“No, it ain’t,” Starkey replied. “Because if we hear only what we want to hear, then by God we’re seeing only what we want to see, too.”
“Why not?” Jesse said. “Why isn’t that possible, too? You trying to tell me we all see things the same way?”
“No, but if we’re both looking at an apple, we know by God it’s an apple and not an orange.”
“How do you know we’re both calling an apple the same thing?” Buddwing asked.
“What do you mean?”
“How do you know an apple isn’t an orange to me?”
“Because an apple is an apple, that’s why.”
“But suppose I just heard you say, ‘An orange is an orange’?”
“That ain’t what I said.
“How do you know it’s not what you said? How do you know you heard what I said?”
“I got ears, ain’t I?”
“Yes, you’ve got a nose.”
“I said ears.”
“Yes, I heard you. You said nose.”
“Don’t you see what he’s trying to do?” Jesse said to Starkey in exasperation.
“Yeah, he’s trying to mix me up, that’s what,” Starkey said.
“He’s trying to explain something, you goddamn fool.”
“He’s trying to explain that what I hear and what I see ain’t what I hear and what I see. Does that by God make sense to you?”
“It makes a whole hell of a lot of sense,” Jesse said.
“Yeah, well, I think you’ve both gone Asiatic,” Starkey said, and he stretched himself out full length in his sack and turned his back to them.
They left the aft sleeping compartment and went out to stand on the fantail. The war was over, the Fancher was running with lights again, they stood in semidarkness near the stacked garbage cans and talked in excited whispers, involved in a highly philosophical discussion for which neither of them was adequately prepared. Looking back on that night now, he recognized just how specious their theory had been. They had, after all, communicated. Moreover, they had both used words that each had readily understood. If they had seriously accepted their own theory, they would have been forced to believe that Jesse was supplying all the dialogue in a conversational stream that was quite different from the one Buddwing pursued, the one in which he was the sole creator. And granting this, it would have been necessary to grant the inevitably following premise as welclass="underline" that one of those separate though concurrent conversations had simply vanished into air, leaving neither trace nor memory of itself.
Something was eluding him now, too; something had vanished as surely as that second hypothetical conversation. He moved through his courtship with Grace in the midst of a clamoring mingled reality, a disjointed conglomeration of thoughts and images from within and without, pulsating with life, each as real in its shimmering presence as the other. The reality was this girl who went through the exploratory rite with him, but the reality was also Grace, and cross-hatched through these two concurrent truths was another and terror-ridden truth, so that reality upon reality, truth upon truth crossed and recrossed, tumbled and swam. Surely these Saturday night people surrounding him, these pleasure-bound faces, these bodies in their twentieth-century finery, these sleek and shining automobiles, these curving neon tubes, these pavements, these streets, this city, surely these were as real as the girl on his arm. But a more youthful Grace was just as real, a Grace with brighter hair and a firmer body, a Grace in college-girl sweaters and skirts, this was real, too, this lived inside him, he could see her, he could touch her, he could reach out and touch her.
He moves out of the living room he approaches the door he can hear the swishing sound behind the door why should it frighten him he puts his hand on the doorknob it takes forever for his hand to open the door he sees the tile first there is something glittering on the tile.
The motion picture something stupid and shallow Kim Novak and three married men Dan sits beside him clever stupid insipid Dan they do not speak.
“Do you like Chinese food?” the girl asked.
“Well, I was in Chinatown this afternoon,” Buddwing said.
Grace, where are you?
When he and Dan came out of the movie theater the streets are cluttered with the Friday night throng, they buy the little black address book in a novelty shop on Broadway, Dan gives him the number, you won’t forget to call, will you? no I won’t forget, you won’t forget now, will you? no, I won’t forget I won’t forget I won’t forget.
He would not forget, he would never forget.
He would forget immediately.
He would forget almost everything they did the moment they did it, so that their life together would become an unremembered series of incidents leading to a final lapse.
There was in this girl, in Grace; there had been from the very beginning, a contradiction of personality that bewildered and intrigued him. She seemed to be a curious mixture of innocence and guile, of gaiety and brooding intensity, of high-minded purpose and of loose resolve. Perhaps he saw in her a mirror image of the person he had become; perhaps this was why she seemed so enormously attractive. His discharge from the navy had been abrupt and somehow unsatisfactory, a four-day stay at Treasure Island, and then a cattle-car cross-country trip and a whirlwind formal severance at Lido Beach. He could remember taking a bus across the Whitestone Bridge, his eyes drinking in the city in the distance, aware that a woman was holding onto a strap just to his right, but unwilling to give her his seat because then he would not have been able to see the skyline. He took a taxi from Gun Hill Road, and all the while a single thought kept echoing in his head, I’m going home, I’m going home, but he had not as yet given “home” a binding definition — where was “home?” Wasn’t “home” the Whitestone Bridge, and the magnificent skyline in the distance? Wasn’t “home” this familiar stretch of Gun Hill Road? Wasn’t it Evander Childs High School, and Bronxwood Avenue, and the rutted, potholed streets? He paid the cab driver and stood on the sidewalk with his sea-bag and looked up at the frame house and thought again, I’m going home, and the thought lingered in his mind as he walked up the driveway and then into the house, and stayed in his mind as he embraced his mother and his father, they both looked so much older, I’m going home. He sat in his own living room and told them of his adventures in Japan, and all the while he thought, I’m going home, because somehow none of this was home.
Beethoven was dead; none of the boys even mentioned his name. They went to see his mother once, but she wept when they arrived, and they never went again. L.J. had met a girl in Boston, and was seriously considering marrying her. Red Vest said he was bored and was thinking of re-enlisting. They spent the summer at Orchard Beach, reminiscing, but something was wrong, this was not home, these were not the boys he had once known. At the end of August, Red Vest went back into the army. In September, L.J. went to Boston to propose to the girl he had met there, and Buddwing enrolled at N.Y.U.
He first saw her in the small park outside the school in the middle of October. He was sitting on a bench with his back to the sun, watching the front steps of the building. Behind him, he could hear two men playing chess. Someone was strumming a guitar. She came down the steps and a student called, “Hi, Grace,” as she passed, and she nodded and smiled briefly, and then went to sit on a bench at the other end of the park, facing Washington Square West. She opened a book in her lap and began reading. He must have watched her for perhaps ten minutes before he finally rose and walked to where she was sitting. He sat down beside her and immediately said, “Hello, Grace.”