The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [170]
And he has a girl friend, a great catch, the young beauty at this summer colony. Miss Sally Tendecker of Lake Shore Drive, and the inescapable connotations to come of Christmas holidays, and fur coats, perfume, and college dances in the hue-titled rooms of the big hotels.
Bob, you drive faster than anybody I know, you're going to kill yourself one of these days.
Uh-huh. He's slow at speech with women yet, absorbed for the instant in negotiating the turn. His Buick swings out wide to the left, resists, struggles against going to the right, and then straightens from the turn. There had been panic for a second, and then relief, exultation as he goes streaming down the straightaway.
I declare you're a wild man, Bob Hearn.
I don't know.
What goes on in your head, Bob?
He parks the car off the highway, turns to her with a sudden abrupt outpouring of speech. I don't know, Sally, sometimes I think. . . but that isn't true, I just get all worked up, and I stew around, and I don't want to do anything, I'm going to Harvard just 'cause my father said something about Yale, and I don't know, there's things, there's something else, I can't put my finger on it, I don't want to be pushed, I don't know.
She laughs. Oh, you're a crazy boy, Bob, I guess that's why all we girls love you.
You love me?
Just listen to him talk. Why, of course I do, Bobby. Across from him on the leather seat cushions, her perfume is a little too strong, a little too mature for a girl of seventeen. And he senses the truth beneath her banter, moves over to kiss her with his heart beating. Only back of it is the forecast of dates at all the holidays, of college weekends, and the identification with this summer resort, and the green lawns in the suburbs, and the conversations with his father's friends, the big wedding.
You know I can't plan on anything if I'm going to be a doctor, because you know eight years, ten years, it's a long time.
Bob Hearn, you're conceited. What do you think I care? You're too conceited, that's all.
Now, son, now that you're going away to college, there's some things I want to be talking to you about, we don't get much of a chance to say much to each other but, what the hell, we're pretty good buddies I always like to think, and now that you're going to college, just remember that you can always depend on me. There's gonna be some women, what the hell, you wouldn't be my son if there weren't, not since I been married of course -- a patent lie which both of them ignore -- but if you get in any trouble you can always depend on me, what the hell, my old man used to tell me you get in any trouble with any of the mill girls, you just let me know -- the embarrassing ambiguity of the grandfather who has been sometimes a farmer, sometimes a factory owner -- so that goes for you too, Bob, and remember it's always easier, always more natural to buy a woman off than to get in any alliances with her, so you just let me know, letter marked personal is okay.
All right.
And as for being a doctor, well, that's okay, we got lots of friends here, we can set you up in a decent practice, buy into some old quack who's ready to retire.
I want to do research.
Research. Listen, Bobbo, there isn't a man you know, not one of our acquaintances who can't buy and sell a carload of research men, that's just some damn fool idea you picked up somewhere, and you're gonna change your mind, I can tell you that right now. The way I really look at it, your mother and me, is that you'll end up in the business, which is where you belong anyway.
No.
Well, I ain't gonna argue with you, you're just a damn fool kid anyway, you'll change your mind.
He flounders through the first weeks of freshman year, walks in bewilderment through the Yard. Everyone knows so much more than he does here -- there is an instinctive resistance to them -- the left-handed remnant of the humus around the mushroom stem -- everyone talks flippantly of things he had thought about in the privacy of his own room, his own head.
His roommate cozens him, product of another