Wake Up With a Stranger

1.

Thinking severity would be appropriate, she wore a brown wool gabardine suit and a simple white Dacron blouse with a string bow at the collar. As she waited in an outer office for Tyler to become free, Donna wondered that she had bothered to come here on an errand, certainly futile and with small chance of success. But she understood she was compelled to explore all possibilities, however remote, just as she had been compelled to effect the fiasco with Shirley Burns. Two hundred thousand dollars was to her an enormous sum of money, something about which one might talk, as one talked about the light years to the sun, but which was never quite clearly comprehended or obtained. Here in the rich atmosphere of the bank, where money was handled and kept in staggering amounts, paradoxically it seemed to be more remote and unobtainable than ever. However hard she tried to convince herself of the reasonableness of her effort, she simply could not imagine that a shrewd and conservative financier would risk so large an investment in her talent and confidence, which were all that she had to offer as security. Perhaps he would scoff at her. Perhaps, even worse, he would treat her appeal with the kind condescension that one accords the fantasy of a child. She could not bear the thought she was absolutely the greatest possible fool to expose herself to such humiliation, and if she were to leave immediately, she could still avoid it. But she did not leave, of course. Because she was compelled, she sat and waited.

“Mr. Tyler is ready to see you now. Please go right in.” Standing, Donna crossed to Tyler’s door and let herself into the office. Now that she was irrevocably committed and was acting positively, her dread of the interview was suddenly gone. The first thing she felt inside the office was an extravagant pleasure that she had worn by chance a color that went well with the dark walnut paneling, and she was able, moreover, to be amused by her pleasure as she would have been amused at choosing a hat to match a car. Tyler was seated behind a massive desk, walnut like the paneling, and he stood up as she entered and came around to meet her. Behind him an expanse of Venetian blinds admitted light in a pattern of horizontal bars. He was wearing gray, as he had been the one time she had seen him in the shop, expensive and impeccable, and he held her hand a moment with the same cool, dry touch she had noted then.

“How are you, Miss Buchanan?” he said. “I’m happy to see you again.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I wasn’t certain that you’d remember me.”

“You’re much too modest. It would be more difficult to forget you than it is to remember you.” He indicated a chair beside the desk. “Will you sit down?”

She thanked him again and accepted the chair. Seated again, he offered her a cigarette from a silver box on the desk, leaning forward to light it with a lighter that matched the box. The cigarette was just what she needed. She felt relaxed and durable and, if not confident of success, at least prepared to accept failure.

“Has Mr. Joslin spoken with you?” she asked.

“Yes, he has. About you — and very highly.”

“Mr. Joslin has been kind and helpful. I don’t know why he should concern himself with my affairs, but I’m thankful that he does. I suppose he explained to you why I asked to see you.”

“He did, of course, but I’d like to hear it again from you.”

“Well, I don’t know how to say it except simply. The shop in which I work, which was left by Aaron Burns as part of his estate, is to be sold. I would like to buy it myself, but I have practically no money and no security. My proposition is that your bank loan me two hundred thousand dollars, which would be secured by a mortgage on the business.”

“For better or worse, you have at least put it precisely. I understand from Mr. Joslin that the business has been doing extremely well.”

“Yes. It has done well, and I’m certain that it will do even better in the future if I am able to continue along the lines we have established.”

“I can easily check the past record of the business, of course, but it is not so easy to verify what may be anticipated. What makes you feel, now that Mr. Burns is dead, that the business will not deteriorate?”

“Because I contributed much to its growth in the past few years.”

“That you are exceptionally talented in the designing and execution of fashions I am convinced. There is more to operating a business, however, than the creation of a product. Do you also have the training and the quite different kind of ability that would make you successful in management?”

“I think I have. When Mr. Burns had his second heart attack, I was left in charge. I admit this was for a short period. Nevertheless, it was long enough to give me the feel of things and to assure me that I could have run the shop indefinitely.”

Tyler helped himself to a cigarette. He sat quietly for a few seconds, looking down at the glowing ash and the thin ascending silver smoke.

“Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, Miss Buchanan,” he said at last. “It is especially a lot of money when it belongs to someone else and is merely in one’s custody. What I’m trying to say is, I must exercise a conservatism in the investment of bank funds that I might not exercise in the investment of my own. At any rate, a loan of this kind and size could be made only after a very meticulous investigation, and I must tell you honestly that I can’t offer you much reason for optimism. I accept personally your statement about the condition of the business, but you can surely see that you as an individual are an additional and relatively unknown factor of peculiar significance in this case. I am certain, I must tell you, that your request for this loan will not be approved.”

