Lights flashed out where lights had no business to be — on the blank side walls of buildings and in midair — without giving the day a chance to die decently, so that the twilight was done to death with splashes of tropical yellow, scarlet, and green that moved, that sputtered, flashed and blinked. At the end of one of the side streets a brazen comet flashed by halfway between the roofs and the ground carrying a long tail of lights with it — an elevated train headed uptown The streets were a kaleidoscope; every drug store, every millinery shop, had its glowing neon tubes of jade and vermilion spelling out what it had to say and dyeing the pavement in front of it, and the throngs that went by on the sidewalk took on for a minute a tinge of greenish or of reddish hue until they had gone on to the next to become some other color, like chameleons. Only directly overhead, if you threw your head back as far as it would go, was anything serene, and there a round blush moon that had been unobtrusively present since four in the afternoon now stood out like a porthole in a chaotic stateroom, with no one able to reach it and look through to the other side. Evening had descended upon New York.
I had a roast beef sandwich and a cup of coffee at a counter shaped like an 8, with waitresses in little yellow linen dresses on the inside and the customers seated on revolving seats around the outside. Which proved nothing at all as far as the sandwich was concerned, but I was in a trance anyway and wouldn’t have known whether it was shoe leather or ambrosia I was eating. And when the handmaiden in yellow asked me whether I would like some more coffee, I drew back my cuff and answered that it was a little after seven.
“I’m certainly glad of that,” she answered tartly, “and now while I have the perk right here with me, maybe you’ll let me know if you can stand another cupful.”
So I stood another cupful to kill time, and while its inkiness grew cold before me, kept making mental calculations, although people were standing up in back waiting for seats, mine included. “Now,” I said to myself, “she is out somewhere eating with somebody (hope he chokes!) If he’s the one she’s going out with, then nine chances to one she’s dressed already for the evening and won’t go back to the place any more. But if she’s going out alone or with some one else, then maybe she’ll get rid of whoever she’s with now and rush back to change. Then if I stick around, I may have a chance to see her before she goes out. It’s worth trying.” So I paid my check and got out of there, and went up to Fifty-Fifth Street to the tall white building Bernice lived in. But I approached it on the opposite side of the street, and when I had located her floor and the windows that I judged to be hers, they were pitch-dark; no one was in. So I crossed over, and the doorman spun the door around for me, and I found myself in her lobby, with its hidden flesh-colored lighting and its uncomfortable Italian furniture and its chocolate hallman the envy of his race in kid gloves, padded shoulders, and gilt braid. “Yessir,” he said, “good evening.”
“Phone up Miss Pascal for me, will you?” I said.
“Miss Pascal?” he said. “She stepped out just about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Alone?” I said.
He looked at me without smiling and answered, “I couldn’t say.”
“Oh, yes, you could,” I insisted, and slipped something into one of his kid palms, at the same time wishing him all sorts of calamities but without telling him so.
“She left with a gentleman,” he said.
The pink lights weren’t as pink as they had been until now, “That’s all right,” I remarked. It wasn’t at all. “She left her key with you, didn’t she?”
“I didn’t know it was that,” he said naively. “She left a little envelope with me and told me a gentleman would call for it later on. Is that you?”
“That’s me, all right,” I answered disgustedly. I saw I’d made a mistake by mentioning the key, she hadn’t wanted him to know what it was. But in any case, he would have seen me go upstairs in the elevator to her floor and, knowing she was out, surmised the rest. And who the hell was he, anyway?
I tore the little white envelope he passed me open right there under his eyes and shook out Bernice’s brass latchkey, which was all it contained. Not a word, or anything. But maybe she hadn’t had time. “I’m going up,” I said, and he clicked a little metal snapper he held between his fingers, and a lot of Florentine bas-relief done in bronze and copper slid out of the way, and I stepped in the car.
Going up, I thought the ghost of her Narcisse Noir still lingered in the corners of the car; I was sure it was her elusive perfume that I caught with each prolonged breath. I hissed so, trying to draw it to my nostrils, that the starter even turned his head and glanced back over his shoulder at me, evidently under the impression I was either sobbing softly or suffering from a cold in the head. I lowered my eyes.
He stopped the car a trifle above her floor, meticulously lowered it again an inch or two to the right level, opened the slide for me, and I stepped out. I waited until he had hidden himself again and gone down (as a little lighted garnet above the shaft door indicated) before I took out her key and got ready to enter. First I took the precaution of ringing the bell. No one answered it. So then I put the key in the door and let myself in.
I took my hat off before I even crossed the threshold, because here was where she lived, here was where my dreams began. All respect, all homage to love.
And now magic began, and the world dropped away behind me as I carefully, tenderly shut her door after me. The air around me was the air she had breathed all morning, all afternoon; the floor, the rug I moved across was where her feet had carried her a hundred times a day. Oh, everything in here she had touched before me, and so I went around touching chairs and cushions, mirrors, tabletops and doorknobs, light chains and cigaretteboxes, holding a communion with her through the medium of my coarse, yellowed, banal fingers. And when I found her handkerchief in a corner of a divan, I put it to my mouth there in the dark and kissed it lingering. Until the horrible thought presented itself: it may belong to the maid! I nearly retched for a minute, and couldn’t wait until I had scratched a match and held it up and searched the corners of it. In one corner it had B. That was all right then, so I whipped out the match and drew the handkerchief to my mouth once more and kissed it again and kissed it again, and put it in my inside pocket. And not being a very intelligent man, all the poetry my mind was capable of at the moment was: “Gee, I love you; I wish you would come home.”
I didn’t light the electricity because she had asked me not to over the phone that afternoon, as some one who knew her and knew her windows from the street might pass and look up and think she was home and decide to drop in, etcetera. But I didn’t really need lights anyway, because in the living room the portières were drawn far back, exposing the whole of each window, and the night was so bright, it made a swath of blue across the floor from each window, like twilight in a grotto when the day is dying outside. I stepped over and looked out without opening the window, and the moonlight lighted my face up and fell across my tie and shirt like one of those diagonal ribbons foreign diplomats are so fond of wearing. There were stars out there too, and city lights, but the moon was the whole cheese. It looked to me from where I was exactly like a gilt thumbtack nailing the blue plush carpet that was the sky closer to the floor of heaven. As I thought of Bernice and wondered where she was, I could almost feel its light swimming in my eyes like soft golden tears. Here was the moon and here was I — why wasn’t she here? She would only come home when the moon was gone, perhaps, and something of perfection would be lacking. But even in the dusk of moonrise, how could her arms seem anything but white?