A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

Death Escapes the Eye

The other night at a party I met my last love again. By last, I don’t mean my latest, I mean my final one. He was as taking and as debonair as ever, but not to me any more; a little older maybe; and we said the things you say, with two glasses in our hands to keep us from feeling lonely.

“Hello, Lizzie”; “Hello, Dwight”; “Haven’t seen you”; “Nor you either.”

Then when there wasn’t anything more to say, we moved on. In opposite directions.

It isn’t often that I see him any more. But whenever I do, I still think of her. I wonder what really did become of her.

And just the other night, suddenly, for no reason at all, out of nowhere, the strangest thought entered my head for a moment.

But then I promptly dismissed it again, as being too fantastic too absurd.

I first met him on paper.

Jean was the one called my attention to the manuscript. Jean was my assistant on the magazine. Strange, I suppose, for that type publication to have an all-female staff. I’ve never run across another such instance before or since. It didn’t deal with confessions or with the screen or with home-making; it dealt with murder mysteries purely and simply. And they were pure and they were simple, I assure you. Nothing else got in. Well, the backing was masculine, if capital can be said to have a gender; and they’d picked us to run it, so they must have liked the way we did it. We turned out a competent, craftsmanlike, he-man shocker and we signed it with first-initials, so the readers never knew the difference. “Editor, E. Aintree; Associate Editor, J. Medill.” All my mail came addressed “Mr. Aintree.”

We had a hole left in the magazine. You work pretty close to deadline on a monthly, and that will happen now and then. One of our regulars had defaulted; gotten drunk, or gotten the grippe, or come through with a stinker that couldn’t be used. I don’t remember now any more. We didn’t have enough of a backlog to help us out; we were too young yet. (That’s an accumulation of stories already purchased and held in reserve for just such an emergency.)

“What about the slush-pile?” I asked. That’s the stuff that goes back. It varies all the way from abominable up to just plain not-so-good. That was poor Jean’s department, first readings. She used to have to drink lots of black coffee with her lunch, to make her head feel better.

“There are a couple of shorts,” she said, “but they’re pretty bad. We’d have to use two.”

“If we’ve got to use a bad one,” I said, “I’d rather use just one long bad one than two short bad ones. See if you can’t dig up something at ten thousand words.”

She came into my office again in about an hour. “I’ve found something,” she announced triumphantly. She made a face expressive of cynical appreciation. “Park Avenue,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I glanced at the return address on the cover. “Dwight Billings, 657 Park Avenue, New York City.” This was before the postal zones had come in.

Her eyebrows continued satirically arched. “We’re getting contributions from the Four Hundred now.”

“It runs all the way up to 125th Street and beyond.“I reminded her. “He may have rented a room in someone’s apartment. Most likely receives his mail care of the doorman.”

“Do they rent rooms on Park Avenue?” she wanted to know. Not sincerely; she seldom asked her questions sincerely. She already had the greater part of the answers, as a rule. She asked to see whether you had, that was the impression.

I read it. It was encased in dream-format, if you know what I mean. And that was taboo in our shop.

I’d read worse. But very infrequently.

“It’s a first try,” I let her know.

“Think we can take a chance on it?” she asked.

“We’ll have to. We go to the printer tomorrow. If we lop off the dream-casing and run it straight, it might get by. A good retreading job ought to fix it up. Have Ann see if she can get him on the phone for me.”

She returned breathlessly in a moment. “He’s listed,” she announced. She acted surprised, as though she’d expected at least the address — if not name and address both — to be feigned. “But we can’t reach him. And it’s quarter to five now.”

I slapped the manuscript rather short-temperedly into my briefcase. “I’ll have to take it home with me myself tonight, and try to hop it up.”

“That,” she said sweetly, “is what you get for being an editor.”

It was on its way to the printer’s by nine next morning; the hole had been filled up.

At nine-thirty the switchboard rang in.

“There’s a Mr. Billings here about a story—”

“Ask him to wait a minute,” I said tersely. I was still a little resentful of the time I’d given up the night before; my own time.

The minute became twenty. Not intentionally, but there was office routine, and he’d come in so damned early.

Finally I picked up the phone. “Ask Mr. Billings to come in.” I lit a cigarette and leaned back in the chair.

He knocked subduedly. “Come in.” I tilted my head and waited.

He was tall and he was thirty; brown eyes and lightish hair.

He looked at me, and then he looked around the room inquiringly. “Wrong office, I guess,” he grinned. “I’m looking for Mr. Aintree.”

I was used to that. I got it all the time.

“Sit down,” I said. “It’s Miss Aintree, and I’m she.”

He sat down. He looked well sitting; not too far forward, not too far back. Not too straight, not too sunken.

I thought of my hair. I’d never thought of it before, here in the office. I wished I’d had it dressed once a fortnight or so, like Jean; not just run a comb through loosely and be done for the day.

“Is this your first story, Mr. Billings?”

He smiled deprecatingly. “I haven’t fooled you, have I?”

I explained about the dream-format. “—so we took it out.”

“But,” he said incredulously, “that sounds as if you intended to—”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you? We tried to reach you yesterday afternoon. You see, we’re using it.”

I watched closely. Just the right reaction; not too cocksure, not lackadaisical either. Modestly appreciative. Couldn’t he do anything wrong? He should do something wrong. This wasn’t good for me.

I rang for Jean. “I’d like you to meet the other half of the staff, now that you’re under way with us.”

He’d have to meet her sooner or later, so it was better right now. She only had on a pique shirtwaist and black skirt today, and she’d come in with an overnight cold.

“This is Mrs. Medill, my associate.” I deliberately emphasized the married title. “Mr. Billings is our newest contributor, Jean.”

“Welcome to our family.”

The cold wasn’t noticeable enough and the pique blouse looked too pert and chipper, I thought.

“I’ve been thinking about your story all night,” she said.

“You’ve been thinking about it, but I’ve been working on it,” I said caustically.

The three of us laughed.

Jean had a cigarette with us. We mulled over titles, finally decided on one. He’d been in with me for forty-five minutes, the longest interview I’d ever given since I’d been in the business.

He got up to go finally. He shook our hands.

“You’ll come back at us again with another now, won’t you?” I said. “We’re wide open, you know.”

“Yes,” Jean concurred demurely, her eyes resting on me innocently for a moment, “we’re wide open and our sales-resistance is practically nil.”

“Thanks,” he beamed. “You’ve both been perfectly swell.” He closed the door after him. A moment later he reopened it and looked in again. “I have an idea. Why don’t you both come up and have dinner with me at my place? I’m batching it, but I have some one up there who’ll look after us.”

“I have a miserable thing called a husband,” Jean said. “He doesn’t make any noise, he’s very well-trained, but the poor creature depends on me to be fed.”

“Bring him along!” he said. “Only too glad. Shall we say Tuesday, then?”

“Tuesday’s fine.”

“Tuesday at seven. Just the four of us. Goodbye, Miss Aintree.”

“Oh, make it Lizzie,” I said with a touch of bravado. That was another thing that had to be out and over with, too, so the sooner the better. All the “Beths” and “Elspeths” when I was seventeen and eighteen hadn’t been able to improve on it. “Goodbye, Dwight.”

He closed the door, and I could hear his step going away down the corridor outside. He had a fine, firm tread; clean-cut, without any slurring.

She stood there looking at me with her brows raised.

“Why are your brows up?” I asked, finally.

“Are they up?”

“Well, they don’t grow that way.”

“I’ve never seen you so patient with a writer before,” she mused, gathering up her papers to take back with her.

Yes, he was here as a writer, wasn’t he?

Jean and her husband, the Cipher, stopped by for me Tuesday in a cab, and the three of us went on together. The Cipher was singularly uncommunicative, on any and all subjects, after five o’clock in the afternoon. He was resting from business, she and I supposed. “He has a voice,” she had once assured me. “I called for him one day, and I heard it through the office door.”

On the present occasion he said, “Lo, Lizzie,” in a taciturn growl as I joined them, and that, I knew, was all we were likely to get out of him for the next hour to come, so it had to do. But Jean had settled for it, and Jean was smarter when it came to men than I could ever hope to be.

657 was one of the tall monoliths that run along Park Avenue like a picket fence from Forty-fifth to Ninety-sixth; but a picket fence that doesn’t do its job. It doesn’t seem to keep anyone out; everyone gets in.

We stepped out of the elevator into a foyer, and there was only a single door facing us. Meaning there was but one apartment to a floor, in this building. The little waiting-place was made as attractive as if it were part of the apartment itself. The carpeting was Oriental, there was a heavily-framed mirror on the wall, a carved table below that, and a Louis XVI armchair with grape satin back-and-seat upholstery. A small rock-crystal chandelier was suspended overhead.

