Wake Up With a Stranger

1.

She awakened one morning, about three weeks after sending Enos Simon away. Her first thought was of that other morning when she had awakened in the house of Aaron Burns. There were certain things about the two mornings that were the same, but there were other things that were different. She had the feeling now, as she had had then, that it was late and that she would have to get up at once and go to the shop. But that other day had been a Sunday, with no urgency about going anywhere. This morning was Friday and it was necessary to go to the shop, although there was after all, perhaps, no particular urgency. The other morning of awakening had been in early January, and it had been snowing; and this morning was at the end of April, with over a hundred other mornings and awakenings between, and it was a clear day with a bright scrubbed sky which she could see by turning her head on her pillow and looking up through the window of her room. Now, as then, she was a certain kind of person with a certain kind of day ahead of her, but she was a different certain kind of person and the day was a different certain kind of day, for no person is the same when there have been over a hundred days between what they were and are.

She lay quietly on her back, after having looked up through the window at the sky, wondering idly why she had thought of that other morning the first thing this morning. Reasons existed that made the thinking appropriate, but they were reasons not yet known to her. She could think just then of no good reason at all. The reasons which made the memory appropriate on this morning which she did not yet know and therefore could not think of, were that the first day began what this day would end, and that death figured in both in some kind of significant or symbolic relationship to what happened between. It was good, of course, that she did not now know these things and had no way of knowing or anticipating them, for if she had known through premonition, the day would have been destroyed, or at least impaired, in its beginning. Actually, her day was already being injured, even as she awakened and began to think and looked up through her window at the bright scrubbed sky, but she did not know this and would not know it until the day was almost past. From her viewpoint that morning it was a good day, and it was to remain for its duration a good day in which good things happened, or at least in which she got things she wanted.

She thought again about getting up and going to the shop, but she decided to lie quietly a little longer and think about how things had been going — a pleasure because things had been going well. In the first place, after her mother’s death, in the release from old ties and old claims, she had entered a phase of extreme fecundity that had sustained itself and was still continuing. Her mind had expanded with fresh conceptions, and she worked with pleasure and intensity for long hours without tiring, and in most of the hours when she was not working or sleeping there was William Walter Tyler, now Bill. From those times, the times she worked and slept, he was excluded, or in the latter excluded himself — from what obscure compulsion on his part to be perfectly fair or absolutely certain she did not know or care — but she could sense clearly when they were together that she had lost no ground in the mild intimacy that had developed. For her part, she found him much more interesting and compatible than she had expected, and she was quite willing to be agreeable in any reasonable way in return for what he offered or could offer if he chose.

Thinking of Tyler, she began after a while to think of Enos Simon. She did not want to think of him, because thinking of him was disturbing, but it was impossible to exclude him from her mind entirely, though she had tried. She had decided then that it was much less disturbing in the long run merely to think of him voluntarily and reasonably, when it was necessary to think of him at all, and so, by admitting him freely to her mind, avoid creating the conflict of keeping him out. In the first few days after the night he struck her and ran from her apartment, she had worried excessively about him because she now understood what she had previously only felt vaguely — that he was quite ill in a frightening sort of way and had been so for a long time, probably even back in that spring and summer they had shared. To be exact, she was not so much worried about him as about herself. This was not because of the violence he had displayed in the final seconds of the night she sent him away, for she did not believe that he had really meant to attack her at all. He had only been lashing out blindly at something, some threat or force that pressed upon him, and she had been at the moment in the way, and that was all. The reason she worried about herself was because of what he might do to himself, for if he hurt himself or killed himself, as she now felt was quite possible, it would place upon her, rationally or not, a burden of guilt that was dreadful to consider.

Anticipating this, she had tried to reason it away, to justify herself in relation to him and what had happened between them, and she tried again now, lying in bed and thinking for a while before getting up. What she thought was that she had been kind to him and generous and had at least given him something for some time, and it would certainly be insane of her to blame herself because she had been unable to give him more, when no one else had given him anything at all. This was true enough, but what nullified it and disturbed her was the realization that he would have been better off, much better, if she, like all the others, had given him nothing. There was no sense in this, however, no sense at all, and there was no sense, either, in lying and thinking about it and anticipating something that had not happened — and would surely never happen as a result of anything she had done — now that three weeks had passed. It was a fine day, a spring day with a bright sky, and the sensible thing was to get out of bed at once and start living it.

