As I walked west along 42nd Street, I was figuring with a pencil on the back of an envelope, and I kept bumping into people at every step. I went into the Automat and had a ghost of a lunch, and all the time I was in there kept figuring; when the back of the envelope was all used up, I started in to use the shiny, white top of the table, until a busboy with a greasy rag came along and, whether accidentally or on purpose, effaced the whole thing with a sweep of his arm.
When the dispute had died down and every one had gone back to their seats again, I started over again, this time using the margin of a newspaper I’d picked up from the floor. I started in to mumble to myself, like the old, the feebleminded, and the preoccupied do. “Three-hundred-and-some-odd would make it six hundred, roughly, for the two of us. Now let’s see, without counting what I’ve got in the Corn Exchange — I don’t want to touch that if I can help it; leave it here for Maxine, that’s the least I can do, even if she hasn’t got a kid — nearly three hundred in that compound-interest account over in Brooklyn — and if I put in that check for eighty I got today, that’ll bring it up to four hundred by the time I’m ready to go. That leaves me two hundred short, even on the fare alone. Wait! I can borrow two hundred on my insurance, that does it! But that leaves me without anything when we get off the train there — and I don’t want Bernice to help me in any way.”
The interested stare of my table companion, who was getting an earful while he dipped little round crackers in clam chowder, put an end to the soliloquy. I left the place and continued westward toward my appointment with Maxine, still calculating as I went, except when crossing streets. “All right,” I argued with myself, “suppose Maxine is a good kid and has given me eight years of her life, why should I give her a better break than the girl I love? I’ll take half of that Corn Exchange account with me, or all if I have to, and send it back to her as soon as I start to make some money out there. It won’t put her out much anyway; she can stay on in the flat rent free the first month after I’m gone, on the deposit we paid on the lease. And she’s got her stepbrother and his wife, they’ll do something for her if worst comes to worst. So that takes care of that, and all I have to do now is bide my time and keep a good crease in my trousers for the day we leave!” I threw the newspaper away, brushed my hands hygienically (it hadn’t belonged to me originally), and backed up against the glass-window front of Gray’s Drugstore to wait for Maxine. It was five to one on the Paramount clock across the way.
Swarms of people, principally women, were going in and out the door, buying theater tickets at the cut-rate counter and keeping their appointments on the sidewalk outside, like I was. I thought, “Maybe I ought to get out of the way instead of standing here like this. Suppose Bernice should just happen to come along and bump into me, and Maxine should find me talking to her!” But I’d never seen Bernice on the street after the night we’d first met, and there was no reason why I ever should again. “She’s only just about getting out of bed by now, anyway,” I assured myself.
With that, a taxi edged up to the sidewalk, stopped in front of the entrance to Gray’s, and a girl got out of it alone and paid it off. She turned around then, and it seemed to me I’d seen her somewhere before. But you so often feel that way about people. She was dark-haired and she was handsome. I don’t mean beautiful, I mean handsome; there’s a difference.
She was still putting the change the driver had given her back in her purse, but she looked up to make sure no one was about to collide with her — and saw me. She took a second look — then she finished putting the money away, snapped her handbag shut, came across the sidewalk, and stopped in front of me. At first I thought she was looking at the display of cosmetics in the window behind me, but I saw that her eyes were right on mine.
“What’s the matter, can’t you say hello?” she said in a husky voice. The clock on the Paramount said one.
“Hello,” I said obediently, and still at a loss.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she said unfriendly. “You ought to, you drank enough of my liquor the other night!”
“What makes you think I don’t remember you?” I said uneasily.
She took her eyes off me at last and looked sullenly up the street and then down the street. “Well, the name’s Marion,” she said.
It was no paean of joy to my cars. “Well, I knew that all along,” I said. “So what? What about it?”
She turned her eyes on mine again. “Still in good with Bernice?” she wanted to know.
“Bigger and better than ever,” I answered shortly, and then as a hint, “Going to a show?” The clock over there said four after, now. I was praying she’d go away. What’d she want with me anyway?
“She gotten any mail from Detroit lately?” she wanted to know.
“Who, Bernice?” I said. “Why should I tell you that?”
She flashed me a dark look and said: “Oh, I guess she has, if that’s the case. Just let me find that out! Just let me find that out!”
Because I didn’t like her anyway, and because she was annoying and worrying me by standing there like that when I expected Maxine to show up momentarily, I revenged myself by teasing her and telling her what I thought would be most likely to get her angry. And at the same time rid me of her. “She gets ’em from Detroit at the rate of two and three a week, sometimes,” I informed her amusedly. And then, remembering something she had said the other night, added, “You know, funny scrawly handwriting, like a little kid at school.”
I could see that made her angry enough to eat the glass window we were standing in front of. “And you stand for that!” she snarled. “What kind of a guy are you?”
“What’s the harm?” I said smilingly, “he’s in Detroit.”
She finally prepared to depart, although by the stony look in her eyes it appeared doubtful to me whether she could see where she was going at all.
“You better run along to your show and cool off.” I advised her jocularly.
“Show be damned!” she rasped, and darted into a taxi that someone had just gotten out of. Through the door I saw her lean forward and say something to the driver; he put on the gas and turned up 43rd Street, and that was the last of her.
I kept smirking to myself for a long while afterward at the state of mind I’d managed to get her into.
Meanwhile Maxine didn’t put in appearance, and the afternoon prices went on at all the picture houses. It was too late now to go to a show and still be economical. Presently, as the hands of the clock circled slowly around, I was nearly as angry as my late acquaintance had been. All the theatergoers had gone from the scene long ago. At quarter to three, wondering if perhaps she had never come downtown at all today, I went inside and phoned home to the apartment. Sure enough, she came to the phone herself. “Wade?” she said noncommittally.
“Well, who’d you think it was!” I burst out maniacally. “Mayor Walker?”
As though she were thinking about something else entirely, she repeated evenly after me, “No, I didn’t think it was Mayor Walker.”