Chapter 2
She was really Ivy Galvin. That was her name.
She lay quietly on the worn sofa, one hand holding the other beneath her small breasts and her ankles touching in a position that was the prone equivalent of the one in which she had sat erect, a few minutes ago, to accept her whiskey. Except for her deep and rhythmic breathing, a technique she had developed in the methodical seduction of quietude, she had the appearance of having been laid out neatly for burial. She was feeling relaxed and at ease now, not so much from warmth and whiskey as from the assurance, at last clearly established, that Henry Harper, the odd young man she was using in her exigency, was not in the least interested in what she could not possibly give.
It was not true that she wanted to sleep, for she had found that sleep was treacherous. What she really wanted was to achieve and sustain for as long as possible the marginal twilight area between waking and sleeping in which she felt absolutely detached and inviolate, removed alike from the hard, bright threats above and the symbolisms of the same threats in the stirring darkness below. She wished that she could live in this twilight always, and she had become quite expert, as a matter of fact, in sustaining it precariously for long periods of time, but it was impossible, of course, to sustain it, as she wished, forever. Sooner or later she would descend in spite of herself into the waiting darkness of hostile symbols, which were very bad, and sooner or later after that she would rise inevitably to the shapes and names and terms of reality, which were never any better and usually worse.
Her eyes were not completely closed, although they appeared to be. Through her lowered lashes she watched Henry Harper with a kind of dreamy intentness upon the smallest details of what he did. She did not watch him because she was interested or concerned, but only because he was useful as a neuter distraction that helped her remain a little longer in her interim twilight. She saw him drink his whiskey and sit down and gather his papers. His head in the light of the lamp had a massive and shaggy look, and she thought with the detachment that was now possible to her that he looked completely spent and almost pitiable, committed to his own aberrations, whatever they were, and his own consequent loneliness. After a while he lay his head on the table and did not move for a long while.
Realizing that he had gone to sleep in his chair, she wondered if his sleep was sound and deep, as hers was not, or if it was disturbed by symbols, as hers was. This was something that did not bear thinking about, however, because it threatened the detachment she wished to sustain, and she began, as another distraction, to count slowly to herself, forming without sound with her lips the shape of the numbers, to see how high she could go before she stirred, but the time it took was too long to survive, and she was asleep a full quarter of an hour before he got up suddenly and turned out the light and left the room.
For a while she was neither more nor less than she appeared to be, a girl asleep in a posture of primness on a worn sofa, but then, as the windows on the street side of the room began to lighten, which was about seven o’clock in the morning of that day, she wakened in her sleep to another morning of another day in another place, and she was, in the time and place of her waking, another person.
She was, for one thing, much younger. She was much younger, and the day was soft and bright and beautiful, and she thought for these two reasons, because she was young and the day was beautiful, that she would put on a beautiful dress. She selected one from her closet and examined it, and it was just the kind of dress for that kind of day, pale blue and silken to the touch, although it was really polished cotton. It had a short bodice with a full skirt of yards and yards of material flaring out from a tiny waist, which would make a stiff petticoat necessary underneath, and so she selected the petticoat to wear also, and around the hem of the petticoat there was an inch of real lace that was supposed to show, just slightly, beneath the hem of the skirt of the dress.
She laid the dress and the petticoat side by side on her bed and went into the bathroom and bathed with scented soap, and then she put on a white bathrobe that had tiny blue roses scattered all over it, which was rather ridiculous when you came to think of it, inasmuch as there was no such thing as a blue rose, so far as she knew. Wearing the white robe and thinking of the pale blue dress and feeling clean and perfumed and almost as beautiful as the morning, she went back into the bedroom to the dressing table that had a mirror as big as the one her mother used. With the silver-backed brush that had been given to her by an aunt, she began to brush her hair. She pulled the brush through her hair and lifted it above her head to begin a second stroke, and then she stopped, the brush suspended in the beginning of the stroke, and stared in amazement at the reflection of her face in the glass. It was really rather funny, almost ludicrous, for there were three large brown stains on her face, and she began to laugh at herself and watch herself laughing back from the glass, wondering how in the world she could have bathed so carefully and still have failed to remove the stains. She couldn’t think where she might have acquired the stains, but it didn’t really matter, since they were there, as she could clearly see, and there was nothing to do but wash her face again.
She washed it in the lavatory, using very hot water and a stronger soap, but the stains were stubborn and refused to leave, and all of a sudden she understood that they were never going to leave, never in the world, even if she scrubbed herself every hour of every day for the rest of her life. Filled with terror and monstrous grief, she threw herself on the bed beside the blue dress and the petticoat, and at that instant her Cousin Lila came into the room and began to stroke her hands and arms in an attempt to comfort her, and everywhere that Lila’s fingers touched there was instantly another stain that would never leave. Pulling away with a cry of anguish, she sprang to her feet and began to run across the room to the door, and she was wakened by the cry and the action in the middle of a strange room that she could not remember ever having seen before.
And then she remembered that it was the room of Henry Harper, an odd and antagonistic fellow who had agreed to let her sleep here until tomorrow, or today, which it now was. The last she’d seen of him, he’d been sitting in a chair with his head on the table, the one right over there, but now he was gone. In the gray light that filtered through the dirty glass of the front windows, she could see the empty chair and the table and the typewriter and a stack of yellow sheets beside the typewriter, but she could not see Henry Harper anywhere, and she wondered where he was. There was another room, of course, a bedroom with a bath built into the corner, and it was probably that he was in there, in the bedroom, where he would naturally have gone if he wanted to sleep. She walked over to the door of the bedroom and looked in, and there he was, sure enough, not lying properly in the bed, as he should have been, but lying sprawled across it on his face, fully clothed, as if he had simply fallen there in exhaustion and had failed to get up again.