The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [50]
They sat. There seemed to he a silence on the park. Nothing but the wind. Studs could hear his heart beating like it was a noisy clock. He felt as if he was not in Washington Park, but that he and Lucy were in some place else, a some place else that was just not Washington Park, but was better and prettier, and no one else knew of it. He glanced about him. He looked at the grass which slid down to the bank, and at the shrubbery along parts of the lagoon edge. He gazed out at the silver-blue lagoon that was so alive, like it was dancing with the sun. He watched the rowboats, the passing people. He took squints at everything from different angles, and watched how their appearances would change, and they would look entirely different. He listened to the sounds of the park, and it seemed as if they were all, somehow, part of himself, and he was part of them, and them and himself were free from the drag of his body that had aches and dirty thoughts, and got sick, and could only be in one place at a time. He listened. He heard the wind. Far away, kids were playing, and it was nice to hear the echoes of their shouts, like music was sometimes nice to hear; and birds whistled, and caroled, and chirped, and hummed. It was all new-strange, and he liked it. He told Lucy it was swell, sitting in the park, way up in a tree. Lucy said yes, it was perfectly grand. Studs said: YEAH!
“It’s so lovely here,” she said, leaning toward him, puckering her lips.
Studs looked at her. Without knowing what he was doing, he kissed her. It was all-swell to kiss Lucy, and it was different from a game where she had to kiss him, and everybody was kissing everybody else. And she kissed him with her red lips in a queer sweet way; and he kept telling himself that it was fine to kiss her. In the movies, and in the magazines, which he sometimes read, the fellow always kissed the girl at the end of the story or the picture, and the kiss always seemed to mean so much, and to be so much nicer, and to have so much more to it than ordinary kisses. Kissing Lucy was getting a kiss like that. And it made him feel... all-swell.
And everything just kept on being perfectly jake, not spoiling it there with him and Lucy. They sat. There he was, and there was Lucy, swinging her legs, singing The Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and it was nice, and he told himself that no afternoon in his whole life had been like this one, not even the afternoon after he had licked the stuffings out of Weary Reilley. He had felt sick from the fight then, and the gang had all been around and made things a lot different from now, with himself and Lucy sharing and owning all the niceness themselves. And he had a feeling that this was a turning point in his life, and from now on everything was going to be jake. He had always felt that some time something would happen to him, and it was the thing that was going to make his whole life different; and this afternoon was just what was going to turn the trick; it was Lucy. Living was going to be swell now, and different from and nicer than it had ever been before. The only thing the matter with it all was that it couldn’t last forever. That was the way things were; they ended, just when they began to be most jake.
A bird cooed above them. He usually thought it was sissified to listen or pay attention to such things as birds singing; it was crazy, like being a guy who studied music, or read too many books, or wrote poems and painted pictures. But now he listened; it was nice; he told himself how nice it was.
If some of the kids knew what he was doing and thinking, they’d laugh their ears off at him. Well, if they did, let ‘em; he could kick a lot of mustard out of the whole bunch of ‘em. He gazed up at the bird. Some white stuff dropped on him, and somehow, seeing the bird that sang like this one doing that, well, it kind of hurt