AKA Ms Walter Mitty
Words from a 1967 Army notebook kept for future use by a 23-year-old certain of his destiny as a great writer: One of the best things about making E-5 within twenty months of being a raw recruit in Basic Training is that there is a Top Five club right across the street from Headquarters Company, decent food and cheap drinks and out-of-the-way tables where I can sit and write and listen to the band music.
“So studious,” a husky feminine voice said at my shoulder one night. “Going to school while still in the Army? Very industrious. But you should put up your homework and live a little.” The W’s had a V sound, the V’s a hint of F; German.
She said her name was Giselle and offered her hand. If I had to be interrupted in the middle of a paragraph, she was worth it. Long dark hair, lustrous eyes in the dim club lighting, curvy and compact; a teasing little smile. But I have a horror at being thought a student — a strong personal aversion hard to put into words. So I told her the improbable truth: I am a writer…
She accepted this without a blink and said perhaps I could write her life story. Not the first time I heard this in the Army. For instance the sad old colonel sidetracked to garrison command in France, who told how his promising career went off the rails in Arabia. As a military attaché, he made the mistake of unpopular recommendations concerning control of desert oil fields. Covert Middle East power plays derailed the career of a top West Point graduate for his prescience. Could have been a hell of a story. He wanted me to write it. But I left France before he did.
The band struck up a slow moody tune and some guy touched her elbow and invited her to dance. She immediately said she had promised this dance to me, bent to my ear and murmured don’t make a liar of me. So I danced with her. As if I already had agreed to be her biographer, she began her life story…
A teenage model for Christian Dior in Paris making $950 a week, traveling for shoots to Spain, Italy, and Egypt. Married at fifteen to a GI and lost five children over the course of five years because her husband waited until she was six months pregnant each time and then kicked her in the stomach. Separated from him finally when she was pregnant a sixth time with her son Ernest. And that was just the first waltz.
When we walked back to my table she asked me why I wasn’t writing this down. Well, what the hell? Her tale so far had given me an idea for a short story that I could place in Florida. I took out my notebook and wrote. She…told me she had been a WAC E-5 and just got out of the Army, which was why she was at the Top Five Club. I didn’t follow the logic, but let it go. Another waltz began and she said you must keep dancing with me so those others will leave me alone. I didn’t see any others beating a path to the table but again, what the hell? So we danced.
Her next tale: she had gone hunting and killed a black bear that weighed 605 pounds. That sounds like a big black bear I said. She didn’t hear the skepticism. Assured me she had enough gun: a .300 Holland and Holland double rifle she purchased in England with her proceeds from modeling. Double rifles by that fine old firm cost as much as a modest family home. But it was her story and I withheld comment.
She was a marvelous dancer…wanted to know if I liked her perfume…told me with a complex smile that it was Tigress, selected because it fits her personality. Then she wanted to know if I was a horseman and had I ever been to Paris. I said I have been on horses and yes. Had I ever ridden from the stables in Paris? No? A pity.
She no longer demanded I take notes, just her phone number. She said she had a demanding job, no time for romance, but call tomorrow she would take me to lunch. I doubted it, but it was a slow day so I called.
Her story grew. She thought I was studying because she is always studying; she has studied in Peru, at Bremerton, at the University of Syracuse. Did I read German? No? Too bad, because the German version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is so much more graphic. “The English took out half.” She is a fan of Pearl Buck as far as writers go. She owns a Husky pup. Since I mentioned I lived in Florida, she told me she would be in Florida in June “to look at two Arabian horses there I own.”
She said she would be late for lunch but she was right on time in a huge dark Chrysler, and blew the horn. Two MPs stopped to see if they could put the make on her. “Here’s my boyfriend now,” she said. Seeing the crossed pistols I still wore on my Class As, they said “sorry Sarge,” and left.
She drove fast and erratically but with a sure hand. I was able to examine her at leisure. Her eyes were blue, very pale and luminous, with small very black pupils. She had high sculpted cheekbones, fine flesh taut over the delicate structure of her face, a blade-straight nose and that ink-dark hair, either natural or bottled, piled up in some kind of twist. Her legs beneath a slim skirt were good, shapely and easy to look at. Her breasts were not large but proportional to her five-foot-three inch frame.