She walked barefooted through the living room and into the kitchen and put the coffee on, and then walked back into the living room and through it and into the bedroom and from the bedroom into the bathroom. It was a pleasure, a subtle and sensual delight, to feel on the soles of her feet the sequence of sensations incited by the soft looped pile of the bedroom rug and the stiffer clipped pile of the living room carpet and the smooth cool surface of the kitchen linoleum, the same sequence in reverse when she returned, and finally, almost like a tender bruise, the cold and absolutely ungiving bathroom tile. Showering, she remembered again how on that other morning she had walked naked and arrogant through Shirley Burns’ room, had showered and later dressed in the inappropriate scarlet sheath, and had finally walked downstairs to discover Aaron dead. This had all happened only a hundred days or so ago, and it was incredible that it had been no longer, and that so much had happened, and was still happening, since that time.

But she was thinking again of the day that had happened instead of the day that was happening; this accomplished nothing and was likely, besides, to become depressing. So she turned off the shower and toweled herself vigorously and returned to the bedroom. Retrieving her glasses from the bedside table where she had laid them last night, she put them on, the first act of dressing, then she stood for a minute before her mirror and smiled at herself and received a smile back. There was in this a kind of renewal, as if she had been bored and had met unexpectedly someone she had known and found stimulating and had almost forgotten; and with the renewal of pleasure there was also a renewal of the old resolve, that nothing should be wasted or lost before it was used, not talent or training or time or the fortunate arrangement and quality of flesh and bones. Now, however, that other morning kept intruding upon this morning, actually seemed to keep repeating itself in small parts removed from the whole. She was, for an instant before she moved, looking at herself in another mirror in another house three months ago, and everything that had occurred since would have to be repeated just as her image was now repeated in glass. Moving away from the glass and out of the glass, she dressed and fixed her face and went back to the kitchen where the coffee was ready.

Sitting at the tiny kitchen table with the coffee hot and black in its cup before her, she began for the first time to plan the day precisely around the things that were already established. There were two appointments, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, with two women who wanted gowns designed for specific occasions. It would be necessary to listen to their ideas and then modify them, or transform them completely to conform with her own which were already definite and partially on paper, and this was a delicate process requiring time and tact but which would mean at least a thousand dollars between the two of them and possibly even more. It would also be necessary to talk with Earl Joslin regarding the business, since it was still owned by Shirley Burns for whom Joslin acted, but this would be, because everything was going so well at the shop, no more than a routine conference. It would be, besides, a pleasure to talk with Joslin, who had been kind and helpful from the beginning, and still was. In the beginning, as a matter of fact, she had thought that he was possibly motivated by something more than kindness and a genuine respect for her ability and had expected him to make eventually some kind of overt bid for concession. She had wondered how she would respond if he did, but he had never made it and now quite palpably never would. She was thankful for this, especially since things had developed as they had with Tyler, and it was with Tyler, now that she had reached him in her mind, that the day she was planning would end, in this apartment in whatever development of their relationship he determined or succumbed to. But between now and then there were all these other things to do, and it was certainly time that she started to do them.

She finished her coffee and started. It was the day that ended what the other day had begun, which was, in its simplest terms, her struggle for the shop but was really far more complex, and it was — until long after dark after she had returned to her apartment — a good day that went well.

2.

There were some boys down on the slope beneath the pines. From his position in the headmaster’s office, by looking over the headmaster’s left shoulder and through the bright glass pane of the window behind him, Enos could see them quite clearly. They didn’t seem to be doing much of anything in particular, just moving around rather slowly and aimlessly, in and out of light and shadow as they were cast in pattern by the pines and the sun. There was no special order or purpose in their movements, that was certain, and chances were that they had merely walked down the slope to loiter under the pines because it was a good place to go and be on a fine, bright day. The odd thing about them was that they no longer seemed to be the intolerable monsters of a monstrous world, and there was about them, in fact, a kind of halcyon air, motion and grace without the slightest sound. One of the boys had very pale hair; when he moved into the sun the hair changed instantly into white fire, and when he moved back into shade the fire went out as instantly as it had begun. This was very fascinating to see, and seemed for a moment to have some kind of significance that never became clear. The sight of the boys was not at all upsetting to Enos, and this was something different, a change that was part of his new peace. This was because the boys were now in a different world from his; they belonged to a world which he had left for the last time and to which he would never return, but into which he could still look over the left shoulder of the headmaster through a pane of bright glass.

