The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [211]
What'd you think of it? The Colonel nudges him.
Oh, it was. . . But he cannot find the words. It has been too immense, too shattering. The long dry battles of the textbooks come alive for him, mass themselves in his mind. He can only think of the man who has ordered the attack, and he pictures him with wonder. What. . . courage. The responsibility. (For want of a richer word he picks up the military expression.)
There were all those men, and there had been someone above them, ordering them, changing perhaps forever the fiber of their lives. In the darkness he looks blankly at the field, tantalized by the largest vision that has ever entered his soul.
There were things one could do.
To command all that. He is choked with the intensity of his emotion, the rage, the exaltation, the undefined and mighty hunger.
He returns a captain (temporary), is promoted and demoted in the same order, made first lieutenant (permanent). There is his marriage with Margaret against the subtle opposition of her parents, the brief honeymoon, and they settle down at an Army post, drift in the pleasantly vacant circle of parties and Saturday night dances at the officers' club.
Their lovemaking is fantastic for a time:
He must subdue her, absorb her, rip her apart and consume her.
This motif is concealed for a month or two, clouded over by their mutual inexperience, by the strangeness, the unfamiliarity, but it must come out eventually. And for a half year, almost a year, they have love passages of intense fury, enraged and powerful, which leave him sobbing from exhaustion and frustration on her breast.
Do you love me, are you mine, love me.
Yes yes.
I'll take you apart, I'll eat you, oh, I'll make you mine, I'll make you mine, you bitch.
And surprising profanity, words he is startled to hear himself speak.
Margaret is kindled by it, exalted for a time, sees it as passion, glows and becomes rounded, but only for a time. After a year it is completely naked, apparent to her, that he is alone, that he fights out battles with himself upon her body, and something withers in her. There is all the authority she has left, the family and the Boston streets and the history hanging upon them, and she has left it, to be caught in a more terrifying authority, a greater demand.
This is all of course beneath words, would be unbearable if it were ever said, but their marriage re-forms, assumes a light and hypocritical companionship with a void at the center, and very little love-making now, painfully isolated when it occurs. He retreats from her, licks his wounds, and twists in the circle beyond which he cannot break. Their social life becomes far more important.
She busies herself with running her house, keeping a list of the delicate debits and credits of entertainment and visiting. It always takes them two hours to figure out the list for their monthly party.
Once they spend a week wondering if they can invite the General to their house, discuss the elaborate arguments on either side. They conclude it would be in bad taste, might hurt them even if he came, but a few nights later Captain Cummings wrestles with the problem again, wakes up at dawn and knows it is a chance he must take.
They plan it very carefully, picking a weekend when the General has no obligations and it seems as if none will develop. From the General's house orderly, Margaret finds out which foods he likes; at a post dance she talks to the General's wife for twenty minutes, discovers an acquaintance of her father's whom the General knows.
They send out the invitations and the General accepts. There is the nervous preceding week, the tension at the party. The General walks in, stands about at the buffet table, picking not without zeal at the smoked turkey, the shrimp for which she has sent to Boston.
It is finally a success and the General smiles at Cummings mistily, pleased with his eighth Scotch, the puffed and tufted furniture (he had been expecting maple), the sharp sweet bite of the shrimp sauce through the fur of drinking. When he says good-bye