Presently he went into the kitchen. He absent-mindedly rinsed a few dishes under the rumbling tap and, returning to the front room, unbuckled his belt, drew the curtains, and, with the Sunday paper unheeded under his legs, went to sleep.
A deep rolling noise awakened him. He thought at first that it came from below, out of the subway. But there was no accompanying tremor through the building. He soon placed the sound outside and above him. It was thunder. He looked out. There had been a storm. The screen was still clogged with raindrops. The street was softly darkened by the clouds and the wet brownstone. In one of the rooms across the way a two-branched green lamp was shining. A woman lay on a sofa, one arm bent over her eyes. At the next sound of the retreating thunder she moved her legs.
Leventhal glanced again into the mist and water of the street and then went to the phone and tried Villani’s number. There was still no answer. Apparently they were out somewhere, making a day of it. He poised the receiver over the hook, aimed it, and let it fall into place.
He worked his feet into his shoes, treading down the heels, and went down to the restaurant for an early dinner. The waiter, the same bald, lean man who last week had anticipated his protest about the bad table with a gesture of insincere helplessness, appeared to be occupied with thoughts of his own. His black suit looked damp, and his leather bow tie was not fastened but hung on its elastic from a buttonhole. He brought Leventhal a veal cutlet and a bottle of beer and hurried away with a muscular swing, softly — his soles were padded with sawdust — to wait on a long table of boccie players whose game had been rained out and who were drinking wine and coffee. The odor of wet wood was very noticeable. Leventhal did not linger over his meal. He was soon outside again. The air was dimmer than before, and hotter. He turned west on Eighteenth Street and saw Allbee waiting for him on the corner. He had to look twice in the wavering, longitudinal grays and shadows of the watery street to identify him.
Leventhal did not halt until Allbee detained him, stepping in his way. He dropped his head diffidently and clumsily, as though asking Leventhal to understand that he was compelled to do this.
“Well?” Leventhal said after a moment’s silence.
“Why didn’t you stop? You saw me…”
“And if I did? I’m not looking for you. You’re the one. You follow me around.”
“You’re mad about yesterday, aren’t you? That was a coincidence.”
“Oh, it was for sure.”
“I wanted to talk to you yesterday, it so happens. You won’t hunt me up. If I want to talk to you, I have to find opportunities.”
“Is that the way you describe it?”
“But when I remembered it was Saturday-you people don’t do business on Saturday — I postponed it.” The saying of this appeared to delight him. But then his expression changed. He seemed to recognize and even to be depressed by the poorness of his joke. He looked somberly and earnestly at Leventhal, who understood that Allbee wanted him to know of the feelings that gave rise to it, and to know also that since those feelings were dire and powerful the joke dissembling them was actually a courtesy.
“I don’t observe the holiday,” said Leventhal deliberately and dryly.
“Oh, of course not,” said Allbee, and he again began to smile. He added, a second later, “As far as ‘following’ is concerned, that’s not the way to put it. I have a perfect right to see you. You act as if I had some kind of game, whereas you’re the one that’s playing a game.”
“How do you figure that?”
Allbee raised his hand. “You pretend that I haven’t got a grievance against you. That’s playing.” His fingers brushed over his chest, and then he covered his mouth and cleared his throat.
“Say… with the kid — stuff like that has got to stop.”
“I didn’t know he was with you.”
“Not much! Well, I’m telling you. Besides, I told you the first time, I never wanted to do you any harm.”
“We differ about that. And there was a second time, too.” He gave an illustrative push that stopped short of Leventhal’s shoulders. “That was a little too much game for me. Or were you trying to scare me off?”
“If I was, you mean that I can’t, huh?”
“Well,” Allbee suggested, “you might have sent me to the hospital and gotten rid of me that way for a while.” He grinned. “You said you should have broken my neck.”
Leventhal said contemptuously, “But otherwise… to scare you? It’s impossible to scare you, isn’t it?”
“A year ago I couldn’t have come to you. But now that I’ve done it, made up my mind, it is impossible.”
“What was different a year ago?” asked Leventhal.
“Then I was getting by, somehow, and I wouldn’t have thought of coming near you,” he said quite seriously.
“And now?”
“My wife left me some money. It wasn’t a lot, but I stretched it. As long as it lasted — why, if I were still getting by you’d never hear from me. I’ll say it again. But maybe I don’t have a real sense of honor or I wouldn’t put myself in such a position. I mean real honor. There’s no getting away from it, I suppose, honor is honor. Either you’ve got it up to here,” he drew a line across his throat, “or you haven’t got it. It doesn’t make you any happier to tell yourself you ought to have it. It’s like anything else that counts. You have to make sacrifices to it. You know, I’m from an old New England family. As far as honor’s concerned, I’m not keeping up standards very well, I admit. Still, if I was born with my full share of it, in New York I’d have an even worse handicap. Oh, boy! — New York. Honor sure got started before New York did. You won’t see it at night, hereabouts, in letters of fire up in the sky. You’ll see other words. Such things just get swallowed up in these conditions — modern life. So I’m lucky I didn’t inherit more of a sense of it. I’d be competing with Don Quixote. Now with you it’s different, altogether. You’re right at home in this, like those what-do-you-call “ems that live in the flames — salamanders. If somebody hurts you, you hit back in any way and anything goes. That’s how it is here. It’s rugged. And I can appreciate it. Of course, the kind of honor I’m familiar with doesn’t allow that. Mine tells me not to ask for damages, and so on. But I have it in diluted form; that’s obvious.”
Allbee said this conversationally, in a factual manner; nevertheless Leventhal heard the spiteful ring in it. But he evinced no feeling and made no comment.
“I have an idea that it’s one of those things that’s bound to go-”
“You went through the money,” Leventhal said, disregarding the rest. “Why didn’t you get a job?”
“What did I want to work for? What sort of a job could I get anyhow? Nobody would give me what I wanted. And do you think I could take a leg job, like a high-school kid? An errand boy? Besides, I was in no hurry. Why should I be?”
“Were you black-listed?” Leventhal was unable to conceal his concern. “Is that the reason?”
Allbee did not reply to this directly. “Why, Rudiger wouldn’t have taken me back even to empty his ash trays.”
After this they were both silent for a while. Under its flat rim the ball of the lamp nearby began to shine in the gray and blue depth of the air, revealing suddenly the perspiration on Allbee’s face. The rings under his eyes gave him an aspect of suffering anger and hate. Yet he seemed unaware of any exposure and spoke evenly.