“Is this one of your writers, Lizzie?” Jean inquired quizzically.

“Not on our rates,” I said drily. And unnecessarily.

“Why does he bother fiddling around with writing?” the Cipher shrugged.

We both gave him a cold look. Meant to be taken as haughty reproof.

A colored man opened the door. None of the faithful old family-retainer type. A streamlined version. His accent was pure university. “If you’ll allow me, sir.” He took the Cipher’s hat. “If you ladies would care—” He indicated a feminine guest-room to one side of the entrance gallery.

Jean and I went in and left our wraps in there.

She unlidded a cut-crystal powder receptacle, being Jean, and sniffed at it. “Coty’s, unless I’m slipping. Vibrant for brunettes, and—” She unlidded a second one on the opposite side, “—Rachel for blondes. Evidently there are no redheads on his list.”

I didn’t answer.

We rejoined the Cipher and the butler in the central gallery. It ran on for a length of about three rooms, cutting a wide swath through the apartment, and then ended in a short flight of about four ascending steps. Beyond these was the living room. But it was lateral to the gallery, not frontal to it.

There was again a matter of steps, two this time, to be descended. You stopped, and turned to your left, and came down two steps onto the floor of the room. It was artfully constructed for dramatic entrances, that room.

Desultory notes of “None but the Lonely Heart” played with one hand alone stopped short. He raised his head at the bustle of our coming down the two steps, and I saw his eyes for a moment, fitted evenly into the crevice between the top of the instrument and its upraised lid. There was something sinister about the vignette. It was as if he were wearing a flesh-colored mask between eyebrows and cheekbones, and the rest of his face were ebony-black.

Then he stood up and came forward, one hand each for myself and Jean.

I got the left. “Nearest to the heart,” I had to say to myself, to fool myself that I’d got the best of the bargain.

His man brought in a frost-rimmed shaker and poured bacardis and offered them to us.

“This is Luthe,” he said.

Luthe dipped his head slightly, with the same dignified reticence he’d shown at the door.

I wondered what Billing did. I wondered how to find out, without asking him. And Jean rushed in. It was a great convenience having her along, I couldn’t help reflecting.

“Well, what do you do?” she queried. “I mean, outside of writing for Lizzie, now that you are writing for Lizzie?”

“Nothing,” he said bluntly. “Simply — nothing.”

“Now, there’s a man after my own heart!” she blurted out. “Let me shake hands with you.” And proceeded vigorously to do so.

The Cipher made his hourly utterance at this point. “I admire you,” he stated emphatically. “You carry out what you feel like doing.”

“Do you always carry out the things you feel like doing?” Jean suggested mischievously. “I’d hate to be the lady in front of you at the theatre wearing that tall, obliterating hat.”

After dinner, with a great show of importance, he took me to see the room he did his work in. We went by ourselves. I don’t know why; leaving Jean and Cipher behind. I didn’t mind that.

He keyed open the door, as though revealing a site of very great intrinsic worth. “I don’t even let Luthe in here when I’m at it,” he said. “I’m sort of self-conscious about it, I guess.”

“You’ll get over that,” I assured him. “Some of them can work in the middle of the street at high noon.”

He showed me the typewriter. It had been left open with an insert at mid-page.

“I sit there and look at it and nothing happens. I hit the side of the machine, I hit the side of my head—”

I’m afraid I wasn’t as interested in him professionally as I should have been. I bent down close as if to look, but my eyes went past the roller toward the girl’s photograph standing farther back on the desk.

It said: “To my Dwight,” down in a lower corner, “from his loving wife, Bernette.” But he’d said he was batching it.

Divorced then.

I hummed a little, under my breath. Humming is a sign of contentment.

And then he called, in about a week, and invited us to dine with him a second time, starting the whole thing over.

We went. We were sitting there in his living room, just the four of us, about ten o’clock. And suddenly drama had come fuming in around us, like a flash-flood.

Luthe appeared, went over to him, bent down and said something not meant for our ears.

I saw Dwight look up at him, in complete disbelief.

“No,” he mouthed in astonishment. I caught the word. Then he pointed to the floor. “Here?”

Luthe nodded. “Right outside.”

“With him?” I caught those two words too.

“All right,” he said finally, and gave his hand an abrupt little twist of permission. “All right. She knows I’d never—”

I got it then.

She has somebody else. But not only that:

She’s come right here with the somebody else!

Luthe showed up at the gallery-opening, announced formally: “Mr. and Mrs. Stone.”

That told me the rest of it. She’d remarried, and the somebody else who’d come with her was her second husband.

I felt his wrist shaking a little, but it was safely out of sight behind the turn of my shoulder. For support purely, you understand; to sustain him against the settee-back. Nothing personal. I didn’t have to be told.

I turned my head. She’d come out onto the entrance-apron, two steps above the rest of us. She, and a husband tailing her. But what it amounted to was: she’d come out onto the entrance apron. He might just as well not have been there.

She was familiar with the stage-management of this particular entry-way, knew just how to get the most out of it. Knew just how long to stand motionless, and then resume progress down into the room. Knew how to kill him. Or, since she’d already done that pretty successfully, perhaps I’d better say, know how to give him the shot of adrenalin that would bring him back to life again, so that she could kill him all over again. To be in love with her as he was, I couldn’t help thinking, must be a continuous succession of death-throes. Without any final release, I could feel that hidden wrist behind me bounce a little, from a quickened pulse.

She stood there like a mannequin at a fashion-display, modeling a mink coat. Even the price-tag was there in full view, if you had keen enough eyes, and mine were. Inscribed “To the highest bidder, anytime, anywhere.”

She had a lot of advantages over the picture I’d seen on his desk. She was in color; skin like the underpetals of newly-opened June rosebuds, blue eyes, golden-blond hair. And the picture, for its part, had one advantage over her, in my estimate: it couldn’t breathe.

She had on that mink she was modelling, literally. Three-quarters length, flaring, swagger. She was holding it open at just the right place, with one hand. Under it she had on an evening gown of white brocaded satin. The V-incision at the bodice went too low. But evidently not for her; after all she had to make the most of everything she had. She had a double string of pearls close around her neck, and a diamond clip at the tip of each ear.

They have the worst taste in women, all of them. Who is to explain their taste in women?

She came forward, down the steps and into the room. Perfume came with her, and the fact that she had hip-sockets. The bodice incision deepened, too, if anything.

I kept protesting inwardly, but there must be something more than just what I can see. There must be something more. To make him down a glass of brandy straight to keep from moaning with pain. To make his pulse rivet the way it is against the back of this settee. As though he had a woodpecker hidden in it.

I kept waiting for it to come out, and it didn’t. It wasn’t there. It was all there at first glance, and beyond that there was nothing more. And most of it, at that, was the mink, the pearls, the diamonds, and the incision.

She was advancing upon us. Her two hands went out toward him, not just one. A diamond bracelet around one wrist shifted back a little toward the elbow, as they did so.

He rose from the settee-arm, and his mask was that of the host who has been so engrossed in present company that he is taken completely by surprise by a new arrival. But his mask wasn’t on very tight; you could see the livid white strain it was resting upon.

“Billy!” she crowed. And her two hands caught hold of his two, and spread his arms out wide, then drew them close together, then spread them wide again. In a sort of horizontal handshake.

So she called him Billy. That would be about right for her too. Probably “Billy-Boy” when there were less than three total strangers present at any one time.

“Well, Bernette!” he said in a deep, slow voice that came through the mask.

One pair of hands separated, then the other pair. His were the ones dropped away first, so the impulse must have come from him.

The nonentity who had come in with her was only now reaching us; he’d crossed the room more slowly.

He was a good deal younger than either one of them; particularly than Dwight. Twenty-three perhaps, or five. He had a mane of black hair, a little too oleaginous for my taste, carefully brushed upward and back. It smelled a little of cheap tonic when he got too near you.

Her hand slipped possessively back, and landed on his shoulder, and drew him forward the added final pace or two that he hadn’t had the social courage to navigate unaided.

“I want you to meet my very new husband. Just breaking in.” Then she said. “You two should know each other.” And she motioned imperiously. “Go on, shake hands. Don’t be bashful. Dwight Billings, Harry Stone. My Dwight. My Harry.”

They looked at each other.

Dwight’s crisp intelligent eyes bored into him like awls; you could almost see the look spiraling around and around and around as it penetrated into the sawdust. You could almost see the sawdust come spilling out.

It’s not the substitution itself, I thought; it’s the insult of such a substitution.