She received his judgment with no sense of shock, as if, after all, it was of little importance. Anyhow, nothing had been said that she had not anticipated and been prepared for. Smiling faintly, she stood up.

“In that case, I’ll not waste any more of your time. Thank you for being honest with me.”

“Please.” He lifted a hand and looked at her, and after a moment she sat down again in the chair. “As I indicated previously, I am not always so conservative as an individual as I am as a banker. When Earl Joslin talked with me about this, he suggested two alternatives to a bank loan. One was a personal loan. The other was that I buy the shop myself and let you manage it. I am willing to consider either of these alternatives, but I confess that the latter appeals to me more. If I am to gamble, I want it to be for high stakes, and the profit from the business — if it were to be as successful as both you and Earl expect — would be far in excess of legal interest. I’d have little or no time to devote to the enterprise and would be dependent upon you, on whom I’d be gambling. Would you consider such an arrangement?”

“Yes. Mr. Joslin also suggested that possibility to me. I told him then that I was agreeable, and I still am. The truth is, of course, that I would consider it an extremely good opportunity.”

“Good. You understand, I hope, that I’m not committing myself. I’ll check thoroughly and consider carefully, and I reserve the right to decide on either the loan or the purchase, or neither.”

“That’s understood.”

“In that case, I’ll let you know my decision as soon as possible.”

She inferred from this that the interview was at an end. She stood up, and he stood up after her, and she offered her hand again to the cool, dry contact of his.

“You have been very considerate,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

“Don’t thank me yet.” He shook his head and smiled. “Perhaps it will come to nothing, and you will have nothing to thank me for. Goodby, Miss Buchanan.”

On the street, she felt a singing sense of exhilaration and a lightness of body that made every step seem ludicrously high and long, as if she had to force her feet to earth against a tendency to float. At a corner she paused and considered where she should go and what she should do. If she returned to the shop, she would have to tell Gussie about the interview, and this she did not want to do, not because she did not want Gussie to know, but simply because the exhilaration, the singing sense of good feeling, would surely deaden and dissipate if it were touched by words, and she wanted to hold it as long as she could. She did not, however, want to be alone. She wanted someone with her, someone to talk with and to touch and possibly to love — and the one she wanted, she realized suddenly, was Enos Simon. She would return to her apartment, she thought, and perhaps call the school; and she would walk the long way to her apartment because she was feeling wonderful on a wonderful day and simply preferred walking to riding.

She walked steadily for a long time, but, slowly, as she walked, her euphoria and effervescense diminished as her body tired. By the time she reached the apartment she was depressed, and convinced that she had allowed herself to be deceived by an attempt at kindness, which if it was only that was really cruelty. The more depressed and hopeless she became, the more she wanted someone with her — not just anyone but Enos Simon specifically.

2.

William Walter Tyler, behind his desk, sat and watched the pattern of light on the heavy carpet. It was quite still in the room. From the outer office and the bank and the street, no sound penetrated. The horizontal bars had moved a little, a little farther out upon the carpet, and would soon disappear.

He thought with a stirring of quiet bitterness that a man was entitled to a time of peace. After a while, after the passing of so many years, the feelings of hunger and emptiness should pass and leave a man alone. He was forty-eight, and he had thought indeed that he had reached the time that was surely the right of every man — a time if not of peace at least of quiet, if not of fulfillment at least of the absence of nagging desire. Now he knew that such a time had not come to him. He watched the pattern of light, the sign of the sun that rose and set. He remembered a young woman with a restless feeling he should never have felt. A young woman, hardly more than a girl, with a supple body that housed needs he could never meet because it was, for him, simply too late. That is what he told himself, that it was simply too late. But he watched the pattern and did not move, and remembered her face and hands and voice.

He had twice before been disturbed in the way he was now disturbed, once by a child when he was a child, and once by a woman when he was a man. The child had been fifteen; he had loved her; and she had died. She had been, in fact, the cook’s daughter, coming now and then to the Tyler home, but he had hardly even spoken to her, because he wasn’t allowed to fraternize with servants’ children. When she came, she always remained in the kitchen, or in the garden just outside the kitchen door, and she was, he thought, the most beautiful girl he had ever seen. Having been taught by his mother to be a snob, he could not understand why a person of his social position should be so affected by the daughter of a cook. He suffered intensely, as a young boy suffers. Sometimes he lay in bed at night and remembered her as he had seen her in the garden, he thought that his heart would literally burst. It was then that he learned something of the nature of pain, that it was an immensely complex and irrational reaction.

