for your sins, if you have any, you ought to have to sleep in a bed with a girl who has put her hair up in pin curls to be beautiful tomorrow. Not tonight. They’d never be beautiful tonight. For tomorrow, when we make the competition.
“The girl, Renata, that you are, is sleeping now without ever having done anything to her hair. She is sleeping with it spread out on the pillow and all it is to her is a glorious, dark, silky annoyance, that she can hardly remember to comb, except that her governess taught her. “I see her in the street with the lovely long-legged stride and the wind doing anything it wants to her hair, and her true breasts under the sweater, and then I see the nights in Texas with the pin curls; tight and subjected by metallic instruments.
“Pin me no pin curls, my beloved,” he said to the Portrait, “and I will try to lay it on the line in round, heavy, hard silver dollars or with the other.”
I mustn’t get rough, he thought.
Then he said to the portrait, for he did not capitalize her now in his mind, “You are so God-damned beautiful you stink. Also you are jail-bait. Renata’s two years older now. You are under seventeen.”
And why can’t I have her and love her and cherish her and never be rude, nor bad, and have the five sons that go to the five corners of the world; wherever that is? I don’t know. I guess the cards we draw are those we get. You wouldn’t like to re-deal would you dealer?
No. They only deal to you once, and then you pick them
