The Non-Belligerents

I’d deserted him. He’d waited for me. I couldn’t tell you why.

He walked with a cane. At rest, he was as well-proportioned as a magazine cover or a Greek statue, as solid with muscle as he’d ever been before it happened, but in motion, it was impossible to miss the awful rolling limp with which he walked. There had been complications from the surgery – a word I had come to hate – but I never did find out what they were, and anyway, he survived, and he waited.

More than anything he looked like a boy to me. Nothing could have altered the bones of his face, the taut smoothness of his skin. His voice was the same, his ardent greetings and stupid jokes, and I could almost tell myself that our friendship might resume as if it had never been broken.

It was me who had changed. Just as we were no longer the same height – I had grown about an inch in the last two years, which was not unheard-of after all – we were no longer in symmetry. It was difficult to imagine swapping clothes or tumbling into the wrong bed after a late night of schoolboy pranks.

Like a good old family dog or a faithful manservant, Phineas had waited. I had gone off with Brinker Hadley to face death and destruction and God knew what else, and Phineas had remained behind, just the same. Things slipped into place – not as they were, but another secondary rhythm that echoed life at Devon. Finny slept late, and so did I. Finny hated to go out except when the streets were emptiest, often after dark, and so did I. We were two maimed parts of the same organism.

After the war, we took up rooms with a couple of other boys, in one of those long narrow apartments that get unfavorably likened to railway cars – we were a couple of castaways, Finny and I, and the other boys were frosty sophisticates from some other school, with some other school tie and some other jargon that didn’t come easily. It was only a stopgap measure, the boy Brandon explained to us magnanimously, until they could come by something better. Better for the pair of them, for himself and for his friend, and not for us – before the lease ran out, the two of them upped stakes for some place in Manhattan, and left a painfully exact measure of cash behind to eke out the difference. To tell the truth I scarcely noticed the absence – for me those narrow rooms and that narrow hall were filled with only Finny, to exclusion.

“They were fairies,” Finny said to me, as mildly and evenhandedly as he would have said they were law students or they were Presbyterians.

“How do you reckon that?”

“It’s one of those things. You know it when you find it.”

“They didn’t talk like fairies,” I said. I suppose I meant that they didn’t talk like women. “You never saw them do anything, did you?”

This was uncharitable. I hadn’t been the best roommate myself.

“No, I never saw them do anything, but I had the right idea. You know the untidy one, the piano-player – he left me with the name of a bar, I don’t think he intended to but it must have slipped out without him thinking. I’ve always wondered about those places,”

We went, like a couple of spies.

It didn’t look like the kind of establishment where one would seek out a rowdy good time, a regular Roman orgy – it looked like the place you’d take your brother, the kind of place that was one step removed from sawdust on the floor. An old Polish woman cleared away glasses, and another old fellow – I suppose he must have been her husband – shuffled around behind the bar. The clientele consisted of a run-down old man, two shy-looking women seated with a younger fellow who looked as if he could be fresh off of work in some office block or print shop, and a soldier in uniform. I drank a few beers and tried not to stare. I stared. These couldn’t be the kind of people we thought they were – maybe the old man, who had a dissipated and good-for-nothing look that I associated with perverts, but hardly the girls in their workday office clothes, or their chaperone.

The soldier came and sat with Finny – attracted by his cane, I thought uncharitably, one defective to another. To wear one’s uniform in a place like this seemed like blasphemy. Seeing his manner speaking elbow-to-elbow with my own friend, someone I knew well, filled me with nausea – not because it was lewd but because it was like anyone else charmed by Finny. Finny’s compelling liveliness was muted somewhat, but not eradicated – who knew what it would take to snuff out that light entirely. Perhaps not even death – there’d be a stand of trees on the shore of some glorified creek still haunted by the sound of fleet footfalls and incessant chatter.

The soldier had waving red hair, and eyebrows that moved too much when he spoke. Finny entertained his friendly gestures, and before long the damned show-off had his arm over the back of Finny’s chair.

“I haven’t got a place to stay just now, I’m just passing through. I thought I’d better find somewhere, and then I ended up in here.”

“We’ve got empty beds, don’t we?”

“If your friend wouldn’t mind it,” the soldier said, seeming mildly embarrassed –

“I don’t.” I didn’t mean it, but I didn’t want to discuss it either. “In fact, I think we’d better leave now.”

“Yes, I think we’d better.” Finny caught his new friend around the arm and drew him across the scraped floor.

The walk back to our apartment was full of wrong turns and evasions, taken in silence. I retired to my own room quite crossly, thick with drink – when I woke a few hours later, still in my street clothes and fiercely thirsty, the two of them were still speaking to one another in low voices. They’d cleared away from our kitchen table, and I could see two glasses still standing there forlorn – they had gone into the bedroom, not the one that was empty but Finny’s own bedroom, and were talking there.

