“Get up,” he said brutally. “I didn’t hurt you. I didn’t do anything to you.” She didn’t answer, and he said, “For Christ’s sake, all I did was kiss you. You’ve been kissed before.”
She seemed to begin to breathe again, quite suddenly. It was just plain breathing, in and out, but the sound was sharp and sweet to him, and a little sad.
“Bea? I didn’t hurt you, did I?”
“No,” she whispered. “No, no, of course not.”
“I’m awfully glad.”
“You didn’t hurt me.”
He couldn’t tell anything from her voice. She might have been smiling or weeping or inviting him to kiss her again, or all three, but he no longer cared. He wanted only to get out of the house and never come back.
He got off the chesterfield and began awkwardly to straighten his clothes. His mouth felt wet and sticky and he wiped it off with his handkerchief.
“Steve...” Beatrice said. “Steve...”
“Mind if I turn on the light?”
“Why... why, no, of course not.”
He clicked the lamp on and looked at his watch first. “Gosh, it’s after ten.”
Beatrice was sitting up very straight, smiling again, and tugging at her skirt. Her hair was mussed and there was a rakish red mustache of lipstick on her upper lip.
“After ten,” she said. “Is it really?”
“Yeah. Doesn’t seem that late, does it?”
“No, it certainly doesn’t.” She put one hand nervously up to her face as if she wanted to hide it from him. “It seems — more like eight.”
“Yeah. Bea, I... I wanted to say I’m sorry. You know how it is.”
“Certainly I do.” Her smile was getting brighter and brighter. He couldn’t bear to look at her.
He said, “Thanks a lot for everything. And say goodbye to Aunt Vi for me.”
“Certainly I will.”
He was so anxious to get out of the house that he was slightly sick in the stomach, but he forced down his impatience and held out his hand to her. “Well, Bea, it’s been swell seeing you again.”
They shook hands, very heartily.
Beatrice rose and turned on the veranda light for him and told him to be sure and come again. She shut the door behind him, gently.
He didn’t know why a sense of guilt impelled him to stop at the bottom of the veranda steps and look in at her through the parlor window to see if she was all right. She was standing in the center of the room, just the way he’d seen her stand at the kitchen sink, still and relaxed, as if she had some immediate, but trivial, problem to resolve.
He walked away from the house. Though he moved fast his feet made hardly any noise against the sidewalk. He passed a couple of girls who stared at him curiously, and he realized that he was walking furtively, not on his tiptoes exactly, but with the heels of his shoes barely touching the sidewalk, like a man making a quiet getaway.
Chapter 7
He went to bed expecting to dream of the duck again. But when he woke up he couldn’t remember that he had dreamed. He knew only that he was glad to be awake, as if he had spent the night wandering, lost, through dark windowless places.
It wasn’t eight o’clock yet and normally he would have stayed in bed a couple of hours longer, thinking, dozing off now and then. But this morning he felt a sense of urgency. He must find a place to live. He had been home over a week now and he wasn’t the newly returned veteran anymore — there were lots of them newer than he was. He wasn’t a transient anymore either, he was here to stay, and a hotel room was no place to stay in. Everything about the hotel emphasized his own insecurity. It was a permanent, unchangeable backdrop for a thousand shifting scenes and faces.
In the mornings, especially, the place affected him. The chairs were lined up in the lobby, empty and imperturbable, neither dreading nor anticipating the hundred shapes and sizes that would descend on them during the day. The writing desks had been dusted and furnished with new paper and envelopes and a clean blotter. Yesterday’s blots, yesterday’s scribbled intimacies, lay forgotten in a rubbish can. The potted palms that flanked the marble pillars seemed never to need water, and never to grow or wither, as if they had some secret source of life.
Steve passed through the lobby as quickly as he could and handed in his key at the desk.
“Good morning, Mr. Ferris,” the desk clerk said.
“Good morning. Any mail for me?”
“The mail won’t be in for an hour yet.”
“Thanks.”
“Comes in around nine or a little after.”
“Yes, thanks,” Steve said. He knew this couldn’t be the same desk clerk who’d been on duty late the night before, that there must be a succession of clerks. But he couldn’t distinguish one from the other, they were as alike as the pillars in the lobby. It was as if they had acquired, through association, some of the permanent quality of the furnishings and of the building itself. They seemed impervious to wear and dirt, beyond nourishment like the palm trees, resilient like the chairs.
The desk clerk reached behind the counter and brought out a sign which said, “Mr. Humphreys.” He dusted it off with his handkerchief and placed it unobtrusively on the counter. There was a faintly sly air about this maneuver, as if Mr. Humphreys had known all along what Steve was thinking, and was now showing him how terribly easy it was to have an identity, after all; you just put up a sign.
“Is there anything you want, Mr. Ferris?”
“No, thanks. I was just wondering where to have breakfast.”
“I always go to Childs’.”
“You do?” He couldn’t help sounding a little surprised.
“For butter cakes. Butter cakes are my weakness.”
“I’ll have to try them,” Steve said. He had the feeling that Mr. Humphreys was deliberately setting out to dispel any illusions about himself. Having provided himself with an identity, he now strengthened it with a weakness.
“They’re practically indigestible. Sometimes I feel awful all day,” Mr. Humphreys said, with the merry air of a happy drunk confessing that liquor was killing him. “But they’re dandy while they’re going down.”
“Well, I’ll have to try them,” Steve said again. “See you later, if I’m still alive.”
Mr. Humphreys’s gentle laugh slid after him across the lobby.
Out in the street he stopped to buy a paper, then walked down a couple of blocks to the nearest Childs and ordered butter cakes. While he was waiting, he opened the paper at the classified ads. He was excited at the prospect of finding a place to live, a small, furnished apartment not too far out, with a kitchen, so he could throw a party if he felt like it. After he was settled he’d start on his book. The important thing was to get used to the idea that he was home, this was his town, and he was going to stay in it.
There was nearly a whole column of ads, Wanted to Rent. They started out with “Two hundred dollars reward for information leading to the rental of a five-room apartment or house,” and ended up with, “Service wife with small baby desperately needs place to live.” In between, there were six reward ads and a couple of whimsical ones, but most of them were just straight, like the service wife’s. Squeezed in at the bottom of the column were two apartments for rent, one-and-one-half rooms out in Strongville and an artist’s studio in the Village, which had to be seen to be appreciated and could be appreciated only by those able to pay $500 a month.
He closed the paper. He felt suddenly very tired, and when the waitress brought his butter cakes he ate them without tasting them. He knew it wasn’t physical tiredness, you couldn’t be physically tired after a good night’s sleep. It was something inside his head, something alive, that gnawed at and was gradually severing the vital link between wish and will; it was a conviction that whatever corner he turned, he would confront an obstacle too high to hurdle and too heavy to thrust aside, and whatever he wanted would be out of reach.