“But you couldn’t. You’ve started much that you can’t stop, Lisa. Is that true?”
“I guess so. I guess I’ve started it. Anyhow, one way or another, it has got started.”
“What do you intend to do now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Will you stay here? With this woman?”
“No. I’ve only stayed this long because she said you wanted me here when you came.”
“Yes. I made that stipulation. Where are you going?”
“I don’t know.”
“Have you any money?”
“A little. I’ve been working. I had a job in a shop, tut I’ve quit.”
“Do you think you could give this up? This kind of life?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“It’s impossible to know. I suppose there is no way to make you understand that, but it’s true.”
“It’s difficult. I admit it. To understand this kind of thing, I mean. But I’ve tried. If you think I was ever able to dismiss you from my mind and forget you entirely, you’re mistaken. I...I’ve been reading about it, books about it, and perhaps I’ve learned a little.”
His confession touched her. She had a picture of him reading at night when he was tired and would have preferred to sleep or do something for pleasure, heavy books that actually only confused and frightened him all the more, the light of the reading lamp showing his scalp through his fine, thin hair. She wanted very badly to approach him and to touch him, but she was afraid he would be offended. Revolted, even. In her fingertips she actually had the sensation of his skin crawling away from her touch.
“Thank you,” she said. “It was kind of you to do that.”
“Not at all. It was not a question of kindness. I have wished more than once that you would die.”
“I have wished it more than once myself.”
“In that case, why haven’t you tried to change?”
“It’s not so simple. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. Perhaps it’s a matter of reaching the time for it. Just the right time. I don’t know why I couldn’t change, any more than I know why I couldn’t die. Dying would have been easier.”
“Tell me. Will you leave with me tonight?”
“If you ask me. You will have to ask me.”
“All right. I ask you to leave with me.”
“Will you take me home?”
“No. If you have any idea of ever going home again, you had better give it up.”
“Do they hate me so much?”
“Hate? I don’t think it’s that. They pretend that you are dead. No. More than that, really. They pretend that you never lived at all.”
“Where will you take me, then?”
“That’s something we’ll talk about. Now you had better get ready to go. Do you have much to pack?”
“Not much that I want to take. Excuse me, please.” She went into the bedroom, and got a bag from the closet and began to put things into it. During the time that she and Carl had talked, Bella had stood smoking her cigarette with obvious indifference, blowing out clouds of smoke and watching each one disperse before she blew out another. From her position, she could see through the door into the bedroom, and now she watched Lisa packing with the same air of indifference, the cigarette acquiring a long ash in her fingers. She paid no attention whatever to Carl, as if he had removed himself from the earth with the payment of the five thousand dollars, which still lay on the floor by the chair, and she said nothing until Lisa returned from the bedroom after a few minutes, wearing a coat and hat and carrying the bag. Then she spoke.
“Go, then,” she said. “Go, God-damn you. I’ll come spit on your grave, when you’re dead.”
Her attitude of indifference had seemed so genuine that the vitriolic fury in her voice was a physical shock. Not to Lisa, who had experienced it before, but to Carl. He felt cold and withered inside, and a little frightened, and immediately ashamed of the fear. Stepping forward, he took the bag from Lisa’s hand and put a hand on her arm. It was the first time he had touched her for years, and it did not disturb him, though the thought of ever touching her again had disturbed him many times.
They went downstairs and outside into the street. She was acutely conscious of his hand on her arm and was exorbitantly grateful for it. The wind in the street was quite strong and very cold. She was grateful for the wind too. It cut through her coat and inner clothing and was like an astringent on her skin. She lifted her face into the wet snow.
“I left the car a block over,” Carl said. “The grade to this street is rather slick, so I didn’t try it.”
They walked to the corner and turned right across the intersection and under the light which had first shown him to her as she looked down from the window. In the car at the foot of the grade, he turned on the heater at once. The air sucked in by the fan was still warm, and she regretted this and wished that he had left the heater off, because the cold acted upon her as a kind of scourge, as the whip is a scourge to the flagellant, lifting her depression a little and easing the burden of her guilt.
“Where are we going?” she said.
“To a hotel. I’ll leave you there for a day or two and come back for you later.”
“What then?”
“I’ve been ill with pneumonia. The doctor has recommended a few weeks in the sun, and I’ve decided to go to Miami. Would you like to come with me?”
“If you want me to.”
“That’s settled, then. You needn’t make any preparations. I’ll take care of reservations, and you can buy clothing there.”
She was overwhelmed by his kindness. She had thought that he would surely never speak to her again, or recognize her in any way, and now he had come out into the cold and snowy night to help her and was offering to take her with him to Miami. Her eyes felt hot and her throat constricted, and she was on the verge of crying, which would have been a good thing, but it had been so long since she had cried that she seemed to have lost the capacity for it.
“Thank you,” she said, and could find nothing to add. Exercising excessive caution on the snow-covered streets, he drove slowly to a small hotel in a quiet section of town, and they went together into the warm, drab lobby where an old man sat facing the window and the night, and another dozed in a chair beside a rubber plant, an evening newspaper unfolded across his lap. Carrying Lisa’s bag, Carl went ahead to the desk and arranged for the room, paying in advance, and then turned and came back to her, and she thought again, seeing his face in the harsh blue light of the lobby, that he looked very ill and tired.
“It’s all arranged,” he said. “Are you sure you have enough money to last you a couple of days?”
“Yes, thank you. I have plenty.”
“Is there anything you need now?”
“I would like some cigarettes.”
“Of course. I still don’t smoke, you know, so I would never have thought of them.”
The way he said it, the way he used the word still, it sounded as if he were deliberately recalling old times, trying to get them reestablished on old terms, and she watched him walk over to the tobacco counter for the cigarettes with her intense and oppressive sense of guilt in conflict with her gratitude. The truth was, she had never liked him much even in the old days, even in the good days before the bad days. She had considered him dull and stuffy, possessed even in adolescence of an abortive maturity, and she wondered why she had never suspected his capacity for kindness, that he would be the one, of all she had known, whose compassion would rise in the end above fear and indignation.
He returned with the cigarettes and handed them to her and, taking her arm again, guided her to the elevator. A bellhop had appeared at last and had assumed control of her bag and was waiting with it in the car. At the door, Carl stopped.