I told her so. Or started to. “Are you drunk?” she asked.
No, I said. “I haven’t even had a drink. God, how I’ve missed you. I can’t keep my hands off you.”
She smiled. “You must have been working long hours. No girls at all?”
“Look,” I said. “I’m not getting through to you. It’s not girls. It’s you—”
“Jerry, you’re talking gibberish,” she said. “And could we sit down?”
I’m sorry,” I said. I led her to the sofa, and sat down beside her. I took her in my arms again. She tried to fend me off, shaking her head protestingly. “I think I must be getting too old to cope with the under-thirty type of wolf.”
“Listen, Marian,” I said. “Damn it, will you listen to me?” I removed the hat and dropped it on the coffee table, and put my hand against her cheek, turning her face and looking at the smooth dark line of her hair and the incredible blue eyes. I was overcome again with that crazy yearning to imprison and possess every last bit of her. I kissed her again, and it was the wildest and most wonderful thing I’d ever known.
She stirred. “Jerry, what on earth is the matter with you?”
“I love you,” I said. “I should think that would be obvious to a fourteen-year-old girl—”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” She tried to pull back. I held her more tightly. “Jerry,” she protested, “this is hardly the time—”
“Will you, for the love of God, listen to me a minute?” I said. “And try not to kick my teeth out, for once? I’m in love with you. I’m absolutely crazy about you. God knows I missed you while you were gone, but I didn’t realize until I saw you coming up that walk just how much you did mean to me—“
She tried to break in.
“Don’t interrupt,” I said. “I’m going to get through to you some way, if it takes the rest of the night. I’ve tried to tell you before how wonderful I think you are, but you seem to think it’s just some sort of conditioned reflex because I noticed you weren’t wearing a beard. There must be some way I can make you understand. Listen. You’re what I came back for, when I ran off to New York. I know that now. All I want out of this business is you, and I don’t want to spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder for the police—”
She stiffened in my arms. “What are you saying?”
“That we’re going to call this thing off. It’s too dangerous. And it’s crazy. I want you, and I don’t want to be running and hiding all the time like an animal. I realize I’m not one of the solider types of prospect for the vine-covered mortgage and the lawn mower, but I can hold a job when I want to. I want to marry you—”
She broke free and pushed away from me. She laughed, but the sound of it was more like that of a bad skiing accident. “You want us to go steady, is that it? Oh, my God. I wonder how I’d look in crinoline petticoats and bobby socks. Or maybe you could just introduce me as your mother—“
I grabbed her arm and shook her. “Marian! Stop it! For Christ’s sake, I never heard of anybody who could make such a Federal case out of being thirty-four years old. You don’t look twenty-eight.”
Her face was distorted with contempt or bitterness; I wasn’t sure which. “You fool! Don’t you even know yet? Didn’t you hear me say I’d already graduated from college when we got into the war? I’m referring to the Second World War. Or didn’t you study that one in school? Do you have any idea how long ago that was? I’m not thirty-four. I’m thirty-eight years old.”
She began, to laugh again. I caught her, but she turned her face away and went on laughing. “I had one last little shred of dignity left, and you want me to throw that away and start cradle-robbing—”
I caught the turning and twisting face between my hands and held it still so she had to look at me. “I don’t give a damn if you’re thirty-eight,” I said savagely. “Or fifty-eight, or ninety-eight. All I know is what I see and feel. You’re the loveliest woman, probably, that I’ve ever known, and the smoothest, and there’s a grace about you that makes me catch my breath when I look at you. I think you begin being feminine where all other women leave off. When you go out of a room, you leave it empty and when you come back you re-decorate it—”
“Will you stop it?” she lashed at me. “Even if I were capable of ever loving anybody again, do you think I’d marry a man ten years younger than I am, and as attractive as you are, and cringe every time people looked at us and wondered what I’d used to buy you with? I’ll assure you, laddie boy, I don’t look twenty-eight to women. And I can’t compete in that division any more. I’ve just had that demonstrated to me, quite publicly and convincingly.”
“Forget that meat-headed Chapman for a minute,” I said, “if he’s too stupid to know what he had, that’s his hard luck, and he’ll find it out soon enough—”
“Precisely. In about four hours.”
“No! Dammit, no! It’s dangerous, and I don’t want you to do it. Chapman hasn’t got anything you need, or even want—”
She broke in coldly. “I beg to differ with you. He has something I want, and intend to have—a lot of money I helped him make for both of us. That’s the only thing left now. I suppose it’s utterly impossible for you to understand, being a man and a very young one, but I’m through. Finished. I’m all over. I’m something that’s already happened. If I started now and worked at it night and day, by the time I could feel like a woman again, I won’t even be one. Not an operating model, anyway, or one that anybody but the utterly desperate would have. I poured the last six years of my life into an aging adolescent, and all I’ve got left to show for it is humiliation. There are probably women more philosophical than I am who could adjust to that and absorb it and come out of it healthy again. But I can’t. Maybe it’s unfortunate but I don’t even intend to try. I have nothing more to lose, and I’m not going to stand in the wreckage of my own life like some placid and uncomprehending cow and see them get away with it.”
I’m not going to let you do it—”
“Don’t be an idiot!” she said furiously. “There’s no risk at all. And doesn’t the money mean anything to you?”
“Yes. It does. It means plenty. But I’ve just discovered you mean more. And if that sounds like something out of a shampoo ad, I’m sorry, but there it is.”
“And this is Jerome Langston Forbes?” she asked pityingly.
I sighed. “All right, rub it in. This is Jerry Forbes, the angle boy. The guy who discovered before he was twenty that this place is just a nut-hatch for the rest of the universe. And maybe when you stop to think about it, it still is. After all these years I finally go overboard completely for a girl, and I have to pick the one who’s decided to throw away her union card in the female sex.” I lit a cigarette, and stood up.
“Then you won’t help me?” she asked.
“No,” I said. I went in and sat down on the bed. I felt like hell. I stretched out, with the ashtray on my chest, and looked up at the ceiling. There didn’t seem to be any answer.
I was still lying there ten minutes later when I heard her come into the room. She lay down across the bed with her face very near mine. “I’m sorry, Jerry,” she said. “I guess I didn’t really grasp what you were saying. When you have nothing left inside but bitterness, a lot of things don’t come through very well.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
Her eyes looked into mine from a distance of a few inches. “What if I would go away with you afterwards?”
“You would?”
“Yes. God knows why you’d want me, but if you still do, I’ll go.”