She stopped at Madigan Army Hospital, said she had to get an inoculation for overseas. Madigan meant she had a military connection more concrete than being a former WAC. She walked smoothly and naturally on self-described 3 1/2-inch heels, shoulders back, a subtle roll to her snug hips. Shape, hair, eyes — especially walk — she could be almost Glenda’s twin. I tamped that thought away. we walked what seemed like miles of corridors through the sick, the injured and the pregnant.
All that remains is a blur of blue hospital garments and a succession of men’s faces turning to follow her with their eyes. She took my arm, saying she did not want to slip on the glossy, wax-slippery floors. I had one of those errant thoughts: why do they wax hospital floors? We found the office she needed and she got her shot — for some reason she insisted I come into the room with her — and when we started back she just took my hand and held it as we drifted through the clamoring, milling crowds.
Her small private smile was explained when we got back to her car: she was dating a Madigan doctor. By now the hospital grapevine would advise him she was holding hands with a big MP. I was irritated to be put on display but said nothing.
We proceeded off-post to a small café that looked sterile from outside but was like stepping into Germany inside, complete to small racks of Hirsch horns on the walls…She said the Wiener schnitzel was good and it was. She said the soup entrée was terrible and she was right. She dosed her coffee with surreal amounts of cream and sugar and ate as if starved. My magic metabolism that clogs up the minute a girl smiles at me was working, because she was giving me the flirty eyes and the smiles and acting like she was very happy in my company…she said if I didn’t eat she would feed me, and suited action to words, leaning across with forkful after forkful…
The spontaneity of the gesture felt intimate. Only later writing it all down did I wonder if it was genuine or affected.
She drove back to the fort…and seemed to relish cutting people off on the interstate, forcing them to brake or swerve. Then she blew through the fort as if invisible to MP patrols. Casually mentioned her three sports-car crowns on the European circuit, driving a Jag, which was a lot more fun than this big American boat, but don’t look so worried, I won’t kill us…
I was worried but she missed her guess. She was swooping across Basic Training areas with jogging columns of troops. I could see some dog-tired recruit, detailed out on road guard, more afraid of his shouting drill sergeant than traffic, blundering in front of her. She avoided such horrors without effort and parked outside my office, turned those pale shining eyes on me and announced we now had a date later in the week.
I pulled her closer across the seat and hurt the arm she’d had the shot in and realized it when she winced but didn’t pull away. I traced my fingers along her finely molded lips and when I bent to kiss her she was waiting with parted lips. I kissed her very lightly and her tongue found mine and that went on for a sweet moment and then we broke for air, and she was gazing at me as if trying to see behind my eyes. She took my hand in both hers. I was already very late returning and was afraid she would feel my impatience and evidently she did, but her mind-reading failed. She put fingers to my lips quickly. “There is a time for everything with us,” she said. “Everything. But not now. Not here. I have an assignment tonight.”
“Call it off,” I said.
She said she couldn’t. Asked me to call her later. I called at 7:30 pm. She sounded different — subdued, bellicose — said she had a lot to do. Didn’t know if she could keep our date, which irritated me because it had been her idea. Give me a ring when you’re free I said. I don’t call guys she said. Now I really was irritated. I’m not just some guy I said.
“I still don’t call guys, not even General Pierce. I don’t have to run after men. I never have. You call me.”
“And just keep calling and calling,” I said. “Is that the game?”
She heard the irritation. “It’s traditional,” she said in a conciliatory tone. “The boy must call the girl.”
In a way her words echoed instructions from my lost Paris love: “A woman cannot say take me in your arms and love me. That is for the man to do.” But it sounded more like the high school silliness of call me/don’t call me I avoided by never having a teenage girlfriend.
Before she hung up she said she’d meet me at the club tomorrow night at eight. But at eight I was in Seattle with one of my news staff, guarding his bug-eyed Sprite by a fireplug while he ran into a theater to reserve two seats for his upcoming heavy date. Gigi was already consigned to my growing list of near-misses.
The week after I stood Gigi up, I had a month to serve on my two-year sentence. I would be going home to face who knew what. Mainly an aborted love affair with a married woman not ready to concede it was over, while the matriarch absolutely opposed resumption.
The window was closing for adventures I had — and almost had — in the Army. So when our Saturday shift ended and the Army weekend began, I called Gigi. My notebook: She…immediately said she was coming to get me for lunch, but needed to make another stop at the hospital. Once more I figured what the hell? Her officer boyfriend at the hospital wouldn’t be able to get a short-timer sent to Vietnam, in King David’s Biblical solution to a Uriah problem.