“Do you understand what I have been saying?” the headmaster said.

“Yes,” Enos said. “Yes, I understand.”

What he understood was that the headmaster was trying to be kind and firm at the same time, which is standard procedure for headmasters in dealing with both students and young masters. This was something for which Enos should have been thankful, but he was not. The truth was, the firm kindness was more than a little patronizing, or at least it seemed so to Enos, and he was offended by it, because he was now, after a long time, superior and invulnerable and in no need of kindness or patronage or anything at all from anyone on earth. This feeling of detached invulnerability was so strong in him that he thought it must surely be apparent to any sentient person, and he could not understand why the headmaster was not aware of it and persisted in his foolish attitude, as if it were he who were the stronger of the two. But then, of course, when you stopped to consider it, that was because the headmaster was really a dull and inadequate little man who was aware of practically nothing and was more to be tolerated than resented. He was a frail man, with a tracery of fine blue veins visible under his skin; and his hair was white and soft and rather sparse and seemed to float in a kind of detached thin cloud around the contour of his skull. His lower lip sometimes began to tremble, which gave him the appearance of being on the verge of tears, but actually this was only a sort of tic; when it happened he would pinch the lip between the thumb and index finger of his right hand, and after a bit the trembling would stop.

“I regret the necessity for this action very much,” he said.

“It’s all right,” Enos said. “It’s perfectly all right.”

“If it were only that your instruction was weak, your techniques, or something of that sort, we could undoubtedly work it out. It is not only that, however, as I have tried to make clear. It is that you have lost control of the boys, which means, to be blunt, that you have lost their respect. This is a much more serious matter. Irremediable, I should say. Once you have lost control, nothing is left but to try to start again in another position. I realize, of course, that you have a contract for the remainder of the year, and the contract will be honored, that is, you will continue to receive your salary. However, for the good of the school, as well as for your own, we must remove you from the classroom.”

“I don’t care about the contract,” Enos said. “You can forget it.”

“Nothing of the sort.” The headmaster shook his head and frowned slightly, as if his word and honor had somehow been questioned. “The contract is binding.”

The headmaster was silent, staring at Enos across the desk. His lower lip began to tremble, and he took it gently between the thumb and index finger and pinched, gradually increasing the pressure until it became quite painful. Enos looked over the headmaster’s shoulder and through the pane of glass at the group of boys on the slope beneath the pines. The boy with pale hair crossed a path of light, from shade to shade. The white fire flared briefly and instantly died.

A shadow of irritation drifted into the pastel blue eyes of the headmaster as he began to understand finally that the situation was really quite abnormal. It was surely only appropriate that a young master facing failure and dismissal should betray some signs of distress, perhaps even plead for another chance, which the headmaster would have been willing to grant, but Enos seemed quite withdrawn and untouched. And as a matter of fact there seemed to be in him a feeling of deep and quiet relief, a profound thankfulness that circumstances had reached their present point of development. What the headmaster resented more than anything else, though he did not concede it even to himself, was the uneasy feeling that he had himself been maneuvered, through a distortion of normal values that he had not followed and could not understand, into a position of subordination. This was intolerable, forcing him to feel the distress that Enos should in all decency have been feeling, and he was forced to exercise careful control of his voice to prevent his resentment from becoming apparent.

“I have an impression that you are, perhaps, not well,” he said. “Have you consulted a doctor?”

“No, I haven’t seen a doctor.”

Enos continued to look through the glass into the remote bright world of the boys under the pines, and he thought of the other pines and of the doctor who had been in the place where the pines were. But now the remembrance did not distress him, for he knew that he would not be compelled to see that doctor again, or any other doctor, and that he was finally through with all such things, with doctors and boys and pines and schools and all distressing things. There were some words that expressed it very well, the words of a poem he had once read, words about one balm for many fevers, but he couldn’t remember them exactly. Anyhow, it did not matter, and it was, under the circumstances, clearly a ridiculous waste of time to sit here any longer in this room with this inadequate little man who was obviously quite determined to make a great deal out of what was, after all, very little.

