Manhattan Love Song

Chapter Two

I looked back and her house was gone, sunken, swallowed up in the masonry quicksand of New York. I sank into it myself a moment later, plunging into an iron hut with a ground-glass roof that stood on the sidewalk, down a flight of cement steps laved by tepid air, onto a concrete platform flooded with tawdry dusty electric light. A roar, a hiss, a current of wild air carrying leaves of newspaper on its bosom, and the opposite platform had vanished behind a long row of dirty lighted windows and pneumatic doors that slipped effortlessly back like secret panels in a detective story. But when they attempted to close again, there was always some latecomer, now at one car, now at the other, to squeeze himself in at the last moment with a sheepish grin of satisfaction, until at last a guard came and glowered and pulled each one definitely shut with a swing of his arm.

I saw that there were seats, but I was so used to standing that I stood anyway, my wrist linked around a porcelain hoop. I felt more comfortable standing. I was one of that vanishing race who, when they had a seat, relinquished it to the first woman who entered, unless they were too stout or smelled of garlic. This was an express, hence all the locals going in the same direction passed it with quick facility. Laboriously it overtook them at the in-between stations, only to be passed again a moment or two later. The idea seemingly being that, since an express was an express, it could rest on its laurels.

Up the steps again, the fresh air meeting me halfway and seeming to say. “Hello, you back again?” A shower of sunlight, the legs of passersby, then suddenly the whole city was in focus again. Oh, I don’t mean I thought of all these things; they simply passed through my mind without my mind doing any work at all.

Bernice’s image had gone hurrying away on the train I had just left. Another took its place, bringing with it discomfort, diffidence, and the dregs of yesterday’s cold resentment. I put my key in the door and turned the lock, but after the bolt was gone and the knob free, I still didn’t turn it for a moment but stood there with my head bent, listening or thinking. Evidently thinking, for there was nothing to listen to. “Tail between your legs, as if you were whipped,” something inside me commented, and I reared away from the thought, went in, and shut the door forcibly behind me. At the same time a chair creaked. I put my hat on the little three-legged table and stood leaning negligently against the open doorway next to it, looking into the room beyond, one hand in my hip pocket.

Now the image that had taken the place of Bernice’s swiftly left my mind, rushed into the room beyond and presented itself to me in the flesh, dressed in a sleeveless house frock with a little rubberized apron over it. No peach negligees here. Little cracked patent-leather pumps, each with a childish strap over the instep, side by side on the floor, immovable in angry determination. Within them were the same small graceful feet that had danced with me eight years ago to the strains of The Japanese Sandman, that I had kissed many times in fervor, and once, much later, trodden on brutally with my whole weight, to make her cry out, to show her who was master and that she must not throw things at me, especially hot coffee.

At sight of me, Maxine became galvanized into action. She flashed out of the chair as suddenly as though a spring had been released under her, letting it rock unheeded behind her, and started out of the room in the opposite direction, toward the bedroom. It occurred to me that, womanlike, she had timed the whole thing wrongly. That first creak of the chair, while I was still at the door, had told me she had heard me. She should have quitted the room then, if she was going to. But no, she had to wait and make sure that I would see her get up and leave the room, to drive the point home more forcibly. If it had been a man, and the sight of any one was as intolerable to him as she pretended the sight of me was to her, he would have gotten up in the first place, and not waited to do the whole thing under observation.

“Now, listen—” I remonstrated.

“Don’t talk to me,” she said, but inconsistently remained in the room and turned to me to do some talking on her own part. “So you finally decided it was time to come back, did you? Probably because you were hungry or needed a shave or something.”

“There’s where you’re wrong,” I laughed grimly, “I passed a million barber shops on my way here.”

“I suppose you think I should feel flattered that you came back at all. Well, I got along beautifully without you, it was so peaceful and quiet!”

“Sure it was.” I said, “with all the neighbors’ radios going at the same time.”

“You try that again,” she went on, “and you won’t find me here when you get back!”

I finally took my shoulder away from the door and came into the room. I sank into a chair and put a match to a cigarette. “What are you trying to do?” I said. “Start all over again? Didn’t we have enough yesterday?”

“You think all you have to do,” she assured me, “everytime anything comes up, is walk out the door and that ends it. Then you can come back when you please and everything’ll be peaches and cream.”

She was crying meanwhile.

“You don’t act the least bit sorry. And oh, Wade, the awful things you said! They haunted me all night.”

Outside the window a radio started to play Kiss and Make Up. She drooped toward me until our foreheads touched. I closed my eyes, thought hard of Bernice, and kissed her devoutly. But she must have noticed something, because she remarked half-laughingly, but with an undertone of injury, “It’s just like taking medicine, isn’t it?”

I told her it wasn’t at all. “How do you get that way?”

Lord knows, it shouldn’t have been. I watched her as she stood by the window looking out, holding the green net curtain pinned to the frame with one hand. She was young, younger than I was, undoubtedly younger than Bernice was. She was slim-waisted. We had decided not to have children. I didn’t want them around. She had never had any, so didn’t know what it would be like and consequently didn’t miss them. Hence her figure and her face were just what they were the night I first looked at her. But I had looked at that face daily now for several thousand days. I mean, even Cleopatra would have palled on one in less time than that. And furthermore, Maxine had never outgrown the fads and foibles of the season I met her. It was as though she had crystallized immediately after marrying me. She still wore the lumpy, chopped-off, bobbed hair of 1920. She still put rouge on in two round fever sores when she went out. Though I hadn’t danced with her in a long time, I suspected her of still shaking her whole body in your arms. The jazz age had been deplorable enough, as I remembered it, but to have to live with a leftover from it was asking too much. Good looking or otherwise.

“You’ll never know,” she said, still at the window, “just what I went through last night and this morning.”

“We’ve got to cut out this animal-baiting, both of us,” I suggested dully.

“It’s funny about a man,” she went on, as though talking to herself. “In the beginning, they do all the running after you, they can’t let you alone, can’t live without you. And then just as soon as you begin to see things their way, and tell yourself, ‘Yes, he was right, I can’t live without him either,’ they seem to have gotten over it. When anything comes up, you walk out that door with a bang, and I know what you’re thinking just as though I were inside your head. You’re thinking: ‘I’ve had enough of her for a while! I’m not going to think about her again until I’m good and ready to come back.’ But I sit here thinking about nothing else but you the whole time you’re gone. It’s funny, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m here now,” I said with an inward sigh, “so come on over, and if you still want to cry some more, I’ll mop up after you: and if you want to smile, why, I’ll smile right back at you.”

She didn’t cry any more, but she didn’t smile much either; she seemed to be contented just as she was, in my arms. I thought, “Good Lord! what am I going to do with this kid? I wish she’d fall in love with someone else all at once.” I stroked the top of her head and pressed my check to it, and touched the tip of her ear, where she had a little pendant of violet glass attached, and lifted it with my finger and let it drop again, the stupid ornament.

