“I have to admire his temper,” I said.
Sally sniffed. “I don’t,” she said. “He yells a lot, but he sure can’t fuck very well.”
2
FORTUNATELY discontentment doesn’t affect my appetite. Sally had just walked out the door, mad, which made me very discontent, but just before she left she had fried a whole chicken and I sat at the ironing board and ate the half of it that was rightfully mine. The ironing board was what we were using for a kitchen table.
Sally hadn’t really wanted to go to Lake Charles, when she left Godwin. I was completely in love with her, so I took her to Houston with me and a week later we got married. I wouldn’t have minded living in sin for a while, but Sally was scared of her parents. Lake Charles wasn’t very far away and she was afraid they would get wind of things, in which case her father would come up and kill us. I was just as glad to get married, but I was surprised at how often Sally got mad at me, afterward. We had only been married three weeks and she had already walked out in high dudgeon five or six times. I could never understand what I did to put her in high dudgeon, but whatever it was I always felt utterly to blame.
It was a hot, muggy Houston dusk, and big Gulf Coast mosquitoes flitted against the window screen while I ate my chicken. The fact that Sally had gone away mad preyed on my mind and made me indecisive. It took me five minutes to decide whether to put her half of the chicken in the oven or in the icebox. Finally I put it in the oven, and just as I did someone knocked at the door. My immediate thought was that it must be Mrs. Salomea, a formidable lady whose backyard we walked through in order to get to our apartment. Just that morning I had done something absolutely inexcusable and I was sure Mrs. Salomea was coming to accost me about it.
I think having Sally to sleep with had given me the confidence to do what I did. I had been wanting to for months, before she came, and hadn’t had the nerve. Mrs. Salomea had a terrific old tree in her backyard. Its top branches must have been two hundred feet above the ground, and it was always full of squirrels. I had a little single-shot .22—it had been the only gun I could afford all through my childhood, when hunting had been an obsession with me. I thought I had outgrown the obsession, but Mrs. Salomea’s tree full of squirrels made it come back on me. All the time I was writing my novel I could see the squirrels out the window and I kept wanting to go out and shoot one. Sometimes in the morning, before I started writing, I would sit with the .22 and shoot eight or ten squirrels in my imagination, always aiming at the ones on the highest branches. That morning, in a moment of complete happiness, I had actually shot one.
Sally was the reason I was so happy. We meant to make love when we went to bed, but for some reason I got to talking and we didn’t. I guess we slept all night feeling sexy, because about dawn we woke up doing it. We had just sort of rolled together. I went right back to sleep and when I woke up again, about seven, I felt wonderful. Sally was still asleep. A crease in the sheet had made a crease on one side of her face. I felt clear and dry and hungry, and extremely like working. Out the window I could see the squirrels in Mrs. Salomea’s tree. I felt that I had lived a routine life long enough. I would have taken a parachute jump, if one had been offered me just then. It was obvious to me that I could do much more than I had been doing. I put on some Levi’s and got my .22 and one shell and went outside. The thick St. Augustine grass in the Salomeas’ yard was wet with dew. Pale-yellow shafts of sunlight slanted down through the leaves of the great tree. I was only going to shoot a running squirrel, not one that was sitting. Finally a brown squirrel ran along a branch very high up, eighty-five feet I’m sure, maybe a hundred, just a movement on the branch with the sun flickering through the leaves right above him. I swung and shot and he dropped straight down all those feet of air, as if a string had been stretched from where I hit him straight to the ground. It was a perfect shot. He was dead before he left the branch. His beautiful brown coat had beads of dew on it when I picked him up. I know I should have left him alive, but I couldn’t have, not that morning. I’m afraid I was his fate—otherwise I couldn’t have hit him at that distance, with him running and the sun in my eyes. I hadn’t shot a gun in seven or eight years, either; but that is not to say it was a lucky shot. It was perfect, not lucky. I was frying him when Sally woke up.
“What have you done now?” she said. She was standing in the kitchen doorway, holding her clothes over her arm.
“I can still shoot,” I said.
