“Won’t you let me take you to a hospital?” she asked gently.
“I can find my own way to a hospital, thank you.”
“Is that where you’re going?”
“No.”
“You should.”
“Why? Are they going to tell me who I am? I’m eight million different people — how the hell are they going to know who I am?”
“Look, I...” She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t mean to make you angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Forget it.”
“I suppose I... I suppose I did lead you on.”
“I suppose you did.”
“And I was flirting with you,” she said.
“I know you were.”
“But I can’t get involved with you, that’s all there is to it.”
“Sure. Nobody wants to get involved with anybody. Why the hell should you be any different?”
“I’m not usually afraid of involvements,” she said.
“Then what are you afraid of?”
“Look...” she said. She shook her head. “Look, I don’t owe you a goddamn thing. You have no right to talk to me this way.”
“I’ll talk to you however the hell I damn please,” he said.
“No, you won’t,” she answered, her eyes flaring, “and don’t you ever forget it!” She seemed not to realize that she had, in that moment, given their tenuous relationship both continuity and longevity. He stared at her silently and said nothing.
“Well,” she said, “why... why don’t you go?”
“All right,” he said, but he did not move.
“I can’t go around feeling sorry for every damn stray dog who crosses my path.”
“All right,” he said.
“I’ve got enough troubles of my own.”
“All right.”
“I don’t want to know you,” she said. “This is just what I don’t want, this... this goddamn intimacy. So... so just disappear, will you? I’m not about to get involved with you, no, sir.”
“Okay, so long,” he said, and again he turned.
“Wait a minute.” she said.
“What do you want?”
“Have you got any money?”
“You know I haven’t got any money.”
“Have you... have you had dinner yet?”
“No.”
They faced each other silently. She would not say more, and he sensed it. He kept watching her, waiting for her to speak, and knowing she would not. I know you too well, he thought. I know every goddamn corner of your mind.
“Do you want to have dinner with me?” he asked.
“You don’t have any money,” she said. Her voice had become very gentle, almost shy. She smiled shyly and looked up at him, waiting.
“That’s right, I don’t,” he said.
“You mean you want me to pay for your dinner?”
“Well, I hadn’t really thought of it that way. I just thought it’d be nice to have dinner together.”
“That’s kind of nervy, isn’t it?” she asked. A coquettishness was creeping into her manner, replacing the shyness, or perhaps merely an extension of it.
“Is it?” he asked.
“Well, sure it is,” she said. “Very nervy.”
They were not talking about dinner at all. He suddenly remembered a long discussion he and Jesse had had aboard the Fancher one night, and then pushed it out of his mind and walked very close to where she was standing by the lamppost.
“I am hungry,” he said.
“So am I.”
“Where would you like to eat?”
“I didn’t know it’d been settled.”
“It’s settled,” he said.
She stared at him in silence for a long time, and then she said, “Yes, I suppose it is.”
13
As they moved through their courtship — and he thought of it as that, no matter how brief it was — Buddwing felt himself becoming more and more involved in an intense inner reality that seemed as clearly defined as whatever was happening in the outer space through which he and the girl moved, inexorably pulled toward a conclusion he knew would no longer be valid when they reached it.
This curious dichotomy of logic puzzled them. He knew that this girl whose hand he held was Grace, and that their lives would become inextricably bound together, but he felt a curious futility about their early exploration of each other, as though it would lead only to an inconclusive end. But how could its conclusion be in doubt when everything they did together seemed to prepare naturally and easily for the next thing they did, and then to prepare for what followed that, building toward the only possible conclusion, the inescapable conclusion? And yet, he had the feeling that the end — why did he even consider an end, why did he allow his mind to entertain thoughts of an end when this was only the beginning? — would leave him exactly where he had been all along.
It seemed to him that there were definite echoes of Doris in this girl; she moved like her sometimes, and sometimes she even sounded like her; all right, what the hell, so she was something like Doris. But if a person followed that line of reasoning, he would have to conclude that every woman in his life was simply an echo of the woman who had preceded her. Grace was an echo of Doris, and Doris was an echo of his goddamn cousin Mandy with her piano legs, and Mandy was an echo of the first woman he had ever known, his mother. Well, okay, if a person wanted to get involved with all that Freudian jazz, well then, okay, Grace was an echo of his mother thrice removed, okay? A subtle refinement of the rather coarse and sometimes gross woman who had been his mother, okay? The same blond hair, and the same height more or less — he always thought of Grace as being tall, almost as tall as his mother had been — and the same directness and the same trigger-quick suspicious mind, and the same full breasts; okay, I’m falling in love with my own mother, okay? Well, now, just a minute, don’t draw any hasty conclusions. So you kind of like this girl, fine, you’ve got a little lech for her, fine, she does look a little bit like your dear mother the queen, the same blond hair, but let’s consider all the aspects of this, shall we? After all, if we are going to go searching through the involuted labyrinth of your mind, we must also inspect the possibility that not only does this sweet young social worker remind you of herself, who she most certainly is, this figure of beauty and Grace who she undoubtedly is and is not, and not only does she remind you of your dear late lamented mother with no mouth and blue pom-pom slippers and full and eagerly comforting breasts, and oh yes Mandy with her piano legs, your older cousin full of bursting vigor and sex, oh yes, all of these various and assorted women, but does she not remind you too of another sweet and angelic face, the cherub face on the roof of Il Duomo in Milan, the face that belonged to Beethoven who was machine-gunned to death in the underwater barbed wire off Tarawa? If we are to pursue these separate though tangential paths, where, then, will the conclusion lie? The conclusion will lie in endless repetition and inconclusion, that’s where. The conclusion will lie in the knowledge that you are not yourself at all but merely a collection of neurotic responses to random stimuli.
He remembered again the conversation he and Jesse had had one night aboard the Fancher shortly after the hurricane that had overtaken them on the way to Japan. They were trying to explain a theory to one of their shipmates, a radar striker named Starkey, getting more and more excited by their idea. Starkey would not or could not grasp their meaning.
“Don’t you see?” Jesse was saying. “I say ‘Good morning’ to you, right? But you don’t hear me say ‘Good morning,’ you only hear what you want to hear, and what you hear is ‘How are you?’ So you answer, ‘I’m fine, thanks, how’re you?’ but instead I hear you say, ‘Nice day, isn’t it?’ and I answer, ‘Beautiful day,’ but you hear me say, ‘Got the sniffles, can’t kick otherwise.’ Don’t you get it? It’s possible. We’re telling you it’s possible.”