Wake Up With a Stranger

1.

She had planned to go on Sunday to see her mother, but she changed her mind and did not go, and she did not go the following Sunday, either. She tried to convince herself that she did not go because of other things which needed doing, and she actually worked hard at the shop on both days, but she knew quite well, nevertheless, that she did not go simply because she dreaded the visits so much. The third Sunday after her last trip to the high, narrow house on the mean street, she understood that it would be impossible to procrastinate any longer. It had now become imperative to go for the sake of her own peace, if nothing else, and so she took a taxi and got there about three o’clock in the afternoon.

Her father was in the living room. He did not rise from his chair when she entered, and apparently, since there was neither a book nor a newspaper in his hands or near him, he had simply been sitting alone and doing nothing. She was thankful that he remained still and made no effort to greet her physically, for she could not bear to have him touch her. His gray, curly hair was uncombed, and his face below it, still rather handsome in a heavy, florid fashion, had a kind of blurred look, the features somehow indistinct, as if he had been drinking heavily. She knew, however, that he had not, for he never drank at all. Neither did he smoke or gamble or engage in infidelity. His only vices were failure and petulance and sometimes petty sadism. Looking at him, she wished that she might never have to look at him again, but she was determined to be amicable.

“Well,” he said, “so you have finally condescended to come and see us.”

“I have come to see Mother,” she said, violating her amity at once with the pointed exclusion. “Is she here?”

“She’s upstairs in bed.”

“Taking a nap?”

“I don’t know if she’s asleep or not. She’s sick.”

“Sick? What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know. We haven’t had a doctor.”

“Has she been sick long?”

“Why should you be so concerned? If you came to see her a little more often, or if you lived at home as a decent daughter should, you would not have to ask such questions. What if she had died any time in the past three weeks? Would you want to know how long she had been dead?”

She turned away from him and started toward the door, but when she reached it, she stopped and turned and looked at him with loathing.

“I’ll tell you something,” she said, “which you know is perfectly true, though you would never admit it. I came here determined to be amicable, but I see that it is impossible, and so I will tell you what we both know. You have done a great deal for Mother, and I have done very little, this is true. But the little I have done has been for good, and the great deal that you have done has been for bad, all for bad. It would have been better if you had gone away and left her long ago.”

With an intensification of her loathing, she watched a dull and ugly flush rise slowly into his face. Before he could speak, she went on out into the hall and upstairs to her mother’s room. The room was closed tightly and did not look clean. The air was still and sour. On the bed, her mother lay breathing with a harsh, throaty sound, almost as if she were fighting strangulation, and every few seconds the strangled sound of breathing was punctuated by a moan. Crossing to the bed, Donna looked down at the sick woman and saw immediately that she was certainly burning with a high fever. That her illness was serious, if not critical, was obvious. “Mother,” Donna said.

She laid a hand on her mother’s forehead and repeated the word, and her mother’s eyes opened slowly and focused slowly.

“Donna,” she said.

She was almost unable to say it at all. The name was hardly more than the shape of the sound with her lips. She lifted a hand above the covers, and Donna caught it as it was falling.

“I’m sick,” she said. “I’m so very sick.”

Donna had to lean far down in order to hear the words. Besides being faint, they were distorted by pain.

“How do you feel?” Donna said. “In what way do you feel sick?”

“I am cold and hot by turns, and I am sick to my stomach. And my legs and back hurt. I can’t understand why my legs and back hurt me so much.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“I didn’t want to bother you. I was sure I would begin to feel better soon.”

“You should have called me. Surely you know that I want you to call me when you need me. Certainly, at any rate, you should have called a doctor.”

“Doctors are expensive. I thought I would get better without it.”

“Why didn’t Father call one? Damn it to hell, doesn’t he have any judgment whatever?”

“You mustn’t blame your father, dear. Things are so difficult for him just now.”

“Oh, hell! Things are always so difficult for Father. Well, never mind. I’m sorry. You lie still, now, and I’ll go call a doctor at once. Would you like the window opened a little before I go? The air is so stale in here.”

“If you think so, dear. Only a little, though. I have such chills.”

Donna released her mother’s hand and crossed to a window, which she lowered about a foot from the top, and then went out and downstairs to the telephone in the hall. She looked up the number of a doctor who had been called to the house before and dialed it with a kind of restrained violence. She was furious with her father for not having called earlier, and the fury was at the same time a useful defense against the guilt she felt herself for having stayed away so long. The doctor agreed to come, and she hung up the telephone and turned to face her father, who had come out of the living room.

“What have you done?” he said.

“I have done what you should have done yourself,” she said. “I have called a doctor.”

“We don’t need you to run our affairs. Your interference is not wanted.”

“You would let Mother die without attention, but I will not. I have called a doctor, whose bill I will pay, if that concerns you, and you can go to hell.”

“I will not allow you to talk to me like this in my own home. You are not welcome here any longer. Get out of here and don’t come back.”

“I’ll leave your Goddamn house, all right, if that’s what you want, but I’ll not leave until I’ve seen the doctor. In the meanwhile, you stay the hell away from me and leave me strictly alone. Do you hear?”

