The Neon Jungle

Chapter Two

The next morning Henry was moody and thoughtful. He spent a lot of time standing at the windows, looking down at the street. He jingled change in his pockets. He paced restlessly.

After lunch he got up and brought more coffee from the stove and filled their cups. He sat down opposite her.

“I’ve got seven more days furlough, Bonny.”

“I know. You said you could hitch a plane ride. Why don’t you, Henry? I’ll stay right here. Honestly. Then you could come back here, and by then I should be strong enough. I could get a job, maybe.”

“I’m not going home. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

“Goodness! Don’t snarl.”

“I’ve got something figured out.”

“What do you mean?”

“I told you it’s a big house. There’s room. God knows there’s plenty of work, so it wouldn’t be like you were sponging on the old man. He drives everybody. Then you’d be getting the allotment money. It wouldn’t be much.”

She stared at him. “Allotment?”

“I can’t leave you this way. I got to know that you’re set. And I know enough about you to know that you won’t be set unless you got a reason. And the only reason that’s going to mean anything to you is to have somebody depending on you and trusting you. I can get a cab and we can go fill out the forms and get the blood tests or whatever you have to have in California. And then, by God, you’ll be a Varaki, and you’ll have the whole damn family on your side. The way I figure it, it will be an arrangement. I haven’t written the family any of this. They won’t know a damn thing, except you’re my wife. And that’ll be all they need to know.”

She rested her hands flat on the table and shut her eyes for long seconds. “What are you, Henry? Twenty-three?”

“Twenty-two.”

“I’m a twenty-six-year-old tramp.”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“A tramp. A semi-alcoholic. A girl who works the bars and works the men she finds in the bars. A girl who... can’t even remember all their faces. It’s good luck instead of good judgment that I’m not diseased. Bonita Wade Fletcher. A great little old gal. I’ve been tossed in the can twice here and once in L.A. That’s what you’re trying to wish on your family, Henry. On decent people.”

“My God, you like to wallow in it, don’t you?”

“You’re playing a part now, Henry. A big fat dramatic part. Saving the fallen. Rescuing the scarlet woman. My God, look at me!”

“I’m looking.”

“I walk a certain way and talk a certain way and look at men a certain way, and your whole damn family would have to be blind not to see it. I’m just one big smell of stale bedroom and warm gin. No, Henry. Not on your life.”

“I say you got to look at yourself and understand that you got to have some kind of a reason to prop you up. You forgot how to stand up by yourself.”

“Love. Love goes with marriage. I couldn’t love you. I haven’t got enough love left for anybody. I gave it all away. Free samples.”

“I haven’t said a damn word about love. This is just an arrangement. Goddamn it, you go back there to Johnston as Mrs. Henry Varaki and let the name prop you up until you can stand by yourself. Or maybe you don’t go for Varaki. Too foreign, maybe. Low class.”

“No. No.”

“I go away and I come back. O.K. By then you know. Either way we break it up legal. And to hell with you if you let me down.”

“You said it’s a nice business. Profitable. How do you know I won’t stay tied around your neck, lushing on your father’s profits from the store for the rest of your life?”

His voice softened. “Bonny, I listened to you for a lot of days and nights. I listened to a lot of things. I know more about you than you know about yourself.”

She put her head down on her wrist on the table. She rocked her head from side to side. “No,” she said in a broken voice. “No. No. No.”

It lasted until midnight. She felt utterly drained and exhausted. She felt as though she had no more will or identity of her own, as if some great force had picked her up and carried her along. She was sick with the strain, with the long bitter hours of it.

“All right,” she heard herself say. “All right then, Henry.”

He looked at her for a long time and then grinned. “We Varakis got a reputation for stubbornness.”

They went down in a taxi at ten the next morning. They filled out the application forms, had blood tests made, were told when to reappear for the license and civil ceremony. There was a great deal of constraint between them. That evening she straightened up after making up the studio couch for him and said in a deadly flat tone of voice, “You can start sleeping with me if you want to. You ought to get that much, at least, but I won’t blame you if you refuse the kind offer, because it isn’t exactly what you might call a generous offer. It’s more like maybe offering somebody a cigarette. The last one in the pack. The kind that are all...”

“Shut up and go to bed, for God’s sake.”

“Just drop in any time. I won’t consider it an inconvenience.”

“Will you shut up? Or will I shut you up?”

“Oh, goody! We’re engaged! We’re engaged!”

“Good night, Bonny.”

“Good night, Henry.”

They were married on a cold rainy Thursday in late November at five minutes of noon. They taxied back to the apartment in rigid uncomfortable silence. My happy wedding day, she thought.

Henry said he’d be back in a while and he went out. She sat and watched the rain run down the window. My wedding day. The bride carried a bouquet of raspberry blossoms. Henry came back in an hour, his clothes rain-spattered. He carried a bundle into the kitchen. He came back in and tossed a flat box onto her lap. “I put champagne on ice.”

“Dandy. One sip and I’ll go on a nine-week bat.”

He sat and looked gravely at her. “Why do you do it to yourself, Bonny?”

