The Bell Tolls for No One. Charles Bukowski

had arguments over her dancing because I still loved part of her.

      “I’m too smart for them,” she said. “When the party’s over and I’ve turned the male on, I’ll slip out the back door and vanish.”

      “But that’s a lie, you see. You offer yourself to men and then you run away. That’s a lie. You’re trying to get even with something.”

      “Listen,” she said, “you’ve got this fuck-chain on your leg. I don’t. I float free. When I’m dancing, I don’t even think of you. I think of the music and I think of his dancing, whoever I’m dancing with. I float free—I am a great white bird in the sky.”

      “O.K., fine.”

      “You’ve said before that when I dance, I betray you. How can I betray you?”

      “You know how,” I replied. “Dancing can be more sexual than copulation. There’s more movement and people watching. There are the eyes, the getting closer and closer. I know you, bitch. You’re no great white bird—you’re the Whore of the Centuries . . . ”

      “You’re a son of a bitch, Charlie. You just don’t understand.”

      I don’t know why I hung on.

      Maybe I just wanted to hear a story, maybe I just wanted to write a story. I suppose the tragedy of her dancing was that she thought she was a great dancer. I had seen great dancing—things that people practiced months, years, lifetimes to bring out.

      Nina just brought sex right on out, she did that well, but it was hardly great dancing.

      I once saw a white woman in a Turkish café one night. It was one of those places where you ate downstairs, then went upstairs to drink. The dark girls were doing their natural quiet movements alone, and then the American woman, a nicely-shaped blonde got up and did her thing. She did it well but it was ugly because it was so obvious. They asked the woman and her escort to leave and the white American woman screamed obscenities at us—all the way down the stairway. What she never realized was the difference between art and artlessness. Then I turned my eyes upon the dancing dark girls who flowed like rivers of realness to the sea . . .

      Besides the parties, I got other bits of information from Nina, mostly upon the love bed, before or after. One might call them confessions or perhaps, in her case, exhilarations.

      “Yeah. Well, there was this clothing store. I went in to get my husband something. There was this guy there. He was very sarcastic to me. Oh, I always go for these sarcastic guys . . . ”

      She looked at me but I avoided her cruel eyes.

      “He took me behind a curtain and kissed me. There was a little room in the back. He walked behind me and had his cock out and there were some guys there and everybody laughed. I came back later and I told him, ’You’re just a queer, aren’t you? You’re just a queer!’ ”

      “Was he?” I asked.

      “I think so.”

      “O.K. . . .”

      “You know,” she continued, “I didn’t cheat on my husband much. Just maybe once or twice. This one guy, well, I told my husband I had taken his cock out and kissed it but I hadn’t screwed him though.” More stories: she’d placed an ad in an underground newspaper and gotten 50 answers. One guy left his phone number so Nina called him. She met the young, thin guy in a coffee shop. Then he asked her to drive him down to the park because he’d left his car at the park. “I drove him down,” Nina told me, “but I should have known better. He got me real hot, he knew he had me hot, and he had this huge curving cock like a scythe. I never saw anything so big. But he wouldn’t tell me his name. I didn’t want to get pregnant so I said no. He got angry and said, ‘I’d rather screw a guy—at least they don’t bother me with all this shit!’ ”

      “And you let him go?”

      “Yes, and you should have seen it—Huge, curving, like a scythe!”

      I don’t know. There were many battles and many turnings between us. I made a living as a writer which meant I didn’t have much money but much time. Time to think—time to love. I suppose that I was in love with Nina. Even though I was 20 years older than her.

      One weekend I drove her all the way to Arizona where she put on a special three-hour dance show in a ranch-house with a homosexual. She wore a pair of red pajamas with strands that flopped open to show her belly and bellybutton.

      I drank most of the night in the game room, looking at dead and mounted animals, feeling quite a knowledgeable relationship with them.

      Finally, I walked into the poolroom of the ranch-house where they were dancing. I lifted the homosexual high over my head, but decided not to crack his skull on the ceiling. I set him down and then gave my own drunken version of the Dance—the Great White Bird Flying.

      When I finished, the fag walked up and said, “Pardon me.”

      I gave way and he danced with Nina and nobody seemed to object, not even I . . .

      Time and things went on, they do, you know.

      I gave a few poetry readings, got some minor royalties from a novel. Then I was up in Utah with Nina waiting for the big Fourth of July dance.

      “That’s the only time when things happen up here,” she told me.

      So we made the little town big-time dance, and Nina met her big, dumb cowboy. Or maybe he wasn’t big and dumb.

      I watched him a bit and I thought, hell, he’d even make a writer if something got up and really sliced his soul, showed him where it was at. But nothing had bothered him too much, and so, let’s say he had soul of a sort and Nina knew it. She kept looking back at me as she kept offering it to him in the Dance. And I thought—here I am, a stranger in a shit town. I just wish I could get out and leave the Nina’s and their people and themselves to each other, but Nina kept slicing in closer and closer and offering herself.

      And that was it for me, because if she wanted him, she could have him. That was my way of thinking: the two that wanted each other should have each other.

      But she had to keep bringing him back to me after each dance. “Charlie,” she said, “this is Marty. Doesn’t Marty dance nice?”

      “I don’t know much about dancing. I guess he does.”

      “I want you two guys to be friends,” she said.

      Then the floor squared off and they danced together, everybody clapping and laughing and joyous. I smoked a cigarette and talked to some big-titted lady about taxes. Then I looked up and Nina and Marty were kissing while they were dancing.

      I was hurt but I knew Nina. I shouldn’t have been hurt. As they danced they kept on kissing. Everybody applauded. I applauded too. “More, more!” I demanded.

      They danced again and again.

      The townspeople became more exhilarated. I simply lost hope, came down to reality, and became terribly bored. Bored, that’s the only state I can name it. There is something about the beat of dance music. It can only hold me so long then I feel as if I have been flattened with hard and meaningless hammers.

      Nina and I had been living in a tent at the edge of town. I was sitting alone against a tree one evening outside the tent when she came running down the road, “Charlie, Charlie, I don’t want Marty, I want you! Please believe me, goddamn you!”

      Her car was parked along the downward road and evidently Marty was chasing her in the moonlight. The big, dumb cowboy was on a horse. He caught up with her in the path and lassoed her and she screamed in front of me in the dirt. He pulled her blue jeans and panties off and put it in. Her legs raised into the pitch black sky.

      I couldn’t watch anymore so I walked down the pathway to the main road.

      I had a good five-mile walk to the nearest bus station in town.

      I