The sunlight, when at last I saw it, was diluted to the impotency of a pale lemonade washing over the floor and the walls. And the blur of sleep in my eyes made even this seem no more than a faraway gleam, imperfectly realized, like the flash of an oar far off at sea.
Beside me, she stirred and her eyes opened.
Her toe made a tiny pyramid of orchid taffeta for a moment. Then the pyramid sank from sight.
She bunched her shoulders and yawned. Then quickly covered her mouth with her hand, looked askance at me, and breathed, “Excuse me, I forgot you were here.”
This took my breath away. My mouth dropped open.
"When I’m alone,” she explained, “I can yawn all I want to. I forgot.”
I looked around, but there was nothing to put over me except the fuming cataract of peach stuff she had affected toward the end of the night before. I put it around me, and incidentally made an armhole where there had been none before by the simple process of thrusting my hand in the wrong direction. I glanced covertly at her. She had not seen it happen. I left the room, and in the other room came face to face with a colored woman who was emptying cigarette-ashes with an air of extreme disinterest. She looked up and said “Good morning!” without an instant’s hesitation, and even after I had seen her limpid eyes rest for a moment on the negligee I had around me like a toga, one bare arm hanging limply out, she did not smile, so self-controlled was she.
“Leave it outside the door when you go in,” she said in the whisper of a fellow-conspirator. “I’ll sew it up so she won’t notice.”
But this may have been simply policy on her part, this wish to conciliate every one, especially some one whom she had just seen for the first time.
Called Bernice all at once, in a voice that carried welclass="underline" “Turn the warm water tap for me, Wade, and dump a lot of those pink crystals in.”
The colored woman answered in gentle remonstrance, “I’m here, Miss Pascal.”
“Let him do it,” she ordered. “You can wash last night’s glasses.”
I at once adopted her own unmannerliness. “You can wait,” I shouted hoarsely. “I’m in here now. And I don’t suppose you have a razor?”
“Oh, order me about some more,” she replied languidly. “It sounds so good. No, only a curved one for the arms. But there’s a barber’s shop downstairs in the building. I can call down for you and have them send some one up here.”
“No, you better not do that, Miss Pascal,” the colored woman interposed hastily. “It don’t look right.”
“Oh, but they know anyway,” Bernice called back candidly.
“But that’s a little bit too brazen,” her mentor assured her.
I heard a startled gasp. “Well, I like that!” But nothing more was said about it.
At noon I extinguished my cigarette with a gesture (and a mental attitude to accompany it) of finality in the coffee dregs at the bottom of the cup, rose, and looked at her.
Once more, inevitably, she was different. She was lazy now, languid, plump. She was less intriguing, less desirable than she had been at any time since our meeting the evening before. She was moistening the tip of a finger with her tongue to remove a little imaginary sweet taste left by the brioche she had eaten a few minutes ago. When she got through with that finger, she went on to the next, and so on down the line, but fairly rapidly, so that the whole proceeding had an aspect of that insulting gesture made with the thumb to the nose. For a moment I even harbored a suspicion that this might be the case, but I noticed that her hand was pointed sidewise and not at me. The little rite concluded by her drying her fingers on a napkin and then tossing it down. “Good-bye.” I said, “the whole dozen of you.”
“Are there as many of me as all that?” she laughed, “Which aspect did you like best?” And then she looked at one of the pillows and hit it with her fist.
“Wrong again,” was all I said.
She gave a toss of her head.
“For heaven’s sake,” I said irritably, “you were right about the calories last night. Look at those shoulders!” And I gave them a slight disdainful push. And then somehow I kissed her. And at once I was in love again, the reaction away from love was at an end, and she was lithe again and slim and all things attractive.
“And before I go,” I said, crouching down with my hands on my knees so that our faces were on a level, “won’t you tell me one thing? Who is he?”
“Who is who?” she said. “What are you talking about?”
“I know you don’t make hats or take in washing.”
“No,” she said, “only stupid people do. But then, also, only stupid people are ever completely happy.”
“I’ve been stupid,” I assured her, “ever since nine last night.”
Her cigarette quivered between her lips as she spoke. “What a swell set of sides you’ve had handed you. What’s the name of the show going to be?”
“Good-bye,” I said, straightening up.
“Can you find your way out all right?”
“It’s all right about my finding my way out. The thing is, can I find my way in again?”
“Well, can you? I don’t hand out road maps.”
“You’re the boss,” I informed her philosophically.
“Suppose,” she said, pinching her lower lip meditatively, “you take this number here—” And she struck the base of the little cream-colored telephone with her thumbnail, “but first you’ve got to promise something. Don’t ever stay on if any one’s voice but mine answers. Get right off without saying a word. Will you do that? Don’t ask for me, and don’t even say hello. Now, you know my voice, and Tenacity isn’t here in the evenings. The jig,” she explained Tenacity. “So it’s really quite simple.”
I started to whistle the minute I had shut the door behind me. To be in love, why, it was swell!
Chapter Two
I looked back and her house was gone, sunken, swallowed up in the masonry quicksand of New York. I sank into it myself a moment later, plunging into an iron hut with a ground-glass roof that stood on the sidewalk, down a flight of cement steps laved by tepid air, onto a concrete platform flooded with tawdry dusty electric light. A roar, a hiss, a current of wild air carrying leaves of newspaper on its bosom, and the opposite platform had vanished behind a long row of dirty lighted windows and pneumatic doors that slipped effortlessly back like secret panels in a detective story. But when they attempted to close again, there was always some latecomer, now at one car, now at the other, to squeeze himself in at the last moment with a sheepish grin of satisfaction, until at last a guard came and glowered and pulled each one definitely shut with a swing of his arm.
I saw that there were seats, but I was so used to standing that I stood anyway, my wrist linked around a porcelain hoop. I felt more comfortable standing. I was one of that vanishing race who, when they had a seat, relinquished it to the first woman who entered, unless they were too stout or smelled of garlic. This was an express, hence all the locals going in the same direction passed it with quick facility. Laboriously it overtook them at the in-between stations, only to be passed again a moment or two later. The idea seemingly being that, since an express was an express, it could rest on its laurels.
Up the steps again, the fresh air meeting me halfway and seeming to say. “Hello, you back again?” A shower of sunlight, the legs of passersby, then suddenly the whole city was in focus again. Oh, I don’t mean I thought of all these things; they simply passed through my mind without my mind doing any work at all.
Bernice’s image had gone hurrying away on the train I had just left. Another took its place, bringing with it discomfort, diffidence, and the dregs of yesterday’s cold resentment. I put my key in the door and turned the lock, but after the bolt was gone and the knob free, I still didn’t turn it for a moment but stood there with my head bent, listening or thinking. Evidently thinking, for there was nothing to listen to. “Tail between your legs, as if you were whipped,” something inside me commented, and I reared away from the thought, went in, and shut the door forcibly behind me. At the same time a chair creaked. I put my hat on the little three-legged table and stood leaning negligently against the open doorway next to it, looking into the room beyond, one hand in my hip pocket.