Waltz Into Darkness

51

The discovery was catastrophically sudden, though it shouldn’t have been. One moment, they were affluent, he could afford to give her anything she wanted. The next, they were destitute, they could scarcely meet the cost of the immediate evening’s pleasure they had contemplated.

It shouldn’t have been as unforeseen as all that, he had to admit to himself; shouldn’t have taken them unaware like that. There had been no theft, save at his own hands; nothing like that. But there had been no replenishment either. A vanishing point was bound to be reached eventually. It had been imminent for some time, if he’d only taken the trouble to make inventory. But he hadn’t; perhaps he’d been afraid to, afraid in his own mind of the too-exact knowledge that he would have derived from such a summing up: the certainty of termination. Afraid of the chill that would have been cast upon their feasting, the shadow that would have dimmed their wine. There was always tomorrow, tomorrow, to make reckoning. And tomorrow, there was always tomorrow still. And meanwhile the music swelled, and the waltz whirled ever faster, giving no pause for breath.

He’d delved in each time, in haste, in negligence, without counting what was over. So long as there was something left, that was all that mattered. Something that would take care of the next time. And now that next time was the last time, and there was no next time beyond.

They’d been about to go out for the evening, swirls of sachet fanning out behind her like an invisible white peacock’s tail spread in flaunting gorgeousness, an electric tide of departure crackling about them, she stuffing frothy laced handkerchief within the collar of her gloves, he lingering behind a moment to pluck out gas jet after gas jet. She was sibilant in tangerine taffeta, flounced with bands of brown sealskin, orange willow plumes snaking like live tentacles upon her hat. She was already in the open doorway, thirsting to be gone, waiting a moment to allow him to overtake her and close the door after them, and grudging that moment’s wait.

“Have you enough money with you, lovey?” she asked companionably. And somehow made it sound entrancingly domestic; a wife being solicitous of her husband’s welfare, much as if she’d said “Are you warmly enough dressed?” or “Have you brought the latch key with you?”; though its ends were not domestic at all, but quite the reverse.

He consulted his money-fold.

“No, glad you reminded me,” he said. “I’ll have to get some more. I’ll only be a moment, I won’t keep you.”

“I don’t mind,” she assented graciously. “When you enter late, everyone has a better chance to take in what you’re wearing.”

She was still there by the door, idly tapping the furled sticks of her small dress-fan, secured by silken loop about her wrist, upon the opposite recipient palm, when he returned from the bedroom where he had gone.

When she saw him coming, she dipped her knees a graceful trifle, caught higher the spreading bottom of her dress, and reached behind her to grasp the doorknob, prepared to go, this time offering to close the door for him instead of him for her.

Then she saw his gait had changed, was hesitant, expiring, not as it had been when he went briskly in.

“What is it? Something wrong?”

He was holding two single bank notes in his hand, half extending them before him, as though not knowing what to do with them.

“This is all that’s left. This is all there is,” he said stupidly.

“You mean it’s missing, been taken?”

“No, we’ve used it all. We must have, but I didn’t know it. I could see it growing slimmer, but — I should have looked more closely. Each time I’d just reach in and— There always seemed to be some over. I didn’t know until this moment that — this was all it was—” He raised it helplessly, lowered it again.

He stood there without moving, looking at her now, not it, as if she could give him the answer he could not find for himself. She returned his look, but she said nothing. There was silence between them.

Her lips had parted, but in some sort of inward appraisal; they said no word. A little breath came through, in a soft, wordless “Oh” of understanding.

Her hand left the doorknob at last, and dropped down to its own level, against her side, with a little inert slap of frustration.

“What shall we do?” she said.

He didn’t answer.

“Does that mean we — can’t go now?”

He looked at her, still without answering. Surveyed her entire person, from head to toe. Saw how beautifully she’d arrayed herself, how perfect in every detail the finished artistic picture she was offering for presentation. Or rather, had intended to offer, if given opportunity.

Suddenly he swerved, reached purposefully — and defiantly — for his hat.

“I’ll ask for credit. We’ve spent enough by now, wherever it is we’ve gone; they should give us that.”

It was now she who didn’t move, remained poised there by the door. She looked thoughtfully downward at nothing there was to be seen. At last she shook her head slightly, a smile without mirth influencing her lips. “No,” she said. “It’s not the same. It would cast a pall, now, just knowing. And then they treat you with less respect, when you ask them. Or they commence to hound you within a few days, and you’re twice as badly off as before.”

She came away from the door. She closed it at last, but now before, and not behind, her. And she gave it a sort of fling away from her, in doing so; let it carry itself to its proper junction. He tried to make out if there was ill temper lurking in the gesture, and couldn’t tell for sure. It might have been nothing more than jaunty disregard, an attempt to show him she didn’t care whether she stayed or went. But even if there was no ill temper in it, the thought of ill temper was in his mind. So it had already appeared on the scene, in a way.