I was too sensible to wish I’d never met her and never married her, because our love had been beautiful while it lasted, but all my life I’ve hated responsibility, and what worse responsibility was there than this: to have her keep right on loving me after I had stopped loving her (except as a reflex action).

“And I sat there until two o’clock,” she was saying, “and the light got so it burned my eyes, so I put it out and kept right on sitting there in the dark. And I thought any moment the phone would ring, I said to myself, ‘I can’t go to bed like this, without hearing from him. My Wade never did this to me before.’ But the phone just wouldn’t ring. I got up one time and took it in my hand and shook it, and still it kept quiet. Then after a while it got so I didn’t care very much any more, the worst was over, and I couldn’t’ve felt any more rotten than I did. You understand, don’t you, honey? I just couldn’t keep on wanting anything as much as all that. It was taking everything I had. Then I closed my eyes a second, and all of a sudden it was broad daylight and the dumbwaiter buzzed for the garbage. I felt like going down on it with the rest of the cast-off junk. That’s when I did most of my heavy crying, when the sun started to come in the kitchenette window and I smelt bacon broiling and heard the lady over us say, ‘Get up, Sam, your coffee’s ready.’ Gosh, it would’ve been sweet to see your morning grouch just then, and hear you say, ‘Where the hell are the towels?’ and ‘Jesus, how I hate this place!’ and all the things you always say! I even envied the morning you threw the cup of coffee at me, because I had you with me then, even if my chest did get scalded.”

I was getting alarmed at all this. I covered her mouth with my hand. I didn’t want to hear all about how much she loved me. If she couldn’t tell me she was starting to grow indifferent, like I was, at least she could keep still. “That isn’t love, Maxie, that’s... that’s almost hypnotism. You want to cut it out, I don’t like to hear you talk like that. You make too much of me” (“and make it tough for me,” I added to myself.)

We sat down to eat. Maxine had the table lowered from the wall and covered with orange and green dishes that came from Japan via the five-and-ten. We had canned tomato soup, canned spaghetti, canned pineapple, and evaporated milk. The bread was not canned, but it came wrapped by machinery in wax paper and already sliced. “Awfully thoughtless of them,” I remarked sociably, “to make us go to all the trouble of buttering it ourselves. Us pioneers certainly endure hardships.”

“Well,” she observed, passing between the gas range and the table a number of times, “the little there was to do, I did it. You’re idea of chipping in is to get yourself smelling like a barbershop.”

And over our heads, at the same time, we heard a chair indignantly clamped down, and the lady upstairs remarked in high dudgeon to her spouse: “Oh, yeah? Well, don’t eat it then, if you’re so particular! Too bad about you!”

“Find out what it is,” I suggested. “If he doesn’t want it, maybe we could use it down here.”

“What’s the matter with you, Wade?” Maxine remonstrated. “You’re crazy!”

“Do you dare me?” I insisted.

We listened a moment longer. “Believe me, I’ve got something better to do than slave over a hot stove all day for you. Shut up!” This last explosive admonition would have been audible even in a much better-built house than ours was. I thought: “It’ll be a feather in her cap; she won’t refuse,” and prided myself on my knowledge of feminine psychology.

“Do you know her?” I asked Maxine eagerly.

“No,” she said, “and this is no time to be interrupting them. You’ll get yourself disliked. Come back here.”

I went to the dumbwaiter shaft, opened the panel, and called up: “D-twelve! Oh, D-twelve!”

The panel above me opened and a man’s voice growled, “Who is it?”

“The floor below,” I answered cheerfully. “Couldn’t help overhearing your Mrs. just now. Listen, sport, how about sending down a little dish of that stuff, whatever it is? We don’t get much home cooking down here.”

I heard Maxine’s wail from the depths of the kitchenette. “Oh, Wade, you’re terrible! You don’t know how mortified I am.”

The gentleman I was conversing with replied truculently, “Think you’re wise, don’t you? Why don’t you learn to mind your own business!” And the panel slammed back. I waited. A second later it opened again and a persuasive feminine voice queried: “Hello? Hello below?”

I reached behind me, seized the eavesdropping Maxine by the elbow and dragged her forward, changing places with her.

“Yes,” she said embarrassedly, “my husband got a notion he would like to try somebody else’s cooking for a change. You know how men are. The grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard.” She laughed apologetically. “Oh, that’s awfully nice of you. I’m Mrs. Wade. Thank you so much, Mrs. Greenbaum.” This went on for quite some time. They seemed to be exchanging recipes.

“Here,” she said, coming away from the dumbwaiter at last with a platter in her hand, “you nut! Here’s some lovely tapioca pudding for you.”

“Oh, God!” I said, sinking weakly back in my chair and covering my eyes with one hand, “and I thought it was a steak!”

“Now,” she said, “I hope you’re satisfied. As a result of this, I’ll probably have to say hello to her every time I meet her going up in the elevator. Or else sit here and entertain her all afternoon when you’re away. Phone the movie house and find out what’s going on.”

I felt like saying, “It’s polite to wait till you’re asked.”

I thought the picture would never be over. I squirmed and gritted my teeth in the baleful silverish glow that went on and on. I thought, “It’s not they who should be paid a couple of grand a week for making faces, it’s we who ought to be paid for sitting and watching.” Then we were back again, and Maxine snapped on the lights, while I put the milk bottle outside the door and locked the apartment for the night. Another day was over. But what good was that, when the one after would be just like it?

I delayed as long as I could, after she had gone to bed and even after she had turned out the bed light. I stalked around in the living room with my coat off and my tie loosened. There wasn’t going to be any making up of the row of the night before. I mean, we were made up already, but there weren’t going to be any tokens of it. But there wasn’t anything to read (and I hated reading, anyway) and there wasn’t anything to do. I went into the kitchenette, and there was that awful tapioca pudding of Mrs. Greenbaum’s staring me in the face. I emptied it into the sink and came out again. I pulled up the shades and looked out of the window. The sky was all brick dust, and there was no moon. Suddenly, standing there like that, I realized I had been praying, I had been saying, “Oh, Lord, give me a break. Let something romantic, something exciting, happen to me. Only once, if never again. Before I’m too old. Break up this life of mine. Never mind about mending it again, I can do that myself. Why did I ever marry her? Without her, every minute would have been an adventure! It isn’t fair—”

I went inside, jumped out of my things, and got into my own bed. She may have been awake or she may have been asleep, it didn’t matter to me.

Noise woke me up, great rolling drumbeats of it. I opened my dazed eyes, and outside the windows it would be all black one minute and all platinum the next, with a great big crash. And in that minute rain began to hiss down, and the curtains did a dance of the seven veils. “Quick, close the windows, Wade!” Maxine whimpered, and one of the tinsel flashes showed her to me in the next bed, with her arm flung before her face and the pillow over her head instead of under it.

“What’s the matter, scared?” I laughed, and got up and pulled down the sashes. That robbed the storm of all its dignity, made it just a stage effect in an old-fashioned melodrama, with the room very quiet all of a sudden and the flashes removed to a distance and not much better than an electric sign with the current flickering and dying down.