“Do what, husband darling?” she asked blandly. “What have we here in the box, husband darling?”

“Open it and find out.”

“Oh, goody! A present for your winsome little wife, perhaps.”

She took off the paper and opened the box. She looked at what it contained. She heard the rain. She knew she should look over at him. She could not quite force herself to look at him. My wedding day, I forgot that it was his, too. Selfish, self-pitying nag. She took it out of the box. The lace on the bodice of the nightgown was like white foam. She looked at it for a moment and then buried her face in it. A great raw sob hurt her throat.

He came to her and held her. When she could speak she said, “What are you... trying to do to me?”

“Keep you from doing too much to yourself, Bonny. I know it isn’t a marriage like in the movies. Is there any law about having as much as we can, even if it isn’t perfect?”

“Nothing has ever been more perfect for me. I’ve acted foul to you. I’m terribly, desperately sorry, Henry. So damn sorry.”

“You’ll wear it?”

“Of course.”

Later she was able to laugh in a way in which she had not laughed in years. It was a good gayness. Later, in the darkened bedroom, she felt oddly virginal. She had to push the bitter, ironic thoughts back out of her mind. His big hands were tender and gentle, and there was a warm strength to him. Gentleness stirred her as fierceness never could. She felt strangely shy, almost demure. It was all sweet and moving, and he did not find out until afterward, when he kissed her eyes, that she wept.

“Why, darling?” he whispered.

And she could not tell him the truth. That she wept because she regretted the years that had left her so little to give him, and had turned her own responses into nothingness. He was big and gentle. A nice kid. She could feel that, and nothing more, no matter how she tried.

“Why are you crying?” he repeated.

“Because I think I love you, my darling,” she lied. And she knew that her lie was a strong fence that would be around her during the time he would be gone.

The day he left he gave her the bus ticket and twenty dollars. He said he’d change the insurance and make out the allotment forms. He kissed her hard. She watched his broad back as he walked off. He did not turn again.

She was on the bus two hours later. The wire from Henry’s father, Gus Varaki, had said, TELL HER THIS IS WHERE SHE LIVES NO NONSENSE.

It was a long bus trip. Nights and darkness and flashing lights and muted sleep sounds around her. Early-morning stops at the wayside stations. The grainy, sticky, heavy feeling of sleeping in a tilted seat. She wanted to feel that the blue and silver bus was taking her out of one life and into a new one. But you could not empty yourself of everything, become a shell to be refilled. Wherever you went, you had to take yourself, take all your own corrosive juices and splintered memories and patterned reactions. Henry became unreal after the first day of travel. He was a gentle hand that touched her forehead, seeking the dry heat of fever. A big muscular kid who walked lightly. A faceless kid. A kid who joined the ranks of all the other faceless ones. His eyes had been blue, his hair coarse, blond, bristly. Mrs. Henry Varaki.

Gus and Jana met her at the grubby bus station in Johnston. By then she was too weary to look for their reactions. She knew only that Gus Varaki was a thick-bodied stocky man who hugged her warmly, and Jana was a plain sturdy girl who kissed her. They took her to a car and drove her through the afternoon streets, through snow that melted as it fell. They took her to a big house and to this third-floor room. Jana brought food. She went to sleep after a hot bath. She did not awaken until dusk of the following day.

It had taken her months to build confidence. Gus and Jana and Anna and Teena had helped. Walter seemed to have no reaction to her. His thin dark bitter pregnant wife, Doris, was actively unpleasant.

It had taken a long time to rebuild. In March it was all torn down again when the wire came about Henry. The letter from his commanding officer came a week later, to the gloomy, depressed household.

Gus came to her room and sat stolidly, tears marking the unchanging gray stone of his face.

She told him twice that she was going to leave before he seemed to hear her. Then he looked at her slowly.

“Leave us, Bonny? No. You stay.”

“I’m no help to you. I’m no good here.”

“We want you. What other thing I can say?”

Jana later showed her the letter Henry had written his father. “I think I’ll be O.K., Pop, but in a deal like this you can’t be 100 percent sure. If anything happens, make Bonny stay with you. Don’t let her leave. She hasn’t got any place to go. Keep her there until it looks like she can make out O.K. on her own.”

Jana said, “That isn’t why Gus wants you to stay, Bonny. Not on account of this letter. It’s more than that. To him, you’re like a part of Henry. The only part left. We... all want you.”

“But you don’t know. You don’t know what I was when Henry came along and...”

Jana, sitting close, gently touched Bonny’s lips with her fingertips. “Shush, Bonny.”

“But I want you to know all of it.”

“Why? To punish yourself, maybe? We weren’t blind. We’ve watched you change. You aren’t what you were.”

