XIV

John Grandin was sorting out his books to select those which he would need for his opening class when the telephone rang. The automatic dialing system filled the living room with an insistent zing. For a moment, he thought of letting it go. Then he told himself that this would be an indication of fear—fear of answering and fear of finding out. After a second or two of hesitation he picked up the receiver.

The young baritone voice sang over the wire, hearty as always but with an unwonted nervousness or tension:

“Johnnie? It’s me, Johnnie—Cliff. I’m in the station at Bridgeport, just coming into New York; can I see you, Johnnie?”

“What is it, Cliff?”

“Oh, nothing special—I just thought if you were in—”

“Wait a moment, Cliff, I hear someone at the door. . . .”

John Grandin put down the receiver and walked to the middle of the room. Why should Cliff want to see him, or he Cliff? He knew full well why. If Cliff wanted to call on him—if the two of them were to have the opportunity of being together in the apartment, with no one knowing—what, indeed, was there to decide. It was a fortuitous meeting in private—for what?—such as he could not have dared to hope for. He stalled a moment longer and then went back to the phone.

“Sorry, Cliff, it was the laundryman. Now, what was it you wanted?”

“Wanted? Well, it isn’t that, Johnnie, but I’m coming in town and if you’re not busy—”

Grandin looked ruefully at the books he had chosen for the first-­morning class. “All right, Cliff.”

“I’ll be there in about an hour and a half,” said the eager young voice, “say about ten-­thirty at the latest. I’ll come straight to your apartment, Johnnie, shall I? That all right?”

“Yes.—You know where I am?”

“Oh sure! I’ve been keeping that note you stuck in our box before we left Nantucket. I bet I’ve been calling you a dozen times. Though I don’t know why, ’cause I knew you wouldn’t be back till today. Still, I just thought maybe you might be in earlier. . . .”

“Wait a moment, Cliff.” He found this difficult to say, but it was something he had to ask: “Is Billie coming with you, by any chance?”

“No, just me.”

As he came away from the telephone, Grandin realized with a sinking feeling that he had not given himself time really to think if this was what he wanted. Once again Cliff Hauman had completely taken over his day.

He sat by the open window and waited. He saw the worn briefcase on the living-­room table, its open flap and straps hanging down over the edge, ready to be buckled; he had been about to put in his books for the morning class. But this was all right, he told himself: class or no class, it was far more important that he settle this thing now—one way or the other, for good and all.

But he was filled with an almost physical apprehension of Cliff’s coming. There was no sense in kidding himself. Maybe nothing would happen; but he knew what he himself would go through merely to have Cliff sitting opposite him in the same room, with no one in the world knowing what they were doing or not doing, no one knowing where they were. Cliff’s calling him on the telephone had not been accident. John Grandin knew only too well, after the note he had left in the Dune House box, that he himself was to blame; Cliff had not even needed to look him up in the book. Nor was this the first time he had called, according to Cliff’s own words. What was the meaning of the projected meeting? What did it intend on Hauman’s part? For the first time, Grandin had the feeling that he was being played with; and for once he didn’t give a damn. Let school and the first class of the summer semester go to hell. Let Cliff come; let what might happen happen.

The hot morning seemed interminable. In spite of his decision, he could not but feel a real guilt to think that the new students would be assembled and waiting—wondering what had become of their professor on this, the first day, while he remained here in the apartment, indifferent to them and helpless in himself. About ten-thirty, the buzzer rang.

Before answering it, John Grandin gave a last look around the living room, thinking, as he did so, that it was a ludicrous and irrelevant thing to be doing; he had tidied it thoroughly the morning he left for Woods Hole. Assuming a calm he was far from feeling, he stepped to the door.

Cliff came in breathless, but with a radiant smile, a smile of complete health and charm.

“How are you, Johnnie? Gee!”

He seemed irrationally delighted to be here, happy—not at all restless (for the moment) as he had been during their farewell in Sconset on that last unhappy evening, an evening unhappy for John Grandin because he thought he would never be seeing him again.

