Desperate Asylum

Section 1

Emerson Page thought about the girl waiting upstairs, and wished very much that he was up there with her. The girl’s name was Edwina and Emerson’s thinking of her was always pleasant and frequently glandular.

Edwina, whose name was lovingly abbreviated to Ed, was Emerson’s wife, and at this moment he was wanting her very much, and he knew that she wanted him also. He regretted that this was not possible, or at least not practicable at the moment, but he consoled himself with the assurance that it would later be both.

The time was eight o’clock of a Saturday night in November. The place was the kitchen of a small restaurant and bar of distinction, of which Emerson was owner, in the town of Corinth, which was not in Greece. Emerson stepped out of the kitchen, where he had just eaten his own dinner, into the dining room, where he stopped and looked around and was conscious of a familiar warm diffusion of pride in his work and his accomplishment. It was not a large dining room, but it was relaxed and pleasant and good for the digestion. The napery was snowy. The silver and crystal caught and reflected the light from the ceiling. The woodwork was fine walnut, shining softly as satin. On the beige carpet from wall to wall, the footsteps of patrons and waitresses fell without sound. It was a nice room, and he had raised it like an only child from a short-order diner, and he was very proud.

Moving slowly, he skirted the room, nodding and smiling to guests at dinner, and turned under an arch into the bar. Here, light had been reduced even more than in the dining room, and he stood for a moment just inside the archway while the pupils of his eyes dilated in adjustment. A couple of men occupied stools. At a table in the rear, a man and a woman were drinking Manhattans. The woman reached over and lifted the cherry by its stem from the man’s glass. The man said something and the woman laughed, putting the cherry daintily between white teeth. Beyond the man and the woman, in an automatic coin machine with its volume carefully modulated, a platter was spinning out under a needle the reproduction of a throaty female voice: Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover.

He listened to the voice, still thinking of Ed, and he knew that he would never want her to let him go. Never in the world. Thinking of her, he could see her. Upstairs in the apartment, as he had recently left her, wearing the red velvet toreador pants that were enough to excite the bull in any normal male. Curled up in the biggest chair in the room under a reading lamp, concentrating with childish intensity on one of her interminable books. Books were an obsession with her. Books on history and art and literature and all such heavy stuff as that. Even books on psychology. Stuff about what made you do things. Her hunger to know things was created by an early and deeply instilled feeling of inadequacy that was a result of her never having finished high school.

“My God,” he’d said, “that was a long time ago. By now you probably know more than half the God-damn college professors in the country.”

“Well,” she’d answered, “after a while I may know more than the other half. Only I don’t. Know more than almost anyone, I mean. I have such a hell of a time remembering the stuff. It makes me simply furious.”

He stood very quietly, thinking and smiling, hoping that she would come down to have a drink with him before the night was gone. They would have a martini apiece, maybe two or three, and then they would go upstairs together, and it would be very wonderful, as it always was. It was a fine thing to have a wife you kept right on loving and wanting. It was a fine, lucky thing, and it didn’t happen to every man.

Walking across the room, he crawled onto a stool at the lower end of the bar where it curved around to the wall. Roscoe Dooley, the bartender, came down on the inside and said, “Good-evening, Em. Drink?”

Roscoe was more than an employee. He was an old friend. Even more than that. Emerson thought of him as an early benefactor, one of the people on Earth to whom he owed something. Time was, as a matter of fact, when their positions had been reversed. Roscoe had been the employer, Emerson the employee. But that was a long time ago, or seemed like a long time, before the second World War, in another world. Roscoe had then owned an owl diner across town near the high school. He had given Emerson a job and had sometimes read poetry to him.

In response to the question, Emerson shook his head. “No, thanks, Roscoe. It’s too early.”

Roscoe looked past him through the archway into the room of damask and silver and shining crystal where people talked softly and walked soundlessly and fed themselves well.

“It looks like a good night,” he said.

“Saturdays are always good.”

“It’s a long way from the old diner.”

“Quite a way.”

“I think a lot about then. How it was and everything.”

“So do I.”

“You were a smart kid. Quiet and smart. I always knew you were going someplace.”

“I haven’t gone much of anyplace, Roscoe. Just a restaurant and bar downtown.”

He didn’t really feel that way about it. It was a violation of his pride in what he had wanted to do and had done, and it pleased him to hear Roscoe deny it.

“It’s a fine place. It’s got character.”

“Say it again, Roscoe. You’re good for me. You’re good for my ego.”

“It’s true, anyhow. Almost anyone could operate a place to eat and drink. A lousy filling station. It takes someone like you to give a place the kind of character you’ve given this place. I couldn’t have done it. Not ever. I stayed out in the old diner for almost twenty years, and I’d still be there if you hadn’t come and got me out and given me this job.”

“It’s Ed’s character, not mine. I probably wouldn’t be here myself if it hadn’t been for her.”

Roscoe’s face got soft. He loved Ed in a way that went with his age. It made him happy to look at her and smell her and maybe touch her fingers when he handed her a drink.

“She’s a sweet girl,” he said. “I’m glad you married. Ed.”

“You should have married a girl like Ed yourself.”

“Me? Why the hell would a girl like Ed want to marry someone like me? I’m just a bum. Besides, there weren’t any girls like Ed when I was young enough to be interested, and I’ve never seen another one like her since then, either.”

Roscoe was in one of his gloomy periods. He was looking back and wishing things had been different for him. Emerson tried to think of something to say, but he couldn’t, and just then a patron got onto a stool down the line, so it wasn’t necessary to keep on trying. Roscoe went to get the order, and Emerson slipped off his stool and walked up to the big front window. He drew the drapes apart a little and stood looking out into the street.

