Take Me Home

Chapter 2

She was really Ivy Galvin. That was her name.

She lay quietly on the worn sofa, one hand holding the other beneath her small breasts and her ankles touching in a position that was the prone equivalent of the one in which she had sat erect, a few minutes ago, to accept her whiskey. Except for her deep and rhythmic breathing, a technique she had developed in the methodical seduction of quietude, she had the appearance of having been laid out neatly for burial. She was feeling relaxed and at ease now, not so much from warmth and whiskey as from the assurance, at last clearly established, that Henry Harper, the odd young man she was using in her exigency, was not in the least interested in what she could not possibly give.

It was not true that she wanted to sleep, for she had found that sleep was treacherous. What she really wanted was to achieve and sustain for as long as possible the marginal twilight area between waking and sleeping in which she felt absolutely detached and inviolate, removed alike from the hard, bright threats above and the symbolisms of the same threats in the stirring darkness below. She wished that she could live in this twilight always, and she had become quite expert, as a matter of fact, in sustaining it precariously for long periods of time, but it was impossible, of course, to sustain it, as she wished, forever. Sooner or later she would descend in spite of herself into the waiting darkness of hostile symbols, which were very bad, and sooner or later after that she would rise inevitably to the shapes and names and terms of reality, which were never any better and usually worse.

Her eyes were not completely closed, although they appeared to be. Through her lowered lashes she watched Henry Harper with a kind of dreamy intentness upon the smallest details of what he did. She did not watch him because she was interested or concerned, but only because he was useful as a neuter distraction that helped her remain a little longer in her interim twilight. She saw him drink his whiskey and sit down and gather his papers. His head in the light of the lamp had a massive and shaggy look, and she thought with the detachment that was now possible to her that he looked completely spent and almost pitiable, committed to his own aberrations, whatever they were, and his own consequent loneliness. After a while he lay his head on the table and did not move for a long while.

Realizing that he had gone to sleep in his chair, she wondered if his sleep was sound and deep, as hers was not, or if it was disturbed by symbols, as hers was. This was something that did not bear thinking about, however, because it threatened the detachment she wished to sustain, and she began, as another distraction, to count slowly to herself, forming without sound with her lips the shape of the numbers, to see how high she could go before she stirred, but the time it took was too long to survive, and she was asleep a full quarter of an hour before he got up suddenly and turned out the light and left the room.

For a while she was neither more nor less than she appeared to be, a girl asleep in a posture of primness on a worn sofa, but then, as the windows on the street side of the room began to lighten, which was about seven o’clock in the morning of that day, she wakened in her sleep to another morning of another day in another place, and she was, in the time and place of her waking, another person.

She was, for one thing, much younger. She was much younger, and the day was soft and bright and beautiful, and she thought for these two reasons, because she was young and the day was beautiful, that she would put on a beautiful dress. She selected one from her closet and examined it, and it was just the kind of dress for that kind of day, pale blue and silken to the touch, although it was really polished cotton. It had a short bodice with a full skirt of yards and yards of material flaring out from a tiny waist, which would make a stiff petticoat necessary underneath, and so she selected the petticoat to wear also, and around the hem of the petticoat there was an inch of real lace that was supposed to show, just slightly, beneath the hem of the skirt of the dress.

She laid the dress and the petticoat side by side on her bed and went into the bathroom and bathed with scented soap, and then she put on a white bathrobe that had tiny blue roses scattered all over it, which was rather ridiculous when you came to think of it, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a blue rose, so far as she knew. Wearing the white robe and thinking of the pale blue dress and feeling clean and perfumed and almost as beautiful as the morning, she went back into the bedroom to the dressing table that had a mirror as big as the one her mother used. With the silver-backed brush that had been given to her by an aunt, she began to brush her hair. She pulled the brush through her hair and lifted it above her head to begin a second stroke, and then she stopped, the brush suspended in the beginning of the stroke, and stared in amazement at the reflection of her face in the glass. It was really rather funny, almost ludicrous, for there were three large brown stains on her face, and she began to laugh at herself and watch herself laughing back from the glass, wondering how in the world she could have bathed so carefully and still have failed to remove the stains. She couldn’t think where she might have acquired the stains, but it didn’t really matter, since they were there, as she could clearly see, and there was nothing to do but wash her face again.