He suffered from loving her, and the suffering was ecstasy, but then she died, and he suffered still, but there was no ecstasy in it any longer. His anguish was secret and somehow shameful, so intense and shattering that it was like a brutal physical violation of his incipient manhood. In his room, he wept. In his heart, he despised himself because by his snobbishness he had deprived himself of a friend, or the more that she might have been. When she was buried, the Tyler family sent a magnificent arrangement of white carnations, and Mr. Tyler, William Walter’s father, attended the funeral as the representative of the family.

She died of tetanus. Trying to understand why it was necessary for her to die at all, William Walter saw it in its simplest terms as a mortal conflict between a beautiful girl and a microscopic bug. The bug had been the victor, that was certain, and since he had been taught that God took a personal interest in such matters, he could only assume that God had been on the bug’s side. This thought was not original with him. It was something he had heard or read, the effect of a similiar experience related by someone else. It was an intolerable assumption, however, one which he could not accept; neither could he subscribe to the hypocrisy that such things happened for the best in God’s design. The truth of it, so far as he could see, was that God was compassionless, remote and unconcerned, if not impotent, and beyond the reach of supplication. This was a belief he always held afterward, the only tenable one in his judgment. The Tylers had been Episcopalians for generations, and he remained an Episcopalian, attending and supporting the church but accepting little that was taught in it.

The second person to disturb him comparably, quite a long time later, was the young woman he married. He met her at a tea dance to which he had gone reluctantly. She was a cousin of his hostess, her house guest, and her name was Harriet Cochran. Her family was wealthy, though not nearly so wealthy as the Tylers; and when he looked at her, he thought of expensive crystal gleaming in candlelight. That was an understandable response to her particular kind of loveliness, for she gave a deceptive impression of cool and detached delicacy. Actually, she was physically strong, and psychically she was both strong and resourceful. William Walter fell in love with her immediately, which was disturbing but not unpleasant, for love is unpleasant only when it is frustrated or dying. She responded to him promptly, with restraint, and was obviously prepared from the beginning to marry him. Their courtship fell just short of formality, all things always in the best of taste; they were united eventually in a grand ceremony and went to Europe on their honeymoon. The union was approved by both families, and everyone considered it especially fortunate.

It wasn’t. When they returned from Europe, he had already accepted the truth that he was not married in any real sense at all. This was traumatic, and it reflected favorably on the resiliency of his personality that he was able to adjust to this readily and adequately. At first their failure caused him naturally to wonder and probe and diagnose, but slowly, or really relatively quickly, he became convinced that it was something much better left alone. More than that, it was something that could be vastly disruptive if disturbed. He felt in the beginning defiled and tainted, as well as cheated, but self-devaluation was not natural to him, and the feeling passed. In his public life he remained aggressive, adding to a fortune that was already large, but in his private emotional life he withdrew and became passive, thankful, as the years were used up, for the gradually diminishing demands of his body.

Now after such penury and long oppression, his flesh and spirit were at last awakened and causing him pain. It was strange, he thought, that this could happen so long after he had stopped thinking it possible, and all because of a clever young woman who wore the rather ridiculous kind of glasses that clever young women so often seemed to prefer. She was, moreover and quite obviously, exorbitantly ambitious. He did not criticize her, of course, for being clever or ambitious, for he had himself been both, and still was. What he criticized her for — or at least felt a strange mixture of excitement and resentment for — was her capacity to arouse within him emotions he did not want aroused, and he tried to understand why it was that she could do this.

I have known many women more beautiful, he thought, and the truth is, she is not beautiful at all. She is only quite clever and knows how to make the most of what she has, but this in itself is perhaps as important as beauty is. At any rate, she is more provocative than anyone I have known or can remember seeing, provocative in a deeper and broader sense than is generally meant when the word is used, and there is more in this effect by far than can be explained by the response of certain glands. I was aware of it in the shop when I went there with Harriet, and I remembered it and considered it, and I was more than ever aware of it this afternoon in this office, and I think it is largely explained, apart from her face and body and voice and the deliberate effect she achieves through skill, by her almost childlike dedication to what she must do and be. She is not, however, either cold or narrow, as dedicated people often are, and there is certainly in her a potential for splendid passion. How I should know this, knowing her so slightly, is something I do not understand, but there is something else that I understand quite well, which is that I had better now for the peace of my soul begin to forget her before it’s too late, or more to the point, because it already is.

