Loving Women by Pete Hamill

Author:Pete Hamill [Hamill, Pete]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780786016389
Publisher: Random House
Published: 1989-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART

THREE

Chapter

35

Then began the time of my education. Miles Rayfield taught me the secrets of drawing. Bobby Bolden taught me about music. And Eden Santana taught me about everything else. Sitting here now, on a motel balcony facing the enormous Gulf evening, I try to reconstruct those hours, and although many have vanished into the blur, all seem accounted for, too. I know that I worked every day at the Supply Shack and stood my watches at the dumpster and was soon trusted with being the duty storekeeper. I know I did what I could to be a four-oh sailor and keep out of the way of Red Cannon. But I don’t have a series of sharp pictures of all those moments: What I saw and what I did are still at war with the way I felt.

And most of those feelings are tangled up with the time of Eden Santana. All those Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. And some sweet and timeless Sunday afternoons. I was always with her on Tuesday and Thursday nights, too, unless I pulled duty at the Supply Shack, because Eden didn’t work on those nights; even today, there is something oddly thrilling and poignant to me about meeting a woman on one of those weekday evenings. Eden worked late on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and though I could have spent each night with her, waiting at the trailer, she told me early on that it would be better if we didn’t fall into too rigid a routine. “You’re special, child,” she said. “I don’t want you ever to become ordinary.” And then touched my face and added, “Or me to be ordinary for you.”

That was never to happen. On some of those nights when I wasn’t with her, I began to feel the presence of what I called The Boulder. The true word was jealousy, but I couldn’t admit then that I could be shaken by a feeling that made me laugh when I saw it in movies or comics, or read about it in books. A real man wasn’t supposed to feel jealous of a woman any more than he could admit to being afraid. But on some lonesome nights I could feel The Boulder pressing up out of my guts, or coming down upon me from outside, filling the room like the giant orange in Miles Rayfield’s painting. I would hear a scrap of music, the rattle of the palms, smell the odor of the captain’s flowers, and Eden would appear in my mind. I would wonder what she was doing at exactly that moment. Sometimes I wondered if she was seeing Mercado, leading him (or someone else) into the holy precincts of the trailer. I would get physically sick then: nauseated, pouring sweat. I saw myself scaling the fence, heading into the night, jerking open the trailer door, confronting the two of them, the pictures of all this as vivid as a front-page photo, while my guts coiled and knotted until I fell into exhausted sleep.

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