@@@@@There is a migratory party almost every
@@@@@There is a migratory party almost every night from house to house along Lake Shore Drive, and the wives and husbands are always mixed, always drunkIt is all done in a random, rather irritable kind of lust, and the petting is more frequent than the cuckolding
And once a week or so there is usually a nice public quarrel, or a drunken bathos which grates his spine
Now look, old man, Don Randolph says to him, you and Sally used to be great friends, maybe you are still by God I don't know (the drunken accusing stare) but the truth is Sally and I love each other, a great passion, I've been fooling around and I'm a dog, woman in our office, and Alec Johnson's wife, Beverly, you were there you saw us coming back in the car, stopped off at her house, oh God, wonderful, but I'm a dog, no moral fiber, and I'm(starting to weep) Wonderful children, Sally's a bitch to themHe stands up, lumbers along the dance floor to separate Sally from her partner
The Randolphs are at it again, someone gigglesAnd the thing lurches in his head, and Hearn discovers he is drunk
You remember me, Bob, Sally says, you know what capabilities I have, what talentI tell you there's nothing can stop me, but Don's impossible, he'd like to keep me in a rut, and my Lord he's perverted, the things I could tell you about him, and sullen, we went a month and a half one time without touching each other, and you know really he's no good in the business, my father much as told me that, it's just tied down with children and nothing really, you know nothing really I mean definite I can get my teeth into, if I were a man, and I have to make an appointment to get braces for Dorothy's teeth, and I'm always worried about cancer, you can't imagine what a deep worry that is for a woman, somehow I just don't keep up with things, once there was an Air Corps lieutenant, young but really very nice, very sweet, oh, but so na?ve, you can't imagine how old I feel, I envy you, Bob, if I were a man

He knows this thing will not take either, the Lake Shore and conventions and entertaining men who bore him, the rigidity of an office, and eluding his mother's matches, transforming the impulse into carloads and contacts, the campaign contributions and representatives, senators, who are amenable, the Pullman cars, and the tennis courts, the absorption in golf, the particular hotels, and the odor of liquor and carpeting in a suiteBehind it there is the primal satisfaction, but he has learned too many other things on the way
New York again, and a job doing copy for a radio network, but this is a stopgap and he knows itRather abstractedly, without any deep feeling, he does a lot of work for Bundles for Britain, and follows the newspaper headlines of the advance on Moscow, thinks not very seriously of joining the partyAt night sometimes he throws off his covers and lies naked on his bed feeling the late fall air eddy through the window, listening with a somber ache to the harbor sounds that float in on the fogA month before Pearl Harbor he enlists in the Army

On the troop transport, which slips under the Golden Gate Bridge and heads out into the Pacific on a chill winter twilight two years later, he stands on deck and stares at San Francisco, fading away like dying logs in a fireplaceAfter a time he can see only the gaunt dark line of land still separating the water from the deepening nightThe waves splash coldly against the hullIn the old one he has looked and looked and butted his head against the wall of his own making
He ducks into a hatchway and lights a cigaretteThere is the phrase "I'm seeking for something" but it gives the process an importance it doesn't really possess, he thinksYou never do find out what makes you tick, and after a while it's unimportant
Somewhere in America now were the cities, and the refuse sitting on the steps, the electric lights and the obeisance to them
(All the frenetic schemings, the cigar smoke, the coke smoke, the passion for movement like an ant nest suddenly jar