The morning of the second day we heard the church bells ringing, and I remembered I was due to sing at the Sunday night concert. I got up, went to the piano, and tossed a few high ones around. I was just trying them out, but I didn’t have to. They were like velvet. At six o’clock we dressed, had a little something to eat, and went down there. I was in a Rigoletto excerpt, from the second act, with a tenor, a bass, a soprano, and a mezzo that were all getting spring try-outs. I was all right. When we got home we changed to pajamas again, and I got out the guitar. I sang her the Evening Star song, Träume, Schmerzen, things like that. I never liked Wagner, and she couldn’t understand a word of German. But it had earth, rain, and the night in it, and went with the humor we were in. She sat there with her eyes closed, and I sang it half voice. Then I took her hand and we sat there, not moving.
A week went by, and still I didn’t see Winston. He must have called twenty times, but she took all calls, and when it was him she would just say I wasn’t in, and hang up. I had nothing to say to him but goodbye, and I wasn’t going to say that, because I didn’t want to play the scene. Then one day, after we had been out for breakfast, we stepped out of the elevator, and there he was at the end of the hall, watching porters carrying furniture into an apartment. He looked at us and blinked, then dived at us with his hand out. “Jack! Is that you? Well, of all the idiotic coincidences!”
I felt my blood freeze for fear of what she was going to do, but she didn’t do anything. When I happened not to see his hand, he began waving it around, and kept chattering about the coincidence, about how he had just signed a lease for an apartment in this very building, and here we were. She smiled. “Yes, very fonny.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to do but introduce him, so I did. She held out her hand. He took it and bowed. He said he was happy to know her. She said gracias, she had been at his concert, and she was honored to know him. Two beautiful sets of manners met in the hall that day, and it seemed queer, the venom that was back of them.
The door of the freight elevator opened, and more furniture started down the hall. “Oh, I’ll have to show them where to put it. Come in, you two, and have a look at my humble abode.”
“Some other time, Winston, we—”
“Yes, gracias, I like.”
We went in there, and he had one of the apartments on the south tier, the biggest in the building, with a living room the size of a recital hall, four or five bedrooms and baths, servants’ rooms, study, everything you could think of. The stuff I remembered from Paris was there, rugs, tapestries, furniture, all of it worth a fortune, and a lot of things I had never seen. Four or five guys in denim suits were standing around, waiting to be told where to put their loads. He paid no attention to them, except to direct them with one hand, like they were a bunch of bull fiddlers. He sat us down on a sofa, pulled up a chair for himself, and went on talking about how he was sick of hotel living, had about given up all hope of finding an apartment he liked, and then had found this place, and then of all the cockeyed things, here we were.
Or were we? I said yes, we were at the other end of the hall. We all laughed: He started in on Juana, asked if she wasn’t Mexican. She said yes, and he started off about his trip there, and what a wonderful country it was, and I had to hand it to him he had found out more about it in a week than I had in six months. You would have thought he might have conveniently left out what he went down there for. He didn’t. He said he went down there to bring me back. She laughed, and said she saw me first. He laughed. That was the first time there was the least little glint in their eyes.
“Oh, I must show you my cricket!”
He jumped up, grabbed a hatchet, and began chopping a small crate apart. Then he lifted out a block of pink stone, a little bigger than a football and about the same shape, but carved and polished into the form of a cricket, with its legs drawn up under it and its head huddled between its front feet. She made a little noise and began to finger it.
“Look at that, Jack. Isn’t it marvelous? Pure Aztec, at least five hundred years old. I brought it back from Mexico with me, and I’d hate to tell you what I had to do to get it out of the country. Look at that simplification of detail. If Manship had done it, they’d have thought it was a radical sample of his work. The line of that belly is pure Brancusi. It’s as modern as a streamlined plane, and yet some Indian did it before he even saw a white man.”
“Yes, yes. Make me feel very nostálgica.”
Then came the real Hawes touch. He picked it up, staggered with it over to the fireplace, and put it down. “For my hearth!”
She got up to go, and I did. “Well, children, you know now where I live, and I want to be seeing a lot of you.”
“Yes, gracias.”
“And oh! As soon as I’m moved in, I’m giving a little housewarming, and you’re surely coming to it—”
“Well, I don’t know, Winston, I’m pretty busy—”
“Too busy for my house warming? Jack, Jack, Jack!”
“Gracias, Señor Hawes. Perhaps we come.”
“Perhaps? Certainly you’ll come!”
I was plenty shaky when we got to our own apartment. “Listen, Juana, we’re getting out of this dump, and we’re getting out quick. I don’t know what the hell his game is, but this is no coincidence. He’s moved in on us, and we’re going to beat it.”
“We beat it, he come too.”
“Then we’ll beat it again. I don’t want to see him.”
“Why you run away?”
“I don’t know. It — makes me nervous. I want to be somewhere where I don’t have to see him, don’t have to think of him, don’t have to feel that he’s around.”
“I think we stay.”
We saw him twice more that day. Once, around six o’clock, he rang the buzzer and asked us to dinner, but I was singing and said we would have to eat later. Then, some time after midnight, when we had got home, he dropped in with a kid named Pudinsky, a Russian pianist that was to play at his next concert. He said they were going to run over some stuff, and for us to come on down. We said we were tired. He didn’t argue. He put his arm around Pudinsky, and they left. While we were undressing we could hear the piano going. The kid could play all right.
“I see his game now.”
“Yes. Very fonny game.”
“That boy. I’m supposed to get jealous.”
“Are you jealous?”