I shut my eyes. I thought I might be sick, but it was only the beer in my stomach that made me feel that way.

In the morning the sun was streaming down the long corridor of the apartment, and we were alone, Finny and I. The next few days were uncomfortable days – we were unexpectedly flushed with money, both of us, and I nursed my bruised recollections until they festered.

We were together at the narrow kitchen table playing cards when my will broke down.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “What you did the other night.”

“Every other night is another night. I don’t know what you mean, but I know it’s eating at you.”

“You shouldn’t have brought that man home. He was a complete stranger.”

“Not a complete stranger. We introduced ourselves.”

“He could have robbed us blind, coming back here. He probably wanted money. Did you give him any?”

“He wanted somewhere to stay, so I gave him it.”

Finny laid down a card; I tossed mine down in annoyance, spoiling the game.

“Don’t be such a shit-for-brains. This is serious. Didn’t you even think–”

“If you didn’t like it, you should have said something.”

“He’s a queer, Finny.” This was saying the unsayable; a sharp-edged, military word. This man had intruded on our private excursion, he had intruded on our home; he deserved that kind of language flung at him and worse. Lamely, I began again. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“Would it scandalize you to know we only talked? Like you and I used to talk, unaffectedly.”

“Finny,” I said, beginning to despair. “I don’t want to think about that.”

“He was a sportsman before the war. He’ll never be one again. He’s a fairy like you are. I think you’d like him.”

He meant to hurt me; I refused to give him the satisfaction of seeing it on my face, but the hurt welled up anyway, stifled and cold. Phineas’ eyes were fixed on me, blue-green and insistent.

“Why would you say something like that?”

“Because it’s true. If something can be ruined by telling the truth, it probably deserves it, don’t you think?”

That wasn’t the Finny I had known. I scarcely recognized the boy who said those words, as simply and unequivocally as if they were common truths – i before e, two plus two, Gene loves Finny and he must not lie.

“Don’t be ugly,” I said. I didn’t tell him he was wrong. How could I? “You’re saying things you can’t possibly mean, and it makes me sick. We’re not kids, you know.”

“Was that what this was for?”

His hand clasped his crippled leg. The bone would never lay even, the muscles would never knit, the strength would never return.

“It wasn’t.”

I wasn’t envious, I was jealous – jealous that Finny wasn’t mine, that he could scarcely be said to belong to anyone. All his strength and daring was his own. It couldn’t be harnessed to make a soldier or a sailor or a pilot out of him, or it would evaporate entirely and be wasted. In my way I’d saved him – saved him from being totally lost.

He kissed me, and on some reflex I did not understand I buried my fingers in his hair. It was darker now than it had been that day on the shore, where it had been salt-crisped and sunbleached and shot with gold. He had lost some of his luster. Phineas opened his mouth against mine, and pressed my hand deeper.

He drew me against the bed, angling his stiffened leg to let me in closer – I must have flinched because the strength of his body went taut and electric against me.

“I’m no good for anything,” Phineas said – he’d chipped his bottom lip against my teeth, and it had flushed red. “Just this. Just this. It figures the least I can do is give you what you’ve wanted for a while now.”

It was an ugly thing to say, and it stung my pride, but it didn’t deter me. I wanted him, I had always wanted him – it was like free fall, like the sickening drop from a very great height.

“That’s not true,” I said, and tugged his shirt tails untucked. “I need you more than damn near anything.”

It was easy to lose sight of what belonged to him and what belonged to me – my hands, his hands, my mouth and his, legs and flatly muscled bellies and all the great expanse of skin. I wanted to take him on entirely, to take him into myself however I could – I had only the dimmest idea of what two men might do together, informed by dirty jokes and black suspicions, but Phineas knew – it almost hurt, the way he handled me, and the way I liked it.

We kissed. I undid the fly of his pants.

His body was as beautiful as ever, crooked and beautiful – I pressed my mouth to the gold-prickling stretch of his thigh. There was an ugly series of scars there, below the hip’s crease and above the knee, but they could be no uglier than my own petty wounds considered in aggregate.

I took him in, and we did what two boys might do – at Devon or anywhere. He said my name, and then again, more urgently.

After that, we reclined together.

“I thought of you every single night over there. I wished you were with me. I thanked God you weren’t. I thought I was cracking up.”

I smoked a cigarette uneasily, and then another, gazing on Phineas’ gracefully shaped head – he wore his hair longer than he had at Devon, just brushing his neat close-laid ears, and I could study the red-gold down at the corner of his neck. It made him look heroic – not like a soldier, which was the ultimate intent of all that unrelieved schoolboy blue and the shearing of clippers at the back of the neck, but like a crippled Greek god.

If Finny noticed me staring at him, studying the reddened whorls of his ears and the kiss-reddened skin of his throat, he did so only dimly.