Sally was horrified. “We have cereal we can eat!” she said, pointing at it. “Wheat germ is perfectly healthy. I wouldn’t have married you if I’d known you were going to kill animals.”
She wouldn’t touch the squirrel—I had to eat it all myself. “Squirrels are in no danger of extinction,” I said. “Animals would drive us off the earth if a few weren’t killed now and then.”
My reasonableness didn’t placate her. I apologized several times during the day, but it did no good. There was no knowing if she would ever forgive me for killing the squirrel—or for anything else I did that she didn’t like. Forgiveness was not the kind of act Sally was prone to. By her own admission she had never been heartbroken in her life.
She liked to eat meat, too. It just never occurs to her while she’s eating it that an animal has been killed. She looked at me all morning like I was the Butcher of Dachau. Finally it bugged me.
“People with appetites like yours shouldn’t be so idealistic,” I said. “How would you like to live on kelp for the rest of your life?”
Maybe my saying that was why she walked off mad, six hours later. She has delayed reactions. Sure enough, it was Mrs. Salomea who had knocked at the door.
“Danny?” she said. I began to try to think of a defense, and also to look for an apron. It was very hot and I was only wearing my underwear.
“Yes ma’am,” I said. I found a big dish towel. Sally didn’t have any aprons.
“I’ll be right there,” I said. “I’m not fully dressed.”
“I’ll let myself in,” she said. I heard the door shut. Mrs. Salomea neither wasted time nor stood on formalities.
Somehow the dish towel I found made me look even less dressed than I was. I really felt indecent, but I knew I couldn’t stall much longer, indecent or not. Mrs. Salomea was noted all over Houston for her impatience. She was the wife of a very well-to-do decorator—I guess he could be described as locally prominent. His name was Sammy Salomea and he decorated mansions. It was generally agreed that Mrs. Salomea was eating him alive, one joint at a time. I think she had him eaten about up to the hips. She was thirty-eight or so, but very trim. In the days before I got married the Salomeas would sometimes invite me into their yard in the late afternoons to be a fourth at badminton. They were free with their liquor and I always managed to get drunk on those occasions. Those were the only times I ever got to drink good liquor. Mrs. Salomea’s first name was Jenny. She and I always teamed against Sammy and some guest or other and we always slaughtered them. We were both extremely good badminton players and could have slaughtered almost anyone we were put up against. Up to a certain point I’m a very well-coordinated drunk and I hit some terrific smashes. Sammy Salomea was slightly in awe of me, but Mrs. Salomea wasn’t in awe of me at all. I was slightly in awe of her. I always stayed as late as I could, drinking their liquor and watching her eat her husband. I told myself I was gathering material for a book I meant to write, to be called “Cannibalism in Texas,” but I was really just fascinated by Jenny Salomea. She was the scariest woman I had ever known, and God only knew what she was going to have to say about my shooting that squirrel. I finally tucked the dish towel into my shorts and straggled into the other room, feeling sheepish and quite apprehensive. I don’t think she approved of Sally, either. She was standing by our bookcase in her tennis outfit, a drink in one hand.
“Hi,” she said. “I wanted to ask you something. Does your wife like cunnilingus?”
The question completely disoriented me. I had been about to try and expl
ain that shooting the squirrel had been a rare, isolated act, one that could never possibly repeat itself.
“Beg pardon?” I said.
“I think that’s the way you pronounce it,” she said. “Cunnilingus.”
“That’s the way I’ve always heard it pronounced,” I said, though truthfully I don’t think I’d ever heard it pronounced before at all.
“Does Sally like it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve only been married a week.”
“You better hurry up and try it. A girl that pretty’s not going to stay around very long if she gets bored. I saw her walking down the sidewalk and she looked pretty bored.”
“She’s not bored,” I said. “We just got married. How come you asked me that?”
“I’ve never done it,” she said. “I lead a pretty routine life. I thought maybe you could show me about it while your wife’s taking a walk.”