He stood up abruptly and said, “I’m quite well, there’s no need at all to see a doctor. If you have said all to me that you want to say, I’d like very much to go.”

The headmaster’s lower lip began to tremble again, and he pinched it severely. He did not trust himself to speak and was actually so weakened by a sense of shock that he did not, for the moment, trust himself to rise from his chair. He merely nodded his head and continued to pinch his lip. He remained sitting in the same position for quite a long time after Enos was gone, resenting with unusual bitterness the young master’s pre-emptory attitude. Always afterward, thinking back, he remembered his resentment and was ashamed of it.

Outside, Enos walked down the slope. He walked across the grass and under the trees into the remote and halcyon world at which he had been looking a few minutes earlier, and it was as if the glass were still there, bright and shining and wonderfully protective between him and the world in which he walked and of which he was no part in any real sense. When he came to the boys beneath the pines, several of them looked at him and quickly away, but one of them spoke and said “Good afternoon, Mr. Simon.” He nodded and said “Good afternoon” in a perfectly normal voice, and he knew that they were watching him from behind and were certainly sorry for the part they had played in what had happened to him. But this did not matter to him at all, not in the least, except that he was truly a little amused that they presumed to pity him. He felt very good, remarkably light in a way that could almost be called effervescent, and as he walked in this remarkably light way, hardly bending the grass beneath his feet, he thought of a pleasant little tune and began to whistle it softly. And he kept whistling it over and over until he came to the house at the foot of the slope in which he lived.

He went inside and upstairs into his room, and when he was there he went directly across to the window that looked out upon the slope which he had just descended. He stood looking out the window and up the slope at the boys, who were still there beneath the pines, and he began to whistle again the little tune that had got into his head and was very pleasant to listen to. After a while he began to get tired — there was quite an ache in his legs from standing so long without moving — so he got an easy chair and pushed it up to the window and sat down. During all this he continued to whistle the little tune. Eventually he stopped whistling for a few minutes, but he missed it so much, there was such an emptiness without it, that he picked it up again and went on with it. The shade got deeper and deeper on the slope outside, which was the east side of the hill, and the boys walked up the slope and over the crest and were gone.

Pretty soon after that, with the shade getting deeper and the boys gone, he began to think of Donna, of the things they had done together and would never do again, and it was not painful, as it had been before, to think of her. This was also part of the new peace that had come with the acceptance of a very simple solution to everything. As a matter of fact, far from being painful, it was now quite pleasant to think of her; it gave him something to do while he sat in the chair and looked up at the darkening slope. He conceded that she had been very kind, and he was grateful for the kindness and wished that he had not struck her — a very bad thing to have done. If it were possible, he would certainly go back and tell her that he was sorry, but it was clearly not possible. What he had better do instead was to write her a note and tell her how sorry and grateful he was, and that everything would be all right from now on. Thinking about writing the note, he became so absorbed in the problem, whether to do it or not, that he forgot to continue whistling and this time did not even miss it.

In time he came to the conclusion that the note should surely be written, that it was no more than the simplest courtesy which was also an obligation. He got up to write it, but it was too dark; this necessitated turning on a light which he was reluctant to do. It was, altogether, another problem which had to be considered, and he stood in the darkness with his back to the window and thought about it. Because he felt he could not shirk the obligation, he eventually walked across the room and turned on a light and sat down at his desk and began to think about what he should write.

It was necessary and very difficult, he thought, to achieve the right tone. He did not want to be tedious, but neither did he want to be excessively curt, which might be interpreted as a sign of anger or accusation. It seemed best on the whole to write merely what he had been thinking, that he was sorry for what he had done and grateful for what she had given, and so he wrote this as simply as he could on a sheet of paper. Then he folded the paper and put it into an envelope and wrote Donna’s name on the outside of the envelope. Leaving the envelope on the desk, he turned off the light and went back to the chair at the window and sat down and looked out at the pines on the slope. But now, after the writing of the note, he was beset by impatience that developed from a feeling that he had reached a point of completion, that there was nothing more of consequence to do or see or think, and that he was only wasting time inexcusably. The house around him seemed very quiet, and even as he sat and listened to the silence, it was broken by the sound of footsteps in the hall and a sudden knocking on his door. He turned his head and looked over his shoulder toward the door, but otherwise he did not move, and in a few seconds the knocking was repeated, and he still did not move or speak. He knew very well that the knocker was the other master who lived in the house, a fellow named Calkins. It was dinner time, and Calkins was starting up the hill to the dining room, and he wanted to know if Enos cared to go with him — and Enos didn’t. After the second knocking, the footsteps receded in the hall and died on the stairs, and shortly thereafter, looking out the window again, Enos could see the figure of the master ascending the darkening slope. It was then, indeed, time to end delay.

