They were lying now on the bed and the girl said to him, “Don’t you ever close windows?”
“No. Do you?”
“Only when it rains.”
“How much alike are we?”
“I don’t know. We never had much of a chance to find out.”
“We’ve never had a fair chance. But we’ve had enough of a chance for me to know.”
“And when you know what the hell have you got?” the Colonel asked.
“I don’t know. Something better than there is, I suppose.”
“Sure. We ought to try for that. I don’t believe in limited objectives. Sometimes you’re forced to, though.”
“What is your great sorrow?”
“Other people’s orders,” he said. “What’s yours?”
“You.”
“I don’t want to be a sorrow. I’ve been a sorry son of a bitch many times. But I never was anybody’s sorrow.”
“Well you are mine now.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll take it that way.”
“You’re nice to take it that way. You’re very kind this morning. I’m so ashamed about how things are. Please hold me very close and let’s not talk, or think, about how things might have been different.”
“Daughter, that’s one of the few things I know how to do.”
“You know many, many things. Don’t say such a thing.”
“Sure,” the Colonel said. “I know how to fight forwards and how to fight backwards and what else?”
“About pictures and about books and about life.”
“That’s easy. You just look at the pictures without prejudice, and you read the books with as open a mind as you have, and you live life.”
“Don’t take off your tunic, please.”
“All right.”
“You do anything when I say please.”
“I have done things without.”
“Not very often.”
“No,” the Colonel agreed. “Please is a pretty word.”
“Please, please, please.”
“Per piacere. It means for pleasure. I wish we always talked Italian.”
“We could in the dark. Although there are things that say better in English.
“I love you my last true and only love,” she quoted. “When lilacs last in the door-yard bloomed. And out of the cradle endlessly rocking. And come and get it, you sons of bitches, or I’ll throw it away. You don’t want those in other languages do you, Richard?”
“No.”
“Kiss me again, please.”
“Unnecessary please.”
“I would probably end up as an unnecessary please myself. That is the good thing about you going to die that you can’t leave me.”
“That’s a little rough,” the Colonel said. “Watch your beautiful mouth a little on that.”
“I get rough when you get rough,” she said. “You wouldn’t want me to be completely otherwise?”
“I would not want you to be in any way other than you are and I love you truly, finally and for good.”
“You say nice things very clearly, sometimes. What was it happened with you and your wife, if I may ask?”
“She was an ambitious woman and I was away too much.”
“You mean she went away, from ambition, when you only were away from duty?”
“Sure,” the Colonel said and remembered, as unbitterly as he could. “She had more ambition than Napoleon and about the talent of the average High School Valedictorian.”
“Whatever that is,” the girl said. “But let’s not speak about her. I’m sorry I asked the question. She must be sad that she is not with you.”
“No. She is too conceited ever to be sad, and she married me to advance herself in Army circles, and have better contacts for what she considered her profession, or her art. She was a journalist.”
“But they are dreadful,” the girl said.
“I agree.”
“But you couldn’t have married a woman journalist that kept on being that?”
“I told you I made mistakes,” the Colonel said.
“Let’s talk about something nice.”
“Let’s.”
“But that was terrible. How could you have done such a thing?”
“I don’t know. I could tell you in detail but let’s skip it.”
“Please let’s skip it. But I had no idea it was something as awful as that. You wouldn’t do such a thing now, would you?”
“I promise you, my sweet.”
“But you don’t ever write to her?”
“Of course not.”
“You wouldn’t tell her about us, so she could write about it?”