All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [65]
“Don’t be so bitter!” she said, and reached out to seize my forearm and set her sharp fingers in it, through the coat, and shake it a little.
“I’m no bitter. I don’t give a damn what they did. Or do. Or why.”
“Oh, Jack,” she said, still clutching my forearm, but not hard now, “can’t you love them a little, or forgive them, or just not think about them, or something? Something different from the way you are?”
“I could go for the rest of my life and not think about them,” I said. Then I noticed that she was shaking her head ever so little from side to side, and that her eyes were as dark a blue as they ever got and too bright, and that she had drawn in the edge of her lower lip and had set her teeth to it. I reached my right hand over and took her hand off my left forearm and laid it down flat, palm down, on the tablecloth, and covered it with my hand. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re not, Jack,” she said, “you’re not sorry. Not really. You aren’t ever sorry about anything. Or glad, either. You’re just–oh, I don’t know what.”
“I am sorry,” I said.
“Oh, you just thing you are sorry. Or glad. You aren’t really.”
“If you think you are sorry, who in the hell can tell you that you aren’t?” I demanded, for I was a brass-bound Idealist then, as I have started, and was not going to call for a plebiscite on whether I was sorry or not.
“That sounds all right,” she said, “but it isn’t. I don’t know why–oh, yes, I do–if you’ve never been sorry or glad then you haven’t got any way to know the next time whether you are or not.”
“All right,” I said, “but can I tell you this: something is happening inside me which I choose to call sorry?”
“You can say it, but you don’t know.” Then, snatching her hand from under my hand, “Oh, you start to feel sorry or glad or something but it just doesn’t come to anything.”
“You mean like a little green apple that’s got a worm in it and falls off the tree before it ever gets ripe?”
She laughed, and answered, “Yes, like little green apples with worms in them.”
“Well,” I said, “Here’s a little green apple with a worm in it: I’m sorry.”
I was sorry, or what went for sorry in my lexicon. I was sorry that I had ruined the evening. But candor compelled me to admit that there hadn’t been much of an evening to ruin.
I didn’t ask her to go to dinner with me again, at least not that time while I was out of a job and doing the sleeping. I had hunted up Adam and heard him play the piano. And I had sat across the spaghetti and the Dado red and looked at Anne Stanton. And as a result of what Anne said to me, I had gone down to the slums and seen the old man, not the very tall man who had once been stocky but whose face now dropped in puffy gray folds beneath the gray hair, with the steel-rimmed spectacles hanging on the end of the nose, and whose shoulders, thin now and snowed with dandruff, sagged down as with the pull of the apparently disjunctive, careful belly which made the vest of his black suit pop up above the belt and the slack-hanging pants. And in every case I had found what I had known I was going to find, because they had happened and nothing was going to change what had happened. I had been sinking down in the sleep like a drowning man in water, and they had flashed across my eyes again the way people say the past flashes across the eyes of the drowning man.
Well, I could go back to sleep now. Till my cash ran out, anyway. I could be Rip Van Winkle. Only I thought that the Rip Van Winkle story was all wrong. You went to sleep for a long time, and when you woke up nothing whatsoever had changed. No matter how long you slept, it was the same.
But I didn’t get to do much sleeping. I got a job. Or rather, the job got me. The telephone got me out of bed one morning. It was Sadie Burke, who said, “Get down here to the Capitol at ten o’clock. The Boss wants to see you.”
“The who?” I said.
“The Boss,” she said, “Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don’t you read the papers?”
“No, but somebody told me in the barbershop.”
“It’s true,” she said, “and the Boss said for you to get down here at ten.” And she hung up the phone.