude, Hearn decided. He was disgusted and there wasn't sufficient cause for it. Slowly he extended his arms and legs, lowered himself gradually to the ground, feeling the muscle tension in his stomach. There had been an instant when he was tempted to hug Conn and Dove with his arms, and rather deliberately