“Because if that’s what you mean, say so. Let’s settle it here and now. I’m not your husband and even if I was I wouldn’t make my living as a stoolpigeon.”
She looked at me now in bewilderment, and holding her baby to her, sat as far from me as she could get. She stared out the windshield with her chin on the baby’s head. God knows her remark was innocent enough. But the confidence behind it I found irritating — as if living and traveling with her I must fit her preconceptions. I suppose what really bothered me was the strength of character behind this. I felt if she didn’t even know what she was doing as she did it, I couldn’t hope to change her.
Then of course in a few miles Joe was sorry, he apologized, which encouraged her to sulk and afterward to regain her good cheer.
Sandy could have said he was traveling on her money. But it never occurred to her. It occurred to him, however — he was not unaware of his talent for using other people’s money, he was not unaware of his attraction to other men’s wives, he was not unmindful that his life since leaving Paterson had been a picaresque of other men’s money and other men’s women, who in hell was he to get righteously independent with anyone? This kid was giving him her life everything she owned and all he could do was kick her in the ass for it.
He wondered seriously if love wasn’t a feeling at all but a simple characterless state of shared isolation. If you were alone with a woman your feelings might change from moment to moment but the circumstance of your shared fate did not change. Maybe that’s where the love was, in the combined circumstance. This was not the Penfield view but it could be argued. Joe looked at other couples old and young and wondered what they saw in each other, working their little businesses, or pushing their jalopies west, or eating their meals together or holding the hands of a child between them. Maybe all the world’s pairs, dreary and toothless and stumbling drunk, or picking at garbage pails or waiting on the street for a flop knew about love as, say, he and Clara Lukaćs never had. They knew it could incorporate passion or prim distaste, it might be joyous or full of rage, it might carry extreme concern of any kind, or unconcern, but it was presumed to survive challenge. All it was, was a kind of neutral constancy. Sandy knew it! You just made the decision, all you needed to do was decide to have it and love was yours. Nothing grand, nothing monumental, and not a prison either, but a sort of sturdy structure of outlook, one that wouldn’t break under the weight of ideas and longing feelings terrors visions and the world’s awful mordant surprises.
“Sandy,” he said, “let’s get married.”
She hugged him until he thought the truck would go off the road.
“We don’t want a new start, Sandy, we want a new life. A whole new life. When we get to California. Okay? That’s the place.”
She was more than amenable. “Oh my, oh my,” she said, hugging the baby. “You hear that, darlin? We’re gonna have a proper daddy. Yes we are! Oh my!”
There followed a period of solemn discussion. I explained that to make a true marriage we both had to shuck the ways of our old lives, its attitudes, its assumptions. “I know I won’t be able to live a road life anymore,” I said. “I know I have to plan to make something of myself. And I have ideas, Sandy, a man can do a lot starting from a small investment. More than one fortune has been made that way, I can tell you.”
She nodded.
“So I know I’ve got to give up my past life and I want you to think about giving up yours. Do you ask in what way?”
“Yes sir.”
“In the way of style, Sandy honey. In the way of more ambition of style. Now, take this truck for instance. They stop trucks like this by the hundreds at the California state line. They don’t want people coming in looking like Okies, you know? In fact I’ve read if you can’t prove you have a job waiting they won’t even let you in.”
“This truck is bad?”
“Very bad.”
“But how else we gonna move the furniture and all?”
“Ah, well, the furniture, that’s the next thing I want to talk to you about.”
An hour later we were in a fair-sized town east of Albuquerque, New Mexico. There was a big junk store at the edge of town. Sandy and I stood with our luggage in the dusty street while the furniture was unloaded. A man scrawled a big number in chalk on each piece or tied a tag to its leg. Sandy watched her chair and sofa, her big Philco radio disappear into the darkness of the store. I patted her shoulder.
It was cold and very sunny. The man counted out sixty dollars into my hand.
“Where’s there a used-car lot?” I said to him. He walked around the truck, looking it up and down. He leaned his weight on the lowered tailgate. “I’ll take it off your hands,” he said. “Not worth much, though.”
I got seventy-five dollars for the truck, for which I had paid a hundred in Jacksontown. Twenty-five dollars to transport us across six states didn’t seem at all bad.
I tied two of Sandy’s bags with rope and slung them over my good shoulder. I held another valise under my good arm and a fourth in my good hand. Sandy carried the baby and the remaining bag and, slowly, and with many halts, we shuffled several blocks to the railroad depot. It was a small station on the Santa Fe line and in a couple of hours a train was coming through to Los Angeles.
I checked the bags and took my wife-and-baby-to-be across the street to a diner and left them there. I found a barbershop a few blocks away. The barber removed my bandages and pulled out the stitches. He shaved me and gave me a haircut. He gave me a hot towel.
Then I had an idea. I stopped in a drugstore. My cast was supposed to be on for six weeks, but it was a torment. The druggist did the job as several customers looked on.
I was shocked my my pale thin arm. The break had been down toward the wrist. My fingers ached when I tried to move them. But it was good to be rid of the weight of all that plaster and to sport instead a couple of splints and adhesive tape.
To celebrate I stopped in a haberdasher’s and bought a dark suit with a vest and two pairs of pants. Eighteen dollars. The tailor did up the cuffs for me on the spot. I bought a white shirt and a blue tie for three-fifty. Even my old khaki greatcoat looked good after the man brushed it and put the collar down. “Wear it open,” he said, “so the suit shows.”
Sandy didn’t recognize me when I walked back into the diner.
“Is that you?”
“It’s either me or George Raft,” I said.
The idea was coming clear to her. We still had an hour before the train arrived. She took one of her bags from the check-in and repaired to the ladies’ room.
I remember that depot: it had wooden strip wainscoting and a stove and arched windows caked with chalk dust. I sat on the bench with Baby Sandy and held her on my lap. I felt her life as she squirmed to look at this or that. She wore a wool cap from which hair of the lightest color peeked through. I untied the string under her chin and pushed back the hat and it seemed to me now the hair was more red than I remembered. It seemed to me too as we regarded each other that her facial structure was changing and the father was beginning to show. “Oh, that would be a shame,” I said aloud. She grabbed my tie in her fist.
And then I looked up and standing there Sandy James in a dress of Clara’s and hose and Clara’s high-heeled shoes. She was looking at the floor and holding her arms out as if she were on a high wire. Her face was flushed, she dropped her bag and grabbed hold of the bench.
“I’m fallin!” she said with a shriek.
“You’re not falling,” I said.
She had combed her hair back and put on lipstick a little bit crooked. She wore a coat open over the dress I hadn’t seen it before it was creased but it was fine a dark creased coat not originally hers any more than the dress or the shoes, but it looked fine, it all looked fine.