Getting up, he removed his coat and tie and rolled the sleeves of his white shirt above his elbows. He did this in a leisurely way, folding up the sleeves neatly, as if there were some sort of pleasure in the simple act. Afterward, he walked across the room, which was now quite dark, to the dresser. From the top drawer of the dresser he took his safety razor, a small gold instrument which had been given to him as a gift, at Christmas or a birthday or some time, by someone he could not exactly remember, his father or mother, a cousin or someone. Carrying the razor, he went out into the hall and down to the bathroom and inside. He locked the door behind him and snapped on the light and laid the razor on the lavatory and turned on the water in the tub and sat quietly on the commode until the tub was almost full. Then he turned off the water and removed the bright double-edged blade from the razor and stood for several minutes looking at the tub and thinking.

He was not concerned about pain, for he remembered from the first time, the abortive time, that there was very little. Primarily, he wondered about the best position to assume, and he wished that there were a low stool available so that he could sit comfortably. A kneeling position seemed to be the only one that would serve, and so he got down on his knees beside the tub. At the same time, without being aware that he was doing it, he began to whistle the pleasant little tune again. Kneeling and whistling, he submerged both forearms in the water with the palm of his left hand turned up and the palm of his right hand turned down. With the small blade in his right hand, he opened the artery in his left wrist. And as he remembered it from the time before, there was only the slightest burning sensation.

A thin red ribbon rose in the water from his wrist and diffused and darkened the water around, and the water grew slowly darker and darker, and the darkness spread from the water over everything, and he died kneeling in the darkness.

3.

At five-thirty, Tyler called.

“I’m relieved to find you still there,” he said. “I was afraid you might have gone.”

“No, I’m still working,” Donna said. “I’ll be here for at least another hour.”

“Have you had a good day?”

“Yes. Everything has gone well. I’m looking forward to seeing you tonight, of course.”

“Well, that’s what I’m calling about. Something has developed to prevent my coming. It’s a nuisance, I know, but I simply can’t avoid it.”

“I’m sorry.”

He was silent for a moment, and she could hear faintly in the background the lilting sound of music — strings and brass and reeds forming the light and perishable pattern of a popular tune. She listened to the tune and liked it and was able to name it. Lisbon Antigua. A jukebox. She wondered if he was calling from the small bar to which she had first gone to meet him and where she still frequently met him. She was sure that he was there, and she could suddenly see and feel the place as truly as if she were there, and she wished that she were. Without forewarning, with the faint and perishable tune on the wire between them, it was quite abruptly an instant of crisis, a point from which her life would move inexorably one way or another, and she felt in the instant a surge of panic. He was calling to put an end to things. Already, she was certain, he had simply gone away, leaving the wire open to the inconsequential tune as a kind of commentary on the inconsequential affair he had initiated and tolerated and was now ending, for his own reasons, in this contemptuous manner.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m here.”

“Are you at our bar?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I can hear music. Lisbon Antigua.”

“Oh. I see. There’s a fellow here who seems to like it. He insists on playing it over and over. Would you like me to explain why I can’t come tonight?”

“If you want to.”

“It would be easier if you were here. Can you come for a drink, or does that work have to be done immediately?”

“It can wait.”

“Shall I have a drink ready for you?”

“A Martini, please.”

“All right. I’ll be expecting you.”

She hung up and went out into the salon. Gussie was standing at the rear alone, a cigarette hanging loosely from her lips and leaking smoke in a thin ascending wisp. She spoke without removing the cigarette, squinting through the smoke.

“Leaving, darling?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Tyler again?”

“Yes. I’m meeting him for a drink.”

“How are things going?”

“About the loan?”

“Yes, of course, darling. Did you think I was being inquisitive about your sex life?”

“I think it may work out all right, Gussie.”

“Well, it seems to me that it’s taking a hell of a long time. Why don’t you simply tell him to crap or get off the pot?”

