They are a little ill at ease, not talkative as they were only minutes ago, as they clear out their lockers and throw away stiff old gym socks and worn tennis balls. Bruce jams his stuff into the equipment bag, Joe rolls his into a wad, and they go down to the parking lot loaded with rackets, gear, and the big boxes containing their sweaters. It is getting hot. The rumble seat of Joe’s Ford is an open oven. They throw their stuff into it and climb in.
“Have we got time to run down past Nola’s?” Bruce asks.
“I guess so. The Temple Square?”
“No, she’s moved out of there. That place was full of snoops. She’s got an apartment with two other girls down on Fifth East. They’re all working at Auerbach’s this summer.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Joe says. “Letting yourself get crowded out by a couple of Auerbach clerks.”
“They’re protection,” Bruce says. “We don’t trust ourselves. It’s stronger than we are.”
Joe grunts. “I wouldn’t be surprised, at that.”
Neither would Bruce. Since the night when he played hide-and-seek with the elevator man, he and Nola have been headed toward something serious that neither of them speaks about and that both understand.
“She know you’re going to law school?”
“How would she? I told you, I just heard a couple hours ago. Anyway, it isn’t a cinch I’m going.”
“You gonna tell her now?”
They tip down the Second South hill. Bruce punches Joe in the arm. “Listen, Giuseppe, I haven’t had time to think about it. My family don’t even know. No use to bring it up till I’m sure. So when we get down to Nola’s, how about just unostentatiously keeping your face shut?”
One cough of laughter comes out of Joe. “My face is a lot more unostentatious shut than open. Mason, you silly bastard, you slay me.”
He stops before the apartment house that Bruce points out, and Bruce hops down and reaches the sweater box from the rumble seat. It is well baked. The high sun pours down on him. The old run-down street smells of summer. The cottonwoods are shedding fluff.
“You coming in?”
Joe doesn’t move. “I’ll just sit out here and keep my face unostentatiously shut. But don’t poop around, Mason. The old man will be out there before one, and it’d be a good idea to be busily bagging bullshit when he arrives. Or it would be, that is …” He leans to inspect something on the left running board. “It would be if the chance to become a partner in the Mulder Nursery meant anything to you.”
He makes Bruce mad; he seems to blame, or threaten.
“Joe, you know goddamn well it means a lot.”
“Fine. Glad to hear it.”
“You think I don’t know how much you and your dad have done for me?”
“Shit,” Joe says. “Go on in and give her her sweater and kiss her tenderly a few times and get the hell back out. I’ll sit here and think up a firm name to replace Mulder and Mason, Nursery Stock Bedding Plants, and Garden Supplies.”
“I’ll come back and be the company lawyer.”
“What do we need of a lawyer?” Joe says. “The job we’ve got open is for an experienced bullshit bagger with a stake in the business.”
3
From the apartment entrance he looks back upon the hot street, the sharp shade of trees, the old Ford with Joe’s red head sticking high above the windshield, the bright morning climbing toward the peak of noon. And from far off, he looks upon himself standing there on the brink of something. A voice goes on in his head, patiently explaining, like the voice of someone explaining baseball to an Arab.
Accident, they say, favors the prepared mind. Opportunity knocks only for those who are ready at the door. If we believe the novels we read, upward mobility is always ambitious, hungry, and aggressive, or at the very least, discontented. The George Willards are forever yearning away from the spiritual starvation of Winesburg toward some vague larger life.
But that is not always the way it is. Some of us didn’t know enough to be discontented and ambitious. Some of us had such limited experience and limited aspirations that only accident, or the actions of others, or perhaps some inescapable psychosocial fate, could explode us out of our ruts. In a way, I suppose I had to hitchhike out of my childhood; but if I did, I did it without raising my thumb.