She was certain for a moment that he was going to strike her, something he had not done since that night on the porch when she was fifteen years old, but then he turned abruptly and went back into the living room. She stood and listened while he crossed to his chair and dropped heavily into it, after which she ascended the stairs and entered her mother’s room, stopping by the door and staring across at the figure on the bed, which did not move. The sick woman had not gone to sleep, but at least she had become quiet, and it would surely be better not to disturb her until the doctor came. In the meanwhile, it would be quite impossible merely to stand and wait in the shabby, sour room. What was needed was a cigarette, which would be in a measure sustaining and would make time endurable, but it might not be wise to add smoke to the already fetid air in which a sick woman already breathed with a strangled sound.

Stepping back into the hall, leaving the door slightly open behind her, Donna lit the needed cigarette and drew smoke deeply into her lungs. She wondered how long the doctor would be in coming. She hoped that he would not be long, for the last thing she wanted was to stand here waiting and waiting, with guilt and loathing in her heart for herself and her father, and the old ambivalence of contempt and love for her mother, who was very ill and possibly even dying. Perhaps it would be best, after all, if she did die, and perhaps her mother herself thought it would be best and wanted it and for that reason had not called the doctor or expressed any need for one. She had wasted everything — everything was gone and nothing at all of any value was left to waste — and perhaps she simply recognized and accepted that it was time to die.

Leaning against the wall, staring across at the ugly, faded pattern of roses on the wall opposite, she began to remember — in no particular order, without relationship to the chronology of their occurrence — some of the things she had seen and done and been a part of in this house. The sewing machine singing in the room where women came and stood for fittings. The small girl working the treadle with her hands, sometimes in a colored tent of silk or wool or brightly printed cotton. Mrs. Kullen in her corset in a slant of sun, an oddment with downy thighs. Wayne Buchanan saying grace to God and hating God’s world for reasons of his own. A dozen scattered fragments of a part of life renounced and outgrown but still in remembrance an oppression and a threat.

Why does that bastard Tyler wait so long? she thought. Why in God’s name doesn’t he simply tell me whether he will or will not let me have the money?

Downstairs, the front door bell rang and stopped ringing and rang again. Moving to the head of the stairs, she looked down into the hall and watched her father come out of the living room and admit the doctor, a short, plump man carrying the black leather bag that was as much the sign of his profession as the caduceus. After an exchange of words, the doctor came up the stairs alone. He had a round face with sharp little eyes in puffs of darkened flesh. As he rose to her level on the stairs, he looked at Donna, and away, and changed the bag from one hand to the other. He gave the impression of being uncertain as to why he had been called, and what might be expected of him now that he had come.

“This way, doctor,” Donna said.

She preceded him to the door of her mother’s room and opened it and stood aside for him to enter. She did not follow him inside, but remained waiting in the hall, and after a while lit and smoked another cigarette. When the cigarette had burned to a stub, she lit still another from it. The last cigarette was also a stub when the doctor came out into the hall at last. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and index finger and shook his head in a way that she interpreted to indicate solemnity.

“She’s sick,” he said. “Very sick.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“Well, it’s risky to say on the basis of a cursory examination, but the symptoms seem quite definite. Chills and fever, pain in the legs and back. Nausea. Frequent and painful urination. I would say, as a tentative diagnosis at least, that pyelitis is strongly indicated.”

“Pyelitis? What’s that?”

“A kidney infection.”

“Should she be in a hospital?”

“Yes. It would be better. I recommend that she be taken immediately.”

“Will you make the arrangements?”

“Yes, yes. I’ll call and have an ambulance sent. In the meanwhile, perhaps you could pack a few essentials and prepare her to go.”

“All right. I’ll get her ready while you’re calling.”

The doctor went down the hall and downstairs to the telephone, and Donna went into her mother’s room. She found a small bag in the closet and put into it the articles of clothing and toilet that she thought her mother would need in the hospital. When she had finished doing this, she went over to the bed and looked down at her mother’s face.

“You are going to the hospital, Mother,” she said.

“I know.”

“You will feel better when you are there. They will make you well soon.”

The sick woman’s eyes closed and remained closed for perhaps thirty seconds and then opened again.

“I will not get well,” she said, “but it doesn’t matter. I only want to be comfortable, so that I can die peacefully.”

“You mustn’t say things like that, Mother,” Donna said. “We are sending you to get well, and that’s what you must do.”

But she did not, of course. She died as she had said, and as she wished.

In her apartment, about three o’clock in the morning, Donna received the news from the hospital.

2.

It was a dull, wet day. In the night it had rained, and it had rained also early in the morning. Then it had not rained again, though it had threatened constantly to resume, and the sky was a dirty smear. The wind was northwesterly, still cold. Beside the dark hole that had been opened in the earth, the mound of dirt had been covered with white canvas, but at the edges it spilled out thinly, like a brown stain, on grass that was beginning to show the merest sign of green. In a bush of bridal wreath beside a grave, a scarlet bird of some kind sat and cocked its head.

