The Studs Lonigan Trilogy - James T. Farrell [381]
He looked covertly at Catherine, and a horror like a cold sweat came over him. He saw her again as if she were a stranger. He didn’t know her. Didn’t know what went on in her head. He didn’t feel that he would ever know her. He wondered how he could ever love her, and was this all that love really was?
“I wonder what time it is?” she asked moodily.
He shrugged his shoulders, and then noticed that she was looking thoughtfully ahead at those in the water and hadn’t seen him shrug his shoulders. Was she having the same kind of thoughts that he was having?
“I don’t know what time it is, but it must be about four o’clock.”
“I was just wondering what time it was,” she said abstractedly, and her voice, too, impressed him as the voice of a stranger.
“Come on, Hal, let’s go in,” a female voice behind him was saying.
“Darling, please,” a man said.
“What’s the matter, Connie, did Hal soak up too much moonshine last night?” another male voice asked.
“That wasn’t all. We went to a party at Joe’s and he and Joe’s wife, Martha, hit it off swell. So he took her to his bed and board for the night, and Martha must be more wearing on a man than I am.”
“Well, now, darling, it isn’t that. It was just the liquor.”
“Say, Connie, how about you and I trading off our mates for a night?”
“All right. But I’m taking a plunge now.”
Studs and Catherine watched the one called Connie, a heftily constructed woman in a black bathing suit, run by them, followed by a bronzed-shouldered man in a two-piece blue-and-white suit.
“Terrible people, if you ask me,” Catherine said, frowning disapproval.
“It’s a funny way they talk,” Studs said, puzzled by the conversation he had heard.
What the hell kind of a guy was it who’d let his wife play like that? Boy, he’d sock such a wife’s teeth out and slam the crap out of the guy.
“That talk was just terrible. Why, I never even thought that there were people like that in the world. They ought to be arrested,” Catherine said in a low but shocked voice.
“Yeh.”
“The idea of it,” she added with growing indignation.
He shook his head and asked himself how was it now, and how did it come about that he was marrying Catherine when she seemed to him suddenly like a stranger he could never know. And that a child of his was, at this very minute, growing inside of her. He scratched his puzzled head. He felt alone, so completely alone that it seemed as if there were no one near him. All these people, too, strangers. He closed his eyes and held in his mind the naked image of Catherine, and he imagined her with him in that act that was supposed to make a guy and a girl so close, and still she seemed a stranger, and he still felt all alone. His thoughts and feelings were padlocked, completely padlocked in his mind, and when he talked, most of the time, instead of expressing them he was using words to prevent himself from letting them out, fooling people by putting into their minds a picture of himself that was not at all Studs Lonigan.
He lay back, resting his head in cupped hands, looking at the sky, almost pale blue, while clouds floated so slowly, the sun glaring through it. He became light-headed, and thought of what a big place the world was after all, and he was sort of lost in it. He felt that he had always been like this. Ever since he had been a kid, he had wished and waited, and there had been no change except for the worst. He tried to laugh at this thought as if it were a wisecrack, but he couldn’t, because it was too important to him. He had met lots of new people, become almost thirty years old, lost his health, and now he was getting married and going to have a kid of his own. And what change would there be after he got married? He’d already gotten it enough from her to know what it was like, and maybe after the kid she might get fat and...He glanced sidewise at her. He liked it with her, though, and wished it was dark now and they were together, and still... oh, Christ Almighty! He was just a goddamn chump trying to figure too much out.