My friends forsake me like a memory lost,
I am the self-consumer of my woes.
And who had written those last lines? Keats again? What was the difference who had written them? She hadn’t.
If she could sculpt, if she could paint, if she could write something! Anything—
The door bell rang.
A friend! She ran to the door, pulling her belt tight around her. All I need is a friend to take my mind off myself and tell me how silly I’m being. A girl friend with whom I can go shopping and have coffee, in whom I can confide. Why didn’t Gabe take up with someone I could befriend? Why did he choose her!
She opened the door. It was not a friend; she had had little opportunity, what with her job, her night classes, and generally watching out for herself, to make any friends since coming to Chicago. In the doorway was a pleasant-looking fellow of thirty or thirty-five — and simply from the thinness of his hair, the fragile swelling of his brown eyes, the narrowness of his body, the neatness of his clothes, she knew he would have a kind and modest manner. One was supposed to be leery of opening the door all the way in this neighborhood; Paul cautioned her to peer out over the latch first, but she was not sorry now that she had forgotten. You just couldn’t distrust everybody and remain human.
His hat in one hand, a briefcase in the other, the fellow asked, “Are you Mrs. Herz?”
“Yes.” All at once she was feeling solid and necessary; perhaps it was simply his having called her “Mrs. Herz.” She had, of course, a great talent for spiritual resurrection; when her fortunes finally changed, she knew they would change overnight. She did not really believe in unhappiness and privation and never would; it was an opinion, unfortunately, that did not make life any easier for her.
“I’m Marty Rosen,” the young man said. “I wonder if I can come in. I’m from the Jewish Children’s League.”
Her moods came and went in flashes; now elation faded. Rosen smiled in what seemed to Libby both an easygoing and powerful way; clearly he was not on his first mission for a nonprofit organization. Intimidated, she stepped back and let him in, thinking: One should look over the latch first. Not only was she in her bathrobe (which hadn’t been dry-cleaned for two years), but she was barefoot. “We didn’t think you were coming,” Libby said, “until next week. My husband isn’t here. I’m sorry — didn’t we get the date right? We’ve been busy, I didn’t check the calendar—”
“That’s all right,” Rosen said. He looked down a moment, and there was nowhere she could possibly stick her feet. Oh they should at least have laid the rug. So what if it was somebody else’s! Now the floor stretched, bare and cold, clear to the walls. “I will be coming around again next week,” Rosen said. “I thought I’d drop in this morning for a few minutes, just to say hello.”
“If you’d have called, my husband might have been able to be here.”
“If we can work it out,” Rosen was saying, “we do like to have sort of an informal session anyway, before the formal scheduled meeting—”
“Oh yes,” said Libby, and her thoughts turned to her bedroom.
“—see the prospective parents”—he smiled—“in their natural habitat.”
“Definitely, yes.” The whole world was in conspiracy, even against her pettiest plans. “Let’s sit down. Here.” She pointed to the sofa. “Let me take your things.”
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said.
“God, no,” she said, realizing it was almost ten. “I’ve been up for hours.” After these words were out, they didn’t seem right either.
With his coat over her arm, she went off to the bedroom by way of the sofa, where she slid into her slippers as glidingly as she could manage. She walked down the hall, shut the bedroom door, and then, having flung Mr. Rosen’s stuff across a chair, she frantically set about whipping the sheets and blankets into some kind of shape. The clock on the half-painted dresser said not ten o’clock but quarter to eleven. Up for hours! Still in her nightclothes! She yanked the sheets, hoisted the mattress (which seemed to outweigh her), and caught her fingernail in the springs. She ran to the other side, tugged on the blankets, but alas, too hard — they came slithering over at her and landed on the floor. Oh Christ! She threw them back on the bed and raced around again — but five whole minutes had elapsed. At the dresser she pulled a comb through her hair and came back into the living room, having slammed shut the bedroom door behind her. Mr. Rosen was standing before the Utrillo print; beside him their books were piled on the floor. “We’re getting some bricks and boards for the books.” He did not answer. “That’s Utrillo,” she said.
He did not answer again.
Of course it was Utrillo. Everybody knew Utrillo — that was the trouble. “It’s corny, I suppose,” said Libby. “My husband doesn’t like the impressionists that much either — but we’ve had it, I’ve had it, since college — and we carry it around and I guess we hang it whenever we move — not that we move that much, but, you know.”
Turning, he said, “I suppose you like it, well, for sentimental reasons.” He seemed terribly interested to hear her reply.
“Well … I just like it. Yes, sentiment — but aesthetics, of course, too.”
She did not know what more to say. They both were smiling. He seemed like a perfectly agreeable man, and there was no reason for her to be giving him so frozen an expression. But apparently the smile she wore she was going to have to live with for a while longer; the muscles of her face were working on their own.
“Yes,” she said. “And, and this is our apartment. Please, sit down. I’ll make some coffee.”
“It’s a very big apartment,” he said, coming back to the sofa. “Spacious.”
What did he mean — they didn’t have enough furniture? “Well, yes … no,” replied Libby. “There’s this room and then down the hall is the kitchen. And my husband’s study—”
Rosen, having already taken his trouser creases in hand, now rose and asked pleasantly, “May I look around?”
She did not believe that the idea had simply popped into his head. But he was so smooth-faced and soft-spoken and well-groomed that she was not yet prepared to believe him a sneak. He inclined slightly toward her whenever she spoke and, though it unnerved her, she preferred to think of it as a kind of sympathetic lean.
“Oh do,” Libby said. “You’ll have to excuse us, though; we were out to dinner last night. Not that we go out to dinner that much — however we were out to dinner”—they proceeded down the hall and were in the kitchen—“and,” she confessed, “I didn’t get around to the dishes … But,” she said, cognizant of the sympathetic lean, though doing her best to avoid the sympathetic eyes, “this is the kitchen.”
“Nice,” he said. “Very nice.”
There were the breakfast crumbs on the floor around the table. All she could think to say was, “It needs a paint job, of course.”
“Very nice.”
He sounded genuine enough. She went on. “We have plenty of hot water, of course, and everything.”
“Does the owner live on the premises?”
“Pardon?”
“Does the owner of the building live on the premises?” he asked.
“It’s an agency that manages the place,” she said nervously.
“I was only wondering.” He walked to the rear of the kitchen, crunching toast particles. Out the back window through which he paused to look, there was, of course, no green yard. “There was just”—he lifted a hand to indicate that it was nothing—“a light bulb out in the hallway, coming up. I wondered if the owner …”