The answer was in all those places, but not in her face. So what was the sense of his looking for it in her face? Faces are masks, anyway.
He tried his luck again. “This is the first time I was ever up here.”
She didn’t bring her eyes back from the pelting silver gleams streaking down the walls. “We’ve missed you.”
“I guess you get tired of dancing. I guess by the end of the evening, like this, it starts in to get you.” He was trying to find an excuse for her surliness, so that his self-esteem could tell itself it wasn’t on account of him, was for some other reason. She knew; she knew how they were.
This time she brought her eyes back to him, witheringly. “Oh no. I never get tired of it. I don’t get half enough. Why when I go back to my room after I leave here at nights I practise splits and high kicks.”
He dropped his own eyes momentarily, as the barb made itself felt, then raised them to hers again. “You’re kind of sore about something, aren’t you.” He didn’t ask it as a question but stated it as a discovery.
“Yeah. Me.”
He wouldn’t give up. Couldn’t he take a hint, even when it was driven home with a sledge-hammer? “Don’t like it here?”
That was the crowning irritant of the whole series of inept remarks he’d been awkwardly tendering her as conversational fodder. She could feel her chest beginning to constrict with infuriation. An explosive denunciation would have surely followed. Fortunately, the necessity of answering was removed. The spattering and jangling of tin buckets that had been going on ended on a badly-fractured note, the mirror-gleams faded off the walls, and the center lights went up. A trumpet executed a Bronx cheer of dismissal.
Their enforced intimacy was at an end. His ten cents had spent its course.
She dropped her hand from the turn of his arm, inertly, as though it were something that had died long ago; and in doing so managed unobtrusively but definitely to push his own arm off her waist.
A sigh of unutterable relief escaped from her, that she made no effort to quell. “Good night,” she murmured tonelessly, “we’re closing up now.” She turned to leave him and walk away.
Before she had quite time to complete the act, the look of surprise she saw on his face held her there a moment longer, her back half to him. More than that even, it was the way he was fumbling in his various pockets, bringing out coils and spirals of linked tickets from each, until he had a massed overflowing double-handful.
He looked down at them. “Gee, I guess I didn’t need to buy all these,” he murmured ruefully, but more to himself than to her.
“What did you expect to do, camp in here all week? How many did you get, anyway?”
“I don’t remember. I think about ten dollars’ worth.” He looked up at her. “I just wanted to get in here, and I didn’t stop to—” he began. Then he stopped again.
She’d caught that, however. “You just wanted to get in here?” she said on a rising inflection. “That’s a hundred dances! We never play that many in a night.” She glanced over toward the foyer. “And I don’t know what you can do about it, either. The cashier’s gone home for the night and you won’t be able to get a refund now any more.”
He was still holding them, but helplessly rather than with any air of acute loss. “I don’t want a refund.”
“Then you’ll have to come back again tomorrow night and keep coming till you’ve used them all up. They’ll be just as good then.”
“I don’t think I’ll — be able to,” he said quietly. Suddenly he’d edged them slightly toward her. “Here. Want them? You can have them. You get a cut on the ones you turn back, don’t you?”
For a moment her hands strayed uncontrollably toward the mass; then she quickly checked them, drew them in again, looked up at him. “No,” she said defiantly. “I don’t get it, but no thanks.”
“But they’re not any good to me. I’ll never be back here again. You may as well take them.”
It was a lot of commission. A lot of easy commission, too. But she’d made a rule for herself long ago, out of bitter experience. Never give in anywhere, about anything, even if you couldn’t see what they were driving at. If you gave in about one thing, no matter what it was, you’d find yourself giving in about the next, somewhere else along the line, that much easier.
“No,” she said firmly. “Maybe I’m a chump, but I don’t want any commissions I haven’t danced for. Not from you or anybody else.” And this time she completed the act of leaving him, turned on her heel and walked across the barren floor, upon which they were almost the last two to have remained standing.
She glanced back toward where she’d left him just once, from the dressing-room door on the other side of the ballroom. It was more of a posture-reflex that went with the act of widening the door to enter, than an intentional deliberate look back to him.
She could see his hands going in a sort of compressing motion, kneading the mass of tickets more compactly together. Then right while she looked, he flung the lumpy ball indifferently away from him, offside toward the edge of the parquet, and turned and went strolling forward toward the foyer entryway.
He’d danced about six times with her, all told. He’d just thrown away well over nine dollars’ worth of tickets. And it was no pose or act to impress her; she could tell he hadn’t been aware of her scrutiny at the moment it occurred.
Pretty easy with his money, as though he didn’t know what to do with it, couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Meaning — if anything-that he wasn’t used to having it. Because, she was shrewd enough to have learned by now, those who have had money for any length of time are never at a loss as to what to do with it.
She gave a shrug with one shoulder, went in and closed the door behind her.
She called this next step, the departure from the premises, running the gauntlet, but it no longer held any real terrors for her. It was like stepping over a puddle of dirty water that lies in your path; inconvenient, but in a moment you’re on the other side of it and it’s done with.
The lights had gone down again, this time for good, when she came out. Just one in back, so the scrubwomen could see to work by. She said to someone, invisible behind her as she reclosed the dressing-room door, “Well, then don’t ask me to go out on double dates with you any more, and you won’t get turned down!” She made her way down one side of the gloomy, barren, cavernous place, her footfalls muffled by the strip of carpeting that ran along it, except in one place where she cut a corner and they echoed out in hollow woodenness for a moment.
The pattern of the darkness had reversed itself. It was lighter now outside the open windows than in here in the interior of the dance-hall. She passed the two at the end, and her friend, her ally and accomplice, was up there limned against the sky. Her head turned slightly toward it as she moved rapidly by, until the casement cut them off from one another again with her passage. If any message or look of gratitude passed fleetingly between them at the moment, that was between her and it.
She parted the swing doors and stepped out into the still-lighted foyer running to the head of the stairs, with its alcoves for the ticket-seller and cloakroom-attendant and its two decrepit rattan settees.
There were two of them out there. There was always somebody. They always hung around. If you waited until daybreak to emerge, there would still have been one or two of them hanging around. One, a leg draped from the edge of the settee, must have been waiting for someone who was still in there; he gave her only nominal attention. The other, standing out at the very head of the steps themselves, was, she saw as she passed him, the very one who had just been with her for the past half-dozen dances or so.