“You’re how I imagined you to be, Nancy.”
She was about to cry. I wished she would not cry. I put my gloved hand on her shoulder and tried to tell her with a slight pressure that Please, I did not want her to cry, I was not worth crying over.
“What... what do you suppose it is, Bert?” she asked.
“Nancy,” I said, “it’s just that I don’t know where I belong any more.”
“Maybe you belong with me.”
“Nancy...”
“Because I love you.”
“Nancy, I wake up in the middle of the night, and I don’t know who I am.”
“You’re Bertram Tyler.”
“Or where I am.”
“You’re home.”
“That’s just it. I don’t feel as if I’m home.” I took a deep breath. “Nancy,” I said, “I think I want to leave Eau Fraiche.”
“All right,” she said.
“Yes,” I said, and nodded.
“But why?”
“I don’t know why.”
“Where would you go?”
“Milwaukee,” I said. “Or Paris.”
“Paris?” Nancy said, as surprised as I myself was, and then suddenly she burst out laughing. “What in the world would you do in Paris?”
“Well,” I said, “I guess I’d sit and drink wine or something,” and then I grinned, and then I began laughing, too.
“Paris,” she said, “well, well.”
Her laughter trailed. She took one hand from her muff, wiped at the corners of her eyes, and then quickly tucked it away again. We sat silently on the huge rock overlooking the frozen lake.
“Bert,” she said, “if it’s because you don’t love me, please don’t feel... please don’t go away because of that.”
“No, it isn’t that.”
“Bert,” she said, “please don’t go to Paris.”
“I wouldn’t go to Paris.”
“Please don’t go anywhere.”
“Well...”
“Without me,” she said. “I’m so embarrassed,” she said. “I thought...” She shook her head. “Here I am being so forward and you’ve... made all sorts of plans that don’t include me.” She readied up suddenly with one clenched hand and pressed it to her cheek. “Forgive me,” she said.
“Nancy,” I said, “I killed seven men.”
“Pardon?”
“I killed...” She lifted her face to mine, her eyes immediately seeking my lips. I took her naked hand in both my own, and very softly said, “I killed seven men.”
“Yes, Bert,” she said.
“I shot one of them in the back.”
“Yes, Bert.”
“I stole from dead soldiers. A ring from one German and a pair of boots from another. I threw away the ring.”
“Yes.”
“In a town one day, I can’t remember the name of it, we... Nancy, there were five of us on patrol, and there was this dead horse in the courtyard and a French girl standing in the doorway, and we... we took her upstairs to where one wall of the house had been blown away, and they, on a straw pallet up there, they did it to her, Nancy. J’ai treize ans! she screamed. Une vierge! But they forced her, Nance, and... I... I didn’t try to stop them, I didn’t do anything to stop them. And then we left her there and walked down the wooden steps and out into the courtyard again where the horse lay dead in bright sunshine with flies buzzing around his bleeding mouth, and a soldier named Kerry showed us a silver pendant necklace he had taken from the second bedroom upstairs where the girl’s mother was dead on the floor from the shell that had hit the house, and which he said would bring him luck, I didn’t try to stop them, I didn’t even try.”
I was out of breath. I bent and put my forehead down on Nancy’s hand. She sat unmoving.
Then she said only, “Yes, Bert.”
“Did you hear me?” I said.
“Yes, Bert,” she said. “I heard you.”
February
On the weekends I had to play, I would die from wanting Dana.
I had got together with three other freshmen guys at Yale, one of whom was in pre-med and who had suggested the name for the group, a great name, The Rhinoplasticians, a rhinoplastician being a doctor who docs nose bobs. We didn’t sound as great together yet as the old Dawn Patrol had, but we were getting there, and also we were beginning to play a lot of local jobs, especially at preppie parties in the vicinity, where college MEN made a big hit with all the little girls from Miss Porter’s. We usually pulled down about twenty-five bucks a man whenever we played, and we played approximately once every other weekend, which meant that I was earning between fifty and seventy-five dollars a month, more than enough to pay for the apartment in Providence. I was living on a tight allowance from my father, and I didn’t think it was fair to ask him for additional money to pay for the apartment, so the new group was a godsend. But at the same time, whenever I played to earn money to pay for the apartment, I couldn’t get up to Providence to use the apartment; it was something of a dilemma, not to mention painful besides.
The apartment belonged to a guy named Lenny Samalson, who was studying graphic design at Risdee. Lenny had a girlfriend in New York, and her name was Roxanne, and she went to Sarah Lawrence but her parents were very strict, making it necessary for Lenny to go down to the city each weekend if he wanted to see her. Roxanne lived in the same building as Dana, on Seventy-ninth and Park, and when Dana casually mentioned, you know, that it would be convenient if she and I had, you know, a place where we could be alone together on weekends, Roxanne said, Well, how about Lenny’s place in Providence? and we grabbed it. Lenny was delighted to let us have it because I paid him thirty dollars a month for using it only on weekends, and not every weekend, at that. On the other hand, we were delighted to get it because it was only two hours from New Haven and an hour from Boston, which meant that Dana and I could both leave for Providence after our respective Friday afternoon classes, and get there for dinner, by which time Lenny was already on his way to New York and the carefully guarded Roxanne, who, Dana said, had lost her virginity at the age of fourteen on the roof with the boy from 12C.
I had very little difficulty getting away from Yale for weekends, but our trysts involved a certain amount of subterfuge on Dana’s part. Dana was but a mere female freshman living in Shelton Hall and blanket permission (pun unintended by the administration of B.U., I’m sure) for overnights had to be in writing from her parents. With permission, she was entitled to unlimited weekends, provided she signed out before the two a. m. curfew, and left a telephone number where she could be reached. Dana had little difficulty convincing Dr. Castelli that blanket permission would be far simpler than having to call home each time she was invited to spend a weekend with a girlfriend. And the telephone number she left at Shelton each Friday afternoon before putting her check in the overnight column was of course the one at Lenny’s apartment.
Providence was a singularly grubby town, but Lenny’s apartment was really quite nice. I had always thought artists were sloppy people who left twisted paint tubes and dirty rags all over the place, but Lenny was very tidy. In fact, since he was in Graphic Design rather than Fine Arts, he hardly ever worked in oils, and the place was miraculously free of the aroma of paint or turpentine, which could have been disastrous in a one-room apartment with a screen separating the kitchen from the bedroom-living room. Lenny had hand-decorated the screen himself, using the Nuclear Disarmament symbol in various sizes as an over-all black-and-white pattern. The symbol, Dana informed me, was a composite of the semaphore signals for the letters N and D, this information having incidentally been garnered by her in library research for a paper she was doing on William Shakespeare, figure it out. The screen stood at the foot of the bed, and tacked to it was a very decorative poster Lenny had painted in blues and reds, advising everyone to MAKE love, not war, though actually we didn’t need any reminders.