She launched right into her continuing saga: her real name was Tatiana, a Mongol, heiress to a sweep of steppe and herd of ponies. She worked undercover for the Munich police and was instrumental in breaking a heroin ring. She took a ranging pistol shot along her right rib-cage but “got him” left-handed with her trusty .38, which she preferred to a .45 as “too big.” After she was unmasked at trial, she was beaten so badly she was in the hospital a week, and assumed the Gigi alias. While she was being patched up, a visiting sheikh invited her to come see him in Arabia…
I was enjoying this now, over my infatuation. I had her pegged now. She was the first female Walter Mitty I ever encountered. I resolved to save all her tales for posterity. Then she threw me a curve-ball: her appointment was at the OB/GYN clinic. Suddenly the slight, tight bulge in her otherwise flat belly took on new meaning. Today she was wearing a loose bright-patterned yellow dress that hinted at maternity wear. “Are you bringing me to have our baby?” she said coyly.
“Not ours,” I said. “Certainly not mine.”
“Are you sure?” Her eyes sparkled with her delighted laughter and she was really having fun.
“One hundred percent.” I couldn’t help laughing.
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because, young lady,” I said. ”I have never been in bed with you.” She shrugged as if that were a quibble and we went into the waiting room. I was the sole male present in a roomful of pregnant women. In my dress greens and eleven-dollar shades that I.Z. got me in the habit of wearing, I played it inscrutable…wandered into another room full of senior lifers who were talking about being on their third or fourth kid and complacent about the whole thing. I picked up an Outdoor Life and joined them until her exam was complete and she was ready to go…
We ate at the main fort cafeteria. She stopped at the PX to shop for clothes for her two children. She did not look at infant wear. Then dropped me at my barracks to change into civilian clothing so she could take me on a date in Seattle. On the phone then she said her check had not come. She needed money for the beauty parlor to have her hair done before we went. I said hell I’ll pay for your hair. She flared up, saying I insulted her. But she would see me at the club.
She was on friendly terms with Steve, a portly NCO who worked nights as a waiter, and we chatted together that night. But she got restless and wanted to drive. Another mad dash, this time through Saturday traffic; she led me into a department store and homed in on the jewelry counter. She proposed an exchange of gifts…something with my name engraved on it…when I pointed out the store was trying to close, she blew up and raced me back to the fort, furious at my “pushing her…”
Back at the fort, like a chameleon, she entered another role entirely. Sat in the car talking. Said a car going slowly past in the company street was keeping her under surveillance. Suddenly we were rolling again, onto I-5.
She really put her foot down for some fast and fancy driving before ducking into a Tacoma neighborhood and announcing with satisfaction, ”We lost them.” Professional driver? Who knows? But her driving was impressive.
She pulled into a gas station and felt ostentatiously in her purse. I waited for her reminder that her mysterious check had not come and could I help out with gas. Instead she said she was just checking to make sure her .38 was within easy reach, handed me five dollars for Ethyl for the big Chrysler, and went to make a phone call. Before I bought the gas I frisked her purse. A female Walter Mitty on a boring Saturday night is entertainment. A female Walter Mitty with a .38 in her purse is something else. But there was no gun…
It was quite a night. She raced madly back to the fort and parked outside the MP Stockade. An MP sedan with bubblegum light flashing raced into the night. She instantly took off after it, followed some distance, then cut off and took me back to barracks. Best you not get involved, she said darkly. I am working with them and the FBI, you know, on a big heroin thing. Jesus H. Christ.
I.Z. was on his bunk reading Camus, one of his favorite writers. He was curious: had I scored with the “clop broad?” He was a big fan of an old TV show, ”Boston Blackie,” which opened with a man walking dark cobblestone streets, hence clopping. He adapted it to his vocabulary to signify adventure. I told him no, but I had a strange tale to tell. Shit all your tales are strange this calls for drinks he said. So I loaned him my dress uniform blouse with E-5 rank on it; the Top Five Club never checked ID on a man in uniform with the minimum amount of rank. We walked across the street…
I launched my tale, waiting for his sardonic humor at being dragged all over the place by an unbalanced broad. But he hunched across the table and said watch your step and sounded serious. He had been in headquarters just yesterday and overheard the Post Sergeant Major and the MP Captain plotting a sting against a heroin operation centered around this club. “They pass the stuff when the lights go out for the black lighting on the dance floor,” he said.
