Manhattan Love Song

Chapter Four

“I came back to return your key to you,” I said.

“That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said. “You could have left it downstairs with the doorman just as well, couldn’t you? I happen to know you stopped by twice yesterday and once the day before — asking about the weather, I suppose.”

I laid the key down on the table beside me.

“I wanted to be good and sure you got it yourself.”

She sighed. “In the face, I suppose, like the pocketbook the other night.”

“You got off easy,” I told her. “I should have broken your arms for you.”

“Houdini,” she remarked to herself.

“No — just one of those that are born every minute.”

“And since this seems to be the day for returning presents or what have you,” she went on, “I have something for you, before I forget it.” She opened a drawer and took out the folded telegram envelope I had put the money in three nights before. “Returned with thanks,” she commented, and held it out to me.

I made a pass with my hand at it. “Give it to Tenacity.”

“Tenacity gets paid good wages.” she informed me dryly. “It’s yours; you can’t pull that millionaire-playboy stunt while you’re wearing that kind of a suit — every time you turn around, I can see my reflection on the back of it.” And stabbed the envelope toward me once again, less patiently than before.

“It isn’t mine,” I scowled ungraciously.

“You gave it to me, didn’t you?” she told me.

“I gave it to you, all right,” I said, “but if you must know, I held somebody up for it Saturday night, so either keep it or stuff it down the sink. I don’t care what you do with it!”

She didn’t say anything for such a long time, just looked at me, while I kept thinking: “Dumbbell! What’d you have to tell her that for? Now wait’ll you hear the flock of insults she’s getting ready to unload on you.”

Finally she said in such a funny, quiet way: “Is that true, Wade?” I didn’t answer. “Is that how you got that money? You did that for me, Wade?” And kept looking at me with eyes that weren’t hard any more.

She spun the envelope away over her shoulder with a reckless sort of gesture, as though it wasn’t important any more one way or the other, as though there was something else she wanted to talk about now. She came closer, and put her hands on my arms and shook me a little bit back and forth, just a very little, hardly noticeable bit.

“If I could only live up to you,” she said, “what a girl I’d be!”

I could feel little pinpoints of sweat coming out on my forehead, and I said, “Don’t fool me anymore; you’ve fooled me so much — I can’t stand it if you fool me anymore! It may be fun for you, but it’s awful for me. It’s inhuman and unkind. We should only suffer pain in dentists’ chairs and on operating tables, Bernice, and not day and night, night and day, without a letup ever. It can’t be done; it shouldn’t be done.”

She was the maternal Bernice this time; a madonna of tenderness and consolation. Oh, I found all things in her. She seemed older than me for a little while that afternoon; our profane love took on a semblance of sanctity. Her cheek was pressed to mine, cool, caressing, reassuring; our intertwined fingers were held before our faces in what unconsciously resembled an attitude of prayer. From the sky outside, the sun pierced the windowpanes and shot downward toward our feet in thin, golden tubes that were like the pipes of an organ. We neither of us moved, we each of us heard music and were fanned by benign wings.

“Bernice, Bernice, I’m not afraid any more. My love for you is stronger than anything you can do. That was the crisis, just past. Now it’s immune, now nothing can affect it ever again; it goes right through to the end. So live as you’ve lived and do as you’ve done, and don’t think twice about it — ’cause always, always, from now on, you’ll be right and I’ll be wrong. And if you do things that seem strange to me or new to me, the error is mine, not yours. Just give me a moment’s breathing spell each time, and then the strange won’t be strange and the new will be customary. Vice and crime and all those other words — how do I know when to tack them on and when to leave them off? There’s just you, and just me, and the rest is none of my business.”

“My baby,” she hummed, “my boy, my lover. I’ve loved you on and off now since I first began to really know you. Even Saturday night, when all that happened, I still loved you, Wade, I still loved you. In that room, up on that chair, I saw your face looking at me. Across the whole room I saw your face and no one else’s; saw you trying to get near me, knew that I was torturing you — and yet, Wade, I couldn’t get off that chair. No one made me get up there, no one would have stopped me from getting down. And yet I couldn’t, I tell you, I couldn’t! There was a scream way down inside me, a louder scream than all the noise in the room — oh, you would have heard it so clearly. “Wade! I am going to get down. Look! Watch! I am getting down.” But it couldn’t get to my lips, I couldn’t bring it to my mouth. I didn’t want to smile — and yet there I was braying with laughter. I didn’t want to take my dress off — oh, God, I didn’t want to after I saw your face — and yet I felt my own hands reach up to my shoulders and snap open the fasteners. Oh, Wade, are there two of us in each of us, a good and a bad — or what is it? What makes us do the very things we don’t want to, know we shouldn’t?”

We were silent for a long time, both of us. Almost it seemed as though we didn’t have to speak to know what we were saying to each other. Then she went on: “The moment after you’d gone out the door, the moment after you couldn’t see me any more, the moment that it was too late to ease your pain a little — I pulled up my dress around me like a flash of lightning, I got off that chair with a jump! Ask Jerry, ask Marion, ask anyone who was there what I said; they all heard me. I called out, ‘All bets are off!’ Some of them thought I was just trying to save face, I guess. One or two came up to me later on, on the sly, when they thought no one was looking, and tried to speak their pieces. I took a hundred dollars from the first one just as a joke and faked an appointment with him for the next evening, which I never kept. The second one followed me into another room when I went to get my things just before you came back. He took my pocketbook from me, opened it, and put the hundred in. He was drunk and couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, so when Jerry came to tell me you were there, I sneaked out and locked the door on him. That was the hammering you heard, remember? That’s all there was to it,” she said. “It was bad enough; but it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”

I was convinced — that it wasn’t true as she told it; that the true version was the one that had gnawed at my vitals for three whole days — from the moment I had found the money in her pocketbook until the moment I had come back here today. But how easy to forgive her when the lie was for my sake!

Or maybe this was the culminating irony of it all — that having believed her each and all of the many times that she was lying to me, when it didn’t matter much to her whether I believed or not, now at last, when she was telling the truth and wanted to be believed (for there were tears in her eyes) — she failed utterly. I was inalterably convinced that she had lain with some one in that side room in Jerry’s apartment.

But whether I believed her or not had nothing to do with my loving her; my love for her had now reached a stage where it could forgive anything she did. Only, perhaps, it was forgiving her once more than she needed to be forgiven.