The minister went through the ritual of consignment. His voice was high, nasal, threaded with a thin sound of petulance, as if he were scolding Death as a trespasser, but the petulance was surely only part of the quality of his voice. It was all depressing, and all unnecessary. Everything was finished, everything had been done and said, and all this — the words and gestures and symbolism — was no more than an ugly superfluity that were better omitted. Since it had not been omitted, however, it would at least be only decent, Donna thought, to complete it quickly and without excessive pretension. Life had been rejected, it was as simple as that; and it was now ill-mannered of Life, to say the least, to cling tenaciously to one who had wanted to go, comfortably and peacefully, to hold her now in the dull gray threat of rain and subject her in the end to the last grim measure of prescribed ritual.

Standing beside Donna, Wayne Buchanan began to sob. The sound of his sobbing was shallow and shocking, rattling in his throat like phlegm. All through the ceremony earlier, and during the slow ride to this depressing place, he had sat silent and decorous. She had thought that she would at least be spared a maudlin demonstration (which was more than she had hoped for to start with), but now it seemed that she was not even to be spared this and she must bear after all, in addition to everything else, this intolerable abasement.

How disgusting! she thought. How absolutely obscene!

She closed her eyes and bowed her head and waited, and after a while it was over. In the back seat of the black car in which they had come, she sat beside her father, who was now quiet, and returned to her father’s house. It was not really necessary for her to go there — she might have gone on to her own place or to the shop or wherever she chose — but she wanted to go for a particular reason. The reason was that she might walk through the house one last time without obligations or bonds or anything at all to keep her or claim her or bring her back again when she was gone. It would be, in its own way, her own ritual.

In front of the house, she got out of the car and went inside and directly upstairs. She walked through the rooms slowly, staying in each one until she felt impelled to move on, trying in each, by making herself very quiet and receptive, to recover the quality it had possessed in the short-lived period of happiness when she was very young, wanting sincerely in the final moments of the final departure to remember these rooms as kindly as she possibly could. The sewing room she saved to the end. Mrs. Kullen was there when she arrived, and remained when she went. Caught in her corset, fixed in light, she survived all others and would never leave.

In the hall below, Wayne Buchanan was standing at the door and looking out through the small glass pane to the street. He turned when she came up behind him. His face was livid and loose on its bones, and he was at that moment, though she didn’t know it, more afraid and alone than he had ever been.

“Are you going?” he asked.

“Yes, I’m going.”

“Will you come back to see me when you can?”

“No. I hope that I never see you again.”

“But... but why?”

“You are not my father and have never been. You are only the man who helped to beget me.”

“How can you say such things?”

“Since they are true, they are not difficult to say. Perhaps it is difficult to hear and accept, but that’s your problem.”

“I have always tried to do my best for my family.”

“Do you actually confess that you could have done no better? Anyhow, it does not matter, because it’s a damn lie, and you know it very well. You have been mean and petty and cruel, and you have never tried honestly to do a truly generous thing. I was sick of you long ago, and I am sick of you now, but I am willing to do you the courtesy of forgetting you entirely if you will do the same for me.” He stepped aside abruptly and opened the door.

3.

Because she wanted to restore at once the pattern of life which had been interrupted by her mother’s death, she went to the shop. She arrived just before closing time and went through the salon to her workroom. There, she threw herself into a chair and stretched her legs out long in front of her, arching her back, and feeling in calves and thighs the pleasant tension of muscles. She felt liberated, cut loose, in a way exonerated. She did not have any idea of precisely what she had been exonerated of, but she was conscious, nevertheless, of the lifting of an obscure indictment. Corollary with the liberation was a sense of being caught in a quickening current, a conviction that something of significance was going to happen to her, and that the thing to happen would be good. Reacting physically to the spur of her thoughts, she felt in her flesh a kind of tingling resiliency, and she was impelled to laugh aloud.

After a while, Gussie Ingram knocked and entered without waiting for a response. She slouched in a chair and lit one of her interminable cigarettes.

“Well,” she said, “how did it go?”

“Miserably. I’m immensely relieved that it’s over.”

“I hope you don’t mind because I wasn’t there. I simply cannot endure a funeral.”

“Of course not. It would have been completely unnecessary.”

“What will your father do now?”

“I don’t know. He’ll get along, I suppose.”

“I was wondering if perhaps you’d move in with him, now that he’s alone.”

“No. I wouldn’t even consider it. My father and I are not compatible.”

“Oh? Well, neither were me and mine, so far as that goes. What in God’s name is it that makes fathers so frequently impossible?”

“Maybe they aren’t. Maybe ours were exceptions. Anyhow, I am feeling too good at present to spoil it by talking of unpleasant things. Do you think it wrong of me to feel good under the circumstances?”

“I have long ago abandoned judging what is wrong or not wrong, darling.”

“Well, I was just sitting here feeling free and rather excited. Rather like I used to feel the last day of school when I was a child. As a matter of fact, I have a peculiar notion that something good is about to happen. Do you believe it is possible to have valid premonitions?”

