allowance is just about what they have, a dinky little apartment. So I made a deal with the Japanese real estate guy. I would buy this place. He would say he was renting it to me. They would send him a check for your housing allowance, which he would turn over to me.”
“Jesus!”
“Then, when they sent us home, I figured it would sell better with furniture in it . . . No, that’s not true. I wanted to sell the furniture, except for a few really personal things— that Ming vase we bought in Taipei, for example. When we started our new, out-of-the-Marine-Corps life, I didn’t want you to remember, every time you sat on the couch or something, how they had crapped all over you.”
McCoy said nothing.
“So it didn’t sell while we were in the States,” she said. “So when you and Uncle Flem came back, I called the real estate guy and told him to take it off the market. Then I decided, what the hell, since we have a house in Tokyo, there’s no point in me staying in the States all by my fucking lonesome.” She paused. “Are you really pissed, honey?”
“I’m shocked, is what I am,” he said. “ ‘Fucking lonesome’? ‘Crapped all over you’? ‘Pissed’? What happened to that innocent lady I married?”
“She married a Marine, and she now knows all the dirty words,” she said. “Answer the question.”
He exhaled audibly.
“No,” he said. “I can never be . . . pissed at you.”
“Good, because there’s more,” Ernie said. “Now that we know how the Marine Corps paid you back for all your loyal service, I don’t care if the goddamn Commandant himself knows we’re well off—”
“You’re well off,” McCoy interrupted.
“—we’re well off,” Ernie repeated, firmly, even angrily. “Don’t start that crap again, Ken. I’ve had enough of it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“And we’re going to live like it,” Ernie said, firmly.
“Okay,” he said.
“Okay?” she asked, as if she had expected an argument.
“Okay,” he repeated.
“Starting tonight with dinner in the best restaurant in Tokyo,” she said.
“Fine,” he said.
“Well, with that out of the way,” Ernie asked, “whatever shall we do now?”
Her hand moved sensually down from his neck over his chest and stomach.
“Hart said Pickering said I get thirty minutes, no more, ‘personal time’ with my wife.”
“Fuck him,” Ernie said. “He can wait a couple of minutes. The whole fucking world can wait a couple of minutes.”
“My thoughts exactly,” McCoy said.
[SEVEN]
Captain Kenneth R. McCoy, USMC, came out of his bedroom in a crisp uniform fresh from the dry-cleaning plant of the Imperial Hotel.
He was just a little light-headed. It was probably due, he thought, to the sudden change of uniform, from foul utilities to clean greens, from foul and heavy boondockers to highly shined low-quarter shoes, which felt amazingly light on his feet, and he was, of course, freshly bathed and shaved.
And freshly laid, he thought somewhat crudely. Freshly laid twice. It’ll be a long goddamn time before those guys on the Clymer and Pickaway get to share any connubial bliss again. If they ever do.
Master Gunner Ernest W. Zimmerman, USMC, similarly attired, was sitting in one of the armchairs in the living room with Captain George F. Hart. They both had a drink dark with scotch in one hand, and a bacon-wrapped oyster on a toothpick in the other.
“Do I live here now, or what?” Zimmerman asked. “From the way the room I took a shower in looks, it looks that way.”
“There’s plenty of room,” McCoy said. “You, too, George.”
“The boss wants me in the hotel, but thanks.”
That’s the difference between a reservist and a regular. I never think of General Pickering as anything but “the general, ” and neither does Zimmerman. George thinks of him as “the boss.” And George is perfectly comfortable with that drink in his hand at three o’clock in the afternoon, and I was just about to jump Ernie’s ass about it.
Fuck it. We’re entitled to a drink.
He walked to the bar and made himself a drink.
“How come we never came here before?” Zimmerman asked.
“I didn’t know until fifteen minutes ago that Ernie owns this place,” McCoy said. “Until then, I thought it was GI quarters; that we’d given them up when they sent me to the States.”
“Ernie bought this?” Hart asked.
“Ernie didn’t like the GI quarters,” McCoy said.
“Good for her,” Zimmerman said. “Mae-Su got us out of officer’s housing at Parris Island just as soon as she could get a house built in Beaufort.”