The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [335]
“Listen, I wish you’d snap out of it. I don’t want fights, and don’t like them,” he said low, leaning over the table toward her, feeling like a clown with the two guys at the counter watching them and listening.
Singin’ in the bathtub, happy once again,
Watchin’ all my troubles go swingin’ down the drain,
Singin’ through the soapsuds, life is full of hope .. .
“Yes, you don’t like fights. You’re a gentleman, too. Yes, a gentleman. You’ve hardly spoken a word to me all night, and you let me take off my coat, and sit down ahead of me. I know... You think you’ve won me, so I can be ignored. Well, I tell you this, I can play the same tune as you can, and just as long, too.”
“Gee, is that all it is?” he smiled, but carefully so as not to give her grounds for thinking that he was laughing at her.
Catherine pouted, and stabbed at her pie with a fork. Studs concentrated on his pie and milk, and felt a tenseness hanging between them like a curtain dividing two sides of the table.
Reachin’ for a towel, ready for a rub,
Everybody’s happy when singing in the tub.
Studs looked up at her prepared to smile if she did, or if she gave a sign. She held her eyes on her pie, sipped coffee with the pout remaining on her plumply pretty face. He shrugged his shoulders and thought to himself, the goddamn women, how in hell could a guy please and satisfy them, and what the hell did they expect? Didn’t he have enough serious stuff on his mind without this silliness?
“You’re unbearable and insufferable,” she said with excessive spite.
“What’s eating you?” he countered, stunned by the unexpectedness of her remark.
“Eating me? What’s eating me? I’ll tell you what’s eating me without any waste of words. You!”
“Oh, I am, am I? Well, isn’t that just too bad!” he said, unwittingly raising his voice, attracting amused glances from the counter and other tables, flushing because they were putting on a show for strangers.
“You needn’t tell the whole world, either. First, you insult me. Then you try to make a public disgrace of me,” she said in a muffled but angry voice.
Hell, he guessed women just couldn’t listen to reason. He finished eating in silence and waiting for her, smoking in assumed nonchalance.
Little brooklets breaking free,
Work their way down. to the sea.
He smirked fatuously, and, catching him, she looked back in disgust, and he hadn’t really meant it, either. With her last drink of coffee, she flounced up, grabbed her coat and stamped out of the restaurant. Feeling like a fool, he arose, laid a quarter under his cup. He could notice that the lads at the counter were laughing quietly. He laid another dime on the table, and put on his coat with determined nonchalance.
Birdies sing in cages, too,
They know that’s the thing to do...
He paid the bill.
“Goodnight,” the proprietor said cheerfully.
“Goodnight,” he said, hurrying out, seeming almost to feel eyes and laughter on his back.
Catherine was energetically walking along Seventy-first Street, her high heels rapping on the sidewalk. Hastening, he caught up with her and strode along at her left, breathing rapidly.
It was clear and pleasant out, and he glanced absently up at the skies, seeing star galaxies as if he were discovering them. It was nice. But he’d get a stiff neck and look like a sap walking along with his hands in his pockets and his eyes raised this way. Ahead, he saw the sidewalk, the red lanterns hanging from . the railroad gates which pointed almost vertically from the street, buildings with darkened stores along the street. His mind wandered to his stocks. He forgot that she was beside him. A frail breeze tickled his neck pleasantly. He became aware