The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [368]
She was nuts about him, he thought with gratifying assurance. But she wanted to get married. Somehow it was not right, either, to go on this way. But how could he get married now? Christ, what a chump he had been, hanging on to his stock. Letting Ike Dugan make a chump out of him, that snaky rat. He could just see himself meeting with him, swinging, pounding that skinny, ratty face of his into jelly. And then he’d just say, that puss of yours that I punched, it’s only fluctuations, and you can go and get the brain of Solomon Imbray to fix it up for you and not let it hurt.
He had worked himself into a state of excitement, and he was breathing rapidly and could feel his heart knocking and going like a pump. He tried to relax and calm himself, and to smile about it and tell himself, what the hell, there was no use bawling over spilled milk. It was only that just when things looked like they could go so well for a guy, his luck just turned sour on him.
He listened to slow, sobbing radio music, and the indistinguishable cries of a peddler cut in upon the saccharine flow of music. He lay still on his back and stared up at the white ceiling, and a drowse seemed to lilt through his body, and suddenly he was hearing music again, feeling that period had just been chunked out of his life. He had been lying looking at the ceiling, and suddenly he heard the radio.
I love you, love, you, Merle .. .
The song made him think of French girls, of some excitable young French dame, with a thin body full of live hot wires who said oo-la-la, and ziss, and zat, and zose, and zese, and himself with her. Fun to think of it, but with a real French cherie he wouldn’t maybe know what the hell to say or do. And Catherine. Maybe he had let himself in for something when he’d gotten engaged to her. But then, for years he was going to be getting something regular that he liked, and that, now, was something elegant, all right, and no matter what else happened, that, sister, was something he would get. And if he only had his money back so that he could marry her right off. But Jesus, though, suppose she got knocked up! But she couldn’t. She couldn’t, that was all, and he believed it was true that a person’s luck couldn’t be all bad, or all good, and his bad luck had all come. He couldn’t get any more tough breaks. Goddamn it, there was a law of averages.
He was distracted by a telephone ringing somewhere, and he wondered what kind of people it was talking, and what they would have to say to each other. But suppose now that he still had his two thousand bucks. Suppose he had even cleaned up on the market a little, two hundred, five hundred, two thousand, five thousand, fifteen thousand. Getting married to Catherine, and having fifteen, twenty thousand bucks, and Red and everybody he knew saying, well, I never thought that Studs would be so well-heeled. He could just see himself with twenty-five thousand bucks to ,his name, and that only a starter. Bank accounts, checking accounts, buying anything he wanted to. Thinking of himself like this, too, it gave him a pleasant, sleepy, lulling feeling. His eyes grew heavy. A drowsing, dozeful sense of animal comfort caressed his limbs, his nerves, his muscles, his brain. Studs Lonigan, the big shot. He fell asleep.
II
Studs entered the parlor, wearing old trousers over his B.V.D.’s. He rubbed his hand over his drawn and sleepy face, yawned again, stood indecisive, with his arms, white and thin, hanging at his sides.
“Hello, Bill. How are you feeling?”
“Pretty good, Dad. I took a nice nap.”
“That’s good. I always like a little snooze myself on a Saturday afternoon after the week’s work. But today I just couldn’t come home and take one. I was down to see Barney McCormack today.”
“You saw Barney McCormack today, huh?