The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [178]
Maybe. And he wonders, feels the stirrings of the deeper urge. I want to think about it.
Everything is lousy, so at least why not do it in a big way?
He meets Sally Tendecker Randolph at a party, talks to her in a corner.
Oh, sure, Bob, I'm domesticated now. Two children, and Don (a prep-school classmate) is putting on weight, you won't recognize him. It brings back memories looking at you.
After the preliminaries they have a casual affair and he drifts around on the outskirts of her group for a month, and then two. (The few weeks have elongated.)
An odd setup. They are nearly all married with one or two children and governesses and the children are sometimes seen at bedtime. There is a migratory party almost every night from house to house along Lake Shore Drive, and the wives and husbands are always mixed, always drunk. It is all done in a random, rather irritable kind of lust, and the petting is more frequent than the cuckolding.
And once a week or so there is usually a nice public quarrel, or a drunken bathos which grates his spine.
Now look, old man, Don Randolph says to him, you and Sally used to be great friends, maybe you are still by God I don't know (the drunken accusing stare) but the truth is Sally and I love each other, a great passion, I've been fooling around and I'm a dog, woman in our office, and Alec Johnson's wife, Beverly, you were there you saw us coming back in the car, stopped off at her house, oh God, wonderful, but I'm a dog, no moral fiber, and I'm. . . I'm. . . (starting to weep) Wonderful children, Sally's a bitch to them. He stands up, lumbers along the dance floor to separate Sally from her partner.
Stop drinking.
Go away, Don dear.
The Randolphs are at it again, someone giggles. And the thing lurches in his head, and Hearn discovers he is drunk.
You remember me, Bob, Sally says, you know what capabilities I have, what talent. I tell you there's nothing can stop me, but Don's impossible, he'd like to keep me in a rut, and my Lord he's perverted, the things I could tell you about him, and sullen, we went a month and a half one time without touching each other, and you know really he's no good in the business, my father much as told me that, it's just tied down with children and nothing really, you know nothing really I mean definite I can get my teeth into, if I were a man, and I have to make an appointment to get braces for Dorothy's teeth, and I'm always worried about cancer, you can't imagine what a deep worry that is for a woman, somehow I just don't keep up with things, once there was an Air Corps lieutenant, young but really very nice, very sweet, oh, but so naïve, you can't imagine how old I feel, I envy you, Bob, if I were a man.
He knows this thing will not take either, the Lake Shore and conventions and entertaining men who bore him, the rigidity of an office, and eluding his mother's matches, transforming the impulse into carloads and contacts, the campaign contributions and representatives, senators, who are amenable, the Pullman cars, and the tennis courts, the absorption in golf, the particular hotels, and the odor of liquor and carpeting in a suite. Behind it there is the primal satisfaction, but he has learned too many other things on the way.
New York again, and a job doing copy for a radio network, but this is a stopgap and he knows it. Rather abstractedly, without any deep feeling, he does a lot of work for Bundles for Britain, and follows the newspaper headlines of the advance on Moscow, thinks not very seriously of joining the party. At night sometimes he throws off his covers and lies naked on his bed feeling the late fall air eddy through the window, listening with a somber ache to the harbor sounds that float in on the fog. A month before Pearl Harbor he enlists in the Army.
On the troop transport, which