The wait was just long enough to have a special meaning; you could make of it what you willed. Finally Dwight shook his hand vigorously. “You’re a very lucky — young fellow, young fellow.”

I wondered what word he would have liked to use in place of “young fellow.”

“I feel like I know you already,” the new husband said sheepishly. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“That’s very kind of Bernette,” Dwight said crisply.

I wondered where she’d got him. He had the dark, slicked-back good looks that would hit her type between the eyes. I cut him off below the neck, to try and visualize what would go with the face. And all I kept getting was a starched soda-jerk’s jacket. The little white cap would show up, cocked over one eye. I couldn’t keep it off. A devil with the three o’clock high-school shift.

Then again, why differentiate? They went well together. They belonged together.

The line of distinction didn’t run between him and her, it ran between her and Dwight. And part of her, at that, belonged on one side of the line, and part belonged on the other. The mink coat and the pearls and the diamond clips belonged on Dwight’s side of the line; and she herself belonged on the other side of it. She wasn’t even an integrated personality. The husband, with all his cheapness and callowness, was at least that.

Dwight introduced the rest of us. Introduced us, after I already knew her better than he ever had or ever would, with a pitiless clarity that he would never have.

Jean might have aroused her antagonistic interest. I could see that, but the married title deflected it as quickly as the introduction was made. Then when it came to myself, one quick comprehensive look from head to foot, and she couldn’t explain to herself what possible interest he could have in me, what anyone who looked like I did was doing there at all.

“Oh, a business friend,” she said.

“No, a friend,” he corrected firmly. And my heart applauded. That’s my boy. If you don’t love me, at least don’t cut me off altogether.

“Drinks for Mr. and Mrs. — ” he said over our heads to Luthe. He couldn’t get the name yet. Or didn’t want to.

“Stone,” the husband supplied embarrassedly, instead of letting the embarrassment fall on Dwight, where it rightfully belonged.

She at least was perfectly self-possessed, knew her way around in this house. “My usual, Luthe. That hasn’t changed. And how are you, anyway?”

Luthe bowed and said coldly that he was all right, but she hadn’t waited to hear, the back of her head was to him once more.

Their drinks were brought, and there was a slow maneuvering for position. Not physical position, mental. She lounged back upon the settee as though she owned it, and the whole place with it; as she must have sat there so very many times before. Tasted her drink. Nodded patronizingly to Luthe: “As good as ever.”

Dwight, for his part, singled out the new husband, stalked him, so to speak, until he had him backed against a wall. You could see the process step by step. And then finally, “By the way, what line are you in, Stone?”

The husband floundered badly. “Well, right now — I’m not—”

She stepped into the breach quickly, leaving Jean hanging on mid-word. “Harry’s just looking around right now. I want him to take his time.” Then she added quickly, just a shade too quickly, “Oh, by the way, remind me; there’s something I want to speak to you about before I leave, Billy.” And then went back to Jean again.

That told me why she’d dragged him up here with her like this. Not to flaunt him; she had no thought of profitless cruelty. The goose that had laid its golden yolks for one might lay them for two as well. Why discard it entirely?

Dwight was in torment, and when anyone’s in pain too much to be borne, they strike back blindly.

“Where’d you go for your honeymoon, Bernette?”

She took a second, as though this required courage. She was right, it did. “We took a run up to Lake Arrow.”

He turned to the husband. “That’s where we went. How’d you like it?” Then back to her again. “How is the old lodge? Is Emil still there?”

She took a second. “Emil’s still there,” she said reticently.

“Did you remember me to him?”

She took two seconds, this time. “No,” she said reluctantly, mostly into the empty upper part of her glass, as though he were in there. “He didn’t ask about you.”

He shook his head and clicked with mock ruefulness. “Forgetful, isn’t he? Has he done anything about changing that Godawful wallpaper in the corner bedroom yet?” He explained to me, with magnificent impartiality: “He was always going to. It was yellow, and looked as though somebody had thrown up at two second intervals all over it.” He turned and flicked the punchline at her. “Remember, Bernette?”

It was magnificent punishment.

I watched them at the end, when they were about to go. Watched Dwight and her, I mean, not her husband and self. When the good-byes had been said and the expressions of pleasure at meeting had been spoken all around — and not meant anywhere. They reversed the order of their entry into the room. The husband left first, and passed from sight down the gallery, like a well-rehearsed actor who clears the stage for a key-speech he knows is to be made at this point. While she lingered behind a moment in studied dilatoriness, picking up her twinkling little pouch from where she had left it, pausing an instant to see if her face was right in a mirror on the way.

Then all at once, as if at random afterthought: “Could I see you for a minute, Billy?”

They went over to the side of the room together, and their voices faded from sound, it became pantomime. You had to read between the attitudes.

I didn’t miss a gesture, an expression of their faces, a flicker of their eyes. I got everything but the words. I didn’t need the words.

She glanced, as she spoke, toward the vacant gallery-opening, just once and briefly.

Talking about the husband.

She took a button of Dwight’s jacket with her fingers, twined it a little.

Ingratiation. Asking him something, some favor.

She stopped speaking. The burden of the dialogue shifted to him.

He shook his head almost imperceptibly. But definitely. Refusal. His hand had strayed toward his back pocket. Then it left it again. The billfold pocket.

Money for the husband.

The dialogue was now dead. Both had stopped speaking. There was nothing more to be said.

She stood there at a complete loss. It was something that had never happened to her with him, before. She didn’t know how to go ahead. She didn’t know how to get herself out of it.

He moved finally, and touched her guidingly at the same time, and that broke the transfixion.

“Well — goodnight, Billy,” she said lamely. She was still out of breath — mentally — from the rebuff.

He came and leaned over me.

“I’ve been neglecting you,” he said solicitously.

I had him all to myself for a moment, at least the outside of him.

Not for long, just between the acts. It wasn’t over yet. Suddenly she’d reappeared at the lower end of the room, was standing there.

He turned his head.

“Billy, talk to Luthe, will you? What’s the matter with him, has he had a drink or something? I can’t get him to give me my coat.” And her whole form shook slightly with appreciative risibility.

He called Luthe. Luthe appeared almost instantly, holding the mink lining-forward in both arms. Like someone who has been waiting in the wings the whole time and takes just a single step forward to appear and play his part.

“Luthe,” Dwight said amiably. “Is that Mrs. Stone’s coat you’re holding?” And before she could interject, “Of course it is!”, which it was obvious she was about to do, he added: “Read the label in the pocket-lining and see what it says.”

Luthe dutifully peered down into the folds of satin and read “Mrs. Bernette Billings.”

There was a pause, while we all got it, including herself. Then suddenly Luthe had stepped from sight again, coat and all. While she still stood there, blankly and still coatless, not knowing what to do. Dwight stepped over to a desk, lowered the slab, and hastily inked something on a card. “Bernette,” he said, “I want to give you something.” And then he went to her with it and handed it to her. “Take this with you.”

It was an ordinary visiting- or name-card. She held it bracketed by two corners and scanned it diagonally, puzzled.

“What’s this for?”

“I’ll call him and make an appointment for you,” he said quietly. “Do me a favor, go in and talk to him. The whole thing’ll be over in no time.”

She still didn’t get it.

“Why should I go in and see your lawyer?” she blurted out. “What have I got to see him about?”

I got it myself, then. An annulment.

Anger began to smolder in her eyes.

Her fingers made two or three quick motions and pieces of cardboard sputtered from them.

“Think it over,” he urged, a second too late.

“I just did,” she blazed. “Is Luthe going to give me my coat?”

“It’ll be here waiting for you — any time you say—”

Her voice was hoarse now, splintered. “You think you’re going to show me up, is that it? No, I’ll show you up!”

Her hands wrestled furiously at the back of her neck. The pearls sidled down the bodice-incision. She trapped them there with a raging slap, balled them up, flung them. They fell short of his face, they were probably too light, but they struck the bosom of his shirt with a click and rustle.

“Bernette, I have people here. They’re not interested in our private discussions.”

“You should have thought of that sooner.” Her hands were at her ear-lobe now. “You want them to know you gave me things, don’t you? You don’t have to tell them! I’ll tell them!” The earclips fell on the carpet at his feet, one considerably in advance of the other.

Hers was the hot rage, incapacitating itself. His was the cold kind, the more deadly of the two, in perfect command of itself, able to continue its barbed, indirect insults.

“You can’t carry that out down to its ultimate—”

Only his face was chalky; otherwise he was motionless, voice low.

“I can’t, hunh? You think these people being here is going to stop me, hunh? The hell with them! The hell with you, yourself! I’ll show you! I’ll show you what I think of you!”