She washed it in the lavatory, using very hot water and a stronger soap, but the stains were stubborn and refused to leave, and all of a sudden she understood that they were never going to leave, never in the world, even if she scrubbed herself every hour of every day for the rest of her life. Filled with terror and monstrous grief, she threw herself on the bed beside the blue dress and the petticoat, and at that instant her Cousin Lila came into the room and began to stroke her hands and arms in an attempt to comfort her, and everywhere that Lila’s fingers touched there was instantly another stain that would never leave. Pulling away with a cry of anguish, she sprang to her feet and began to run across the room to the door, and she was wakened by the cry and the action in the middle of a strange room that she could not remember ever having seen before.

And then she remembered that it was the room of Henry Harper, an odd and antagonistic fellow who had agreed to let her sleep here until tomorrow, or today, which it now was. The last she’d seen of him, he’d been sitting in a chair with his head on the table, the one right over there, but now he was gone. In the gray light that filtered through the dirty glass of the front windows, she could see the empty chair and the table and the typewriter and a stack of yellow sheets beside the typewriter, but she could not see Henry Harper anywhere, and she wondered where he was. There was another room, of course, a bedroom with a bath built into the corner, and it was probably that he was in there, in the bedroom, where he would naturally have gone if he wanted to sleep. She walked over to the door of the bedroom and looked in, and there he was, sure enough, not lying properly in the bed, as he should have been, but lying sprawled across it on his face, fully clothed, as if he had simply fallen there in exhaustion and had failed to get up again.

Turning away, she crossed the living room to one of the front windows and stood looking down into the street. The street was narrow and dirty and utterly dismal in the gray morning light. Across the way, in the recessed doorway of a pawnshop, over which hung the old and identifying sign of the Medici, were several sheets of a newspaper that had been driven there in the night by the wind. Just below her and a little to the right, attached at a right angle to the face of the building in which she stood, was a sign that said “USED BOOKS” in large white letters, and in smaller letters underneath, “BOUGHT AND SOLD.” She could read the words clearly from her position, and they seemed to her in their innocence to be a gross obscenity, a tiny part of the monstrous distortion of all things that was effect of her depression. She had no watch, but she could tell by the quality of the light that it was still early, which left ahead of her the most of an interminable day, and she wondered in despair how she would live it, and if she did, how she would then live the one that would surely follow it.

She wondered if Henry Harper had any cigarettes. He must have some somewhere, because she remembered that he had given her one on the street outside the diner where they had met. She looked around the room and could not see any, and so she walked softly into the bedroom and found part of a package lying on his dresser with some loose change and a pocket knife and a folder of paper matches. She helped herself to three of the cigarettes and the folder of matches and went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The smoke did not taste good, mostly because she had been unable to brush her teeth for quite a while, but she accepted this as being appropriate, natural enough in a life where nothing at all was any good, and it amounted to nothing more than another minute factor in the grand sum of her depression and despair. She had lived in her depression now for far too long, and it was nothing she had been able to do anything about, she had tried, and it had made Lila furious. It was, she supposed, one of the reasons Lila had tried to kill her.

Now she had deliberately thought about it, after trying so hard not to think about it at all, and it seemed like a long time ago that it had happened, far back in the remote and incredible past of yesterday. Something so remote could surely be thought of without particular trauma, could be considered calmly, or at least without excessive emotion, in the hope that something beneficial might come of it, something recovered that had been lost, something learned that had not been learned before, or had been forgotten. She was not actually optimistic that any of these things would result from her thinking, however calmly, or anything good at all, but anyhow it was sometimes easier in the long run to think than it was not to think, and it was a kind of relief for a while, even though it did not last.

