I knocked at Alma’s door. There was no answer. I opened the door cautiously and saw that the room was empty. I went in. The bed had not been slept in. It looked as if our Alma had had a night on the tiles. I couldn’t blame her. Not in her frame of mind. I remembered she had been carrying a red coat in my hotel room. I looked in her closet. No red coat. So the odds were she hadn’t come back to her room last night. There was a picture on her maple dressing table. A tinted photograph of a young man in swim trunks. He looked stiffly into the camera, unsmiling, his arms held awkwardly so the muscles would bulge.
I went downstairs and gave the fat woman a reassuring smile. “I guess she just didn’t come in at all last night.”
“Oh, she came in, all right.”
“You saw her?”
“No, but my room is off the kitchen, right under hers, and I heard her moving around, quiet like. It woke me up. I sleep light, and my clock has hands you can see in the dark. It was after three.”
“I guess she came in and went out again, because the bed isn’t slept in.”
“You know, I remember thinking in the night it was good for her to be going out with a gentleman friend again. She used to keep real late hours, and come dragging in at dawn and sleep a little and go off to work bright as a dollar. I guess you can do that when you’re young as she is. She was cheerful then, like I said, but since she’s been spending the evenings in her room, she’s been broody. No pleasant word for anybody, and she was one of my nicest girls. They don’t go much for the late dates except on week ends, because some of them are studying a lot on their graduate work over to the college.”
“Would it be too much trouble to check with your other girls and see if any of them saw her last night or this morning, Mrs.—”
“Colsinger. Martha Colsinger, Mr. Dean. Where should I phone you if I find out anything, or will you come back?”
“You can phone me at the Gardland. If I’m not in, please leave your name and I’ll phone you back. I hope it isn’t too much trouble.”
“No, because I’d check anyway. I got a kind of uneasy feeling about all this. You don’t think anything could have happened to her, do you?”
“I don’t think so. I certainly hope not.”
I thanked her and left. I told myself I was primarily interested in seeing Niki because I wanted to see what her reaction would be to my decision to back Walter Granby. Of course, it wasn’t a final decision. It was a bluff. I had until the Monday meeting to make my actual decision.
But as I drove, a little too fast, toward the Lime Ridge house, I had enough fragmented decency to be conditionally honest with myself. I wanted to look at her. I wanted to see her because our sunlit orgy had become unreal and implausible. It was an episode I knew I should try to forget, yet, perversely, I wanted some confirmation from her that it had actually happened.
A time of sleep, even when it is as dream-torn as mine had been, erects a curious barrier. The memory of that particular kind of frenzy becomes very like the memory of having been very drunk. It is difficult to credit yourself with the remembered things done and said. You say, “That could not have been me! I am not like that! There is some mistake. There is some significant thing I have forgotten which makes all the rest of it excusable.”
Low, misty clouds were moving quickly, sometimes touching the tops of the rolling hills. The air was humid with spring, and warming rapidly.
Victoria greeted me, smiling, and told me to wait in the living-room. I watched her narrowly, alert for any subtle hint that she had learned, somehow, what had happened. Maids can make an entire construction from the smallest carelessness. I wondered if Niki had been properly careful with my stained clothing and with the toilet kit she had provided. Though usually I give less than a damn about what anybody thinks of how I live and what I do, I surprised myself with the extent of my concern for Victoria’s good opinion. She struck me as being, in that only basic and pertinent way, a lady. And she would assess sudden and sweaty copulation between the new widow and the brother of the deceased as a unique vileness. Which it was.
There was no change in her remote, friendly politeness. As she walked away I suddenly knew that if Victoria guessed what had happened after she left, she would no longer be here. She was that sort of a person. So Niki, no matter what other motivations she might have, would be extraordinarily careful for fear of losing an exceptionally good servant.
I waited tensely in the rich silence of the big room. It was a handsome but sterile room. I saw it was a room without sign or stain that life had gone on in it. (This model home is in the hundred-and-fifty-thousand price range. Note the subtle yet effective use of color. The small placards show where each item may be purchased. Please do not touch anything.)
Niki came walking in quickly, brisk and smiling, coming to me to put the quick light kiss at the corner of my mouth, then say with a housewife’s glib affection, “Hello, my darling. I’ve missed you.”
She wore a man’s white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and closely tailored pale blue denim ranch pants. Her hair was latched back with a twist of matching blue yarn. A scab of mud was drying on the right knee of the ranch pants. She carried work gloves and a muddy grubbing tool, shaped like a green steel claw. (And this model represents the lovely mistress of the $150,000 house who loves to work in her garden on warm spring mornings.)
“If you need props, you could wheel a wheelbarrow in.”
She looked at the gloves and garden tool. “I didn’t know I’d brought these in. I can be nervous too, you know. Give me that much credit, Gevan.”
She walked over to place the tool and gloves on the raised hearth. As she did so, the pale crust of mud fell from her knee and broke on the rug. She squatted and carefully picked up every crumb, her back to me. The coarse denim was pulled as tight as her skin. There were no kidney pads of fat, no rope of softness above the stricture of the dark blue belt. There was a long and firm blending of line, from the reversed parentheses outlining the trimness of the waist, down into the reverse curve of the inverted, truncated, Valentine heart of solid buttocks. Even as she sat so effortlessly on her heels, she kept her back so straight, the small of her back was concave. Her figure was strangely deceptive. She was so basically sturdy as to be, in thigh, hip and breast, almost massive. Yet the total impression she gave was of actual slenderness. This was the product of her height, of the long oval of her face — designed for a more fragile woman — of the quick, light way she moved, of her short-waisted, leggy build, and of her lack of any sagging softnesses, any self-indulgent bulgings. She was styled for function, designed with the merciless economy men expend on the weapons with which they kill. There are never many of them in the world at any one time, and fewer who, like Niki, had peaked into such rich and awesome splendor.
Looking at her confirmed every memory of the previous day, and made me willing to partially — very partially — forgive myself. Hers was an earthiness and a primitive readiness that created a response so atavistic, all the intellectualizings and moralizings of a modern man were flung aside, like dust from a spinning disk.
She dropped the crumbs of mud into an ash tray, walked over and sat on the flat wooden arm of a handsome chair and seemed to study me with care. “I really thought you would come back last night. I thought of cute little ways of keeping you from feeling too awkward about coming back so soon.”
“Would they have worked?”
“Probably not. But five minutes after you were here, it wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”
“I almost came back.”