It had begun to snow. Great flakes descended lazily from darkness into the light of the street lamps and shop windows to make a thin, white cover for this street of Corinth. Watching the slow and silent transformation of his town, Emerson felt his quiet happiness swell within him and become for a moment an enjoyable pain. He had lived all his life in Corinth and would not have considered living anyplace else. He liked the town, and the town liked him, and he had been successful in it. Not that everything had come easily. His father had died when he was very young, leaving enough insurance to pay for a funeral and retire a small mortgage on a house that was getting old and hadn’t been much when it was new, and Emerson started earlier than most boys to work at odd jobs. He delivered the local paper, The Corinth Reporter, and when he was finally able to buy a bicycle he began delivering parcels for various small merchants who didn’t have enough business to maintain a regular service.

At the age of sixteen, the year before the war began, he got a job working in an owl diner from six to midnight. This was the diner owned by Roscoe Dooley, a man of unsuspected sensitivity and compassion. He felt that he had lost his way in life, and this had created in him a kind of gentle resignation instead of the bitterness that often comes to people who feel that way. He didn’t have much of anything to do in the evenings after Emerson relieved him in the diner, and so he often stayed on until nine or ten o’clock, sitting in a canvas lawn chair behind the counter and reading the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson. Sometimes, when there were no customers on the little stools on the other side, he read some of the poetry aloud to Emerson. Emerson thought the poetry was very beautiful, especially the way Roscoe read it, but he couldn’t understand why anyone should feel as bad about everything as this Robinson did...

Emerson liked his job in the diner, and he began to think about having a diner of his own. He was very good with food, and after a while Roscoe began to let him make a few changes in a menu that hadn’t changed in ten years, except that the chili was omitted when the weather got hot. He began to save a little money, though not much, and he had it all planned how he would buy an old coach from the railroad and fix it up with booths and have it moved onto a spot of ground where the trade would be good. But all this was spoiled by the war. While he was in the army, his mother died and he came home briefly on leave to see her buried beside the father he could hardly remember, and there was no time, as there never was in those days, for more than a gesture of mourning, the slightest concession to grief. To tell tie truth, his mother had been a tired, morose woman for many years, and he had admired her courage and respected her position, but had never loved her greatly.

Two years later, on the island of Leyte, he was hit in the right leg by a machinegun bullet while he was going up the slope of a ridge one wet, gray dawn. The bone was broken, and while he lay patiently in the rain until a medic could get to him, the mortar platoon that was supporting the attack from the rear dropped half a dozen short rounds on their own men, which was something that happened more often than is generally admitted, and he picked up a couple pieces of shrapnel in addition to the bullet, one of which broke the same leg in another place. He was left with a bad limp, but in compensation for this he was released early from the army and received a small pension.

Back in Corinth, he sold the house his mother had left and got much more for it than he had expected because of the inflated value of real estate. With the money from the house to invest and the pension to help carry him through the hard time of getting started, he was able to do a little better than an old railway coach. He rented a narrow building next door to a bowling alley and opened a diner. He served only short-orders, but the food was good, and maybe he got some breaks besides, but for whatever reasons there were, he did well and made some money. And all the time he kept thinking about the kind of place he really wanted to own, a small restaurant and bar of distinction where good people came for good food and good drinks. A place of integrity, he called it in his mind.

It was not long before there was more work than he could do by himself in the diner next door to the bowling alley. He had a boy who washed dishes, but he needed someone to help him with the short-orders behind the counter and to serve the four booths along the opposite wall, and he decided that it would be good for business to have a pretty girl. He put an ad in The Reporter, and half a dozen girls answered it, but the last two were wasting their time, because the fourth was Edwina, and she was just what he wanted. As a waitress, of course. That was what he kept telling himself, anyhow, and he honestly tried to convince himself that it was true. But after a while, in spite of his efforts, he had to admit that he also wanted her another way, and a little while after that he had her. It happened in the diner one night after the dishwasher was gone and the door was locked, and it was a thoroughly co-operative and satisfactory performance.

After it was over, he drew two cups of coffee and handed her one. He was pleasantly surprised to see that she looked as good to him now as she had before, which was something that had never been true with anyone else at any other time. She took the cup of coffee and set it down and combed fingers through dark hair that was thick and almost straight, curling only a little at the ends. She wore it pretty long then, almost to the shoulders, which was the fashion. Her white uniform, re-donned, fitted her slender body snugly.

“I’ll get the cream out of the refrigerator,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I forgot you use cream.”

She got the cream and put some in her coffee. She used a lot of it. The color of the coffee after the cream was in it, he noticed, was almost exactly the same color as her skin.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

“Done what?”

“You know. What I just got through doing.”

“It wasn’t you. It was us.”

“It was my fault, though. I started it.”

“Did you? That’s what men always think.”

“I’ve been trying not to do it. The trouble is, you’re so damn pretty.”

“Thank you. Have you really wanted to before?”

“Lots of times.”

“Why haven’t you, then?”

“Because you’re a good girl. Does that sound corny? Because I can’t get married or anything for quite a while yet.”

“Don’t be silly. I don’t expect you to marry me.”

“I wouldn’t blame you if you did.”

“Do you think a fellow ought to marry the first girl he makes love to?”

“Well, not necessarily. This isn’t my first time. I’ll admit that.”

“If a fellow married the first girl, I’d already be married. Would you like that?”

“No, I wouldn’t. I never thought about it like that. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even think about its having happened to you before.”

“Well, you’re pretty green for a fellow who talks so big, I must say. Couldn’t you tell?”

“I guess I could have told if I’d thought about it.”

“All right. Now you can quit thinking about it.”

“I don’t think I want to quit. You’re the prettiest gill I’ve ever seen.”

“Being pretty isn’t enough. A girl has to be smart to keep a man interested.”

“You’re smart enough.”

“No, I’m not. I’m not smart at all. I’m ignorant. I didn’t even finish high school.”

“Finishing high school doesn’t make you smart. Lots of dumb kids finish high school.”

“Just the same, anyone ought to finish high school, at least. I’ll bet you finished.”

“Well, I just did. I never went to college or anything. I went into the army instead.”

“You could have gone after you got out. On the GI Bill.”

