“Nicely put, Jane, but that isn’t what I meant at all.” Tom caught Jane’s right hand and brought it to his lips.
He kissed her knuckles. She closed her eyes in silent rapture, but then just as suddenly opened them and asked him point-blank: “What do you mean?” Her look now registered undisguised confusion.
“That I have no intention of spending the rest of my life with you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It isn’t difficult. You are, as I’ve often said, a very bright girl. Probably the smartest of your set. Smart enough to know there’d be nothing dottier for me to do than to be married to you for even ten minutes, let alone for the remainder of my days. Positorily bug-house.”
Jane wanted up. Tom released his hold on her. She slipped out from under him and sat straight up and patted her pompadour back into place and made adjustments to her calico skirt and blue linen blouse (both purchased from Pemberton, Day & Co. with her shopgirl discount, though it still took a bite out of her small salary). Finally, she said between pursed, angry lips, “Is this the person you become when you drink, Mr. Katz? A repellent one-night roué?”
“I sobered up a good while ago.”
“Then you’ll have no trouble understanding me clearly when I say that it’s time for you to go. If your pursuit of me has only been for the purpose of a single night of debauched conquest, which you’ll either conveniently deny any memory of to your friends or, or blame on all those Manhattan cocktails we had at the Fatted Pig, then let me serve notice here and now: I won’t go along with even a minute more of it.”
Calmly: “You’ll go along with it.”
“What did I just say?”
Tom got up from the sofa. “Get up.”
Jane remained seated on the sofa.
“Get up. I want to show you something.” Jane rose slowly, warily. Tom reached out and took Jane — not by the hand, but by the wrist, as one leads a recalcitrant child who will not come otherwise — over to the mirror on the wall. He positioned her before it. “Take a good look at yourself. What do you see?”
Jane looked at her reflection in the glass. The gaslight was low. She hadn’t bothered to turn up the flame when they’d first entered the room, thinking that Tom would appreciate the romantic mood created by the muted lighting. Now he did the unthinkable. He reached over and turned up the jet himself — all the way to its limit. It flared obscenely, flooding the room with harsh bright light. In that unforgiving illumination, every flawed feature which lived upon Jane’s face stood out in exaggerated relief: the “horsey” nose, eye sockets set so deeply into her face that the dark brown of her globes seemed to disappear almost entirely in their retreat, a chin that jutted protuberantly like a witch’s in a children’s fairy story.
“That’s what I look like,” said Jane to herself, mesmerized by the starkness of the image before her. “A witch.”
Yet Tom was not content with her only thinking about the way she looked. “Say what you see,” he said, his voice steely, cold. “It’s just you and me. No one but us is listening.”
“I see a — a hideous woman.”
Tom shook his head. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘hideous.’ That’s not being very kind to yourself, now, is it? I would use the less punishing word, ‘unattractive.’ But hideous, or unattractive, or just plain ugly or just plain plain, it’s all the same, isn’t it?” Tom gestured with a casual hand toward the image in the mirror. “No man wants to make love to a woman who looks like this.”
Jane took a moment to reply. The words were freighted with such pain that she could hardly bring them to voice. “Then why do you?”
Tom smiled. “Because, my dippy darling, I and I alone have the capacity to ignore your repulsiveness in my mission of mercy. This is what I’ve always sought to do — from that first afternoon at Pemberton, Day when we discussed the photography session in Miss Colthurst’s absence. I felt pity for you, working among all those pretty young women, and looking the way you did — the way you do.” Standing behind her, he moved his head slightly to the side to better see the reflected image Jane was beholding with a mixture of sadness and absolute horror. “I wanted to give you that thing you’ll never have otherwise, because, speaking as a man, even ugly men have no use for ugly women. We men — let me speak frankly here — we know our worth is gauged not by the way we look, but by what we are capable of doing—the things we make of our lives. A woman’s worth, on the other hand, is measured largely by her looks, her shape and carriage, by that sparkle in her eye — all of these things appealing to a man in a primal sort of way. This desire in the human male to seek out an ideal — it’s the way we’ve evolved, how biology tells a man to be. A man doesn’t go looking for a Jane. He seeks out a Molly or a Carrie. You know exactly what I mean. This is the quest. This is the game. The plain Janes of the world play no part in this game, in this ‘chase,’ unless, of course, they get lucky. But I doubt you are ever going to get lucky, Jane. Look at yourself.”
Jane turned away. “I don’t want to look at myself anymore.”
Tom turned Jane around so she was forced to look at him. “I wanted to give you something tonight, Jane. I wanted to show you what it was like to be with a man, so you’ll have that one special memory to sustain you.”
The room was spinning, whirling about her. Jane was still very drunk and not used to this feeling; it had been a sort of twirling, pinwheel kind of dream, but now it had transmogrified itself into a terrible, ugly, formless nightmare. Yet as Tom was speaking to her in a soft and confiding voice, the ragged edges of the nightmare were being smoothed away. In their place was a form of tortuous, perverted kindness. Jane had a sense of the distortion. She had the feeling that what there was left of respect for self was being whittled away by the man who stood next to her, gauging her worth by his own selfish measure, leaving her a hollow reflection of who she used to be. And she was too weak to fight it. And she hated herself for it. She hated herself for submitting to him based on that singular desire to know what it would feel like in those next moments to be loved, even if the love wasn’t real.
And in the end she became a helpless victim to that need, regardless of the price it cruelly exacted from her dignity.
Tom ran the back of his hand across Jane’s wet cheek in a gesture which replicated what she had done only moments before to him. The act represented great tenderness of feeling, whether or not there was any sincerity behind it.
He dropped his voice to a seductive whisper. “I’m giving you the chance to see what the world would be like if you had been born beautiful. This is my gift to you, Jane.”
Jane’s eyes brightened. Then in the next moment all the light went out. “But it would only be pretend.”
“Of course it would only be pretend. But won’t we have fun with it all the same?”
Tom Katz took Jane to the sofa and undressed her and made carnal love to her. And all the while, he did not look at her. But she looked at him and imagined in those moments all the things she had imagined in all the hundreds, the thousands of moments of longing for an intimacy that had been denied to her.