“Oh, God, darling, don’t ask me.”

“Wasn’t it Huxley who defined metaphysics as the art of befuddling oneself methodically?”

“I wouldn’t know about that, either. Huxley and I are as incompatible as my old man and I were, but for different reasons.”

“Well, to hell with Huxley and metaphysics. Tell me how things went in the shop today.”

“Nicely, darling. I sold your red taffeta.”

“Really? To whom?”

“Mrs. Christopher Polk, no less.”

“Jesus, Gussie, it’s impossible for her!”

“I know. Her ass is far too big. Serena modeled it, however, and Serena’s ass is neither too big nor too small, but intolerably perfect. The moment Polk saw the taffeta on Serena, she assumed, of course, that it would look the same on her. The vanity of some of these bitches is perfectly incredible.”

“It will have to be altered all to hell.”

“I know. The seamstress has it upstairs now.”

“Oh, well, it’s another original sale, anyhow, and everyone will certainly recognize that the gown can’t be blamed for Polk’s tail. Some day, Gussie, nothing but originals will be sold in this shop. Nothing at all.”

“Say, you are feeling good, aren’t you? Are you withholding information by any chance? Did Tyler tell you something over the telephone to bring on this optimism?”

“Tyler? Telephone? What do you mean?”

“He called earlier this afternoon and left word for you to call him back. There’s a memo on the desk in the office. Didn’t you see it?”

“No. I’m sorry. I haven’t been in the office since I got here.”

“Then you’d better go and call him at once.”

“In a minute, Gussie. I don’t suppose there’s any hurry.”

Actually, now that the cure for action had been presented, she was oddly reluctant to commit herself. It was not that she dreaded hearing whatever Tyler had to say, but just the contrary, for she still felt the imminence of something significant and good, of which the call might very well be the beginning. She wanted to savor the expectation for a while, and she decided that she would smoke a cigarette slowly and call Tyler afterward. Lighting the cigarette, she blew out smoke and watched it rise and thin and disappear.

“Did he imply at all what he wants?” she asked.

“No. It wasn’t even him personally. It was a woman. His secretary, I suppose. Why don’t you call him?”

“I’m going to. Just as soon as I finish my cigarette.”

“Well, finish the goddamn thing, will you, darling? I would like to get away from here, if you don’t mind, and I’m damned if I’ll go before I learn what he wants.”

Donna laughed and stood up, bending down to grind the cigarette out in a tray.

“Jesus, Gussie, you’re simply a slave driver. All right, then. I’ll go and call, and afterward we can go out and have a drink together in celebration, or several in mourning.”

She went out of the room and across to the office that had been Aaron’s and was now, at least for the time being, hers. Gussie had written Tyler’s number on the memo pad, and she dialed, leaning with one hip against the desk for the duration of two long rings, after which the voice of Tyler himself came over the wire.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Mr. Tyler. This is Donna Buchanan.”

“Oh, yes. Miss Buchanan. Did you think I had forgotten you?”

“I was beginning to wonder.”

“I assure you that I hadn’t. I would like to talk with you again, but it is a little late in the day for it now, perhaps.”

“It’s not too late for me, if it isn’t for you.”

“Well, let’s see. I’m just preparing to leave here, but I plan to stop for a drink in a small bar I patronize. Would you care to meet me there? We could have a drink together and talk comfortably. Or I could pick you up at the shop, if you prefer.”

“That won’t be necessary. I’ll be happy to meet you.”

“Good. Could you make it in, say, half an hour?”

“If it isn’t too far. What is the name and address of the place?”

He told her where to come, and she hung up, after saying goodby, and returned to her workroom where Gussie was waiting.

“Did you get him?” Gussie said.

“Yes, I got him. He was still in his office. I have a feeling he was there just waiting for me to call.”

“What do we have, a celebration or a wake?”

“Neither, I’m afraid. Do you mind very much if we take a raincheck on it?”

“Oh, God, stood up again! I guess, at my filthy age and in my condition, that it’s to be expected.”

“I’m sorry, Gussie, truly I am. He asked me to have a drink with him, and I had to agree, of course, under the circumstances. You can understand that.”

“Sure, I understand, darling. And never mind the apology. If I had to choose between me and a millionaire, I sure as hell wouldn’t consider it much of a problem, you can bet your sweet chastity on that. And speaking of chastity, I wonder why it just happened to come into my mind at this moment as an appropriate allusion. Do you suppose that my female intuition warns me that yours is under seige?”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Gussie. This is strictly business.”

“Business is what I’m talking about, darling. Your business.”

“I doubt that he’d consider it worth two hundred thousand dollars.”

“Maybe on a long-term lease he would. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of business! My God, it would be a career in itself, and it absolutely decimates me to think of it. Oh, hell, darling, I’m just kidding, of course. I wish you luck and all that, and I’ll have a drink to it at the earliest opportunity, which should occur not later than ten minutes from now. Before the evening is over, as a matter of fact, I shall probably have as many as a dozen to it.”