But as the minutes passed, Cliff began once more to create an impression of strain as he had during the boat trip when they first met, even a kind of anxiety. Scarcely looking at Grandin, he walked about the apartment admiring things too enthusiastically. John Grandin watched him. Then, as Cliff became aware of this, he went to a chair and sat down with a kind of self-­consciousness.

John Grandin took out a cigarette. Cliff, turning his gaze from the pictures on the wall, hurried across the room to light it for him; then, instead of sitting down again, he resumed his tour of inspection.

With his back to John Grandin, he put his broad hands on his waist, craned his tawny head upward, and gazed at the packed bookshelves reaching to the ceiling. Grandin saw two damp spots in the armpits of his khaki shirt, the first sign of sweat he had ever noticed in the immaculate Clifford Hauman; it must be because of the humid New York heat.

“Gosh, I never saw so many books in my life. Wouldn’t my daddy love this? He reads more books! Regular bookworm. . . .” He wheeled about and said, as if it were an afterthought—as if it had just occurred to him: “Say, Johnnie, would you mind if I took a bath? I’m just stinking hot. Dirty too, I guess. . . .”

Without waiting for consent, Cliff found at once the small bathroom between the living room and study, and a moment later Grandin heard the noise in the shower and Cliff sloshing about in the stinging spray.

. . . You son-­of-­a-­bitch, Grandin reflected, not without pleasure in spite of the violence of his thought. . . . I will not be played with in this fashion, I will not be made a monkey of. If he had any sense at all, he would have quitted the apartment at once, leaving Cliff to find his way out by himself. But he knew he couldn’t and wouldn’t. He stayed. To his dismay, he even discovered he liked it. He himself would never have dreamed of suggesting that Cliff should take a shower; it would have been so obvious, such a cheap invitation to sexuality, that he could not have brought himself even to hint of it—nor, for that matter, had it occurred to him. Yet when Cliff had expressed such a desire on his own, John Grandin had been helpless to refuse him.

In less than ten minutes, Cliff was again in the living room. He was fully dressed as before, shining and fresh; his field scarf looked as if he were wearing it for the first time; the damp dark spots under the armpits were gone.

With a rapidly sinking heart, a thumping heart which gave him actual pain, John Grandin sat rooted in his chair. He looked up at the broad back and the straining shoulder seams of the khaki shirt. He loved Cliff Hauman. Understanding this fact was not enough, however. He felt he had to declare himself, somehow, some way: the time was now. But he was unable to do anything but wait. His mind touched fleetingly on the first morning of summer school, while he sat here, and ruefully he realized how the new students would be already in the classroom, wondering what had happened to their professor—wondering, even, if they had got the date or the hour wrong and consulting their schedules to find out.

Cliff finally sat down opposite him, but at a considerable distance. For some reason of his own, he had chosen a chair on the far side of the room. As Grandin made conversation to prolong the unhappy happy visit and smoked cigarette after cigarette, Cliff each time sprang to his feet and came rapidly across the room to light it for him; then he would recede at once to his distant chair. The older man noticed how he sat leaning forward, on the very edge of the chair, his elbows on his knees, in the exact position in which he had sat throughout their first meeting on the boat to Nantucket—tense, restless, ill at ease. In spite of his good looks and freshness, with his tawny hair darker with damp but well combed, he was so unlike the natural happy careless fellow of the Sconset holiday that Grandin was keenly struck by the difference. Cliff seemed torn between a restless desire to get up and go, and a kind of worry or unease because, possibly, Grandin might have lost interest in him.

By an unexpected but groundless intuition, John Grandin suddenly got the notion—why, he couldn’t have said—that Cliff Hauman had failed his physical examination in Brooklyn and was hanging on for dear life to anyone who still thought of him as the Marine captain he wanted to be. If this were true, Cliff had no need to worry. John Grandin had by no means lost interest in Cliff: on the contrary, in spite of his knowing better, he felt an all but passionate desire to put his arms around the fellow. But what good would it do him; or Cliff? Such an overt move would most certainly mark the end of their relationship forever. . . .