“I’m still scared,” she informed me in a certain tone.

“Have a cigarette,” I said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

Presently she said, “I have a cigarette, but I haven’t got a match.”

I took a folder of them from under my pillow and passed them to her across the aisle between the two beds. In grasping them, she reached too far up on my arm. I could feel her fingers slip almost up to my elbow. I left the matches and took the arm away.

In the morning I was dreaming of Bernice. I was saying. “There’s nothing worse than an earthquake; stand close to me in the doorway here until it passes,” when Maxine woke me by shaking my shoulder.

“My goodness,” she said. “I don’t know where you were the night before last, but you certainly act as though you’re making up for lost sleep. Come on, the coffee’ll get cold.”

“Where’s a towel?” I grumbled, with my eyes still shut.

“Now don’t start that,” she said. “I laid one out for you.”

I got up, leaned sleepily against the wall for a minute, then went out, jumped under the cold water, and began hitting myself from all directions. It was only when I was all through that I realized I had forgotten to take my pajamas off. They were clinging around me like wet elastic. So I knew by that what kind of a morning it was going to be. I felt sorry for her for a moment, and wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder and more advisable to walk straight out as soon as I was dressed and swallow a glass of orange juice at the corner drug store instead of raising hell for the next half-hour. But she wouldn’t have understood if I had, and what’s the use of being self-sacrificing when the motive isn’t made clear to the bystander?

But when I was dressed and went in and sat down, I kept the fingers of my right hand crossed.

She laughed charmingly, poor Maxine. “It’s cleared up beautifully,” she said. “I was terribly scared when we were having that storm last night.”

“I know,” I said briefly.

“Well, you didn’t do much about it,” she went on good-naturedly.

“What did you expect me to do, lay a hot-water bottle at your feet?”

“Well, you don’t have to look so awful, Wade.”

“Well, don’t look at me, then.”

She got off the subject in a hurry. “The lightning turned the milk sour. We’ll have to use some of the evap., I’m afraid.”

“I knew that was coming,” I said.

“Why, you must be a mind reader.” she suggested gently.

I thought, “It’s a good thing you’re not. If you could read mine right now, you’d dive under the bed in a hurry.”

“Lousy,” I said in reference to the coffee.

“It would be,” she sighed, “no matter what was in it. If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t know the difference.”

I enlarged on the subject.

“Well, don’t take it, then,” she said indifferently. “You don’t have to, you know. Nobody’s going to make you.”

“Yeah!” I barked, “and I’m going to feel swell by the time I get to Forty-Second Street, you didn’t stop to think of that, did you?”

“Oh,” she moaned, “what am I going to do with this man?” And glanced entreatingly at the clock.

“Don’t worry, affectionate, I’m going,” I laughed grimly. And I looked down at the coffee cup for a second.

She saw me and forestalled me. She had learned by experience what I was thinking. She quickly took it off the table and emptied it down the sink. “No matter what happens to me now,” she said, “at least it won’t be another scalding.”

That turned the trick, somehow. She probably expected it to as little as I did myself, but nevertheless it did. I laughed, went over to her, put my arms around her, and pressed my face against hers. “You poor kid,” I droned, “why don’t you go out and get yourself a pair of brass knuckles one of these times and rearrange my front teeth?”

“I’m just a dumb frail, like you say when you’re drunk,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt a tooth in your head. It’s funny,” she added thoughtfully, “in this life, one of us always has to do the bossing. Upstairs it’s Mrs. Greenbaum, to judge by the sounds we hear, but in this family it’s you.”

“Since when?” I said. “It’s news to me. I’m afraid you’re taking me for a sleigh ride.”

She came to the door with me, and then when I got down to the street she came to the window to say good-bye some more. I didn’t bother looking up, so she tapped on the pane. When I turned my head, she threw up the sash and leaned out to call down that old one of eight years ago. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

“Sure I will,” I answered, “so I can pass ’em on to you.” And waved, and went away.

For a little while everything was all right. I even stepped up on a high rickety chair under an awning to have my shoes shined. All my life, that, and a haircut, and a shower, have been barometers of well-being to me. Then my newly glistening shoes, gleaming like burnished bronze, carried me down into that twilight grotto they call the subway. The turnstiles made a continual popping sound, like machine-gun fire in that faraway war I so blissfully missed. Then a red comet and a green one, side by side, came hurtling out of the gloom, and behind them, like an accordion, a long row of lighted cars expanded and came to a standstill. I took my place before a seated lady with a little boy on her lap, tilted my chin, and stared down my nose at a gaudy placard showing a girl with what looked like a strip of gelatine pasted over her mouth. The little boy started to wipe the soles of his shoes on my trousers. The lady noticed it and said indulgently, “Put your feet down, Stefan.” “Or else put your hands up,” I thought, “and fight like a man,” and moved away from there.

Then it was five o’clock and I was still standing in the crowded car aisle, only now the train was going in the opposite direction. And the luster had been trodden from my shoes and I had about sixty kilowatts less energy, that was all. I got out finally and pulled my clothing after me. Luckily, it still stayed on. Going up the steps, still in a crowd, the man in front of me missed a step and went down on his knees. I picked up his hat for him. A girl on the other side of him picked up the halibut steak he was bringing home to his wife. I could tell it was halibut steak by the smell. And the impact against the steel-rimmed step didn’t help it any, either. “Maybe,” I said to myself unfriendly, “that’s some of your business too. Are you going to eat it?”

She wasn’t in when I got there. There I was, back where I had started from. “Now, what the hell did I get out of that?” I thought morosely. “Just so they won’t cut off the gas and electricity on us at the end of the month!” I picked the gin bottle up from the floor of the broom closet, poured two inches into a glass, went in and took a shower. One that could be heard out on the street, I’m sure. I thought I heard the doorbell ring, but wasn’t sure. But when I was through toweling and had my shirt on, I went out to see, and Maxine had come in. She had deposited a big brown-paper bag full of stuff on the kitchen table and was sitting on a chair alongside of it, elbow on the table, holding her head in her hand. She lifted it to remark, “You couldn’t even let me in, could you? I stood out there ringing away for fully five minutes, doing a juggling act with this stuff in one hand and my key in the other!”

“How was I going to open the door?” I said. “I was all wet.”

“What was that?” I thought I had heard her say, “You always are.” “Anyway,” I went on, “you believe in giving delivery boys a swell break, don’t you? What are they getting paid for?”

“Oh, don’t bother me,” she groaned. “I’m too tired to answer any deep questions right now.”

I turned to leave the room; at the door, though, I turned a second time to answer this, hands in my back pockets. I evidently felt it needed answering. “Tired from what?” I sneered, “sitting around on your fanny all day? That’s about all you do, as far as I can make out.” Which, I figured, should have held her for awhile. Expecting me to answer doorbells in the nude! Even if she was my wife, there might be other people using the hallway at the same time.

