The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [113]
They all accepted one another in time, with of course all the gossip requisite to acceptance. Dekes under the skin. Even Conn and he had made up. They hated each other, of course, but that was conveniently forgotten. A week after their quarrel he had passed Conn in the G-2 tent, and Conn had cleared his throat forcibly and said, "Looks like it's gonna be cooler today."
"Yes," Hearn had said.
"I got a lot of work today, I appreciate it cooler," Conn had added, and after that they made a point of nodding to each other. Today on the beach he had been talking to Dove, and Conn had come over.
"Yes, sir," Conn repeated, "many's the party we've had. You talk about that whisky and dandruff gag, what was his name, Fischler, any relation to Commodore Fischler?"
"I don't think so."
"The Commodore's a good friend of mine. Anyway I remember one time when Caldwell got a woman over and by God if she didn't drink her liquor in. . ."
"Lord, you'd think she'd burn herself to death," Dove exclaimed.
"Not her. That was her specialty. Caldwell almost bust a gut laughing. He liked his good time, Caldwell."
Dove was visibly shocked. "I can't say I've ever seen anything like that. God, isn't it disgusting, you're out in the open air like this, and the chaplain's probably giving his services now."
"Well, we really shouldn't be talking like this on Sunday," Conn agreed, "but what the hell, we're all men." He lit a cigarette, and speared the match in the sand. The crack of Dalleson's carbine sounded again, and a few shouts came from the water where some officers were having a water fight in the shallow surf. "I've made a study of parties," Conn said, "and there's just two ingredients to have a good one, enough to drink and some willing slits. Ready, willing, and able."
Hearn squinted along the sand. You could reduce it probably to four kinds of parties. There were the ones that made the newspaper society columns with the senators and the important representatives, the industrialists, the high brass, the foreign dignitaries, even his father had gone to one of them once, and been miserable no doubt. But then they all were miserable there. It was the highest flowering of an industrial capitalist culture, and a good time was segregate from the social forms, the power swappings, the highly elaborated weather talk. Everyone hated everyone else as a matter of course, for if they came to do business they found they could not, and if they came as snobs bearing gifts they were contemptuous of the men who had the power and lacked the conventional aptitudes.
There were the hotel parties with field officers and congenital lower-level brass, the American Legion -- Washington Extension, and big small-business men with nice factories in Indiana, and call girls. A desperate boredom always lay over those things until they got drunk, and then they all had a wonderful time, and went back with refreshed loins and new Pullman tales to their desks in Washington and Indiana. Sometimes, if you could get a hold of a representative who was a regular guy he would come along, and your business would be consummated with a couple of drunken bear hugs, a sentimental cognition that everybody was a hell of a good guy, and a call girl yelling into your ear, "Break it up, honey, break it up." His father had never mentioned it, but of course he had gone to that kind of party too.
There were the parties his own friends gave, with the quiet sustained drinking and essential joylessness. All the American college intellectuals, the ones who weren't sick, with their clear logical voices, their good manners, their kindness, their tact and their miserable, dreary and lucid intelligences. They were all in government now, or they wore bars and had hush-hush jobs, and they talked of Roger who had been lost on some OSS mission, or they analyzed politics, sometimes hopefully, sometimes sadly, with a detached and helpless and intrinsically superior attitude. There was good wit, incisive but always peripheral information, and the dry dejuiced hopelessness of all of them with their rational desiccated minds and their wistful contemplation of lusts and evils they would never understand with their bodies. William Blake angels, gray and clear, hovering over horseshit.