“Gee,” Cliff said with a strained unhappy eagerness, “I’d give anything to have you know my buddy Walt, and him to know you. You’d like him a lot, Johnnie. He’s a swell guy to pal around with. Christ almighty, the circus we used to have in Melbourne! I wish Walt could tell you about it some time, he could tell you so much better than I could. I don’t think either one of us ever laid a dame on leave that we didn’t do it together. He loved it and so did I, but it was never any good, I don’t care how hot she was, unless Walt was there too. We used to keep it up all night—not just once or twice, you understand, but seven or eight times.”

Absorbed and alarmed, John Grandin took out a cigarette to recover himself. Cliff at once started up from the edge of his chair on the other side of the room, but Grandin shook his head. “Never mind, Cliff, I’ve got it.”

This would never do; no, not at all. Never in a thousand years. Fond of him though he might be, John Grandin was disappointed and saddened thus to be made a fool of. He wanted to say: You’ve got the idea all right, Cliff, but oh, you’ve got it all wrong, too. . . .

“Say Johnnie,” Cliff went on, “did I ever tell you about the times a couple of guys and myself went up to Hollywood from San Diego? We had three-­day leaves from the hospital—”

“Just a moment, Cliff,” Grandin interrupted.

“Yes, Johnnie?”

“I thought you were seriously wounded. Billie couldn’t go out to California because you were too sick to see her—wasn’t that it?”

“Oh well, sure.” He laughed. “But Christ, they had to let us out once in a while or we’d have gone nuts. I wasn’t so sick all the time but what I was good for a piece of tail now and then.”

“I see. . . .”

‘‘Anyhow, these two buddies and myself went up to Hollywood to look over the place. You know how the movie stars make a fuss over you just because you’re a serviceman, specially a marine. Jesus, you can lay almost any of them if you’re in uniform. Like I started to say, we went from the canteen one night to the home of Marina Colfax out in Bel-­Air—you know, swimming pool, butlers, all that stuff—and almost before we had time for a drink, my buddies and the other two dames disappeared. Marina looks at me wise and says, ‘Well, what are you waiting for, kid?’ Can you beat it, Johnnie?” He laughed nervously; then he added with a grin: ‘‘We went upstairs, and before midnight I laid her three times.”

At this moment Cliff seemed heartbreakingly pathetic. The fellow didn’t know what he wanted, any more than Grandin did. Cliff certainly didn’t want what he seemed to be inviting, consciously, or not. He was a lonely affectionate kid who was hanging on at all costs, trying to stimulate or hold the other’s interest by a conversation which must have been as distasteful to himself as it was outrageous, fascinating, and upsetting to John Grandin. Like the destructive young man he had become, he was destroying, in his innocence, the very thing he thought he wanted. Grandin, looking back, began to believe that very possibly Cliff had been exploiting him for days. He was both saddened by the thought, and, curiously, intensely relieved. He got up and walked deliberately across the room like a man in a daze.

At his approach, Cliff rose from his chair and looked about him with an anxious worried smile. Though he was past caring—and indeed scarcely saw him at all now—John Grandin yet felt so sorry that he wanted to put his arms around him and say, Don’t worry, Cliff; you’ll be back in the service one of these days and everything will be all right. . . . But he knew this was untrue; Cliff’s happy days in the Marine Corps were probably already over. Aloud he said the impossible, the utterly unthinkable words, the declaration of love no one could have told him he would ever make: “Cliff, I’ve grown very fond of you, I can’t help it. . . .”

There was no satisfaction in having said it at last; but the release he felt now gave him a purpose and a deliberation he had not experienced in years. Cliff was leaning awkwardly against the fireplace mantel, uncomfortable and self-­conscious to the point of pain. John Grandin stood before him, very close. He placed his two hands on the solid but slender waist; beneath his fingers he felt the live flesh and charm and power, the whole potent youthfulness of him. Involuntarily Grandin’s hands moved around him and locked, and he drew Cliff tight against him.

For an instant the tense body froze; then it reacted, violent and automatic, as if by reflex.

Even as John Grandin saw the blue eyes suddenly blaze, the hand reach back, the brass-­handled tongs go up and swing sharply down toward the flat of his face, he knew Cliff was not to blame, knew he had brought it on himself, asked for it. . . .