“I didn’t want to go.”

“Don’t you ever wish you had?”

“No. There’s something else I want to do.”

“What?”

“I want to have a restaurant and bar downtown. A nice place people will come to and talk about and come back to.”

“That would be fun. Someday you’ll have a place like that, too. Sooner than you think, maybe. May I come and work there?”

“Probably you won’t even want to. Probably you’ll be married to a millionaire by that time.”

He drank some coffee. It had got cold, so he went over and poured it down the drain beneath the water tap and drew some hot from the urn.

“More coffee?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

He carried his own cup back to where she was and set it down and let it start getting cold like the other. The flush of color was still in her cheeks that had risen there in the excitement earlier.

“Who were the others?” he said.

“Others?”

“The ones before me.”

“What difference does it make? It had nothing to do with you then.”

“I know. I guess I’m jealous.”

“You shouldn’t be. If you’d been there, it wouldn’t have happened. Except with you, I mean. Anyhow, it wasn’t others. It was just other.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better. It makes him sound like someone special, whoever he was.”

“I thought he was special, but it turned out he wasn’t.”

“What happened to him?”

“It was during the war. He went into the army and didn’t come back.”

“Killed?”

“No. I don’t think so. He just didn’t come back.”

“Were you sorry?”

“I was glad. I didn’t want him to get killed, but I didn’t want him to come back, either.”

He picked up his cup and hers and carried them to the sink.

“I’ll take you home,” he said.

“You don’t have to. I can go alone.”

“I want to do it.”

“All right. If you really want to.”

She lived with her mother in a house that was about two miles from the diner, and he said he would get a taxi, but she said she would rather walk, so they did. At the house it happened again, and it hadn’t lost anything, and afterward he walked back to town to his own room and sat there thinking about her. He looked down from his window into the street and watched a policeman walk slowly along the other side. The policeman stopped to rattle the door of each shop to see if it was locked, and after he had passed, the street was empty for a long time. Then there was a drunk who got too close to the curb and slipped off and fell in the gutter and got up and stayed in the gutter and walked carefully to the corner and out of sight across the intersection. The street was empty again for a while, after which there was a taxi going one way and a milk truck going the other, and by that time Emerson had decided that he would marry Edwina, not because of what they had done, because he felt like he had to, but just because it was something he wanted.

The next day when she came to work he told her. “Are you sure?” she said.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

“Why?”

“Because I love you. I thought about you all night, and it hurt, and I kept wanting you.”

“Still? Even after—?”

“Yes.”

“I’m glad.”

“Was it the same with you?”

“It’s the same with everyone when they’re in love.”

“I can’t understand how it happened to you. With a guy like me. You could get almost anyone if you tried.”

“Well, silly, I don’t want almost anyone. I want you.”

“But why?”

“I don’t want to pick it apart. Maybe because you’re a shrewd guy who will have a nice restaurant and bar downtown that people will go to and talk about and go back to. Maybe because you’ve got a funny, ugly face that makes me feel excited. I wish I were smarter. I wish I had gone to high school and even college. Then people would say what a brilliant wife Emerson Page has. Everyone would say what a lucky fellow Emerson Page is to have a wife like that.”

“That’s what they’ll say anyhow. They see what you look like, they won’t care if you’ve ever been through high school, or any school at all.”

“No, really. I want to know things. I think everyone has a kind of obligation to read books and develop his intelligence and all that, don’t you?”

He hadn’t thought about it at all, but he said he agreed with her. He thought she was very cute when she talked like that. Now that he had made up his mind, he wanted to get married right away.

“Let’s close the diner and go down to the City Hall and get a license,” he said.

“Do you really want to? Don’t you want to think about it? It would be all right if you changed your mind.”

“No, I don’t want to think about it anymore. I want to get married.”

“We’ll have to wait three days. It’s the law.”

“The hell it is! Why?”

“We’ll have to take blood tests and things. You got anything catching, honey?”

“Not that I know of. You never can tell, of course, with a wild guy like me.”

“Oh, sure. You’re wild, all right. You couldn’t even tell about me.”

“Well, I thought you were decent. You know how some girls can fool a guy. How the hell was I supposed to know you were promiscuous?”

“Listen. You sound like someone who’s changing his mind. Maybe we’d better hurry down to City Hall and get that license before you talk yourself out of it.”

“I’m not going to talk myself out of anything.”

“All right, then. Let’s go.”

They did. They locked the diner and went down to the City Hall and got a license and waited three days and got married. After that they found a large room with a bath above a clothing store for forty dollars a month and moved into it, and everything was remarkably wonderful, and neither of them regretted what they had done or wished for a minute that they hadn’t done it. From the bed in the room, they could read the neon identification of a shabby funeral parlor across the street, and they sometimes lay there quietly and talked about dying, and how it would be to be dead, and how neither of them would want to live without the other now that they knew what having each other was like. Beyond the funeral parlor in the sky, they could see the brighter wash of light from the better downtown area, and they talked about the restaurant and bar they would have there, the place of integrity, and he began to understand after a while that her mind was much more daring and decisive than his.

“How much money do you have?” she said.

“A couple thousand,” he answered.

“All right. Take the two thousand. You’ve never used your loan rights under the GI Bill. Add that. We could mortgage the house my mother’s living in. It belongs to her, of course, but she’d borrow on it if I asked her. Add that. It would come to something, honey. A lot of money. What I mean is, why wait? We could have the place right now. Right now, Em!”

Her voice in talking about it acquired a desperate urgency, as if they might die tomorrow and lose all of their chances forever, and it frightened him a little.

“I don’t know, Ed. Maybe it’s too soon.”

“It’s not too soon! It’s not, it’s not!”

“We’d need a lot of luck.”

“Sure, we would. And we’d get it. Our kind of luck, Em. Good luck.”