The provinces export manpower, yes, as surely as atmospheric highs blow toward atmospheric lows. But the brains that are drawn outward to the good schools, the good jobs, the opportunities, don’t necessarily initiate their move. It can be as unavoidable as being born. They feel themselves being rotated into position. Even if they could know what they’re going to find outside, all that pain, blood, glaring light, sudden cold, forceps, scissors, hands tying Boy Scout knots in their umbilicus, they could neither prevent nor delay it. Head first, leg first, butt first, out they go.
Bruce is feeling the strains of that inevitability as he walks away from Joe, whom he has just rejected, and puts his thumb on the doorbell of Nola, whom he will leave behind. No Fates have woven him into any fabric of obligation. He was not born to found Rome, he has no specific compulsion to be rich and famous, he is incapable of calculation and strategy. On the contrary, his wishes and his visible future coincide. What Joe and J. J. Mulder have planned for him will guarantee every dream he ever had, and secure him in the middle-class security he has always coveted. He can make a decent home for his mother (in these daydreams the old man is always gone—divorced or dead, vanished somewhere). He can marry (eventually, not right this week) the girl whom he contains as a house contains a furnace. Her pilot light is never out. A slight change of temperature, a turn of the thermostat, and his heated blood clanks in his radiators.
Can he give her up, or postpone her, perhaps for years? Can he go away and leave his mother to the old man’s selfishness and dependence? Can he cut himself away from everything familiar and secure—friends, job, tennis, Sundays when the whole hard week uncoils and stretches?
The answer is that he probably can, for he is tacitly planning to. But September is a long way off. Decision, though he has to sign his name to it within a few days, will not produce its consequences for three months.
Nola is a long time coming. He rings again, wondering if she may already have started working at her summer job. Then the knob turns, and he is looking at a young man whose face, strange to him, is clouded with irritability fading toward a schooled politeness.
He is so unexpected that Bruce stumbles over his tongue. Almost contemptuously the young man opens the door, and as Bruce steps in he sees Nola standing in the living room with her fingertips on the back of an overstuffed chair. Her fingers are bent backward with the weight she is putting on them. Her face is scowling, the Indian look heavy in it.
Tableau. Bruce and the young man inspect one another without making their interest too obvious, and Nola stands sullenly by the chair with the light behind her and her face in shadow. It is several hard seconds before she says, “You two don’t know each other. Eddie, this is Bruce Mason. Bruce, Eddie Forsberg from down home. He just graduated from West Point.”
They shake hands. Forsberg has a polite, stiff manner, and his handshake is firm and brief. Bruce has no way of knowing what Forsberg knows about him, but he knows at least one thing about Forsberg. High school sweetheart. The air is full of competitive tension, the way it is before the first serve of an important match.
“Aren’t you working today?” Nola says.
“I’m on my way. I just dropped by to …” He carefully does not look at Forsberg, but feels his attention. It occurs to him that he ought to save the sweater for a more private occasion. It is a dirty trick to rub the guy’s nose in the fact that someone else has intimate understandings with his former girl. But he has the box in his hands, and here is this rival waiting across the net. He serves, and he goes for an ace. “… give you the sweater I promised you.”
She takes the box and sets it on the thick back of the chair to open it. Then Bruce beco
mes aware that Forsberg is looking at him with pale, furious knowledge. Pointedly he drops his eyes to Bruce’s hand, on the fourth finger of which Bruce is wearing his West Point class ring.
In civilian clothes he is under a handicap; he would compete better in his regimentals. For all he knows, the sweater with its four stripes certifies that Bruce is some notable athlete, able to broad-jump twenty-five feet or give Nurmi a run for it in the mile. Or perhaps he isn’t thinking any such thing. Perhaps he is just sick at his stomach with the certainty that he is out and Bruce is in.
He interrupts Nola’s badly acted pleasure in the sweater with some unconvincing acting of his own. His face has gone pinched and pale, his voice is too loud. “Well,” he says, “I see it’s time for me to take my unwanted presence out of here.”