And she had stayed, and it was June, and she had learned to take a pride in the quickness with which she could handle the big cash register at the check-out counter. She rarely had to examine the packaged goods to find the price. The regular customers knew her, and she talked with them. The first burden of grief had lifted from the big house. Gus Varaki had not recovered from it completely, and it did not seem that he would. Some of the life had gone out of him. Bonny remembered the way it had been when she had first come there, finding Gus and his young bride standing close in corners, laughing together in a young way, blushing and moving apart when someone noticed them. There was no longer the busty, impulsive caress, a hard pinch of waist, a growl and nibble at the firm young throat. The loss of his son had in some odd way placed Jana in the role of daughter rather than young wife. And Jana no longer would watch her husband across the room in the evening after the store closed, and grow heavy-lidded, soft-mouthed, to at last go up the stairs with him, saying good night to the others in a faraway voice.

Jana was the sort of girl who, at first glance, was quite plain. Face a bit broad, pale skin, shiny nose, hair that was not quite brown and not quite blond and very fine-textured, body that was solidly built, eyes that were pale and not quite blue and not quite gray.

But at third glance, or fourth, you began to notice the glow of health, a silky, glowing ripeness. Her waist and ankles and wrists were slim, and she moved lightly and quickly. You saw the soft natural wave in her hair, and you sensed the sweetness of her, the young animal cleanliness, and you saw then the softness and clever configuration of the underlip, the high roundness of breast.

She had no cleverness or mental quickness. Routine tasks suited her best, and she could not seem to acquire enough speed on check-out. She could handle heavy sacks and crates with lithe ease. She ate as much as any man. And she had a good true warm instinct about people. She was a good wife for Gus. Yet Bonny guessed from the puzzlement she often saw in Jana’s eyes, from her frequent fits of irritability, that she was not being treated as a wife. She was receiving the affection of a daughter. And Gus walked heavily and did not smile much.

Today the man with the clown face had come in. Lieutenant Rowell. A thick-legged, fat-bellied little balding man with thin narrow shoulders, and a face that made you want to laugh. Button nose, owl eyes, a big crooked mouth. His forehead bulged and it gave his face a look that was not exactly the look of an infant, but rather something prenatal, something fetal.

He was from the local precinct. The area was one in which there were factories, alleys, down-at-the-heels rooming houses, poolrooms, juvenile gangs, tiny shabby public parks, candy stores with punchboards, brick schoolyards. There were long rows of identical houses. There was always trouble in the neighborhood. Rowell was, they said, a good cop for the neighborhood, inquisitive, bullying, cynical, and merciless. He had watched Bonny other times he had been in.

Today he had said, without warning, and in a voice that stopped all other talk and motion in the store, “I like to know everybody I got in the neighborhood, Bonny. Everybody that moves in. It saves time. I got to get a transcript of the application for license to find out the name you used to run under. Fletcher, they tell me. So I check it through on the teletype. Just routine.”

She could not look at him or speak.

“What’s on the books out there is between you and me, honey. All I say is this: stay off my streets at night. Stay out of my joints.”

In the silence she heard Pop chunk the cleaver deeply into the chopping block. He came out around the end of the long meat counter, saying, “Lieutenant, you know you talk to my daughter.”

You build carefully, and something behind that clown face can tear it all down. His streets. His joints. Some people from the neighborhood had been in there. It would spread fast. Walter Varaki had been on one knee in an aisle, marking cans and stacking them on a low shelf. Rick Stussen, the fat blond butcher, had been behind the meat counter with Gus, running the slicer.

She sat in the small third-floor room by the gabled window, and knew it was time to go back down. To wait longer would make it more difficult. The record was finished again. She lifted the arm back and placed it at rest and turned the switch. The turntable stopped. It had been a gift from Gus and Jana at Christmas. Another bus hissed at the corner. It was headed downtown. Down to where the lights were, down to places of quick forgetting. There was a tide that ran strongly, and for a time she had been in an eddy near a lee shore, caught in a purposeless circling. One gentle push and the tide would catch her again and take her on, away from this quietness, away from these people who trusted her merely because one of them had married her.

She got up from the chair and stretched the stiffness out of her long legs, cramped from sitting so long in one position. She went down the hall to the third-floor bathroom, turned on the light, and examined her face in the mirror. She looked at herself and saw what Rowell had seen. A guilty furtiveness in the gray eyes. The cast of weakness across the mouth, with its sullen swollen lips. The look of the chippy. Chippy in a white cardigan, in black corduroy slacks. She made an ugly face at herself, dug lipstick out of the pocket of the slacks, and painted on a bold mouth, bolder than the mouth she had worn these last months.

She went down and found Jana swamped at the checkout, five people waiting with loaded baskets. Jana gave her a strained smile and moved gratefully over. They worked together, unloading the baskets onto the counter. Bonny’s fingers were staccato on the register keys, while Jana packed the groceries in bags and cartons. Bonny was curt and unsmiling with the customers.

Soon there was no one waiting. She straightened the stacks of bills in the register drawer, took the machine total for the day, and, using the register as an adding machine, quickly totaled the checks that had been taken in.

Gus came over, wiping his hands on his apron, saying too cheerfully, “You don’t get upset about him with the funny face.”

“It’s all right.”

“Let’s see a smile.”

“It’s all right,” she said, unsmiling. Another customer wheeled a loaded basket up. Gus walked away. Bonny worked the keys so hard that her fingers stung.