He began with the ox joints consommé, followed by cucumber spears, olives and the boiled halibut with egg sauce and Parisienne potatoes. He chose the boiled leg of mutton with caper sauce for his meat course, with apple fritters, boiled onions, new green peas and the tomato salad au mayonnaise. For dessert, he began with the bread pudding in cognac sauce, then sampled the Roquefort and Edam cheeses with fruit and biscuit, and he was lingering over his café noir when he happened to glance up and catch the eye of a young woman seated all the way across the room from him in the midst of a gay-looking young group.
Or he didn’t catch her eye, not exactly — she seemed to have caught his. She was staring at him, and she never flinched or turned away when he looked up and saw that she was staring. Normally he wouldn’t have made a thing of it — if anything, he would have shied away and pretended to study the configuration of his cuticles for the next half hour — but he’d never felt so good and the wine was sparkling in his veins and invading his eyes and inhabiting his smile, and there was something about her that was maddeningly familiar, almost as if he knew her…. And after all he’d been through that day, well, he couldn’t help himself. When one of the men in her party got up from the table and crossed the room to the lavatory, Stanley rose inconspicuously and made his way to the lavatory too. Avoiding the mirrors, he watched as the man emerged from one of the stalls and washed up at the sink, and then he cleared his throat, introduced himself and asked if he might not have an introduction to the young lady in blue?
The man was Morris Johnston. He was of average height and build, he dressed in an average way, and his hair and eye color were resolutely average as well — that is, he was neither stout nor thin, not showy but no stick-in-the-mud either, and his coloring was mouse brown. “Oh, you mean Katherine?” he said, not at all taken aback.
“Yes,” Stanley managed, tugging at his collar, which suddenly felt like a garrote round his throat, “Katherine,” and he was trying out the name. “I think I know her. What’s her family name?”
Morris flashed a smile. “Dexter,” he said. “Katherine Dexter. But you’re not from Boston, are you?”
It all came back to him then, from the look of Monsieur LaBonte’s tortured mustaches to the smell of the wax on the polished floorboards of his studio and the feel of that twelve-year-old girl in his arms, all wing and bone and tentative shuffling feet, the girl who was Katherine Dexter, now grown and mature and sitting in the next room, dressed in blue. “No,” he said, remembering the moistness of her palms in that overheated room, the proximity of their bodies, the quality of her laugh on a certain winter day when the temperature plummeted and the snow dropped softly from the sky like the plucked feathers of some rare celestial creature, “I used to know her in Chicago.”
He was shy, Stanley, furtive still, the boy who burrowed, but there was something about Katherine that made him want to open up, turn himself inside out like a glove or a sock, to hide nothing, to spill it all, fears, dreams, hopes, predilections, theories, fixations. They reminisced about Chicago, and when they’d gone round for the second time and remembered everything twice and exhausted the roster of mutual acquaintances and experiences, he saw the light fading in her eyes — she was tired? bored? sated with Monsieur LaBonte and Prairie Avenue and Bumpy Swift? — and he felt a terrible tension rising in him. He had to hold her there, he had to, even if it meant reaching out to touch her wrist where it lay so casually, so nakedly perfect on the table before him, touch it and seize it and pull her to him, though he knew he could never do that, even if he’d sat beside her every night for a thousand years. But if she left him, if she got up from the table, if she danced with Morris Johnston or yawned and put a hand to her mouth and excused herself to turn in for the night or even to use the ladies’ room, he would die. His mouth was full of ashes, his heart was pounding, and even as she leaned toward this other one, this Butler Ames, a whisper on her lips, he felt the voice tighten in his throat and heard himself blurting, “Have you read Debs’s Unionism andSocialism?”
It was the key, the first principle, the beginning. And so much was engendered there, the broken wall, the burning roof and tower, because the key fit and the key turned, and from that moment on he wooed her with the sweetest phrases from the driest texts, with reform, the uplifting of the poor, the redistribution of wealth and the seizing of the means of production for the good and glory of the common man.
In the morning, at first light, he was outside her door, rapping. He needed to talk to her, but he didn’t want to disturb her, didn’t want to spoil her sleep or upset her schedule — they’d been up past one, after all — and so he rapped gently. Very gently. So gently he could barely detect the sound himself. There was no response and he knew he should leave it at that, but he needed to talk to her — he’d been up all night with the need of it — and he rapped harder. And when that got no reaction he began to thump the door with the heel of his hand, louder and progressively louder, until finally he forgot himself altogether and he was boxing with that mute stubborn unreasoning slab of wood, left/right, left/right, and he set up such a racket that the janitor came running with his mop and an old woman in a cap poked her head out of the next door up the hall and chastised him with a look that wilted him on the spot. “Shhhhh!” she hissed. “Get away from there now. Are you crazy?”
He ducked away, shamefaced, and let his shoulders sag beneath the weight of his criminality, but ten minutes later he was back at Katherine’s door again, rapping. This time, the instant his knuckles made contact with the wood, her muffled voice rose wearily from some buried niche of her room: “Who is it?”
“It’s me, Stanley. I’ve got to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“Stanley. From last night?”
A pause. “Oh, Stanley.” Another pause. “Yes. All right. Just let me get dressed.”
“That’s fine,” he said, raising his voice so she could hear him through all that rigid cellulose and the vacant space of her sitting room, “because I wanted to tell you what I’ve done with my ranch in New Mexico — that’s where I’ve spent the better part of the past two years, you know, roughing it like a cowboy in all that fine air and dramatic scenery, you should see it, you really should — but what I wanted to tell you is that I’ve organized the ranch as a cooperative concern where we all share equally in the profits, from the meanest hand to the one-legged Mexican cook, every one of us equal under the western sun, and you might not know that I’m the one who instituted the profit-sharing scheme at the Harvester Company, against my brothers’ objections, and I set aside the money for the McCormick Factory Workers’ Club too—”
And then the door opened and there she was, Katherine, the sweetest compression of a smile, her eyes searching his, and she was dressed in her tennis whites, a racquet dangling casually from her hand. “Do you play?” she asked.
“I — well — yes — I — well, in college, at Princeton, that is—”
“Singles?”
“Sure.”
“You don’t mind playing before breakfast, now? Because if you do, don’t be afraid to tell me.” She was smiling up at him as if he’d just bought her all of Asia and laid the deed at her feet. “You’ll play then?”
“Sure.”
But this was a conundrum, a real conundrum. It weighed on him as he hurried back to his room to change into his tennis things while she waited just outside the door, and he was still worrying it as he won service on a spin of the racquet and took his position behind the baseline. He’d never played tennis with a woman before and he didn’t know the etiquette involved: he didn’t want to overpower her — that wouldn’t be gentlemanly, not at all — and yet he didn’t want her to think he was playing down to her either. And so he tried to moderate his serve accordingly, putting the first one right in the center of the box at what must have been half the usual velocity, and with a very nice straightforward bounce to it. She surprised him by driving it directly back at him, and the surprise showed: his return was a bit tardy and he slapped the ball impotently into the net. She was glowing, beautiful, her hair pulled back in a tight chignon beneath the straw boater that was cinched under her chin with a strip of white muslin. “Love-fifteen,” she chirped.