Bruce would hate to have Nola look at him the way she looks at Forsberg—forbidding and uncharitable. Contributory, embarrassed, and triumphant, he stands outside the closed circuit of their tension. With his sweater forgotten in her hands, Nola says, “Will I see you again?”
“What would be the point?”
A slight, considering, agreeing, dismissing hesitation. “I’m sorry, Eddie.”
“Are you?” He transfers his attention to Bruce, and he is more ham actor than ever. Bruce understands that it is his real and angry feeling that makes him sound so false. “I owe you my thanks,” he says, and all but bows. “It’s been very instructive.”
Bruce does not answer; he is both appalled and ready to laugh. Anyway, what is there to say? Forsberg has read the situation correctly. He takes hold of the doorknob with his left hand, and salutes derisively with his right. “There are some advantages to being in the Army,” he says. “Then you don’t have to join the Foreign Legion.” His laugh sprays around the room. “Have a very pleasant time down in Castle Valley,” he says, and is gone, slam.
The moment the door closes, Nola spins around and with spread fingers lifts her hair off her head as if she were dying of the heat. “Hooo!”
“What’s the scoop?”
“Oh, he makes me so mad! I hate people who act as if they own you.”
“What’s he done?”
Now her eyes lock with his, a look that is at once searching and almost furtive. “He’s been after me all morning to marry him and go off to the Philippines.”
This information takes Bruce’s wind. It is far more threatening than Forsberg’s actual presence was. The thought of his intense attempt, the intimacy and seriousness of his intention, the previous understandings it suggests, is demoralizing.
“Just out of a clear sky?”
“Oh, he’s been writing. I never gave him any encouragement.”
So they have been corresponding, and Bruce has known nothing about it. Bruce has understood that the ring, which he stole off her finger and which she never made him give back, was something from the past. Apparently he has been misinformed. While he and Nola have been going out, hotly kissing, touching, driving each other wild, working closer to what they both want and anticipate and don’t quite know how to approach, she has been writing this other fellow. She has kept him informed of her changes of address, else how did he find her? The thought of how much he doesn’t know, how much she has not told him, leaves a cold, hollow spot in his solar plexus.
“You never talked about him.”
“There was no reason to. I’ve only seen him a few times in three or four years.”
“Were you ever engaged or anything?”
“No, of course not.”
“He must have thought so. Otherwise why would he think there was a chance you’d marry him and go off to the Philippines?”
“I have no idea. Why would any girl go off to the Philippines with anybody?”
“Is that why you turned him down?”
“Oh, what do you think?” she says angrily. “I sent him away, didn’t I? What more do you want?”
Caution. Move softly. Lightly he says, “You ought to introduce him to Holly. She’s red hot to go to the Philippines or any place else.”
There is an annoyed, fuming silence. He hears himself like some bothersome insect. “Were you ever in love with him?”
“Will you let it drop!”
“All right, all right.” He folds her in his arms, but she is a stiff armful. In a moment she pulls back to look into his face. “He wouldn’t believe me when I said it was over!”
“It?”
“Oh, whatever it was! I used to go out with him in high school. He thought he could come back and I’d look at him once and that would be that.”
“It was seeing me wearing his ring that convinced him.”
“Yes.”
“That makes me feel sort of crummy.”
“Why? It’s all right. He doesn’t mean anything.”
If he doesn’t mean anything, why is she upset? Yet she did send him away. She stonily sent him away, and Bruce is in possession.
“What did he mean, have a good time down in Castle Valley?”
“I told him you were driving me down to Audrey’s wedding. It was the only thing I could think of that would put him off.”
“Why wouldn’t he just have come to the wedding himself?”
“He’s sailing from San Francisco in three days. Anyway”—she gives him a smoldering look, her face a foot from his, so that he sees the little check mark scar above her eye—“anyway, if he showed up there my father would shoot him, or my brother Buck would.”
He laughs. “You’re kidding. What for?”