He watched her return, with indolent gait, to the seat before the mirror that she had occupied for the better part of an hour only just now. But now she gave her back to the glass, not her face. Now the former process was reversed. Now she rid herself, one by one, with limp gesture, of the accessories she had so zestfully attached to herself only a brief while ago. Her gloves fell, stringy, over her shoulder on the dressing table. Her untried fan atop them a moment later, its stylized, beguiling usage never given a chance to go into effect. Off came the tiny hat with orange willow feathers, she pitched it from her broadside (but not with violence, with philosophic riddance), and it fell upon the seat of a nearby chair. The plume tendrils fluctuated above it for a moment, like ocean-bottom vegetation stirring in deep water, then settled down over it.

“You may as well turn up the gas jets again,” she said dully, “as long as we’re staying in.”

She raised her feet, heels upward, one by one, and taking them from behind, plucked off the bronze satin slippers with their spool-shaped Louis XV heels, full three inches in length, a daring height but pardonable because of her own stature. And let them fall as they would, and set her stockinged soles back on the floor as they were.

And last of all, undoing some certain something behind her, she allowed her dress to widen and fall of its own looseness, but only down to her seated waist, and sat that way, half-in and half-out of it, in perfect disarray. Almost as if to make a point of it.

It did something to him, to watch her undo that completed work of art she had so deftly and so painstakingly achieved. More than any spoken reproaches could have, it implicitly rebuked him.

Hands grounded in pockets, he looked down at the floor and felt small and humbled.

She took off the string of pearls that had clasped her throat and, allowing them to drizzle together, tossed them in air as if weighing them and finding them wanting, caught them in her palm.

“Will these help? You can have them if they will.”

His face whitened, as if with some deep inward incision. “Bonny!” he commanded her tautly. “Don’t ever say anything like that to me again.”

“I meant nothing by it,” she said placatingly. “You paid better than a hundred for them, didn’t you? I only thought—”

“When I buy you a thing, it’s yours.”

They were silent for a while, their lines of gaze in opposite directions. He looking toward the window, and the impersonal, aloof evening outside. She toward the door, and (perhaps) the beckoning evening outside that.

She lit a cigar after a while. Then said in immediate compunction, “Oh, I forgot. You don’t like me to do that.” And turned to discard it.

“Don’t put it out,” he said absently. “Finish it if you like.”

She extinguished it nevertheless.

Turning back, she reared one knee high before her, clasped her hands about it, settled comfortably backward. Then instantly, and again with contrition, she dissolved the pose once more. “Oh, I forgot. You don’t like me to do that either.”

“That was before, when you were supposed to be Julia,” he said. “It’s different now.”

Suddenly he looked at her with redoubled closeness, as if wondering belatedly if this was some new indirect way of chiding him: reminding him of his past criticism of her faults. Her face seemed plotless enough, however. She didn’t even seem to see him looking at her. The edges of her trivial mouth were curved upward in placid contentment.

“I’m sorry, Bonny,” he said at last.

She returned her attention to him, from wherever it had strayed. “I don’t mind,” she said evenly. “I’ve had this happen to me before. For you, it’s your first time; that makes it hard.”

“You haven’t had any supper,” he said presently. “And it’s nearing eight.”

“That’s right,” she agreed cheerfully. “We can still eat. Can’t we?”

Again he wondered if that was an indirect jibe; again it seemed to be only in his mind. But at least it was there in his mind; it must have come from somewhere.

She got up and went over to the wall and took down the pneumatic speaking-tube. She blew through the orifice and a whistling sound went traveling far downward, to its destination below.

“Will you send up a waiter,” she said. “We’re in Suite 12.”

When the man had arrived, she ordered, taking precedence over Durand.

“Bring us something small,” she said. “We’re not very hungry. A mutton chop apiece would do very nicely. No soup, no sweet—”

Again Durand’s eyes sought out her face to see if that was meant for him, that ironic emphasis. But hers were not to be met.

“Will that be all, madam?”

“And, oh yes, one thing more. Bring us up a deck of cards, along with the tray. We’re staying in this evening.”

“What’d you want those for?” Durand asked, as soon as the door had closed.

She turned to him and smiled quite sweetly. “To play double solitaire,” she said. “I’ll teach you the game. There’s nothing like it for passing the time.”

His reaction didn’t come at once. It was slow, it didn’t materialize for some four or five minutes.

Then suddenly he picked up a bisque ornament from the center table and heaved it with all his strength, mouth knotted, and shattered it against the wall opposite him.

She must have been used to violence. She scarcely turned a hair, her eyelids barely rose enough to let her see what it had been.

“They’ll charge us for that, Lou. We can’t afford it now.”

“I’m going to New Orleans tomorrow,” he said, thick-voiced with truculence. “I’m taking the first train out. You wait for me here. I’ll have money for you again, you’ll see. I’ll raise it from Jardine.”

Her eyes were wider open now, but whether any deeper with concern, could not have been told. “No!” she said aghast. “You can’t go near there. You mustn’t. We’re wanted. They’ll catch you.”

“Rather that than go on here this way, living like a dog.”

Now she smiled a real smile, beaming-bright; no sweet pale copy like a stencil on her lips. “That’s my Lou,” she purred, velvet smooth, her voice velvet warm. “That was the right answer. I love a man that takes chances.”