Chapter Ten
After that, they each thought privately: never again.
Cal was mortified, panicked, disgusted with himself.
For the first time since moving down the hall, he was truly grateful he and Becky weren’t sharing a bed because he needed the alone time to recover, and stew in his shame.
Never in his life, he kept thinking. Never in his life would he have thought himself capable of what he’d done.
He knew he’d stumbled—in a big way. Their clothes were strewn about, he’d kicked a clock off her end table, it looked like a mini-tornado had swept through the room. Never again.
Only, the following Thursday he drove past Margaret’s house as he ran errands, even though her house was on the way to nothing.
And he drove past it a second time a little while later, and a third time at a snail’s pace, until Margaret finally saw him and came out and said hello.
This time, they went upstairs. Funny, he said—nervously, as she led him by the hand—he’d somehow known she’d have a four-poster bed.
But she ignored that and led him past her bedroom and down the hall to what he suspected was the guest room.
From guest room to guest room, then. He’d become a guest in his own life.
They had a conversation about what they were doing.
How they both felt bad about it, how neither of them had done anything like this before, and how they weren’t looking to upset their marriages.
That wasn’t what was happening here. What was happening was something that was clearly outside of their marriages, and physical, and needed—for different reasons, maybe.
It didn’t matter. What mattered was that they found a way not to be so eaten up with guilt that it would cause disharmony in their marriages.
Thus, they managed to cast themselves as at least somewhat thoughtful and even responsible people.
Thursday afternoons—just for an hour or so—became their time.
They were careful in every respect. They used protection.
He parked in various spots on the surrounding blocks, walked up the alley behind her house, slipped in through her gate, then through the unlocked kitchen door.
He wore a hat, and made an effort to conceal his limp.
He felt sleazy, coming in this way, but also a little mysterious.
He thought: there really is little distinction between having sex and making love.
He thought: don’t think that. The duality their involvement required meant that he was constantly at odds with himself.
On the third Thursday, for example, he couldn’t wait to get to her house.
Afterward, he stood in her shower, alone, slapping his forehead.
For Margaret’s part, all she wanted was to feel and be desired.
To be physical with someone she desired.
Was that too much to ask? Call it a fling, an affair, a lapse in judgment.
She believed in her heart that if she could have this with him, here and now, she could deal with whatever the future held for her and Felix.
Cal, in bed, made her feel alluring, provocative. She made him feel sensations he hadn’t known existed before (it was amazing what you discovered when you just slowed down a little). More than that, she made him feel deserving of an adventure.
In a postcoital, breath-catching moment, he laid his head on her stomach and she toyed with his hair, and after trying to get his cowlick to go down (and joking about that), she noticed the reason he always had a cowlick was because his hair, wavy and almost wheat-colored, grew out from his crown in two different directions, like swirls in a Van Gogh sky.
—
In mid-June, two weeks into Margaret’s involvement with Cal, a letter arrived from Felix about how the Teague had had to sit anchored in a bay somewhere for an entire week, waiting for its turn to unload.
Felix mentioned some upcoming R two and a half years later, he still heard it just fine).
The ship itself was loud. It moaned and groaned, jostled and screeched, shivered and knocked.
Even in calm waters, it cracked its welded knuckles.
What was the life expectancy of a ship built in under a month?
he wondered. He’d spent close to a thousand days and nights on it.
The Teague had gleamed when he first saw it.
Now, it was hard to tell if it needed a new coat of paint or a complete overhaul.
He’d been thirty-one and rock-solid from basic, in the best shape of his life since college, when he’d first walked up its gangplank.
Three birthdays later, threading around the Pacific, he’d thinned out.
Most of them had. Their ability to work exceeded their appetite for bad food.
Sometimes, instead of eating, they smoked.
Anyone he’d gotten to know to any degree onboard, he’d gotten to know over a cigarette.
Work friendships, he guessed they’d be called.
Though one of the many differences between working in an aluminum plant and working on a ship was that you got to leave the plant and the people who worked there at the end of your shift, whereas you were stuck on the ship with your co-worker friends (and everyone else) twenty-four seven.
Felix did okay, held his own and was generally well-liked, but the common ground the rest of them shared was never his.
Wives, fiancées, girlfriends, sure, but not the constant talk of tits and ass and this one was like butter and that one was like a glove, all of it sounding desperate and wolfish to Felix.
He could fake being interested. He could even fake being amused.
He just couldn’t fake participate. He compensated for his lack of racy material by acting even more amused by theirs.
He’s tightly wound, that Lieutenant Salt, they said.
He’s tried-and-true married, but you can tell he gets a kick out of hearing the racy stuff.
There was also a lot of talk among them about the willingness to kill, but no talk of actually having killed.
None of them had done it, Felix suspected, which was why they could wax on about it so easily.
Having been trained to be a killing machine, you were either the kind of person who was relieved to be running supplies instead, or the kind who was antsy to put your training to use.
There was a lot of talk about winning the war and teaching the enemy a lesson they’d never forget, the hatred for the Japanese extending to other, sometimes random-seeming groups.
Cocksucker, Felix noticed, was the go-to term for someone you wanted to kill (or just hated).
The more time he spent listening to his crewmates, the more it became clear that they were all—including him—fighting to protect a way of life that didn’t include everyone back home, or even right here on the ship.
—
And yet, even here, he encountered the look.
There were transfers, new faces that made his guard drop for an instant, now and then.
You could get the look and return it unintentionally, in such a confined space.
He wondered how he imagined it sometimes.
A handful of them stood on deck one morning after loading engine blocks for new PBY Catalinas.
A match went around. Seaman A. Varick, twenty-nine, a farmer from Scottsbluff, Nebraska, asked if anyone could spare a smoke.
He’d been on the Teague for a month. Tawny-haired, lean, but as strong as two men, somehow.
Felix had listened to him talk about his Pentecostal upbringing, Foursquare Gospel, snakes.
A. Varick—Augustus, the A stood for—shook his head and laughed when he talked about the snakes but not when he talked about the laying-on of hands.
That was like a force you didn’t know you had, traveling from you into someone else.
He’d done it both ways, he said. He’d laid hands and been touched, and both times he’d thought he was faking it—until he couldn’t tell anymore. It was intense.
Augie, he went by.