"Hey, you down there!" he shouted. "Are you paid to work or to gape?"
The man bent silently over his drill. Dominique laughed aloud.
The superintendent said: "It's a tough crew we got down here, Miss Francon ... Some of 'em even with jail records."
"Has that man a jail record?" she asked, pointing down.
"Well, I couldn't say. Wouldn't know them all by sight."
She hoped he had. She wondered whether they whipped convicts nowadays. She hoped they did. At the thought of it, she felt a sinking gasp such as she had felt in childhood, in dreams of falling down a long stairway; but she felt the sinking in her stomach.
She turned brusquely and left the quarry.
She came back many days later. She saw him, unexpectedly, on a flat stretch of stone before her, by the side of the path. She stopped short. She did not want to come too close. It was strange to see him before her, without the defense and excuse of distance.
He stood looking straight at her. Their understanding was too offensively intimate, because they had never said a word to each other. She destroyed it by speaking to him.
"Why do you always stare at me?" she asked sharply.
She thought with relief that words were the best means of estrangement. She had denied everything they both knew by naming it. For a moment, he stood silently, looking at her. She felt terror at the thought that he would not answer, that he would let his silence tell her too clearly why no answer was necessary. But he answered. He said:
"For the same reason you've been staring at me."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"If you didn't, you'd be much more astonished and much less angry, Miss Francon."
"So you know my name?"
"You've been advertising it loudly enough."
"You'd better not be insolent. I can have you fired at a moment's notice, you know."
He turned his head, looking for someone among the men below. He asked: "Shall I call the superintendent?"
She smiled contemptuously.
"No, of course not. It would be too simple. But since you know who I am, it would be better if you stopped looking at me when I come here. It might be misunderstood."
"I don't think so."
She turned away. She had to control her voice. She looked over the stone ledges. She asked: "Do you find it very hard to work here?"
"Yes. Terribly."
"Do you get tired?"
"Inhumanly."
"How does that feel?"
"I can hardly walk when the day's ended. I can't move my arms at night. When I lie in bed, I can count every muscle in my body to the number of separate, different pains."
She knew suddenly that he was not telling her about himself; he was speaking of her, he was saying the things she wanted to hear and telling her that he knew why she wanted to hear these particular sentences.
She felt anger, a satisfying anger because it was cold and certain. She felt also a desire to let her skin touch his; to let the length of her bare arm press against the length of his; just that; the desire went no further.,
She was asking calmly:
"You don't belong here, do you? You don't talk like a worker. What were you before?"
"An electrician. A plumber. A plasterer. Many things."
"Why are you working here?"
"For the money you're paying me, Miss Francon."
She shrugged. She turned and walked away from him up the path. She knew that he was looking after her. She did not glance back. She continued on her way through the quarry, and she left it as soon as she could, but she did not go back down the path where she would have to see him again.
2.
DOMINIQUE awakened each morning to the prospect of a day made significant by the existence of a goal to be reached: the goal of making it a day on which she would not go to the quarry.
She had lost the freedom she loved. She knew that a continuous struggle against the compulsion of a single desire was compulsion also, but it was the form she preferred to accept. It was the only manner in which she could let him motivate her life. She found a dark satisfaction in pain — because that pain came from him.
She went to call on he distant neighbors, a wealthy, gracious family who had bored her in New York; she had visited no one all summer. They were astonished and delighted to see her. She sat among a group of distinguished people at the edge of a swimming pool. She watched the air of fastidious elegance around her. She watched the deference of these people's manner when they spoke to her. She glanced at her own reflection in the pooclass="underline" she looked more delicately austere than any among them.
And she thought, with a vicious thrill, of what these people would do if they read her mind in this moment; if they knew that she was thinking of a man in a quarry, thinking of his body with a sharp intimacy as one does not think of another's body but only of one's own. She smiled; the cold purity of her face prevented them from seeing the nature of that smile. She came back again to visit these people — for the same of such thoughts in the presence of their respect for her.
One evening, a guest offered to drive her back to her house. He was an eminent young poet. He was pale and slender; he had a soft, sensitive mouth, and eyes hurt by the whole universe. She had not noticed the wistful attention with which he had watched her for a long time. As they drove through the twilight she saw him leaning hesitantly closer to her. She heard his voice whispering the pleading, incoherent things she had heard from many men. He stopped the car. She felt his lips pressed to her shoulder.
She jerked away from him. She sat still for an instant, because she would have to brush against him if she moved and she could not bear to touch him. Then she flung the door open, she leaped out, she slammed the door behind her as if the crash of sound could wipe him out of existence, and she ran blindly. She stopped running after a while, and she walked on shivering, walked down the dark road until she saw the roof line of her own house.
She stopped, looking about her with her first coherent thought of astonishment. Such incidents had happened to her often in the past; only then she had been amused; she had felt no revulsion; she had felt nothing.
She walked slowly across the lawn, to the house. On the stairs to her room she stopped. She thought of the man in the quarry. She thought, in clear, formed words, that the man in the quarry wanted her. She had known it before; she had known it with his first glance at her. But she had never stated the knowledge to herself.
She laughed. She looked about her, at the silent splendor of her house. The house made the words preposterous. She knew that would never happen to her. And she knew the kind of suffering she could impose on him.
For days she walked with satisfaction through the rooms of her house. It was her defense. She heard the explosions of blasting from the quarry and smiled.
But she felt too certain and the house was too safe. She felt a desire to underscore the safety by challenging it.
She chose the marble slab in front of the fireplace in her bedroom. She wanted it broken. She knelt, hammer in hand, and tried to smash the marble. She pounded it, her thin arm sweeping high over her head, crashing down with ferocious helplessness. She felt the pain in the bones of her arms, in her shoulder sockets. She succeeded in making a long scratch across the marble.
She went to the quarry. She saw him from a distance and walked straight to him.
"Hello," she said casually.
He stopped the drill. He leaned against a stone shelf. He answered:
"Hello."
"I have been thinking of you," she said softly, and stopped, then added, her voice flowing on in the same tone of compelling invitation, "because there's a bit of a dirty job to be done at my house. Would you like to make some extra money?"