WEDDING RING
377
she said,
"If
he'd throw those awful clothes away-and get something
decent."
"Yeah," Jack Burden said, "on his seventy-five dollars a month."
She looked at him now, down at his clothes. "Yours are pretty
awful, too," she said.
"Are they?" Jack Burden demanded.
"I'll send you money for some decent clothes," she said.
A few days later the check came and a note telling him to get a
"couple of decent suits and accessories." The check was for two
hundred and fifty dollars. He did not even buy a necktie. But he and
the two other men in the apartment had a wonderful blow-out, which
lasted for five days, and as a result of which the industrious and un–
lucky one lost his job and the idle and lucky one got too sociable and,
despite his luck, contracted what is quaintly known as a social disease.
But nothing happened to Jack Burden, for nothing ever happened
to Jack Burden, who was invulnerable. Perhaps that was the curse of
Jack Bun.!en: he was invulnerable.
So, as I have said, Jack Burden lived in the slatternly apartment
with the two other graduate students, for even after being fired the
unluckyt industrious one still lived in the apartment. He simply stop–
ped paying anything but he stayed. He borrowed money for cigarettes.
He sullenly ate the food the others brought in and cooked. He lay
around during the day, for there was no reason to be industrious any
more, ever again. Once at night, Jack Burden woke up and thought
he heard the sound of sobs from the living room, where the unlucky,
industrious one slept on a wall-bed. Then one day the unlucky, indus–
trious one was not there. They never did know where he had gone,
and they never heard from him again.
But before that they lived in the apartment, in an atmosphere of
b10therhood and mutual understanding. They had this in common:
they were all hiding. The difference was in what they were hiding
from. The two others were hiding from the future, from the day when
they would get degrees and leave the University. Jack Burden, how–
ever, was hiding from the present. The other two took refuge in the
present. Jack Burden took refuge in the past. The other two sat in the
living room and argued and drank or played cards or read, but Jack
Burden was sitting, as like as not, back in
his
bed room before a littie
pme table, with the notes and papers and books before him, scarcely
hearing the voices. He might come out and take a drink or take a hand
ot
cards or argue or do any of the other things they did, but what was
real was back in that bed room on the pine table.
