The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [229]
You dance, Joey?
No. A momentary anger toward all the others. They have time to dance, time to become lawyers, time to become smooth. But it passes, is uncharacteristic, and he is merely uncomfortable again.
Excuse me, Lucille, he says to the hostess, but I have to go now, got to get up early, convey my fondest apologies to your mother.
And back inside his house at the socially rejected hour of ten-thirty, he sits with his mother, drinks a glass of hot tea on the eroded white porcelain table, is obviously moody.
What's the matter, Joey?
Nothing. And it is unbearable that she knows. Tomorrow I got a lot of work, he says.
At the shoe factory they should appreciate you more, all the work you do.
He tilts the carton off the floor, gets his knee back of it, and zooms it up over his head, lofting it onto the top of the seven-foot pile. Beside him the new man is wrestling it up clumsily.
Here, let me show you, Joey says. You have to combat the inertia of it, get it in momentum. It's very important to know how to lift these things or you get a rupture, all kinds of physical breakdowns. I've made a study of this. His powerful back muscles contract only slightly as he flips up another carton. You'll get the hang of it, he says cheerfully. There are lots of things in this kind of work you have to study about.
A lonely deal. Sad things, like leafing through the annual catalogues sent out by MIT, Sheffield School of Engineering, NYU, and so on.
But there is a party at last, a girl to whom he can talk, a pretty dark-haired little girl with a soft shy voice and an attractive mole on her chin of which she is self-conscious. A year or two younger than he, just out of high school, and she wants to be an actress or a poetess. She makes him listen to the symphonies of Tchaikovsky (the Fifth is her favorite) and she is reading Look Homeward, Angel, works as a salesgirl in a woman's store.
Oh, it's not a bad job, I suppose, she says, but it's. . . the girls are not really high class, it's nothing special I could write a letter about. I'd like to do something else.
Oh, I would too, so much, he says.
You ought to, Joey, you're a finer-type person, I can see we're the only thinkers. (They laugh, suddenly and magically intimate.)
Soon they are having long conversations on the stuffed rigid cushions of a maroon sofa in the parlor of her house. They discuss marriage versus a career for her, academically, abstractly; of course it concerns neither of them. They are the thinkers, regarding life. And in the complicated, relished, introspective web of young lovers, or more exactly, young petters, they progress along the oldest channel in the world and the most deceptive, for they are certain it is unique to them. Even as they are calling themselves engaged, they are losing the details of their subtle involved pledging of a troth. They are moved and warmed by intimacies between them, by long husky conversations in the parlor, in inexpensive restaurants, by the murmurs, the holding of hands in the dark velvet caverns of movie houses. They forget most of the things that have advanced them into love, feel now only the effect of them. And of course their conversation alters, new themes are bruited. Shy sensitive girls may end up as poetesses or they may turn bitter and drink alone in bars, but nice shy sensitive Jewish girls usually marry and have children, gain two pounds a year, and worry more about refurbishing hats and trying a new casserole than about the meaning of life. After their engagement,, Natalie talks over their prospects.
Oh, honey, you know I don't want to nag you, but we can't get married on the money you're making; after all, you wouldn't want me to live in a cold-water flat. A woman wants to fix up things and have a nice home, it's awfully important, Joey.
I understand what you mean, he answers, but, Natalie honey, it's not such an easy thing, there's been a lot of talk about a recession, and you can't tell, it might be a depression coming again.
Joey, it's not like you to talk like that, what I like about you is you're so strong and optimistic.