“I can hardly wait,” she said.
And there, she thought wearily, you go again. You are really quite impossible. All that is required is to be compatible and pleasant and to say the right things at the right time, and this is what you want to do and arc: resolved sincerely to do, but every time you open your mouth, here are these words with the most sarcastic sound, and the reason for it is that you are a coward and are afraid of these people and of what they may do to you. You are anticipating the hurt that you feel they will surely do you sooner or later, and you are therefore trying to hurt them first, including Avery, as was evident at the table, in whatever little way is available to you. Is this logical? Is this actually the reason? Well, if it is not logical, it is at least very good rationalization, and I am quite clever to think of it, and here at last is this ridiculous bartender named Roscoe to fill my glass with the fourth martini, and so it no longer matters in the least.
She lifted the full glass and also her eyes and saw Avery approaching her in the mirror. He stopped behind her and said, “Oh, here you are.”
“Yes,” she said. “Here I am.”
He nodded to Emerson. “Been getting acquainted with Lisa, Em? Hello, Roscoe. Scotch for me. You know how.”
“Right, Mr. Lawes. On the rocks.”
Emerson stood up and said, “Here, Avery. Take this stool.”
“No. Not at all. You keep it.”
“Oh, come on. The guest always sits. That way he stays longer and drinks more.”
“Well, if you put it that way.”
Avery got on the stool and picked up the Scotch that Roscoe had poured.
“Did you have an interesting conversation with the old family friends?” Lisa said.
“Not very interesting, I’m afraid. I’m sorry it took so long.”
“It did, didn’t it? Take a long time. It took so long, in fact, that I decided to come in here and arrange for a third martini.”
“Good. I’m glad you did.”
“That’s not all, however. I am now drinking my fourth, martini, which is one more than the third, and this will give you an idea of just how long it took.”
“It’s difficult to get away from an old couple like that.” Avery twisted on the stool and looked over his shoulder at Emerson. “How did things go in Corinth this winter, Em?”
“Oh, fine. Everything as usual. Not as exciting as the places you’ve been, I guess.”
“I don’t know about that, Em. They’re really not what they’re blown up to be.”
“That is right,” Lisa said. “That is quite right.”
She smiled and lifted her martini. Avery did not smile and lifted his Scotch. Behind them, Ed came through the archway. Emerson saw her in the mirror and turned to meet her. She was wearing a very pale blue dress that left her shoulders out, and her shoulders, he thought, were something to make you want to know what the lest of her would be like out, which was something he already knew and was happy about. Watching her approach, he felt fiercely possessive and almost exultant. “Hello, honey. I was hoping you’d come.”
“Did you doubt it? Darling, I’ve been drooling over the thought of one of Roscoe’s martinis for an hour.”
“Good. You can have one with Mrs. Avery Lawes. Mrs. Lawes, this is my wife.”
Lisa revolved on her stool, and Avery vacated his, stepping back beside Emerson.
“Call me Lisa,” Lisa said.
“Thank you. My name is Edwina.”
“Your husband says he calls you Ed. Why does he call you that?”
“Because he thinks it’s cute, I think.”
“Really? He told me it was only because it’s short.”
“Isn’t that just like a man? He tells every woman something different.”
“I called a girl Al once. Everyone else called her Alison, but I called her Al. I was the only one who did it. It was my special name for her.”
Which was really an insane thing to say, a perverse expression of sudden pain that left her poised perilously on a razor’s edge between a chasm behind and a chasm before, and she looked into the glass that had held the fourth martini and wondered why, why, why. Why did she deliberately jeopardize herself, and why did she put her fingers around her own heart, and why did she now feel in an instant, with the appearance of Ed, the intolerable and destructive way she felt? She revolved again on the stool, facing the bar, and Ed got onto the stool beside her, and Roscoe came along with the soft look on his face that was the look he kept for Ed and no one else.
“Martini, Ed?”
“Dry, Roscoe. Very dry.”
“Do you have to tell me? I know just how you like them.”
He fixed it that way and pushed it across to her. From the same shaker he poured the fifth that Lisa was obviously ready for and expecting.
“Avery said everyone thinks you’re pretty,” Lisa said. “Your husband said he doesn’t know about everyone, but he thinks you are, anyhow, and I think you are too. I think you’re very pretty.”
“Thank you,” Ed said. “You are too, you know.”
“Oh, nonsense. You’re just saying that. I’m much too thin and pale. Don’t you think so, Avery? Don’t you think I’m much too thin and pale?”
He laughed. “I think you’re much too full of gin, if you want to know the truth. I think maybe we’d better be going home.”
“I don’t want to go home. Things are only now becoming interesting. I want to sit right here where this talented bartender can arrange martinis for me. You are lucky to have such a bartender, Mr. Page. He arranges martinis better than any bartender I have ever known.”
“All right. If you want to stay, all right. But I wish that you would come home.”
She looked up into the mirror, at his face in the mirror, and then she drained her glass and slipped off the stool and was at the end of the movement somehow small and contrite and all at once exceedingly tired.
“You are quite right,” she said. “It is certainly time to go home.”
Without saying good-night, she turned and walked through the archway into the dining room and back to the small room at the entrance where they had left their wraps, and she waited there for Avery to come, understanding that he was being polite to the Pages and saying the good-night that she had failed to say, or had deliberately refused to say through perversity, and she thought that Emerson Page, the nice guy, was someone she would probably hate more than she had ever hated anyone before.
Avery came and got their wraps, and they went outside and got into the black Caddy. She sat beside him in the front seat and leaned her head back and closed her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Truly I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For being a perverse, nasty, unnatural bitch.”
“All of that? Just because you drank too many martinis? Don’t be silly, Lisa. I’ve been known to drink too much in Em’s bar myself. It was the night before I left for Miami last November. Did I tell you about that?” It was apparent that he was going to pass it off lightly, as of no consequence, and this was probably out of kindness, which was the last thing she wanted at the moment, to be treated with kindness, and she would have preferred to have him strike her in the face.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t tell me.”
She kept her head back and her eyes closed, and he began to tell her about it, and she sat there feeling the destructive thing that had started, and thinking that the prognosis of all this with Avery was now hopeless if it had ever been anything else and that she had better run away at once, tomorrow if not tonight, and knowing in spite of this that she would not run.