The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [158]
Here's good-bye to Fieldmont, good old FCD, we had a lot of time there.
That's no lie.
The Dean wasn't bad but I never could figure him out, and you remember what a good-looking wife he had.
Here's to the wife, I heard she left him last year for a month.
Oh, no. The bottle goes on its second and third circuit.
All in all we had a good time there, only I'm glad to be out, I sure wish I was going with you fellows to Yale.
In a corner the football captain of the previous season is bending Hearn's ear. I wish I could be back for this next fall, what a team we're going to have with those juniors, you mark my words, Haskell is going to be All-American in four years, and while we're on the subject, Bob, I would like to give you just a little word of advice 'cause I've kept my eye on you for a long time now, and you don't try hard enough, you don't pull, you could've made the team 'cause you're big and you got natural ability but you didn't want to, and it's a shame because you ought to pull harder.
Stick your head in a bucket of ice.
Hearn's drunk, the captain yells.
Look at old Hearn off in the corner again. I bet he busted up with Adelaide.
She's a keen girl, but she necks around an awful lot, I bet Lantry used to worry about it before he went off to Princeton.
Aw, brothers don't care, that's my theory. I've got a sister, and she doesn't fool around, but I wouldn't care if she did.
You're only saying that 'cause she doesn't, I mean if she did, oh, that liquor is going around in my head. Who's drunk?
Yippeeee! It is Hearn standing in the middle of the floor with his head tilted back, gasping at the spout of the bottle. I'm a sonofabitch, what I say is all you men put your cards on the table.
Man, is he potted.
Go ahead, dare me to jump out the window, watch me pull my oar. Sweating, his face red with sudden anger, he pushes one of them away, opens the window and teeters on the sill. I'm gonna jump.
Stop him.
Yippeeeeeee! And he is gone, leapt out into the night. There's a thud, a crash of some bushes, and they rush horrified to the window. How are you, Hearn, are you all right, where are you, Hearn?
Fieldmont, Fieldmont über alles, Hearn roars back at them, lying on the ground in darkness, laughing, too drunk to have hurt himself.
What an odd egg Hearn is, they say. Remember last year when he got potted?
The last summer before college is a succession of golden days, and shining beaches, the magic of electric lights on summer evenings, and the dance band at the summer bathing club, AN AIRLINE TICKET TO ROMANTIC PLACES, and the touch and smell of young girls, lipstick odor, powder odor, and the svelte lean scent of leather on the seats of convertibles. The sky always has stars, always has moonlight gilding the black trees. On the highways the headlights lance a silver tunnel through the foliage overhead.
And he has a girl friend, a great catch, the young beauty at this summer colony. Miss Sally Tendecker of Lake Shore Drive, and the inescapable connotations to come of Christmas holidays, and fur coats, perfume, and college dances in the hue-titled rooms of the big hotels.
Bob, you drive faster than anybody I know, you're going to kill yourself one of these days.
Uh-huh. He's slow at speech with women yet, absorbed for the instant in negotiating the turn. His Buick swings out wide to the left, resists, struggles against going to the right, and then straightens from the turn. There had been panic for a second, and then relief, exultation as he goes streaming down the straightaway.
I declare you're a wild man, Bob Hearn.
I don't know.
What goes on in your head, Bob?
He parks the car off the highway, turns to her with a sudden abrupt outpouring of speech. I don't know, Sally, sometimes I think. . . but that isn't true, I just get all worked up, and I stew around, and I don't want to do anything, I'm going to Harvard just 'cause my father said something about Yale, and I don't know, there's things, there's something else, I can't put my finger on it, I don't want to be pushed, I don't know.
She laughs. Oh, you're a crazy boy, Bob, I guess that's why all we girls love you.