The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [393]
“Come on, Hal, let’s go in,” a female voice behind him was saying.
“Darling, please,” a man said.
“What’s the matter, Connie, did Hal soak up too much moonshine last night?” another male voice asked.
“That wasn’t all. We went to a party at Joe’s and he and Joe’s wife, Martha, hit it off swell. So he took her to his bed and board for the night, and Martha must be more wearing on a man than I am.”
“Well, now, darling, it isn’t that. It was just the liquor.”
“Say, Connie, how about you and I trading off our mates for a night?”
“All right. But I’m taking a plunge now.”
Studs and Catherine watched the one called Connie, a heftily constructed woman in a black bathing suit, run by them, followed by a bronzed-shouldered man in a two-piece blue-and-white suit.
“Terrible people, if you ask me,” Catherine said, frowning disapproval.
“It’s a funny way they talk,” Studs said, puzzled by the conversation he had heard.
What the hell kind of a guy was it who’d let his wife play like that? Boy, he’d sock such a wife’s teeth out and slam the crap out of the guy.
“That talk was just terrible. Why, I never even thought that there were people like that in the world. They ought to be arrested,” Catherine said in a low but shocked voice.
“Yeh.”
“The idea of it,” she added with growing indignation.
He shook his head and asked himself how was it now, and how did it come about that he was marrying Catherine when she seemed to him suddenly like a stranger he could never know. And that a child of his was, at this very minute, growing inside of her. He scratched his puzzled head. He felt alone, so completely alone that it seemed as if there were no one near him. All these people, too, strangers. He closed his eyes and held in his mind the naked image of Catherine, and he imagined her with him in that act that was supposed to make a guy and a girl so close, and still she seemed a stranger, and he still felt all alone. His thoughts and feelings were padlocked, completely padlocked in his mind, and when he talked, most of the time, instead of expressing them he was using words to prevent himself from letting them out, fooling people by putting into their minds a picture of himself that was not at all Studs Lonigan.
He lay back, resting his head in cupped hands, looking at the sky, almost pale blue, while clouds floated so slowly, the sun glaring through it. He became light-headed, and thought of what a big place the world was after all, and he was sort of lost in it. He felt that he had always been like this. Ever since he had been a kid, he had wished and waited, and there had been no change except for the worst. He tried to laugh at this thought as if it were a wisecrack, but he couldn’t, because it was too important to him. He had met lots of new people, become almost thirty years old, lost his health, and now he was getting married and going to have a kid of his own. And what change would there be after he got married? He’d already gotten it enough from her to know what it was like, and maybe after the kid she might get fat and...He glanced sidewise at her. He liked it with her, though, and wished it was dark now and they were together, and still... oh, Christ Almighty! He was just a goddamn chump trying to figure too much out.
“Let’s go in,” he said after jumping up sprightly.
She offered him her hand and laughed while he pulled her to her feet. He dragged her swiftly to the water edge, determining to make her get exercise, and he was thinking that, all things considered, she was a damn good egg. They stopped with their feet in the water, breathing quickly. Still holding her hand, he suddenly asked himself who the hell he was, wanting so damn much, and thinking she wasn’t enough for him. He was small and became ashamed of his body and his size, and he wished he were a six-foot handsome bastard, built like a full-back, attracting the attention of the crowd of bathers. He splashed into the water.
III
With pain, he sensed a world that was black and twirling, and with grooves