"I think so," she said. She was still frowning, but she was listening intently now.
"Forty per cent of ten million dollars is four millon dollars, Chickie. If we win this case, my partner will get two million dollars and I will get two million dollars. I will be a very r-r-rich man, Chickie, and v-v-very well-known." Sidney paused. "I will be a successful lawyer, Chickie."
"You're a successful lawyer now," she said.
"Not like J-J-Jonah Willow."
"You're every bit as smart as Willow," she said. "Don't stammer."
"Yes, but not as successful." He paused. "Maybe not as s-s-smart, either, I don't know."
"You're just as smart, Sidney."
"Maybe," he said. He paused again. "Chickie, as you know, I have a widower father to support, he has a garden apartment in Queens, he's a very old man, and no trouble at all. I pay the rent each month, and I give him money to live on, that's about the extent of it."
"Yes, Sidney."
"Chickie, I've been wanting to ask you this for a long time now, but I never felt I had the right. I'm forty-eight years old, going on forty-nine, and I know you're only twenty-seven and, to be quite truthful, I've never been able to understand what you see in me."
"Let me worry about that," she said, and began stroking the back of his neck.
"B-b-but, I feel certain I'm going to win this case and that would ch-change things considerably. That's why I f-f-feel I now have the right."
"What right, Sidney?"
"I guess you know I 1-1-love you, Chickie. I suppose that's been made abundantly apparent to you over the past several months. I am very much in love with you, Chickie, and I would consider it an honor if you-were to accept my p-p-proposal of matrimony."
Chickie was silent.
"Will you marry me, Chickie?"
"This is pretty unexpected," she said. Her voice was very low. He could barely hear her.
"I figured it would come as a surprise to you."
"I'll have to think about it, Sidney. This isn't something a girl can rush into."
"I realize that."
"I'll have to think about it."
"I'll be a very rich man when I win this c-c-case," Sidney said.
"You dear man, do you think that matters to me?" Chickie asked.
He lay full length on the bed opposite the window, his hands behind his head, staring up at the ceiling. He had been lying that way for close to an hour now, ever since their return to the hotel room. He had not closed his eyes in all that time, nor could Ebie fool herself into believing he was actually resting. There was a tautness in his very posture, an unseen nervous vibration that she could feel across the length of the room. His silence was magnified by the rush-hour babble from below. In the echoing midst of headlong life, he lay as still as a dead man and stared sightlessly at the ceiling.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
"I'm fine," he said.
"Dris?" '
"Yes?"
"I'm afraid."
"Don't be afraid, Edna Belle."
"Can't we talk?" she asked.
"What would you like to talk about?"
"Can't… can't you reassure me? Can't you tell me we're not going to lose?"
"I'm not sure of that, Edna Belle."
"Please don't call me Edna Belle."
"That's your name isn't it?"
"My name's been Ebie for the past God knows how long, please don't call me Edna Belle. I hate the name Edna Belle. You know I hate the name."
"Ebie is an affectation," he said.
"It's not an affectation, it's my name. It's an important part of me."
"Yes, I'm sure it is."
"Yes, it is."
"I said yes."
"Then please don't call me Edna Belle."
"I won't."
"And if you feel like getting angry, please…"
"I'm not getting angry."
"… don't get angry with me. You have no reason to get angry with me."
"That's true. No reason at all."
"Get angry with Constantine, if you want to get angry. Or his lawyer. They're the ones who are trying to ruin us."
"If you ask me," he said, "you're the one who's getting angry, not me."
"Because you're not giving me the assurance I need."
"False assurance is a beggar's—"
"Don't try to get literary," Ebie said.
"Was I getting literary?"
"You were trying to, there's a difference. I can't stand it when you try to sound like a goddamn novelist."
"Have no fear. I am not a goddamn novelist."
"What are you then?"
"A Vermont farmer."
"You were a novelist before you were a farmer."
"I have never been a novelist," he said.
"No? What do you call The Paper Dragon?"
"Luck," he said, and closed his eyes.
The room was silent. From the street below, she could hear someone shouting directions to a truck driver at the Times depot. In the distance, Sardi's neon sign stained the dusk a luminous green, and the surrounding gray and shadowy buildings began to show lights in isolated window slits. She stared at him without speaking, and then pressed her face to the glass and watched the truck as it backed into the depot. How simple it is, she thought. How simple they make everything. When she turned to him again, her voice was very low. "They can take it all away from us," she said. "We can lose everything, Dris."
"We lost everything a long time ago," he answered. His eyes were sill closed.
"No."
"Ebie. We lost everything."
"Thank you," she said, and sighed. "That's the reassurance I wanted, thank you." She glanced through the window. "That's the encouraging word I wanted, all right," she said, and pressed her forehead to the glass.
At home they called her Edna Belle, and they called her brother George Benjamin, always using their full Christian names. In the center of the town, there was an enormous statue of Andrew Jackson, said to have been razed by the Yankees during the War between the States and left there as a grim reminder to the people of the South, never repaired or rebuilt, standing in ruinous splendor. She and George Benjamin would go down to the monument and play at its base with the other children. Once she cut herself falling on a piece of broken glass there she still had a crescent-shaped scar on her thigh as a reminder of the accident. Sometimes she would wander down to the center of town alone, and she would sit and sketch the monument in charcoal, the way the general's broken sword ended abruptly against the sky, with the bell tower of the church beyond, and down the street the white clapboard courthouse. She loved to work in charcoal, smearing the black onto the page with her index and middle fingers, rubbing it, shading it, smoothing it into the paper. It was very hard to draw niggers, even in charcoal.
She found the bird one day at the base of the monument, a sparrow who had broken his leg, probably by flying into the general's broad bronzed back or the shell-torn rim of his campaign hat. The bird lay on his back with his beak open, his throat pulsing, no sound coming from him, but his tongue or whatever it was leaping into his throat, beating there, as though he were mutely begging for assistance. She reached down for the bird, and he tried to regain his feet, the broken leg hanging crookedly and, still dazed, flopped over onto his side. No eyes were showing, his eyes were rolled back into his head, only an opaque white showed. She cradled him in her hands, and then couldn't pick up her sketching pad or her box of charcoals, so she left them at the base of the monument and walked slowly home holding the bird gently in her hands, his throat working. She was terrified lest he try again to fly away and fall from her hands to the pavement — she knew that would kill him. They all said the bird would die, anyway, even George Benjamin said so. But she took care of him until he got better, just as she knew he would, and one day he flew off before she had a chance to take him back to the monument where she had found him. She used to look for him at the monument after that, thinking he would maybe come back, like in picture books, but he never did.