… at least not since I've been here.”
“You're alive, aren't you, Ward?” Her voice was soft beneath the bright lights where they sat, but her eyes bore into him.
“Sometimes that's not enough.”
“Yes, it is. In a place like this, that's a lot to be grateful for. Look around you every day … look at the boys wounded and crippled and maimed … the ones who're never going home at all….” Something about the tone of her voice bore straight to his heart and for the first time in four months, he had to fight back tears.
“I try hard not to look at that.”
“Maybe you should. Maybe it'll make you glad you're alive.” She wanted to reach him, to touch the place that hurt so much. She wondered what it was, as slowly he stood up.
“I don't give a damn anymore, Faye. If I live or die, it's all the same to me and everyone else.”
'That's a terrible thing to say.” She looked shocked and almost hurt as she stared up at him. “What could possibly make you feel like that?”
He looked down at her for an endless moment, silently begging himself not to say anything more, and suddenly wishing she'd go away. But he stared at her, she seemed not to move at all, and suddenly he didn't give a damn who he told. What difference did it make now? “I got married six months ago, to an army nurse, and two months after that she was killed by a fucking Jap bomb. It's kind of hard to feel good about this place after that. You know what I mean?”
She sat frozen in her seat, and then slowly nodded her head. So that was it. That was the emptiness she saw in his eyes. She wondered if he'd always be like that, or if he'd come alive again. One day. Maybe. “I'm sorry, Ward.” There wasn't much else one could say. There were other stories much like this, some worse. But that was no consolation to him.
“I'm sorry.” He smiled a quiet smile. There was no point dumping it on her. It wasn't her fault. And she was so different from Kathy. Kathy was so quiet and plain and he had been so desperately in love with her. And this woman was all beauty and flash, worldly right down to the tip of every brightly polished nail. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to tell you something like that. There are a thousand stories like that here.” She knew that there were and she had heard most of them before, but that didn't make them any easier to hear. She felt terrible for him, and as she followed him slowly back out to the jeep, she was glad she hadn't had dinner with the CO. after all, and she told him so, as he turned to her with that quiet half smile of his that somehow appealed to her, more than any smile she'd seen in Hollywood, at least in the last year or two.
“That's a nice thing to say.”
She wanted to touch his arm, but she didn't dare. She wasn't just Faye Price the actress now, she was herself. “I mean it, Ward.”
“Why? You don't have to feel sorry for me, Faye. I'm a big boy. I can take care of myself. I have for a long time.” But she saw more than that. She saw what Kathy had, and more. She knew how desperately hurt he was, how lonely, how shocked still by the pretty little nurse's death … his wife … it had happened two months after they got married, to the day, but he didn't tell Faye that bitter detail as he drove her back to the tent she'd been assigned. “I still think it's damn nice of you to come out here to see the men.”
“Thanks.”
He stopped the jeep, and they sat looking at each other for a long time, each with a lot more to say, but no way to say it here. Where did one start? How did one begin? He had read about her affair with Gable years before, and he wondered if it was over now. She wondered how long he would pine for the army nurse he had loved.
“Thank you for dinner.” She said it with a shy smile and he laughed as he opened the door for her.
“I told you … it's just like ‘21’ …”
“Next time I'll try the hash.” They were back to joking again, it seemed to