“Don’t be like that! Of course I’m sorry. Where are you now?”
“Downtown. I’m about to go home.”
“You’re all depressed and upset. Why don’t you go to Angelo’s and wait there for me? We’ll have a drink and have some dinner. Maybe I can cheer you up.”
“Well...”
“I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”
After she hung up, she wished she’d said No. It would be nice to go out with him this evening, but she knew she would have felt better if she had had a chance to go home and change. She found another dime and called her mother.
“Mom, I’m going to stay in town and have dinner with Bob.”
“All right, dear. How did your appointment go?”
“They don’t have any vacancies.”
“Oh, that’s too bad. But you’ll find something soon.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Don’t be too late now.”
“Yes, Mother.”
Jane Ann walked four blocks to Angelo’s. She found a small semicircular bench against the back wall, a low cocktail table in front of it. She put the portfolio and her shoulder bag on the bench beside her. The smiling waiter recognized her and took her drink order.
She did not see Bob come in. She looked up and saw him as he walked toward her, smiling. Bob Larrimore was a big, vivid, personable man. She had met him at one of Mamie Gilbraith’s parties. He was the young eastern-division sales manager of a company which was one of the store’s big suppliers. Jane Ann liked him very much. Bob was trying to get her to convince herself that it was love. She was not yet willing to admit that. She knew only that she had fun when she was with him. He wanted badly to marry her, and so persistent was his campaign that he sometimes made her feel a bit trapped.
He sat beside her. “Honestly, how any man could be fool enough not to hire you...”
“Shambrun didn’t. I got off on the wrong foot somehow.”
“When you go after a job, honey, you’ve got to use the old psychology; you can’t beg. You have to make ’em want you.”
“You told me that before, and besides I didn’t beg.”
“Did he look at your work?”
“He looked at it.”
“Gosh, you are down, aren’t you, Waiter!”
When the waiter had left with his order. Bob took Jane Ann’s hand in his. “Honey, I don’t want to kid you. I feel bad because you do, of course, but I can’t help thinking it’s for the best.”
She removed her hand. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“I can’t help saying it. I think it’s fine that you want to do something with your art training. But marriage is a job, too. A damn important one.”
“I realize that. I want to be married, and I want to be a good wife.”
“Well?”
“Let me finish. I just want to know that I can do something else. That I could be good at it. You see, I have to prove that to myself. First.”
“But I know you can do it.”
“I haven’t proved it yet. And until I do, I can’t be that confident, thank you.”
He frowned. “Honey, if you’d gotten the job, I wouldn’t have said a word. But you didn’t get it. We have to face that. It just means that you’re going to keep on looking, and time is going to keep going by. I’ll be thirty next year. I’ve got a good job. A man in my job ought to be married. There are certain kinds of entertaining that can only be done in a home. I think we ought to...”
“Sometimes. Bob, you make me feel as if I have no face.”
“No face? What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You seem to be in love with the idea of getting married, not with me. You think it’s time you got married. So I’m just the thing you’ve picked to marry. You make me feel as if I’m not me.”
“That’s the darndest thing I ever heard! It isn’t that way at all! I love you, Jane Ann. And I’m telling you that we’re wasting time just because you feel you have to prove something about yourself.”
“You make it sound juvenile.”
“Isn’t it? Just a little?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Today they sank me without a trace. And I need another drink.”
He looked uncomfortable. “That isn’t the solution, dear.”
“To drink too much? I hadn’t thought of it. But now that you bring it up, maybe I will. You never drink too much, do you, Robert? Have to keep your wits about you. Make good impressions.”
“Let’s not scrap.”
He looked so miserable she felt sorry for him. She touched his hand. “Okay.”
“Now I’ll tell you something. I have to make a swing through the territory. It’ll take about three weeks. I could take a week off before the swing starts. That would give us a week’s honeymoon, and then three weeks on the road which would be almost like having a full month. What do you say?”
“You just don’t give up, do you?”
“Not Larrimore. Not ever.”
“Larrimore, this evening I do not want to talk about marriage. Buy me a drink and tell me funny jokes or something. Make me laugh.”
It was five minutes to nine. Rome sat alone in Heard’s office. He got up restlessly from the desk and stood at the windows. Somewhere out there, in the city, was the bomb. The man who had made it was in a cold drawer at the city morgue. The ruined body of Holmar was at a funeral home. Somewhere out there a girl walked, talked, laughed — and her life was a thin gray wire weakening under the slow assault of the acid. Perhaps she sat in a movie with the purse on her lap. He snapped his fingers, hurried from the office. When he returned slowly to the office, he knew that within minutes the warning would come over the big speakers in all the movie houses of the city. It was one further precaution, probably as useless as all the rest.
He sat at the desk, head propped on his fists. He wondered if, during these last few years, he had been working too hard. This affair had unsettled him badly. He lived in a furnished room, ate in restaurants, had no outside interest beyond the job. Objectively he knew that his way of life was wrong. He sensed the distortion, and knew that it was not good. He had excused himself by believing that one day things would change. But things had not changed and the work load grew heavier rather than lighter.
He could not stop thinking of the girl, imagining how she was, how she looked. Through a trick of his mind she had become infinitely precious to him. She had become the girl he had not yet found, the girl who would have changed his life.
Rome knew that such imaginings were absurd. This girl would be no substitute for the Irene he had lost years ago. This would be no tall fine girl with level eyes and sober lips and hair that had the feel of silk. If they found her in time — and he had begun to doubt that they would — she would turn out to be a squat, acne-ridden, shallow-eyed, gum-chomping girl, with a shrill nervous laugh and a great dull-eyed hulk of a boy friend. Or she would be one of those women who seem to exist only in offices — figure like a milestone, geometrically corseted, face like a summons and eyes like flint. Or that other type, body made of sticks, vague eyes behind heavy lenses, a wardrobe embracing every possible shade and tone of mud.
He had been in police work long enough to know disillusion. It was a stupid and pointless mental game to endow this unknown girl with all the qualities of the lost Irene, of the girl he had hoped to find. Yet he could not help it. He could see her, walking alone. She would have a shoulder bag. It would brush lightly against her side in the cadence of her walk. The curve of her hip and waist was lovely, all the warm vulnerable aliveness of her. He shut his eyes and he could see her walking away from him down an empty, brightly lighted street, tall, quick, and graceful. He stood and watched her walk away from him. Then there would be a hard flash, a fist blow against the night. It would leave its after-image against his eyes, and, when he could see again, he would see the figure on the sidewalk, stilled and shattered and shrunken...