The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [114]
And Dove's parties. But of course they were common to San Francisco and Chicago and Los Angeles and New York at times. The American Legion -- Washington Extension, Junior Auxiliary. Only with something more. Give it credit. In a proper light with proper glasses, these parties were sometimes magical and sad, festooned with all the echoes of all the trains that had brought them there, all the advance awarenesses of the great hollow stations that would bear them away again, And they were always young, Air Corps pilots and ensigns, and good-looking girls in fur coats, and always the government secretary or two, the working girl as a carry-over from the fraternity parties when she was always the girl who could be made because in some mysterious way the women of the lower classes could be depended upon to copulate like jack rabbits. And they all knew they were going to die soon with a sentimental and unstated English attitude which was completely phony. It came from books they had never read, and movies they shouldn't have seen; it was fed by the tears of their mothers, and the knowledge quite shocking, quite unbelievable, that a lot of them did die when they went overseas. Its origins were spurious; they never could connect really the romance of their impending deaths with the banal mechanical process of flying an airplane and landing and living in the barren eventless Army camps that surrounded their airfields. But nevertheless they had discovered it was a talisman, they were going to die soon, and they wore it magically until you believed in it when you were with them. And they did magical things like pouring whisky on each other's hair, or setting mattresses afire, or grabbing hats on the fly from the heads of established businessmen. Of all the parties those were perhaps the best, but he had come to them too old.
". . . and damn if we didn't find out she had hair growing clear up her belly," Conn said, finishing a story.
Dove laughed. "If Jane knew the things I've done."
Their talk had ended by revolting him. He was becoming a prude, Hearn decided. He was disgusted and there wasn't sufficient cause for it. Slowly he extended his arms and legs, lowered himself gradually to the ground, feeling the muscle tension in his stomach. There had been an instant when he was tempted to hug Conn and Dove with his arms, and rather deliberately knock their heads together. All right, he was tough. But there had been too many thoughts like that lately, in officers' mess, the time he wanted to strike the General, or just now. It was the trouble with being a big man. He raised his head and stared across the bulk of his body, pinching the roll of fat that had started on his belly. Under the hair that covered his chest his flesh had become white. Five years more, ten at most, and he might be having to buy it from women. When a big man's body started going, it fell apart quickly.
Hearn shrugged. Then he'd end up like Conn and to hell with it. He'd buy it and talk about it, and it was probably a damn sight easier than getting rid of women who had found something in him that he didn't have or he didn't care to give.
"She looked at it, and she said, 'Major' -- I was a major then -- 'what are they gonna do next? White ones, silver ones, gold ones, they'll probably be puttin' the American flag on 'em.' " Conn laughed and spat a little phlegm into the sand.
Why didn't they quit? Hearn rolled over on his belly, and felt the sun warming his body to its core. He'd be needing a woman soon, and short of ferrying to the next island, a couple of hundred miles away, where there were supposed to be native women, he was going to find little comfort.
"Hey," he said abruptly to Conn and Dove, "if you can't bring a whorehouse in, how about letting the women go for a while?"
"Beginning to get you down?" Conn asked with a smile.
"It's brutal," Hearn said, imitating Dove. He lit a cigarette, shaking the sand out of the pack.
Dove looked at him, tried another gambit. "Say, I was thinking before, Hearn, is your father's name William?"
"Yeah."
"We had a William Hearn who was a Deke about twenty-five years ago; could it be him?"