“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why are you laughing?”
“Forgive me. I was laughing because I’m a coward and have been relieved of the necessity of acting with courage.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. I would still like very much for you to marry me.”
“In spite of the way I am?”
“It doesn’t matter. The way you are and the way I am are things that may change or may not change, but in the meanwhile we will go to Mexico City and back to Corinth, and eventually we will find out.”
She could not look at him any longer. She folded her hands on the edge of the table and looked down at the hands and listened to the sound within her of the dry weeping.
“You are very kind,” she said.
Which was an echo of the oracle, he thought.
Women like kind men, the oracle had said. In the end, she had said, it is more important than anything else.
He wondered if it was true.
Section 5
The night was alive, and all things in it. He lay in the center of the living night and was the focus of the living things. They crouched and waited and watched in darkness, and he rose and fell in silky, sickening motion on the breast of the breathing bed, and nothing happened, nothing at all.
Getting up, he moved among the living things and lit a cigarette and opened the blind at the window and admitted the slanting light of the circling moon. His body was wet, and the wetness evaporated in the air, and he was cold. Turning, he saw the other body, the white body in the white light, and it was perfectly still and from appearances might have been dead.
“It’s all right,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s not all right,” she answered. “It never will be.”
“Eventually it will. It is something we can learn.”
“You don’t know. It’s not the way you think it is.”
“I know that we must be patient with each other.”
“Do you really think it is so simple? I shouldn’t have married you. It was a dirty trick that you didn’t deserve.”
“No. You told the truth. As you now know, that is more than I did.”
“You think I told you the truth? Oh, well, it is too late to worry about that. It is too late for anything.”
“You’re just feeling depressed. Futility is always depressing, but you will feel better tomorrow. Can I get you something? A cigarette? A drink?”
“No, thank you. Nothing.”
He left the window and lay down beside her on the bed. The living things had quit living and watching and waiting and had become the dead fittings of the room. Outside, the moon moved on.
Chapter IV
Section 1
Emerson usually handled the bar himself until Roscoe came in around eleven. Mornings were slack, and it was hardly worth hiring someone to do the job, and besides, Emerson liked to do a share of work around the place. It kept his hand in and gave him a good, solid feeling of personal intimacy with the things he had created and developed and loved. He was polishing glasses and looking through them against the light for smears when the postman came in.
“Well,” he said. “The good man in gray.”
The postman put his leather pouch on one stool and sat down on another. His name was Marvin Groggins, and he hated all people who wrote letters and was very proud of his casual rapport with all the business men on his downtown route, no matter how God-damn important they were, or thought they were.
“Crap,” he said.
Emerson grinned. “What do you mean, crap? You better watch out, Marv, or you’ll be getting investigated for subversive talk or something. You got to show proper respect for public servants, even if you happen to be one of them yourself.”
“Oh, sure. Public servant. You know what I am? I’m a God-damn errand boy for a lot of fatheads, that’s what I am. You see that bag? Look at it. Just look at the God-damn thing. Bulging. Running over. And you know something? I could take at least half of that stuff and throw it down the nearest storm sewer, and no one would be a damn bit the worse off for it, and the truth is, they’d probably be a hell of a lot better off.”
“Except you, Marv. You’d be worse off. You’d be in the pokey, as a matter of fact.”
“I know. Durance vile. Just for throwing away a bundle of lousy trash. I’m not so sure I’d be worse off, at that. You got to put up with a hell of a lot in this postman racket. Take Aunt Lucy, for instance.”
“Who’s Aunt Lucy?”
“Well, she’s just a for-instance, damn it. The point is, she hasn’t got anything worth while to do with herself, so she writes letters. She writes them to everyone in her lousy family right down to umpteenth cousins, and no one wants the letters, and probably don’t even read them, and all they really want is for Aunt Lucy to mind her own damn business, but after they get the letters their lousy consciences won’t let them alone until they’ve answered them, and the thing keeps going on in a vicious circle, and it’s the postman who suffers. Trouble is, stamps are too damn cheap. If stamps cost more, there wouldn’t be all this stuff to peddle. By God, I’ll vote for the first guy who runs for president on a platform calling for dollar postage stamps, and I don’t give a damn if he’s a Republican or a Democrat or a Druid.”
“Druid? Druidism’s a religion or something, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what it is, and I don’t give a damn. All the guy has to do is advocate dollar stamps. Minimum, that is.”
“You’re pretty bitter this morning, Marv. What you need is a couple fingers on the house.”
Marv shook his head. He had a long, lugubrious face with a big nose that was now bright red from the cold. Emerson liked to get him going when there was time to listen, and he knew damn well that Marv loved his job and wouldn’t have traded places with the postmaster general.
“Not while I’m on duty,” Marv said. “Everyone else can take time out for a little drink if he pleases, but if a postman takes a drink on duty it’s a stinking crime or something.”
“How about a cup of coffee?”
“Well, coffee’s something else. Even a postman can have a cup of coffee, I guess.”
“Okay. You can have the coffee now and come back on your own time for the drink.”
“Thanks, Em. I’ll do that.”
“Meantime, while I’m getting the coffee, you can dig my mail out of that bag. I want to get it before you decide to take it out and throw it down the sewer. You take cream and sugar?”
“Hell, no. You know better than that.”
Emerson went back to the kitchen and got the coffee and brought it into the bar. Marv had sorted out half a dozen envelopes, and Emerson set the coffee down in front of Marv and picked up the envelopes. He went through them slowly, reading the return address on each one.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” he said.
Marv had his big red nose stuck down into the fragrant steam rising from the coffee. He rolled his eyes up at Emerson without removing his nose from the steam. “Bad news?”
“No. I don’t suppose so. How the hell would I know, Marv? I haven’t even opened the envelope.”
“The way you sounded...”
“I was just surprised. It’s from Mexico City, as a matter of fact. From Avery Lawes.”
“Avery Lawes? I thought Avery went to Miami.”