George Mills (42 page)

“That’s wonderful, Sal. I know my customer appreciates that.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I want to thank you.”

I sat on the little bench in the tiny dressing room two hours, my curtain open to the weather of the other customers, men with wardrobes, with three and four and five suits in their closets, with dressy slacks and sports coats, with—I didn’t know this then—tropical-weight worsteds for the warm seasons, heavy tweeds for the cold, who examined themselves imperially in the glass and spoke without looking at them to the salesman at parade rest behind their backs, scrutinizing the mirror close as shavers or people examining blemishes in a good light. They talked knowledgeably about buttons, the slant of a pocket, the cut of lapels, and I, alien as a savage, listened greedily. I couldn’t have been more interested if they had been women.

“Hey,” Sal said, when he came down to check a customer’s measurements, “it’s going to be a while yet. You don’t have to hang around here. Walk around the store.”

“I’m all right. This is fine.”

“Buy your shoes,” Sal said. “Buy your shirt, buy your tie.”

“That’s right,” I said. “I forgot.” I stood up.

“Tell the shoe man a brown oxford.”

“A brown oxford. Yes.”

“Maybe a tan shirt with a thin stripe. A dark, solid-color tie, no pattern. If there’s a pattern it should be delicate, no heavier than the stripe on your shirt.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You got a decent leather belt? Something the color of new shoe soles, I think, but stay away from oxblood.”

“All right,” I said, “thank you.”

“Stockings,” he called after me. “Black. Knee length.”

It is perhaps the first time he has ever really examined himself in the glass. Looking for blemish, sorting rash, feature, the inventory of surface, the lay of the skull. He sees with wonder the topography of his hair, the evidence of his arms beneath his suit coat, the hinged and heavy wrists. He leans forward and splays his lips, stares at the long teeth, touches them. Before, if he has looked in the mirror, it has been with the shy, cursory glance of a customer into a barber’s glass, that automatic, that mechanical.

I was no
virgin,
you understand.

His sexual encounters had been in bars, low dives, his conquests drunk, mostly older, fumbling his cock in the alley, blowing him in cars, deeply, deeply, smothering his foreskin on their sore throats, scratching it on dentures. Hoarsely they had moaned, called out someone else’s name. Or come to them always in
their
beds, in cold rooms, in badly furnished apartments above beauty parlors. So that he believed, vaguely, that females had regulated intervals of abstinence, cycles of seasonal rut, their need encoded, driven by the calendar, the tides, the moon, by floundering glands, secret biological constants. (He stayed away from whores not because he believed their need was shammed but because he believed they had no need, that their natures had been torn from them, that their cunts were quite literally holes, hair and flesh covering nothing, like houses built on the edges of cliffs. He thought of them as amputees. He did not go with whores.)