So Lila had tried to kill her. There was no question about that. It was only by the merest chance that she escaped, and if she had not escaped, no one would ever have known that she had been deliberately killed, for Lila was far too clever to be found out, and it would have been considered either an accident or suicide, whichever under the circumstances seemed most likely. Her relationship with Lila had started going bad ages ago, long before remote yesterday, and it had gone steadily from bad to worse, and the most terrible part of it was that it had been, until yesterday, all kept carefully under the surface of a terrifying cordiality. So far as she could understand it, for this deterioration of a relationship that had once seemed the only true and possible one in her shrunken world, there were two reasons, and neither was a reason that she could change.

In the first place, she had not been a cheerful or pleasant companion. She admitted that. It’s difficult to be cheerful or pleasant when one is burdened constantly, more and more heavily as time goes on, by a complex feeling of guilt and danger and loneliness, and it is impossible not to have such a feeling, or to hide it forever, when one is insecure in one’s position. She was like an apostate who, having no longer any belief in God, still fears God’s judgment. And then, in the second place, Lila had simply grown away from her and wished to be rid of her, but there was danger in this for Lila, or Lila thought there was, for she did not trust her little cousin any longer, and there was no telling what harm the cousin might do, in ignorance or fear or malice or all together, if she were deserted and left to her own devices. Lila was beautiful and talented and ambitious, and if it was compulsory for her to be one thing, it was imperative for her to appear to be something else. Therefore, she had tried to kill, and it was something, after all, that could be thought about afterward in the room of a stranger without grief or anger or exorbitant sense of loss.

Ivy Galvin lit another cigarette and closed her eyes and saw herself clearly. She was standing at the glass doers of their bedroom, hers and Lila’s, staring across the small terrace outside and down into the interior court of the apartment building in which they lived, and Lila opened the door behind her and came into the room. Lila was wearing one of her beautiful tailored suits, the silvery-gray one, and she was, in spite of her day’s work, which must have been arduous, as perfectly groomed in detail as she had been when she left in the morning.

“Hello, darling,” Lila said.

“Hello, Cousin Lila.”

Ivy did not turn away from the glass doors. She continued to look out across the terrace into the interior court. Lila, for an instant, looked annoyed, the thinnest shadow of an expression on the smooth cameo of her face. She removed the tailored jacket of her silvery-gray suit and began carefully to remove her wrist watch and the sapphire ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me Cousin. I’ve told you and told you that I dislike it.”

“I forgot. I’m sorry.”

“Considering everything, it’s rather ridiculous, don’t you think?”

“I suppose it is?”

“Sometimes I think you do it purposely to annoy me.”

“No. I just forget, that’s all. I always called you Cousin at home.”

“Well, you’re no longer home.” Lila stared at Ivy’s back, and now the shadow on the cameo was a suggestion of slyness. “Perhaps you don’t do it purposely. Perhaps it’s an unconscious expression of hostility.”

“I don’t think so. It’s only a habit.”

“Are you feeling hostile, Ivy?”

“What makes you think I am?”

“Never mind. I see we are about to get into a session of answering questions with questions, which will get us nowhere at all. Have you had a good day?”

“It’s been just an ordinary day.”

“Meaning that it has been a bad one. You have many bad days, don’t you, Ivy? I wish I knew what is the matter with you.”

“There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“Obviously there’s something. Do you think you ought to see someone?”

Lila removed her blouse and skirt and sat down on the bed to remove her shoes and stockings. She did not look at Ivy now, but she somehow gave the impression of doing so. In the room, suddenly, there was at atmosphere of urgent waiting.

“What do you mean, someone?” Ivy said.

“A doctor.”

“No. I don’t need a doctor.”

“You needn’t be so intense about it. It was only a suggestion.”

“I don’t want to see one.”

“Don’t, then. It’s entirely up to you. As a matter of fact, I agree that it’s not necessary and possibly wouldn’t be very wise. Haven’t you dressed today?”

“No. I didn’t see any use in it.”

“You should dress and go out more often.”

“There’s no place to go.”

“On the contrary, there are many places to go.”

“Anyhow, there is no place to go that I want to go, and therefore there’s no sense in going.”

“Perhaps if you tried it, you’d think differently. You should develop an interest in something to keep your mind occupied. You never read a book or look at pictures or listen to music or do anything at all that might divert you and give you pleasure.”

