This was in November, more than two months after their first dinner together — a dinner which Lora never remembered without a quiet inward smile and a chuckle of incredulity at the verisimilitude of memory. She had supposed when she left the office with him that Saturday afternoon that they would drive somewhere in his car and later eat at some outlying roadhouse or at one of the well-known uptown places — for she knew that Steve had an extraordinary salary out of all proportion to his age — among the girls at the office it was commonly reported to be a hundred dollars a week or more. But instead he had driven around the park for an hour or so, apparently preoccupied, talking very little, and then headed downtown, down Seventh Avenue, halting the car finally in front of a dingy red brick building in a part of town she had never seen before. The sign at the nearby corner said Bank Street.
Steve was fumbling with a bunch of keys, locking the car. Without looking up he explained that he had given up his place in Brooklyn and had taken some rooms here, a little apartment in fact — and he had thought it might be nice — he hoped she wouldn’t mind...
Lora saw that he was stammering, almost incoherent with excitement; his hand trembled so he couldn’t get the key in the hole.
The ride had made her hungry. “What about dinner?” she asked.
“It’s coming — that is — I’m having it sent in. From Chaffard’s, in a taxi.” He looked at his watch. “Seven o’clock, I told them. It’s six-thirty. We could have a cocktail...”
Lora looked at him, the man of action, and considered. He has no more idea what he’s doing than the man in the moon, she thought; and she pitied him and felt suddenly tender toward him with all her twenty years.
“What’s the matter, won’t it lock?” she asked.
“Yes. It’s all right now.”
He made the cocktails in the kitchen. After she had taken off her hat and jacket and looked at her hair in the mirror on the wall of the front room, and powdered her nose, she went to the kitchen and watched him, sitting on the wooden chair in the corner. She saw that the refrigerator was stocked with ice, and oranges and grapes and a melon; on another shelf was bacon, milk, butter and cheese; and in a cupboard at one side was a conglomerate array, everything from salt and pepper to two tins of caviar. She observed that he must have been living here quite a while, but he said no, he had moved in only the day before.
She liked the bitter cocktails, and they drank the shaker empty, sitting on the couch in the front room. It wasn’t a couch precisely; it was low and very wide, with neither head nor foot, with a soft dark blue coverlet. Steve gulped the cocktails down, but said little, and seemed immensely relieved when the doorbell rang to announce the arrival of the dinner. They both helped the waiter arrange it on the oblong table against the walclass="underline" salami and olives and anchovies, a whole roast chicken smoothly brown and glistening, peas in tambour shells, stringy crisp potatoes, an enormous fruit salad, and two bottles of wine.
“It’s enough for a whole family,” Lora said. “And two bottles! We’ll both be drunk.”
“It’s quite mild, just something to wash it down,” said Steve.
The cocktails seemed to have dissolved his excitement; he carved the chicken neatly and expertly, explaining that he had performed that duty at home for years. “Father doesn’t carve well,” he said, “he maintains that after he gets the legs cut off he can’t tell which is front and which is back.” Later, when their plates had been once emptied and refilled and the first bottle was nearly gone, he got started on the war. He had about decided to enlist, he said, and now with the draft on he wished he had; certainly it was more honorable to go voluntarily than to be forced into it. Not that he approved of war, no man of sense did, but one had to accept the liabilities of citizenship along with its benefits. His mother didn’t want him to go. Only yesterday he had had a letter from her, saying that the only thing worse than having her son murdered would be to have him a murderer. Of course she didn’t mean that literally, it was just her way of putting things.
He got up to take the empty wine bottle to the kitchen and open the second one, and came back and refilled their glasses.
“I mustn’t drink any more,” Lora protested. “My head is like a merry-go-round already.”
“It’s quite mild, quite mild,” he insisted. His eyes, shining, seemed a little uncertain of their focus. “Oh, I forgot, I ought to make coffee. Should we have coffee?”
“I don’t care. If you want it.”
Standing, he served the salad, spilling a little over the side of the dish and letting it lie there on the tablecloth.
Lora ate her salad carefully and to the end; it tasted fresh and good after all the meat and vegetables she had eaten. She knew she was not drunk, for she heard all that Steve said and was able to decide what she agreed with and what she didn’t. He was talking about the war again. That was nonsense; why did he have the war on his mind? Pete had gone to war. And got killed maybe. All right, what if he had, to hell with him, not a pretty sentiment, but to hell with him; if he hadn’t gone to war he’d have gone somewhere else, and left her like that. Not that it was Pete’s fault, she had nothing against Pete — no, if you were going to talk about fault she would have something to say that wouldn’t be forgotten very soon. She wouldn’t think about that though — she had sworn she would not and she never would. It would have been a year old now — no, it would be — it would be — she couldn’t figure it. Who was that? Oh, it was Steve; what did he mean asking her what was the matter with her? Well... would you believe it, he was right, she was crying, there were tears in her eyes, she could feel them...
She wiped her eyes with her napkin, laughed aloud into Steve’s face, got up and pushed her chair back, and walked across to the couch. Stretching herself out, she put her hands up behind her head and through half shut eyes looked at Steve as he got up from his chair and came towards her.
“No one but a pig would eat as much as that,” she said. “I’m ashamed of myself. I think I’ll go to sleep while you do the dishes.”
He stood beside the couch looking down at her.
“Of course you know—” he said, and stopped. He said it again, and stopped again: “Of course you know—”
She felt removed and skeptical, and her head hurt.
“Of course I know what?”
He opened his mouth but said nothing, and then he sat down on the couch, clumsily bumping against her thigh; she didn’t move. His eyes were bloodshot and he kept looking at her armpits, as she lay with her hands back of her head. Let him, she thought defiantly, I can’t help it if this dress shows spots.
“You know I’m a virgin,” he said.
She laughed directly into his face, as she had before she left the table, but his expression did not change.
“So am I,” she laughed.
He stared at her, and burst out, “But you said—”
“I was just talking. You had no right to ask.”
“I don’t believe it. I tell you I don’t believe it.” His voice trembled and his hands wavered towards her and then dropped again. “If you deceived me — if you made me think — oh, my god—”
And all at once he fell forward beside her on the couch, clutching her dress in his fingers, burying his face next to her body, trembling all over so violently that the couch shook under them; his shoulders went up and down in spasmodic jerks, and unseemly muffled noises came from his buried face. Good heavens, he’s crying, Lora thought, now if that isn’t funny I’d like to know what is. That’s funny, his head and shoulder bumping against me like that, up and down, just listen to him, he sounds terrible. His head was rubbing against her breast, and all at once it ceased to be the head of a crying man, a strange object to be commented on and thought about, and became something directly personal to her; her breast, beginning to enjoy it, swelled toward the pressure with its own welcome, and was encouraged by her hand, which came down and buried its fingers in the hair of his head, holding him against her. “Oh, my god, oh, my god,” he was saying over and over, like a phonograph record with its spiral impeded, unable to leave its groove. Within her was a deep displeasure and a profound irritation, at the very moment that her other hand was working at the fastening of her dress, to uncover the breast to him. Neither the displeasure nor the hand’s betrayal was present in her consciousness; indeed, consciousness had given up the affair altogether, saying in effect, as defeated and embarrassed it turned its back on the painful scene, “Very well, have it your way, but I’m off, I don’t intend to get involved in this sort of thing. See you later.”