She stood up and walked out of the room, looking somehow graceful and very smart in spite of her slouch and sharp protrusions, and Donna went into the lavatory and washed her hands and repaired her face. Five minutes later, in the street outside, she caught a taxi and gave the driver the address that Tyler had given her. Ten minutes later than that, in another street, she got out of the taxi in front of the bar.

It was a small bar, tucked in between a book dealer and a florist, which didn’t look like much on the outside, and didn’t look much more on the inside. And it certainly didn’t look like the kind of bar a millionaire would patronize or ask a young woman to meet him in. Standing for a moment just inside the door, while her eyes adjusted to the shadows, she wondered if she could have misunderstood the number or the name of the street, but this wasn’t at all likely. And then, she could see Tyler standing and smiling beside a small table in the rear. She went back to him and submitted a hand to his cool, dry touch, and they sat down together at the table, their knees touching for an instant underneath as they settled themselves.

“First,” he said, “I’d like to offer my sympathy. I didn’t know until I called the shop earlier today that you had lost your mother.”

“Thank you,” she said, feeling that she should say more but not knowing what it should be.

“Perhaps it was tactless of me to invite you here. I don’t wish to intrude.”

“Oh, no. It’s quite all right.”

“I’m glad. The truth is, I was most anxious to see you again. I’ve been sitting here like a schoolboy anticipating your coming.”

“You’re very gracious to say so, but I don’t believe it, of course.”

“Why not?”

“If you had been so anxious to see me, it could have been arranged much sooner. As I’ve told you, I was beginning to think that you had forgotten me entirely.”

“You couldn’t have been more wrong. However, here is the waiter for our order. What will you have?”

“I think I’ll have a sidecar.”

“Sidecar? I haven’t had one for ages. It’s brandy, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Brandy.”

“I’ll have one with you. Ordinarily I drink only bourbon and water, but I’m not feeling ordinary this evening.” He turned to the waiter. “Two sidecars,” he said.

The waiter moved over to the bar, which was not many steps away. She thought, looking at Tyler, that he was certainly a man who never felt ordinary at any time, this evening or any other. His face, she decided at first, was the face of an ascetic, which he surely was not, his nose aquiline and his mouth finely fashioned, suggesting sensuality in conflict with the asceticism. Ascetic, as a matter of fact, was not quite the adjective with which to describe his appearance. She sought the proper adjective in her mind and decided that it was sentient. He was a man aware, possibly in some respects, vulnerable. The waiter brought their sidecars, and she sipped hers hungrily, controlling an urge to drink it right down. It was cold and good, the tart liquid accented pleasantly by the sugared rim of the glass.

“Do you know why I waited so long to contact you again?” he said.

“I heard that you were out of town. Mr. Joslin told me.”

“So I was. For about ten days. That is not why I waited, however. Or rather, it is, like the waiting itself, part of the effect of the cause.”

“I don’t follow that, I’m afraid. Anyhow, I assume that it takes quite a long while to decide about making such a loan.”

“Frankly, I haven’t yet definitely decided about the loan. I’m considering it.”

“Is that why you wanted to see me? Just to tell me that you haven’t decided?”

“If that had been all I wanted, I could have told you over the telephone. Shall I be perfectly honest with you? I am not incapable of subtlety and indirection when it is necessary, but I have an idea that you would prefer to have me say bluntly what is on my mind.”

“Yes, I would prefer that.”

“All right. I wanted to see you simply for the pleasure of seeing you, and I waited so long to do it because I wanted it too much.”

“Is that being blunt? It sounds rather devious to me.”

“I don’t think so, and I don’t think you think so, either. However, I can be even blunter. I have not met anyone in many years who has interested me as you have. Do you remember the day I came to your shop with Harriet? Afterward, I kept thinking about you and wishing that I might meet you again under different circumstances. Then you came to my office about the loan, and I thought that the second meeting might cure the first, but it didn’t. It only accelerated my regression to adolescence. Am I now being too blunt?”

“No, you are not being too blunt, but I can’t understand why you should consider it adolescent to be interested in a woman.”

“The quality of my interest was adolescent, and still is. If it were not, I could try to seduce you and be done with it. It involves the most exquisite misery and a kind of masochistic passion for bondage. I am much too old to feel so young — so I have waited for the passing of an emotional condition I had thought and hoped I would never feel again, and thought, when it came, that I could never sustain. But it hasn’t passed. It hasn’t even diminished. Consequently, if I must feel like a schoolboy, I have decided that I can at least react to the feeling like an adult. So I called you, and so we are here drinking sidecars, and how do you feel about it?”

“I feel relaxed and quite flattered, and the sidecars are excellent.”

“That strikes me as being an evasion.”

“If it is, it is only temporary, to give me time to understand what you are saying. Are you asking me to have an affair with you?”

“Not yet.” He smiled and shook his head. “I am only asking you if you would consider giving us an opportunity to decide sensibly, after a while, whether an affair for us would be mutually acceptable.”