[I did not
go
with anyone. When I wanted a woman I knew where to find her. Those bars. Maybe once a month I’d leave my neighborhood and take the bus north or south, get off somewhere in the city I had never been and find a tavern, and usually it was the only place with the lights still on, settled among the frame houses and dark apartment buildings—bowling alleys too, the lounges there, those Eleventh Frames, Lovers’ Lanes, Spare Rooms and Gutter Bowls near the pinball arcades and shoe rentals—so that I always had the impression I had come to the country. I didn’t waste time. I ordered my beer, showed them my money—I didn’t have a wallet; in those days I carried my cash in my pay envelope—and looked around, smiling not broadly so much as inconclusively. If I saw a woman put money in the jukebox I listened to hear what songs she’d picked and I played them too, leaning backward or forward when the music came on, waiting to catch her eye, raising my glass to her, toasting our taste. Almost always she smiled. I took my beer and moved down the bar toward her. If the stool next to hers was empty I sat down. I’d read the label on her beer and signal the bartender to bring us another round, talking all the time, not lying, you understand, but this wasn’t conversation either, telling my name and where I worked, the position I played, other things about me, all I could think of who didn’t know what my hair looked like or what were my strong points or the condition of my teeth, and never asked anything about her unless it was what she was drinking if it wasn’t beer or something I recognized, the difficulty being finding things to say after I’d told her my name, what I did for a living, where I was from, conversationed no better than a candidate, some pol at a gate when the shifts change, but talking anyway, having to, the distracting spiel of a magician, say, the cardsharp’s chatter, friendly, open, frank for a man in work shirts, boots, but steering clear, too, of questions and promptings and preemptive reference, not rude or aggrandizing but shy for
her,
modest for the lady, in charge only through consideration, a ricochet restraint, the billiard relationships and carom closures and retreats tricky as dance steps. Because I figured we both knew what was what, who, one of us at least, knew nothing. And assumed she assumed I would not mention it, her presence a matter of course, the body’s will, some compulsion of the skin, shame’s innings and lust’s licks, as if, were I to permit her the edgewise word that word would be a groan, a speech from heat, not conversation either, as if the both of us were mutes, but the driven diction of desire, I more than hinting she had gotten there as I had, on a bus, come in a car from some distant neighborhood, as much the stranger in those parts as myself. And where, I wonder, did those gestures come from, that silent toast, that almost knowledgeable little bow of deference and tribute, that polite, bar-length greeting, romantic, so close to civilized? How would I have learned these signs who had learned nothing? Not my profile, not my air. But deferential, always deferential, as deferential to her hormones as a gent to disfigurement or some grand-mannered guy to handicap, deferentially drilling her with my attentive small talk, clocking the parameters of her drunkenness all the way to its critical mass. Like a scientist, like a coach, like a doc at the ringside, gauging, appraising and contemplative, only then stepping in, cool as a cop: “That’s enough, don’t you think so? Look, you’re beginning to cry. Listen how shrill you’ve become. You don’t want to throw up, do you? You don’t want to pass out. Where are your car keys, where is your purse? Is that your coat? Did you come with a hat? Splash water on your face, go relieve yourself first. Beer, pee and estrogen. That’s a tricky combination. The beer’s in the pee. The pee floods the estrogen. Go on, go ahead, I’ll wait.” And damned if she didn’t. Do as I say. And grateful as well. As if I’d actually helped her. So that by the time I had her skirt up, her brassiere down, lowered her corset, raised her slip, sucked the garters, kissed the hose, and had the cups of her bra loose on her belly or awry at her side, she was actually watching, amazed as myself at her condition, convinced by her gamy, ribald chemistries, struck by what was neither rape nor love but only my simple, driven confidence, a kind of carnal transfusion, sexual first aid and the terrible blunt liberties of emergency, averting her eyes not even when she came, her moans and cries and whines and whimpers and skirls of orgasm a sort of breathless yodel, Baby Shameless beneath this fellow like some heavy lifter or love’s day laborer who did all the work and insinuated knees, fingers, hands, lips, mouth, tongue, teeth and cock too at last, not as weapons—as little seduction as rape—and not even as parts, members but as tools, the paramedical instrumentality of the available—as if I lived off the land, made do like a commando—so that only when
I
came did she avert her eyes, blink, as if only then I had exceeded my warrants, behaved less than professionally. But reassured the next moment by my withdrawal, suddenly thoughtful, charmed and sad. “Oh, say,” she’d say, “where’d you learn to do a girl like that? That was really something.
Really
something. You know I never…I didn’t frighten you, did I? When I made those sounds? Did I? Tell the truth, were you embarrassed? Honest, I never…It was like someone else’s voice. I swear it. It was like someone’s voice I’ve never heard. I never
have
heard it. I didn’t know I even knew those noises, words.” I all skeptical reassurance, muzzling my doubts as till the last minute I had muzzled my lust, as accomplished a dresser in the dark back seats of cars or on the damp sheets of those strange beds as undresser, saying: “Oh, hey, listen, that’s okay. That was only nature. You mustn’t mind what Mother Nature says. You’re not to blame—here’s your stocking—you couldn’t help it. Don’t you think I know that much? Sure. Anyway, it was your glands talking, only your guts’ opinions, just some tripe from the marrow. You think I pay
that
any mind? That I listen to endocrines? Women
do
that stuff when they get excited. They’re not in control. I know
that
much. It was just Nature and your ducts’ low notions.
Hey
now, cheer up. Do I look like the kind of guy who sets store in a fart? Here’s your earring. It must have slipped out when you were thrashing around like that.”]