“You smoke more cigarettes than I’ve ever seen anyone smoke, and I’ve seen some smokers. You remember the Butt Room back at Devon, don’t you?”

Better than Finny could possibly have known – but it was difficult to shake the impression that he did know, that his innocuous jokes were only a veil over some deeper knowledge. I’d made the confession of my crime into a farce, a bad joke – and one at Finny’s expense.

“The Army gave them to us.”

“I heard about that. It’s supposed to keep your nerves from going screwy.”

“It didn’t do much good.” I had laughed, but it wasn’t much of a joke, and it landed oddly. Phineas sat up a little as if to study me for evidence of frayed nerves.

Scrambling all over a little rock in the Pacific, trying to remember what the purpose of it all was, trying to avoid being maimed or killed. We were the last of all of them and the men who had gone before us resented us for it, but that charmed status didn’t keep us from having our heads blown off, from getting shot in the lung and drowning in the blood. There’d been precious little for us to do in the intervals between slogging – the war had been ending and we knew it, everyone knew it. Men were stealing off to corners and storage rooms, they were finding one another, and if it had been another way they would have found Finny.

What if I had been the one to fall? If I’d thrown myself down in that moment of jealous impulse rather than hurt my dearest friend. I never had Finny’s grace. I’d have done it headfirst.

Phineas said my name, softly.

“Finny, why did you wait?”

“There wasn’t much else to be done.”

“There were plenty of jobs for boys who–” I caught myself. “With your leg.”

“Leper went. He didn’t make it. Washing out is worse than cracking up, you know. No man really knows if he’ll break down under pressure, but untempered weakness is just weakness. The bone never healed evenly. It’d have given out on me on the beach at Normandy, sent me right down face-first in the sand, and then where would I be?”

“You can’t know that.”

The old Finny would have said something to that. The new one didn’t. I passed Finny my cigarette, and he sipped the smoke from it.

“It isn’t as if I have the Olympics to worry about now,” he remarked, when I took it back again to my own lips. “These lungs are my own property.” He thumped himself on the chest with a fist for emphasis.

If I had ruined things between us, I had done it already – I had done it long before, perhaps, and what I had just done was only the parting shot.

“I should have written you letters.”

“I wouldn’t have read them.” Finny’s voice was suddenly blackly despairing, like an autumn storm. “I didn’t want to believe you when you told me. I didn’t want to believe it had happened at all, it’s only that a broken leg is hard to forget.”

I took a rattling breath. The seaside taste in my mouth reminded me of that night at the beach, of nickel beer and the golden haze that had hung on Finny then and the sharp coastal air. My love for him had crystallized then and halted; I would never love him any less.

“I haven’t talked about it because I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already had. I didn’t want to remind you. I thought if things went back to the way they were, I might make it up–”

Like a test. There had been a test, and I had failed – or I’d missed the test entirely, I hadn’t even been in attendance. Phineas stiffened and sharpened; I could see he was adopting a pose, a grand pose, just as he used to.

“Well, that’s foolish. I want to know everything, every sorry little detail. There’s no need to make it up to me, you see, because you’ve already done that.”

“I’ve done no such thing.” Protesting against one of Finny’s declarations was always in vain, anyway.

“You went and did it for me, Gene. Downright decent of you.”

I went and did it because it seemed like the thing to do – the thing every boy at Devon wanted to go and do, the thing Brinker would have roped me into one way or another. I did it because it seemed as if I had never known anything else, because it seemed as if the world was ending, because the world had ended for me in a horrible lurching moment on the riverbank.

They might not have taken him anyway – not the Army, not the Navy, not the Marines, not the Air Force, not the Canadians or the Brits or the Russians. A fine Soviet commando he’d make – Tovarisch Phineas, in a funny furred hat. Maybe nobody would have had him, and he’d have gone bitter and curdled and unhappy with two good legs and no Olympic medal. It didn’t matter what might have happened; it mattered what we would do together, he and I. There was a world before us, not a shadow world of possibility but a real one – we could begin at that shabby little bar, and there would be more places after that. I could see them opening up like a flower, like a succession of names on a list – places for people like us. With Phineas, no place could be shameful. No beer hall could be so low that Phineas wouldn’t light it up like a fiery beacon. Perhaps there were clubs for men like us, secret ranks operating under secret orders. Perhaps there were more like us than we had ever known.

It was impossible not to yield in the face of that – like holding fast in the face of a lava flow, or a surging wave. You’d think it was possible, maybe even believe you could manage it, but the moment the onslaught even touched you, you’d yield at once and be swept back howling. Phineas was smiling at me, that vague and abstract smile,

“I’ll tell you everything,” I promised him. I would have promised him nearly anything, under the circumstances.

Finny’s hand was on the back of my neck – like a swat of approval, paused midway. Reconciliation was not beyond the two of us after all.