His thoughts and the silence were suddenly oppressive, and he turned abruptly in his chair and pressed a switch on the intercom.

“Have the attendant bring my car around, please,” he said. Leaning back again, he waited a few minutes, giving the attendant time; then he got up and crossed to a closet and put on his hat and coat. Passing through the outer office, he spoke briefly to a woman with a pince-nez and then continued on his way through the bank to the street. His timing was precise, as it almost always was, for the car had just arrived before him. It was a small car, a Chevy, and he knew that it was considered an affectation in a man who could have afforded any kind of car, but it gave him a kind of satisfaction to drive the Chevy, affectation or not, and he got into it now and drove away. Weighing in his mind the alternatives of his town apartment and his house in the country, he decided upon the house in the country, especially since it was Friday and the weekend was ahead. The truth was, however, that neither was a place he fervently wanted to go to. He wondered how long it had been since he had gone any place with fervency. It had certainly been longer than he cared to remember. If he went now to the house in the country, however, he would have to stop first at the apartment to ask Harriet if she would care to go, even though he knew she would stay in town. Nevertheless, it was an obligation to ask, and so he continued in the direction of the apartment and was there in little over half an hour.

In the foyer, he gave his hat and coat to a maid and was told that Harriet was not in. He went through the living room and into the adjoining study. Alone in the room, he mixed a drink and drank it slowly, thinking again of Donna Buchanan and wondering what she was doing at the moment and what she would be doing in the coming three nights and two days. This seemed to be of immense importance — knowing the things she would do and the places she would go, knowing if they would be places and things she really wanted to go and do or if, as in his own case, they would be no more than time-fillers. Would she work? Would she go to a show or go dining or dancing? Did she have a lover, and would she sleep with him? He thought these things, and he realized that he was like a stricken schoolboy. It did him good to think so of himself, and he smiled about it and drank his drink. After a while he heard the voice of Harriet in the living room.

Having finished his drink by then, he mixed another for himself and one for her and carried them out. She had gone directly to her own room, however, and so he followed her there and rapped on the door with the edge of the glass in his right hand. She asked who it was and invited him in when he told her, but he was obliged, because of the glasses, to ask her to open the door from the inside.

“I thought you might like a drink,” he said.

“Thank you.”

She took the drink and carried it to a table and set it down without tasting it. Carrying his own, he crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. She was really very beautiful, he thought, watching her. She was more beautiful than she had been when he married her, and this was rather remarkable because she was thirty-eight years old now, ten years younger then he. He conceded the beauty and admired it — and was not stirred by it in the least.

“I’ve decided that I’ll drive out to the house,” he said.

“Have you? I thought you planned to stay in town.”

“I did plan to stay, but I’ve changed my mind. Would you like to come along?”

“No. It’s impossible. I have commitments here.”

“Do you object to my going alone?”

“Not at all. Please do just as you like about it.”

He lifted his glass and lowered it and sat for a moment looking down into it. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’ve been thinking of going away for a while.”

“Away? Where?”

“I don’t know. Just somewhere for a change. Only for a few days, perhaps a week.”

“I see. Perhaps it would be a good idea if you did go. You’ve been looking rather tired. Are you feeling well?”

“Quite well. I’m neither tired nor ill. Just stale, that’s all.”

“In that case, a change would undoubtedly do you good.”

“Well, I haven’t definitely decided. I’ll let you know, of course, if I do.”

“All right.”

He drank again from his glass, and she stood watching him, obviously waiting for him to leave. She wanted to change her clothes, and she did not want to undress in front of him. In all the years they had been married, she had never undressed in front of him or permitted him to see her naked.

“I would like your judgment on something,” he said.

“My judgment? On what? Not on a business matter, I hope.”

“It is, in a way, as a matter of fact. Something a little out of my line, however. I think your judgment would certainly be of value to me.”

“What is it?”

“It has to do with the local shop in which you bought two original gowns. The shop owned by Aaron Burns, who died recently. You’ll remember that I was there with you when you bought the second gown.”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Do you also remember the young lady who designed the gowns?”

“Yes, I remember. Donna Buchanan. She’s very talented.”

“Do you intend to continue buying gowns from her?”

“Yes, I do. I’m convinced she will build quite a reputation. Why are you so interested?”

“As I said, it’s a matter of business. She wants to borrow money to buy the shop, so she can continue to use it as an outlet for her work.”

“Then loan it to her. She will certainly be successful.”

“As a designer, I have no doubt. But there is more than that to running a successful business.”

“Well, that’s something I know nothing about.”

