Loving Women by Pete Hamill Read Free Book Online Page B

say, Old enough . And she’ll say, Don’t you have a woman back home? And I’ll say, Not anymore . And she’ll say, Well, you might as well spend the night . Yes. Like that.
    Then up ahead there was a gigantic brightening, the sky suddenly fuller and whiter. The bus heaved up a long sloping rise and the trees became sparse and then at the crest of the rise I could see the land falling away for miles, and the smudged air of many chimneys and the first gas station and a restaurant called Mom’s and a sign saying BAIT and then groups of Negroes, men and women, walking along the sides of the road and cars falling in behind the bus and flatbed trucks moving toward us in the other lane. I opened the bus window and was slapped by a hot, damp wind. And then, beyond the buildings and the smoke and the scrubby mottled surface of the land, out past the trucks and the Negroes, I could see the wide blue waters of the Gulf.
    “Well,” Turner said, standing in the aisle beside me, stretching the muscles of his face, cracking his knuckles, “we’re here.”

Chapter
    6
    O ne night, after we had made love, my third wife asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I laughed and said she didn’t want to know. Turning in fury, slamming the pillow, she insisted. She was in the stage of our marriage when she was demanding some abstraction called intimacy, the most favored word that year of women’s magazines and the self-help industry. “If you don’t tell me,” she hissed, “I’ll never ever know you.” Rose had a genius for making small talk seem like a stickup. I reached for a cigarette and sighed and started to calculate. But my long pause filled her with the grief she must have been seeking; she sobbed, she cursed, she pulled a pillow over her head. And I tried to remember all those faces, the blurred flesh of three decades and five continents, blond hair and brown, pale skin and olive, bodies thin and thick. Furious, she got up, slamming the door on her way to the bathroom, and was gone a long time, and when she came back, I said I thought the number was around twelve hundred. But then, I added, I couldn’t be expected to remember everything. She fell back as if wounded and lay in a theatrical state of trembling shock. I knew almost immediately that I should have lied; some truths are always unacceptable. To say that she had asked for this information—had demanded it—wasn’t sufficient excuse. Actually telling her was cruel, even stupid. So then I lied. In the name of peace. I told her that I was only kidding, that I’d slept with only twenty-odd women, including wives, and none were as good as Rose was in bed and she smiled through tears and looked grateful and in an hour was talking about Elizabeth Taylor’s diet. But as I lay beside her in the dark,and then made love to her again (another lie), with my brain flooding with the images of other women, I remembered the first. The woman I’d seen so briefly on a bus. The woman named Eden Santana. And tonight, close to the Gulf again, I am full of the aching loneliness I felt the first time I thought I had lost her forever. Eden Santana.
    We had arrived in Pensacola at last, the bright sun hurting my eyes. There was no bus station. The Greyhound pulled up at a curb and I saw signs telling me I was on the corner of Garden Street and North Palafox. “Pensacola, folks,” the driver said, and there was a wheeze of doors opening and then people were pulling luggage from racks. Turner went ahead. I stopped and talked to the driver.
    “There was a woman sitting beside me,” I said. “Got on in Atlanta, got off somewhere between there and here.”
    “White woman?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I remember. Yeah. Pretty woman. Got off with some cullid folks in, oh, hell, musta been Palatka.”
    “Where’s that?”
    “Oh, fipty mile back. She figget somethin?”
    “No. Nothing. I was just …”
    He smiled. “She was a looker, awright.”
    “Yeah.”
    That was all. I’d met