“I’m not clever like you. I’m no good at such things.”

“It doesn’t require a very clever person to read and look at pictures and listen to music. At least you’re not illiterate.”

“That’s something, isn’t it? Thanks for reassuring me.”

“Oh, please don’t imagine slights where none was intended, Ivy. I’m only trying to be helpful.”

“I don’t need any help. I only need to be left alone.”

“Pardon me. If that’s what you need, we should be able to arrange it with no difficulty whatever.”

She stood up in her shimmering white slip at the same moment that Ivy turned from the door. Lifting her hands to her head, she began to remove the pins from the black bun on the back of her neck, and the bun became fluid under her fingers and spilled down between her shoulders in a dark stream. In the movements and features of her body there was the hard and disciplined grace of a ballerina. Watching her, Ivy experienced again the intense and tortured reaction of adoration and submission that she had felt almost the first moment of their meeting.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she said.

“Didn’t you?” How, precisely, did you mean it?”

“I didn’t mean anything precisely. It’s only that I’m always depressed and afraid of something.”

“Afraid? Afraid of what?”

“I don’t know. I guess I’m afraid of what may happen to me.”

“Would you like me to tell you what your trouble is?”

“I don’t think so. I’d rather not hear it.”

“Nevertheless, I think I’ll tell you. Your trouble is, darling, that you have neither the courage to be what you are, nor to become what you are not. You would, I think, be better off dead. When you are like this, which is now almost always, you are not tolerable to yourself or to anyone else. I’m really getting rather sick of you. Did you know that? I’m sick of your moods and your whining and your sad, sad face. You are no longer a pleasure to me, and so far as I can see there is no other excuse for your existence, and certainly none for your living here. Why don’t you go home?”

“You know perfectly well that I can’t.”

“Why can’t you?”

“They wouldn’t have me.”

“Oh, I’m not so sure. They might. They could lock you in your room and pretend to everybody that you had a lingering and fatal illness of some sort. And perhaps you have. Anyhow, it would be just like them.”

“I’ll not go back to them. I’ll go away from here, if that’s what you want, but I’ll not go back.”

“You’d never survive on your own. You’re too ineffectual.”

“I could find a job and another place to stay. I may not be so helpless as you imagine.”

“What kind of job? As a waitress? As a clerk in a store? Don’t be absurd. You are incapable of doing anything worthwhile. In the end, you’d have to find someone else to keep you, if you didn’t get yourself into serious trouble first, and where would you be then? Worse off than ever, I imagine. You would go on and on getting worse and worse off, until you had destroyed yourself and possibly others. If you won’t go home, you will have to stay with me, that’s all there is to be said about it.”

Lila walked over to her dressing table and dropped the hairpins from her black bun into a glass tray and went on without stopping into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. After a minute or two the shower began to run behind the door, and Ivy sat down stiffly on a frail brocaded chair and folded her hands’ in her lap and looked steadily at the hands. It was beginning to get dark in the court outside the glass doors, and darker in the room than out. Between five and six, that meant. Closer to six. It was true, she thought, what Lila had said. It was true that she, Ivy, could do nothing worthwhile and would surely come to a bad end if she tried. It was for her, after all was said and done, only a question of which end of possible ends was a little less bad than the others. The truth was, she wished nowadays only to sit quite still, as she now was, and do nothing whatever. The sound of the shower stopped, and she sat and listened to the silence where the sound had been. Pretty soon Lila came back into the room and turned on a light above the mirror of the dressing table and began to make a selection of clothing from drawers and a closet.

“Where are you going?” Ivy asked. Her attention locked upon Lila’s naked figure — the white, glowing flesh, the smooth curve of breasts that had known the touch of her fingers, the wide sweep of hips, the enticing length of thigh and calf.

“Out,” Lila said, turning to face Ivy so that the lush richness of her breasts were exposed to Ivy’s feverish glance. There was an odd, taunting look in Lila’s knowing eyes which informed Ivy that Lila was completely aware of the effect of her nudity upon her.