“It will take at least two hundred thousand dollars. That’s quite a lot of money to invest with no more security than the shop itself.”

“Surely you don’t expect me to advise you regarding your investments.”

“Of course not. All I wanted, really, was your opinion of Miss Buchanan’s ability.”

“I’ve told you that. She is certain, in my judgment, to go a long way.”

“Isn’t it rather unusual for a designer to start in this way? Don’t they usually get a position with a large outfit, or something of the sort?”

“I suppose they do, usually. I suspect that Miss Buchanan is an unusual person.”

“Yes. I suspect that myself.” He drained his glass and stood up. “Well,” he said, “I think I’ll get started for the country.”

“All right. I hope you have a pleasant weekend.” He went over to her and touched his lips to her cheek and went out.

She undressed and lay down on the bed and began to think about the harpist, another talented young woman, whose expenses she was paying at a local conservatory.

3.

Enos Simon walked slowly beneath the pines of Pine Hill. It was four o’clock, and he had survived another day of classes, which was something to be thankful for, but how to survive the day after, or the days after and after and after, was something he could not imagine or even bear to think of. Fortunately, however, it was not necessary to think of it, at least not at the moment, because this was Friday and there were no more classes until Monday. This was something else for which he could, he supposed, be thankful. He walked slowly because he was by no means eager to reach his destination and because he was much more tired than he should have been. But he soon reached the house in which he lived, which was only a short distance from the school, right at the foot of the hill, and inside in his room he stood looking out the window and up the hill in the direction from which he had just come.

He hated the hill and the pines. He would have hated them anyhow, for reasons he would never understand, but he especially hated them because they looked like a hill and pines he had known in another place in another time. The place was not far away, nor the time so very long ago, and from his window there he had looked down the hill instead of up; but otherwise the two views were almost identical. Sometimes he had the feeling, looking out the window and up the hill, that the same doctor who had gone to talk with him there would return to talk with him here. He had not hated the doctor, who tried to be kind and helpful, but neither had he wanted to talk with him, always feeling relieved when he went away. One of the reasons he had not wanted to talk was that he would say things about himself that he afterward regretted saying. When he felt this regret he would go back over the conversation in his mind, trying to recall it precisely — and this was disturbing. Quite a long while after he had left the place — especially at times when he was particularly depressed — he would find himself trying to reconstruct one of these conversations. It was impossible, of course, to do this accurately, and the remembered conversation would be a mosaic of bits gathered from many conversations and imagined words that had never actually been said.

“How are you feeling today?” the doctor asked.

He did not feel like talking and remained silent. He wished the doctor would go away.

“Don’t you feel like talking?” the doctor said. “Do you want me to leave you alone?”

This was, of course, what he did want, but he could not bring himself to say so, for the doctor meant well and was only trying to be kind and helpful.

“It’s just that I don’t feel very well,” he said.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do you think I might be able to help you? In what way do you feel bad?”

“Well, in a number of ways, actually. It’s rather hard to put your finger on anything specifically. My head aches quite a bit — it’s not exactly an ache, more like it’s sort of stuffed with something. And I ache in other places too, and feel as if I had a fever.”

“I can assure you that you don’t have a fever. Your temperature’s perfectly normal.”

“I didn’t say I had a fever. I only said I feel as if I had.”

“Oh. I see. Well, is there anything else you would like to tell me about? Is your wrist painful?”

“No. My wrist doesn’t bother me at all. That’s a very small thing. What bothers me most is the feeling I have that I have come to the end of things.”

“To the end of things? What do you mean, to the end of things?”

“Oh, I don’t know how I can make it any clearer than that. It’s just a premonition or something. As far as I’m concerned, everything is finished.”

“I’d be very much interested to know why you feel this way. Would you care to tell me?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say. I’ve always had this feeling that I’d come to a bad end. It’s not something you can just simply explain.”

“Do you think you deserve to come to a bad end?”

“I suppose I do. I’m not much good, I guess. I’ve never been able to do anything of any consequence, and I’m a coward besides. Terrible things have happened to lots of people who were much better than I am.”

“I dare say that’s true. Terrible things have happened to lots of people who were better than I am, too, but that’s not our fault, is it?”

“I don’t know about that. I don’t know.”

“You said you’re a coward. I don’t believe you are, or at least no more than we all are, but I would like to know what makes you think so. Are you afraid of anything in particular?”

“Right now, you mean?”

“Now or any other time.”

