The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [379]
He heard radio jazz from a nearby flat. Nice, hearing music when he was taking it easy like this. All week now, he had kept getting the feeling that it was old times. Mixing and grinding paints, slapping it on after having washed the walls, calcimining ceilings—it had all been something to do that he knew how to do right. If this job wasn’t finished yet, or if only there was another one to do next week. Well, the old man had said he was going down to see Barney McCormack, the politician, and come to a showdown about getting some political contracts. Boy, if the old man got something, wouldn’t that be just too sweet and rosy?
He shaded his eyes, spread his legs out wide, and tried to think of life with no worries on any side, nothing but working, himself and Mort, painting, seeing a dirty wall with the paint peeling, and turning it into a clean and nice and freshly painted wall that filled the room with its smell.
It seemed almost as if a rhythm pulsed in his head while he continued to see himself and Mort working. Just to have things like that, like they used to be, with no real griefs or worries.
But he’d been having heart pains all week, and Thursday night with Catherine he’d gotten one that was like a knife ripping through his chest. He had felt like a clown. And Jesus, think how awful to die from heart failure while you were jazzing your girl. He’d been afraid to look her in the eye after, because she might have thought he was weak and not much of a man. But she liked him. She had kissed him, and stroked his head, and talked that silly chatter to him that girls liked. He was beginning to understand more about girls, though. Once a girl was broken in, she wasn’t to be stopped. And Catherine was learning fast. Thursday night, he’d almost gotten afraid of her, and she had even bit him. He’d never thought he or any guy could make a decent girl like Catherine get so excited. He smiled slightly, and felt that he could hardly wait until tonight when he’d be seeing her again.
She was nuts about him, he thought with gratifying assurance. But she wanted to get married. Somehow it was not right, either, to go on this way. But how could he get married now? Christ, what a chump he had been, hanging on to his stock. Letting Ike Dugan make a chump out of him, that snaky rat. He could just see himself meeting with him, swinging, pounding that skinny, ratty face of his into jelly. And then he’d just say, that puss of yours that I punched, it’s only fluctuations, and you can go and get the brain of Solomon Imbray to fix it up for you and not let it hurt.
He had worked himself into a state of excitement, and he was breathing rapidly and could feel his heart knocking and going like a pump. He tried to relax and calm himself, and to smile about it and tell himself, what the hell, there was no use bawling over spilled milk. It was only that just when things looked like they could go so well for a guy, his luck just turned sour on him.
He listened to slow, sobbing radio music, and the indistinguishable cries of a peddler cut in upon the saccharine flow of music. He lay still on his back and stared up at the white ceiling, and a drowse seemed to lilt through his body, and suddenly he was hearing music again, feeling that period had just been chunked out of his life. He had been lying looking at the ceiling, and suddenly he heard the radio.
I love you, love, you, Merle .. .
The song made him think of French girls, of some excitable young French dame, with a thin body full of live hot wires who said oo-la-la, and ziss, and zat, and zose, and zese, and himself with her. Fun to think of it, but with a real French cherie he wouldn’t maybe know what the hell to say or do. And Catherine. Maybe he had let himself in for something when he’d gotten engaged to her. But then, for years he was going to be getting something regular that he liked, and that, now, was something elegant, all right, and no matter what else happened, that, sister, was something he would get.