“Merely to see you and go out with you? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes. In the beginning, no more than a friendly relationship without commitments on either side, so that we can decide later what we want to do.”

“It sounds rather bloodless.”

“Believe me, I don’t feel bloodless. Quite the contrary. I only want, as a regressed adult feeling strangely uncertain in his regression, to be reasonably sure that neither of us makes a mess of things for himself or the other.”

“What about your wife? I have a feeling that she wouldn’t appreciate such an arrangement, even in the early stage before anything is decided.”

He smiled thinly, looking down into the shallow bulb of his glass, which was now empty. She thought that his mouth, after the thin smile left, was distorted briefly by a twist of bitterness, but she couldn’t be sure because his face was obscured by the inclination of his head.

“That needn’t concern either you or me,” he said. “Since I have proposed such an arrangement to you, however, I am rather obligated to assure you that Harriet and I made our own decision and established our own arrangement quite a long, long time ago. It has worked, in a way, and neither of us is likely to disturb it.”

As it was with Aaron, she thought. Probably it develops from different conditions, but in the end it comes to the same default. Is it going to be my part indefinitely to serve as compensation for inadequate wives?

“All right,” she said. “I don’t ask you to tell me anything that won’t concern me. There is something else, though, that concerns me a great deal, and I am wondering about it.”

“What’s that?”

“The loan. Does it depend upon my response to your proposal?”

“In other words, am I trying to bribe you? No. I’m not overly scrupulous, but I’m sure that I’m not doing that. Let’s put it this way. If we were later to decide to go ahead with this, I’d certainly establish you in the shop. That’s assured. If either one or both of us did not decide to go ahead, I might or might not make the loan, or invest in the shop myself. It would depend upon other factors entirely.”

“Well, that is clear enough, and it is also fair.”

“I’ve tried to be both, and I’m glad that you think I’ve succeeded. Do you want some time to consider your answer?”

“No. I have already decided. I won’t pretend that I’m offended by your proposal, for the truth is that I feel flattered. I can’t see that I have anything to lose from an arrangement that demands no commitments, at least in the beginning, and from which I can withdraw if I choose.”

“I see that you have an analytical mind. I’m beginning to be convinced that I would make no mistake, regardless of our personal relationship, in supporting you as a business woman.”

“I’m a good designer and a good business woman, and if it comes to it, I’ll be a good mistress.”

He laughed with genuine pleasure and lifted his empty glass.

“You have ended our discussion perfectly, and anything else would be a detraction. I suggest that we have another sidecar, and go to dinner afterward.”

“I agree to the sidecar, but I am not dressed for dinner.”

“You are dressed well enough for the place I’ll take you. I warn you at the beginning that I patronize only plain places. I drink in this plain place, where the drinks are good, and I eat in a plain place, where the food is good, and I drive a plain Chevrolet car which gets me from one place to another as well as a Cadillac would. By others, these preferences are considered affectations, and I dare say they are.”

“Not necessarily. Perhaps they are signs of humility.”

“Oh, nonsense. I’m a monstrous egoist, and they are certainly affectations. If I were poor and couldn’t afford it, I’d eat and drink in expensive places and drive a Cadillac at least.”

“Well, however that may be, I agree to eat with you in a plain place and go there with you in a plain Chevrolet.”

He laughed again, again with pleasure, and signaled the waiter, who brought the sidecars. They enjoyed the drinks and the company of each other, and moved on in time to the plain place with good food, where they enjoyed broiled lobster and still the company of each other, and the evening slipped away.

It was not until after eleven o’clock, when he was taking her home, that she remembered Enos Simon, that she was to have seen him that evening. It was by then, of course, far too late to do anything about it.

4.

He waited and waited, but she did not come. He had no means of getting into her apartment, and because he could not loiter so long in the hall, he went back downstairs and across the street and waited there in the dark doorway of a tobacco shop. At first he was able to convince himself that she had only been delayed, that she would arrive soon to secure the equilibrium of his tiny personal world which now stood suddenly in precarious balance, but as time passed he was unable to sustain this conviction. Eventually he was as thoroughly convinced that she would not come as he had previously been that she would. It was then a matter of enormous importance to know why she would not come, whether it was the result of something unavoidable which she would regret as much as he, or whether it was deliberate and ominously significant, a brutal indication that she was sick and tired of him and wanted nothing more to do with him. He reasoned that this was surely not so, for there had been no warning of it, no sign or word or slightest withdrawal. It was not possible, surely it was not, for such a monstrous change to occur all at once with no warning whatever. Or had there, perhaps, been signs that he had missed? Thinking back, he began to fancy that such signs had actually been present in her behavior, a reluctance to which he had been blind simply because he chose to be, a general impression that she was making concessions she would have preferred not to make.