She was beside herself with rage. There was a rending of satin, and suddenly the dress peeled off spirally, like a tattered paper wrapper coming off her. Then she kicked with one long silkencased leg, and it fluttered further away.

She had a beautiful figure. That registered on my petrified mind, I recall. We sat there frozen.

“Keep your eyes down, ducky,” I heard Jean warn the Cipher in a sardonic undertone. “I’ll tell you when you can look up.”

For a moment she posed there, quivering, a monotoned apparition all in flesh-tints, the undraped skin and the pale-pink silk of vestigial garments blending almost indistinguishably. Then she gave a choked cry of inexpressible aversion, and darted from sight.

He called out: “Luthe, that raincoat in the hall. Put it over her. Don’t let her go out of here like that. It’s chilly tonight.”

A door slammed viciously somewhere far down the gallery.

Jean was the first one to speak, after the long somewhat numbed silence that had followed. And, probably unintentionally, her matter-of-fact minor-keyed remark struck me as the most hilariously malapropos thing I had ever heard. I wanted to burst out laughing at it.

She stirred and said with mincing politeness: “I really think we should be going now.”

A six-week interval, then.

Nothing happened. No word. No sight. No sign.

Was he with her once more? Was he with somebody else entirely different? Or was he alone, with nobody at all?

I had it bad. Real bad.

I was reading proof when the desk-phone rang one afternoon.

“Mr. Dwight Billings calling,” Ann said.

He said: “I don’t dare ask you and the Medills to come up here after what happened that last time.”

“Dare,” I said faintly. “Go on, dare.”

“All right, would you?” he said. “Let’s all have dinner together and—”

Jean came into the room about fifteen minutes later, to see if the proofs were ready.

“Dwight Billings just called,” I said, trying to right an inverted comma with the wooden cone of the pencil.

She said the strangest thing. I should have resented it, but she said it so softly, so understandingly, that it never occurred to me until later that I should have resented it.

“I know,” she said. “I can tell.”

She uncoupled my phone and turned it the other way around, so that it wouldn’t come up to my ear reversed the next time I lifted it. She stooped and picked up two or three stray proofsheets that were lying on the floor under my desk. She dredged a sodden blue cigarette out of my ink-well, and removed my pen from the ashtray.

“Either that, or there’s a high wind out there on Fifty-third Street today.”

So back we went, the three of us, for another glimpse at this real-life peep-show that went on and on, with never an intermission, even though there was not always someone there to watch it.

He was alone. But my heart and my hopes clouded at the very first sight of him as we came in; they knew. He was too happy. His face was too bright and smooth; there was love hovering somewhere close by, even though it wasn’t in sight at the moment. Its reflection was all over him. He was animated, he was engaging, he made himself pleasant to be with.

But as for the source of this felicity, the wellspring, you couldn’t tell anything. If I hadn’t known him as he’d been in the beginning, I might have thought that this was his nature. He was alone, just with Luther. We were only four at the table, one to each side of it, with candles and a hand-carved ship-model in the center of it.

Then when we left the table, I remember, we paired off unconventionally. I don’t think it was a deliberate maneuver on anyone’s part, it just happened that way. Certainly, I didn’t scheme it; it was not the sort of partners I would have preferred. Nor did he. And the Cipher least of all. He never schemed anything. That left only Jean: I hadn’t been watching her—

At any rate, the two men obliviously preceded us, deep in some weighty conversation; she and I followed after.

She stopped short midway down the gallery, well before we had emerged into view of the drawing-room, which the two men had already entered.

“I have premonitions of a run,” she said. “I don’t trust these sheers.” But what she did was jog her elbow into my side, in a sort of wordless message or signal, as she turned aside and went in through the nearest doorway.

So I turned and followed her: that was what her nudge had summoned me to do.

The lights went on.

“But this is his bedroom,” I protested, with an instinctive recoil at the threshhold.

“Oh, is it?” she said with utter composure. She had already crossed to the other side of it, to a dressing-table. I saw her squeeze the bulb of an atomizer so that its trajectory passed beneath her nose. “Chanel Twenty-two,” she deciphered. “Are THEY using that now?”

I couldn’t have given her the answer; she wanted none, it hadn’t been a question.

She went toward the full-length mirror in a closet-door. She went through the motions of validating her excuse for stepping in here; raised her skirt, cocked her leg askew toward the mirror, dropped her skirt again. Then she reached out and purposefully took hold of the faceted glass knob of the closet-door.

“Jean,” I said with misgivings, “Don’t do that.”

I saw she was going to anyway.

“Just coats and trousers,” I prayed unavailingly. “Just tweeds and — and things like that.” I couldn’t think of an alternate fabric, there wasn’t time.

She swept it wide, the door, with malignant efficiency, and stood back with it so that I could see, and looked at me, not it, as she did so.

Satins and silks, glistening metallic tissues, flowered prints; and in the middle of all of them, like a queen amidst her ladies-inwaiting, that regal mink.

Then there was a blinding silvery flash as the electric light flooded across the mirror, and the door swept closed.

“Back,” was all she said, brittly.

She put out the light as she shepherded me across the threshhold; I remember the room was dark as we left it behind.

She held her arm around me tight as we walked slowly down the remainder of the gallery. And twice, before we got to the end of the way, she pressed it convulsively, tighter still.

I needed it.

“Tune in the stadium concert, Luthe,” he suggested at one point. “It must be time for it.”

I wondered what he wanted that for.

Some very feverish dance-band drumming filtered out.

“If that’s the stadium concert,” Jean said, “they’ve certainly picked up bad habits.”

“Luthe,” he said good-naturedly, “what’re you doing over there? I said the open-air concert, at the stadium.”

“I can’t seem to get it. What station is it on?”

“ABC, I think.”

“I’m on ABC now. Doesn’t seem to be it.”

“Does it?” agreed Jean, pounding her ear and giving her head a shake to clear it, as a particularly virulent trombone-snarl assailed us.

“Call up the broadcasting station and find out,” he suggested.

Luthe came back.

“No wonder. It’s been called off on account of rain. Giving it tomorrow night instead.”

“It’s not raining down here,” Jean said. She turned from the window. “It’s bone-dry out. Do you even have special weather arrangements, for Park Avenue?” she queried.

“Look who we are,” he answered her. A little distractedly, I thought as though he were thinking of something else. “What time is it now, Luthe?” he asked.

She arrived about an hour and a half later. Perhaps even two hours. I don’t know; since I hadn’t been expecting her, I wasn’t clocking her exactly. If he was, he’d kept it to himself, you couldn’t notice it. No more parenthetic requests for the time, after that first one.

There were several things to notice about her arrival. One of them was, she was not announced. She simply entered, as one does where one belongs. Suddenly, from nowhere, she had taken her stance there on the auction-block (as I called it after that first time). Then, after flamboyant pause and pose there, she was coming down the steps to join us.

He’d made a few improvements in her. Surface ones only; that was the only part of her he could reach, I suppose. Or maybe he needed more time.

She’d even acquired an accent. I mean an accent of good, cultivated English; and since it was false, on her it was an accent.

When she walked, she even managed to use the soles of her feet, and not her hips so much any more: I wondered if he’d used telephone directories on her head for that.

“You remember Lizzie, and Jean, and Paul,” he said.

“Oh, yes, of cowass, how are you?” she leered affably. She was very much the lady of the manor, making us at home in her own domain. “Sorry I’m so late. I stayed on to the very end.”

“Did you?” he said.

And I thought: Where? Then, No! It can’t be! It would be too good to be true—

But she rushed on, as though speaking the very lines I would have given her myself. She wanted to make a good impression, avoid the cardinal social sin of falling mute, not having anything to say; all those unsure of themselves are mortally afraid of it. So the fact of saying something was more important than the content of what it was she said.

“Couldn’t tear myself away. You should have come with me, Billy. It was heavenly. Simply heavenly.” Business of rolling the eyes upward and taking a deep, soulful breath.

“What’d they play first?” he said tightly.

“Shostakovich,” she said with an air of vainglory, as when one has newly mastered a difficult word and delights in showing one’s prowess with it.

I saw the Cipher’s lips tremble preliminary to speech. I saw the tip of Jean’s foot find his and squeeze it out unmercifully. Speech never came.

You couldn’t tell she’d said anything. His face was a little whiter than before, but it was a slow process, it took long moments to complete itself. Until finally he was pale, but the cause had long been left behind by that time, would not have been easy to trace any more.

She caught something, however. She was not dense.

“Didn’t I pronounce it right?” she asked, darting him a look.

