Free Finding a Girl in America by Andre Dubus Page B

old and for the first time stroked and plunged into action. He would never forget that. (Nor would he ever make love with a virgin again, nor anyone who loved him, and when it was over with Sheila, when he had broken her heart, he wondered—this on the drill field one day at San Diego, while calling cadence to a marching platoon—if she had ever had an orgasm with him; saddened, he realized she had not, and he knew someone else would take her there, someone strong and gentle who could be for her what he could not, and that was almost enough to make him write to her again, to seek forgiveness and to return to her and nail down once and for all, with marriage, what he had started that first night he so easily unclothed her and shaped her into his sweet and sinful lover.) She was a cheerful girl. He had dated her for three years before joining the Marines, and he knew he had not been fooled. She was undemanding, acquiescent (a quality, strangely, that Betty Jean did not share, as though compensating for her round heels with trifling demands that were nevertheless rigid); there was nothing wrong with her.
    It followed then, in his mind, that something was wrong with him: to prefer a life with men, broken periodically by forgettable transactions with whores. He began to believe that he was reaching a pivotal point in his life: either Sheila, who at times seemed to live in a fairy tale rather than in the world he knew; or whores, threats of VD, promises of nothing. Then he saw it wasn’t that at all. In Marshall he would not miss the whores; he would long for the men. Now he knew what the pride in performing his duties and the immediate camaraderie of the Corps, as well as the deeper one—the sense that he belonged to a recognized group of men, past and present, dead and living—had been bringing him to: he had, as the troops said, found a home. He was a career man.
    He wrote to her, asking how she felt about leaving Marshall and living with him on or near Marine bases until he retired. She answered his letter on the day she got it. Again her stationery in his fingers brought to him her smells, her lowered face as she talked to him, strolling with him. In a voice whose sweet compliance he could almost hear, she told him of course she would miss Marshall, she had never thought she would live any place else, but she loved him and would marry him and go with him wherever he had to go; and she looked forward to those new places.
    His next leave was in summer and they made love with sweat and mosquitoes and he told her he must now work hard to get promoted so they could afford to be married. He did not name a rank. Now he could sense a brooding quality in her lovemaking, as though resigning herself to annual trysts granted by the Marine Corps which would someday grant the promotion and money that would allow them to live as they should; and he felt her trying to possess him. For the first time she asked what he did on liberty; she asked if he did this with other girls. He lied. He had lied about Betty Jean Simpson too, but in a different way: he had simply told her nothing about where he was going on a particular night. Now telling her a direct lie made him feel diminished as a man, and he held that against her. At the train station her goodbye kiss was both vulnerable and sternly possessive.
    And so it went on: every year with a mingling of reluctance, fear, and passionate anticipation—all blurring his deeper and true feeling of love for her, his knowledge that for his own good he ought to marry her—he returned to Marshall. By the time she was twenty-two he was in the first year of his second enlistment, he was a corporal, and he had promised her that sergeant was the rank. He spoke to her father about it; he even spoke quite easily to her father, who had a small farm and believed in hard work and bad luck and little else, and who liked Roy’s having man’s work which was based on skill yet had