As he believed, again vaguely, in virgins. Not—he was no prude—in their moral superiority. Not in some special quality they possessed which their fallen sisters—not even, particularly, in the fall of those sisters—lacked. Not in their fitness as brides or suitability as girl friends, not in their congenial apposition to grace and tone or in their conformity to a grand convention. Not, in fact, in anything petite or chaste or delicate, prudent, pure, virtuous, discreet or even modest. In virginity, in virginity itself, in its simple mechanical cause. He believed, that is, in the hymen. In the membrane, that, he took it, air-and watertight occlusive seal like cellophane on a pack of cigarettes or the metal cap on a soda bottle that somehow shored for as long as it was still in place all the juices of need, all the sexual solutions, that endocrinous drip drip and concupiscent leak which he so expertly stanched in cars and plugged in those furnished rooms.

And just as he shied away from the whores, he shied away from the virgins, and for much the same reason——that they had no needs. They were too much trouble. They would take seduction, courtship, the long, difficult ploy of friendship.

[What was the point? How could I deal with someone who did not mean to be dealt with? Did I have beer money and bus fare to burn on women and girls who had an existence aloof and outside the terms of my desires? If I did not think of them as incorruptible then I thought of them as indifferent, people outside my sphere of influence. I might as well have had conversations with ladies whose language was French, who could not understand my English, who may not even have heard it.]

Which explains why, at twenty-seven, George Mills, who’d had his ashes hauled as often as he’d felt the urgency, who’d been blown, whose flesh and buttocks had been chewed and clutched, whose back and backside raked in wanton, dissipate zest, why George Mills, bruised by delight and all the hijinks of high feeling, had never so much as kissed a maiden. It was that membrane, that cherry like some mythic grail or fortified fastness, which kept him off, not so much at bay as at home, like some frail, stiff, awkward peasant mowing in a field who sees the battlement, the walled, high, thick and ancient parapet and, behind the casement, the oppressor himself, say, taking the sun on the bulwark’s broad and open deck, defenseless, alone, who looks once, shrugs, and embraces the hay, the infested, heavy bales, to shove them about with his last declining energies.

[It was the two free passes.]

He wasn’t shy around these women, any more than one is shy around furniture——tables, chairs. He wasn’t overly modest or unassuming. (He had his assumptions.) It was that in their presence—the presence of virgins—he had some genuine gift for the revoked self, a redskin caution, an anonymity reasonable as a good alibi. It was only afterward that a teammate ever remembered that he had failed to introduce George to his girl’s friend, her roommate, a cousin in town on a visit. The roommate or cousin would not even have noted this much. On a streetcar or bus, in a private automobile going back to the neighborhood after a game in the park, he could sit thigh to thigh beside the strange girl without contact, his skin as nerveless as his clothing.

[I figured why bother, and made myself as indifferent as I supposed her to be. I looked out the window. I watched for my stop.]

He might have gone on this way forever.

[It was the two free passes, at two bucks apiece the sixteen bottles of beer they represented, which, if you figure the woman in that tavern was already on her second bottle by the time I put my coin in the jukebox to play her song, and when you remember that I nursed mine—someone had to drive, someone had to stay sober enough to take responsibility for my erection—often drinking only one to her three or, if I ordered a pitcher, maybe a glass and a half to her four, and if you add to the equation the fact that she rarely drank more than seven bottles, two of which she’d paid for herself, and usually not more than five or six, three or four of them on me, then the two passes stood for two to three women successfully courted, successfully wooed. I’m not mean. Money doesn’t move me. I’m talking about effort, all that waiting at bus stops, listening to songs played over again again that I hadn’t liked the first time, all those strained and jumpy monologues, the patient stints at their bodies, watched as boilers, supervised as machinery. So it was the two and a half months I was thinking of—I’m a working man, I punch time clocks, I’m paid by the hour—when I made the connection between the two free passes and the trio of women. It wasn’t the money. A fifth of my working year. It wasn’t the money. Didn’t I spring for new clothes? Didn’t I pop for accessories? And it wasn’t any investment I was seeking to protect when I bought them. The poor aren’t cheap, there’d been no investment. “Bring your girl,” the manager said and gave me free passes. So it wasn’t the money and I had no girl. Hell, maybe it was the manager’s investment I was protecting. Though I still think it was the effort, that I suddenly saw all the man-hours and elbow grease that just those beers and bus rides entailed.]