“Well, I’ve thought about it and tried to understand it. Mostly it’s only a kind of general feeling, not about anything in particular, but sometimes it attaches itself to something, and then I’ll be afraid for a while of whatever it attaches itself to. Later on the feeling will get general again, and then become specific about something different, or maybe the same thing again, and it keeps going on that way.”

“What are some of the particular things you have been afraid of?”

“I don’t believe I want to talk about them.”

“That’s too bad. Sometimes if you talk about such things, it helps.”

“Well, I don’t think it will do any good, but I guess it won’t do any harm, either. I was afraid of God once for quite a while, because I thought He was going to do something terrible to me, and I was afraid of people all together, society I mean, and I was afraid of contamination and diseases like epilepsy and such things.”

“Are you afraid of God now?”

“No.”

“How did you get over being afraid of Him?”

“I quit believing in Him.”

“Are you afraid of society or disease?”

“No.”

“Are you afraid of anything in particular now?”

“No. Nothing in particular. I just feel that something is wrong with me, with my life, and I don’t know what it is except that it is something terrible that I won’t ever be able to get rid of. It’s something I was born with, I guess.”

“Is that why you did what you did to your wrist?”

“Yes, that’s why.”

“It’s really unnecessary and unreasonable to let yourself become so depressed over the things you mentioned, God and society and things like that. Don’t you understand that?”

“I understand that it’s unreasonable, but I can’t help it.”

“Of course you can’t. I see that, all right. But perhaps we can help you to help it. As you said, these are merely things or ideas to which your depression attaches. Since you understand that, we are already a long way on the road to understanding the rest of it. Well, now, you see? We have made some progress in just this little while, and I believe we have talked enough for the present, don’t you?”

The doctor stood up and looked around the room. His eyes discovered and rested upon a book.

“I see you are reading the Grand Testament,” he said. “It isn’t often you see someone reading Villon. Do you like him?”

“Yes, I like him. He is a fine poet.”

“Is that the only reason you like him? Because he is a fine poet?”

“No. I like him because he was an evil man who created a kind of beauty that few good men have been able to create.”

“Why does this idea appeal to you? Because you find it reassuring in respect to yourself?”

“I guess so. I’m evil, too. It’s something I’ve felt to be true for as long as I can remember, and I wouldn’t have felt it was true for so long if it weren’t.”

“And it makes you feel a little better to believe that evil people are capable of great good?”

“Great beauty, I said.”

“Beauty is good, isn’t it?”

“That’s right. I guess you’re right about that.”

“Can’t you see that if you were truly evil you would not be concerned about your potential for good?”

“I don’t know. It’s all part of the same thing. Just twisting words around won’t change it.”

“Have you ever done an evil thing?”

“That doesn’t matter. Doing evil and being evil are different things. God knows the difference.”

“I thought you had quit believing in God.”

“Oh, well, that’s just a manner of speaking. I can see that you are only trying to catch me up, and that’s no help to anyone.”

The doctor smiled again and placed a hand lightly for a second on Enos Simon’s shoulder.

“I said we had talked enough for the present, and here I have started all over again. It’s a weakness of mine. Whenever you’ve had enough of me, you mustn’t hesitate to say so. Goodby, now. Perhaps we can talk again soon.”

He went away quietly, and Enos Simon looked down at the slope and the pines.

As he now looked up at them. In this different place, at this different time, quite a long while later. His depression was increasing, the deep dark swing of the cycle, inexplicable and inexorable, that never swerved to the antithetical elation, the mania, but hovered only between depression and release from depression. He knew quite well that he should not be standing here in idle submission looking up the slope among the trees, that it was in fact the worst thing he could possibly do. But it was a part of the dark process to want most to do nothing when it was most imperative to do simply anything. It was a mistake also to remember the past, the effects of depressions that had become confused with causes, and he knew quite clearly what a mistake it was. It was one he had made before, and often, but he continued to make it, in spite of his knowledge.

There was, for instance, the time he had gone with a group to a home for incurables; it had been a day depressing in itself, a gray day of cold rain in which the sun had never shone. He had seen these patients, these men and women in all stages of degeneration, some in that terrible corruption of body and mind, and looking at them, he had wondered where their souls had gone. It was easy to believe that a normal person possessed a soul, but where was the soul of an idiot? And what happened to the soul of a person who had once not been an idiot but had become one slowly through degeneration over a period of time? And how could one seriously believe in something that was supposed to be the very essence and immortal part of life and yet was subject to physical corruption, or at least had no discernible existence apart from it in the way that the mind might survive cleanly and discernibly in a body otherwise mutilated? And most terrifying of all, if the soul survived, did it survive an idiot as an idiot soul?

