The Sleeping Soldier by Aster Glenn Gray

Author:Aster Glenn Gray [Gray, Aster Glenn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-08-06T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter 20

As Caleb had expected, Russell didn’t write. Caleb did, once a week, with the increasing feeling that he was being a fool. Probably Russell wasn’t even opening his letters, and Caleb would return to Hawkins to find an unopened stack, as he had when he dropped by Greg’s house at spring break of his freshman year. Well, Caleb, you just write so many, Greg had muttered, sullen and defensive, his arms crossed over his chest.

Caleb had written to Carol, too, that first summer in Chicago, just after they had broken up. Just once, though. He had learned something from Greg.

But those were both entirely different situations. Greg would never have put his head on Caleb’s lap to cry. Carol hadn’t asked Caleb to write to her. So Caleb kept writing his letters to Russell, and tried not to feel that he was tossing papers into a void.

To Caleb’s surprise, Dan and Adam kept their promises to write, and as Dan was on campus for the summer, Caleb received a slow drip of news about Russell. We went to a drive-in theater with Russell. (“We” meant Dan and Lacy.) Or, Russell rode a horse onto the campus green. We all ran out of the science lab onto the lawn to look. I think he was trying to impress Sandy Updike.

Caleb felt a pinch in his heart. At this distance, it was hard to believe he had ever been so addled by his own attraction to Russell as to believe Russell might be homosexual.

In his off hours, Caleb pushed himself to explore the city. He went to the Art Institute and the Shedd Aquarium and the Lincoln Park Zoo, to give himself something to write about in his letters.

He could hardly write about Francis’s cocktail parties, after all. At first he went uneasily, dreading a meeting with Jeremy, until finally that dreaded meeting took place, and Caleb surprised himself by feeling nothing much about it after the first unpleasant shock.

After that, Caleb attended the cocktail parties much more regularly. One night, he found Francis holding forth on his favorite subject: The War, meaning of course World War II. “You could meet real men then,” Francis said, with a smack of his lips on the word men. “Stevedores, steel workers…”

“Meat packers,” someone threw in. They had all heard this many times.

“Soldiers.”

“The uniforms,” added Caleb, with a wistful moan that got everyone laughing. He had learned something about comic timing from watching Russell.

Francis grinned. “You’re just jealous. You were born too late, that’s all. You can’t find proper rough trade anymore, real men these days don’t wanna get their dicks wet.”

Last year, Caleb had thought that this boasting was just a load of hot air. Now, though, he caught Francis in a quiet moment mixing drinks at the bar. “This is an old-fashioned, darling, do try it.”

Obediently Caleb sipped the drink. “What happened to them all?” he asked.

“What happened to who?”

“The soldiers and stevedores and all.”

“Oh, they grew up and got married and became bald and fat and hairy.

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