Deep in thought, Amy looked after Beckford, holding the lipstick and tiny mirror in her lap. For several seconds she could see his contours through the frosted glass in the door as he was pushing it closed.
Is this really business? Amy asked herself, finishing her makeup with haste. I guess I’ll find out tonight.
She put the lipstick and mirror in her purse, pushed back her hair, got up, pulled on her gloves, threw her coat over her left arm, and left the office, closing the door carefully, gently humming a melody.
Wearing the same suit as he had worn to the office, Beckford arrived at the rendezvous spot two minutes before eight. At three minutes after eight, Amy appeared.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. Beckford, that you had to wait for me. The bus pulled away as I reached the bottom steps of the stairway.”
“It’s not a big deal,” said Beckford, “we won’t miss the movie.”
He was embarrassed and did not feel like her employer at all. Suddenly, he had lost the conviction that he could easily conquer Amy. Seeing her, he felt as if he were on the dance floor standing across from a row of pretty girls, like a youth who had lost the courage to ask even one to dance.
The Amy who was waiting for him was not his secretary. He hardly recognized her. Had she not addressed him and had she continued past him, he would have kept waiting for Amy. She was not dressed to kill, which he had expected. Amy was elegant in a quiet unassuming manner meant to impress both men and women but not to call attention to herself. In terms of dress and stance, she was not much different from Aslan now. At her side, Beckford felt not only homespun but rather shabby. He could have slapped himself for not having worn his best suit. He had not even shaved again. The only thing he had done was to have his shoes polished.
Now I understand, he said to himself, how it’s possible that just eighteen weeks after selling men’s cotton socks, a salesgirl at Macy’s or Gimbels can strut around on the silver screen as a princess or duchess, as if she had been born with a silver spoon in her mouth.
Amy took his arm and they set off toward Thirty-Fourth Street.
“Okay,” he said. “You win, Miss Amy.”
Suddenly he did not dare use her first name without the prefix.
“Yes, as I said, you win. First: Your Past—the Despair of Your Present—is that the correct title?”
“That’s correct.”
“And then dinner.”
“And then dinner,” she repeated.
He happened to glance at a big, brightly illuminated clock in the middle of a towering advertisement for nail-buffing cream.
“We have thirty minutes till the movie,” he said. “What about a cup of coffee?”
“Wonderful,” she agreed, “we might get thirsty, since the movie is at least an hour and forty-five minutes.”
In the café, as he was stirring in the sugar, he said without looking up, as if nothing in the world interested him more than his coffee: “Your Past—the Despair of Your Present. So, you think it will be a sexy film?”
“I’m sure. Two of my girlfriends who saw it told me that there were a couple of times during the film when just couldn’t contain themselves.”
Silently Beckford thought: Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to see this film with her, even if it’s terrible. Provocative. That’s exactly what she needs tonight.
This thought gave him back his aggressiveness from that afternoon. He felt his embarrassment waning slowly. In any case, I’m the boss, he assured himself, and as her boss I don’t need to let her intimidate me. I’m the one who’s meant to intimidate her. She lives off of me. I pay her salary. Then he realized that he also depended on Aslan’s money.
I don’t actually care where the money is coming from. I must be worth the money and the office to her, or else she wouldn’t spend it so easily on me. Therefore, I earn it honestly. I didn’t ask her to furnish an office for me and to leave such a large sum of cash in the safe. And I still don’t have a clue what she really wants from me. It’s possible that this new company in which I am apparently to play an important role is designed to be a gigantic haul in which five hundred idiotic honest men get robbed blind and left outside of the fence. And then I as the general manager will be saddled with the blame for the entire fraud. Then I’ll sit comfortably in prison for five years, and when I get out—
Suddenly he realized that Amy was looking critically at his face. “What are you thinking about, Mr. Beckford? Business worries? These days we all have worries, even if we don’t own a business and have to live off a salary instead. Forget your worries for a few hours.” She glanced at her watch. “It seems that it’s just about time to get to the theater.”
“You guessed right, Miss Amy. I do indeed have grave, very grave worries, fears, and sorrows. All right, let’s get to it. Maybe the past of a woman who is completely unknown to me will distract me from my own present.”
Amy laughed. “How cleverly you transfer the title of the movie to your personal circumstances!”
“If only you knew, dear Miss Amy, how I—”
He meant to say how I suffer, to spark and possibly keep her interest. He expected that such feelings would help overcome the resistance she was sure to put up against him. But he failed. She didn’t ask about what he had wanted her to know. For a few seconds he considered whether he should just leave, pretending that he did not feel well. However, his curiosity about how the evening would end outweighed his desire to get rid of her immediately.
Now they were sitting in the movie theater. Nestled into soft, deep armchairs. Surrounded by darkness. In front of them was the innocent screen, which a group of experienced and trained engineers had used to create an illusion. In a businesslike and coldhearted manner, they were attempting to uncover the background and internal discord of an utterly shattered human life. They uncovered it so brutally and nakedly that even a mentally disabled street sweeper would be forced to understand that life happened like this and in no other fashion.
The armchairs were incredibly comfortable. It felt good to sit there and watch those on-screen struggle fiercely.
But these comfortable armchairs had one disadvantage. Apparently, they had been created for people who had been married for more than forty years and who only remembered every three months that smoldering-hot love had gotten them into marriage in the first place.
Beckford had imagined everything beautifully. He had allowed Amy to convince him to go to the movies only because of the seats. The seats alone had convinced him. Usually seats in the movie theater allowed you to lightly touch your female neighbor’s knee to interest her in more after holding hands had lost its initial appeal. If she returned the pressure of the knee, at first only very gently and then as if by coincidence, you increased your own pressure. If the female knee did not retreat in a pout, then that was already proof of her thoroughly weakened resistance.
But clearly these chairs had been designed and enforced by some kind of anti-vice committee, who did not tolerate any kind of fun. They had designed these chairs so cleverly that it was difficult, if not impossible for Beckford to use his usual art of seduction. For that simple reason, the movie lost all appeal that it might have originally had for him. It was not even possible to whisper something into Amy’s ear. The distance was too far due to the ridiculously wide armrests.
No wonder Beckford was in a bad mood. Even the provocative scenes left him cold. Since Beckford had no interest in these steamy scenes, he observed Amy at his side and realized that she kept shifting in her seat. He remembered that she had told him that her girlfriends also had not been able to sit still during certain scenes of the movie.
It was not the movie that excited him but Amy’s continuous movements. Finally, earsplitting brass music announced the end with deafening noise.