When I thought of how much I thought of her — why, my head nearly cracked. She was everything to me in one. She was my God, my Garbo. She was dearer to me than a sandwich at Reuben’s, sweeter than a soda at Schrafft’s. I would rather have looked at her than at the Ziegfeld Follies, rather have folded her in my arms than folded a ten-grand check, rather have held her hand than held a royal flush. It was wicked, it was wild, it was swell.
The hands of the clock were at 8 and at I now; I turned it over on its face to try and stop looking at it so much, but that didn’t do much good. I kept turning it over all the time, anyway. Finally I put an end to the agony by picking it up by the end of its strap, carrying it to the window, and pitching it out into the night. I don’t know where it landed, never heard a sound. After it was gone, I remembered how Maxine had slipped it under my pillowcase the first Christmas Eve after we were married. That made me twice as glad I had done it. And immediately afterward, as though I had dispelled a charm in getting rid of the watch that way, I turned from the window just in time to see the door open and close again noiselessly at the far end of the apartment. Not a sound, just a chink of light there, then gone again.
In the dark she came back to me, in the dark she came home. Into the blue-black emptiness of the room she stepped, with only me there; where there had been nothing before, now there was something, and my temples beat like tom-toms and strange pulses I never knew I had, in strange places like my neck and back of my ears, throbbed delightedly as though they were calling her to my attention — “Oh, Wade, she is here!” As though I didn’t know it! As though my mind needed the dumb mechanical parts of me to tell it!
I got so excited, I could hardly see her any more; a sort of rose-red mist swept over her and hid her from my eyes. Then presently she emerged from it again, but her image was still limned in coral like a motionless white statue in a garden flushed by a hidden carmine reflector at its base. Then she spoke, and as her voice flashed into my ears, the peculiar rigidity of a statue that my inflamed senses had given her changed into the mobility of a Bernice coming home to her apartment as she did on any other night, brushing her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand, carrying the same hand to her shoulder to rid it of the short velvet jacket that hung over it, and then with the other hand touching a certain spot on the wall and making the whole place grow light with a sort of jazz dawn, instantaneous and blinding, of lamps and brackets on the walls.
“I thought it was you,” she had said, just as the lights went on, “but I never can be sure. I’m a little drunk.” The little velvet cape that she had dislodged from one shoulder still clung to the other, hanging like a pennant toward the floor. She twitched, and down it went, sliding off her like a snake and lying coiled around her feet. I stooped to pick it up, and then I stayed there. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t kiss my knees; Lincoln freed the slaves,” and bending over, touched my face with a little gesture that was half a slap and half caress. “Oh, I’m so tired, Wade,” she said. “I’ve had this all night long, in every room I went into to get away from someone in the room before. After all, I couldn’t spend the evening in the bathroom sitting on the rim of the tub—” And then she pushed my shoulders back a little and stepped out of the circle of my arms. “I want to be alone a little, and just talk to someone from across a room. Oh, I like love, I even love love, but for just a minute I want to feel nothing but air on all sides of me. So go back there in a chair and drink and look at me if you want to, make your love by remote control.”
“What can I say now,” I said, “that hasn’t been said to you in a corner by someone else this evening? Oh, I get the breaks. I’m the only one of them all that really means this thing; they’re all stealing my stuff from me, but they got their innings first — so it must seem to you the other way ’round. Oh, isn’t there someone can tell you for me, make you believe me? Oh, if you only had a girlfriend, I could win her over to my side—”
“Get up from the floor,” she said; “you have a regular penchant for making passes from your knees.”
“Oh, I need help — Bernice, Bernice. The touch of your hand on my face is telegraphed all over me. Can’t you see I’m half crazed? You’ve got to get me out of this state—”
She laughed a little, and then she said, “How am I to blame? It’s in you, and in all of them, to torture the life out of some poor girl. And because you came across me, you react like a caged chimpanzee and then try to tell me I got you into the state you’re in. That’s a laugh!”
“Ah, but don’t you know it only too well!” I cried, and I reached behind me for my glass, which still had something in it, and pitched the liquor into her face. I saw the whole thing so clearly, like in a slow-motion film, even saw the gin hiss through the air in sort of a funnel shape and break over her face and shoulders in little drops. And even while it was happening, I didn’t know why I had done it, wished I hadn’t done it. I suppose I wanted to kiss her so badly and have her near me, and she wouldn’t let me at the moment, so the effort to make her a part of me took that form on account of the increased distance between us, and I threw the liquor at her instead of throwing my arms around her.
She started up, but before her knees could quite carry her all the way to a standing position, I was over there and my arms were around her. I squeezed her, and I buried the words she was saying with my lips. She tried to struggle a little at first, and then because (as she herself had said) she loved love, she stopped and stood quietly with her mouth to mine. And all the way from where her fragile spike heels touched the floor up to where her lips shared their rouge with mine, she was a lightning rod of love; she was what she had been born for: something that caused a short circuit.
And later she said, “Oh, this thing tortures us, doesn’t it? All our lives through we’re never rid of it. And nothing that we say or do can be held against us, can it, because we’re not responsible, are we?”
In the dawn, the world started over again, carrying New York with it as it rushed eastward to meet the sun. Her eyes, then, catching the light from the brightening skies outside before anything else in the room, were like two white pebbles gleaming upward through fathoms of murky water. She shut them a minute and breathed deeply. She said, “Wade.” I took her hands and clasped them around me, behind my back. She said, “I love you. I knew I would. I told you I would. I do.”
I had loved her so long, so much, it really didn’t matter by now whether she loved me or not. It was just the third button to a two-button suit.
“Oh, I don’t know for how long,” she said. “Not forever. Maybe only just for now. But while it’s here, while I’ve got it—!” She kissed me two or three times on the face. “I want to give you the first token of it, the one true token, the only token. Listen.”
I listened.
“Will you do something for me? For your own sake?”
I asked her what it was.
“Do it for me, Wade. Try to do it.” She seemed so afraid to come to the point. She brushed the back of her hand all around her face, almost exactly the way cats do when they wash. “I don’t know how to say it.”
“Say it; what are you afraid of? What is it?”
“Because you won’t believe me; you won’t take it in good faith.”
I shrugged. “All I can do is try.”
“You see, I love you—”
“Lucky me.” She put her hand over my mouth. “Let me finish, or I won’t be able to go on at all. I said I loved you, didn’t I? Well, that changes everything. While I was still in the act of falling for you, I didn’t think about you much, just myself. Now I’m thinking about you more than myself. Wade, will you do me a favor? Don’t see me any more.”