Donna laughed. She loved Gussie and was never offended by what she said, and she knew quite well that Gussie’s vulgarities were a kind of derision directed toward her own sentimentality.

“I’m afraid he might get off,” she said.

“Sure. I can see where that would leave us, all right. Right up that well-known creek without a paddle. Do you think this joint is really worth the trouble?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I guess it is, at that. For you, anyhow.”

“It takes time, Gussie. We have to be patient.”

“I know, I know. I’m just a sour bitch, and you mustn’t pay the least attention to me. I think I need a hobby or something. You know. Something to take my mind off things after hours. Isn’t that a hell of a confession for a woman to make? Time was I had an entertaining hobby that just came naturally, but I’m getting too old for it. But then, no one wants what I haven’t got any longer, so it comes out even in the end. Maybe I’ll buy myself a motorcycle.”

“You’d better buy yourself a drink.”

“That’s a superfluous suggestion, darling. Buying myself a drink is something that still comes naturally, and something for which, apparently, one does not become too old. However, thank you for reminding me. Run along, darling, and have fun. I’ll finish up here and get out myself in a few minutes.”

“All right, Gussie. Goodby, now.”

She went out and caught a taxi and went to the bar between the books and the flowers, and Tyler was waiting for her, and so, as he’d promised, was the Martini. The man who liked Lisbon Antigua was still playing it — probably it had associations for him. He stood leaning against the jukebox and listened to the music and thought about the associations, whatever they were. At the small table with Tyler, Donna lifted her glass and drank from it and set it down again, and Tyler took and held her hand. And her recent panic and sense of crisis, the irrational reaction on the telephone, was instantly and properly reduced to absurdity.

“I’m glad you could come,” he said.

“You only had to ask,” she said.

“I want to explain why I must break our date.”

“It isn’t necessary to explain.”

“Anyhow, I would like to. It’s nothing much, really. Merely that I must drive my wife to the airport.”

“Oh? Is she going away?”

“Yes. For quite a long time. The truth is, she is going to Europe.”

“Did she decide so suddenly to go so far?”

He shook his head. “No. It has been planned for some time, of course. Originally, she intended to leave next week, but she decided all at once to leave earlier in order to have an extra week in New York before sailing.”

“Is she going alone?”

“No.” He looked down at her hand in his, and his voice went curiously flat. “She is going with a friend. Of hers, not ours. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call her a protégée. A young woman who is studying music at the local conservatory. A harpist, I believe. The primary purpose of the trip, I’m told, is to give her training and experience abroad. Harriet is very generous in such matters. Anyhow, it seems that I am expected to drive her to the airport, though I should think a servant would do as well. Perhaps it is merely something a husband is required to do when his wife goes to Europe.”

“It’s all right, of course. There’s nothing else you can do.”

“I’d much prefer keeping our date.”

“Will it be too late after the plane leaves?”

“It will be quite late. Midnight, I suspect, before I could get back to your apartment.”

“That’s all right if you want to come.”

“Would it be all right if I wanted to stay?”

“You’re imposing a condition, and so I won’t answer. If you want to stay, you must ask me directly, and I’ll give you a direct answer.”

“All right. So far as I’m concerned, the preliminary period we agreed upon is over. I want to stay, and I am asking you directly if I may.”

“Are you sure it’s what you want? Do you remember what it commits you to?”

“The shop, you mean?” He smiled and lifted her hand to his lips in an obviously warm and spontaneous gesture that elicited in her a response of tenderness that she had not felt for him before. “I had decided long ago that you should have your shop in any event. Did I neglect to tell you that?”

“I’m afraid you did.”

“Perhaps I should not be telling you now.”

“Why?”

“That should be apparent. I’m not the most astute man in the world, but neither am I naive. I am well aware that the shop has been from the beginning my principal negotiable asset. Perhaps my only one.”

“No. In the beginning it may have been your only one, but now it is not.”

“Nevertheless, since you know that you are going to get anyway what you set out to get, I may have weakened my position.”

“You could always change your mind about the shop.”

“No. Like most men with few virtues, I make great issue of the few. I don’t break my promises, and I promise that you shall have your shop. Now will you give me the direct answer to my direct question?”

“You may stay, of course.”

“Because you’re grateful?”

“Not only that.”

