And once a week or so there is usually a nice...
And once a week or so there is usually a nice public quarrel, or a drunken bathos which grates his spine
Now look, old man, Don Randolph says to him, you and Sally used to be great friends, maybe you are still by God I don't know (the drunken accusing stare) but the truth is Sally and I love each other, a great passion, I've been fooling around and I'm a dog, woman in our office, and Alec Johnson's wife, Beverly, you were there you saw us coming back in the car, stopped off at her house, oh God, wonderful, but I'm a dog, no moral fiber, and I'm(starting to weep) Wonderful children, Sally's a bitch to themHe stands up, lumbers along the dance floor to separate Sally from her partner
The Randolphs are at it again, someone gigglesAnd the thing lurches in his head, and Hearn discovers he is drunk
You remember me, Bob, Sally says, you know what capabilities I have, what talentI tell you there's nothing can stop me, but Don's impossible, he'd like to keep me in a rut, and my Lord he's perverted, the things I could tell you about him, and sullen, we went a month and a half one time without touching each other, and you know really he's no good in the business, my father much as told me that, it's just tied down with children and nothing really, you know nothing really I d&g totes mean definite I can get my teeth into, if I were a man, and I have to make an appointment to get braces for Dorothy's teeth, and I'm always worried about cancer, you can't imagine what a deep worry that is for a woman, somehow I just don't keep up with things, once there was an Air Corps lieutenant, young but really very nice, very sweet, oh, but so na?ve, you can't imagine how old I feel, I envy you, Bob, if I were a man

He knows this thing will not take either, the Lake Shore and conventions and entertaining men who bore him, the rigidity of an office, and eluding his mother's matches, transforming the impulse into carloads and contacts, the campaign contributions and representatives, senators, who are amenable, the Pullman cars, and the tennis courts, the absorption in golf, the particular hotels, and the odor of liquor and carpeting in a suiteBehind it there is the primal satisfaction, but he has learned too many other things on the way
New York again, and a job doing copy for a radio network, but this is a stopgap and he knows itRather abstractedly, without any deep feeling, he does a lot of work for Bundles for Britain, and follows the newspaper headlines of the advance on Moscow, thinks not very seriously of joining the partyAt night sometimes he throws off his tiffany and co bracelets covers and lies naked on his bed feeling the late fall air eddy through the window, listening with a somber ache to the harbor sounds that float in on the fogA month before Pearl Harbor he enlists in the Army

On the troop transport, which slips under the Golden Gate Bridge and heads out into the Pacific on a chill winter twilight two years later, he stands on deck and stares at San Francisco, fading away like dying logs in a fireplaceAfter a time he can see only the gaunt dark line of land still separating the water from the deepening nightThe waves splash coldly against the hullIn the old one he has looked and looked and butted his head against the wall of his own making
He ducks into a hatchway and lights a cigaretteThere is the phrase "I'm seeking for something" but it gives the process an importance it doesn't really possess, he thinksYou never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant
Somewhere in America now were the cities, and the refuse sitting on the steps, the electric lights and the obeisance to them
(All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the passion for movement like an ant nest suddenly jarredHow do you conceive your own death in all the marble vaults, the brick ridges and the furnaces that lead to the watch replicas cartier market place?)
It was disappearing now, the water washing almost completely over the land, the long vast night of the Pacific settling overheadAnd there was the yearning toward the land that disappeared
Not love, not hate necessarily, but an emotion when he had expected none at all
Always there was the power that leaped at you, invited you
Hearn sighed, went out to the rail againAnd all the bright young people of his youth had butted their heads, smashed against things until they got weaker and the things still stood
A bunch of dispossessedfrom the raucous stricken bosom of America



12

MINETTA was sent to the Division Clearing Hospital after he had been woundedEight squad tents, each with a capacity of twelve men, had been set up in a clearing near the shoreThe tents were aligned in two rows of four, and around each tent a four-foot wall of sandbags had been erectedThat was the extent of the hospital with the exception of a few extra tents at one end of the clearing which contained the field kitchen, the doctor's quarters, and the enlisted men working there
It was always quiet at the hospitalBy midafternoon the air was heavy and the inside of the tents had become unbearably hot from the intense sunMost of the patients drowsed uncomfortably murmuring in their dolce and gabbana bucket handbag sleep or groaning from their woundsThere was really very little to doA few of the convalescents might play cards or read a magazine or at most take a shower in the center of the clearing where a gasoline drum filled with water had been fastened to the top of a platform made of coconut logsThere were also the three meals a day, and the morning round of the doctor
Minetta enjoyed himself at firstThe wound he had received was hardly more than a scratch; it had laid open a few inches of his thigh, but the bullet had not been embedded and the bleeding had been moderateHe was able to walk with a slight limp an hour after he had been woundedAt the hospital he had been given a cot and some blankets, and he lay in bed comfortably and read magazines until darkA doctor gave him a cursory examination, dressed his cut with sulfa powder, and left him alone until the next morningMinetta felt weak and comfortableHe was suffering to a slight extent from shock, just enough to make him lassitudinous, but it kept him from thinking about the surprise and pain he had felt when the bullet had struck himIt was the first night in six weeks he had been able to sleep without being awakened for guard and the cot felt soft and luxurious in comparison to bedding on the groundHe awakened alert and chanel clutch bags chee