“Are you going to dinner?” Ivy asked. Her voice was a hoarse whisper and there was a dryness in her throat that came from the memory of all the times she had been together with Lila. She felt her breathing quicken and had to fight down an urge to run toward Lila and gather her soft, perfumed flesh in her arms. There was an ache deep inside her, an ache of remembrance of things past, a longing for the sure touch of Lila’s fingers on her body, a pulsating wish to lose herself in the perfumed mystery of Lila’s flesh.

“Yes,” Lila answered curtly.

“Who is taking you?”

“A man. Someone at the agency. I’m meeting him at a cocktail lounge.”

“Have you been with him before?” Ivy asked, forcing herself to stare at her hands, hoping in that manner to quiet the emotional disturbance in her.

“Yes. Several times.”

“Why do you go?”

“Because he’s useful to me. He’s been useful before, and he’ll be useful again.”

“I don’t understand how you can do it.”

“I know you don’t. You’d be better off if you did.”

“Is it possible to be two persons?”

“I’m not two persons. I’m one person who can adjust at different times to different conditions.”

“Is it necessary for you to go tonight?”

“Not absolutely. I’m going because I want to.”

“Please don’t.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because I want you to stay here with me.”

“No, thank you. You’re not very entertaining company these days.”

“I don’t feel like staying alone.”

“Only a little while ago you were saying that it was exactly what you needed.”

“I said I didn’t mean it. Sometimes when I’m alone too long. I begin thinking about killing myself. I’m afraid I might do it.”

“I don’t think there’s much chance.”

While they were talking, Lila was dressing, and now she slipped her dress over her head and stared at Ivy levelly across the distance that separated them. Her face softened, and she seemed suddenly to regret her words.

“Oh, well,” she said, “it’s not so bad as you imagine, and I don’t wish to be cruel. Just zip me up, darling, and I’ll make you comfortable before I leave.”

She walked over to Ivy and turned her back, and Ivy, standing, pulled up the zipper and locked it. Lila’s shoulders above the dress were as smooth and flawless as her cameo face.

“What do you mean?” Ivy said.

“About making you comfortable?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll put you to bed and give you a sedative. Something to make you sleep. It will prevent you from dreaming, and you’ll feel better in the morning. Tomorrow’s Sunday, you know. I’ll be home with you all day.”

“I never take sedatives.”

“It won’t hurt you this once. It’s the kind I take all the time. You have the most fantastic ideas about what’s harmful.”

Lila went to the dressing table again, where she brushed her hair a few strokes and restored the luxurious, dark bun. Then she fixed her face and moved on into the bathroom. Ivy got into bed, sitting erect with her back against the headboard. She heard water running, and the brittle sound of glass against glass. Lila returned with a crystal tumbler half full of a deep pink liquid.

“Here you are,” Lila said. “It will be a little bitter, but not too bad. Just drink it quickly.”

Ivy drank the liquid and slipped down under the covers with her head on her pillow. The bed and the pillow were wonderfully soft, and it would be, she thought, a kind of minor and healing miracle if she could only sleep deeply and quietly through the night, as Lila had promised, without dreams.

“Will you be late?” she said.

“Probably. I may not be back until morning.”

“If I’m asleep when you come, wake me up.”

“We’ll see. Don’t worry about it.”

Lila got her fur coat from the closet and turned off the light above the mirror. In the total darkness that followed for a few seconds the extinction of the light, she spoke again.

“I’ll put some records on the phonograph in the living room.”

“It doesn’t matter. You needn’t bother with it.”

“No. I’ll put them on. I know you’re indifferent to music, but it will soothe you and help you get to sleep sooner. The phonograph will shut itself off when the records are finished.”

She went past the foot of the bed and across the room in the darkness. In the living room, she turned on a table lamp, and the light of the lamp approached the door between the rooms and entered a little way into the darkness. The phonograph began to play softly, the hall door opened and closed, and Ivy, lying alone and sedated in the suddenly enormous apartment, did not know what the music was, its name or its composer, but she knew that it lifted on strings a little of the weight of the night and what the night held, and that Lila, who had been cruel, had in the end been kind.