She did not come, and after a while he was absolutely converted to the belief in his rejection. He wondered how he had ever been such a fool as to think that it could have ended otherwise, or continued without ending in a life in which everything that was good ended and nothing ever ended that was not. He felt degraded, debased, absurdly threatened, and he felt for her then, standing in the dark doorway watching her dark windows, a virulent and exorbitant hatred because she obviously intended to destroy him. Or, rather, because she was by some kind of mysterious selective process the agent of the dark forces that had been trying to destroy him all his life. He was aware all at once of a repeated harsh sound in the doorway with him, and immediately afterward he was aware that the sounds were in his own throat and were his own involuntary sobs. Lunging out of the doorway, he turned to his right and moved down the sidewalk at a kind of awkward lope, as if he were pursuing something or fleeing from something, both of which were true enough.

He had no goal, or even conscious direction, but he kept in his flight, or pursuit, or both, to darker streets where fewer people walked. And he continued his awkward loping gait in the empirical knowledge, though it was not specifically recognized as such, that there was a balance of sorts to be held in motion that could not be held when motion ceased, that it would require, once he became static, an impossible exertion of will ever to move again. His body was soon wet with sweat, but he went on and on across intersections and around corners and down the dark streets until, after many miles and a long time, he slipped off the edge of a curb and fell on his knees in the gutter. He remained on his knees for almost a minute, and then he stood up slowly. He felt stunned, incredulous that he had done such an idiotic thing, falling in the gutter as if he were drunk, and he realized dully that he must have veered gradually toward the curb without knowing it. His right knee burned, and there was, he saw, a tear in his trousers. Moreover, now that he was not moving, his wet body began to chill. He was exhausted, and it was necessary to find a place to rest. Stepping back onto the sidewalk, he began to walk again, much slower than before, and a couple of blocks farther along the street he came to a bar and entered.

The room was long and narrow, dimly lighted, the bar stretching the length of one side. Tables and chairs were scattered without order or design over a bare floor that had begun to splinter, darkened and greasy from innumerable applications of sweeping compound. Some of the tables were occupied. A man and a woman sat drinking at the bar. Two other women sat drinking pale drinks at the bar alone, separated by an intervening empty stool. The two lone women were wearing cheap evening gowns, short-skirted, that clung to the upper slopes of their breasts, and they were obviously part of the place. Enos sat at the bar and ordered whisky and water. He drank the whisky at a gulp, gagging a little before he could lift the water and wash the taste from his mouth. His body was drying now, and not so chilled. The bartender refilled his glass, and he drank again, only part of the whisky this time, holding his breath after swallowing and washing the taste away at once with the water. The nearer of the two lone women moved down and sat beside him. She was wearing a thick and sickening scent, and he could see, looking sidewise and down from the corners of his eyes, a swell of flesh below the cleavage of her breasts. The gown was pale green and looked like rayon.

“Buy me a drink, honey?” she said.

He did not want to offend her, but neither did he want to buy her a drink or have anything at all to do with her. All he wanted, with an intensity of desire that was almost nauseous, was to be left alone by everyone on earth. Specifically, in his general withdrawal, he wanted the woman to go away, and he told her so with an exorbitantly precise articulation of syllables, as if he were afraid she would not clearly understand him and thereby force him to the monstrous effort of repeating himself. “Go away,” he said.

The woman understood him, all right, and for a moment she considered him with eyes reduced to slits of venom. Then she laughed with professional resiliency and laid a hand on his arm in a placating gesture.

“What’s the matter, honey? Something bothering you? Lost your best girl or something?”

Her persistence was an affront, her touch a violation, and her remark was unfortunate, to say the least. He reached across his own body and knocked her hand from his arm with a degree of violence that he did not actually intend.

“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want you here.”

The woman sucked in her breath with a hiss, and darkened lids slipped down again like purple bruises over gathering venom. She spat an epithet and slapped like a cat with her claws. He saw the attack from the corners of his eyes, as he had seen her breasts and swell of flesh, and he tried to avoid it, but he was not quick enough, and he felt on his cheek the burning mark of a nail. Down the bar, the woman sitting with the man had twisted on her stool to watch them, and beyond her her escort leaned far forward over the bar with his face turned toward them, split in cruel pleasure by a stained grin. Behind the bar, the bartender began to laugh, a windy expulsion without body. Quickly, neither speaking nor retaliating in any way, Enos got up and left. Laughter behind him grew and followed, and the woman, for good measure, added another epithet.

When he reached the sidewalk, he knew already what it was that he had to do next, but it was necessary to stop at the curb and think, for he did not know exactly where he was in relation to the place to which he wanted to go. It was imperative, he knew now, to return to Donna’s apartment. It was not that he hoped to salvage anything of what was surely lost, but only because there was a kind of negative security in establishing definitively that there was nothing to be salvaged, the kind of dark security he had felt in the end that had been no end before the remembered pines.

