Barbary Shore by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page B

friendship.
    Across the blur of the past, I have a memory which returns over and over again, and I am almost certain it happened. Perhaps it was during a furlough from the Army, although that is not important. I knew a girl then who was in love with me and I very much in love with her. We spent a week in a tourist home at some seashore resort, and that week provided more happiness and more pain than I could have thought possible. For the girl love had always been difficult and clothed in a hundred restrictions of false delicacy. She had been ashamed of her body and almost indifferent to men. What combination of circumstance and myself could bring it about I no longer know, but I adored her, so completely, so confidently, that my admiration seemed to accomplish everything. The room we shared burgeoned for her. She came to love her flesh, and from there it was but a step to loving mine. We lay beside each other for hours on end, brilliant with new knowledge. I had discovered magic to her and reaped the benefit; I could shine in the reflection of her face. Never, as she would assure me, had a man been more ardent, more thoughtful, and more desirable. She blossomed in that week, and I was so proud of myself. We were very close. We fed upon one another, we talked, we made love, we ate sandwiches she brought to the room, and we stole out to the beach for long solitary walks. We lived under the shadow of the war and perhaps that furnished its spice.
    While I was with her I was very happy, but the moment I had to talk to someone else, an agony of shyness beset me. To order a meal from a waitress became a minor ordeal, and I remember that I could not bear to talk to the woman who owned the tourist house. Once on a hot afternoon we had wanted some ice water, and I had pleaded with the girl to go for it herself because I sensed myself incapable of managing such a transaction.
    “But, Mikey,” the girl had said—if I had another name it is not recollected now—“Mikey, why don’t
you
get it? You make so much of it.”
    And I had refused, actually sweating at the prospect. “No, I can’t,” I had said. “Please, you go get it. I just don’t want to talk to her.”
    I had won and therefore lost, and the girl got the ice water. When we parted, and I believe I never saw her again, she whispered a phrase not devoid of literary ambition, “Mikey, you know the room is the trap of the heart,” and the extravagance of the words was not completely without meaning.
    This is one of the few memories I possess, and I offer it for what explanation it may provide. If I lived in a close relation with the few people I knew in the rooming house and became progressively less capable of doing without them, there is after all a precedent. I was a dog on a chain, and the radius circumscribed a world in which I was able to provide for many of my wants and most of my needs. I had begun again to think about my week with that girl, but the image of Guinevere, no matter how incongruous, often accompanied her, and I find it hardly surprising that a few days after seeing Hollingsworth I felt compelled to make the trip downstairs and ring the bell of Guinevere’s apartment.
    It was after three o’clock and Guinevere was in the midst of lunch. I was greeted at the door with a surprising reception. “Oh, Mr. Lovett, you’re just the man I want to see. Come in, won’t you, please?” I shall not bother to describe her costume in detail; suffice it that she was clothed with enough variety to suggest everything from breakfast in bed to a formal evening. “I had an idea you might be coming down,” she said, her voice lilting through high notes and modulated carefully through the lower tones. “I’m just finishing eating. Won’t you have coffee with me?”
    “Well, all right. I’d like to talk to you about a business matter.” As the pretext for visiting, I intended to ask her again to clean my room.
    We walked through the hallway of her apartment