"Right, it is better!" I exclaimed. I had no more patience. "For ten cents they'll bunk me in a flophouse, no questions asked. You needn't expect me back tonight."
"That's right, advertise to the entire house '@.@?
"It's just like you to worry about the house. Damn the house. It's more shameful to act this way than that the house should know. I don't give a bloody damn about the house!"
"Joseph!" she said.
I shut the door with a crash, already aware, under my anger, that this was beneath me and altogether out of proportion to the provocation. I pulled my hat down against the rain. Our windows, with their glowing shades, set two orange rectangles, trade-marks of warmth and comfort, against the downpour and the dark, the glitter of the trees, the armor of ice on the street. The intense cold of the past week had lifted. Fog had succeeded it, rising in spongy gray blooms from the soaked walks, hovering in the yards and over the hollows blinking with rain and changes of color from the muffled signal lights-comgreen, amber, red, amber, green, shuttering down the street. Mr.
Vanaker's window went up. He threw a bottle, using the neck as a hilt. It landed softly into the clay, beside the others; there were dozens of bottles among the bushes, their high shoulders streaming as though drops of mercury were falling on them from the withes. The window was run down hastily.
My shoes, their once neat points scuffed and turned up, squashed, as I walked, through half-a-dozen leaks. I moved toward the corner, inhaling the odors of wet clothes and of wet coal, wet paper, wet earth, drifting with the puffs of fog. Low, far out, a horn ttered a dull cry, subsided; again.
The street lamp bent over the curb like a woman who cannot turn homeward until she has found the ring or the coin she dropped in the ice and gutter silt.
I heard behind me the clicking of a feminine stride and, for a moment, thought that Ira had come after me, but it was a stranger who passed at the awning of the corner store, her face made bleary by the woolly light and the shadowy fur-piece at her throat. The awning heaved; twists of water ran through its rents. Once more the horn bawled over the water, warning the lake tugs from the headlands. It was not hard to imagine that there was no city here at all, and not even a lake but, instead, a swamp and that despairing bawl crossing it; wasting trees instead of dwellings, and runners zf vine instead of telephone wires. The bell of an approaching streetcar drove this vision off. I hailed it and, paying my fare, remained on the platform. It was not far to Kitty's. If my shoes had been watertight, I would have walked.
My purpose was not to retrieve the book-though, of course, I might as well ask her to return it while I was there-but to see Kitty.
I don't recall how she came to ask me for the book, nor how it was that I volunteered to give it to her. She would not have heard of it, and I cannot conceive in what connectionI mentioned it. Here was one more conflux I could not trace or interpret. Kitty-but I do not ay this in dispraise-is not an intelligent or even clever girl. She is simpleWarm, uncomplicated, and matter-of-fact. Two years ago I had mapped out a Caribbean tour for her, and she had come in later to tell me what a good time she had had and to ask me to appraise some of the things she had bought. For that purpose I went to her apartment.
She accepted my verdict of her tourist stuff so casddually and treated me with such marked friendliness that I began to thnkqnot without a touch of pleased excitementqthat she was less interested in the appraisal than in me. At the first opportunity, I mentioned Iva, but Jt was apparent from her reaction or lack of reaction that she had taken my being married for granted. For her, she said, marriage as such did not exist. There were only people. Then began a conversation on marriage and love which I don't care to remember in detail. I made it abundantly plain that while I would talk of such matters I would not venture beyond talk. I was, however, flattered that such a handsomewoman should be drawn to me. She was saying that some of the others on the cruise had made themselves absurdwith the guides and beach boys. She could not stand that kind of looseness, and the pretty, characterless romanticLatin faces filled her with aversion.
They were such vapid-looking men.
As I was leaving, her friendly hand somehow finished a gesture on my shoulder. She hoped I would come again for a talk. Next time I should do the talking. She was also a good listener.
I did not see her again for a month. Then one day she walked up to me at Inter-American and, without preliminariesAsked why l had not visited her.
I answered that we had been busy.
"But you can break away one evening, can't you?"
"I can, certainly, if I want to."
"Why not come Thursday, then? We can have supper together."
Iva and I had not been getting along well. I don't think the fault was entirely hers. I had dominated her for years; she was now capable of rebelling (as, for example, at the Servatius party). I did not at first understand the characterof her rebellion. Was it possible that she should not want to be guided, formed by me? I expected some opposition. no one, I would have said then, no one came simply and of his own accord, effortlessly, to prize the most truly human traditions, the heavenly cities. You had to be taught to struggle your way toward them. Inclination was not enough. Before you could set your screws revolving, you had to be towed out of the shallows. But it was now evident that Iva did not want to be towed. Those dreams inspired by Burckhardt's great ladies of the Renaissance and the no less profound Augustan women were in my head, not hers. Eventually I learned that Iva could not live in my infatuations. There are such things as clothes, appearances, furniture, light entertainment, mystery stories, the attractions of fashion magazines, the radio, the enjoyable evening.
What could one say to them? Women-thus I reasoned-were not equipped by trainingto resist such things. You might force them to read Jacob Boehme for ten years without diminishing their appetite for them; you might teach them to admire Walden but never convert them to wearing old clothes. Iva was formed at fifteen, when I met her, with likes and dislikes of her own which (because, for some strange reason, I opposed them) she set aside until the time when she could defend or simply assert them. Hence our difficulty. There were nervous quarrels. She, in brave, shaky, new defiance, started to enjoy her independence. I let her alone, pretendingindifference.
Now I began to visit Kitty Daumler frequently. She lived in a rooming house similar to the one where Iva and I had stayed the first two years of our marriage, befwe could afford a flat. I partly blamed the flat for the change in Iva and so took some pleasureddin Kitty's rooms. Her furniture was soiled, the wallpaper next to the mirror was smeared with lipstick, clothes were flung about, the bed was always unmade, and she was careless about herself, trying to rule her hair with a single comb, pulling it back constantly from her solid face with its large brows and large mouth. An affectionate, worldly, impudentGenerous face.
We talked about all kinds of ordinary things.
My friends were leaving the city, one by one. I found no comfort in them anyway. I would not have held these conversations with anyone but Kitty. But I had learued to discern the real Kitty, the lively, plump, high-colored, scented, gross girl, behind the talk. I liked her. Beyond talk, however, Kitty and I did not go. She freely admitted that she "liked being with men" if they were the kind that interested her. I did interest her. We were amiable toward each other and were continually smiling. And the burden of the amiability and the smiles, as we both understood, was twofold: the intention and its check; the smiles checked us. I continued to smile.
Until, one wet and prematurely cold evening in early fall, I came in to find her in bed, drinking rum and tea. She had been caught in the rain and chilled. I sat by the bedside, holding a cup of whisky that was daubed along the rim with lipstick (her mark: towels, pddillowcases, spoons, napkins, forks, all bore it). The room, in its usual statc the bronze-leafed lamp, the tissue paper of shoe boxes, the doll with the telephone concealed in its petti. coat, the framed Venetian scene the drying slip hung from an elbow of the steampipc was no longer, for some reason, the usual comfortable anchorage. I was not smiling. i had not smiled since entering. She sipped her drink, her head raised between the cleft of the raised pillows; her chin, when she lowered the cup, nestled above the other deft, the world's most beautiful illustration of numberTender division of the flesh beginning high above the lace line of her nightgown.