“Other things, too,” she said, “aren’t as bad as they seem. Or maybe they’re worse, but not in the same way. I know you know I’m not paying for the things I have here. You’ve known that because I’ve told you to be careful about phoning me, and all the rest. But you think I’m some one’s mistress. You’ve never said it, but I know you’ve thought it all along, ever since the night you first set foot in here. Then get this: I’m not being kept by one man — I’m being kept by a clique. I’m not being kept because I’m loved — I’m being kept because I’m useful. I can’t tell you any more than that. It isn’t good if I talk. Bad for me, maybe bad for you too.”

“Tell me you love me. That’s all that matters, not who your friends are or what you’ve done.”

We were sitting now on the divan in one another’s arms, where one night I had found her handkerchief when I came in here alone, and where the other night that taffeta cushion had lain with the print of some one’s heels bitten into it. “Wade,” she said, “you complete the circle for me; by loving you, I’ve come around again to where I started from. Eight or nine years ago I used to go with a boy like you — you know, a boy who really loved me; it was only when I’d had the opportunity of comparing him to those that came later that I realized he must have been a pretty decent sort after all. Oh, he wouldn’t have been healthy for a good girl to know — and yet when I told him I’d been drugged and kept locked up in a roadhouse overnight, he went out and got blind from wood alcohol. Since then I’ve been dragged through cage after cage of gorillas, and now once more I’m with some one who loves me. It seems so strange to hear those words ‘I love you’ and know they’re really meant, really mine.”

“They’re no good,” I said, “how can they tell you what I really want to say?”

“It’s funny, it can’t be explained,” she murmured, “I feel sometimes as though you were sent my way to remind me now that it’s too late; as though someone were shaking a finger at me and saying, ‘See what you’ve missed, Bernice!’ Oh, it’s not you so much, honey, it’s what you stand for in my mind; there’s really nothing to you, you’re just a man no different from a dozen, from a thousand, others — like that song that goes, ‘Along came Bill, you’d see him on the street and never notice him at all.’ But you love me for myself, that’s what counts — and you’re honest and you’re not too cruel. The kind of girls that get your kind wouldn’t understand me; they’d say. ‘Who wants Bill? The world is full of Bills’; they’re looking for romance, the saps, for sheiks and mysterious strangers. Wade, darling, I’ve had a man die in my arms — I’ve had to pretend to dance back to my table when I knew I was holding a corpse in my arms, so that people would think he was just drunk — with the blood coming out of the little holes where the bullets went in and soaking into my dress in spots the size of dimes. Maybe that’s romance; to me it was just obeying instructions. They can have it; I want what you stand for. I want to take up your ways and drop my own. And it’s just a little too late, I guess.”

So the Plan was born then, as we sat there, and we talked it over ever so indefinitely at first, just skirmishing around the edges, afraid it would rise up and vanish like a mirage if we dared to look it too closely in the face. We were like two people bending over a pool of water and seeing our dreams in there, afraid to breathe on it for fear of causing a ripple. And what we said was set to the key of “If I had a million dollars” or “If I were the mayor of New York”; in other words, as though we both knew it could never be, but as though there were no harm in plotting and planning it just the same. Children often play that game: “If you could have just three wishes, what would they be?”

“—And if the worst came to the worst,” Bernice said, “Lord knows, I’d have enough money to tide us over the first few months until you could find the right kind of job—”

“Oh, no,” I said virtuously, “I wouldn’t let you do that; whatever you have, you’d put away for yourself.”

She drew her legs deliciously up under her and suddenly went down a notch or two lower on my arm. One additional little squirm of supreme comfort, and the game went on. “Let’s see, now! I’ve got some rings and things in a safe-deposit box downtown — I haven’t looked at it in years. I really ought to go down one of these days and find out just what’s in it — I bet I could get enough on them to chip in with you on a car, some kind of a little Chevy, say.”

“I’ve got a compound-interest account in a bank over in Brooklyn, it must come pretty close to three hundred by now. That would be so much to the good—”

“Wait a minute, don’t interrupt,” she said absorbedly, “I’m trying to remember things. Then there’s that wristwatch with the platinum-and-diamond case — if I were going to do something like that with you, the first thing I’d do would be to get rid of all that junk; cold cash always is the handiest after all.” She looked up over her head, and said, “Oh, God, I feel so happy this afternoon!”

I took her open hand and smeared it over my face. “Why don’t we do it, Bernice? Why don’t we do it? If it goes wrong, you could always take up again where you left off.”

“No,” she turned to me and said, “that’s one of the main reasons why it’s so out of the question. There’d be a lot more to it than just — changing over, if you want to call it that. To begin with, I’d have to get right out of New York. And I’d have to do it like that!” And she smacked her palms together and threw one arm up and the other down, like a person playing the cymbals. “I couldn’t stay on here a minute once I did anything like that. Well, to speak quite plainly to you, Wade, I’d have to duck — and stay under cover for weeks, and maybe months.”

“Why?” I said. “This is a big city.”

“I’ve seen what happens too often,” she assured me. “You wouldn’t get me to stay here. Or come back within two years, either!”

“Well, okay, then we’d quit New York; it’s not the only town in the country—”

“Believe me, we’d have to,” she said doggedly, “it’d be either that or the observation ward at Bellevue for me; I wouldn’t want to have kittens every time the doorbell rang while you were out.”

“Ah, honey, that sounds sweet,” I grinned. “One roof, four walls, and you and me!”

“And to be like other people are,” she said, “and love each other, and to read the morning papers for the weather and the style hints and not — not for anything else. I’d give anything if a thing like that could only come true.”

“It can,” I said, “I tell you it can! Other people have made their lives to be what they want them to be. Why can’t we? We’re as good as any one else, and maybe a whole lot better; we’ve got that much coming to us at least! Ah, darling, don’t back out; ah, honey, say it can be done.”

She turned and flung her arms around me, and hid her face upon my shoulder. “It can’t be done, Wade, can’t be done!”

“Only because you don’t want to; only because you don’t think so!”

“It’s not for me,” she said. “Funny how you can go ahead as far as you like, but you can’t take a step backward — ever."

“Only because you don’t trust me; only because you’re afraid—”

She stroked my face. “Wouldn’t you be too — just a little — if you were in my place?”

“But Bernice,” I protested, “what are you driving at all the time? What makes you always talk like this? What’ve you done? Is it the police you’re afraid’ll come after you—”

“The police?” she said with exquisite cynicism. “You mean those men in blue who stand in the middle of the street directing traffic all day long? Oh, yes, there are police — I’d forgotten about them for a minute or two.”

“I can’t make it out at all,” I said dejectedly. “You talk in riddles.”

“I can’t say any more than I’ve said already,” she protested. “I’ve tried to explain just where I stand! I’ve done more talking already than I have any business to be doing, for my own good.”

“Yes, you always lead up to a certain point,” I cried helplessly, “and then you stop dead and put me off with ‘I can’t say any more than that, don’t ask me to explain.’ It’s happened over and over now. I’ve noticed it again and again. Why can’t you come right out with it? What’s always holding you back? I’m not just anybody at all to you any more, am I? It’s all settled that we love each other, isn’t it? Well then, why can’t you give me the lowdown, the absolute goods, on what it is you’re afraid of, on what you’d have to worry about if you left this place and came away with me? Who is it? What is it? Maybe I can help you. Don’t you trust me? Are you afraid of me, too? Why won’t you tell me?”

“All right, I’ll let you have it, then!” she said. “Yes, I love you — and if you can’t see that by now without my telling you, then maybe I’ve made a mistake in you altogether. But trust you?” She stopped and narrowed her eyes at me. “I don’t trust anybody. I met you on the street; how do I know who sent you my way?”

“That’s a swell thing to say to me,” I said bitterly. “That’s the swellest yet of all the swell things you’ve said to me since I’ve known you! Mud in my eye, all right! Every time I get through putting you all together, you fall apart again at my feet. Oh! what’s going to become of us? Why, even everyday friends trust each other before love’s even thought of. And you — and I—”

“I know the game from A to Z,” she said meditatively, “and I know all the rules of it, too. And the one that should never be broken is — ‘Don’t talk!’ Love. Why, love is no guarantee! I’ve known people to have loved as much as we have, and known each other a darn sight longer, too — and before they’re through, one has unintentionally done the other dirt — because they talked too much. And you — why. Wade, you almost love me too much for me to trust you; love and brains don’t mix.

“All right,” I said wearily, passing my hand at her, “that’s forgiven, too, like all the rest. Have your own way; keep it to yourself. Maybe you’re right not to tell me, and then again, maybe you’ll find out some day it would have been a lot better if you had. But one thing’s clearer than ever to my mind: you’ll never be exactly as I’d like you to be until I can get you all to myself, away from whatever it is that’s going on behind the scenes around here. Oh, won’t you do it, Bernice? It felt as though we were so close to it a little while ago, and now we seem to have drifted away from it again, back where we always were.”

“I want to more than you know,” she said dreamily. “Let’s do this: let’s be happy with what we have, for a little while yet. Let’s talk it over, and over, and over, whenever we’re together and there’s no one to hear us.”

“But just talking about it won’t get us anywhere,” I whined.

“But just talking about it — that’ll be something in itself. It’ll be like selling the idea to ourselves, don’t you see?” She glanced over at the clock, lit a cigarette, and called Tenacity into the room. “See if they left anything to eat in the Fridge, and bring us in a couple of little glasses of that Malaga, yes?” and turning to me when the other had left us alone again, whispered, “Don’t say anything to me in front of her — ever, do you hear? She may be all right about little things, like sneaking off to a party, but beyond that — you never can tell.”

I couldn’t help wondering for a moment if she didn’t have just a slight touch of the persecution complex, mistrusting everyone and anyone the way she seemed to. But kept it, of course, to myself.

“The first thing we’d have to think of,” she said, “would be where we’d strike out for if we left New York together—” And then broke in upon the remark herself with the rueful observation: “But you see, I’m afraid we couldn’t get enough together to take us very far.”

“Well, how far would you suggest?” I asked with ill-concealed eagerness. “Buffalo? How does that strike you?”

“That wouldn’t be a bit of good,” she said instantly. “Not any large city in the east, nor any middle-sized one. That would be almost as bad as staying right on here in New York. No, it’s got to be somewhere unexploited, like the Coast or New Orleans—”

“Unexploited?” I said blankly.

“Well, I mean—” she said, and didn’t say what she meant.

“All right,” I said happily, “then it’s either the Coast or New Orleans.”

“When the time comes,” she reminded me quietly.

“Fair enough,” I agreed. “When the time comes.”

She said with elaborate dissimulation, as Tenacity came in carrying a tray. “What do you think they call gloves in German? Hand-shoes! Isn’t that an uproar?”

“Where’d you dig that up?” I said, laughing at her rather than with her.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she admitted. “It just came to me this minute.”

Tenacity was having a belly laugh over it; she left us hitting herself repeatedly in that region and bending low, cackling, “Han’ shoes! Oh, shut me up! Han’ shoes!” I expected momentarily to see her fall on her face,

“That’ll be all over Harlem tonight,” Bernice giggled. She turned to me and resumed: “Another thing: it mightn’t be a bad idea if I started buying clothes now while the buying is still good, and get sort of a layout together. Even if nothing ever turns up, I’m that much ahead.”

“What about the place here?” I asked. “I suppose there’s a lease on it or something, isn’t there?”

“I have nothing to do with that,” she said, “I don’t even know what I’m paying here. No, I’d leave everything just the way it stands, simply walk out the door as though I were going to the corner. That’d be the only way I could get away with it. I wouldn’t even risk trying to get my trunks out; you see, they’d have to be expressed, and it’d be too easy to trace us through the labels. No, the day I do go, I’ll just take a pair of good hefty valises right along with me in the cab to the station.”

“Here’s to that day,” I said devoutly. “It can’t come too soon!” And we clicked our glasses together.

“What you could do in the meantime,” she suggested, “is scout around from this end and see if you can’t get a line on some job or other out that way, so that when the day comes—”

“Han’ shoes!” accompanied by a sputtering sound, was borne to us faintly from the bowels of the apartment.

“I’ll stop in at the station when I leave here and find out what the tickets cost,” I said, “so I can have that much laid aside ahead of time—”

“And what I want to do the first chance I get,” she said, “is go down to that safe-deposit box and get cash for what I’ve got in there. I could go into some out-of-the-way jewelry shop with it, and if any one I know sees me, pretend I’m just looking at cheap necklaces or something.”

“Han’ shoes and feet shoes!”

“Oh, shut up,” she remarked under her breath. “Maybe it’d be better if I passed it on to you and let you sell it for me,” she added.

“I thought you said you didn’t trust me,” I said, trying to look injured.

“Oh, Wade, darling, I didn’t mean in that way!” she cried remorsefully. “What I meant a little while ago was that there were some things I couldn’t tell anybody, not even you, just as a matter of self-preservation.” She got up and shoved the door closed with the tip of her shoe, just in time to silence another spasm of “Han’ shoes!”

When I left, she came not only to the door, but crossed the corridor to the elevator door with me, and only the arrival of the car put a stop to our kisses. “Don’t give our little scheme away to any one,” she murmured low as the white signal light over us went out. “Gee, darling, didn’t we have a happy afternoon!”

We flew back into one another’s arms like two birds attacking each other in midair, and couldn’t let go.

“When we’re together we won’t ever have to part.”

“Gee, just think — ’Frisco or Los Angeles, to call our lives our own!”

“I could be waiting for you like this and say, ‘Come on in, Wade, the supper’s waiting.’ ”

“You’re the swellest thing ever happened in this world since Adam and Eve first found out what to do with their spare time.”

“I only hope we’re not two suckers,” she said, “kidding ourselves along.”

Tenacity stuck her head out and whispered, “They’re asking for you on the wire—”

“Wake me up, I’ve been dreaming,” Bernice smiled at me sadly as she went in and closed the door. I went down in the elevator.

Home like a bullet, and the wheels as they ground around under me did nothing but sing, “Some day soon now, some day soon.” I almost missed my station, listening to that encouraging song, but a last-minute bolt from the strap I had been standing under got me out of the car just as the doors were closing. When I came up on the street again, the light had changed color, as though the sun had put a lot of rouge on before going down for the evening. Shadows were mauve on the sidewalk, and the world had a carnival air.

I opened our door, and Maxine came to meet me from a chair she had placed to one side of the window, which had enabled her to look down without being seen from below. “What was she doing that for?” I wondered vaguely.

She seemed to have one of her quiet moods on. “What was doing?” she asked me, without kissing me.

“What do you mean, what was doing?”

“I mean, how are things getting on?” she said.

“Oh, no different from any other time,” I said offhandedly.

“Did you see Stewart today?” she asked then.

“He’s there all the time,” I replied, opening The Sun.

“I didn’t ask you that, Wade,” she insisted. “I asked you if you saw him today, if you spoke to him.”

“What’s this all about, anyway!” I shouted suddenly. “I’m trying to read something in here — and you—”

She sat down opposite me and folded her hands in her lap, the very picture of docility. “I knew you’d lie to me,” she murmured.

So I let the paper toboggan to my feet and gave her my undivided attention, at last. “Come again?” I said politely.

“I’m the one would like to know what this is all about,” she told me dejectedly, “not you. I don’t want to row with you; you know I don’t. But why do you pretend to me you were at the office today, when you know you weren’t? You don’t think that makes it any easier for me, do you?”

“Makes what any easier for you?” I said embarrassedly.

“They called up today and wanted to know why you weren’t there. I suppose now you’ll blame me for it. If you’d’ve told me ahead of time, I would’ve gladly fibbed for you and told them you were sick or something. But I was so taken back myself, I didn’t know what to answer. They said you weren’t there all day yesterday, and the day before you only came in for a minute and went right out again without saying anything—” She stopped for breath. I needed some too, although I hadn’t been saying a blessed word. “And they said for the past few weeks now this has been going on steadily, you’ve stayed away without any explanation at all, at the rate of once every two or three days. They said they’re not going to stand for it any more.” She turned her eyes away from me at this point, as though she was the one to be ashamed, not I. “Wade, you’ve lost your job.”

I gave a convulsive little start. “Did they say that too?”

“Imagine how I felt,” she went on, “hearing a thing like that over the phone, from some one I’d never seen before in my life! I said, ‘I’m sure he can explain; haven’t you spoken to him about it?’ They told me they were sure you could explain too, but that they weren’t really interested any more in hearing what you had to say; and would I please tell you when you came in that your check was being mailed to you at the close of business today, and you’d get it by the first mail in the morning. And then whoever it was had the cheek to say to me, ‘He does come home sometimes, doesn’t he, ma’am?’ and I heard him snicker to himself. I’ve been crying all afternoon,” she concluded in a barely audible voice.

“Their bark is worse than their bite,” I remarked after a proper interval of meditation. “I’ll stop in tomorrow morning and talk to Stewart, hear what he says about it. And if not, there are plenty of other jobs. Don’t let it break your heart.” And thought to myself, “What’s the difference if I’m canned now? I would have chucked it over myself anyway in a month or two more — whenever she’s ready. It’s all to the good — and I can make up the difference in money in one way or another between now and then.” What I really was pondering in those few minutes was what to tell Maxine I had been doing with my time when I wasn’t at the office.

“It’s too bad it had to happen,” she mused. “You’ve been staying out on me at nights often enough lately, but I never thought you’d go this far and let your work go hang.”

“It is too bad,” I agreed sociably, “but it’s done now, so what’s the good of talking about it.”

“Of course, as a mere wife,” she said, “I don’t suppose I have any right to ask what you were doing with yourself when you weren’t at the office. Any more,” she added ironically, “than I had any right to ask what you were doing with yourself the several nights that you didn’t sleep at home lately. We’ll let that go; sufficient unto the day is the evil therefore.”

“Thereof,” I corrected learnedly.

“Well, this isn’t a schoolroom.”

“Oh, no? Well, that’s what it’s felt like to me for the past half-hour.”

“Too bad,” she commented. “Poor abused man!”

“For God’s sake,” I said, “stop fidgeting with the bottom of your skirt, will you! Can’t you keep your hands quiet? I’m so nervous I could jump through the ceiling!”

“Wade,” she said, “have you been seeing some one? Who is it you’ve been seeing? ’Cause I know you haven’t got many men friends, they wouldn’t take up so much of your time—”

I thought of the previous Saturday, and answered, “I know I haven’t; I found that out too.”

“You don’t want to answer,” she said to herself, and had a gust of crying and sobbing.

I waited until she was good and through, then I said: “Are you all through now? Good! Well, since your heart’s so set on checking-up on me, I’ll tell you exactly how I spent yesterday and the day before—”

She turned and gave me a look as though she was afraid of what I was going to say next, almost would rather not hear it. But I noticed that she didn’t stop me from going ahead, just the same.

So then I gave her an elaborate, ironically elaborate résumé covering the eight working hours of those two days, sixteen hours in all. Not a detail was overlooked; I took her with me step by step on those long, aimless, tortured walks I had taken, back and forth across the town, that resembled so closely a distracted man pacing to and fro in a room. And when I interrupted myself to recall that I had had an orange juice at Fifty-Fourth Street and Broadway, or that I had bought The Sun at the downstairs stand in the Pennsylvania subway station, she didn’t dare resent the irony implied in my giving her such details. The account was exhaustive; exhaustive and exhausting. I almost mentioned each time I had sought a washroom. Three incidents, and only three, were not exposed to her: my one interrogation of Bernice’s doorman on Monday and my two repetitions of it on Tuesday.

But, womanlike, she still seemed dissatisfied when I was through, seemed to be looking for a motive in all this. As though I had overreached myself in giving her more details than were necessary and yet at the same time withholding the key to the situation. “But why couldn’t you stand the thought of sticking in the office all day? Why were you so distracted? What was the matter with you? You haven’t told me that yet. What was on your mind? What made you chase all over town like a chicken with its head cut off, without knowing where you were going at all?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “couldn’t tell you if I tried. And that’s that. Take it or leave it. I’m no psychologist.”

“And was it the same thing with you today?”

“Identically,” I said shortly.

Then she began to lean toward credulity. “Wade, maybe you’ve been working too hard. I’m worried about you. Maybe you should see a doctor—”

“And maybe I should see the Golden Gate with my Bernice,” I thought feelingly.

“Mrs. Greenbaum told me that after they have the fur sales in August her husband always gets in such a state he has to go to Bear Mountain for a week—”

“With some blonde, I bet,” I said aloud.

“He’s not that kind of a man,” she pouted. “They’re a very devoted couple—”

At which precise moment, as though they had only been waiting for a signal from us to begin, a sound of angered footsteps crossed our ceiling, and words of dispute came crackling through sections of the fragile plaster, now here, now there. “You should be such a man like he is!” And then over in the other corner, “You should live so long — I’m too good for you!” It was timed too perfectly; it was unreal. It was not life, it was the movies. And yet it happened.

Maxine made no attempt to save her face in the matter; her laughter mingled unabashedly with mine. We rocked uncontrollably on our chairs and looked into each other’s eyes to add fuel to our enjoyment of the situation.

“They live like doves!” came from over the chandelier. I could see the chandelier throbbing from the force of this statement.

For a moment I even harbored the delightful suspicion that we were the couple in question, but it seemed not. “Believe me, Sadie don’t know how lucky she is! I’ll tell her the next time I see her—!”

“Tell her a thing or two about yourself, why don’t you, ha?”

I noticed, however, in spite of this last, that the repartee or whatever you might call it was predominantly feminine. Perhaps Mr. Greenbaum was a devoted man after all. Or else his wife’s voice carried much better through laths and plaster.

When we were both completely laughed out, and the situation had begun not only to abate but to pall as well, Maxine leaned confidentially forward in her chair and said to me, “Wade, darling, I was so upset about what happened this afternoon, I didn’t get a thing in for tonight. If I get my hat and coat, will you take me out to a restaurant? We haven’t done that in such a long time,” she added coaxingly. “Will you, Wade?”

“Sure,” I said generously, touching her cheek with one finger, “why not?”

When she had come running back with her things on and preceded me out the door, I remarked, “But no postmortems, do you hear?”

She looked around at me tenderly over her shoulder. “I’m sorry I was mean to you, Wade,” she said. “It’ll all come out all right, won’t it?”

I was too busy locking the door to answer.

By the very next morning, which was Thursday, I had already begun to get up later, now that I didn’t have to be in on time any more. We had breakfast at ten, and Maxine rather seemed to enjoy the idea than otherwise. The peace, well-being, and even amiability that had descended upon us following the Greenbaum explosion the evening before persisted in the sunlight of the breakfast nook. Maxine’s green curtains looked cozy, and I had a paper there I had stepped out to buy while she was getting the coffee ready. It was all okay; I mean as a temporary vacuum to tide me over until Paradise began with Bernice, it would do very nicely.

I finished the paper and she the dishes at about the same time. The check from my late concern had come, and I had it in my pocket; I had told her a little earlier that I didn’t think I would go back and cringe to Stewart just for the sake of getting the job back, that this had pulled me out of the rut I’d been in all along, if nothing else, and I preferred to go out and get a newer, more lucrative job, even if it took me a week or two to find what I wanted. Which is not altogether the empty boast it may sound; jobs were plentiful and times were good.

I got up from the table, stretched, yawned, and said, “I think I’ll blow now.”

“I wanted to go downtown too today,” she told me. “They’re selling out those little collar-and-cuff sets at Gimbel’s; I need one for my dark blue.” Which didn’t interest me at all. I didn’t even know what she meant by her dark blue — probably one of her dresses.

“If you’ll wait till I put something on.” she went on. “we could ride in together.” She was still in her pajamas.

“All right,” I said, “how long will it take you?”

“I won’t be five minutes,” she promised, and went into the bedroom.

When eight of the five were up, she came out again fully dressed to tell me: “Wade, what do you think? I just found a hole in the heel in one of my stockings!” This calamity leaving me unmoved, she went on: “Maybe you’d better go ahead; I have another pair drying over the steam pipe in the bathroom, but they’re still a little too damp to put on.”

“I’ll go ahead,” I decided, “and meet you down there later. Whereabouts you going to be?”

“You can wait for me in front of Gray’s Drugstore,” she said.

“Make it about one,” I told her, “we can run into the State or the Rialto and take in a show before they jack the prices up.”

“Fine!” she agreed. “I’ll be through by that time.”

“And see that you make it one,” I warned her as I opened the door, “and not three or four!”

“I’ll be there,” she sang.

I got off at Times Square and shuttled over to Grand Central first of all, and went up to the ticket office in the station to find out what the fare to the Coast came to roughly. Roughly was right, too; I nearly fell over when he told me. “Is that one person?” I gasped. “I didn’t say a caravan,” he answered tartly. “She was right when she said we ought to be sure of what we’re doing ahead of time,” I told myself despondently. “You’re blocking the window,” the ticket seller reminded me, so I asked him about New Orleans. That was pretty nearly as bad, but then, when I left the window, I looked at a relief map they had hanging up on the wall and found out that New Orleans wasn’t nearly as far away, so it seemed a much better buy and more of a bargain to pick California when the time came to leave. Also, I didn’t know much about New Orleans, but I knew that all kinds of flowers and fruits grew in California, and so it seemed to me to be the place to start life with the one you love.

As I walked west along 42nd Street, I was figuring with a pencil on the back of an envelope, and I kept bumping into people at every step. I went into the Automat and had a ghost of a lunch, and all the time I was in there kept figuring; when the back of the envelope was all used up, I started in to use the shiny, white top of the table, until a busboy with a greasy rag came along and, whether accidentally or on purpose, effaced the whole thing with a sweep of his arm.

When the dispute had died down and every one had gone back to their seats again, I started over again, this time using the margin of a newspaper I’d picked up from the floor. I started in to mumble to myself, like the old, the feebleminded, and the preoccupied do. “Three-hundred-and-some-odd would make it six hundred, roughly, for the two of us. Now let’s see, without counting what I’ve got in the Corn Exchange — I don’t want to touch that if I can help it; leave it here for Maxine, that’s the least I can do, even if she hasn’t got a kid — nearly three hundred in that compound-interest account over in Brooklyn — and if I put in that check for eighty I got today, that’ll bring it up to four hundred by the time I’m ready to go. That leaves me two hundred short, even on the fare alone. Wait! I can borrow two hundred on my insurance, that does it! But that leaves me without anything when we get off the train there — and I don’t want Bernice to help me in any way.”

The interested stare of my table companion, who was getting an earful while he dipped little round crackers in clam chowder, put an end to the soliloquy. I left the place and continued westward toward my appointment with Maxine, still calculating as I went, except when crossing streets. “All right,” I argued with myself, “suppose Maxine is a good kid and has given me eight years of her life, why should I give her a better break than the girl I love? I’ll take half of that Corn Exchange account with me, or all if I have to, and send it back to her as soon as I start to make some money out there. It won’t put her out much anyway; she can stay on in the flat rent free the first month after I’m gone, on the deposit we paid on the lease. And she’s got her stepbrother and his wife, they’ll do something for her if worst comes to worst. So that takes care of that, and all I have to do now is bide my time and keep a good crease in my trousers for the day we leave!” I threw the newspaper away, brushed my hands hygienically (it hadn’t belonged to me originally), and backed up against the glass-window front of Gray’s Drugstore to wait for Maxine. It was five to one on the Paramount clock across the way.

Swarms of people, principally women, were going in and out the door, buying theater tickets at the cut-rate counter and keeping their appointments on the sidewalk outside, like I was. I thought, “Maybe I ought to get out of the way instead of standing here like this. Suppose Bernice should just happen to come along and bump into me, and Maxine should find me talking to her!” But I’d never seen Bernice on the street after the night we’d first met, and there was no reason why I ever should again. “She’s only just about getting out of bed by now, anyway,” I assured myself.

With that, a taxi edged up to the sidewalk, stopped in front of the entrance to Gray’s, and a girl got out of it alone and paid it off. She turned around then, and it seemed to me I’d seen her somewhere before. But you so often feel that way about people. She was dark-haired and she was handsome. I don’t mean beautiful, I mean handsome; there’s a difference.

She was still putting the change the driver had given her back in her purse, but she looked up to make sure no one was about to collide with her — and saw me. She took a second look — then she finished putting the money away, snapped her handbag shut, came across the sidewalk, and stopped in front of me. At first I thought she was looking at the display of cosmetics in the window behind me, but I saw that her eyes were right on mine.

“What’s the matter, can’t you say hello?” she said in a husky voice. The clock on the Paramount said one.

“Hello,” I said obediently, and still at a loss.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said unfriendly. “You ought to, you drank enough of my liquor the other night!”

“What makes you think I don’t remember you?” I said uneasily.

She took her eyes off me at last and looked sullenly up the street and then down the street. “Well, the name’s Marion,” she said.

It was no paean of joy to my cars. “Well, I knew that all along,” I said. “So what? What about it?”

She turned her eyes on mine again. “Still in good with Bernice?” she wanted to know.

“Bigger and better than ever,” I answered shortly, and then as a hint, “Going to a show?” The clock over there said four after, now. I was praying she’d go away. What’d she want with me anyway?

“She gotten any mail from Detroit lately?” she wanted to know.

“Who, Bernice?” I said. “Why should I tell you that?”

She flashed me a dark look and said: “Oh, I guess she has, if that’s the case. Just let me find that out! Just let me find that out!”

Because I didn’t like her anyway, and because she was annoying and worrying me by standing there like that when I expected Maxine to show up momentarily, I revenged myself by teasing her and telling her what I thought would be most likely to get her angry. And at the same time rid me of her. “She gets ’em from Detroit at the rate of two and three a week, sometimes,” I informed her amusedly. And then, remembering something she had said the other night, added, “You know, funny scrawly handwriting, like a little kid at school.”

I could see that made her angry enough to eat the glass window we were standing in front of. “And you stand for that!” she snarled. “What kind of a guy are you?”

“What’s the harm?” I said smilingly, “he’s in Detroit.”

She finally prepared to depart, although by the stony look in her eyes it appeared doubtful to me whether she could see where she was going at all.

“You better run along to your show and cool off.” I advised her jocularly.

“Show be damned!” she rasped, and darted into a taxi that someone had just gotten out of. Through the door I saw her lean forward and say something to the driver; he put on the gas and turned up 43rd Street, and that was the last of her.

I kept smirking to myself for a long while afterward at the state of mind I’d managed to get her into.

Meanwhile Maxine didn’t put in appearance, and the afternoon prices went on at all the picture houses. It was too late now to go to a show and still be economical. Presently, as the hands of the clock circled slowly around, I was nearly as angry as my late acquaintance had been. All the theatergoers had gone from the scene long ago. At quarter to three, wondering if perhaps she had never come downtown at all today, I went inside and phoned home to the apartment. Sure enough, she came to the phone herself. “Wade?” she said noncommittally.

“Well, who’d you think it was!” I burst out maniacally. “Mayor Walker?”

As though she were thinking about something else entirely, she repeated evenly after me, “No, I didn’t think it was Mayor Walker.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before I left that you weren’t coming downtown today, instead of making me hold down the street corner for two solid hours waiting for you like a goddam fool!” I shouted at her.

“I was downtown, and then I came home again,” she said quietly.

“What was the bright idea of doing that? Didn’t you remember you had an appointment with me? Couldn’t you at least have gone past here and told me you were going home? What am I supposed to be, anyway, a flagpole sitter?” And more along the same lines.

Finally she said, “Oh, what do I care? I’m standing here dazed, I can hardly hear what you’re saying at all. I’m going to hang up; you better tell me first whether you’re coming home or not.”

“You talk like you were drunk,” I said to her.

“I wish I was,” she answered. “That’d be something, anyway.”

“What’s the matter, don’t you feel well?” I asked solicitously.

I heard her say to herself: “He asks me whether I feel well!” and then she did hang up. I immediately tried to get her back again, but she wouldn’t answer the operator’s calls.

So I gave up and took the subway home, wondering what had got into her now. “I know it hasn’t anything to do with me, this time,” I reasoned on the way back. “Maybe somebody she knows just died; why couldn’t she have told me over the phone just now? Or maybe she’s going down with the flu— That’d be a real treat; doctor bills at a time like this, when I’m trying to hang on to every cent I’ve got!”