“Oh, perfectly,” he said.

“But here,” she protested. “Here it is right here, on the program.” She’d brought the program with her. She insisted on showing it to him. She thrust it on him.

I thought, What a great man Shakespeare is. He has a line to cover every situation, even from four hundred years back, ‘Methinks the lady doth protest too much.’

He crumpled it without looking at it. But not violently, with a sort of slow indifference.

I wondered how many days ahead they printed them. I wondered how you went about getting hold of one in advance. Well, it wasn’t totally impracticable; there were ways, probably.

I thought once more, What a great man Shakespeare is: ‘Love will find a way.’

She was uneasy now.

She didn’t like us. She was hampered by our being there; couldn’t defend herself properly against whatever the threat was, although she didn’t know what it was herself, as yet. She couldn’t even make the attempt to find out, because of our continuing presence.

She sat for a moment with the drink he’d given her, made a knot with her neck-pearls about one finger, let it unravel again. Then she stood up, put her drink down over where they had originally came from.

“I have a headache,” she said and touched two fingers to the side of her head. To show us, I suppose, that that was where it was — in her head.

“Shostakovich always gives me a headache too,” Jean said sweetly to her husband.

She shot Jean a quick look of hostility, but there was nothing she could do about it. There was nothing to get your teeth into. It had been addressed privately to the Cipher, not anyone else. And it had been said almost inaudibly. Almost, but not quite. If she’d picked it up, that would have been claiming it for her own.

“If you’ll excuse me now,” she said.

She was asking him, though not the rest of us. She was a little bit afraid. She wanted to get out of this false situation. She didn’t know what it was, but she wanted to extricate herself.

“Oh, sure, ’right ahead,” he said casually. “You don’t have to stand on ceremony with us, Bernette.” He didn’t even turn to look at her, went ahead dabbling in drinks.

I thought of the old Spanish saying, Aquitiene Usted su casa. My house is yours. And it probably was as little valid in the present circumstance as in the original flowery exaggeration.

“But you just came,” the Cipher said. He was only trying to be cordial, the poor benighted soul. He hadn’t stepped aside into that room with us.

Jean and I simply looked at one another. I could almost lip-read what she was about to say before it came out. “She hasn’t far to go.” I nearly died for a minute as I saw her lips give a preliminary flicker. Then she curbed herself. That would have been going too far. I breathed again.

She made her goodnights lamely, and yet with a sort of surly defiance. As if to say, I may have lost this skirmish, but I haven’t even begun to fight yet. This was on ground of your choosing; wait’ll he’s without his allies, and must come looking for me on ground of my own choosing. We’ll see whose flag runs down then.

She climbed the steps, she turned galleryward, she passed from view. In her clinging black dress, her head held high, her chin out. A little cigarette-smoke that had emanated from her on the way, lingered behind for a moment or two. Then that dissolved, too.

And that’s all the trace you leave behind in this world, sometimes. A little cigarette-smoke, quickly blown away.

Presently another figure passed the gallery opening, coming from further back in the apartment, but going the same way she had.

Dwight turned his head.

“Going now, Luthe?”

“Yes, sir. Goodnight.”

This time you could hear the outer door. Close not loudly, but quite definitely.

“Luthe goes home to Harlem one night a week, and this is his night for it. The rest of the time he stays down here with me.”

We left soon afterward ourselves.

As we moved down the gallery in leisurely deliberation, I looked ahead. That room that Jean and I had been in before was lighted now, not dark as we had left it. The door was partly ajar, and the light coming from it lay on the floor in a pale crosswise bar or stripe.

Then as we neared it, some unseen agency pushed it unobtrusively closed, from the inside. I could see the yellow outshine narrow and snuff out, well before we had reached it.

There was no sound accompanying it, and it was easy to pretend we had not noticed it happen. Those of us that had.

We were kept waiting for the elevator for some time. Finally when it appeared, it was being run, strangely, by a gnarled elderly individual in fireman’s overalls. There was no night-doorman on duty below when we got down there, either.

“What happened?” Jean asked curiously. “Where’s all the brass?”

“Walked off,” he said. “Wildcat strike. The management fired one of the fellows for impudence, and they all quit. Les’n’n hour ago. They ain’t nobody at all to run the back elevator. I’m practic’ly running this whole building single-handed, right now. You’ll have to get your own taxi, folks. Can’t leave this car.”

She and I were left alone in the doorway for several minutes, while the Cipher went semaphoring up and down Park Avenue in quest of one. We made good use of the minutes.

“She stayed,” I breathed desolately.

“But not for long,” Jean assured me. “I don’t give her twenty minutes. Five’ll get you ten that if you came back an hour from now, you’d find him alone.”

I wished afterward she hadn’t said that; it may have been what first put the idea in my head, for all I know.

The same elderly pinch-hitter was still servicing the building single-handed. “They ain’t nobody at all looking after the back elevator,” he complained unasked.

I felt like saying, “You said that before,” but I didn’t.

He took me up without announcing me.

I got out and I knocked at Dwight’s door. The car went down and left me alone there.

I looked at myself in the wall-mirror. I knocked again, more urgently, less tentatively. I tripped the Louis XVI gilt knocker, finally. That carried somewhat better, since it had a metal sounding-board, not a wood one.

His voice said, “Who is it?”, too quickly for this last summons to have been the one that brought him; it must have been the first one after all, and he had been waiting there for it to repeat itself.

“Lizzie,” I whispered sibilantly, as though there were someone else around to overhear.

The door opened, but very grudgingly. Little more than a crack at first. Then at sight of me, it widened to more normal width. But not full width of passage, for he stood there in the way; simply full width enough to allow unhampered conversation.

He was in a lounging robe. His shirt was collarless above it, and the collar-band was unfastened. It had a peculiar effect on me: not the robe nor the lack of collar, simply the undone collar-band; it made me feel like a wife.

He smiled hospitably. The smile was a little taut. “Well, good Lord! You’re the last one I expected to—”

“Don’t look so stunned. Am I that frightening?” I couldn’t resist saying.

“Did I get you out of bed?” I said.

He kept smiling with unwavering docility. It was a sort of vacant smile. The smile with which you wait for someone to go away. The smile that you give at a door, when you are waiting to close it. Waiting to be allowed to close it, and held powerless by breeding. It had no real candlepower behind it, that smile. “No,” he said. “I was just getting ready, by easy stages.”

He felt for the satin-faced lapel of his robe, as if to remind himself he had it on. He felt for the loose knot of the braided cord that encircled it, as if to remind himself that it was fastened.

His face looked very pale, I thought; unnaturally so. I hadn’t noticed it the first moment or two, but I gradually became aware of it now. I thought it must be the wretched foyer-light, and I hoped I didn’t look as pale to him as he did to me. I take pallor easily from unsatisfactory lights. The thing to do was to get inside away from it.

“It’s my compact,” I said. “I left it up here. Only take me a minute. I’d feel naked without it.”

“Where are the others?” he said. His eyes shifted wearily from my face to the elevator-panel rearward of me, then back to my face again.

“I dropped them off first,” I said. “Only missed it after they’d left me. Then I came straight back here.”

“It couldn’t have been up here,” he said. “I would have — I would have found it myself right after you left.” He gestured helplessly with one hand, in a sort of rotary way. “It must have been in the taxi. Did you look in the taxi?”

The light was the most uncomplimentary thing I’d ever seen. It made him look quite ghastly.

“It wasn’t in the taxi,” I insisted. “I didn’t use it in the taxi. Up here was the last place I used it.” I waited for him to shift, but he didn’t. “Won’t you let me come in and look, a moment?”

He was equally insistent. We were both extremely cordial about it, but extremely insistent. “But it isn’t up here, I tell you. It couldn’t be, Lizzie, don’t you see? If it was, I would have come across it by now myself.”

I smiled winningly. “But did you look for it? Did you know it was lost, until I told you so myself just now, here at the door? Then if you didn’t look for it, how do you know it isn’t there?”

“Well, I–I went over the place, I—” He decided not to say that, whatever it was to have been.

“But if you didn’t know what it was that was lost, you couldn’t have had your eyes out for it specifically,” I kept on, sugaring my stubborness with a smile. “If you’d only let me step in for a moment and see for myself—”

I waited.

He waited, for my waiting to end.

I tried another tack. “Oh,” I murmured deprecatingly, turning my head aside, as if to myself, as if in afterthought, “you’re not alone. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

It worked. I saw a livid flash, like the glancing reflection from a sun-blotted mirror, sweep across his face. Just for an instant. If it was fear, and it must have been of a kind, it was a new fear at this point; fear of being misunderstood, and no longer fear of my entering. He stepped back like magic, drawing the door with him.

