“Here we are,” he said.
She looked at the scant furnishings, old and worn and ugly, the stained and faded walls. She reeked, it seemed to him, of an irritating air of disdain.
“It isn’t much,” she said.
“It suits me.”
“You must be easily pleased.”
“It’s a place to go, at least. That’s more than you’ve got.”
“It’s warm, I admit. That’s something.”
“It seems to me that you’re mighty goddamn particular for a beggar.”
“Well, you needn’t get so angry about it. You’re surely aware that it’s nothing to be proud of.”
“If you don’t care for it, you don’t have to stay. No one asked you in the first place.”
“Under the terms of our agreement, I’m willing to stay.”
“Thanks a lot. It’s very generous of you.”
“You must be very poor.”
“I’m not rich. If you thought I was, it was your mistake.”
“I should think a writer would make quite a bit of money.”
“Some writers don’t make any money at all.”
“Why don’t they quit writing, then?”
“Because they’re writers.”
“Don’t you make any money at all from writing?”
“I’ve made a little in the past, but not for quite a while.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ve been writing a novel and haven’t had anything to sell.”
“If you ask me, you’d better quit writing the novel and write something to sell instead. Then you might be able to live in a little better place.”
Abruptly, as if she were acting suddenly upon a decision slowly reached, she unbuttoned her coat, removed it, and tossed it into a chair. Walking across to a ratty, brown, frieze sofa, she sat down and stretched her legs in front of her. She was wearing a gray wool dress that did not look shabby or cheap, although not new or expensive, and the thinness of her body, which had been a suggestion under the coat, was now clearly apparent.
After stretching and yawning, she kicked off her shoes. She did look very young, as the Greek had said, and he wondered for the first time what her age was.
“How old are you?” he said.
She yawned again, stretching, and looked up at him from the corners of her eyes with a sly expression. Her hair had a soft luster, gathering the light. It was a soft golden color, thick and full, brushed back over the ears at the sides. At the moment it was badly tousled by the wind, but it was palpably clean, and he had a notion it would have the smell, if he were to bury his nose in it, of scented soap.
“I’m twenty-four,” she said.
“You don’t look it.”
“Don’t I? I feel at least three times that.”
“Are you in trouble of some kind?”
“If I am, it’s my own.”
“That’s right. I only hope you keep it to yourself. Why don’t you want to go back to the place you came from?”
“I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind.”
“You’ve run away from home, haven’t you?”
“Run away? I told you I’m twenty-four, and that’s the truth. I’m old enough to go where I please.”
“You do have a home, don’t you?”
“I used to have one, but not any more.”
“What happened to it?”
“Nothing happened to it, except that it’s not mine any more. My family doesn’t want me. They consider me a disgrace.”
“Are you?”
“I suppose I am. At least they think so.”
“Do you have a husband?”
“No, God, no! Why do you keep asking questions? You tell me to keep my trouble to myself, but at the same time you keep trying to get it out of me. It’s not sensible.”
“Oh, hell. There’s no use whatever in trying to come to terms with you. That’s plain enough.”
Before she could respond, he turned and walked out of the littered living room and through the bedroom into the tiny bathroom that had been built, as an afterthought, in one corner. After turning on the light above the lavatory, he splashed his face with cold water and tried, with a brush and paste, to wash some of the feverish night out of his mouth. He was drawn tight, his nerves on edge, and although he was tired, it was still impossible to sleep. It occurred to him that he didn’t even know the name of his guest, and that it had not, in spite of their unusual arrangement, seemed important enough to compel him to learn it. There was no assurance, of course, even if he asked, that she would tell him, or tell him, at any rate, the truth. When he went back into the living room, she had stretched out on the sofa with her arms folded up and her fingers laced beneath her hand.
“It has just come into my mind that I don’t know your name,” he said.
“Has it? I don’t know yours either, for that matter.”
“It’s Henry Harper.”
“Mine’s Ivy, if it makes any difference to you. Ivy Galvin.”
“Do you know something? I believe it really is.”
“Of course it is. Did you think I’d give you a false name?”
“I thought you’d probably either give me a false one or none at all.”
“You’re suspicious of everything, aren’t you? Well, I’m warm now, and I’m getting sleepy. I believe I could sleep for a while. Would you mind letting me alone?”
“Not at all. It would be a pleasure.”
“Thanks very much.”
She shut her eyes, as if by this small act she could achieve seclusion, and her breathing assumed with completion of the act an added depth and rhythm. In the posture and semblance of sleeping, she looked exposed and terribly vulnerable.
“I’ll get you a cover,” he said.
“I don’t need a cover. It’s warm enough in here without one.”
“At least you’ll need a pillow.”
“I’ll take a pillow if you have an extra one, but what I’d like more than anything else is a drink of whiskey. Do you happen to have any?”
“I have some bourbon in the bedroom.”
“I think, if I had a drink of whiskey, that I could go right off to sleep.”
“I’ll get it for you.”
He went into the bedroom to a chest of drawers, where the piece of a bottle stood in the midst of several tumblers. He poured about three fingers into two of the tumblers, got a pillow from the bed, and carried the tumblers and the pillow back into the living room. Ivy Galvin, or whoever she was if she was not Ivy Galvin, opened her eyes and sat up immediately on the edge of the sofa, her knees and ankles together in a position of unconscious propriety. She took the tumbler he offered and drank the whiskey in two swallows with only the briefest interval between.
“Thank you,” she said. “Are you going to work some more?”
“No.”
“It’s all right if you want to. Don’t let me interfere.”
“I won’t. It’s just that you reach a point when it goes bad, or seems to go bad, even if it doesn’t really, and there’s no use trying any longer.”
“That’s true in everything.”
She set her empty glass on the floor beside the sofa and lay down again with her head on the pillow. Her eyes closed, she began to breathe, as she had before, with depth and rhythm. He drank his own whiskey and sat down in the chair at the table and began to gather the scattered yellow sheets of his manuscript, putting them in order. This done, he began reading, but reading at this time was a mistake, because he was tired and satiated with words, and everything seemed worse than it was. The whiskey began to work on him a little, making him slightly drowsy, and he pushed his typewriter back and lay his head for a moment on the edge of the table where the typewriter had been, and the moment stretched on and on and became nearly an hour, and he wakened abruptly with his head splitting and a dull pain between his shoulders. Standing, he turned off the lamp on the table and walked in darkness into the bedroom and sat down on the edge of the bed and removed his shoes. He thought that another swallow of whiskey would do him good, and so he got up and took the swallow from the bottle and then lay down across the bed for a minute, for just a minute before undressing and getting into bed properly, and this minute across the bed, like the moment at the table, stretched on and on into the day, the particular Sunday that this day was.