I couldn’t wait until I got up the steps again, those subway steps that I seemed to spend so much of my life going up and down; and over to the place, and in the door. I could’ve saved my breath and energy: she was as well as I was. Not only that, she looked much better than she did at other times. Sartorially, if not physically. For she had on full makeup instead of just half makeup or none at all. And she had a pair of her 1920-model glass prisms dangling below her ears. And a dress that I associated vaguely with the words, “Oh, I can’t wear that; it’s too good!” And perfume escaped from her at all angles, although rather faintly, as though it had been doing so for a considerable number of hours now. All in all, her getup denoted that she aimed, or had aimed, to please and charm.

For a moment I even misled myself to the extent of thinking that I might be the object of her pleasure-giving efforts, or whatever you want to call them. But she hadn’t met me as she had promised, and somehow I had an idea that all this finery dated from earlier in the day. I knew darn well she hadn’t put it on just to greet me when I came home. Only a year ago, and I would have been open to jealousy at a juncture like this. Worrying, wondering if she had been seeing someone. The time for that was gone, though, now. She could have done what she wanted. What would I have cared any more?

“Boy, you look classy!” I remarked cordially, sticking my thumbs into my vest pockets and studying her with my elbows akimbo.

“I tried to make myself look that way today,” she said dully. “I meant to change when I got back here, and then I forgot to, I guess.”

“You act all down-in-the-mouth, though,” I remarked. “What was the matter with you over the phone just now? Why didn’t you show up today?”

“Sit down,” she said indifferently, brushing my questions aside with a limp drop of her wrist, as though they were of no moment at all. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”

Not her appearance but still her attitude, even the very way she had just seated herself sidewise on the chair and rested her forearm and her chin along the back of it, suggested a gin-soaked old scrubwoman to me. One of those old crones tired out with life and chronically stewed to the gills.

I wondered if thirty or forty years from now she was really going to wind up that way, the way she had just now struck me as seeming for a moment. I wouldn’t know her any more in those still-far-off days, and she wouldn’t know me any more, but too bad if it had to happen: the little flapper I had danced the Japanese Sandman with eight years ago! She had been the youthful of the youthful—

She began to speak.

“I went to see her today. And, honey, she was nice. I expected her to laugh at me, I expected her to make me eat dirt. And, honey, she was nice. Honey, you won’t believe me, but she was nice to me—”

I could feel my eyes growing bigger.

“—real nice to me. Honey, you’ll only laugh, I know, but we cried together, me for her and she — she for herself, I guess. But I mustn’t lose you. Honey, I mustn’t lose you.”

“Who?” I panted. “Who?”

“You. Who else? You.” She tried to stretch out her arms toward me. I pushed them aside. “No, who? Who were you with?” I could hardly talk with my windpipe all closed up.

“Bernice,” she said. And as I heard the name on her lips for the first time, but spoken so casually, as though shock or grief had turned all values upside down for her and made a name like that seem like an everyday household name to her ears, I simply sat back; I was beyond surprise, regret, humiliation, or anger. “Here,” I remember thinking, “is either an unusually wonderful person, whom I have no longer the wish nor the time to understand, or the biggest dumbbell in the world, who doesn’t deserve any better than she’s going to get.”

She smiled ruefully and said. “I wish I had worn that stocking that had the little hole in it, and left when you did this morning. I mightn’t have ever found out. But I guess it’s better that I know about it—” And looked at me almost as though expecting me to confirm her judgment in this. “That taxi driver came to the door a little while after you’d gone — you know, the one you promised to pay — and he said you knew where his stand was but you’d never come near him to pay him since that night, and he said he wasn’t going to wait any more, he’d come here to collect. I had quite an argument with him and told him he was drunk and — oh, what’s the use going into it? He didn’t purposely tell me anything, but the few things he let drop fitted in so well with what I knew already — about your staying away from me all the time and getting in wrong at the office and walking around so crazy all day yesterday and the day before — so I thought maybe it would do some good if I — had a talk with her, just had a talk with her — and at least find out what I was up against or what was going to happen to me. I found out from him where it was, and I tried to make myself look as pleasing as I could, and—” She gave a pathetic little shrug. “I drank a tablespoonful of your gin and went there—”

“Wasn’t I the one to talk to? What’s she got to do with it? What do you mean by dragging her in it for? All right! You’ll see how much you gained by it, you’ll see what good it does you!”

“It did this much good, anyway,” she said humbly, “whatever happens now, I know she won’t be to blame and I know I won’t — it’ll be all up to you, Wade.”

“You’re telling me,” I said ungraciously. And sneered. “Now just what was it you said to her makes you so sure of that? Let’s have it!”

“Oh, I didn’t walk in there like they do in the movies and say, ‘Give my back my husband!” Why, Wade, Bernice didn’t know you were married! I know she didn’t. Leaving me out of it altogether, I wouldn’t even call that fair to her herself—”

“What do you think you are, a court of justice?” I demanded resentfully. “Did she complain about it? Did she say she’s got a kick coming?”

“No, all she said was, ‘That may surprise you in a man, Maxine, but it doesn’t me any more.’ ”

“I notice you got pretty chummy, calling each other by your first names,” I said enviously. “What’d you do, sign a blood pact together? Too bad you didn’t both keep on bleeding a while longer!” It made me almost as furious at Bernice as at Maxine herself to think they had gotten on so well together — especially without my being there. I suppose, subconsciously, it would have suited the male in me much better to know that they had clawed and scratched each other’s eyes out over me.

“I almost like Bernice, in spite of everything,” Maxine mused. “I suppose a lot of women would call me crazy — because, after all, she’s stepped in where she has no right to — but I don’t blame her for that, not one bit. If I were single and had been through all she’s been through—”

“Single!” I thought to myself bitterly, “around the noon hour each day, and that’s about all!”

She looked at me a very long time, just sat there and looked at me like a calf looking at a man with a butcher knife in his hand. I didn’t speak either; what was there to say? Then she began to make her plea, the big plea that she must have been preparing all afternoon. It wasn’t very eloquent; but eloquent or otherwise, what chance did it have with me?

“What was in your mind all the time. Wade? You weren’t thinking of anything — anything permanent, were you? You mustn’t. It’ll blow over—”

“Will it?” I thought, and didn’t answer.

“We’ve had so much fun together. Wade. Even when we’ve fought it’s almost been like fun — compared to — compared to this. Fun to sulk, and fun to make up. Do you remember the time we got so sore at each other on the train, and we each swore we’d have separate rooms when we got there? And then, when we got to Atlantic City, there was only one double room left in the whole hotel? And we had that big screen brought in and put up between us? And it fell over in the middle of the night? And we were each of us sitting in exactly the same position, on the sides of our beds with our hands around our knees, listening? Wade, darling, we were like lovers in a musical show in those days. Boy-husband and child-wife. Let’s carry the thing through. Let’s sing our duet, kiss and make up. Let’s not throw it all away. It’s here with us now. Why should you, why should I, begin all over with somebody else?”