I’d been horny for her the whole two years I’d lived in the apartment, and she’d never so much as given me a look. Now I was married and there she was. There was no bull about her, either. She was obviously ready to peel off her tennis shorts. Nothing ever happens conveniently for me.
“I’m just a student,” I said. “How about Sammy?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, indignant that I would even suggest it. “Sammy’s not going to root around like that. He doesn’t like to expose himself to germs—his mother scared the shit out of him when he was a kid.”
“I meant where is he,” I said, though I hadn’t. Sammy was very fastidious. I had forgotten that.
“He’s in Ecuador. He has a client with a ranch there.”
“I don’t understand why you came here now,” I said.
“I told you in plain English,” Mrs. Salomea said. It was obvious her patience was being strained.
“If you don’t think you know how say so and I’ll go home and get drunk,” she said. “You’re not as macho about sex as you are about badminton, are you?”
Her manner was awfully irritating. “I know how,” I said. “I just got married, remember?”
“Big deal,” she said. “I bet she was desperate to get away from somebody or she wouldn’t have taken up with you.”
Oddly, I had come to the same conclusion. It made me furious, that Jenny Salomea could figure it out so easily.
“Go to hell!” I said. “I didn’t even invite you in.”
“Why don’t you just admit you don’t know how? You don’t have to get vulgar. I know you’re just a kid. You’re so sloppy you look like you’d be good at it—that’s why I asked. Also, we’re handy to one another.”
“We’ve been handy to one another for two years,” I said.
“Yeah, but you weren’t sexy then. You looked too studious. You even looked studious when you were drunk. Maybe it took a little sex to make you sexy. They say it works that way. Makes the feathers shine.”
“I just fell in love,” I said. “Didn’t you notice that?”
“Sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t have come here when you weren’t in love even if I had thought you were sexy. You don’t think I want you in love with me, do you? You’d be harder to keep out than the goddamn mosquitoes. I don’t like love anyway. I was just hoping for a little cunnilingus.”
“It’s the wrong time of day,” I said. “Sally was probably just going around the block.”
“That’s a bunch of horseshit,” Jenny said. “I know her type. She’ll be gone for hours. We could have already done it if you weren’t so slow off the mark.”
Just then there was a knock on the door. I was very grateful for the interruption. It was a man from Western Union.
“Daniel Deck?” he said. He looked taken aback to see me in the dish towel. I admit it made me look awfully sleazy.
“Yes?”
“Telegram.”
“My goodness,” I said. “I’ve never gotten a telegram in my life.”
He handed it to me anyway. “Could be a mistake,” he said. “I’ve never delivered one to anybody who looked like you.” He was a middle-aged guy who seemed bored with his profession.
The telegram was really for me. I could hardly believe it. I walked back to where Jenny Salomea was, trying to believe it. It was from an editor at Random House, for whom I had revised my first novel:
DEAR DANNY. REVISION EXCELLENT. NOVEL ACCEPTED. CONGRATULATIONS. YOU DID GOOD. LETTER AND CONTRACT WILL FOLLOW. I GOT YOURS ABOUT MARRIAGE. CONGRATULATIONS ON THAT TOO. KISS SALLY FOR ME. ALSO PROSPECTS GOOD FOR AN IMMEDIATE MOVIE SALE. COLUMBIA VERY EXCITED. HOW WOULD 30,000 STRIKE YOU? OR MORE. YOURS. BRUCE.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “I sold my novel. It’s going to be published.”
“Yeah?” Mrs. Salomea said. “Somebody told me you were writing a book. What you gonna do now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I can’t believe it.” I really couldn’t. I kept looking at the telegram to make it seem real. Things were swirling. I never expect most of my dreams to come true, even though I keep dreaming them, and when one does come true I don’t know how to handle the feelings I have. I felt very odd—I was glad and excited and curious and a lot of things. I became instantly giddy, and within the giddiness was a kind of fear. I had got one dream but something felt wrong in the pit of my stomach. Maybe some other dream was being taken away from me forever. Maybe I wanted that one more. I didn’t know, and at the same time I felt dizzy with relief. It was actually going to be published.