“You’re mistaken,” he said tersely. “Come in.”

And then as I did, and as he closed the door after me, and pressed it sealed with his palm in one or two places, he added, and still quite brittly. “Whatever gave you that idea?” And turned to look the question at me, as well as ask it.

“After all,” I drawled reassuringly, “I’m not anyone’s grandmother.”

He was no longer smiling. This point was evidently of importance to him, for some peevish reason that escaped me. Sheer contradictoriness, perhaps. Certainly I’d never detected any trait of primness in him before. “I never was so alone in my life,” he said somewhat crossly. “Even Luthe went uptown.”

“I know,” I reminded him. “He left while we were still here.”

But I had been thinking mainly of somebody else, not Luthe.

We moved slowly down the gallery, I preceding him.

She’d gone, just as Jean had said she would. The door that I had seen slyly closing before, shutting off its own beam of light, was standing starkly open now, and the room was dark. It looked gloomy in there, unutterably depressing, at that hour of the night.

“I didn’t leave it in there,” I said. I wasn’t supposed to have been in there.

“No, you didn’t,” he agreed, with considerable alacrity.

We turned and faced across the gallery to the other door, the closed one, to that “writing-room” of his.

“In here, maybe,” I suggested.

I heard him draw some sort of a crucial breath.

“No,” he said quite flatly. “You didn’t.”

“I may have, just the same.” I reached out to take the knob.

“No,” he said. Tautly, almost shrilly, as though I were getting on his nerves.

I glanced at him in mild surprise, at the use of such a sharp tone of voice for such a trifling matter. The look I caught on his face was even more surprising. For a moment, all his good looks were gone.

He was ugly in mood and ugly of face.

Then, with an effort, he banished the puckered grimace, let his expression smooth out again. Even tried on a thin smile for size, but it didn’t fit very well and soon dropped off again.

I tried the door and it was locked.

“It’s locked,” I said, desisting.

“I always keep it that way,” he said. “I write in there, and leave my copy lying around, and — well, I’m sensitive about it; I don’t like Luthe nosing into it. I caught him once snickering—”

“But you said he’d gone home.”

“Well, the habit persists.”

“Well, won’t you let me go in and look at least?” I coaxed. I thought: I still love him, even when his face is all ugly and puckery like that. How strange; I thought it was largely his looks that had me smitten, and now I see that it isn’t.

“But you weren’t in there, so how could it get in there?”

“I was. I was in there once earlier tonight. I don’t know whether you knew it or not, but I strayed in there one time this evening.”

He looked at me, and he looked at the door. “I’ll see if I have the key,” he said quite suddenly, and gave the skirt of his robe a lift and plunged his hand into his pocket. There was a great commotion of jangling. The pupils of his eyes slanted far over into their corners for an instant, toward me, then righted themselves.

I’d caught the little secretive flicker; I read it. That was a look of hidden annoyance with me, I told myself, expressed quicker than he could master it.

Why do I drive him like this, I wondered? To see how far I can go? To make him fully aware of my being here alone with him? I didn’t know myself.

He took out a considerable palmful of them; five or six, I should say. They were all secured together on a little ring-holder. The majority, it could be seen at sight, were not door-keys at all. They were keys of special usage: to a desk-drawer, perhaps; to a safetybox; to the ignition of a car.

And as he paid them over, making considerable noise with them, I saw an additional one fall soundlessly to the carpet, from between his robe and the mouth of his pocket. One that must have been held in there separate, apart from the rest. One that had come up accidentally, perhaps, without his meaning it to, when he had drawn the rest of them up.

It was long-shanked, a typical interior-door key, this one.

I saw that he hadn’t noticed its fall, the noise he was making with the others covered it. For a moment I was going to pick it up and restore it to him. Then, instead, I shifted my foot, put it over it, and stood there making no other move.

He tried one unsuccessfully, withdrew it again. It was far too small to be taken by that particular lock.

He creased his forehead querulously. “I’ve misplaced it,” he said. “I don’t seem to have it here.” He restored them under his robe, without exploring with his fingers to see if there were any additional ones lingering in there. I could tell; his hand came out too swiftly. As if this were a point he himself needed no reassurance upon, he already knew the answer.

“I may have dropped it into something around the place. I do that sometimes.” He scratched his head, and glanced the other way, as if in aid to his memory.

I stooped swiftly, in that instant he left unguarded, and took up the key, and kept it to myself in my hand.

“Well,” he said, as if in conclusion to the whole interview, “if I come across it, I’ll see that you get it back.”

We stood and looked at one another for a moment, he waiting for me to make the next move.

“He wants me to go,” I said, as though speaking ruefully to a third person. “He can’t wait until I do.”

What could he say then? What could anyone have said, except in overt offense? And that, you see, was why I’d said it. Though it was true, my saying so forced him to deny it, obliged him to act in contradiction to it. Though he didn’t want to, and I knew that he didn’t want to, and he knew that I knew that he didn’t want to.

“No,” he said deprecatingly. “No, not at all.” And then warmed gradually to his own insistence: picked up speed with it as he went along. “Come inside. Away from that door.” (As though my departure from a fixed point was now what he wanted to obtain, and if he could obtain it only by having me all the way in, rather than by having me leave, then he’d have me all the way in.) He motioned me the way with his arm and he turned to accompany me. And kept up meanwhile the running fire of his invitation at a considerably accelerated tempo, until it ended up by being almost staccato. “Come inside and we’ll have a drink together. Just you and I. Just the two of us alone. As a matter of fact I need company, this minute.”

On the rebound, I thought. On the rebound; I may get him that way. They say you do. Oh, what do I care how, if only I do.

I went down the steps, and he went down close beside me. His swinging arm grazed mine as we did so, and it did something to me. It was like sticking your elbow into an electrical outlet.

That drawing room of his had never looked vaster and more sombre. There was something almost funereal about it, as though there were a corpse embalmed somewhere nearby, and we were about to sit up and keep vigil over it. There was only one lamp lit, and it was the wrong one. It made great bat-wing shadows around the walls, from the upraised piano-lid and other immovables, and now added our own two long, willowly emanations.

He saw me look at it, and said “I’ll fix that.”

I let him turn on one more just to take some of the curse off the gruesomeness, but then when I saw him go for the wall-switch, that would have turned on a blaze overhead, I quickly interposed “Not too many.” You can’t have romance under a thousand-watt current.

I sat down on the sofa Jean had been on that night of the striptease.

He made our drinks for us, and then came over with them and then sat down in the next state.

“No, here,” I said. “My eyesight isn’t that good.”

He grinned, and brought his drink over, and we sat half-turned toward one another like the arms of a parenthesis. A parenthesis that holds nothing in it but blank space.

I saw to it that it soon collapsed of its own emptiness, and one of the arms was tilted rakishly toward the other.

I tongued my drink.

“It was a pretty bad jolt,” I admitted thoughtfully.

“What was?”

“You don’t have to pretend with me.”

“Oh,” he said lamely.

“You’re still pretending,” I chided him. “You’re pretending that you haven’t thought of it; that I’m the one just now brought it back to your mind for the first time. When all along it hasn’t left your mind, not for a single moment since.”

He tried to drown his face in his drink, the way he pushed it down into it. “Please,” he said, and made a grimace. “Not now. Do we have to— Don’t let’s talk about it now.”

“Oh, it hurts that much,” I said softly.

The parenthesis had become a double line, touching from top to bottom.

“Why don’t you put iodine on it?” I suggested.

He made a ghastly shambles of a smile. “Is there any for such things?”

“Here’s the bottle, right beside you,” I offered. “And there’s no death’s head on the label.”

That symbol seemed to frighten him, or at least be highly unwelcome. He screwed up his eyes tight, and I saw him give his head a shake, as though to rid it of that particular thought.

“It stings for a minute, and then you heal,” I purred. “You heal clean. No festering. And then you’re well again; even the mark goes away. And you have a new love.” I dropped my voice to a breath. “Won’t you try — iodine?”

So close his face was to mine, so close; all he had to do—

Then he turned it a little; oh, a very, tactful little. The wrong way; so that the distance had widened a little. And he could breathe without mingling his breath with mine. Which seemed to be what he wanted.

“Don’t you understand me, Dwight? I’m making love to you. And if I’m awkward about it, it’s because women aren’t very good at it. Can’t you help me out a little?”

I saw the look on his face. Sick horror. I wish I hadn’t, but I did. I never thought just a look on a face could hurt so.

“Would it be that bad? Would it be that intolerable, to be married to me?”

