The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [353]
Women like her, and a girl like Catherine, now there was all the difference in the world between them. After being with her, and then thinking of a girl like Catherine, a guy wanted to go and fumigate himself. But what the hell? Just as Slug Mason had always said, tail was tail. Catherine didn’t know about it, and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. If she wanted to be tough, as she had last night, let her, and then she could see what she was going to lose. Lighting a cigarette, he thought that this was a just revenge on her.
He stopped at a newspaper stand at Seventy-first Street, bought a paper, quickly opened to the day’s stock-market quotations. Eight and a half. Hell, wouldn’t it ever go up? Hardly any use now in selling it, losing so much dough.
The street was alive with people, women rushing through their last-minute marketing, people coming home from work. Suppose one of these men coming along was George Jackson. Nice surprise for Georgie.
Catherine. Was she home yet? What was she doing at this minute? And that broad, he wished he hadn’t seen her, a broad who would do as lousy a thing as that made a guy feel contaminated. Still trying to kid himself. He’d wanted her, and he’d gotten just what he needed, and she was better than a whore. Catherine, though, was she home yet? Didn’t she really give a damn about him? Had she meant the things she’d said to him last night? He couldn’t make up his mind about it, or about her. Call her up? Forget her?
And now that the day was finished, he had to get through the night. Christ, things sometimes got dull for a guy.
But maybe she’d call up after supper, and he’d go over and see her. He thought she would. She really cared for him. Maybe when he got home there would already be a message for him from her.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
Was it going to turn out the same way as it had with Lucy? There had been a little scrap, and he’d waited for something to happen and for Lucy to take the first step, and days had dragged into months, and then it was about two years gone by and one day he discovered that she had moved. It was already three days since the quarrel with Catherine, and no word. He didn’t want it to drag along and die out as it had with Lucy.
Since then, he would feel free and forget her, and then he wouldn’t want to feel free, and the thought of her would pop right back in his mind. Then he would want to call her up, but he wouldn’t because it might seem like he was crawling back, ready to eat dirt. So he had just had it on his mind, the fight, thinking of how they would act about making up, how they would get along better after they made up, and he would go off all over again into day dreams, and they would be busted wide open in disappointment with the question, What was he going to do about it?
He walked over to the parlor window, looked out at the street, wet and gloomy under the raw day, and he guessed he would just have to sit around home and not do much of anything. An automobile sloshed by. He stared at a space of blackened pavement, seeing the rain patter on it. He watched a man in a tan raincoat hasten by. A woman wearing a bright green raincoat came out of the apartment hotel building, buried her head under an umbrella, half ran in a clumsy, feminine way.
He turned away from the window, yawning, feeling imprisoned. And the damn gloomy weather made him feel twice as rotten. He looked wistfully at the crumpled copy of the morning paper, regretting that he had already read it. He picked up a copy of The Argosy Magazine, slumped in his father’s chair, fitfully glanced through it until he came to a story of secret-service men who thwarted an effort of Chinese and shaggy-bearded Bolsheviki to blow up the Panama Canal. He read on, how the hero took a general’s daughter into his arms, kissed her, and in the last paragraph they stood by a steamer rail, looking shoreward at the