Moving abruptly, he walked to the corner and read on an iron post the names of the streets. He was able then to orient himself in relation to Donna’s apartment, which was an astonishingly long distance away, and he was dully incredulous that he had walked so far. He began to walk in the direction he needed to go, lunging forward again with the awkward, loping gait that carried him with remarkable swiftness over asphalt and concrete; and he reached the doorway in which he had stood before, just as a Chevrolet drove up from the opposite direction and stopped. He stood quietly and watched as Tyler got out and went around the car and opened the door for Donna. He felt within himself the silent, unbearable beat of pain that was somehow coordinated with the beat of his blood but was separate and stronger and not at all the same. In the brick wall of the apartment house light came up where darkness had been, from Donna’s windows. Time passed, and Tyler reappeared and drove away, and the time that had passed was no more than ten minutes, though it seemed longer than a night could be. After waiting yet a little longer in the distorted night where time, and all things, were deceptions, he crossed the street and went up to the floor on which Donna’s apartment was and pressed the button beside the door.

“For God’s sake,” Donna said, “what’s happened to you?”

She was shocked at his appearance, almost frightened. He wore no hat, and his hair was tousled, as if he had raked his fingers through it in every direction. His clothes were rumpled and stained in spots, his trousers torn at the knee. The side of his face where he had been clawed was smeared with blood and a little swollen. It was perfectly apparent to her that he had been making some kind of fool of himself, and it was quite likely that he had been impelled to do it simply because she had not been at home to meet him. This made her react immediately with compassion and anger, which were ambivalent, which was a kind of reaction she resented strongly because she had had too much of it and wanted no more of it.

“You had better come in,” she said.

He walked past her into the room and sat down. Turning away from him, glad for the moment of the necessity for petty action that would delay her facing fully what was now apparent, that she had taken upon herself an intolerable burden and perhaps a greater responsibility than she had imagined, she went into the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth and a bottle of merthiolate. She cleaned his face and painted the scratch and carried the cloth and the antiseptic back into the bathroom. Returning, she stood and inspected him from a distance of two paces, feet spread and hands on hips, in a posture that seemed to suggest between them a difference of at least two generations.

“Now, then,” she said, “please tell me what kind of idiocy you have been up to.”

“You weren’t here,” he said, “and you didn’t come, though I waited for a long time, and so I went for a walk and walked for a long way.”

“Did you get yourself in such a mess merely by walking?”

“I fell down. I don’t quite know how it happened. Somehow or other I slipped off a curb and fell down.”

“How did you get your face scratched?”

“A woman did it. I went into a bar, and she wanted me to buy her a drink, and I didn’t want to. It made her furious because I didn’t want to buy her a drink.”

“Jesus Christ, are you completely without any kind of capacity to cope with things? Do you intend to go on forever letting every little emotional disturbance threaten you with ruin?”

“Why weren’t you here? You said you’d be, but you weren’t.”

“I know. I’m sorry. There was something I had to do.”

“You were with a man. I was outside, across the street. I saw him bring you home.”

“All right. I was out with a man. I’d have told you so, if only you’d given me time. We had some drinks and went to dinner, but it was really a matter of business. This man may loan me the money to buy the shop, which is very important to me. Right now, it is the most important thing that could happen to me.”

He did not respond, would not even look at her, and she resisted a compulsion to kneel beside him and hold his head against her breasts. This would have been a concession, she knew, which would not be good in the long run for him, and perhaps be worse for her. It was clear that she must, this night, refuse to carry any further something that had already been carried too far. Now that her life had taken the direction and gained momentum in the last few hours, he was clearly impossible. He was quite incapable of being reasonable or of accepting a simple and undedicated relationship that might have been pleasant for both of them and possible to maintain, and it was practically certain that he would destroy all her chances absolutely if he were allowed to hang on. She had been disturbed all the way home by the fear that he might be waiting in the hall to create a scene in front of Tyler. She did not wish to be unkind — actually she would have preferred not to give him up entirely — but it was essential she act decisively, in spite of her feelings, for the sake of what otherwise might be lost.

She got a straight chair and placed it directly in front of him and sat down and took one of his hands in both of hers.

“I want to talk with you,” she said.

“All right.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“You must understand that all this is impossible. Don’t you see yourself that it is? For a while it has been all right, and I hope it has even been good for us, something we can remember later without regret. But neither of us is committed or bound to each other, and it will surely be the worse for us from now on if we permit it.”

He looked up at her with eyes which were curiously flat.

“Do you mean that you don’t want to see me any more?”

“I mean, at least, that I don’t want to see you any more in the way that I have been. I don’t deny that I wanted it and was largely responsible for it. I admit also that even now I wish it were not necessary to say what I am trying to say, but it will be better for both of us if we do not try to go on any longer.”

“Can’t I stay tonight?”

“No. Not tonight. Nor any other night.”

He drew his hand slowly from hers and looked down at it with his flat eyes, turning it over and over and peering at it intently, inspecting it, it seemed, for marks or stains or some strange sign of contamination. Suddenly, without warning, he folded the fingers into a fist and struck out with the fist savagely, emitting at the same time a hoarse cry of animal anguish.

The blow caught Donna on the side of the head above the ear and knocked her to the floor, the straight chair falling after her. She was stunned for a few moments, blind and deaf, and when she recovered he was already gone. Reaching out for the chair in which he had sat, she pulled herself into it and put her head into her hands and sat quietly for some time.

She was thankful he had struck her. She felt a little better because he had.