Young Lonigan - James T. Farrell [373]
He looked around the darkened room as if to fasten his attention on something that would make him forget what he couldn’t just now forget. He heard footsteps outside, a telephone ringing in the flat upstairs, and he felt, again, removed from all the world with her burying her head against him, his skin wet from her tears. Would he ever be able to look her in the eye again? He had acted with her the same as with a whore or that Jackson bitch. And Catherine had been decent. This was the same way, the same way, too, it seemed with any girl, except that Catherine had been hurt, and she had been so stirred and excited by him that she had trembled and quivered. Never before had he done that to a decent girl. It made him proud, and again his pride left him.
“Kid,” he said gruffly.
“Yes, darling.”
“I’m sorry.”
She lay against him, stroking his legs. They fell asleep for a while. She awakened, jumped up, ran to the dining room, returned.
“Bill, Bill. It’s nine-thirty. Hurry up or the folks will find us like this.”
She pressed the wall electric button, and they saw each other naked in the light. Mutually embarrassed, they dressed. Studs thought of love songs he was always hearing on the radio. Secrets divine I am sharing with you. Like love, you gayly come and go. And this was the way it had turned out. He turned away from her in her slip, so that she would not see him buttoning his trousers.
Ugh. Jesus Christ.
V
“Goodbye, darling,” she said, kissing him possessively.
He left, still in a state of uncertainty. She would get up in the morning knowing that she was no longer a virgin. And all because of him. No girl had ever cared that much for him before. She had proven she cared for him. Or had it been that she’d gotten too excited? Girls were only human beings, and Catherine was twenty-five, and by this time she should have been curious to know what it felt like.
It was clear out and he sensed a hanging darkness in the atmosphere. He saw himself as a man with experience, and he felt that the things he had just gone through these last few days had been dramatic, things that might have happened in a movie. Experiences that would make plenty of fellows envy him.
But his pride suddenly went out of him like a punctured balloon. He remembered the way Catherine had squirmed, strained in pain, moaned. He had ruined her, taken from her something very precious that was lost forever. Gee, he felt kind of rotten about it and then he didn’t feel so rotten, because he was glad. A virgin. And now Catherine, who had never been made, was his woman.
But Jesus, what if she got sore and hated him? He shrugged his shoulders, thinking that he should worry. The cards were now stacked on his side. If she got tough now, or they had another fight and it got serious, he could always say, well, baby, I know everything you got. Getting sore wouldn’t get her any place.
But that was not how he felt, either, and he didn’t mean such thoughts. He could not get out of his mind the memory of her, naked and hurt, warm and moist, her little gestures, burying her head against his shoulders. He wanted her again, goddamn it. Once she got used to it, and it didn’t hurt her any more, it would be swell. This time hadn’t been so much as it should be, but it was going to be more. And it was different from going and getting a whore. Falling asleep, forgetting everything, awaking, dozing, hearing her breathing, her heart beating, feeling her beside him.
He crossed Stony Island Avenue, walked on past a gas