She was irresistible, so they finally did it, and they had the luck. They found the building in the place they wanted, and they sank over ten grand in it right away, and people came to it and came back, and every year they sank more and made it better, and it made money for them and made them happy, and at last they had it securely, and, best of all, they had each other and would go right on having each other until it was time to find out how it was to be dead.

And now, at this time in the place of integrity, he stood at the window and watched the snow falling, and remembered all these things that had happened, and saw Avery Lawes get out of his black Caddy at the curb and cross the sidewalk to the door.

Section 2

Letting the drapes fall together across his view of the street, he turned and watched Avery come through the door and shake the snow from his hat. He had known Avery for as long as he could remember, as one boy is likely to know another in a town of thirty thousand. Avery was the last of the Laweses, the first family of Corinth since the beginning of Time — which was, in the minds of those who cared, the beginning of Corinth — and he lived now, as the family had always lived, in a big house of red brick on High Street above the river. In spite of social position, however, Avery had always been a pretty good kid by the standards of kids. He had gone to public school like the others, had always been rather shy and withdrawn, displaying sometimes an appealing eagerness to be liked and accepted. A handsome boy, he was now a handsome man, slender and graceful, as if he’d been specially tutored in the proper way to hold himself and to walk and to gesture restrainedly with his hands. He talked slowly and precisely and softly because of an impediment in his speech which showed up to embarrass him if he got careless.

People in Corinth wondered when Avery would get married. Ambitious mothers with eligible daughters were especially concerned, and most of the daughters themselves would have been happy to sign a contract to share his four-poster. He had, they felt, a moral obligation to procreate that was beyond the ordinary. Alone now, the only surviving Lawes, he held the family name in toto on the dark brink of extinction. And he wasn’t getting any younger. He was Emerson’s age, thirty; not that Avery seemed to be worried about it, or even conscious of it in any way of special significance. He was seldom in the company of women, or any company at all, and though he had acquired, since the death of his father in late summer, the habit of coming in Emerson’s place two or three times a week for dinner and at odd times for drinks at the bar, he was invariably alone.

Watching him hang his coat and hat on the rack by the door and move toward the bar, Emerson had a faint, fleeting impression of something read or heard, something almost remembered but not quite. A word, a phrase, a voice in his brain like a whisper. He stood quietly by the window and tried to bring it back, and slowly it came, or they came, the time and the place and the voice and its words. The old diner in the old days, and Roscoe reading Robinson behind the counter. Reading aloud the brief and beautiful fragment in rhyme that told how a man had gone home one night and shot himself. A man named Richard Cory. A man imperially slim. That was the phrase. Imperially slim. Those were the words heard from then to now because of Avery Lawes. Seeing Avery move and take a stool and speak to Roscoe, he thought that they fitted well.

Roscoe put ice in a glass and poured Scotch over the ice. Avery lifted the glass and drank. Emerson left the window and walked over to Avery and sat down on the stool beside him.

“Good evening, Mr. Lawes.”

Avery turned his head and smiled. “Hello, Em. What’s with the mister?”

“Just standard propriety.”

“Nuts. Have a drink?”

“Thanks. They’re on the house, though. Bourbon, Roscoe.”

Roscoe supplied the bourbon and went away. The good whiskey, undiluted, was mellow on the tongue, the warmth of it creeping centrifugally from the stomach. The first drink is always the best, Emerson thought, and with the thought was the awareness that it was not, with Avery, the first. Nor, probably, the second or third. His voice and movement had the carefully contained quality that is evidence of deliberate control, and there was a laxness in his mouth, a thin fog in his eyes. Lifting his glass again, he drained it and sat looking down at the uncovered cubes.

“You’ve got a nice place, Em,” he said. “You’re a lucky guy.”

“Me? Well, I guess so. I guess I’ve had my share of luck. Compared to a lot who have had less, that is. Not compared to you, though. I shouldn’t think you’d be impressed.”

“Why not? You’ve done something, at least. I’ve never done anything. Maybe it’s because I’ve never felt the necessity of doing anything.”

“Is that bad?”

“Oh, I know.” Avery laughed and beckoned Roscoe. “I sound like a God-damn soap opera or something. Poor little rich boy and all that crap. Well, it’s not the money. Money’s a pretty damn handy thing to have, and It’ll admit it. Another drink? On me this time.”

“I haven’t finished this one yet.”

“Well, finish it and have another. Two of the same, Roscoe.”

Roscoe glanced at Emerson and received a nod. He filled the order and went away again. All but two of the stools at the bar were now occupied, and a girl had come in from the dining room to handle the tables and booths. The couple who had been drinking Manhattans were still drinking them. The woman had lined up cherry stems in a little row on the table to keep account of the number, and now she counted the stems and laughed, touching each stem with a fingertip and looking up and across at her escort slyly through her lashes. Watching her reflection in the mirror behind the bar, Emerson could see that she was quite drunk and would be more so but would probably not be offensive about it. The man, he thought, was probably in for an interesting evening.

He finished his first bourbon and worked a little on his second. The rocks, he noticed, were already out of the Scotch. Avery was looking at them as if he were wondering what had caused them to emerge so quickly. Emerson considered suggesting that Avery take it easy and decided that it was not his business. You could never tell how someone, even a gentleman like Avery, would react to something like that. Men were often sensitive about their capacity. But perhaps it would be possible to make the suggestion indirectly, in a way that would not be obvious.

“Snowing pretty hard,” he said. “Supposed to get about four inches, I understand. That much in the streets will make driving pretty tough.”

“Maybe. Forecasters are wrong half the time. You can’t rely on them.”

“That’s true, all right. At least it seems like it. I guess you just remember the times they were wrong, though, and forget about all the times they were right.”

“Wrong half the time. Absolutely can’t rely on them.”

“Well, it looks now as if this might be one of the times they’ll hit it. I was looking out the window when you came in, and it was coming down pretty good then.”

“Yes. I hate snow. Hate the cold. Hate the cold, dark winter. I’m just like a God-damn something or other. Don’t know just what I mean. Something that becomes like whatever’s around it. The environment. The weather and everything. Too damn sensitive. Day’s cold and dark, so am I. Inside, I mean. Come to think of it, however, I’m pretty damn cold and dark inside even if the day isn’t.”

“Oh, come off it. You’re just feeling lousy about something.”

“Indigestion, maybe? Something I ate? Well, you’re wrong. It couldn’t be that because I haven’t eaten anything. Just been drinking. Off and on, sort of. I got up this morning, and the thought came into my head. This would be a good day to drink, I thought. So I have been. Scotch. Never mix it. Just Scotch.”

“You don’t look like you’d been drinking all day.”

“Not like a tramp? That’s the Lawes in me. A Lawes always keeps up appearances. Part of the creed. Drilled into us from the cradle. You remember when I was a kid? When we were in school together? Tell me. What did you think of me then? Straight. Really what you thought.”

“Well, I thought you were a pretty good kid. Not snotty like a rich kid might be. Well, just a pretty good kid, I mean, just like the rest of us.”

“Wrong again. I wasn’t a pretty good kid at all. Not like the rest of you. Not like any good kid that ever lived. Truth is, I was a nasty little bastard. All screwed up. Deceptive as hell. Appearances. The God-damn Lawes in me. You believe that?”

“All I can say is, you certainly didn’t seem that way to me.

“Of course not. I told you. Never seem like you really are. It’s the creed. I was a nasty kid, I tell you. A perfectly foul kid. Still am, of course. Not a kid, but perfectly foul. All screwed up. You don’t grow out of a thing like that. It just grows with you. Gets bigger to fit. You like another bourbon?”

“No, thanks. I think I’ll just work on this one awhile.”

“Think I’ll have another. Scotch. Soon as Roscoe gets time. Busy tonight. Cold, dark night. Snowing. Everyone drinking to keep out the cold. Roscoe won’t look, damn it. Too busy.”

“Never mind. I’ll get it for you.”

Emerson went around behind the bar and put ice cubes in a clean glass and poured Scotch over them and pushed the glass across the bar. He wished Avery would quit talking the way he was. Ordinarily Avery was a very reticent guy, but the Scotch had let his inhibitions down, and if he remembered later the things he’d said, he’d be embarrassed as hell and would feel uneasy the next time he and Emerson met, and maybe he’d just quit coming into the restaurant and bar at all. Emerson wouldn’t like that Not just because of the loss of patronage, the profit. He liked Avery, really, and he wanted him to keep on coming in and enjoying himself. That was the biggest satisfaction in running a place like this. It sounded phony, but it was true.

He went back around to his stool and got on.

“You ever been to Miami?” Avery said.

“No. Up till recently, I never had the money. Now I’ve got the money, I don’t have the time.”

“It’s warm in Miami. Sun shining on the beach. Not cold and dark. Not snowing. You ever lie on the beach in the sun and feel like something was boiling out of you? All the poison inside seeping out your pores. Like creosote out of a railroad tie in the summer. Remember that from when I was a kid. Nasty little bastard. You had the feeling?”

“The only feeling I ever had on any beach was fear. In the war. Except for those times, I’ve never been on a beach. We’ll have to take time for Miami one of these days; Ed and I.”

“You ought to do it. Come with me if you want to. But I don’t suppose you would. Of course not. Why should you?”

“You going to Miami?”

“Tomorrow. Driving down in the Caddy. Going tomorrow.”

“Some guys have all the luck, lying around on a sunny beach while the rest of us are wading through snow.”

“Got to go. Got to get myself cleaned out. Now or never. Realize it now.”

“Well, it ought to be fun.”

“Not going for fun. For therapy. What they call it. Nasty damn word.”

“How long you going to stay?”

“In Miami? Don’t know. Going on someplace from there, I think. Thinking of Havana. Never been there. Probably Mexico City, though. Store the Caddy and fly. You ever been to Mexico City?”

“No.”

“I was there once. Long time ago. Went with my mother and father. Just a little kid. All I can remember is Chapultepec Park. Odd about that. Can’t remember anything else, but I can remember all sorts of things about Chapultepec Park. Vendors. Hundreds of them. Selling all sorts of things. Balloons and colored bottles. Stuff to eat. Fruit, cheese, all kinds of nuts. Coconuts all over the place. Thin cakes you ate with some kind of hot seasoning. Pepper sauce, I guess. Hot as fire. Big lake there. Lots of cypress trees. And a castle. Chapultepec Castle. Man who would draw your picture in charcoal for a few cents. Artist. Probably lots of them around, but I only remember this one. He did a picture of me. Squat, dark man with a long mustache that stuck straight out to the sides. Must have been ten inches from tip to tip. Pocked skin. Ugly devil, to be truthful about it. I’ve still got the picture at home. The one he drew. Not very good, really.”

“You remember a hell of a lot, if you ask me.”

“Just about Chapultepec Park. Nothing else. We didn’t stay long. My mother went to bed with a Mexican musician, and my father brought us home. I didn’t know about the musician until later. Much later. Wondered at the time why the old man brought us home in such a hell of a hurry.”

Emerson was startled. He remembered Avery’s mother, a tall woman with golden hair who had died young. It had been long ago that she died, and his remembrance of her had lasted only because of her great beauty. She had seemed to him proud and arrogant. He couldn’t imagine her going to bed with a Mexican musician or with anyone else for pleasure. He wondered if Avery could be making it up. Maybe too much Scotch made a liar of him. It was hard to believe of Avery, but you had to admit that too much to drink sometimes did odd things to unlikely people.

He got off the stool and put a hand for a second on Avery’s arm.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I think I’d better float awhile.”

“Of course. Business first. See you later, Em.”

“Sure.”

“That trip to Miami. You and Ed riding along, I mean. Really meant it, you know.”

“Thanks, Avery. We couldn’t possibly make it, though.”

“No. Thought not. Well, better go float, Em. Duty of proprietor.”

“That’s right. And thanks just the same about Miami.” He walked up to the front window and looked out into the street again. It was still snowing, and a wind had come up. The flakes no longer drifted through the light lazily, but were driven through on a tangent, and the snow already lying on the pavement was whipped up by the wind in thin, swirling clouds. A car passed slowly with flapping wipers. Avery’s black Caddy at the curb, facing into the wind, had acquired a drift against the windshield. It looked like they would get their four inches at least. Maybe more.

Emerson turned and walked into the dining room and through the dining room into the kitchen. They were almost finished serving in the dining room, and in the kitchen they were cleaning and polishing and getting ready to wrap it up for the night. Looking at his watch, he saw that it was a few minutes after ten. He wondered if Ed would come down for the drink. He hadn’t suggested it when he’d left her, and now he wished that he had. He wanted her to come very badly, and his need for her seemed to have something to do with Avery’s quiet drunkenness, but he couldn’t understand why that should be. He didn’t want to go on thinking about Avery, but he couldn’t help it. The truth seemed to be that Avery was very lonely and very unhappy about something. It was even more than unhappiness, really. A kind of despair. Sometimes a guy really gave himself away when whiskey let his inhibitions down. Sometimes you found out things that surprised the hell out of you. The truth was, it was a little disturbing. It made you wonder how much you really knew about anyone, even people you saw all the time, day in and day out, and you got the crazy idea that everyone was actually a God-damn stranger or something. Take that crack about his mother and the Mexican musician. That was a hell of a thing for a guy like Avery to come out with. Sober, he’d have cut his tongue out first.

Where was Ed? He was willing to bet, thinking about it, that she’d gone to sleep over her book. She did that lots of times. Lots of times he went up and found her curled up under the reading lamp in the big chair with the book open in her lap or sometimes on the floor where it had fallen. She was cute as all hell when she went to sleep that way. He always kissed her awake, and that usually got something bigger started. He had a notice to go up and get something started right now but decided that first he’d probably better make another tour of the bar, just to be sure everything was going along all right. Come to think of it, he’d just have Roscoe mix up a shaker of martinis to carry upstairs with him.

In the bar, trade was brisk and would stay brisk until midnight, when they would have to close because of the Sunday closing law. The man and woman drinking Manhattans were still at it, but Emerson could see by the cherry stems that they had reduced their rate of consumption. The row of stems was not much longer than it had been the last time he looked. The woman was fuzzy in the eyes and her lipstick was a little smeared but her gestures were controlled and she seemed to be talking coherently to the man across from her. No potential disturbance there. She could hold what she took, no question about that.

Moving his eyes right, he saw Avery Lawes lift his glass and drain it and stand up abruptly. Turning, Avery walked carefully toward the rack where he’d left his coat and hat. His slim body was erect and graceful in its motion. If there had been a chalk line on the carpet, he would have been on it every step. When he was abreast, Emerson stepped forward and intercepted him.

“Leaving, Avery?”

“Yes. Going home. Red brick house on High Street. View of the river and everything. Money street. Class street. Home of the Laweses, the God-damn Laweses.”

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Perfectly. Perfectly sober. A Lawes never gets drunk. In public, that is. It’s against the creed.”

“I don’t know. The streets are getting bad. Looks like the forecasters hit this one.”

“Really? Unusual. Never would have believed it. Fellows are usually unreliable.”

“Maybe I ought to call a taxi for you. I’d be glad to run the Caddy out to your home in the morning.”

“Thanks, Em. Damn gracious for you to be concerned. Won’t do, though. Leaving for Miami in the morning. Early. Remember I told you?” He stopped and looked at Emerson as if he were trying to make a decision about something. “Wouldn’t want to smash up the Caddy tonight, though. Spoil everything. Delay my leaving. Wonder if you’d mind running me out now. Damn gutty of me to ask. Appreciate it, however. Consider it a great favor. Get a cab out there to get you back.”

Emerson didn’t want to do it. He had Ed on his mind, and he wanted to get up to her right away, but he didn’t know how to refuse Avery. He had a feeling, moreover, that Avery had no real doubt about his own ability to handle the Caddy in the snow. His request was based more on an urgent desire to prolong companionship, on a deep dread, perhaps, of returning alone in the cold, dark night to the old house on High Street above the river.

“All right,” he said reluctantly. “But first I think I’d better tell Ed where I’m going. Besides, I’ll have to get a hat and overcoat. Tell you what. You wait for me here, and I’ll be as quick as I can. Okay?”

“Sure. I’ll just have another Scotch while I’m waiting.” Exercising the control which the Scotch made consciously deliberate but did not destroy, he walked back to the stool at the bar and got on. Emerson followed and went around behind. Roscoe was busy at the far end, so Emerson poured Avery’s Scotch and mixed the shaker of martinis to carry up to Ed. With him gone, she would not want to come downstairs, and she would probably like to have the martinis while she was waiting for him to return. Cursing his bad luck and regretting his role of Samaritan, he carried the frosty shaker out through the dining room into the kitchen and upstairs from the kitchen to the second floor. Opening the door to the living room of the apartment, he saw that he had been right. Ed was asleep in her chair.

He closed the door quietly behind him and put the shaker on a coffee table and stood watching her, his heart swelling and aching, and he wondered how it was that a man could love someone so long and so hard without becoming worn out from it. She hadn’t changed much since the day she’d come to work for him in the direr beside the bowling alley, except that she was a litle sleeker, a little more finished and polished by the things that money brought, and now her dark hair was not long, as it had been then, but very short in the Italian style. In the chair under the light, her knees were drawn up against her breasts, the red velvet stretched tight as second skin over the flank of the leg on his side, and her head had fallen forward until her forehead lacked only a little of touching her knees. Her lips were slightly parted and quivered with the passage of her breath. Her book was on the floor. It was, he noticed, The Magic Mountain.