“That’s consideration!” she said. “How do you know what I’m doing? Television hasn’t come in yet, has it?” She walked very close to me, and there wasn’t much friendship in our glance. “So you think I’m sitting around all day doing nothing. Who do you think washes up the dishes after you’ve gone?”

“What’s there to that?” I assured her. “Park ’em in the sink, turn on the water, and let evaporation do the rest—”

“Who do you think keeps the place clean, the Board of Health?”

“Maybe that’s why I find our four-legged friends in the bathtub every now and again.”

“Who do you think sends out the laundry? Who do you think makes the beds? Who do you think—”

“Oh, keep your funnies,” I said. “I’m not end man in a minstrel show.”

She was still standing close to me. It got on my nerves. “Don’t crowd,” I said, and gave her a push.

“Yes.” she said, “that’s what you’re best at!”

“As long as I’m good for something, that’s a help.”

“Well,” she cried, pointing rapidly at this and that, “there’re the chops and there’s the stove and there’s the table — so if you want to eat, go to it! I’m going in and have a good cry. You can go to hell.”

“I’ll stop off at a restaurant on my way,” I called after her. “I’m not pansy enough to get a kick out of doing your work for you!” And picked up my hat and went.

And sitting in state at a table in the “Original Joe’s Restaurant” with a veal stew in front of me, I addressed the image in my mind in this wise: “And I don’t have to have you, either. I can get along without any one. I can get along by myself.” The image was Bernice’s, not Maxine’s. But with the dessert before me, I suddenly stood up and walked into a phone booth, dropping my napkin midway on the floor, where it lay like a challenge.

I pulled the glass slide after me, a light went on, and I got out my little book. “Tha-a-at’s right,” I assured the operator. It started to ring at the other end. It kept on ringing at the other end. I changed the foot I was standing on. Then I changed back again. I was so nervous I felt like going to the men’s room. Wouldn’t it ever stop ringing at the other end? Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seven—. Suddenly the operator got on again. “Your party hasn’t answered yet.” As though I didn’t know that! “Shall I keep on ringing?”

“Do that little thing,” I said, “if it takes all night.” Meantime the dessert out there was getting warm and the coffee getting cold. No one had picked up the napkin yet, either.

And still it rang. “The dirty stay-out!” I commented. I started to work the little hook up and down to get the operator back. I wanted my nickel back. I had given up hope, you see. And suddenly the ringing stopped and there was a faint click at the other end. The receiver had been lifted. But there wasn’t a sound. Whoever it was was waiting to hear my voice first. And she had told me not to open my mouth, not even to say hello, unless I heard her voice first. So a new kind of endurance contest began then and there. But I wasn’t good at it, I had too much at stake. I gave in. “Hello?” I said formally.

“Hello?” a man’s voice answered. “Who do you want?”

I couldn’t’ve gotten off the line if I had wanted to. “Miss Pascal there?” I said mildly.

“Who’re you?” was the immediate result of this.

“Is she or isn’t she?”

“You a friend of hers?”

I knew I’d never get past him to her even if she was there, and why make it tough for her? There was always another day.

“I’m the repair man,” I said, “for the City Service Radio Corporation. We’ve had a call from her saying her instrument needed looking over.”

“Seven in the evening,” he told me, “is a peculiar time to be going around repairing radios.”

“The slip I have here is marked ‘Urgent,’ ” I answered, “and we guarantee our customers day and night service, so I called to find out if it was all right for me to come up.”

“The closest you’ll get to here,” he assured me, “is where you are now.”

“It’s up to you,” I said philosophically. “If you prefer static to good reception, we ain’t gonna cry about it.”

“And thank the City Service Radio Corporation for me,” he remarked emphatically. “It’s darn sweet of them, considering I got the instrument at Landay’s.”

“Y’ dirty punk!” I exploded, and hung up.

So you see the call wasn’t exactly a success.

I went back to my table and started to think it over. The bisque tortoni was just whey by now, anyway. I told myself I might’ve known it would go wrong, I should have waited until some other night. I went over the conversation word by word, and the more I went over it, the more something struck me. About his voice. Especially in the opening phrases. He had sounded more scared than I was. As though he had no right to be where he was, and as though he were afraid of being caught there. “But still, if he bought the radio,” I reminded myself, “he has every right to be there.” There was no getting around that. And yet he hadn’t seemed at all at home, at all at ease.

Just as I stuck my hand in my pocket to get out some money to pay for my dinner, a bell rang, and then a waiter came over to me and asked if I had just put in a call from the middle booth.

“One of ’em, anyway,” I answered. “Yeah, I think it was the middle one, the stuffiest of the lot.”

“Well, they’re calling back,” he said. “You’re wanted on the line.”

“Who they asking for?” I said cautiously, noting my hat within grasping distance.

“All they said was ‘The party that just got off this wire.’ The cashier told me it was you.”

I knew how it had happened: whoever hangs up first on a telephone makes it possible for the other party to trace the call through the operator. In the intrigue racket it’s a good rule to always let the other fellow hang up first, if you don’t want your whereabouts known. He had evidently stayed on after I did, and found out it was a restaurant. I thought I’d go back and give him hell.

But when I got in the booth and picked up the loose receiver, it was Bernice herself.

“Hello,” she said immediately, “is this the manager of the City Service Radio Store?”

“No,” I said, “it’s Wade.”

“Well, I’d like an explanation,” she went on, as though she hadn’t heard me. “Some one just rang my apartment claiming to be a repair man for your concern. And used insulting language—”

“Who was he, honey?” I said softly, “the big stiff that answered the first time?”

“Now, I not only never sent you people any calls, but my radio didn’t come from you in the first place. I want that distinctly understood—”

“Keep on talking,” I said. “Gee, your voice is beautiful!”

“If I’m annoyed like this again,” she threatened, “I’ll notify the police. It’s very embarrassing, to say the least.”

“Have you missed me?” I crooned, “Have you been thinking about me like I’ve been thinking about you?”

She went on improvising beautifully. “Oh, he was drunk? Well, he certainly acted it, my dear man. And I’m surprised at your firm for employing people like that. Now, would you mind telling me just how he got hold of my telephone number and my name?”

“Baby,” I agreed, “that’s going to be a hard one for you to answer.”

But she had ideas of her own. “I beg your pardon, I am not listed,” she contradicted.

“When am I going to see you again? When are you going to give me a break? Tomorrow night? Wednesday night?”

“Oh, he was formerly employed by Landay’s and has a list of their customers? So that’s it! That explains it.”

“How about tomorrow night?” I pleaded. “Just say yes or no, can’t you?”

“No,” she said, and went on, “I don’t want you to discharge him. I’d be afraid he’d hold a grudge against me. Especially if he drinks.”

“The night after, then?” I said. “How about that?”

“Yes,” she said, “please see that it doesn’t happen again.”

“You swell thing!” I gasped.

“Thank you,” she said briskly. “Good-bye!”

