Dancing After Hours Read Online Free PDF Page B

need an hour. I don’t want to drive drunk.”
    “Are you?”
    “It’s hard to tell, after working.”
    Her car was small, and when they got in, he pushed his seat back to make room for his leg; its knee did not bend. She pushed her seat back and turned to him and held him and kissed him. She liked the strength in his arms hugging her. She started the car and left the seatwhere it was; only the upper half of her foot was on the gas pedal. She drove out of the town and through wooded country and toward the highway, then said: “You have very sad eyes.”
    “Not now.”
    “Even when they twinkle. You wanted to be a corpsman.”
    “It wasn’t what you think. I joined the Navy to get it over with, on a ship. Before I got through boot camp, I felt like a cop-out. Then I asked to be a corpsman and to go with the Marines. A lot of times at Khe Sanh, I wished I had just joined the Marines.”
    “So you could shoot back?”
    “Something like that. Were you good in the play?”
    Yes
filled her, and she closed her lips against it and reached into her purse on the floor, her arm pressing his leg; then she put her hand on the wheel again and looked at the tree-shadowed road and said: “I forgot to buy cigarettes.”
    “From a squirrel?”
    He lit one of his Lucky Strikes and gave it to her and she drew on it and inhaled and held it, but the smoke did not touch what filled her. She blew it out the window and said: “I was great in the play.”
    After he came home from the war, making love was easy. He had joined the Navy after his freshman year at Boston College, because his mind could no longer contain the arguments and discussions he had had with friends, most of them boys, and with himself since he was sixteen years old. One morning he woke with a hangover and an instinct he followed to the Navy recruitingoffice. When he came home from the war and eight months in the Navy hospital in Philadelphia, kept there by infections, he returned to Boston College and lived in the dormitory. He had made love in high school and college before the war, but the first time with each girl had surprised him. After the war he was not surprised anymore. He knew that if a girl would come to his room or invite him to hers or go on a date with him, off the campus, walking in Boston, she would make love. There were some girls who did not want to know him because he had been in the war and his cane was like a uniform. Few of them said anything, but he saw it in their eyes. He felt pain and fury but kept silent.
    There were boys like that, too, and men who were his teachers, people he wanted to hit. In his room he punched a medium bag and worked with weights. Sometimes, drunk in bed with a girl, he talked about this until he wept. No girl could comfort him, because the source of his tears was not himself. It was for the men he knew in the war, the ones he bandaged, the ones he saved, the ones he could not save; and for the men who were there for thirteen months and were not touched by bullets, mortars, artillery. “They’re not abstractions in somebody else’s mind,” he said one night to a girl; and, holding her, he said aloud some of their names; for him they were clearly in the dark room; but not for her. Then looking at her face, he saw himself in the war, bandaging and bandaging and bandaging, and he stopped crying. He said: “How the fuck would you like to be hated because you did a good job, without getting killed?” This one soothed him; she said she’d want to kill somebody.
    Now he was twenty-eight and it was still easy; itcould be counted on; he only had to invite a woman to go someplace, for a drink, or dinner. The women decided quickly and usually he could see it in their eyes within the first hour of the date. If they felt desire and affection, they made love. Susan would, too. They were on the highway now and he looked at her profile. He was drunk and in love. Nearly always he felt he was in love on his first night with a