The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [144]
He reread the last paragraph when he had finished. "Roy, honey, this'll be the last letter I'll write for a coupel of days, the pain started just a little while ago, and Jamie went down to get Dr Newcome. I'm awful scared cawse he said I'm going to have a hard time, but dont worrie cawse everything will be alright, I know it. I wish you could be with me, you got to take awful good care of youeself cawse I would be afraide to be alone. I love you so much, honey."
He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket. He felt a dull ache, his forehead was burning. For several minutes he did not think of anything at all, and then he spat bitterly. Aaah, the fuggin women, that's all they know, love, I love you, honey, just want to hold a man down. He trembled again; he was remembering the frustrations and annoyances of his marriage for the first time in many months. All a woman wants is to get a man and then she goes to pot, to hell with it all. He was thinking of how wan Mary looked in the morning, and how the left side of her jaw would swell in sleep. Incidents, unpleasant fragments of their life churned turgidly in his brain like a pot of thick stew coming to a boil. She used to wear a tight hair net in the house, and always of course her habit of sitting around in a slip which had a frayed edge. Worst of all was something he had never quite admitted to himself; the walls of the bathroom were thin and he could hear the sounds she made. She had faded in the three years they had been married. She didn't take the right care of herself, he thought bitterly. At this moment he hated the memory of her, hated the suffering she had caused him in the past few weeks. Always that love-dove stuff, and they don't give a fug how they look. He spat again. Don't even have any. . . any manners. He meant "modesty." Gallagher thought of Mary's mother, who was fat and very dowdy and he felt an inarticulate rage at a variety of things -- at the very fact that she was so immense, at the lack of money that had made him live in a tiny drab apartment, at all the breaks he had never got, because his wife in dying had caused him so much pain. Never get a goddam thing. He thought of Hennessey and his mouth tightened. Get your head blown off. . . for what, for what? He lit a cigarette, and tossed the match away, looking at where it fell in the sand. Goddam Yids, fight a war for them. He thought of Goldstein. Bunch of fug-ups, lose a goddam gun, won't even take a drink when it's free. He lurched to his feet, and began to walk again. A dull pain and hatred beat through his head.
On the beach giant kelp had washed ashore, and he walked down to the water's edge and looked at it. It was dark brown and very long, perhaps fifty feet, and its dark rubbery skin glistened like snakes, and gave him a jolt of horror. He was remembering the bodies in the cave. "What drunken bastards we were," he said. He was remorseful, or more correctly he generated remorse in himself because he felt he had done something bad. The kelp frightened him -- he walked away.
After a few hundred yards, he sat down on the top of a dune which looked out to sea. A storm was coming up, and he felt suddenly cold; a great cloud perhaps thirty miles long, shaped like a flat fish and very dark, had covered most of the sky. A wind had sprung up and was lashing the sand in horizontal sheets along the beach. Gallagher sat there