I was mopping my forehead when I came out, the bulb had heated the booth until it felt like an incubator, but I was happy, all right. I even went back to my table and almost left the waiter a fifty-cent tip. Almost, but not quite. I changed it to a thirty-five-cent one at the last moment. If a man has no more ambition than to be a waiter, why encourage him by letting him think there’s money in the game?

So I left that little restaurant I’d never been in before and never went to afterward, like so many other places I’ve only gone to once in life. But afterward, whenever I heard the word “restaurant,” my mind saw that one place and not any of the others, saw the phone booth lighted from within and the napkin lying on the floor and the glass case full of cigar boxes with a cash register sitting on top of it.

Then immediately afterward, it seemed as though I had hardly stepped out of the door, I was in another phone booth and it was Wednesday.

“This is me, honey,” I said.

“Well, Wade,” she said, “I don’t know what to say to you. I’m going out.”

Forty-eight hours’ anticipation went smash. “You told me you’d be in tonight,” I answered. “What kind of a chiseler are you!”

“Don’t get fresh, Wade,” she suggested docilely. “It isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

“It’s going to get me where I want to be,” I told her, “and that’s with you.”

“I doubt it,” she said.

I gave my necktie a tug. “If you don’t want to see me, well—”

“I didn’t say that I don’t want to see you. I said I’m going out. This came up all of a sudden, and — there it is.”

“Business before pleasure,” I said poisonously.

“I’ll hang up if you say anything like that to me again,” she threatened.

I waited a moment to see if she would, afraid that she would, but she didn’t.

“When do you expect to get back?” I said finally.

“I may get back at twelve — and I may get back at dawn. Why?”

“Make it twelve. Leave the key with the doorman, and I’ll wait up for you. What’s your favorite flavor sandwich? I’ll bring some in with me.”

“Just a minute!” she protested. “Not so fast. How do you think that’s going to look?”

“Swell to me.”

“Yes, but to the doorman?”

“I’ll tell him I’m your big brother.”

“You’d better think up a better one than that,” she said sharply. “This isn’t 1910.”

“Well, how about it, lovable?”

“Wade, I’d like to see you awfully,” she assured me, “but I’m afraid — suppose someone insists on seeing me home?”

I knew that was what was really troubling her, not the doorman at all. She probably had him well fixed. “Oh,” I said negligently, “if any one does, tell him you’re having the place repapered, tell him anything, lose him in the lobby. You’re probably good at that, anyhow.”

“Well—” she said.

“If you don’t leave the key,” I said, “I’m going to wait for you downstairs anyway, so take your choice.”

“Now see here,” she flared, “who do you think you’ve got here? You can’t order me around like that! If I feel like leaving the key, all well and good. And if I don’t, you’ll stand for it and like it. You made enough trouble for me the other night as it was.”

“We can get away with murder, honey,” I assured her dreamily, “we’re both young and have our health. Oh, how I wish this phone were out of the way and there was nothing between your lips and mine!”

She sighed good-naturedly and said, “I’ll leave the key. But, Wade, please be careful what you do. I don’t want to have to go around looking for a job.”

“You’re as sweet as you are good-looking,” I groaned elatedly. “You can count on me, I won’t go near the phone, I won’t even light the lights if you don’t want me to—”

“All right,” she said, “then that’s that. What you’re really doing is spoiling the whole first part of my evening, but I know that doesn’t cut any ice with you as long as yours is all set.”

“Oh,” I said, “so that’s where I stand! Just knowing that I’m waiting for you up at the place is enough to spoil your evening for you, is it? I sure stand in thick with you and no mistake.”

“Now wait,” she said, “don’t jump down my throat like that. What I meant was simply this: if I let you wait for me up at the place, you’ll be on my mind. I’ll be afraid something’ll go wrong, that you’ll give yourself away or give me away; I can’t relax with something like that on my mind.”

“Suppose you save your relaxing until the end, when we’re alone together,” I suggested.

“I’ll think about it,” she said, and laughed. “Let’s get this straight now — you want me to leave the key with the downstairs doorman and tell him that a gentleman will call for it, Then you want to go upstairs and wait for me in the place until I get in. Is that it?”

“That’s the ticket.”

“Okay, then,” she said by way of good-bye, “and try not to get ashes all over the rugs, will you? I’ll be seeing you.”

And then, where her voice had been there was only silence and insulated wire and an invisible gum-chewing individual with earpieces clamped to her head, and I was alone once more. I dropped another nickel in and had Maxine.

“Oh, is that you?” she said at once. “It’s ten after six; hurry up, will you? I’ve got the chops on already. Where you talking from?”

“You mean where’m I listening from, don’t you?” I corrected. “I haven’t had a chance to say a word so far. Shut up a minute and I’ll explain where I am and why I’m not coming home.”

“Not coming!” she squalled. “Well, this is a fine time to let me know about it! I just got through spending seventy-nine cents at the butcher and the grocer—”

So I didn’t go home that Wednesday evening, but I went to a barber shop and got a shave, and the setting sun shining through the plate-glass window struck gleams of emerald, garnet, topaz, and amethyst from the bottles of tonic standing in a row on the counter and made the barber shop seem a jewelry shop to me. And the radio over the door hummed ever so softly about love, the world’s one great interest, saying, “Here I am with all my bridges burned, just a babe in arms where you’re concerned; oh, lock the doors and call me yours—”

And I kept thinking, “Yes, make the part straight, her eyes are going to look at it. Yes, put talcum on the back of my neck, her fingers may rest there for a minute. Yes, wipe my forehead clean with your towel, it may lean against hers. Sure, hold up the mirror in back of me, so I can see what she sees, and wonder if the love shows through the way it should, like a candle in a paper lantern.” All this and more. And to him I suppose I was just another customer, not the man who loved Bernice Pascal!

So I came out of there smelling sweet, looking neat, and striding wide, one hand in my pocket jingling coins, the other at the back of my neck to make sure he hadn’t overlooked any little hairs. He hadn’t, but what difference did it make? A few days from now they’d all be back there again anyway. But tonight was tonight, and it was sure a sweet night, that was all that mattered. The whole city seemed full of others like me, coming out of barber shops all dolled up to keep their dates with their little loves. Men in gray suits, men in blue suits, men in brown suits, all looking alike, all in love with someone, all heading for where that someone was. And some were whistling, and some were intent on the ground before them, and some glanced into every mirror along the way to catch their own reflections, and some bumped into you and apologized with a friendly smile, others bumped into you and gave you a scowl, still others bumped into you and didn’t even know you were there at all — all according to their various temperaments. And out of all the beauty parlors came an endless stream of those little someones whom this was all about, with brand-new permanent waves and glistening water waves, with shimmering manicures and rose-leaf facials, with orange lips and cherry lips and mauve lips, all wearing little skullcaps and little kilts for skirts — some looking at their wristwatches and some at their mirrors and some at the heavens above (as though to judge just how long he had been waiting by now). All the players were ready for the game of love, and the endless file of taxicabs bobbing through every street, so repetitious in all their motions, were like a chorus of unlovely but agile Tiller dancing girls to the rest of the proceedings.

