“Okay, so you’re a hero,” Kopeck said lightly. “You’re a fighting man. Tell me one thing, though, John. Did you personally shoot this gun in combat?”

“Whadda you think?” Fallon said through thin, unmoving lips.

“How many times?”

The fact of the matter was that Fallon, as a husky and competent soldier of nineteen, many times pronounced “a damn good B.A.R. man” by the others in his squad, had carried his weapon on blistered feet over miles of road and field and forest in the last two months of the war, had lain with it under many artillery and mortar barrages and jabbed it at the chests of many freshly taken German prisoners; but he’d had occasion to fire it only twice, at vague areas rather than men, had brought down nothing either time, and had been mildly reprimanded the second time for wasting ammunition.

“Nunnya goddamn business how many!” he said, and the others looked down at their plates with ill-concealed smiles. He glared at them, defying anyone to make a crack, but the worst part of it was that none of them said anything. They ate or drank their beer in silence, and after a while they changed the subject.

She took a bath before fixing the dinner, and then ate with a bulky housecoat roped around her in her usual state of post-bath dishevelment: hair damp, skin dry and porous, no lipstick and a smiling spoor of milk around the upper borders of her unsmiling mouth. “Where do you think you’re going?” she said, when he had pushed his plate away and stood up. “Look at that—a full glass of milk on the table. Honestly, John, you’re the one that makes me buy milk and then when I buy it you go and leave a full glass on the table. Now come back here and drink that up.”

He went back and gulped the milk, which made him feel ill.

“Well,” she said, “I certainly don’t wanna get pregnant, if that’s what you mean. May I ask where we’d be if I had to quit my job?”

He got up and began to stalk around the living room, glaring fiercely at the lamp shades, the watercolor flower paintings, and the small china figure of a seated, sleeping Mexican at whose back bloomed a dry cactus plant. He went to the bedroom, where her fresh underwear was laid out for the evening, and picked up a white brassiere containing the foam-rubber cups without which her chest was as meager as a boy’s. When she came in he turned on her, waving it in her startled face, and said, “Why d’ya wear these goddamn things?”

She snatched the brassiere from him and backed against the doorjamb, her eyes raking him up and down. “Now, look,” she said. “I’ve had enough of this. Are you gonna start acting decent, or not? Are we going to the movies, or not?”

[...] Both their heads suddenly turned to look past him, and Fallon, turning too, joined them in watching a girl in a tight tan skirt detach herself from a party at one of the tables in a shadowy corner. She brushed past them, murmuring, “Excuse me,” and all three of their heads were drawn to watch her buttocks shift and settle, shift and settle until she disappeared into the ladies’ room.

“Man, that’s rough,” the shorter of the two soldiers said, and his grin included Fallon, who grinned back.

“Oughta be a law against wavin’ it around that way,” the tall soldier said. “Bad for the troops.”

They had a few more rounds, talking Army, and after a while the tall soldier asked Fallon how to get to the Central Plaza, where he’d heard about the Friday night jazz; then they were all three rolling down Second Avenue in a cab, for which Fallon paid. While they stood waiting for the elevator at the Central Plaza, he worked the wedding ring off his finger and stuck it in his watch pocket.

Fallon, to whom all jazz sounded the same, took on the look of a connoisseur as he slouched in the doorway, his face tense and glazed under the squeal of clarinets, his gas-blue trousers quivering with the slight, rhythmic dip of his knees and his fingers snapping loosely to the beat of the drums. But it wasn’t music that possessed him as he steered the soldiers to a table next to three girls, nor was it music that made him get up, as soon as the band played something slow enough, and ask the best-looking of the three to dance. She was tall and well-built, a black-haired Italian girl with a faint shine of sweat on her brow, and as she walked ahead of him toward the dance floor, threading her way between the tables, he reveled in the slow grace of her twisting hips and floating skirt. In his exultant, beer-blurred mind he already knew how it would be when he took her home—how she would feel to his exploring hands in the dark privacy of the taxi, and how she would be later, undulant and naked, in some ultimate vague bedroom at the end of the night. And as soon as they reached the dance floor, when she turned around and lifted her arms, he crushed her tight and warm against him.

“No more for me,” she called after him, but he was already three tables away, walking fast toward the little ell of the room where the bar was. “Bitch,” he was whispering. “Bitch. Bitch.” And the images that tortured him now, while he stood in line at the makeshift bar, were intensified by rage: there would be struggling limbs and torn clothes in the taxi; there would be blind force in the bedroom, and stifled cries of pain that would turn to whimpering and finally to spastic moans of lust. Oh, he’d loosen her up! He’d loosen her up!