“Good enough. I’m wise enough not to press it any further. And now it’s time I was leaving, and I wish it weren’t.” He lifted her hand to his lips in a repetition of the warm gesture. “Would you like me to take you some place?”

“No, thank you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll have one more drink before leaving.”

“In that case, I’ll see you tonight.”

He went away, and she watched him go, and she continued to feel for him the new tenderness that seemed to have nothing to do with his generosity. The man in the rear of the bar kept playing Lisbon Antigua; she ordered another Martini and sat drinking it, and she thought that it was really very strange how things eventually culminated so quietly, for better or for worse. She had schemed for the shop and had felt intensely that the shop was absolutely essential to all that she wanted to do and be, that failure to acquire it would somehow be a disaster from which she could never recover completely. Now that she was successful and had achieved all that she wanted through her own efforts and the exploitation of herself, she should have been filled with tremendous excitement and satisfaction, but instead she was only quiet and acceptant of things as they had turned out. She knew that she would have been the same way, exactly the same way, if they had turned out bad instead of good. But she also knew that this was something that would change, that she was now caught in a kind of recuperative lethargy in which she would gather again her emotional energy. Excitement would come in its own time, as despair would have come if she had failed.

After finishing her second Martini, she left the bar and walked several blocks to the restaurant where she had gone previously with Tyler. She ate alone in the restaurant, and then she returned to her apartment, and it was almost eight o’clock when she arrived. She wondered what she could do until midnight, when Tyler would come, and she thought that perhaps she would sleep for two or three hours. She actually did set the alarm and lie down on the bed in the bedroom, but it was impossible to sleep after all. Lying there, she began to review in her mind all that had happened in the last hundred days or so since the death of Aaron, but this involved things about which she would rather not think. After half an hour she got up and went out into the living room and began to read a book called The Sleepless Moon, which she had bought only a few days earlier, about a man and a woman, married to each other, who shouldn’t have been. At first it was difficult to get into the book, and her own thoughts kept interfering with the symbols on the pages, but after a while the symbols became dominant. She continued to read without stopping until the buzzer sounded at the door.

She looked at her watch and saw that it was ten o’clock, much too early for Tyler unless something had happened to change his plans, which wasn’t likely. And even if his plans had been changed, it wasn’t likely that he would simply come along early without calling first. Having considered and discarded the possibility of its being Tyler, she thought at once of Enos Simon, that it might be he at the door. If it was, which would be unfortunate to say the least, she had better see him and get rid of him quickly before Tyler came. While this was in her mind, she was aware also of a kind of subversive hope that he had indeed returned, was standing at that moment outside the door, and that she could somehow devise a way of salvaging him and making him compatible with the plan of her life, but this was impossible, as she knew very well, and was not to be seriously thought of.

But it was not Enos. It was a slender man, almost slight, neatly dressed in a dark brown suit with brown shoes and a brown knit tie, and he held in his right hand a brown hat that had covered, before he removed it, a head of short-cut light brown hair. At first she could not place him, though he seemed familiar, and then she remembered who he was, but she still couldn’t remember his name, and this was possibly because it was a name she preferred not to remember.

“Good evening, Miss Buchanan,” he said. “Do you remember me?”

“I remember who you are,” she said, “but I don’t remember your name.”

“It’s Daniels. The last time we met, which was also the first, I said that I would enjoy seeing you again, but we agreed that it would be impossible.”

“Apparently we were wrong.”

“Yes. Apparently. I hope you are not distressed about it.”

“Why should I be? Are you here on police business?”

“In a way I am. In a way I’m not. The fact is, I’m delivering mail.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I have a letter for you. A note. May I come in for a few minutes?”

“If it’s necessary.”

“I regret that it is.”

She stepped back and aside, still holding to the knob of the door. It was something of consequence, of course, that brought him here at this hour, and the chances were that it was unpleasant or possibly disastrous, though she couldn’t think what it might be. What surprised her even more than his presence was the quiet readiness with which she would surely accept whatever it was that brought him. She watched him come past her into the room, feeling in her readiness a certain pride.

“Won’t you sit down?” she said.

“Thank you.”

He drifted across to the chair in which she had been sitting. Seeing her book, which was turned face down on the chair’s arm, he turned toward her with the thin smile that she remembered well, now that she saw it again.