Lights flashed out where lights had no business to be — on the blank side walls of buildings and in midair — without giving the day a chance to die decently, so that the twilight was done to death with splashes of tropical yellow, scarlet, and green that moved, that sputtered, flashed and blinked. At the end of one of the side streets a brazen comet flashed by halfway between the roofs and the ground carrying a long tail of lights with it — an elevated train headed uptown The streets were a kaleidoscope; every drug store, every millinery shop, had its glowing neon tubes of jade and vermilion spelling out what it had to say and dyeing the pavement in front of it, and the throngs that went by on the sidewalk took on for a minute a tinge of greenish or of reddish hue until they had gone on to the next to become some other color, like chameleons. Only directly overhead, if you threw your head back as far as it would go, was anything serene, and there a round blush moon that had been unobtrusively present since four in the afternoon now stood out like a porthole in a chaotic stateroom, with no one able to reach it and look through to the other side. Evening had descended upon New York.

I had a roast beef sandwich and a cup of coffee at a counter shaped like an 8, with waitresses in little yellow linen dresses on the inside and the customers seated on revolving seats around the outside. Which proved nothing at all as far as the sandwich was concerned, but I was in a trance anyway and wouldn’t have known whether it was shoe leather or ambrosia I was eating. And when the handmaiden in yellow asked me whether I would like some more coffee, I drew back my cuff and answered that it was a little after seven.

“I’m certainly glad of that,” she answered tartly, “and now while I have the perk right here with me, maybe you’ll let me know if you can stand another cupful.”

So I stood another cupful to kill time, and while its inkiness grew cold before me, kept making mental calculations, although people were standing up in back waiting for seats, mine included. “Now,” I said to myself, “she is out somewhere eating with somebody (hope he chokes!) If he’s the one she’s going out with, then nine chances to one she’s dressed already for the evening and won’t go back to the place any more. But if she’s going out alone or with some one else, then maybe she’ll get rid of whoever she’s with now and rush back to change. Then if I stick around, I may have a chance to see her before she goes out. It’s worth trying.” So I paid my check and got out of there, and went up to Fifty-Fifth Street to the tall white building Bernice lived in. But I approached it on the opposite side of the street, and when I had located her floor and the windows that I judged to be hers, they were pitch-dark; no one was in. So I crossed over, and the doorman spun the door around for me, and I found myself in her lobby, with its hidden flesh-colored lighting and its uncomfortable Italian furniture and its chocolate hallman the envy of his race in kid gloves, padded shoulders, and gilt braid. “Yessir,” he said, “good evening.”

“Phone up Miss Pascal for me, will you?” I said.

“Miss Pascal?” he said. “She stepped out just about fifteen minutes ago.”

“Alone?” I said.

He looked at me without smiling and answered, “I couldn’t say.”

“Oh, yes, you could,” I insisted, and slipped something into one of his kid palms, at the same time wishing him all sorts of calamities but without telling him so.

“She left with a gentleman,” he said.

The pink lights weren’t as pink as they had been until now, “That’s all right,” I remarked. It wasn’t at all. “She left her key with you, didn’t she?”

“I didn’t know it was that,” he said naively. “She left a little envelope with me and told me a gentleman would call for it later on. Is that you?”

“That’s me, all right,” I answered disgustedly. I saw I’d made a mistake by mentioning the key, she hadn’t wanted him to know what it was. But in any case, he would have seen me go upstairs in the elevator to her floor and, knowing she was out, surmised the rest. And who the hell was he, anyway?

I tore the little white envelope he passed me open right there under his eyes and shook out Bernice’s brass latchkey, which was all it contained. Not a word, or anything. But maybe she hadn’t had time. “I’m going up,” I said, and he clicked a little metal snapper he held between his fingers, and a lot of Florentine bas-relief done in bronze and copper slid out of the way, and I stepped in the car.

Going up, I thought the ghost of her Narcisse Noir still lingered in the corners of the car; I was sure it was her elusive perfume that I caught with each prolonged breath. I hissed so, trying to draw it to my nostrils, that the starter even turned his head and glanced back over his shoulder at me, evidently under the impression I was either sobbing softly or suffering from a cold in the head. I lowered my eyes.

He stopped the car a trifle above her floor, meticulously lowered it again an inch or two to the right level, opened the slide for me, and I stepped out. I waited until he had hidden himself again and gone down (as a little lighted garnet above the shaft door indicated) before I took out her key and got ready to enter. First I took the precaution of ringing the bell. No one answered it. So then I put the key in the door and let myself in.

I took my hat off before I even crossed the threshold, because here was where she lived, here was where my dreams began. All respect, all homage to love.

And now magic began, and the world dropped away behind me as I carefully, tenderly shut her door after me. The air around me was the air she had breathed all morning, all afternoon; the floor, the rug I moved across was where her feet had carried her a hundred times a day. Oh, everything in here she had touched before me, and so I went around touching chairs and cushions, mirrors, tabletops and doorknobs, light chains and cigaretteboxes, holding a communion with her through the medium of my coarse, yellowed, banal fingers. And when I found her handkerchief in a corner of a divan, I put it to my mouth there in the dark and kissed it lingering. Until the horrible thought presented itself: it may belong to the maid! I nearly retched for a minute, and couldn’t wait until I had scratched a match and held it up and searched the corners of it. In one corner it had B. That was all right then, so I whipped out the match and drew the handkerchief to my mouth once more and kissed it again and kissed it again, and put it in my inside pocket. And not being a very intelligent man, all the poetry my mind was capable of at the moment was: “Gee, I love you; I wish you would come home.”

I didn’t light the electricity because she had asked me not to over the phone that afternoon, as some one who knew her and knew her windows from the street might pass and look up and think she was home and decide to drop in, etcetera. But I didn’t really need lights anyway, because in the living room the portières were drawn far back, exposing the whole of each window, and the night was so bright, it made a swath of blue across the floor from each window, like twilight in a grotto when the day is dying outside. I stepped over and looked out without opening the window, and the moonlight lighted my face up and fell across my tie and shirt like one of those diagonal ribbons foreign diplomats are so fond of wearing. There were stars out there too, and city lights, but the moon was the whole cheese. It looked to me from where I was exactly like a gilt thumbtack nailing the blue plush carpet that was the sky closer to the floor of heaven. As I thought of Bernice and wondered where she was, I could almost feel its light swimming in my eyes like soft golden tears. Here was the moon and here was I — why wasn’t she here? She would only come home when the moon was gone, perhaps, and something of perfection would be lacking. But even in the dusk of moonrise, how could her arms seem anything but white?

I got so lonely standing there thinking about her that I had to get out of the moonlight. I went back into the depths of the room, with its two funnels of sapphire blue spilled across the floor, and I felt weak all over and my knees begged me not to move any more and my blood felt like honey that is about to run over the edge of a saucer, so sweet, so lazy, so slow. I threw myself face downward on the divan where I had found her handkerchief before, and took the handkerchief out of my pocket and pressed it between my shut eyes and groaned, I think, aloud.

