It was very hot in the kitchen, because it was not air-conditioned like some of the rooms in the house. She found the glass pot of coffee that had been left over from Avery’s breakfast and put it on the stove and switched on the electricity and sat down to wait in a straight chair by the table. She could hear Mrs. Lamb vacuuming in the front part of the house. The power mower started up again outside and ran a little while and died, and she decided that the yardman was adjusting the motor or something, and that was why he was running it even though there was no grass to cut. It was really extremely hot. A still, oppressive heat in which you could hear, if you listened intently, a whisper of menacing movement. Perspiration gathered in her armpits and trickled down over her ribs. Strangely, the perspiration felt icy cold. She listened to the menacing whisper in the still heat and was suddenly aware that she was about to scream. She closed her throat abruptly upon the scream, and it died with a whimper in a spasm of pain. Getting up, she went to the cabinet where the china was kept and got a cup and carried it to the stove. She poured coffee into the cup and returned with it to her chair at the table. Sitting with her elbows on the table and her head supported by her hands, she stared down into the black liquid and knew that it wasn’t going to work this time either, the technique of substitution, and that she was certainly going to have a drink in spite of all tricks and resolutions. Once this truth was accepted, it was only reasonable to believe that the drink had as well come now as later. Leaving the coffee untasted in its cup on the table, she went into the hall and down the hall to the library, where there was a liquor cabinet. She got a bottle and a glass from the cabinet and carried them upstairs to her room.
Just one, she thought. Just one small drink will be quite sufficient, and there will be no need for another until tonight, when drinking will be expected and acceptable.
She poured the drink and drank it and lay down again on the bed and began to think about the party at the country club that night. It was going to be only a small party with a few people there to whom Avery thought he was obligated for one thing or another, and she had safely gotten through several more formidable affairs since she had come to Corinth, and there was actually no reason at all why it should be dreaded so excessively. She lay there and told herself this, but it did no good, and no matter how she diagnosed the situation or tried to see it for the small matter that it should have been, she understood that the party was somehow established in a pattern of peril, the consummation of the bad day that had started with waking, and that it should., if possible, be avoided at any cost. This was at first a feeling, but it was soon a conviction, and avoidance of the party was essential to survival. She started scheming how this could best be accomplished, and she came to the conclusion after quite a while that she would simply say that she was too ill to go. This would not be, anyhow, an absolute lie, for she was really not feeling at all well. She had slept poorly in the night, and there was a terrible pressure inside her skull. What she needed, she thought, was to go back to sleep, and if she had another small drink she might possibly be able to do it.
She had it and began to think about Ed Page, who had been there waiting to be thought about all the time but had been resisted up to this point. Now she thought about Ed deliberately in all the ways she had thought about her over and over again, and this was a mistake, as she very well knew, for Ed was the siren of a shining, deadly island, the symbol of a particular ruin. In the torment of thinking, however, there was at least a kind of release from depression, the insubstantial peace of submission. Inviting Eel and Emerson to the party at the club had been a suicidal thing to do, exceeding even her usual proclivity for doing suicidal things, and she had alternated afterward between excitement and dread, and finally had refused to think about it at all. But now it was different. Now there was nothing to be lost in thinking about it, because she was herself not going to the party, and it no longer mattered. She lay and thought, and in the uneasy peace thus established, because she was exhausted, she eventually went back to sleep.
She awoke in the middle of the afternoon with the feeling that she had been on the brink of disaster and had awakened just in time, not to avoid it, but to delay it. Her heart was beating hard and fast, and she lay and listened to its beating, feeling the force of it against her ribs. Danger had slipped with her from the sleeping to the waking world and was hovering with infinite patience in the silent room. She got up abruptly and the room, with the motion, became violently alive, its parts merging and spinning and absorbing in an instant all the light of the world. She sat down on the edge of the bed in darkness until the dizziness passed, and she remembered that she had eaten nothing all day and would certainly have to take something into her stomach soon, even though the thought of it made her feel faintly nauseated. Mrs. Lamb was surely gone, because she worked only a half day on Saturdays, but perhaps she had prepared a cold lunch of some kind before she left. If so, it would be in the refrigerator, and she decided that she would go down and see, but first she would have a shower and get dressed.
She removed her robe and gown and stood looking at herself in the full length mirror of her dressing table. It was very strange how she felt about her own body, fiercely possessive with a kind of wild and terrible sadness, as if it were something apart that had been assigned to her custody for the care and protection she could not provide. It was like a child, her own child, and she had somehow failed it. Sometimes, looking at it, she would stroke it and croon to it and feel like crying because it was not stronger and lovelier and more like other bodies she had known. But now she saw it and felt only despair and wished never to see it again. Going into the bathroom, she had the shower and then returned a few minutes later to the bedroom and covered the body with clothing without looking at it again, except partially and quickly as was necessary in dressing.
In the hall below, she stood at the foot of the stairs and wondered what it was she had come down for. She had come for a specific reason, she remembered, but she could not remember what it was, and now that the dizziness had passed and she had been a little revived by the shower, she had completely forgotten about not having eaten and the necessity for food. She was only aware that whatever had followed her from sleeping to waking had also followed her from the bedroom to here and would follow her wherever she went in the house, and that it was therefore necessary to get out of the house at once. She went out the front door and around the house into the back yard and down all the way to the swing near the edge of the bluff overlooking the river valley. A few nights ago, she recalled, she had sat here and told Avery the truth about herself. There had been a kind of satisfaction in it at the time, but it had not come to anything, apparently, and in fact nothing had been said about it since, and she suspected that this was another example of his God-damn depressing kindness that was always placing her under some sort of moral obligation. The yardman, she noticed, was no place to be seen or heard. No doubt he had found it too hot to work, and it was indeed excessively hot. It was dry and blistering heat, destructive heat, the kind that could easily kill you if you weren’t careful. It was, as a matter of fact, far too hot to be sitting in the swing, it was already getting unbearable, and the only thing to do was to go back into the house in spite of whatever was waiting there. In the house she could probably find some gin and soda and lemon juice and make a tall Tom Collins and drink it slowly in the living room, which was air-conditioned. In this way, it would be possible to wear out the time until Avery came home to take her to the party she wasn’t going to, and maybe tomorrow would be a better day, but this was hardly likely.