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Page 88.

Stan waved to a pair of young women who waved back. They were Army nurses in Class B uniforms. They’d traded their starched caps for rakish khaki garrison caps, but still wore their dark green sweaters. They carried their regulation leather purses as well as hat bags with them, and wore their caduceus brass on their rounded blouse lapels. Lieutenants fresh out of some nearby state college, it turned out. Before long, Tim and Stan were having beers with Lorraine and Susie and getting more and more tight. They did a lot of laughing and shoulder-hugging, told a lot of off-color jokes, and rolled from one bar to the next while the air smelled of drizzle and smoke and French fries. At some point, Susie left but was replaced by a darker skinned nursing aide named Myrna or something—Tim never quite got it straight and didn’t really care. They all went dancing in a hall near Chinatown, and by now Tim felt thoroughly anaesthetized. Before long he had trouble standing. Then they were singing in a bar while across the street the Shore Patrol arrived in several gray jeeps. A squad of Marines and one of sailors had decided to exchange opinions by knuckle telegraph. The girls vanished. Men in white cracker jacks and helmet liners piled from trucks, waving night sticks. A row of Black Marias arrived to haul off handcuffed, hatless young men with shiners and torn shirts.

Tim walked with Stan under glaring industrial lights, along endless blocks of dockyards. It had gotten cold, and damp, and fog rolled in. Tim stopped by a lamp post and barfed his eyeballs out into a black void filled with crawling yellow-green lights, or were those inside his skull?

Stan patted him on the back. “Got it all out of your system, eh?”

Tim nodded, feebly spitting out the last remnants, particle by acidic particle, of the evening’s pizza.

“Here,” Stan said, offering a drink.”

“Get away,” Tim said spitting some more.

“Just a soda. It’s a little warm, but it will clean out your bilges.”

In reply, Tim barfed up another slice or so. “That’s it for me. Get away with that.” He dug around in his pocket and found some gum. He popped four sticks in his mouth, one after another, and welcomed their mint taste.

They walked another block or so. It started raining lightly again.

A yellow taxi cruised by. Stan waved, and the cab pulled over. “Thank God,” they both said getting in.

“Good evening,” the driver said. He was a Mexican-American wearing an old, stripped police cap with no strap or hardware.

“Nob Hill,” Tim said with a groan.

“That, and then Lafayette Park where I live,” Stan instructed.

The rain came down hard for a few minutes and then eased off. The driver put on the wipers. The inside was warm, and smelled of upholstery cleaner. It almost made Tim want to gag again.

Stan nudged Tim. “You still alive?”

“Barely,” Tim said, slumped in the seat with his chin buried in his chest. He dozed most of the way back to the hotel, catching flashes of passing lights, snippets of laughter from people still partying away the craziness of the war where nothing was what anyone used to assume to be normal.

“See you at work tomorrow,” Stan said yawning.

Tim stepped from the cab and handed him a five dollar bill. “Pay the man.”

“Oh, amigo, no,” Stan said, fumbling for his own wallet in his back pocket.

“Treat’s on me,” Tim said as he pushed the door shut. “Thanks for showing me around.”

Tim waited a moment, standing in the quiet street. The taxi hove off with a receding motor sound, putting out puffs of vapor on the streets. It was just drizzling now, and Tim welcomed the fresh wind, the sobering calming effect of being away from the frenetic bars and women and the swing music pouring out of every window and dive. He took a deep breath, staggered a bit, and turned to enter the hotel grounds. Okay, that was it. He’d had his little blast. He felt a bit old to party like a kid. He wanted something that he found hard to define—something more, somehow, a bigger meaning in life. He wanted to read important books and think weighty thoughts. Being alive was too precious to waste on trivialities. Thus, over the next few days and weeks, he would settle down to a normal working routine punctuated by dinners alone in this restaurant or that followed by evenings sitting by a lamp, reading Aristotle or Steinbeck or Dos Passos or Fitzgerald before turning in early. Nothing exciting, he thought as he fumbled for his room key.

The front entrance was locked for the night, and he’d been instructed to enter by a smaller secure entrance in the courtyard. He walked around the building, his shoes crackling on the asphalt and gravel of the driveway running alongside, and entered the little maze of flagstones leading through grape bowers, ivy, bougainvillea, and night jasmin. This brought him onto the glistening and moss-edged courtyard of Spanish pavers surrounding a concrete fountain. The fountain barely trickled from its age-dark copper mouth, but it had a picturesque old poured-concrete Classical-style statue set against one ivied wall of the courtyard. The statue was of a female goddess representing a bountiful and happy city. She had a dimpled smile and one breast bare as she poured rainwater from a horn of plenty into the cupped palms of an aroused looking satyr with tiny horns and a mass of tight curls caught in a stone band.

As Tim walked unsteadily into the courtyard, he stopped for a moment to admire the details of the fountain. He noticed a light out of the corner of his eyes and looked up.

Two lights, actually. One was the full moon, which had just swum out from behind a bank of rain clouds and shone like dripping liquid down the gilded piles and wrinkles of cloud and bounced off several windows. The other light came from the window where the brunette had fed the birds.

For a moment, Tim glimpsed the silhouettes, through the curtains, of two women holding drinks and talking earnestly. One laughed—probably the brunette—and, next instant, the light went out. This left the window dark, smoldering with moonlight, like the other windows.