The last thing he said to her when she left him at the subway entrance was that he would go change his uniform and come back. He even kissed her. Rather distantly, she thought even at the time, but a kiss was a kiss. Once she reached the library, mere had been time to consider what she had done: She had allowed one of the patrons to buy her a drink, following which she had taken him directly to bed.
Her worrying started when she began to imagine how she was going to be able to look him in the eye when he came back from Brooklyn. But after he hadn't returned by eleven (when she thought she would take him into the staff lounge, which you could do for a "friend," and give him a cup of coffee and maybe a Danish), she began to worry, to give her imagination free rein.
By noon, one theory of the several that had occurred to her seemed to stand the test of critical examination. The point of this one was that he was not entirely a sonofabitch. He had at least been decent enough to tell her he was married. And she was now convinced that he was indeed a Marine officer.
Yet he had been very vague about what exactly he did as a Marine officer, and where he did it. And in fact, now that she had time to think about it, it no longer seemed entirely credible that he was in New York on leave simply because his family was gone and he had no place else to go, and New York seemed as good a place as any to take a holiday.
If he was so bored with his leave, why was he on leave?
And viewed with the cold and dispassionate attitude that she believed she had reached by one o'clock-when it was apparent that he was not going to come-his melodramatic story of the White Russian wife left on the pier in Shanghai clearly served two purposes. First, it told her he was married, so don't get any ideas. And second, it clearly infected the heart of the librarian with terminal nymphomania and inspired her to perform sexual feats right out of the Kama Sutra. He had probably enormously embellished the original tale as soon as he had realized how much of it she was so gullibly willing to swallow.
Over lunch (preceding which she had a Manhattan to steady her nerves and keep her from throwing the ashtray across the room), she remembered what her father told her when she told him she was going to divorce Charley: "Everybody, sooner or later, stubs their toe. When that happens, the thing to do is swallow hard and go on to what happens next."
And so, by the time she walked back in the library, Carolyn was at peace with herself. She accepted the situation for what it was, and she was already beginning to see small shafts of sunlight breaking through the black cloud. All she had done was make a fool of herself, and thank God, no one knew about it. Except, of course, Henry the Doorman; and he was just the doorman. In her state of temporary insanity, she could have introduced Banning to her colleagues in the library. With her state of rut in high gear, it would have been clear to any of her colleagues that she had more of an interest in Major Ed Banning than as a fellow lover of books.
And being absolutely brutally honest about it, she hadn't come out of the encounter entirely empty-handed. Obviously, she had wanted to be taken to bed, and Ed had certainly done that with great skill and finesse. She would not need such servicing again any time soon.
Now she would simply put Major Ed Banning out of her mind.
And then, there he was, in the Central Reading Room. He was sitting at a table close to the counter. He quickly rose up, with a worried look on his face, when he saw her approach him.
"Hello," he said.
"Hello," Carolyn said.
"I thought you would be interested to know that you don't work here," he said.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I called up and asked to speak to you-"
"You did?"
He's obviously lying. After some thought, he has decided to come back for another drink at the well.
"And a woman said there was no one here by that name," Ed Banning said.
"Oh, really?"
"So I called back, thinking I would get somebody else, and I got the same woman, and she said, in righteous indignation, 'I told you there is no Mrs. Powell on the staff.'"
My God, he doesn't even know my name!
"It's Howell," Carolyn said. "With an 'H.'"
"Well, that explains that, doesn't it?" Ed Banning said. And then he looked at her and blurted, "I was afraid that maybe you had told her to say that, that you just wished I would go away."
"No," Carolyn said, very simply.
"I got my orders," Ed said. "That's why I was delayed. That's what I was trying to tell you on the telephone."
"Where are you going?" she asked.
"The West Coast," he said.
"When are you going?"
"Two April," Ed said. "That's a week from today."
"Oh," she said.
"Are you free for dinner?" Ed asked.
"Dinner?"
"I don't want to intrude in your life, Carolyn," Ed Banning said. "But I had hoped that we could spend some time together."
"Oh," she said.
"Dinner?" he asked again, and when there was no immediate reply, "Maybe tomorrow night?"
My God, he's afraid I'll say no.
"What are your plans for this afternoon?" Carolyn asked.
"I have to go to Brooks Brothers," Banning replied.
"Brooks Brothers?" She wasn't sure she had heard correctly.
"When I replaced my uniforms, I didn't buy as much for the tropics as I should have," he said.
"Meaning you're headed for the tropics… the Pacific?"
"Meaning that I realized this morning that I don't have enough uniforms," he said.
Is that the truth? Or does he know he's on his way to the Pacific and doesn't want to tell me?
"That's all you have planned?" Carolyn asked.
"That's it."
"For this afternoon, or for the rest of the week?"
"For the week," Ed Banning said.
"I thought maybe you'd be going home or something," she said.
"I thought I told you," he said. "Like a lot of Marines, the Corps's home."
Carolyn looked into his eyes.
"Wait for me in the lobby," she said. "It'll take me about five minutes to tell my boss I'm going, and to get my coat."
When she went outside, he was at the bottom of the stairs, standing by one of the concrete lions that seem to be studying the traffic on Fifth Avenue passing the library. It was snowing, and there was snow on the shoulders of his overcoat and on his hat.
She went quickly down the stairs and put her hand under his arm, and then she absolutely shocked herself by blurting, "Hi, sailor, looking for a good time?"
He touched her gloved hand for a moment and smiled at her.
"Have any trouble getting the afternoon off?" he asked.
"I told my boss I was just struck with some kind of flu," Carolyn said, "that'll keep me from work for a week."
"Can you get away with it?" he asked.
"Sure," she said. "Now, aside from Brooks Brothers, what would you like to do?"
His eyebrows rose. She nudged him with her shoulder.
"Aside from that, I mean," she said.
He shrugged.
"Is there some reason you have to stay in the city?" Carolyn asked, as they started to walk across Fifth Avenue to Forty-first Street.
"No," he said. "The only thing I have to do is get on the Twentieth-Century Limited on two April at seven fifty-five in the evening. Why do you ask?"
"How do you feel about snow?" she asked.
"I hate it," he cheerfully admitted.
"How about snow outside?" Carolyn pursued. "On fields. Unmarked, except maybe by deer tracks?"
"Better," he said.
"With a fireplace inside? Glowing embers?"
"A loaf of bread, a glowing ember, and thou?"
"Beside you in the wilderness," Carolyn said. "I have a place in Bucks County. Overlooking the Delaware. An old fieldstone canal house."
"And you want to go there?"
"I want to go there with you," she said.
"Christ, and I was afraid you were trying to get rid of me," Banning said.
Carolyn squeezed his arm. She didn't trust her voice to speak.