Big Money by John Dos Passos Page A

much. I kinder don’t think you do from what you said about the guys you know.”
    â€œOh, please don’t propose,” she said. “If you knew how I hated proposals, particularly in a cab caught in a traffic jam.”
    â€œNo, I don’t mean that. You wouldn’t want to marry me the way I’am now anyway . . . not by along shot. I gotta get on my hindlegs first. But I’m goin’ to pretty soon. . . . You know aviation is the comin’ industry. . . . Ten years from now . . . Well, us fellers have a chance to get in on the ground floor. . . . I want you to give me a break, Doris, hold off the other guys for a little while. . . .”
    â€œWait for you ten years, my, that’s a romantic notion . . . my grandmother would have thought it was lovely.”
    â€œI mighta known you’d kid about it. Well, here we are.”
    Charley tried to keep from looking sour when he helped Doris out. She squeezed his hand just for a second as she leaned on it. His heart started pounding. As they followed the usher into the dark theater full of girls and jazz she put her small hand very lightly on his arm. Above their heads was the long powdery funnel of the spotlight spreading to a tinselly glitter where a redlipped girl in organdy was dancing. He squeezed Doris’s hand hard against his ribs with his arm. “All right, you get what I mean,” he whispered. “You think about it . . . I’ve never had a girl get me this way before, Doris.” They dropped into their seats. The people behind started shushing, so Charley had to shut up. He couldn’t pay any attention to the show.
    â€œCharley, don’t expect anything, but I think you’re a swell guy,” she said when, stuffy from the hot theater and the lights and the crowd, they got into a taxi as they came out. She let him kiss her, but terribly soon the taxi stopped at her apartmenthouse. He said goodnight to her at the elevator. She shook her head with a smile when he asked if he could come up.
    He walked home weak in the knees through the afterthetheater bustle of Park Avenue and Fortysecond Street. He could still feel her mouth on his mouth, the smell of her pale frizzy hair, the littleness of her hands on his chest when she pushed his face away from hers.
    The next morning he woke late feeling pooped as if he’d been on a threeday drunk. He bought the papers and had a cup of coffee and a doughnut at the coffeebar that stank of stale swill. This time he didn’t look in the Business Opportunities column but under Mechanics and Machinists. That afternoon he got a job in an automobile repairshop on First Avenue. It made him feel bad to go back to the overalls and the grease under your fingernails and punching the timeclock like that but there was no help for it. When he got back to the house he found a letter from Emiscah that made him feel worse than ever.
    The minute he’d read the letter he tore it up. Nothing doing, bad enough to go back to grinding valves without starting that stuff up again. He sat down on the bed with his eyes full of peeved tears. It was too goddamned hellish to have everything close in on him like this after getting his commission and the ambulance service and the Lafayette Escadrille and having a mechanic attend to his plane and do all the dirty work. Of all the lousy stinking luck. When he felt a little quieter he got up and wrote Joe for Christ’s sake to get well as soon as he could, that he had turned down an offer of a job with Triangle Motors
over in Long Island City and was working as a mechanic in order to tide over and that he was darn sick of it and darned anxious to get going on their little proposition.
    He’d worked at the repairshop for two weeks before he found out that the foreman ran a pokergame every payday in a disused office in the back of the building. He got in on it and played pretty