All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [171]
Anyway, Anne Stanton, age seventeen, had probably gone upstairs to be alone because she was, all of a sudden, in love. She was in love with a rather tall, somewhat gangly, slightly stooped youth of twenty-one, with a bony horse face, a big almost askew hook of a nose, dark unkempt hair, dark eyes (not burning and deep like the eyes of Cass Mastern, bur frequently vague or veiled, bloodshot in the mornings, brightening only with excitement), big hands that worked and twisted slowly on his lap, plucking at each other, and twisted big feet that were inclined to shamble–a youth not beautiful, not brilliant, not industrious, not good, not kind, not even ambitious, given to excesses and confusions, thrown between melancholy and random violence, between the cold mire and the hot flame, between curiosity and apathy, between humility and self-love, between yesterday and tomorrow. What she has succeeded in creating out of that unpromising lump of clay scooped up from the general earth, nobody was ever to know.
But in any case, in her loving she was also re-creating herself, and she had gone upstairs to be in the dark and try to learn what that new self was. While downstairs Adam and I sat in the swing on the gallery, not saying a word. That was the evening Adam got counted out for all the other evenings, and out you go, you dirty dishrag, you.
Everybody else got counted out, too, for even on those evenings when a crowd would get together on the Stanton gallery, or my mother’s, to play a phonograph and dance (with some of the boys–some of them veterans back from France–slipping off to take a drink from a bottle hidden out there in the crotch of a live oak), Anne and I would count them out. For organdie and seersucker are pretty thin materials, and the only person on the world I ever danced decently with was Anne Stanton and the nights were warm, and I wasn’t so much taller than Anne that I could not inhale the full scent of her hair while our music-locked limbs paced out the pattern of our hypnosis and our breathing kept time together, till, after a while, I would pass from an acute awareness of body to a sense of being damned near disembodied, or floating as light as a feather or as light as a big empty-headed balloon held captive to the ground by a single thread, and waiting for a puff of breeze.
Or we would get into the roadster and drive out of the Landing and pull the cutout and tear along, hell-for-leather, or as much hell-for-leather as was possible on the road and with the mechanism of those days, out beyond the houses between the pines and the tidelands, with her head leaned against my shoulder and her hair puffed with the wind and tendrils whipping against my cheek. She would lean there and laugh out and say, “Oh, Jackie, Jackie, it’s a wonderful night, it’s a wonderful night, it’s a wonderful night, say it’s a wonderful night, Jackie-boy, say it, say it!” Till I have to say it after her, like a lesson I was learning. Or she would hum or sing a song, one of those off the phonograph–God, what were they then? I don’t remember. And maybe let the humming die off, and be perfectly still, with her eyes closed, until I stopped the car at some place where the breeze off the Gulf was enough to blow the mosquitoes away (On nights when there wasn’t any breeze, you simply didn’t do any stopping.) Sometimes then, when I stopped the car she wouldn’t even open her eyes till I had leaned over to kiss her, and I might have to kiss her enough to stop her breath. Or again, she would wait till just the instant before the kiss, then open her eyes wide, all at once, and say, “Boo!” and laugh.. Then she