When I had quieted down, I lit a cigarette and stayed there like that for a long, long while, with just a spark of red in front of me that ebbed and glowed again as I drew upon it. And when the heat began to reach my nails and I knew that I better drop it, I found something to drop it in, and then I got up and found the radio and fumbled with it until I had it going and its midget amber bulb shone through the dial into my face. And while it was warming itself up, I felt my way to the telephone and got the downstairs operator on the line. “What time you got down there?” I asked him.

“Twenty to ten,” I heard him say. That was what my watch said too, hut I had been praying that it would be slow. Gee, there was a long time to go yet.

“I want some sandwiches sent up to Miss Pascal’s,” I added. Might as well do that now, I thought, and have it over with in case she really did come home early. “Is there a delicatessen handy?”

He told me there was a drugstore right in the building. “Good,” I said. “Send them up with the elevator boy,” and then I told him just what kind I wanted. And I thought, “If she doesn’t like olives and pimento, I can always send down for some other kind. In that way I’ll find out exactly which kind she likes most, and I’ll always remember it.”

I hung up and decided to mix some drinks for the two of us, and turned off the radio because it was singing a sad love song and this was going to be a night for happy love. I found that the serving pantry didn’t have any window, so after shutting its two doors I could light the light in there without any danger. Its flashy brightness blinded me for minutes, and I had to shade my eyes until I got used to it. Then I pulled a couple of trayfuls of ice cubes out of the Frigidaire, found the Gordon Dry where Tenacity (no doubt) kept it — on the floor of the broom closet — and began to peel oranges and lemons with my cuffs rolled back. I was happy and I was whistling with my head bent over my task.

After a while the bell rang, and the fellow with the sandwiches was standing at the door. I took them from him and, happening to lift up a corner of one, found that it was spread with crescents of cucumber. “I ordered olive and pimento,” I told him with repugnance.

He had a wearied air, I thought, as of some one who had gone through this trial many times before. “Yessir, half of ’em are olive and pimento,” he explained. “The others are for Miss Pascal; they’re the only kind she eats. They weren’t all for you, were they?” This last had a matter-of-fact intonation to it, as though no answer were really required.

“Oh, so your counterman has what kind she likes down pat?” I said grimly. “She must send down pretty often.”

He smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “Yessir, she does,” he said.

“For two, I s’pose.”

“Always,” he said, and if he had winked I was going to run my hand into which ever eye did it, but he didn’t wink, just looked worldly-wise and bored.

I paid him and closed the door, and went back to the serving pantry not so happy, as I had left it. For one thing, I had stopped whistling. I was in there quite a while, because I kept tasting the drinks as I mixed them, and consequently I had to keep making them over again. When I had finally accumulated two braces of two each, I quit and carried them inside and set them down next to the sandwiches. Then I put the lights out and sat down there in the dark, with just me and the moon. “Boy, how you’re getting wasted!” I remarked to it aloud. After about five or ten minutes, I started to munch one of the sandwiches; that made me thirsty, so I had to sip one of the drinks along with it. By the time I put the empty glass down, the drink had made me hungry, so I had to start munching a second sandwich.

My arm was beginning to ache a little by now from lifting it to my face to look at the time so much, so I unstrapped my wrist-watch and laid it down in front of me among the glasses. The whole dial of it vanished at that distance from my eyes, and just the twelve little glowing numbers arranged in a circle remained, with the two little glowing hands aiming at 9 and at 12. Not that that meant nine, it meant quarter to twelve. “She’ll be here before midnight,” I told myself. “Maybe she’ll come in on the hour, like Cinderella.” And I had another drink. But they moved so quick, those hands! The minute hand deliberately skipped 10, 11, and 12, and took a flying leap down to I under my very eyes. So she hadn’t come in on the hour, after all. And now it was a new day. But it was the same old night.

A vagabond cloud about the size of a fist passed over the moon and immediately turned silver all around the edges as though it had caught fire. “Sure,” I encouraged it, “hide the damn thing! What good is it doing me?”

Oh, I was sore at everything right then: the moon, and the night, and myself most of all! “Here I sit,” I mumbled, “when if I was a man I’d get up, slam the door, and never come ’round her again. Who does she think she is?” But something inside me whispered, “Maybe you love her because she treats you this way. Maybe she’s wise, maybe she knows you better than you know yourself.” So I went to the window, and I went to the door. And then I sat down again. And I had another sandwich. And I had another sandwich. And I had another sandwich.

Then, when there was only one left, it occurred to me too late that that wasn’t enough to offer her with any propriety. I should have thought of that before when there were two, but now there was only one, and offering her one would be a slight. It would look much better if there weren’t any in sight, than to have just the remaining one staring her in the face, seeming to say, “Take me or leave me.” So I reached out and picked it up and ate it, slowly, thoughtfully, mournfully — and the little dream of a midnight snack to be shared by the two of us dissolved in crumbs and went the way of all my other dreams, big and small. I know it would have made a swell comedy scene, but I wasn’t looking in a mirror, and so my heart sang a blue song while I sat there and chewed.

Then I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, and I dusted my knees, and I heaved a deep sigh that seemed to come up from my feet. And still she didn’t come home. I had given up believing that she would ever come home; I was almost beginning to doubt that there was a Bernice.

When I thought of how much I thought of her — why, my head nearly cracked. She was everything to me in one. She was my God, my Garbo. She was dearer to me than a sandwich at Reuben’s, sweeter than a soda at Schrafft’s. I would rather have looked at her than at the Ziegfeld Follies, rather have folded her in my arms than folded a ten-grand check, rather have held her hand than held a royal flush. It was wicked, it was wild, it was swell.

The hands of the clock were at 8 and at I now; I turned it over on its face to try and stop looking at it so much, but that didn’t do much good. I kept turning it over all the time, anyway. Finally I put an end to the agony by picking it up by the end of its strap, carrying it to the window, and pitching it out into the night. I don’t know where it landed, never heard a sound. After it was gone, I remembered how Maxine had slipped it under my pillowcase the first Christmas Eve after we were married. That made me twice as glad I had done it. And immediately afterward, as though I had dispelled a charm in getting rid of the watch that way, I turned from the window just in time to see the door open and close again noiselessly at the far end of the apartment. Not a sound, just a chink of light there, then gone again.

In the dark she came back to me, in the dark she came home. Into the blue-black emptiness of the room she stepped, with only me there; where there had been nothing before, now there was something, and my temples beat like tom-toms and strange pulses I never knew I had, in strange places like my neck and back of my ears, throbbed delightedly as though they were calling her to my attention — “Oh, Wade, she is here!” As though I didn’t know it! As though my mind needed the dumb mechanical parts of me to tell it!