“All right, can all the chatter,” I said brutally. “I’d much rather hear what the upshot of it all was this afternoon. I suppose you drank tea and ate ladyfingers together! And then what? What was the final word when you left?”

“Why, nothing,” she said, “what could we say? I wasn’t going to make a fool of myself and ask her not to see you any more; what would be the sense of such a thing? You’re the only one can decide that, Wade. Which is exactly how she feels about it herself. ‘I’m the passive party in this,’ she told me, ‘it’s something that’ll have to be settled between you two. You go home and talk to him about it,’ she said when I left, ‘and more power to you—’ ”

“Traitor!” I thought poignantly.

“ ‘—and if you can get him to look at it your way,’ she said, ‘why, tell him to give me a ring and let me know, that’s all. I’ll understand.’ ”

“Hypocrite!” I fumed inwardly. “I’d like to kiss all the lies away from your lips, I’d like to kiss you and punch you for that until you squeal!”

“So there it is,” she concluded with a dismal sigh, “and here we are.”

“I don’t know what you expect me to say,” I answered crisply.

“Say what you mean,” she said. “Say just exactly what you feel like saying. God knows, no one’s trying to bully you!”

“Thanks!” I laughed coldly.

“You don’t need to hide anything from me, either, Wade. I know just how far this thing’s gone.”

“What kind of women are there in this world today, anyway!” I exclaimed disgustedly, throwing my cigarette deliberately on the floor and flattening it with my foot, then kicking it away.

“Oh, she didn’t have to tell me that,” Maxine answered with equal disgust. “Don’t, you suppose I can tell?”

“Good!” I said with feigned briskness. “Then you know the worst!”

“It isn’t that!” she tried to tell me. “Oh, Wade, Wade, don’t you understand it isn’t that! Weeks ago, already, when you stayed out like you did, I felt there was something doing — only I thought maybe it was some drifter you’d picked up in a speakeasy or on the street and then never seen again afterwards. Every married woman has that happen to her at some time or another. But this — this isn’t as disrespectful to me, maybe, but it’s a whole lot more dangerous. That’s what I’m driving at, that’s what I’m trying to get out of you — what do you intend doing? Is it going on like this, or what? You surely must have known I’d find out at one time or another; you didn’t expect to be able to lead a double life under my very nose indefinitely, did you?”

“Double life!” I mimicked. “Don’t be so dramatic, will you?”

“Dramatic is good!” she laughed bitterly. “I’m supposed to sit back and not say a word while everything I’ve got goes up the flue. Maybe you would if it happened to you!”

“Ah, baloney!” I said.

She stepped into the bedroom a minute to get a fresh handkerchief. “Better bring a few of ’em with you,” I called after her. “No telling how long this thing’s liable to keep up.”

She came back holding the new handkerchief over the lower part of her face. “Even ten-year-old schoolboys know enough not to hit a fellow when he’s down,” she said through it, her watery eyes peering at me above it.

“Cut out the martyr stuff,” I advised her. “That won’t help any.”

To my surprise, she did immediately, and became coldly disdainful.

“Nothing would with you,” she said. “You’re not worth my letting you see me cry over you. And if I feel like crying over you when you’re not around, I suppose that’s my tough luck.”

“Good!” I said to myself, “maybe she’s going to get sore; then I’ll have an excuse to walk out of here.”

She didn’t say anything for a while after that; just sat staring out of the window at nothing. Then, after fully ten minutes, she turned around and remarked, “You must be hungry, Wade. Why don’t you run down to the corner and get yourself something to eat? I haven’t got anything here for you.”

“What about you?” I said, standing up immediately. “Get your hat and come on.”

She looked at me pityingly. “I’m not a man,” she said. “I couldn’t eat right now — or any time tonight. You go ahead—”

At the door I said, “Want me to bring you back some sandwiches?”

“No, thanks, Wade,” she said, “but do you want to—”

“Do I want to — what?”

“Do you want to kiss me?”

I went over to her, bent over her, and felt her lips reach up to mine.

When I got to the door a second time, I remarked, “I’ll be right back.”

“That’s up to you, Wade,” she told me.

I didn’t pull the door smartly enough to after me, and it slipped back and stayed on a crack, so after I’d punched the button for the elevator, I stepped back to it to close it more firmly, and glancing through into our living room, saw her in there with her head buried in her arms on the sill before her, crying soundlessly to herself. I felt mean about it for a while afterward, but I couldn’t see what there was to do about it even if I had felt inclined to do something about it. “She ought to save her tears,” I told myself, “she’s going to need them a few months from now.”

I went into a lunchroom near where we lived, collected far more unsavory dishes than were necessary on a tin tray, and sat myself down at a table to eat and think it over, commingling the two processes without any difficulty on account of being, as Maxine had said, a man.

Bernice’s attitude occupied me principally. Had she really meant that when she said that if Maxine could persuade me into not seeing any more of her, it was all right with her? “She couldn’t have really meant it,” I assured myself. “She can’t possibly be that indifferent if she’s ready and willing to throw everything over and go away with me!” But the gruesome thought kept presenting itself: “Suppose she’s just been stringing you along, taking you for a sleigh ride, as they say; suppose she never intended to go away with you from the beginning, and that’s why she’s so complacent about Maxine putting the crusher on you if she can?” It was all I could do to keep away from the telephone and sound her out on it then and there. But something told me it would be wiser not to ring her up right on top of Maxine’s visit that afternoon. “She may be sore about it; it may have riled her a little, even if she didn’t let on to Maxine. And you never can tell about women — she may take it all out on me, if I ring her up right now. Better if we both sleep over it; better if I wait till tomorrow.” And I consoled myself in this wise: Bernice hadn’t let a word drop about our intentions to Maxine, she had confined the discussion (from what Maxine told me) to what had gone oh between us in the past few weeks; didn’t that argue that she had been acting a part to bluff Maxine, that she had no idea of relinquishing our scheme of going off together? I felt that it did, and felt a whole lot better about it than I had at any time since the bad news had broken two or three hours before.

“I’ll make it my business to see her tomorrow,” I said, slipping spoonfuls of rice pudding and raisins in and out of my mouth with relentless accuracy, “and I bet I’ll find out I’m right!”

Maxine was in bed when I went back, and though I felt sure she wasn’t asleep, her eyes were closed, so I didn’t speak to her. I noticed a little shiny thing, like a pearl, under one of her eyelids when I put the light on. A tear, I guess.