This kind of speculation was very bad for Enos. Afterward he was unable to forget what he had seen or to quit thinking about it in the way he had begun. The depression he felt was far more enduring and intense than the brief and normal depression that would have come to any sensitive person from the visit. It was a morbid malignancy that grew and grew; he became obsessed with the idea that this visit had been a kind of warning of his own destiny, and at the same time he was driven to irrational efforts to avoid the destiny that was preordained. Everything was contaminated, a personal trap. He had only the vaguest ideas of how such debilitating diseases were contracted, but he knew there was no innocence left in the world, that everything had become an agent of contagion, and it required the most stringent effort to eat or drink, or touch so much as the knob of a door. This went on and on, but at last the fear passed. Or, rather, it was exchanged for a different fear which he dwelled on until it also was exchanged for still another. And in between, once in a while, there were interims of uneasy peace.

The chronology was confused in his mind, but of the interims of uneasy peace, one was a period encompassing a spring and a summer, remembered afterward as the time of Donna. Sustained by her, he experienced in those few months the brightest period of his life since the days of his early childhood, and the day after the climax of their relationship, he felt a sense of worth and confidence and a security that their love would survive and sustain him from that time forward. For a while it did sustain him, but then he began to slip from the level of brightness, caught again in another of the dark cycles; and he was certain that she did not love him, as actually she did not, that no one on earth, because he did not merit it, could love him with permanence or any depth. When his parents moved during his first college term, he had already given her up as lost, and himself also, and he did not return to her to suffer the rejection and humiliation which he anticipated with irrational certainty.

He struggled on through college and reached his third year, which was the worst period of all, the worst of his life — and just why it was worst he could never tell. There was no unusual precipitating incident, nothing at all that he could isolate and define. In the depths of unremitting depression, he felt devaluated and impotent and unfit to live; one afternoon, he returned to his room and tried to quit doing what he was plainly unfit to do. In the bathroom, which was shared by other students, he ran the tub about half full of water and held his left arm below the surface and slashed his wrist with a razor blade. He was afraid of the pain in the last moments of living, but there was only an insignificant sensation in the instant of action, and hardly any at all afterward as his blood mixed pinkly with the water.

It was a fine definitive action of which he was proud in the instant of its execution, but it turned out to be, after all, only another failure and humiliation — a climactic rejection of all rejections, no less than the scorn of death itself — for neglecting to lock the bathroom door, he was found, saved and sent away. Then had come the episode of the hill and the pines and the doctor who came to talk; and after that, after a sustained period on the top of the cycle, his release to the business of living for which he was somehow unfit. Because there seemed to be nothing else to do, he returned to the university and finished his course. Eventually, through the good offices of a friend of his father, after a couple of beginnings and failures in other places, he had come to this second hill of pines. Now here he was, looking out the window and up the slope, wondering how he could possibly go on with the intolerable task of survival.

Looking and wondering, he began to think of Donna, who had returned to his life like a kind of incidental miracle, and he felt the lift in darkness thinking of her always brought. He knew he must go to her again at once, with her permission if possible and without it if necessary, as he had gone three times since their first meeting. Stirred out of his perilous lethargy by the thought of her, he turned away from the window, went to the telephone and dialed her number.

In her own place at that moment, with a need far less profound than his, Donna was wanting him.

4.

She was awakened suddenly by a sound at midnight. She did not actually know that it was a sound that awakened her, the assumption and acceptance of it simply being in her mind upon awakening, but she knew that it was midnight, because she could see, by turning her head slightly on her pillow, the luminous face of the bedside clock. Her left arm was pinned and numb, but she did not attempt to release it, lying very quietly, instead, and waiting for the repetition of the assumed sound, which very shortly came. It was no wonder that the sound had awakened her, for it was strangely penetrating, in spite of being very soft, and it was, she thought, a kind of whimper, a sound of dumb suffering.

Her arm still pinned, she raised her body from the hips as far as she could and leaned over Enos Simon to look down at his face. On his face was the visible expression of the sound, and as she watched the expression, the oral expression was repeated again, but this time with added shrillness and intensity, and it did not diminish and die away as it had before, but ascended precipitately to a high, thin cry. As if lifted by the force of the cry itself, his body jerked up to a sitting position, her own falling aside to avoid a collision, and the cry ended in his throat with a strangled sound.

“Darling,” she said. “Darling, what’s the matter?”

