Waltz Into Darkness

42

Without raising her eyes, she smiled covertly, showing she was well aware that his gaze was lingering on her, there in the little sitting room outside their bedroom. Studying her like an elusive lesson; a lesson that seems simple enough at first glance, but is never to be fully learned, though the student goes back to it again and again.

“What are you thinking?” she teased, keeping her eyes still downcast.

“Of you.”

She took that for granted. “I know. But what, of me?”

He sat down beside her, at the foot of the chaise longue, tilted his knee, hugged it, and cast his eyes upon her more speculatively than ever. Shaking his head a little, as if in wonderment himself, that this should be so.

“I used to want what they call a good wife. That was the only kind I ever thought I’d have. A proper little thing who’d sit demurely, working a needle through a hoop, both feet planted on the floor. Head submissively lowered to her task, who’d look up when I spoke and ‘Aye’ and ‘Nay’ me. But now I don’t. Now I only want a wife like you. With yesterday’s leftover dye still on her cheeks. With the tip of her bent knee poked brazenly through her dressing gown. With cigar ashes on the floor about her. Jeering at a man in their most private moments, egging him on, then ridiculing him, rather than swooning limp into his arms.” He shook his head, more helplessly than ever. “Bonny, Bonny, what have you done to me? Though I still know you should be like that, like those others are, I don’t want anyone like that any more. I’ve forgotten there are any. I only want you; bad as you are, heartless as you are, exactly as you are, I only want you.”

Her tarnished golden laughter welled up, showered down upon the two of them like counterfeit coins.

“Lou, you’re so gullible. There aren’t two kinds of women; there never were, there never will be. Only one kind of woman, one kind of man— And both of them, alike, not much good.” Her laughter had stopped; her face was tired and wise, and there was a little flicker of bitterness, as she said the last.

“Lou,” she repeated, “you’re so — unaware.”

“Are you sure that’s the word you had in mind?”

“Innocent,” she agreed.

“Innocent?” he parried wryly.

“A woman’s innocence is like snow on a hot stove; it’s gone at the first touch. But when a man is innocent, he can have had ten wives, and he’s as innocent at the end of them all as he was at the beginning. He never learns.”

He shivered feverishly. “I know you drive me mad. At least I’ve learned that much.”

She threw herself backward on the couch, her head hanging over so that she was looking behind her toward the ceiling, in a sort of floundering luxuriance. She extended her arms widely upward in a greedy, grasping, ecstatic V. Her voice was a dreamy chant of longing.

“Lou, buy me a new dress. All white satin and Chantilly lace. Lou, buy me a great big emerald for my pinkey. Buy me diamond drops for my ears. Take me out in a carriage to twelve o’clock supper at some lobster palace. I want to look at the chandelier lights through the layers of colored liqueurs in a pousse café. I want to feel champagne trickle down my throat while the violins play gypsy music. I want to live, I want to live, I want to live! The time is so short, and I won’t get a second turn—”

Then, as her fear of infinity, her mistrust that Providence would look out for her if left to its own blind course — for it was that at bottom, that and nothing else — were caught by him in turn, and he was kindled into a like fear and defiance of their fate, he bent swiftly toward her, his lips found hers, and her litany of despair was stilled.

Until, presently, she sighed: “No, don’t take me anywhere— You’re here, I’m here— The champagne, the music are right here with us— Everything’s here— No need to look elsewhere—”

And her arms dropped, closed over him like the trap they were.