She lay utterly motionless, except as she moved to breathe, listening to muted strings from one record to another, and the strings no longer seemed to be in the living room, where they had been in the beginning, but above her in the darkness near the ceiling, and they seemed to keep rising and rising, or she kept sinking and sinking, the distance between her and the receding strings becoming vast and incalculable, like the distance to a star, and then all of a sudden the sound of the strings was gone entirely, leaving a profound and terrifying silence, and someone leaned over the foot of her bed in the darkness and silence and terror and said quite clearly: You would, I think, be better off dead.

Lila had said that. She had said it with calm, unequivocal cruelty, and later she had become inexplicably kind and had mixed a sedative, which Ivy had drunk, and had gone away casually to meet a man for dinner so that Ivy could go quietly to sleep and die sleeping quietly. It was revealed to Ivy in a blinding flash of insight a sudden rising into consciousness of a pattern of truth that had formed and cohered without conscious thinking in a deep and primitive part of her brain. In the morning, after enough time had lapsed, Lila would return and find her dead, or nearly dead, and Lila would tell how she had been depressed, had talked of suicide, and it would all be very logical and acceptable, and there were certain people who would receive the news with relief and thankfulness.

The bottle of sedative was in the bathroom, in the little medicine cabinet above the lavatory. Or the bottle in which the sedative had been. Ivy had seen it there only today, when she had found the initiative, somehow, to go and brush her teeth, and she had noticed specifically that the bottle was nearly full, and had wondered vaguely why Lila used the sedative in liquid form when it would have been so much simpler to take as capsules. Anyhow, it was now imperative to go and look at the bottle, to see if it was still nearly full or not, and Ivy swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up. The darkness shifted and swayed treacherously, but at the same time was a kind of fluid and tangible mass that pressed upon her and served to hold her erect. Walking very carefully, with one arm stretched ahead of her to feel the way, she went into the bathroom and turned on the light above the little mirror which was also the door of the medicine cabinet, and the bottle was in the cabinet, and it was empty.

There, there, there. That was the proof of it. She had taken enough of the sedative to kill her, and if she did not wish to die it was necessary to take some kind of action against it. Her mind, for some reason, in spite of the sedative and unreasonable fear of death, was working quits well. It would never do to call a doctor, and it would do even less to call the police. It would not even do to go for help to another inhabitant of the building. It was perfectly clear, if she was to be helped at all, that she must help herself, and the first thing that must clearly be done was to get rid of the sedative inside her. She had no idea how fast it might work, how quickly be absorbed into her blood where it could not be retrieved, but it was certain that it would work more quickly as a liquid than as a capsule, and even now it might be too late. She went over to the commode and got down onto her knees in front of it and gagged herself with the first two fingers of her right hand, and quite a lot of bitter pink fluid came up through her throat and out her mouth to stain the clear water in the porcelain bowl. She knelt there for two or three minutes, retching, and then she stood up and pressed the fingers of her hands against her temples and tried to think what she should do next, if there was anything at all to be done.

But of course there was. It was imperative to keep moving. She had read or heard that somewhere. It was imperative to fight off sleep with physical action, and it would help, also, if the air was clear and cold and not smotheringly warm, as the air in the apartment was. Her stomach settled, she went back into the bedroom aid stripped and began to dress for the street in the first necessary articles of clothing that came to hand. Finally dressed after what seemed an interminable time, although it was no more than a few minutes, she went out of the apartment and down by the stairs to the street, and she was feeling oddly remote and detached from all things around her, which had no shape or character, as if she were floating just out of contact, or were, perhaps, simply going to sleep on her feet.

She began walking the streets without conscious direction, and she did not know how long she walked, or how far, except that it was a great distance and a long time. In the beginning the streets seemed to be broad and brightly lighted with many people on them, but later they became narrow and dark with hardly any people at all. Fragments stuck in her mind, places she had been and things she had seen, and she especially remembered afterward a very tall man in a blue and red uniform outside a swinging door, a bridge lighted at intervals by yellow bulbs above a giant whispering of black water, a stone bench in front of a cast-statue where she wished to sit and rest for a while but is not because she did not dare. And finally, after ages, she was on a narrow street outside an all-night diner, and she was absolutely too exhausted to walk any farther, and she desperately wanted something hot to drink.

