As he believed, again vaguely, in virgins. Not — he was no prude — in their moral superiority. Not in some special quality they possessed which their fallen sisters — not even, particularly, in the fall of those sisters — lacked. Not in their fitness as brides or suitability as girl friends, not in their congenial apposition to grace and tone or in their conformity to a grand convention. Not, in fact, in anything petite or chaste or delicate, prudent, pure, virtuous, discreet or even modest. In virginity, in virginity itself, in its simple mechanical cause. He believed, that is, in the hymen. In the membrane, that, he took it, air-and watertight occlusive seal like cellophane on a pack of cigarettes or the metal cap on a soda bottle that somehow shored for as long as it was still in place all the juices of need, all the sexual solutions, that endocrinous drip drip and concupiscent leak which he so expertly stanched in cars and plugged in those furnished rooms.
And just as he shied away from the whores, he shied away from the virgins, and for much the same reason — that they had no needs. They were too much trouble. They would take seduction, courtship, the long, difficult ploy of friendship.
[What was the point? How could I deal with someone who did not mean to be dealt with? Did I have beer money and bus fare to burn on women and girls who had an existence aloof and outside the terms of my desires? If I did not think of them as incorruptible then I thought of them as indifferent, people outside my sphere of influence. I might as well have had conversations with ladies whose language was French, who could not understand my English, who may not even have heard it.]
Which explains why, at twenty-seven, George Mills, who’d had his ashes hauled as often as he’d felt the urgency, who’d been blown, whose flesh and buttocks had been chewed and clutched, whose back and backside raked in wanton, dissipate zest, why George Mills, bruised by delight and all the hijinks of high feeling, had never so much as kissed a maiden. It was that membrane, that cherry like some mythic grail or fortified fastness, which kept him off, not so much at bay as at home, like some frail, stiff, awkward peasant mowing in a field who sees the battlement, the walled, high, thick and ancient parapet and, behind the casement, the oppressor himself, say, taking the sun on the bulwark’s broad and open deck, defenseless, alone, who looks once, shrugs, and embraces the hay, the infested, heavy bales, to shove them about with his last declining energies.
[It was the two free passes.]
He wasn’t shy around these women, any more than one is shy around furniture — tables, chairs. He wasn’t overly modest or unassuming. (He had his assumptions.) It was that in their presence — the presence of virgins — he had some genuine gift for the revoked self, a redskin caution, an anonymity reasonable as a good alibi. It was only afterward that a teammate ever remembered that he had failed to introduce George to his girl’s friend, her roommate, a cousin in town on a visit. The roommate or cousin would not even have noted this much. On a streetcar or bus, in a private automobile going back to the neighborhood after a game in the park, he could sit thigh to thigh beside the strange girl without contact, his skin as nerveless as his clothing.
[I figured why bother, and made myself as indifferent as I supposed her to be. I looked out the window. I watched for my stop.]
He might have gone on this way forever.
[It was the two free passes, at two bucks apiece the sixteen bottles of beer they represented, which, if you figure the woman in that tavern was already on her second bottle by the time I put my coin in the jukebox to play her song, and when you remember that I nursed mine — someone had to drive, someone had to stay sober enough to take responsibility for my erection — often drinking only one to her three or, if I ordered a pitcher, maybe a glass and a half to her four, and if you add to the equation the fact that she rarely drank more than seven bottles, two of which she’d paid for herself, and usually not more than five or six, three or four of them on me, then the two passes stood for two to three women successfully courted, successfully wooed. I’m not mean. Money doesn’t move me. I’m talking about effort, all that waiting at bus stops, listening to songs played over again again that I hadn’t liked the first time, all those strained and jumpy monologues, the patient stints at their bodies, watched as boilers, supervised as machinery. So it was the two and a half months I was thinking of — I’m a working man, I punch time clocks, I’m paid by the hour — when I made the connection between the two free passes and the trio of women. It wasn’t the money. A fifth of my working year. It wasn’t the money. Didn’t I spring for new clothes? Didn’t I pop for accessories? And it wasn’t any investment I was seeking to protect when I bought them. The poor aren’t cheap, there’d been no investment. “Bring your girl,” the manager said and gave me free passes. So it wasn’t the money and I had no girl. Hell, maybe it was the manager’s investment I was protecting. Though I still think it was the effort, that I suddenly saw all the man-hours and elbow grease that just those beers and bus rides entailed.]
Stan David was the orchestra leader at the Delgado Ballroom. David’s was a regional band, almost a municipal one. They played at proms and weddings and, during the week, at the Delgado. They cut no records but had been often on the air. Theirs was the studio band for the local Mutual radio station, and they had been heard behind the victory celebrations in the ballrooms of many downtown hotels a few hours after the polls closed on election days.
David was a small man, prematurely gray and responsible-looking. He looked more like the orchestra’s business manager than its conductor and, when he sat down at the piano to lead his band, he somehow seemed someone from the audience, the father of the bride, say, or the high school’s principal being a good sport. Indeed, he’d joked with the man who’d hired him for the Delgado and who’d commented on the fact that Stan wasn’t dressed like the other players. “I know this town. It’s a conservative town. I’m as much a master of ceremonies as a musician. These people will take more from a gray-headed guy in a business suit than they would from some boob in a yellow show biz tux.”
On the Saturday night of George Mills’s free passes it was not yet an orchestra when Mills walked in. Unaugmented by strings or woodwinds, it was barely a band. They were still setting up.
George glanced at the small group, at their odd displacement on the commodious bandstand, at the gap, greater, Mills judged, than the distance between home plate and pitcher’s mound, between the trumpet and the drummer. He looked at the arrangement of the vacant, freestanding, streamlined music stands like big phonograph speakers, at the sequin flourish of their initials.