Crazy Night (A Mulholland / Strand Magazine Short) Read online

  “Maybe you didn’t,” she suggested without much interest. “But anyway, that’s no worse than graduating out.”

  I sat on the edge of the sofa. I planted my hands on either side of her slender body. My knee was against her bosom. I could feel its moving warmth through the cloth of my trousers. I leaned slowly down. I watched her lips relaxing softly and falling open. Then we kissed.

  “Why did you come back?” I whispered hoarsely.

  Her hand rested lightly on my knee. Her eyes lifted with the deep, unblinking brightness of a little girl’s.

  “I didn’t have any fun,” she whispered. “I kept thinking about you and what you said over the phone.”

  She pouted slightly as she murmured the words. Beneath her tightening fingers my knee began to shake.

  “Won’t you…” I whispered.

  But my tongue got stuck in my throat. I didn’t know how to go on. Anna Jean looked up at me. Then her eye-lashes fluttered down and her brows drew tightly together. Her face was already like the face of a woman during the painful ecstasy of a first embrace.

  “We can’t down here,” she whispered at last, “Not with those Feds on the loose…”

  Buck had said that we couldn’t take them upstairs, so I told her about the delivery truck out in the lot.

  “Delivery truck?” she shrieked, “How perfectly priceless!”

  She wriggled up from the sofa and caught at my shoulders.

  “If you want to…” she whispered. “You see, I’m crazy enough for anything tonight!”

  It seemed unreal. I couldn’t believe that it was actually going to happen this time. The boys in the House had taken it for granted that Anna Jean and I had already reached the ultimate degree of intimacy and I had even encouraged them in this belief. But actually we hadn’t. And now that I knew that we were going to this time, it seemed extravagantly unreal like everything else that was happening this fantastic night. I wanted to make her understand a little of what it would mean to me, this act of surrender, but there was something hard in my throat that bobbed up and down like a cork and kept me from speaking.

  We walked slowly out into the lot, through the tall weeds, without speaking. Anna Jean walked behind me, holding tight to my hand. She had let down her dark hair so that it covered her face and when we reached the dim whiteness of the truck she broke away from me, darted quickly past the grocer’s son and into the truck’s black cavity, leaving behind her a nervous tinkle of laughter. I followed more slowly, fumbling through several pockets for the fifty cents, dropping it and having to search for it in the weeds. But I was laughing, too. Laughing like a fool. I tried not to laugh, but I was shaking all over and the laughter seemed to be shaking out of my mouth…

  It was dark in there. I spread my blanket over the cot and Anna Jean lay quietly down. Was it Anna Jean, or was it merely the shadow of a girl? Then her hand touched my face and I knew! There were a few vague movements in the dark like the movements of divers on an ocean’s bottom. Both her arms were lifted toward me. I had fallen between them. And the rest of what happened between us was a blind thing, almost involuntary, drawing from us both something that seemed hardly a part of ourselves.

  A while later we were lying against the old barn that stood in another part of the lot. I was tired, strengthless, but brimming with peace. Anna Jean’s hand lay in mine, motionless and cool. I lay looking up at the stars and my happiness was such that it was hard to breath. These stars were the same that I had gazed at an hour or two before from the window-sill of the second floor bathroom. But now how different they seemed! No longer cold and aloof, but so near and friendly that I felt I could almost brush them with my finger-tips and find them as soft and faintly pulsing in the dark as the palm of Anna Jean’s hand! Everything that had been broken to pieces, shattered into the final chaos of this night, was now woven together more perfectly than it had ever been before.

  I began speaking these thoughts aloud, less to Anna Jean than to myself:

  “It isn’t the end,” I whispered, “It’s just the beginning!”

  The cool fingers suddenly twisted loose from mine.

  “Don’t!” she whispered. “Please don’t!”

  “Why not?” I asked with rising eagerness. “We’re going to get married, Anna Jean! Yes, we’ll get married tonight! Don’t you see, it’s not the end for us anymore, it’s only the beginning!”

  Her fingers, still cooler, touched mine again.

  “You’ll hate me when I tell you…”

  “What?”

  “I married Harry tonight.”

  The crumbling within me was almost a physical thing.

  “You couldn’t have done that,” I answered slowly, “and then done this!”

  “I married Harry tonight,” she repeated. “He’s waiting for me down at the hotel. I told him I had to go home and pack up a few things. He said he would wait in bed. He’s probably expecting…”

  She started laughing hysterically, her cold fingers clutching mine.

  “He’s probably expecting a virgin!”

  “You couldn’t have done that!” I whispered again.

  She rose from the weeds and started brushing her skirt.

  “I couldn’t have done it last night. I guess I couldn’t have done it any other night. But tonight I did it, all right! Tonight I did it!”

  Still laughing, she started slowly toward the House. I followed her numbly as though drawn by a chain. Waiting for me a moment, she clasped my arm. We continued toward the House together. All the windows were closed and now that the Federal scare had fizzled out everyone had gone back inside and weird shadows were flickering across the yellow blinds, bottles and glasses were clinking, voices were crazily shouting as if from a long way off.

  “God, but it’s crazy!” I whispered.

  Still laughing, she answered: “God, yes, but it’s a crazy sort of a night!”

  About the Author

  Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), one of the twentieth century’s most superb writers, was also one of its most successful and prolific. His classic works include Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, Summer and Smoke, Camino Real, Sweet Bird of Youth, Night of the Iguana, Orpheus Descending, and The Rose Tattoo.

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  Crazy Night by Tennessee Williams

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Welcome

  Crazy Night

  About the Author

  Mulholland and Strand Magazine ebook shorts

  Newsletters

  Copyright

  Copyright

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

 
; Copyright © 2013 by Tennessee Williams

  Used by permission of the author’s estate and the George Borchardt Agency

  Cover design by Keith Hayes

  Cover copyright © 2016 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First ebook edition: June 2016

  Originally published in The Strand Magazine, 2013

  Mulholland Books is an imprint of Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Mulholland Books name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-36126-2

  E3-20160517-JV-PC