I put down my drink and turned out the lamp in the living room.
“Don’t forget to bring in the transistor,” she reminded me.
I picked it up and went on back.
She had finished undressing, and she was lying on the bed. My hands began to shake. She had a crazy build on her — real wall-to-wall girl. I started to take off my shirt.
“Do you have to leave it on that station?” she asked, pointing at the transistor. “I mean is that the only frequency that —”
“That’s the one,” I said. “I’d have to take it all apart to —”
“It’s OK,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve never done it with that kind of music on before. Groups most of the time or folk rock — never Beethoven.”
At least she recognized it.
I was having a helluva time with my shirt.
“Here,” she said, sitting up, “let me.” She pushed my hands out of the way and finished unbuttoning my shirt. “Do you like having the light on?”
“It’s a little bright, isn’t it?” I asked, squinting at it.
“Some men do, that’s all — that’s why I asked.”
“Oh.”
“Do you like to be on top, or do you want me to —”
I reached down and gently lifted her chin. “Clydine, love, it’s not just exactly as if we were about to run a quarterback sneak off-tackle. We don’t have to get it all planned out in the huddle, do we? Let’s just improvise, make it up as we go along.”
She smiled up at me, almost shyly. “I just want it to be good for you, is all,” she said softly.
“Quit worrying about it,” I told her. I sat down on the bed and reached for her. “One thing though,” I said, cupping one of the little pink soldiers.
“What’s that?” she asked, nuzzling my neck.
“How in the hell did you ever get a name like Clydine?”
She told me, but I promised never to tell anybody else.
8
“What’s this doing here?” Clydine was standing over me the next morning, stark naked, with my Army blouse clutched in her little fist. She shook it at me. “What’s this doing here?” she demanded again.
“You’re wrinkling it,” I said. “Don’t wrinkle it.”
“You’re a GI, aren’t you?” she said, her voice shaking with fury. “A no-good, lousy, son-of-a-bitching, mother-fucking GI!”
“Clydine!” I was actually shocked. I’d never heard a girl use that kind of language before.
“You bastard!”
“Calm down,” I told her, sitting up in bed.
“Motherfucker!”
“Clydine, please don’t use that kind of language. It sounds very ugly coming from a girl your age.”
“Motherfucker, motherfucker, motherfucker!” she yelled, stamping her foot. Then she threw the blouse on the floor and collapsed on the bed, sobbing bitterly.
I got up, hung the blouse back up in the closet, and padded barefoot on out to the kitchen. I got myself a beer. I had a bit of a headache. Then I went on back to the bedroom. She was still crying.
“Are you about through?” I asked her.
“Son-of-a-bitching motherfucker!” she said, her voice muffled.
“I’m getting a little tired of that,” I told her.
“Bite my ass!”
I reached over and got a good grip on her arm so she couldn’t get a swing at me, then I leaned down and bit her on the fanny, hard.
“Dan! Stop that! Ouch, goddammit! Stop that!”
I let go. I’d left a pretty good set of teethmarks on her can. “Any more suggestions?” I asked her.
“Of all the —” She nibbed at her bottom tenderly. “Goddammit, that hurt!”
“It was your idea,” I said, taking a pull at the beer bottle.
“Can I have some?” she asked me after a minute or so. She sounded like a little girl.
“If you promise not to throw it at me.”
“I’ll be good.”
I gave her the bottle, and she took a drink. “Oh, Danny, how could you? All that beautiful story about letting them put you in prison for a principle. It was all a lie, wasn’t it?”
“Are you ready to listen now?”
“I believed in you, Danny.”
“You want to hear this?”
“I really believed in you.”
I got up and walked on out to the living room.
After a minute she came padding out, still rubbing at her bare fanny. Her little soldiers were still at attention. She was just as cute as hell.
“All right. Let’s hear it,” she said.
“First off,” I said, plunking myself on the couch. “I’m not a GI — not anymore anyway.”
“You’ve deserted!” she squealed, sitting down beside me.
“No, dear. I was discharged — honorably.”
“You mean you didn’t even —”
“Hush,” I said, “I was drafted. I thought it all over, and I went ahead and went in. I spent eighteen months in Germany.”
“Germany!”
I kissed her — hard. Our teeth clacked together. “Now I’m going to do that every time you interrupt me,” I told her.
“But —”
I did it again. It was kind of fun.
“I did not run off to Canada. I did not go to Leavenworth. I did not go to Nam. I didn’t kill anybody. I didn’t help anybody kill anybody. I drank a lot of German beer. I looked at a lot of castles and museums. Then I came home.”
“But how —”
I kissed her again.
“Not so hard —” she said, her fingertips touching her mouth tenderly.
“All right. Now, on my first night back from the land of Wiener schnitzels, you and Joan braced me down on Pacific Avenue with a fistful of pamphlets — we chatted a minute or two. That’s how I came to know your names.”
She looked at me, her eyes widening suddenly.
“At the theater last night,” I went on, “there were some people I didn’t want to talk to, so when I saw you and Joan, I just moved in on you with the first silly-ass story that came into my head. After that, things just got out of hand. I did try to get away several times. You’ll have to admit that.”
“Can I talk?” she asked.
“Go ahead,” I told her. “End of explanation.”
“Once we got away from the others — I mean, once we got here, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because, little one, you are an extremely good-looking, well-constructed, female-type person. You are also, and I hope you’ll forgive my saying this, just a wee bit hooked on things political. I wasn’t about to take a chance on losing the old ballgame just for the sake of clearing up a few minor misconceptions. I’m probably as honest as the next guy, but I’m not a nut about it.”
“Danny?”
“Yes?”
“Do you really think I’m — what you said — good-looking?”
I laughed and gathered her into my arms. I kissed her vigorously about the head and neck. “You’re a doll,” I told her.
Later, back in bed, she nudged me with her elbow.
“Hmmm?”
“Danny, if you ever tell Joan that you haven’t been in prison, I’ll kill you. I’ll just kill you.”
“Watch that, my little nasturtium of nonviolence. That kind of talk could get you chucked out of the Peace Movement right on your pretty, pink patootie.”
“Piss on the Peace Movement!” she said bluntly. “This is serious. Don’t ever dare tell Joan. I’d be the laughingstock of the whole campus. Do you know that I turned down a date with the captain of the football team because I thought he was politically immature? I’ve got a reputation to maintain on campus, so you keep your goddamn mouth shut!”
I howled with laughter. “We’ve got to do something about your vocabulary,” I told her.
“To hell with my vocabulary! Now I want you to promise.”
“All right, all right. Put the gun away. My lips are sealed. Whenever I’m around Joan I’ll be an ex-con. I’ll flout my prison record in everybody’s face. But it’s gonna cost you, kid.”
“Well, it’s the only way I’ll be able to hold up my head,” she explained.
After I drove her back to the campus and made a date for that night, I went on downtown to buy myself some clothes. A lot of my old things that I’d picked up the day before were too tight now — and probably a little out of date, though I really didn’t much give a damn about that. I didn’t want to go overboard on clothes, but I did need a few things.
I had a fair amount of cash, the four hundred from the poker game, three hundred in mustering-out pay, and I’d religiously saved twenty-five a month while I was in the Army — about six hundred dollars there when I got out. I had maybe thirteen hundred altogether. The car and the rent and my share of the hunt and some walking-around money took me down to under a grand, but I figured I was still OK.