The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [92]
"Nevertheless, you make the decisions and they work out or they don't."
There was something unclean about having a conversation like this, while somewhere out on the front a man might be rigid with terror in his foxhole. Hearn's voice was a little shrill as if that terror were somehow communicated to him. "How do you work out something like this? You have men who have been away from America for a year and a half. How can you calculate whether it's better so many be killed and the rest get home faster, or they all stay over here, and go to pot, and have their wives cheat on them. How do you tot up something like that?"
"The answer is, I don't concern myself with that." The General ticked his beard again with his fingernail. He spoke after a little hesitation. "What's the matter, Hearn? I didn't know you were married."
"I'm not."
"Leave a girl behind, get a Dear John?"
"No, there're no loose ends in back of me."
"Then why all this concern about women 'cheating'? It's in their nature to do that."
Hearn grinned with a sudden relish, a little amazed at his own audacity. "What's the matter, sir, speaking from personal experience?" He remembered immediately afterward that the General was married, apparently a piece of minor information, for the General had never spoken about it, and he had learned it from some other officer. He regretted the statement he had just made, however.
"Maybe from personal experience, maybe," the General said. His voice changed abruptly. "I'd like you to remember, Robert, that every liberty you take is with my sufferance. I think you went a little too far."
"I'm sorry."
"You can shut up."
Hearn was silent, watching the General's face, which was remote. His eyes had contracted, looked almost as if they were supporting something about ten inches from his face. Two spots of white had formed beneath his lower lip, almost directly under the corners of his mouth.
"The truth is, Robert, my wife is a bitch."
"Oh."
"She's done just about everything she could to humiliate me."
Hearn was amazed, and then revolted. That self-pity had appeared again in Cummings's voice. You didn't go around telling things like that, at least not in that tone of voice. Apparently, there was the General and there was the General. "Well, I'm sorry, sir," he mumbled at last.
The Coleman lantern was dying, and its flickers threw long shifting diagonals of light through the tent. "Are you, Robert, are you really? Does anything ever touch you?" For that single instant the General's voice was naked. But he extended his arm and adjusted the lantern again. "You know you're really inhuman," the General said.
"Perhaps."
"You never grant a thing, do you?"
Was that what he meant? Hearn stared into his eyes, which were luminous at the moment, almost beseeching. He had an intuition that if he remained motionless long enough the General would slowly extend his arm, touch his knee perhaps. No, that was ridiculous.
But Hearn stood up with a sudden agitated motion, and walked a few steps to the other end of the tent, where he stood motionless for a moment, staring at the General's cot.
His cot. No, get away from there, before Cummings grabbed that interpretation. He wheeled around, and looked at the General who had not moved, had sat like a large and petrified bird, waiting. . . waiting for what must be indefinable.
"I don't know what you mean, General." His voice fortunately was crisp.
"It doesn't matter." The General looked at his hands. "If you have to take a leak, Robert, for God's sake go outside and stop pacing around."
"Yes, sir."
"We never did finish that argument."
This was better. "Well, what do you want me to admit, that you're a God?"
"You know, if there is a God, Robert, he's just like me."
"Uses the common denominator techniques."
"Exactly."
Now, they could talk talk talk. And yet for the moment they were quiet. Between them at this instant was the uncomfortable awkward realization that