“Are you serious?”
“Shit, I’m never serious. But they sure were.”
Which recalled what Steve the waiter told me about Gigi. That she first came to the club in the company of a notorious WAC scheduled to go out on a bad-conduct discharge. He was surprised the WAC braved the Top Five, curious about Gigi, then increasingly nervous when she engaged him in banter about being known for serving underage girls with GIs and wondering aloud if he might be up to other “naughtiness.”
It didn’t take much imagination to write the scenario: a busted female soldier bringing in a ringer as part of some kind of plea deal for the Army to go easier on her. From there my imagination took wing: had she approached me in the first place because she pegged me as a drug connection? Or decided somebody as gullible as me would make good cover? I dismissed it all. No, she was Walter Mitty in an attractive package, that was all there was to it…
I.Z. for once did not accuse me of inventing a story line. We looked for suspicious transactions around the dance floor but saw none. I could write it one of two ways. The surprise about the heroin ring and ambiguity: whether she was Ms. Mitty or an actual operative who talked too much. Or pure fiction with gun-battle climax. The real end was more pedestrian — and unpleasant.
She called to say she needed groceries because the alleged check still had not come. She’d pay me back if I took her to the PX. We’d go shopping and then to a movie; her girlfriend would stay with her children. So they came to get me, the whole crowd. Her girlfriend was a pale slender blonde with bitter eyes and a cruel mouth who radiated protective hostility. Since I wasn’t born yesterday, I thought ah, so that’s the way it is…
The little boy was Gigi’s image, sleek dark hair, fine facial features and nose, pale blue eyes. The little girl was dark-skinned. Her hair wasn’t quite kinky but tried to; Africa written plainly in her features. Interracial off-spring were already common in the military.
It turned out the girlfriend expected me to just hand over money for groceries and they would leave. I said I misunderstood; I thought we were going grocery-shopping together. Her girlfriend cut her eyes at Gigi and her mouth twisted angrily. The silence stretched. Gigi tried to joke with her but she looked about to spit with rage. Gigi had a look I had never seen: trapped, harried, bullied. We need the groceries she pleaded — to her girlfriend, not me…
So we went to the smaller of the PXs. Her lover was in a thunderous sulk and refused to get out of the car. Gigi immediately threw a loud temper tantrum, shoppers turning to look while I tried to become invisible in place.
At that precise moment, the small dark daughter, caught between the quarreling women, looked up at me with a beautiful smile and held up her hand for me to take and walked me into the grocery store. Her tiny hand was steady and confident in mine, as if she had studied me with her small logic and found me acceptable. The adult females followed, slashing each other with bitter sarcasm. Finally Gigi said, “Forget it, just forget it. I won’t do it if I will be hearing about it for the rest of my life!”
She tugged her daughter’s hand out of mine. Her daughter didn’t want to let go. God help me, I didn’t want her to. I wanted to buy groceries so she and her brother — silent and staring — could eat.
“We’ll get it from somebody else,” Gigi said, and fixed me with one of those female blaming gazes like it was all my fault. Her girlfriend folded her arms and permitted herself a small vindictive smile. “We’ll end it here then,” I said. She nodded and they trooped away…
On my bus ride back to my side of the fort I decided if this was my last Army sort-of adventure, she had given me quite a ride. I.Z. had orders to ship for Vietnam. Our Portland clops were all behind us. I was down to two weeks and a wake-up as they say. Gigi would go on the life-list with Irish. Maybe might-have-been is all I would ever manage. I went back to the club with Portland pipe and notebook to finish this disjointed tale. Steve the waiter came by to say he was sorry to hear from Gigi I was so angry with her I dumped her cold. I didn’t know what to say.
“You’re not going to give that gal a break?” he said. “I asked around about her. She’s not a bad gal.”…she had never been in the Army though she said she had; she was a lifer’s divorcee with post privileges, a regular alimony check, two kids, a big house and the Chrysler. “She has a lot of endearing qualities,” Steve said.
“You mean the big house and the car?”
He seemed shocked and offended. “Give her a break.”
“I’ll pass,” I said….
I never saw Ms. Mitty again.