He remained in a rigid posture of sitting and did not answer. His body was trembling, but the trembling slowly stopped. At first she could plainly hear him breathing, but then, quite soon, she could hear him only by listening intently.

“You cried out in your sleep,” she said. “Did you have a dream?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.” Reaching up, she touched his shoulder, drawing her fingers down his side.

“Lie down,” she said. “Lie down.”

He lay back slowly, turning to put his arms around her and press his face against her breasts.

“Did you have a dream?” she said again.

“I don’t know. I don’t remember any dream.”

“You sounded as if something were hurting you. Not physically. As if you were suffering.”

“Nothing was hurting. I don’t know what it was.”

“Does it make you happy to be here with me?”

“Yes. It’s the only thing. Nothing else makes me happy.”

“Did it make you happier earlier? What we did?”

“Yes. Of course. It always makes me happy.”

“When it happens, I get the feeling that you are not happy afterward. That maybe you feel it is something you should not do. Do you love me afterward, or do you despise me for a little while?”

“No, no. I never despise you. You only imagine it if you think I do.”

“All right. Do you want to go back to sleep?”

“No. I’m wide awake. I couldn’t possibly sleep.”

“Neither could I. Would you like a drink or some coffee or anything like that?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

“Or a cigarette? Would you like a cigarette?”

“No. A cigarette is not what I want.”

“What is it? What is it that you want?”

“You know. You know.”

“All right. All right, darling. All right.”

And then, as before, in the achievement of ecstasy and even in the ecstatic accomplishment, she was aware in her bones that it was all a mistake, not in itself alone, but in this way and with this man, and that it might very well be in the end, for him or for her or for both, the worst mistake of all. Afterward, however, lying in the lethargy succeeding excitement, in a warm and delicious indifference to trials and trouble and all consequences whatever, she listened again to his regular breathing, the slow and even pumping of his lungs, and wondered what it was about him that incited her compassion and generosity and almost her love, and she understood suddenly that it was because he was like a child.

He is like a child, she thought, with a terrible problem, whatever the problem may be.

“Are you going to sleep now?” she said.

“Maybe now. In a little while.”

“Do you feel good?”

“Yes, good. Very good.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“You.”

“What about me?”

“That you are lovely. That I love you. That I can almost believe in myself when you are with me, and that I cannot believe in myself, and consequently nothing at all, when you are not with me.”

“You shouldn’t say that. You must not be dependent on me or anyone else. It isn’t necessary.”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Of course not. Just consider a minute. It was only three weeks ago that we met again, and before that we knew each other for only a few months. You see? Out of all your life, you have known me less than half a year, and all the rest of the time you got along perfectly well without me.”

“I did not get along perfectly well.”

“Nonsense, darling. Certainly you did.”

“No. Perhaps sometime I’ll tell you just how I did not.”

“I’d like that. I’d like you to tell me about yourself.”

“Perhaps I’ll tell you.”

“But not now?”

“No, not now.”

“All right. Tell me how things were at school. Did you have a good week?”

“No. I had a terrible week. All weeks are terrible at the school.”

“Is it that bad?”

“It’s bad enough.”

“Why do you stay, then?”

“I don’t know. Where else is there to go?”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that. You sound as if you thought Pine Hill were, so far as you’re concerned, the end of the world.”

“Perhaps it is. Who knows?”

“Oh, such nonsense! Besides, you are almost criticizing me by implication. I have tried to make you happy, and you obviously are not happy at all.”

“You mustn’t think that. When I am with you, I am as happy as I can be. I’d like to stay here always.”

“That’s not possible, of course.”

“I could at least stay again tomorrow night. Is that possible?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think you’d better.”

“Why? Can’t you stand me two nights in succession?”

“It’s not that. It’s just that we probably shouldn’t do it too often.”

“You’re only trying to avoid telling me the truth. You simply don’t want me. Have you planned to be with someone else?”

“No. With no one.”

“Truly?”

“Of course. Do you think I spend all my nights with different men in turn?”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

“I didn’t think you did, really.”

“May I stay, then?”

“All right.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, I promise.”

They lay quietly for several minutes, not talking, and then she sat up and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Do you want a cigarette now?” she said. “No, thank you.”

“I believe I’ll have one.”

She stood up and walked across the room in darkness to the table where she had left her case and matches. Lighting a cigarette, she stood and smoked it slowly with her back to the bed, and she could hear behind her no slightest sound.

The trouble is, she thought, I could never be strong enough. I am strong enough for one, but not for two, and after tonight — or tomorrow night, since I promised — I had better send him away for good, before worse is made of what is already bad enough.