“Oh? My Canadian background?”
Craig’s eyes were sparkling with some inner amusement under their dark brows. But now his attention was forced away by someone else, a blondish boy with a loud mouth, who had some interminable anecdote to tell him, as one insider to another. Craig responded with off-hand but deliberate insults, which the loud one laughed at foolishly.
Kate almost tripped over the tall girl, then sat down beside her on the thick, burgundy-colored carpet. “What sort of games is he talking about?” Kate asked. The girl said something Kate couldn’t catch. Very loud music was starting in the next room. The Pointer Sisters?
Upon the wall that Kate was facing there hung an Escher print, the circle of lizards crawling up out of the flat surface of the drawing-within-the-drawing, crawling up and around an improvised ramp of books and geometric solids, to ease themselves at last down into the flat again, where in three shades of gray their bodies formed a tessellated pattern. Kate willed for a moment to lose herself in the intricacies of the plan, but her mind was too restless.
She looked around abruptly, with the feeling that someone, no one she knew, had just called her real name: a loud, rude calling in a strange man’s voice. But no one else seemed to have noticed it at all. And the voice seemed to have come, now that she thought about it, directly into her mind, not through her ears. Dear Kate, she warned herself, neither you nor Sabrina had better smoke any more tonight.
Restlessness pulled her to her feet. A bar-on-a-cart offered bottles and glasses and ice. Shouldn’t mix with the other stuff, but just a taste was not going to do her any harm. In her hand, a glass half-filled with white wine, she wandered, mocking a slinky tall-model walk, up to a window of very solid, unopenable glass that looked out far above the endless chains of headlights and taillights of the Drive. Beyond the few additional streetlamps that were scattered through the park, the lake stretched out to the edge of everything, a vast black invisibility like death.
One of the nameless boys she had just met came to the window too, ice cubes tinkling in his glass like Christmas music. God, the shopping she had yet to do. What was she here for, anyway? Trying to prove a point to Joe, who didn’t know where she was, and who, when she told him, would fail to get the—
Her name again, but still unspoken.
Looking down a vista of the apartment’s archways, Kate saw a huge, dark-haired man standing gazing toward her. An early Orson Welles, but harder-faced, in a brown coat made of one of those rich fake-furs, like her own blue. Or maybe in his case the fur was real. He was standing there as if he had just arrived, though if her sense of the place was right, he was nowhere near the front entrance.
With a vague feeling that it was important, necessary for her to do so, Kate turned from the window and walked toward the newcomer. No one else seemed to be paying either of them the least attention. The Pointer Sisters grew louder still, then faded abruptly as a door somewhere behind Kate was closed. She was alone with the huge man in the hallway—no, not quite alone. From the corner of her eye Kate saw Craig walk out of another doorway to her left. Craig fell into step beside her as she walked the last few strides toward the big man who stood waiting.
They stopped. Craig put his hands on his hips, then at once let them slide off to hang fidgeting at his sides. “Enoch Winter,” he said, almost whispering again, “this is Kathryn Southerland.”
The huge man said something (what?) to her in an offhand sort of greeting, and she replied. He was really massive, and Kate was reminded of when she had met an All-American defensive end: perfect proportions, but blown up larger than real life seemed to have the right to be.
Enoch Winter’s dark hair was slightly curly, and worn shorter than that of most young men. There were only the beginnings of lines in his face. Still, at second glance Kate would not have called him young if she had had to set down a description. His eye were gray-blue, his broad, pale cheeks a little blue with what would be heavy stubble in a few hours if he let it grow. He was smiling confidently at Kate, and all but ignoring Craig. He spoke to her again; once more she somehow could not grasp what he had said.
There was a brief distraction as the short young man with thick eyeglasses appeared from somewhere to stand at Kate’s right, looking on in silence. The four of them in the hallway were closed off now by doors on every side. Beyond the closed doors, the sounds of the party went on.
Enoch Winter spoke, and Kate stared at him, straining to understand. His voice was loud enough. And she thought the pot would not take hold of her tonight. She shouldn’t even have tasted the wine.
He chuckled, perhaps at something he had just said himself. He didn’t seem to notice that she could not comprehend what he was saying. Or else he did not care. With a faint inward start Kate realized that Craig and Thick-glasses were no longer at her sides. They had gone away somewhere, leaving her standing in the shut-off hall with Enoch Winter, who talked and talked, to her alone. She must not ever let her attention waver from him for a moment, must not . . .
His whitish hand, raised, was so big that the great dark stone that rode one finger in a silver ring seemed not only modest but scarcely adequate. Just past his waving hand Kate’s eye caught sight of a phone on a hall table, and it came to her with desperate force that there was something she must do at once.
“Excuse me a moment,” she broke in clearly. “I’ve got to call home right away.”
“. . . hafta do that for?” His accent was midwestern, vaguely rural. All of a sudden he wasn’t happy any more.
“I have to. That’s all.” Walking to the phone was the most utterly wearying thing that Kate had ever done. She managed to do it, though.
“. . . careful whatcha say. All right.” Enoch’s voice had regained some of its good humor, and now good-humoredly he fell silent.
Kate punched at buttons. She could hear the phone at home start ringing, and then a familiar voice.
“Hello, Gran. I just wanted to tell you . . .” What could she say? What was she able to say? “I didn’t do any shopping after all. So I couldn’t get those things you wanted.”
“Well, goodness, dear. Don’t worry about it. You sound upset, are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“Well, I expect I’ll be going out myself tomorrow, I can do my own shopping. Where are you?”
A leaden pause, in which Kate could feel her own mind groping. Crawling. Trying to get free, but leashed. “Downtown,” she got out at last. It was almost the truth, the closest thing to truth that she could manage.
“Take care now, Kate, they say the roads are very nasty.”
As she cradled the phone Enoch started talking to her again. In this case it really was flattering to have such concentrated attention from a man, attention of a kind she could not get often enough from Joe.
Somehow or other they now were standing by the guest closet and Enoch was watching while she put on her blue jacket. In some far-off room of the apartment voices were cheering now—probably a game was being played. Craig was here again, though, to see them out in silence. Enoch tossed a—condescending?—wink at Craig, whose own face displayed a vast . . . well, admiration, as though for something Enoch was doing or had done. Kate puzzled over all this while she walked out to the elevator, her hand on Enoch’s arm.
Going down with Enoch, she thought for the most part about nothing at all. While he perhaps was thinking of her, for once or twice he put out his huge, pale hand and brushed her cheek with it, rather as if she were something that he had long coveted and had just allowed himself to buy. She wouldn’t like it if Joe behaved so possessively. But this was different . . . of course.