At sweet sixteen she, whose mother had borne her out of wed--well,
anyway, at sweet sixteen, like the maiden in the saying, she had never
been kissed, nor at seventeen, but at eighteen--
It was this way. Steve Turner--"Getaway," as the quick lingo of the
street had him--liked her. Too well. I firmly believe, though, that
if in the lurid heat lightning of so stormy a career as Getaway's the
beauty of peace and the peace of beauty ever found moment, Marylin
nestled in that brief breathing space somewhere deep down within the
noisy cabaret of Getaway's being. His eyes, which had never done
anything of the sort except under stimulus of the horseradish which he
ate in quantities off quick-lunch counters, could smart to tears at the
thought of her. And over the emotions which she stirred in him, and
which he could not translate, he became facetious--idiotically so.
Slim and supine as the bamboo cane he invariably affected, he would wait
for her, sometimes all of the six work-a-evenings of the week, until
she came down out of the grim iron door of the shirt factory where she
worked, his one hip flung out, bamboo cane bent almost double, and, in
his further zeal to attitudinize, one finger screwing up furiously at
a vacant upper lip.
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