Walking over to her silently, he leaned down and pit his right hand on her hip and kissed her as near the mouth as he could reach. She sighed and turned her face up in her sleep, and he kissed her again, now directly on the mouth, and kept kissing her until her eyes opened and her arms came up to lock around his neck.

“Em,” she whispered, arching up against him. “Darling, I’ve been wishing you’d come.”

He laughed. “Like hell you have. You’ve been asleep.”

“Before that. Before I went to sleep I was wishing.”

“I’ve been thinking about you. I’ve been thinking about you and wanting to come back ever since I left.”

“Really? Isn’t it wonderful how we always wish that at the same time? Do you suppose it’s like that with all the others?”

“Not like with us. We’re altogether unique. We never happened before and won’t ever again.”

“You’re a seducer, that’s what you are. You always know just what to say to make a wife fall apart. Especially a dissolute wife like me who seduces easily. Darling, I’m sorry I went off to sleep. I was coming down to have a drink with you.”

“I thought you might come. It doesn’t matter, though, I brought up a shaker of martinis.”

“Oh, you’re perfect. Let me up, darling. I’ll get glasses.”

“No. Wait, Ed. Listen to me. I’ve got something else I have to do first.”

“Something else? What?”

“Well, Avery Lawes is downstairs in the bar, and he’s pretty drunk.”

“Drunk! Avery? I don’t believe it.”

“He is, though. You’d never know it just to see him, and I don’t suppose anyone’s even aware of it, except Roscoe and me, but the streets are pretty bad with the snow and all, and, well, Avery asked me to drive him home, and I didn’t know how to say no.”

“Really, Em! And your lovely wife simply panting!”

“Damn it, Ed, don’t rub it in. I hate it enough already. Say the word, I’ll go tell him to get home any damn way he can.”

“No. Of course not. It’s not much to do for a man, I guess. But it does seem a little odd. His asking, that is. I didn’t know you and Avery were such friends.”

“We’re not. I’ve known him from when we were kids, that’s all. Tonight, like I said, he’s pretty drunk, and he just got talking. You know how it is sometimes when a guy’s had too much. Funny thing about him, Ed. He’s a very lonely guy.”

“Sure. It’s the penalty he pays for having all that money.”

“It’s true, Ed. He’s very lonely.”

“All right. So he’s very lonely. Go drive him home and let your wife be lonely.”

“Damn it, I won’t go. I’ll stay right here.”

“Don’t be a dope, darling. I was only joking. I’ll wait here and think about you until you get back.”

“You sure it’s all right?”

“Yes. Hurry, though.”

“You can certainly count on that.”

“I’ll wait in bed,” she said, “and drink martinis.”

Section 3

On the ascent to High Street, the rear wheels spun and whined in the wet snow. The big Caddy crept up at a fraction of the speed registered on the panel, lurching as it gained the crest, rear end skidding in the turn left. Down the street a half block, Emerson nursed it into the circular drive to Avery’s house and stopped it under a portico.

“Well,” he said, “here we are.”

Avery was sitting slumped in the seat beside him, his chin on his chest and his eyes closed. At the sound of Emerson’s voice, he opened his eyes and sat up straight and closed his eyes again and knuckled them like a child waking in the morning.

“Already?” he said. “Must’ve napped. Can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. Come on in. Call a cab for you. Have a drink while we’re waiting.”

He got out on his side of the Caddy and went up onto the front porch from the portico. At the door he dug in a pocket for a key and used it efficiently, Emerson noticed, in spite of the load of Scotch he was carrying. They went into a hall and down the hall and into a room on the right that was obviously a library. A floor lamp had been left burning at one end of the room, and there was a fire in a fireplace at the other end that created a shirting pattern of light and shadows on the floor in front of it. Avery walked down to the fireplace and dropped his hat and overcoat onto a chair and stood with his hands extended toward the fire.

“Take off your things,” he said. “Fix you a drink.”

“I think I’d better get the cab and get on back,” Emerson said. “Thanks just the same.”

“Sure. Call it for you immediately. Nasty night, however. Take the cab a while to get here. You’ll have time for a drink.”

Reluctantly, Emerson took off his coat and advanced to the fire. Avery went out of the room and was back in two minutes.

“Called the cab. Be here in twenty minutes. Rough estimate. Now for the drink. Still bourbon?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“Scotch for me. Been drinking Scotch all day. Woke up this morning and thought it would be a damn good day for it.” At a liquor cabinet he got out bottles and glasses and then turned. “No ice. Forgot about ice. I’ll go out to the kitchen for some.”

“Never mind. Not for me, I mean. I’d just as soon take it without.”

“Really? Not just being considerate?”

“No, really.”

“Good. Have mine the same.”

He poured the bourbon and the Scotch and brought the bourbon to Emerson. “Here you are. Bourbon for you. Scotch for me. Bourbon for the road. Scotch for bed.”

Emerson thought that he had something a hell of a lot better for bed than Scotch, if he could only get home to it, and he thought of it waiting for him and was very bitter. He drank some of the bourbon and hoped that the damn cab would arrive under the estimate.

“Cold house,” Avery said. “Empty house, cold house. You know what it needs, Em? This house?”

Emerson had a decided opinion on that question. He thought he knew damn well what the house needed and what Avery needed, and it was the same thing he himself needed and ought to be having and intended to have just as soon as a lousy, creeping cab could get him to it in the cursed snow.

“A woman,” he said. “You ought to get married, Avery.”

Avery laughed softly and took Scotch. “Yes. Woman. Wife. Thought you’d say that. Just asked to hear you say it. What everyone’s thinking. What everyone’s saying. Why doesn’t Avery get married? Propagate. Have kids. Last of the Laweses. Avery has no kids, no more Laweses. Wouldn’t that be a God-damn crying shame?”

Emerson didn’t know what to say, and so he said nothing and drank some more bourbon. Avery was looking at him with a queer intentness, and it made him uncomfortable. He wished to hell that Avery would quit.