“Because they don’t like him.”
“They must not like him an awful lot.”
She makes a sound of irritation and turns out of his arms and goes to the window, to stand pulling the curtain aside and looking out. She is in such a state that he can almost see the sparks fly off her.
“Would they shoot me if I appeared with you?”
Flash out of the corners of her eyes. “Why, are you scared?”
“They can’t object so long as my intentions are honorable.”
“Are they?”
He laughs. “No.”
It is not the right tone to assume. She is not in a mood for joking. Some grudge rankles in her. “That’s so, isn’t it?” she says. “You’re like all the others. You’re just after what you can get.”
“For God’s sake!” Were Forsberg’s intentions not honorable, is that what she means? Is that why her father or brother would shoot him if he showed up? Did somebody catch them at something? How far did she let him go? Knowing his own temptations, he is clear on Forsberg’s. He glares at her in doubt and suspicion.
She has tears in her eyes. She is really angry. “I should have told Eddie yes. At least he wanted to marry me, he wasn’t just fooling around.”
“Nola,” he says, distracted, “what are you talking about? Who’s fooling round? What makes you think I don’t want to marry you?”
“You’ve never said one word.”
“That doesn’t mean …”
Accusingly she interrupts. “You know how it’s getting with us. I keep waiting for you to say something, but you never …”
He has a moment of complicated clarity. He understands that without really telling him anything about her past relations with Forsberg, she is using Forsberg as a lever under him. This is not something he resents or resists—it excites him. It is clear that, accusing him of only fooling around, she would be upset if he didn’t pursue her, which he certainly intends to do. But there are cautions in him, just as clear. He remembers that conversation with Holly: In the good old-fashioned way? In the good old-fashioned way. Meaning you want to marry her? Well, sometime, sure. Not right next week. Bill Bennion, too: Six kids in primary school, twins in the baby buggy, triplets in the oven, your ass in a sling, and your double hernia in a nice supportive truss.
A quicksand, Bennion would call her, a swamp to drown in. But how intolerable is the thought of not drowning! He thinks of the folded papers in his hip pocket, and what thos
e say about his intentions, and is shaken. He has intended to tell her. But not now, not now. He takes her in his arms and kisses her long and hard, looking all the while into her wide-open eyes.
“Will you marry me?”
From the way she tries to read him, he might be in Hebrew. Her hair is mussed from her having grabbed it in both hands after Forsberg left.
“Yes,” she says, and puts her forehead against his chest and pounds it on him. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
“Sorry why? Don’t you want to?”
“I made you say it.”
“You never made me say anything I didn’t want to say.”
She rubs her nose against him. Her breath is warm through his shirt. In a little voice she says, “I just got my grades. They aren’t very good.”
“That’s my fault. I’ve been taking up all your time.”
“I took up yours, too. And you’ve been working, besides. What did you get, straight A’s?”
As a matter of fact, he did, but he lies. “Not that good.”
“Whatever you got, you can do it. You’re bright, and you’re a man. I’ll be lucky if I get my certificate, and luckier if I get a decent job. I’m twenty-two, Bruce! I don’t want to spend my life clerking at Auerbach’s.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll see you don’t have to.”
Now she is reading him again, braced back against his arm. “You mean you’ll take care of me? I wonder. You’ll take advantage of me and then something will come up, some chance or other, and you’ll drop me like a hot rock.”
The papers burn in his hip pocket. He does not know what he is going to do about them. But what he says is: “I told you I want to marry you. What more can I say? As a matter of fact, Joe was just telling me his dad wants the two of us to take over the nursery. He’d let me buy in. I’d be a partner.”
Hearing himself, he is both dismayed and thrilled—dismayed because he so falsely conceals the business about law school, thrilled because, spelled out this way, job and girl and all, the second option takes his breath.
“As for taking advantage of you,” he whispers into her pinesoap-scented hair, “yes! I can’t wait.”