I got so excited, I could hardly see her any more; a sort of rose-red mist swept over her and hid her from my eyes. Then presently she emerged from it again, but her image was still limned in coral like a motionless white statue in a garden flushed by a hidden carmine reflector at its base. Then she spoke, and as her voice flashed into my ears, the peculiar rigidity of a statue that my inflamed senses had given her changed into the mobility of a Bernice coming home to her apartment as she did on any other night, brushing her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand, carrying the same hand to her shoulder to rid it of the short velvet jacket that hung over it, and then with the other hand touching a certain spot on the wall and making the whole place grow light with a sort of jazz dawn, instantaneous and blinding, of lamps and brackets on the walls.

“I thought it was you,” she had said, just as the lights went on, “but I never can be sure. I’m a little drunk.” The little velvet cape that she had dislodged from one shoulder still clung to the other, hanging like a pennant toward the floor. She twitched, and down it went, sliding off her like a snake and lying coiled around her feet. I stooped to pick it up, and then I stayed there. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t kiss my knees; Lincoln freed the slaves,” and bending over, touched my face with a little gesture that was half a slap and half caress. “Oh, I’m so tired, Wade,” she said. “I’ve had this all night long, in every room I went into to get away from someone in the room before. After all, I couldn’t spend the evening in the bathroom sitting on the rim of the tub—” And then she pushed my shoulders back a little and stepped out of the circle of my arms. “I want to be alone a little, and just talk to someone from across a room. Oh, I like love, I even love love, but for just a minute I want to feel nothing but air on all sides of me. So go back there in a chair and drink and look at me if you want to, make your love by remote control.”

“What can I say now,” I said, “that hasn’t been said to you in a corner by someone else this evening? Oh, I get the breaks. I’m the only one of them all that really means this thing; they’re all stealing my stuff from me, but they got their innings first — so it must seem to you the other way ’round. Oh, isn’t there someone can tell you for me, make you believe me? Oh, if you only had a girlfriend, I could win her over to my side—”

“Get up from the floor,” she said; “you have a regular penchant for making passes from your knees.”

“Oh, I need help — Bernice, Bernice. The touch of your hand on my face is telegraphed all over me. Can’t you see I’m half crazed? You’ve got to get me out of this state—”

She laughed a little, and then she said, “How am I to blame? It’s in you, and in all of them, to torture the life out of some poor girl. And because you came across me, you react like a caged chimpanzee and then try to tell me I got you into the state you’re in. That’s a laugh!”

“Ah, but don’t you know it only too well!” I cried, and I reached behind me for my glass, which still had something in it, and pitched the liquor into her face. I saw the whole thing so clearly, like in a slow-motion film, even saw the gin hiss through the air in sort of a funnel shape and break over her face and shoulders in little drops. And even while it was happening, I didn’t know why I had done it, wished I hadn’t done it. I suppose I wanted to kiss her so badly and have her near me, and she wouldn’t let me at the moment, so the effort to make her a part of me took that form on account of the increased distance between us, and I threw the liquor at her instead of throwing my arms around her.

She started up, but before her knees could quite carry her all the way to a standing position, I was over there and my arms were around her. I squeezed her, and I buried the words she was saying with my lips. She tried to struggle a little at first, and then because (as she herself had said) she loved love, she stopped and stood quietly with her mouth to mine. And all the way from where her fragile spike heels touched the floor up to where her lips shared their rouge with mine, she was a lightning rod of love; she was what she had been born for: something that caused a short circuit.

And later she said, “Oh, this thing tortures us, doesn’t it? All our lives through we’re never rid of it. And nothing that we say or do can be held against us, can it, because we’re not responsible, are we?”

In the dawn, the world started over again, carrying New York with it as it rushed eastward to meet the sun. Her eyes, then, catching the light from the brightening skies outside before anything else in the room, were like two white pebbles gleaming upward through fathoms of murky water. She shut them a minute and breathed deeply. She said, “Wade.” I took her hands and clasped them around me, behind my back. She said, “I love you. I knew I would. I told you I would. I do.”

I had loved her so long, so much, it really didn’t matter by now whether she loved me or not. It was just the third button to a two-button suit.

“Oh, I don’t know for how long,” she said. “Not forever. Maybe only just for now. But while it’s here, while I’ve got it—!” She kissed me two or three times on the face. “I want to give you the first token of it, the one true token, the only token. Listen.”

I listened.

“Will you do something for me? For your own sake?”

I asked her what it was.

“Do it for me, Wade. Try to do it.” She seemed so afraid to come to the point. She brushed the back of her hand all around her face, almost exactly the way cats do when they wash. “I don’t know how to say it.”

“Say it; what are you afraid of? What is it?”

“Because you won’t believe me; you won’t take it in good faith.”

I shrugged. “All I can do is try.”

“You see, I love you—”

“Lucky me.” She put her hand over my mouth. “Let me finish, or I won’t be able to go on at all. I said I loved you, didn’t I? Well, that changes everything. While I was still in the act of falling for you, I didn’t think about you much, just myself. Now I’m thinking about you more than myself. Wade, will you do me a favor? Don’t see me any more.”

“So you feel like kidding, do you?”

She moaned disconsolately. “Oh, I knew it. I knew it. You don’t understand. It’s because I love you!”

“Well, in that case, how about taking a dislike to me, so I can stick around?”

She nodded and put her hand on my arm in quick, nervous agreement. “Exactly. If I disliked you, the dirtiest trick I could play you would be to have you around me all the time. Wanna know why?”

“May as well,” I said, “the show at the Palace is rotten this week.”

“Oh, if I could only illustrate it concretely,” she said, “but I can’t! It’s just a feeling, a surmise. I know you won’t believe it. But I have a hunch, oh, such a hunch, honey, that if you get in too thick with me you’re coming to a quick, bad finish. You’re different from the types I’ve gone around with. Oh, you do the things that all men do, but Wade, you’re clean, you’re straight. Those are always the ones that get it in the neck!”

“I don’t follow you,” I said grouchily. “What do you do, associate with crooks?”

“I don’t, personally,” she said meekly. And then, all anxiety again. “Wade, won’t you break away? I’ll go on loving you. Maybe forever that way and not just for today.”

“You could tell me that you don’t want me, that would be squarer. Look,” I said, wheeling around toward her, “you tell me honestly that you don’t want me, and I’ll go, I’ll do what you want. Is that a go?” And I slipped the knot of my tie determinedly up to the base of my throat, where it belonged.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said dismally, “it wouldn’t be true.” Then suddenly she flared up furiously at no one in particular and flung one of her embroidered mules violently across the room by the heel. “What is this love racket? I’d rather have a baked apple! Get this and keep it got,” she said, turning to me. “As I understand love, I love you. I don’t want to have anything to do with your laundry, don’t want you around me every day, but how I love you is nobody’s business!

“So stay if you must, honey,” she said after a while, “but tomorrow I won’t love you any more.”

I only laughed. “I’ll take my chances. Who could be a big enough fool to let you slip out of his life?”

“Poor Wade,” she said pensively, “good-bye to you!”