“Well, I guess that leaves getting drunk,” Jenny said. “Put some pants on and come up to the house. We got some champagne. Do you have any dirty books?”
I was looking at the telegram again. I had just really noticed about the movie. Thirty thousand must mean dollars. “What?” I said.
“I was going to borrow a dirty book, if you’ve got one,” she said. “You’re not going to be much help.”
“I’ve only got Tropic of Capricorn” I said. I had stolen it from the library.
“I wouldn’t know one from another,” she said. “Lend it to me.”
I found the book for her and got some clothes on and we went to her house. I had never been in her house before, only in the yard. The house was full of terrible art, but I was feeling very happy and would have forgiven Jenny or almost anybody worse art than that. My stomach had quit hurting and I had the telegram in my hip pocket. Jenny really began to impress me. She gallantly put aside her personal desires and helped me celebrate. Not only was she not totally selfish; in some way she was lavishly generous. They had champagne all right, but only in jeroboams. I couldn’t believe it.
“Oh, Sammy likes to think big,” Jenny said. “He never buys anything small.” She insisted that we open one. “Sure,” she said. “You must have some friends somewhere who’ll want to celebrate too.”
I could barely carry the bottle, it was so heavy. We opened it in Jenny’s kitchen, which was easily a hundred times the size of ours. In the center of the kitchen was the biggest butcher’s block I’d ever seen. It was a whole section of a redwood tree.
“That’s magnificent,” I said. “You could butcher an ox on that thing.”
“That’s an idea,” she said. “Sammy bought it in San Francisco. It weighs over a thousand pounds.”
We opened the huge bottle and drank about a quart each, in almost no time. I couldn’t stay off the woodblock. It was irresistible. I helped Jenny up and we danced—it was the only way I could keep her from reading the Henry Miller book. The Salomeas had a terrific hi-fi system. I began to feel drunk, but it was one of my better-coordinated drunks. We danced for twenty minutes and neither of us fell off the woodblock. Jenny was a well-coordinated drinker too. The woodblock was just the right size for cha-chas.
“You’re a sexy kid,” she said, as we were sidling around one another. “I can’t stand your wife.”
“I don’t know her very well,” I said. I didn’t want to argue. Jenny Salomea was a sexy lady. She kept lifting my T-shirt and counting my ribs, as we da
nced. I hadn’t been to the barbershop in a couple of months and my hair was almost as long as hers. It seemed to amuse her. Also the woodblock was affecting. I’ve never seen a sexier object. The name Sally began to blink in my brain. Fortunately the phone rang. It was Jenny’s sister—she was divorcing somebody in Galveston and wanted to talk about it. I got clear of the woodblock. Western Union and Southwestern Bell had combined to keep me faithful, at least for one evening. As soon as Jenny got off the phone I said I had to go.
“Run mouse run,” she said, not particularly angry. She lifted up my T-shirt and counted my ribs again.
“I love Sally,” I said. “I better give monogamy a chance.”
“I took that attitude once,” she said, holding out her champagne glass. “Now I’d rather give cunnilingus a chance.”
I felt apologetic, but she was very pleasant. We went in and threw our champagne glasses in her huge fireplace, though neither of us could remember precisely what tradition that went with. I had taken a liking to Jenny and had mixed feelings. She insisted I take the jeroboam with me—it still had an awful lot of champagne in it.
“If you’re too drunk to walk you can borrow my car,” she said, as I staggered out the door with the big bottle.
“I can make it to the library,” I said. “There’s probably somebody there to drink it with.”
“Okay.”
She walked through her yard with me, rubbing my back. “As soon as your wife leaves we’ll play some badminton,” she said. I had both arms around the bottle of champagne. Jenny kept sniffing me in various places—apparently she liked how I smelled. It was too much. I had a warm impulse and turned and kissed her. She was nothing loath, but kissing merely seemed to amuse her.
“You’ll never learn,” she said, chuckling.
“Why not?”
“You just won’t,” she said. “Not you.” She said it fondly, though, and she gave me a little shove, to get me started.
3