Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer Page A

note?”
    “So I’d look after your boy-friend, Hollingsworth.”
    She started. “What do you mean by that? You know a lot of people talk about me, but that don’t mean nothing.” She crushed my empty cigarette pack and tossed it on the floor. “I’ll tell you something, something a woman should never tell a man. I wrote that note cause I wanted to see you again, and this time I intended to surrender. I was going to break all my resolutions. I really had it for you, and I was going to slip.”
    “Sure.”
    “But, now, it’s impossible. You hurt something in me. A woman’s not a machine. Why I could no more look at you now than if you were a cripple.” She spoke the word with venom.
    From a depth in me, fatuous and self-pitying, I heard myself say, “I am a cripple.” Anger followed. My voice quivered. “And you, why don’t you stop playing Mata Hari? You’re very bad at it.”
    I might have lashed her across the face. Her eyes contracted. “You can get out of here, Lovett. I didn’t invite you down to insult me.” Her voice became strident. “Get out, get out, you son of a bitch.”
    “Oh, I’m going. And you can come upstairs next time.”
    “Get out!” she screamed.
    So, once again, completely bewildered, I climbed to my room and re-enacted our little drama to exhaustion. And if our fight had been serious—for I hardly understood it—then I was still without Guinevere for my bed, the two of us locked in hothouse warmth. When noontime came I would go down the street to the lunch wagon, eat, and return here. Outside, the heat of summer afternoon would bake the roof. Thus suspended, my mind dallying with the empty hour to follow, I sloughed through empty hours of the past.
    I could almost remember another summer when I had lived in a hotel converted to a hospital. Had it been Paris? And was it the summer of victory? There, too, I would have lain on a cot through hot afternoons, staring at the ceiling, while about me in that, the summer of victory, soldiers ate at a groaning board of black-market treasure and women in profusion, and in the limitless appetite of those days everybody was making a deal or setting up a household, establishing contacts, seducing actresses, losing or winning a half-year’s wages in the nightly poker games. For those few months heat rose from the silenced machines, and if like shavings, men were blown about, one could easily mistake it for a dance.
    While it lasted, I was virtually inactive. I see myself in that period as moving about, even capable of leaving the hospital for a few hours, but I did nothing. I read only the newspapers, I ate the food which was served me, I never approached the black market. Once a month went by in which I did not stir from my cot.
    Occasionally there were eruptions. I must have gone out with most of my face bandaged, and I think I was drunk in one of the bars of Pigalle. I spent fifty dollars that night, and there were soldiers yelling in my ear, and I can almost recall the words from the song of a chanteuse, can almost touch the drowsy whore who scratched herself before she began to dress. Or did I only languish in the summer heat of Paris, my mind inert, my body in torpor?
    At times I am certain I used to lie on the bunk and stare at a photo of myself taken in England or was it in Africa? I would examine the face which the doctors assured me would be almost duplicated. Yet I must imagine this, for of all the hours I looked at the snapshot I cannot remember that face at all, and I do not know if I think of it now or whether, lying in that cot, I saw all the endless children who waited for our leavings on garbage lines, all the whores we abused, the peasants we cursed becausethey could not understand us and we were drunk. It almost comes back, the diarrhea, the trench foot, the boots we polished, the men who got killed. The machine stopped at last, but I stopped first, and lay on my cot that summer in a Paris which might be mythical, and