Free Not Exactly What I Had in Mind by Roy Blount Page A

I shouldn’t be here. I got married too young and I don’t believe in the war. I want to be skinny-dipping and taking consciousness-exfoliating mushrooms with someone who looks like Grace Slick.”
    I just stood there. Obliquity saved me. Just as I did not want to admit to myself that I was in the army, The General may not have wanted to admit to himself that I was either. Or maybe Emmy struck a pose so beguiling to The General’s eye that he was loath to spoil the moment by taking into account a diapered lieutenant. (She may have represented to him a freedom beyond even a general’s: she could be soft, she could be fierce, she could simply choose.) Either way, he must have angled his eyes so as to make it credible, even to himself, that I was not in his field of vision.
    “Quite some cat!” I heard The General say to the spec 6. “Got a bit of the devil in her.”
    “Yes, sir!” I heard the spec 6 say.
    When I unwrapped my head, they were all three gone.
    The next time I saw Emmy, I told her, with, I am afraid, some reediness of tone, “Quite some cat is right.” She was intent on something under an armored personnel carrier and didn’t return my salute.
    What if I had buttonholed The General, and a dialectic had been wrought: I accepting that America was not cut out for a state of nature, he that napalming Asian peasants was not going to liberate them. The spec 6 might have joined in and reminded us that at heart this was a nation of shifting and mingling middle, not rapidly diverging upper and lower, classes. Together we might have charted a wholesome course toward the seventies, and the eighties might have had some soul.
    But how often do people really face up to each other, flush? And how well does it turn out when they do? We are all slanty-eyed.
    Even John Wayne in The Sands of Iwo Jima. On liberty, and planning to get polluted and fight some MPs because he is divorced and his son never writes him, he meets a quite attractive and decent-seeming woman named Mary in a bar. She gets him to lighten up a bit, and takes him to her apartment.
    The two of them see something in each other — in the sixties it would have been no cheap encounter. But at her place, from a back room, a cry is heard. It’s a baby. Nice-looking kid, well taken care of. Mary is picking up soldiers, inferably talking to them nude, and getting money from them so she can feed the baby — whose father, she tells Wayne when he asks, is “gone.” She adds, “There are a lot tougher ways of making a living than going to war.”
    Oof. Wayne gets that grim-wry look in the corners of his eyes, softens and toughens all at once, tosses all his cash to the baby in the crib, and moves his essentially compassionate gruffness to the doorway, which he fills.
    “You’re a very good man,” Mary tells him.
    Looking off, Wayne vouchsafes a quick, grave near-grin. “You can get odds on that in the Marine Corps,” he rumbles, and then he moves on toward Iwo Jima.
    Women have told me that I am too oblique. “Tell it to John Wayne,” I should have replied. All these years, and it has only just lately begun to occur to me; if he is so good, how come he can’t keep any loved ones? Here he is, putting distance between himself and the very things — women and children — whose absence is driving him to drink.
    What if Mary’s cat had done a quick figure-eight around John Wayne’s ankles, causing him to stand there in the doorway for a while and then to come back and sit on the couch; and the cat had jumped up next to him and stared at the side of his head intently, the way cats will do, and caused him to reflect.
    We may think of cats as oblique, because by our standards there is an odd cast in their eyes. But insofar as a cat is interested at all, a cat is at least as un-hung-up and up-front as the sixties. If a cat spoke, a cat would say things like, “Hey. I don’t see the problem here.”
    What if this cat had moved John Wayne to reflect, “Yuh