Turning away, she crossed the living room to one of the front windows and stood looking down into the street. The street was narrow and dirty and utterly dismal in the gray morning light. Across the way, in the recessed doorway of a pawnshop, over which hung the old and identifying sign of the Medici, were several sheets of a newspaper that had been driven there in the night by the wind. Just below her and a little to the right, attached at a right angle to the face of the building in which she stood, was a sign that said “USED BOOKS” in large white letters, and in smaller letters underneath, “BOUGHT AND SOLD.” She could read the words clearly from her position, and they seemed to her in their innocence to be a gross obscenity, a tiny part of the monstrous distortion of all things that was effect of her depression. She had no watch, but she could tell by the quality of the light that it was still early, which left ahead of her the most of an interminable day, and she wondered in despair how she would live it, and if she did, how she would then live the one that would surely follow it.
She wondered if Henry Harper had any cigarettes. He must have some somewhere, because she remembered that he had given her one on the street outside the diner where they had met. She looked around the room and could not see any, and so she walked softly into the bedroom and found part of a package lying on his dresser with some loose change and a pocket knife and a folder of paper matches. She helped herself to three of the cigarettes and the folder of matches and went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa. The smoke did not taste good, mostly because she had been unable to brush her teeth for quite a while, but she accepted this as being appropriate, natural enough in a life where nothing at all was any good, and it amounted to nothing more than another minute factor in the grand sum of her depression and despair. She had lived in her depression now for far too long, and it was nothing she had been able to do anything about, she had tried, and it had made Lila furious. It was, she supposed, one of the reasons Lila had tried to kill her.
Now she had deliberately thought about it, after trying so hard not to think about it at all, and it seemed like a long time ago that it had happened, far back in the remote and incredible past of yesterday. Something so remote could surely be thought of without particular trauma, could be considered calmly, or at least without excessive emotion, in the hope that something beneficial might come of it, something recovered that had been lost, something learned that had not been learned before, or had been forgotten. She was not actually optimistic that any of these things would result from her thinking, however calmly, or anything good at all, but anyhow it was sometimes easier in the long run to think than it was not to think, and it was a kind of relief for a while, even though it did not last.
So Lila had tried to kill her. There was no question about that. It was only by the merest chance that she escaped, and if she had not escaped, no one would ever have known that she had been deliberately killed, for Lila was far too clever to be found out, and it would have been considered either an accident or suicide, whichever under the circumstances seemed most likely. Her relationship with Lila had started going bad ages ago, long before remote yesterday, and it had gone steadily from bad to worse, and the most terrible part of it was that it had been, until yesterday, all kept carefully under the surface of a terrifying cordiality. So far as she could understand it, for this deterioration of a relationship that had once seemed the only true and possible one in her shrunken world, there were two reasons, and neither was a reason that she could change.
In the first place, she had not been a cheerful or pleasant companion. She admitted that. It’s difficult to be cheerful or pleasant when one is burdened constantly, more and more heavily as time goes on, by a complex feeling of guilt and danger and loneliness, and it is impossible not to have such a feeling, or to hide it forever, when one is insecure in one’s position. She was like an apostate who, having no longer any belief in God, still fears God’s judgment. And then, in the second place, Lila had simply grown away from her and wished to be rid of her, but there was danger in this for Lila, or Lila thought there was, for she did not trust her little cousin any longer, and there was no telling what harm the cousin might do, in ignorance or fear or malice or all together, if she were deserted and left to her own devices. Lila was beautiful and talented and ambitious, and if it was compulsory for her to be one thing, it was imperative for her to appear to be something else. Therefore, she had tried to kill, and it was something, after all, that could be thought about afterward in the room of a stranger without grief or anger or exorbitant sense of loss.
Ivy Galvin lit another cigarette and closed her eyes and saw herself clearly. She was standing at the glass doers of their bedroom, hers and Lila’s, staring across the small terrace outside and down into the interior court of the apartment building in which they lived, and Lila opened the door behind her and came into the room. Lila was wearing one of her beautiful tailored suits, the silvery-gray one, and she was, in spite of her day’s work, which must have been arduous, as perfectly groomed in detail as she had been when she left in the morning.
“Hello, darling,” Lila said.
“Hello, Cousin Lila.”
Ivy did not turn away from the glass doors. She continued to look out across the terrace into the interior court. Lila, for an instant, looked annoyed, the thinnest shadow of an expression on the smooth cameo of her face. She removed the tailored jacket of her silvery-gray suit and began carefully to remove her wrist watch and the sapphire ring she wore on the third finger of her left hand.
“I wish you wouldn’t call me Cousin. I’ve told you and told you that I dislike it.”
“I forgot. I’m sorry.”
“Considering everything, it’s rather ridiculous, don’t you think?”
“I suppose it is?”
“Sometimes I think you do it purposely to annoy me.”
“No. I just forget, that’s all. I always called you Cousin at home.”
“Well, you’re no longer home.” Lila stared at Ivy’s back, and now the shadow on the cameo was a suggestion of slyness. “Perhaps you don’t do it purposely. Perhaps it’s an unconscious expression of hostility.”
“I don’t think so. It’s only a habit.”
“Are you feeling hostile, Ivy?”
“What makes you think I am?”
“Never mind. I see we are about to get into a session of answering questions with questions, which will get us nowhere at all. Have you had a good day?”
“It’s been just an ordinary day.”
“Meaning that it has been a bad one. You have many bad days, don’t you, Ivy? I wish I knew what is the matter with you.”
“There’s nothing the matter with me.”
“Obviously there’s something. Do you think you ought to see someone?”
Lila removed her blouse and skirt and sat down on the bed to remove her shoes and stockings. She did not look at Ivy now, but she somehow gave the impression of doing so. In the room, suddenly, there was at atmosphere of urgent waiting.
“What do you mean, someone?” Ivy said.
“A doctor.”
“No. I don’t need a doctor.”
“You needn’t be so intense about it. It was only a suggestion.”
“I don’t want to see one.”
“Don’t, then. It’s entirely up to you. As a matter of fact, I agree that it’s not necessary and possibly wouldn’t be very wise. Haven’t you dressed today?”
“No. I didn’t see any use in it.”
“You should dress and go out more often.”
“There’s no place to go.”