"Well, if you consider the determining factor, which is, of course, economic ... "
"No, I ... I didn't ask it that way ... Katie, I've been very unhappy."
"I'm sorry to hear that. One hears so many people say that nowadays. That's because it's a transition period and people feel rootless. But you've always had a bright disposition, Peter."
"Do you ... do you remember what I was like?"
"Goodness, Peter, you talk as if it had been sixty-five years ago."
"But so many things happened. I ... " He took the plunge; he had to take it; the crudest way seemed the easiest. "I was married. And divorced."
"Yes, I read about that. I was glad when you were divorced." He leaned forward. "If your wife was the kind of woman who could marry Gail Wynand, you were lucky to get rid of her."
The tone of chronic impatience that ran words together had not altered to pronounce this. He had to believe it: this was all the subject meant to her.
"Katie, you're very tactful and kind ... but drop the act," he said, knowing in dread that it was not an act. "Drop it ... Tell me what you thought of me then ... Say everything ... I don't mind ... I want to hear it ... Don't you understand? I'll feel better if I hear it."
"Surely, Peter, you don't want me to start some sort of recriminations? I'd say it was conceited of you, if it weren't so childish."
"What did you feel — that day — when I didn't come — and then you heard I was married?" He did not know what instinct drove him, through numbness, to be brutal as the only means left to him. "Katie, you suffered then?"
"Yes, of course I suffered. All young people do in such situations. It seems foolish afterward. I cried, and I screamed some dreadful things at Uncle Ellsworth, and he had to call a doctor to give me a sedative, and then weeks afterward I fainted on the street one day without any reason, which was really disgraceful. All the conventional things, I suppose, everybody goes through them, like measles. Why should I have expected to be exempt? — as Uncle Ellsworth said." He thought that he had not known there was something worse than a living memory of pain: a dead one. "And of course we knew it was for the best. I can't imagine myself married to you."
"You can't imagine it, Katie?"
"That is, nor to anyone else. It wouldn't have worked, Peter. I'm temperamentally unsuited to domesticity. It's too selfish and narrow. Of course, I understand what you feel just now and I appreciate it. It's only human that you should feel something like remorse, since you did what is known as jilted me." He winced. "You see how stupid those things sound. It's natural for you to be a little contrite — a normal reflex — but we must look at it objectively, we're grownup, rational people, nothing is too serious, we can't really help what we do, we're conditioned that way, we just charge it off to experience and go on from there."
"Katie! You're not talking some fallen girl out of her problem. You're speaking about yourself."
"Is there any essential difference? Everybody's problems are the same, just like everybody's emotions."
He saw her nibbling a thin strip of bread with a smear of green, and noticed that his order had been served. He moved his fork about in his salad bowl, and he made himself bite into a gray piece of diet cracker. Then he discovered how strange it was when one lost the knack of eating automatically and had to do it by full conscious effort; the cracker seemed inexhaustible; he could not finish the process of chewing; he moved his jaws without reducing the amount of gritty pulp in his mouth.
"Katie ... for six years ... I thought of how I'd ask your forgiveness some day. And now I have the chance, but I won't ask it. It seems ... it seems beside the point. I know it's horrible to say that, but that's how it seems to me. It was the worst thing I ever did in my life — but not because I hurt you. I did hurt you, Katie, and maybe more than you know yourself. But that's not my worst guilt ... Katie, I wanted to marry you. It was the only thing I ever really wanted. And that's the sin that can't be forgiven — that I hadn't done what I wanted. It feels so dirty and pointless and monstrous, as one feels about insanity, because there's no sense to it, no dignity, nothing but pain — and wasted pain ... Katie, why do they always teach us that it's easy and evil to do what we want and that we need discipline to restrain ourselves? It's the hardest thing in the world — to do what we want. And it takes the greatest kind of courage. I mean, what we really want. As I wanted to marry you. Not as I want to sleep with some woman or get drunk or get my name in the papers. Those things — they're not even desires — they're things people do to escape from desires — because it's such a big responsibility, really to want something."
"Peter, what you're saying is very ugly and selfish."
"Maybe. I don't know. I've always had to tell you the truth. About everything. Even if you didn't ask. I had to."
"Yes. You did. It was a commendable trait. You were a charming boy, Peter."
It was the bowl of sugar-coated almonds on the counter that hurt him, he thought in a dull anger. The almonds were green and white; they had no business being green and white at this time of the year; the colors of St. Patrick's Day — then there was always candy like that in all the store windows — and St. Patrick's Day meant spring — no, better than spring, that moment of wonderful anticipation just before spring is to begin.
"Katie, I won't say that I'm still in love with you. I don't know whether I am or not. I've never asked myself. It wouldn't matter now. I'm not saying this because I hope for anything or think of trying or ... I know only that I loved you, Katie, I loved you, whatever I made of it, even if this is how I've got to say it for the last time, I loved you, Katie."
She looked at him — and she seemed pleased. Not stirred, not happy, not pitying; but pleased in a casual way. He thought: If she were completely the spinster, the frustrated social worker, as people think of those women, the kind who would scorn sex in the haughty conceit of her own virtue, that would still be recognition, if only in hostility. But this — this amused tolerance seemed to admit that romance was only human, one had to take it, like everybody else, it was a popular weakness of no great consequence — she was gratified as she would have been gratified by the same words from any other man — it was like that red-enamel Mexican on her lapel, a contemptuous concession to people's demand of vanity.
"Katie ... Katie, let's say that this doesn't count — this, now — it's past counting anyway, isn't it? This can't touch what it was like, can it, Katie? ... People always regret that the past is so final, that nothing can change it — but I'm glad it's so. We can't spoil it. We can think of the past, can't we? Why shouldn't we? I mean, as you said, like grownup people, not fooling ourselves, not trying to hope, but only to look back at it ... Do you remember when I came to your house in New York for the first time? You looked so thin and small, and your hair hung every which way. I told you I would never love anyone else. I held you on my lap, you didn't weigh anything at all, and I told you I would never love anyone else. And you said you knew it."
"I remember."
"When we were together ... Katie, I'm ashamed of so many things, but not of one moment when we were together. When I asked you to marry me — no, I never asked you to marry me — I just said we were engaged — and you said 'yes' — it was on a park bench — it was snowing ... "
"Yes."
"You had funny woolen gloves. Like mittens. I remember — there were drops of water in the fuzz — round — like crystal — they flashed — it was because a car passed by."
"Yes, I think it's agreeable to look back occasionally. But one's perspective widens. One grows richer spiritually with the years."
He kept silent for a long time. Then he said, his voice flat: