“He’s in Texas,” Sue says. “He’s stationed in Texas.”
“But just because you’re promised and can’t have a good time yourself, that doesn’t mean you can’t hang around those who can. It might even be good for you.”
“He’s with his buddies,” Sue says.
“Sure,” George Mills says, “sure he is. It was the cars,” he says. “It was the cars, it was the cramped quarters. It was the necking in the cars.” He stops and looks at them. “But you’re married,” he says helplessly. “Ruth’s pregnant. Louise tells me Bernadette’s in her fourth month. Herb is Ellen Rose’s fiancé. Why do you need this stuff? School’s out for you people. You graduated high school. Your diploma hangs on the wall with the prom bids, or’s shoved in the drawer with your underwear.”
The men look shamefaced. They stare at the buffed tops of their dancing shoes. Ellen Rose picks absently at her corsage. Bernadette and Ruth seem suddenly tired. Only Louise and Carol’s energies seem unimpaired, Sue the grass widow’s.
“Bernadette’s folks are out tonight. Oh,” George Mills says, “oh.”
Because only now, years after he’s moved into it, does he comprehend the stability of the neighborhood. He perceives with horror and the communicated shame of the wives and husbands what he’s gotten into here, the force fields of wired intimacy he has somehow penetrated. Discovering, he feels discovered. Like a child rolling Easter eggs on trespassed pitch. He’s not from around here, but it’s as if he’s never lived anywhere else. If he intuits their customs it is done joylessly, with no pride in his cleverness. He has the solution now, of course. To invite them home with him, to open his apartment to their terrible honed occasion, to fetch them pizzas, White Castles, imperial gallons of Crown’s ice cream, the syrups and sweet, auxiliary garnish of their ceremonial cravings.
He was right. He was always right. His logic is a Jacob’s ladder of successive vista, a nexus of predicative data. The foot bone’s connected to the shin bone, the shin bone’s connected to the thigh bone, and so on up through all the bones and glands of need and time and loneliness.
Bernadette’s folks are out, they’ve taken the car. But their house has aunts in it, uncles, the busted survivors of their youth.
Because they’re only alone with their kind, he thinks. Charles’ and Ruth’s baby was conceived in an automobile, Bernadette’s and Ray’s was. I’m sure of it, he thinks. He thinks I’m positive. Sue was driving, he thinks, a godmother and good sport fiddling with her radio dial and hearing their tongues in each other’s heads in the back seat and thinking of Texas.
I haven’t the patience he thinks. It isn’t just time. It isn’t just effort. There are too many virgins to deal with.
But Louise is smiling at him. They damned near all are.
[Because I was twenty-seven years old before I ever entered the Delgado Ballroom.]
Stan David calls for a Relative Dance with cut-in privileges for anyone of any generation so long as he is blood or connected by marriage. Only George and Louise and a handful of others sit this one out, and soon the room is rocking as parents, sons, wives, sisters, cousins, husbands, in-laws, daughters and brothers seek each other out on the dark, crowded dance floor of the Delgado Ballroom.
He is twenty-seven years old, an age when many scientists have already done their best work. He doesn’t understand what he’s seeing, he can’t give it a name, but, in the spiraling life on the packed floor, George Mills has a vision, and can just make out the shape of a perfect DNA molecule.
7
One morning when George Mills entered Mrs. Glazer’s room in the small, private hospital in Juarez to which she had been admitted, the tout, Father Merchant, was already there.
Mrs. Glazer was asleep or unconscious in the hospital bed, her breathing so light it seemed a stage of rest different in kind from anything he had yet witnessed. It was so deep a state of relaxation that it appeared to Mills as if she had just received good news of the highest order. She might just have closed her eyes for a minute. She might have been meditating, or in a trance, or drowned.
George placed his package on the nightstand and sat down.
It was not really her apparent contentment that had caught George up, or the presence of the tout, or even the extraordinarily tidy, shipshape condition of her room. (Which he noticed. Mrs. Glazer had not been a particularly fastidious patient. She wadded Kleenex and dropped it on her bed, the carpet. Though she did not smoke, her ashtrays were always full — with pins, with sputum, with bits of string. And though she had not gotten dressed in a week, underwear caught in the chest of drawers, stockings lay over chairs, dresses were askew on hangers or visible in the open closet. Sections of the El Paso newspaper, though she barely glanced at it, were everywhere, under the bed, beside the toilet, on top of the television set. There were the peels of tangerines and oranges, fragments of lunch and — he had no idea where these came from — husks of dry chewing gum. The telephone cord was unaccountably tangled, the tuning knob on the radio twisted above or below the frequencies printed on the dial. The faucets dripped. Motel soap lay in the bottom of the basin or wrapped in damp washcloths on the surface of the writing desk or even in the peels of the fruit. It often took Mills the better part of an hour merely to straighten the mess and, by the time he was done, Mrs. Glazer, practically immobile in her wide double bed, had somehow begun the room’s piecemeal derangement. It was the same sloven story in the back seat of their rental car.) Today her hospital room seemed immaculate, almost alphabetically arranged.
But it wasn’t the condition of the room, or Father Merchant, or Mrs. Glazer’s strangely exalted sleep which had startled Mills. It was the current magazines, the box of candy, the potted plant and mint bestsellers on her nightstand.
“What’s happened?” Mills asked Father Merchant.
The tout shrugged.
“There’s something you don’t know?” Mills said. “There’s still some circumstance in this world of which you’re ignorant?”
“There’s nothin’ I don’ know.”
“Where’d she get that candy? What’s that stuff?”
“Gif’s,” the tout said. “Everywhere the ill are made offerin’s. Meals. Throughout the worl’ presents een sick rooms are an el grande part of the gross national produc’. Even disease ees good for business.”
“Do you know who brought them?”
“There’s nothin’ I don’ know.”
“Has her husband come?”
“Sam’s in San Louis,” Father Merchant said, “an’ won’ arrive till later. He have an meetin’ muy importante. The chairman of the philosophy departments have receive el offer fantastico from the Universidad de Alabama. Eef Walter leavin’ they don’ no good logician have. Blauer can’t thin’ straight. They are approach Gutstein een Hawaii. Mucho dinero tambien. Personal I feel he don’ come. Es verdad, cos’ of livin’ chipper in Midwes’ than the islan’s. Todos he do to sale his casa in Waikiki an replace eet on the mainland two as grande he ahead. Pero money’s no el problemo. Eet’s Grace. She have art’ritis. I don’ thin’ she lookin’ forward to no bad winter. There is nothing I do not know!”
“Hold it down, will you!” George hissed. “You’ll wake her. She needs the sleep.”