“I see that you are reading The Sleepless Moon,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I haven’t read it yet myself, but I’ve read a review. In the Atlantic, I think.”

“The Atlantic?”

The question had an inflection of skepticism, and she regretted it as soon as it was spoken, not so much because it was a rudeness to him as because it suggested in her a naive snobbishness that discredited automatically the claim of a policeman to read anything superior to comic books. Sensitive to the inflection, he permitted his smile to return briefly.

“Anyhow,” he said, “I’m sure you have no desire to discuss books with me at this hour of the night, or any hour at all. As I said, I have brought you a note, and here it is.”

He took an envelope from his coat pocket and handed it to her, and she took it and looked at it, and there was nothing on the outside except her name. She had not seen Enos Simon’s handwriting for years, not since the letters from college, and she didn’t recognize it. But she knew just the same that the letter was from Enos and that he had written to her before dying and was by this time surely dead. This was knowledge that involved her awareness of the possibility, plus the presence of Daniels, and it was incontrovertible. Removing the note from the envelope, she read it quickly, the few lines, the simple statement of regret and gratitude.

It is too bad, she thought, that he felt this way in the end. If only he had abused me or cursed me or made some kind of indictment, it would now be better and easier for me. He was weak or sick and in a very real sense a coward, though it was something he could in no way help, and if he has now killed himself, which he obviously has, it is because of these things and because he was simply not fit to live, and there is no good reason at all why I should hold myself responsible or be disturbed beyond the demands of compassion and natural sorrow, but I wish to God in all reverence that he had blamed me and cursed me and wished me dead instead of himself, for this would be something I could hold in contempt and soon forget, but I can never forget what he has written, not so long as I live, and he has done me after all the most harm that he could do.

“So he has killed himself,” she said.

“Yes. He cut his wrist with a razor blade and bled to death.”

“I’m sorry, but I’m not particularly surprised.”

“Aren’t you? Why not?”

“Because he was a depressive. He went into the deepest despair over the slightest things, and he had absolutely no capacity for solving his problems.”

“Well, some of us are like that, I understand. Did you know him long?”

“I knew him for several months a good many years ago. When we were kids. We met again this year and became friends again, but I have not seen him for about three weeks.”

“Why not?”

“Primarily for the reasons I have indicated. He was not a person you could be casual with indefinitely. He became quite difficult.”

“I see. Did you anticipate his suicide specifically?”

“Not specifically, nor particularly as a consequence of our relationship, if that’s what you mean. It was merely something he might have done, for this reason or that, at one time or another.”

“In fact, it was something he was almost bound to do. Is that right?”

“I think so.”

“All right. So he did. He has committed suicide, as palpably as Mr. Burns died earlier this year of a heart attack, and that seems to be the end of it. It is only coincidental, of course, that you have been concerned in both instances — and I also, in a lesser way.”

“Yes. Of course.”

He looked at her without saying anything, and she folded the sheet of paper and returned it to the envelope and held it out to him. He smiled his thin smile and executed a small gesture of rejection.

“I thought you might like to keep it,” he said.

“Don’t the police like to retain things of this sort?”

“Only when they are evidence of something or other that concerns us. In this case, there doesn’t seem to be any indication of that.”

“Will it be necessary to give it any publicity?”

“The letter? Not adversely, at any rate. Certainly it can’t be published so long as it is in your possession.”

“Thank you.”

“Not at all. And now I have intruded long enough. Good night, Miss Buchanan.”

“Good night,” she said.

He walked past her to the door and turned without opening it, and it was the last time that she saw his thin smile.

“When I left you about three months ago,” he said, “I wished that I could see you again. Now I wish that I may never see you again on earth. The complications seem altogether too deadly.”

He opened the door then and went out, and she turned and crossed the room to a table on which there was a glass ash tray and a package of paper matches. She set fire to Enos Simon’s note with one of the matches and watched it burn to black ash in the glass tray. It was, in a way, like burning Enos himself. Like burning his body. As Aaron had burned to begin it, so Enos to end it.

Why did Daniels say that? she thought. Damn him to hell, why did he say it? Certainly it is altogether absurd to think that I am, without wanting or trying to be, a kind of carrier of misfortune and death.

She looked at her watch and read the time.

In an hour and a half, she thought, it will be time for Tyler.