“You know why I’m not married?” Avery said.

Emerson said he didn’t. He wanted to say also that he didn’t care. His indifference was not prompted by callousness, but by the thought of waiting and his urgent desire to change that condition. He could see quite plainly that Avery was a lonely guy who wanted to talk, and he was sorry for him and all that, but where in hell was the God-damn cab?

“No,” Avery said. “Of course you don’t know. Guy like you couldn’t possibly know. Probably wouldn’t believe it if you did. No insult intended. Compliment, rather. Thinks straight, feels straight. Guy like you does. Would you believe it if I told you? Why I’m not married?”

“Why not? If you said it, I’d believe it.”

“I wonder. Curious about it. Want me to tell you?”

“Well, that’s up to you, Avery.”

“Sure. So it is. Think I will. Probably because of the Scotch. Probably regret it tomorrow. Think I’ll tell you, anyhow. Just to see if you believe it. Reason is, I can’t stand women. Revolted by them. All women. Every damn woman on earth. As women, I mean. Women all right as people. That’s different. Women as women have special function. You know. Requires a man. Thought of it makes me sick. You believe that?”

Emerson believed it, all right, because there was no reason not to believe it if Avery said it was so, but he couldn’t understand it by a long shot. With a wife like Ed, whose happy lechery was a perfect complement to his own, how could he understand something like this? It seemed to him a sickness. Now he was beginning to see Avery as not only a lonely man but a sick man, and it disturbed him and embarrassed him, and he wished fervently, not for the first time that night, that it hadn’t seemed to Avery like a good day for drinking Scotch.

“I guess it would be possible to feel like that,” he said.

Avery lifted his glass and tipped it and seemed surprised to discover that there was nothing in it. He looked from the glass to the bottle on the cabinet and back to the glass and then apparently forgot all about both of them.

“Woman in this house once,” he said. “Long time ago. Beautiful woman. Most beautiful woman on earth. Loved her. Worshiped her. Greatest happiness just to look at her, listen to her voice, have her touch me. Then it all went to hell. All to hell. Reasons I won’t bore you with. Anyhow, complete reversal. Disgusted me. Absolute revulsion. Couldn’t bear to have her touch me any more, hardly to come near me. Thought of her flesh made me ill. Sickness in me, of course, kind of disease. Realize that but can’t help it. Same feeling about all women. No wife. No propagation. Last of the Laweses.”

He was surely talking about his mother, and what made it so bad, Emerson thought, was that it was really the Scotch talking. And it was saying things that would later be remembered and despised, and where, where, where was the lousy, creeping cab? Take that business about the Mexican musician and the hurried return from the Mexican holiday, for instance, and now all this stuff about love and hate and everything — it was the kind of stuff a guy didn’t want to hear, especially a guy with someone like Ed waiting, and all he could do was keep his mouth shut and sweat it out.

And then, at last, the cab was there in the drive, its horn blasting.

With a vast sense of relief, almost of precarious escape, Emerson went for his hat and coat. He really was sorry for Avery, and he felt a little guilty about running out on a guy who was lonely and was obviously dreading an empty house, but it was impossible to stay, would have been impossible even without the consideration of Ed, because of the things Avery was saying, and you knew damn well how it would be later about his remembering and regretting. Besides, to be truthful, it was pretty damn depressing.

“That’s the cab,” Emerson said. “I’d better run.”

“I hear it. Pretty good time, considering. Less than twenty minutes. I’ll see you to the door.”

“No. Don’t bother. I’ll get out all right.”

“You sure? Appreciate very much your driving me home. Wouldn’t want you to think I don’t.”

“It’s all right, Avery. It was nothing.”

“Contrary. It was a great deal. Fine act of friendship.”

“All right, Avery. Good-night.”

He let himself out the front door and ran for the cab and got in. He slumped back in the seat.

There was still business in the bar, but the dining room was deserted. He went directly through into the kitchen, which was also deserted, and up the stairs from the kitchen to the apartment. Dropping his hat and coat in the living room, he crossed over into the bedroom, and there was a small lamp burning on a table beside the bed, and sitting up in the bed was Ed with a martini, and she was wearing the blue thing, the thing like smoke that looked as if it were about to drift off her entirely.

“Such a long time you took,” she said.

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“I’d almost decided to invite up a sub from the bar.”

“Roscoe?”

“Don’t sneer at Roscoe. Roscoe I love.”

“I’m not sneering at him. I love the old devil as much as you do.”

“Did you get Avery delivered all right?”

“Safe and sound. He’s going to Miami tomorrow.”

“Really? And you feeling sorry for him? When are we going to Miami, Ed?”

“Sometime. We could go tomorrow if we wanted to. With Avery. He asked us.”

“He must have been drunk!”

“He was drunk, all right, but I think he actually meant it. He was funny. All screwed up inside, I mean. He kept saying things it wasn’t like him to say.”

“What things?”

“Oh, crazy stuff. About why he never married and all. About not liking women. About how his mother slept with a Mexican musician once.”

“Maybe he has a psychosis or neurosis or something.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“His mother, you say? Really with a Mexican musician?”

“That’s what he said.”

“I wonder how a Mexican musician would be.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

“Why? What makes you so sure?”

“Because you’ve been spoiled.”

“Well, such conceit! Are you having trouble with that shoestring?”

“Don’t get impatient, darling.”

“Maybe we should go to Mexico instead of Miami. Or maybe I could run down and back by myself while you’re getting that damn shoelace untied.”

“I’m stalling deliberately. You’re cute when you’re eager.”

“I’m perfectly calm.” She tossed her head. “There’s a martini left. Would you care for it?”

“No. I had a couple of bourbons at the bar and another one at Avery’s.”

“In that case, I’ll just drink it myself.”

But there wasn’t time, as it turned out, for the last martini. And for the next part of the evening, all romantic propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, there was no better place anywhere — not in Miami, not in Mexico, not anywhere on earth.