“Married?” His backbone gave a slight twitch, as though a pin overlooked in his shirt had just pricked him. I caught him do it, slight as it was. That was no compliment, either, any more than the look on his face before had been.

“You’ve just been proposed to, Dwight. That was a proposal, just then. The first I’ve ever made.”

He tried, first, to carry it off with a sickly grin. The implication: You’re just joking, and I’m supposed to know you are, but you make me a little uncomfortable just the same.

I wouldn’t let him; I wouldn’t accept the premise.

“You don’t laugh when a lady proposes to you,” I said gently. “You don’t laugh at her. You meet her on her own ground; you give her that much at least.”

“I’m not — cut out—” he floundered. “It would be about the dirtiest trick I could play — I couldn’t do that to you—” And then finally, and more decidedly, like a snap-lock to the subject: “You’d be sorry.”

“I want to be. Let me be. I’d rather be sorry — with you — than glad — with anyone else.”

He looked down his nose now. He didn’t say anything more. A sort of stubborn muteness had set in. That was his best defense; that was his only one. He probably knew it. Their instincts are just as valid as ours.

I had to do the talking. Someone had to. It would have been even worse to sit there in silence.

I took a sip of my drink. I sighed in feigned objectivity. “It’s unfair, isn’t it? A woman can refuse a man, and she doesn’t have to feel any compunction. He’s supposed to take it straight, and he does. But if a man refuses a woman, he has to try to spare her feelings at the same time.”

He hadn’t as a matter of fact made any such attempt until now; he did now, possibly, because I had recalled his duty to him.

“You’re a swell gal, Lizzie — It’s you I’m thinking of— You don’t know what you’re asking— You don’t want me.”

“You’re getting your pronouns mixed,” I said sadly.

All he could repeat was: “No. I mean it, you’re a swell gal. Lizzie—”

“You’re a swell gal, Lizzie,” I echoed desolately, “but you don’t ring the bell.”

He made the mistake of putting his arm around my shoulder, in what was meant as a fraternal embrace, I suppose. He should have left his hands off me; it was hard enough without that.

I let my head go limp against him. I couldn’t have kept it up straight if I’d tried. And I didn’t try.

He tried to jerk his arm away, as he realized this new danger, but I caught it, from in front, with mine, and held it there, around my shoulders, like a precious sable someone’s trying to take away from you.

He shuddered, and hit himself violently in the center of the forehead. As if there were some thought lodged in there that he couldn’t bear the contemplation of. “Good Lord,” I heard him groan. “Good Lord! Right here, in this apartment—”

“Is there something wrong with this apartment?” I asked innocently.

“Not with the apartment, with me,” he murmured.

“I won’t dispute you there,” I said cattishly.

I let go of his arm, and stood up. I got ready to go. I’d been rejected. To have prolonged it would have veered over into buffoonery. I had no self-respect left, but at least I still had my external dignity left. The law of diminishing returns would only have set in from this point on.

“Is it my age?” I said, with my back toward him for a moment, doing something private to my hair.

“No,” he said. “I never think of age in — in connection with you...”

“I’ll be forty in November,” I said, unasked, now that there was nothing further to lose. “So you can see how lucky you were just now.”

“No,” he protested. “You can’t be— Why, I always thought you were about twenty-eight, somewhere along there—”

“Thank you for that much, anyway,” I said. “At least I’ve salvaged something out of the evening’s wreckage.”

I turned and looked at him, still sitting there. “Proposals don’t agree with you,” I let him know. “You look positively harassed.”

I saw him wince a little, as though he agreed with me; not only looked it, but felt it. He stood now, to do the polite thing as host.

“I’ll get over it,” I said, speaking out loud to keep my own courage up. “It doesn’t kill you.”

He blinked at that word, as though it grated a lot.

I was ready to go now. He came closer, to accelerate the process.

“Won’t you kiss me goodnight?” I said.

He did it with his brakes on; used just one arm to support my back. Put his lips to mine, but with a time-valve to them. Took them away as soon as time was up. Mine tried to follow, and lost their way.

We straightened ourselves. “I’ll see you out,” he said.

“Never mind, don’t rub it in.”

He took me at my word, turned back to pour himself another drink. His hand was shaking, and if that’s a sign of needing one, he needed one.

I went down the long gallery alone. My heart was blushing and my cheeks felt white.

I came even with that door, the door to his workroom, and remembered I was holding the key to it, that he’d dropped before when we were out here.

I stopped, and took it out, and put it in the keyhole.

Then I felt his eyes on me, and turned, and saw him standing watching me at the end of the gallery, where I’d just come from myself.

“Lizzie,” he said. “Don’t. It won’t be in there.” His voice was toneless, strangely quiet. But his face looked terrible. It wasn’t just white, it was livid; it was the shining white of phosphorus gleaming in the dark.

He didn’t offer to approach, his feet stayed where they were; but his hands, as if restlessly feeling the need to be occupied with something during the brief pause while we stood and confronted one another like that, strayed to the cord of his robe and, of their own accord, without his seeming to know what they were doing, fumbled there, until suddenly the knot had disheveled, fallen open. Then each one, holding a loose end of the cord, flicked and played with it, all unconsciously. The way the two ends danced and spun and snaked, suggested the tentative twitching of a cat’s tail, when it is about to spring.

He was holding it taut across his back, and out at each side, in a sort of elongated bow-shape. It was just a posture, a stance, a vagary of nervous preoccupation, I suppose.

An odd one.

I flexed my wrist slightly, as if to complete the turning of the inserted key.

The cord tightened to almost a straight line, stopped moving.

For a moment, out of sheer perversity, I was going to open the door, simply to prolong my presence. He was not really interested in whether I opened the door or not; it just seemed that way. What he really was interested in was having me leave once and for all, so he’d be let alone. The opening of the door would have delayed that, so that was why he set such store upon my not doing so. My own common sense told me this.

His eyes met mine and mine met his, the length of the gallery.

The impulse to annoy him died.

Indifferently, I desisted. I dropped my hand slowly, and left the key in the lock, and let the door be.

His hands dropped too. The taut pull of the cord slackened, it softened to a dangling loop.

“It wouldn’t have been in there,” he breathed with a sort of exhausted heaviness, as though all his strength had gone into holding the cord as he had been just now.

“I know it wouldn’t,” I said. “It’s been safely in my bag the whole time.” I opened the bag, took it out, and showed it to him. “I knew it was in there even when I started back here to look for it.” I went on to the outside door and opened it. “The trick didn’t pay off, that’s all.”

“Good night, Dwight,” I added.

“Good night, Lizzie,” he echoed sepulchrally. I saw him reach out with one arm and support himself limply against the wall beside him, he was so tired of me by this time.

I closed the outside door.

They tell you wrong when they tell you infatuation dies a sudden death. Infatuation dies a lingering painful death. Even after all hope is gone the afterglow sometimes stubbornly clings on and on, kidding you, lighting the dark in which you are alone. Infatuation dies as slowly as a slower love; it comes on quicker, that is all.

Twice I went by there in a taxi, in the weeks following that night. And each stopped a moment at his door.

But then I didn’t get out after all. Just sat there. Perhaps to see if I could sit there like that without getting out. Perhaps to see if I was strong enough.

I was. I just barely made it, both times, but I made it.

“Drive on,” I said heroically. It was like leaving your right arm behind, jammed in a door; but I left it.

But the third time, ah, the third time. I was practically over it. I was cured. I made the discovery for myself sitting there in the taxi, taking my own blood-pressure, so to speak, holding my own pulse, listening to my own heart. I could drive away now without a wrench, without feeling that I’d left a part of me behind, caught in his door.

I lit a cigarette and thought with a sigh of relief: It’s passed. It’s finished. Now I’ve got something more to worry about. I’m immune now, this attack will last me for the rest of my life. That was my last siege of love. Now I can go on and just work and live and be placid.

“Y’getting out, lady, or what?” the driver asked fretfully.

“Yes,” I said coolly, “I think I will. I want to say goodbye to someone in there.”

And in perfect safety, in perfect calm, I paid him and got out and went inside to visit my recent, my last, love.

But they tell you wrong when they tell you infatuation dies a sudden death. It doesn’t. I know.

I seemed to have picked an inappropriate time for my farewell visit. Or at least, a non-exclusive one.

There’d been somebody else with him. The apartment-door was already open, when I stepped off at his foyer, and he was standing there talking to some man in dilatory leave-taking.