There was a dark, fat man behind the counter in the diner. He looked like a Greek, she thought. He put a cup of coffee in front of her and walked away down the counter, where he stood idly, and after a while a young man came in and sat down and began to talk with the Greek. She had finished her coffee by this time and was thinking that she would have to go, although she didn’t know where, and then, for the first time, she realized that she had no money, not even enough to pay for the coffee she had drunk, no money at all. Oddly enough, considering what had happened to her and what might yet happen, her inability to pay for the coffee assumed the dimensions of an enormous problem. It was somehow essential for the coffee to be paid for, and perhaps it was because she must demonstrate that she was clever enough to take care of herself after all, in spite of what Lila had said. She looked from the corners of her eyes at the young man sitting on the stool down the counter. He was a shaggy, unkempt young man, his black hair growing on his neck, but there was a lost and dogged quality in his rather gaunt face that seemed to suggest his own aberrations at odds with the world, and she had the strangest and most incredible feeling that it might be possible to be his friend.

Acting with compulsive abruptness, she went down and asked him to pay for the coffee, but he was mean and chintzy after all, the son of a bitch, although he did claim later, after she had waited on the street for him to come out, that he had paid.

She waited for him for two good reasons. She needed a place to rest and get warm, which he might have and share, and she continued to feel strangely, regardless of his meanness about the coffee, that the two of them, she and he, had a common denominator in a general way, although certainly not exactly. And so she had waited, and she had come home with him, and here she was, and the crazy part of it, the monstrous and ugly joke of it, was why in the world she had gone to all the trouble.

Thinking she was dying, she had made herself live and had forgotten that living was not something she really cared to go on doing. Yes, it was funny, a great joke she had played on herself. Sitting on Henry Harper’s sofa, she lit the third of Henry Harper’s cigarettes and began to laugh at the joke. She laughed and laughed with a hard, internal laughter that shook her body and made her bind, but then she quit laughing and began to think calmly and rationally to determine if the joke might not yet be turned in her favor, the mistake of living corrected. What she should have done, of course, was to lie sensibly in her bed and let death come to her gently as it started, thanks to Lila, and it would have been all over by this time, the dying done, and she would not now have this day to live, nor any of the days after, but it was too late to think about that, what she should have done. What she had to think about now was what could yet be done, and it might be done very simply if only Henry Harper kept sedatives.

It seemed reasonable to assume that he might, a fellow who worked all hours and clearly had trouble sleeping. There was time enough, too. Plenty of time. It was still very early, Henry Harper had not slept more than three or four hours at the most and would certainly go on sleeping hours longer, and by the time he wakened it would have been time enough. Even if it hadn’t, even if he wakened too soon, he would probably think that she was only sleeping naturally and would let her go on sleeping until it was too late. If only, to begin with, he had the sedatives.

She got up and went into the bedroom. Henry Harper was lying as he had been before, face down across the bed with his arms outflung as it he were reaching in his sleep for the horizontal extremities of a cross. She went on into the little bathroom in the corner, where she looked carefully among other items for a bottle or a box that might contain what she wanted, but there was none. Sitting on the edge of the tub, she thought about using a razor blade on her wrist, for she understood that it could be done under water with little or no pain, but the idea was revolting and impossible, and then she saw the old-fashioned water heater in a corner with the gas ring underneath. She went back into the bedroom and opened its single window, and then she went in to the living room and opened its two, both of them overlooking the street, after which she returned to the bedroom and covered Henry Harper with a blanket that was folded at the foot of the bed. She did not think it was necessary, since time would not now be so important a factor, but she feared, nevertheless, that the cold air might waken him before she was ready, and it was just as well to take every precaution. In the tiny bathroom, she closed the door and stuffed toilet paper tightly in the cracks around it. This was meticulous work and took quite a bit of time, and it was with vast relief and satisfaction that she finally sat down on the floor beside the water heater and listened to the sound of gas pouring from two dozen holes into the room.

It did not enter her mind, not once, that she was doing Henry Harper a very bad turn.