The man was heavily-built and none too young. In the milder fifties, I should judge. His hair was silvering, his complexion was florid, and there were little skin-like red blood-vessels threading the whites of his eyes. He had a hard-looking face, but he was being excessively amiable at the moment that I came upon the two of them. Almost overdoing it, almost overly amiable, for it didn’t blend well with the rest of his characteristics, gave the impression of being a seldom-used, almost rusty attribute he had to push down hard on the accelerator to get it working at all. And he was keeping his foot pressed down on it for all he was worth so that it couldn’t get away from him.

“I hope I haven’t troubled you, Mr. Billings,” he was apologizing just as the elevator panel opened.

“Not at all,” Dwight protested indulgently. There was even something patronizing in his intonation. “I know how those things are. Don’t think twice about it. Glad to—” And then they both turned at the slight rustle the panel made, and saw me, and so didn’t finish the mutual gallantries they were engaged upon. Or rather, postponed them for a moment.

Dwight’s face lit up at sight of me. I was welcome. There could be no doubt of it. Not like that other night.

He shook my hand cordially. “Well! Nice of you! Where’ve you been keeping yourself?” And that sort of thing. But made no move to introduce the departing caller to me.

And his manners were too quick-witted for that to have been an oversight. So what could I infer but that there was a differentiation of status between us that would have made a social introduction inappropriate. In other words, that one call was a personal one and the other was not, so the two were not to be linked.

“Go in, Lizzie. Take your things off. I’ll be right with you.”

I went in. My last impression of the man standing there with him was that he was slightly ill-at-ease under my parting scrutiny; call it embarrassed, call it sheepish, call it what you will. He turned his head aside a moment and took a deep draught of an expensive cigar he was holding between his knuckles. As if: Don’t look at me so closely. I certainly wasn’t staring, so it must have been his own self-consciousness.

I went down the gallery of lost love. The writing-room door was open now. I went past it without stopping, and down the steps to the drawing-room arena.

I took off my “things” as he’d put it, and primped at my hair, and moved idly around, waiting for him to join me.

I looked at things, as I moved. One does, waiting in a room.

He’d left them just as they were, to take his visitor to the door. Probably I hadn’t been announced yet, at that moment. I must have been announced after they were both already at the door, and he hadn’t come all the way back in here since leaving it the first time.

There were two glasses there. Both drained heartily, nothing but ice-sweat left in their bottoms; the interview must have been a cordial one.

There were two strips of cellophane shorn from a couple of expensive cigars.

There was a single burned matchstick; one smoker had done that courteous service for both.

His checkbook-folder was lying on the corner of the table. He must have taken it out of his pocket at one time, and then forgotten to return it again. Or perhaps thought that could wait until afterward, it was of no moment.

I didn’t go near it, nor touch it, nor examine it in any way. I just saw it lying there.

There was a new blotter lying near it. Almost spotless; it had only been used about once.

That I did pick up, idly; and look at. As if I were a student of Arabic or some other right-to-left scrawl. I looked at it thoughtfully.

He still didn’t come in.

Finally I took it over to the mirror with me and fronted it to that, and looked into that.

Part of his signature came out. “—illings.” It was the thing he’d written last, so the ink was still freshest when the blotter’d been put to it. Above it were a couple of less distinct tracings. “—earer.” And two large circles and two smaller ones. Like this: “OOOoo.”

I turned swiftly, as though that had shocked me (but it hadn’t. why should it?) and pitched it back onto the table from where I stood. Then I fixed my hair a little more, in places where it didn’t need it.

He came in, looking sanguine, looking zestful. I don’t remember that he rubbed his hands together, but that was the impression his mood conveyed: of rubbing his hands together.

“Who was that man?” I said indifferently.

“You’ll laugh,” he said. And he set the example by doing so himself. “That’s something for you. Something for your magazine.” Then he waited, like a good raconteur always does. Then he gave me the punch-line. “He was a detective. A real, honest-to-goodness, life-sized detective. Badge and everything.”

I stopped being indifferent, but I didn’t get startled. Only politely incredulous, as a guest should be toward her host’s surprise climaxes. “Here? What’d he want with you?”

“Asking if I could give him any information,” he said cheerfully. Then in the same tone: “You’ve heard about Bernette, haven’t you?”

I said I hadn’t.

“I think you met her up here once.”

I visioned a Fury in pink lingerie. Yes, I said, I seemed to recall.

“Well, she’s disappeared. Hasn’t been heard of in weeks.”

“Why do they come to you about it?” I asked him.

“Oh,” he said impatiently, “some tommyrot or other about her never having been seen again after — after the last time she left here. I dunno, something like that. Just routine. This’s the third time this same fellow’s been up here. I’ve been darn good-natured about it.” Then he said, more optimistically, “He promised me just now, though, this is the last time; he won’t come back any more.”

He was fixing two drinks for us, in two fresh glasses. The first two had been shunted aside. The checkbook and the blotter had both vanished, and I’d been facing him in the mirror the whole time; so maybe I’d been mistaken, they hadn’t been there in the first place.

“And then there was something about some clothes of hers,” he went on off-handedly. “She left some of her things here with me—” He broke off to ask me: “Are you shocked, Lizzie?”

“No,” I reassured him. “I knew she stopped here now and then.”

“I was supposed to send them after her; she said something about letting me know where she could be reached—” He shrugged. “But I never heard from her again myself. They’re still waiting in there—”

He finished swirling ice with a neat little tap of the glass mixer against the rim.

“Probably ran off with someone,” he said contemptuously.

I nodded dispassionately.

“I know who put him up to it,” he went on, with a slight tinge of resentment. I had to take it he meant the detective; he offered no explanation to cover the switch in pronouns. “That dirty little ex-second husband of hers.”

“Oh, is he ex?” I said. That was another thing I hadn’t known.

“Certainly. They were annulled almost as soon as they came back from their wedding-trip. I even helped her to do it myself, sent her to my lawyer—”

And paid for it, I knew he’d been about to add; but he didn’t.

“I told this fellow tonight,” he went on, still with that same tinge of vengefulness, “that they’d better look into his motives, while they were about it. He was only out to get money out of her—”

(And she was only out to get money out of you, I thought, but tactfully didn’t say so.)

“Do you think something’s happened to her?” I asked.

He didn’t answer that directly. “She’ll probably turn up someplace, they always do.” Then he said grimly, “It won’t be here. Now let’s have one, you and I.” And he came toward me with our drinks.

We sat down on the sofa with them. He didn’t need any urging tonight.

We had another pair. Then a third. We let the third pair stand and cool off awhile.

I was the upright arm of the parenthesis tonight, I noticed presently; he was the toppled-over one.

I didn’t move my head aside the way he had his; his lips just didn’t affect me. It was like being kissed by — cardboard.

“I want you to marry me,” he said. “I want — what you wanted that night. I want — someone like you.”

(That’s not good enough, I thought. You should want just me myself, and not someone like me. That leaves it too wide open. This is the rebound. You want the older woman now. Safety, security, tranquility; not so much fire. Something’s shaken you, and you can’t stand alone; so if there was a female statue in the room, you’d propose to that.)

“Too late,” I said. “I’ve passed that point, as you arrive at it. You got to it too late. Or I left it too soon.”

He wilted, and his head went down. He had to go on alone. “I’m sorry,” he breathed.

“I am too.” And I was. But it couldn’t be helped.

Suddenly I laughed. “Isn’t love the damnedest thing?”

He laughed too, after a moment; ruefully. “A devil of a thing,” he agreed.

And laughing together, we took our leave of one another, parted, never to meet in closeness again. Laughing is a good way to part. As good a way as any.

I read an item about it in the papers a few days afterward, quite by chance. The second husband had been picked up and taken in for questioning, in connection with her disappearance. Nothing more than that. There was no other name mentioned.

I read still another item about it in the papers, only a day or two following the first one. The second husband had been released again, for lack of evidence.

I never read anything further about it, not another word, from that day on.

The other night at a party I met my last love again. I don’t mean my latest; by last, I mean my final one. And he was as taking and as debonair as ever, but not to me any more — a little older maybe; and we said the things you say, with two glasses in our hands to keep us company.

“Hello Lizzie; how’ve you been?”

“Hello, Dwight; where’ve you been keeping yourself lately?”

“I’ve been around. And you?”

“I’ve been around too.”

And then when there wasn’t anything more to say, we moved on. In opposite directions.

It isn’t often that I see him any more. But whenever I do, I still think of her. I wonder what really did become of her.

And just the other night, suddenly, for no reason at all, out of nowhere, the strangest thought entered my head for a moment.

But then I promptly dismissed it again, just as quickly as it had occurred to me, as being too fantastic, too utterly improbable. The people you know never do things like that; the people you read about may, but never the people you know.

Do they?