She got up and went back into the house and found the ingredients for the Tom Collins and made it. In the living room, she sat in a large chair and looked out through a window into the bright still day and sipped the cold drink slowly, and by sitting quietly and thinking as little as possible she was able to induce a kind of semi-trance through which the remainder of the afternoon slipped silently in an illusion of peace. The only time she moved from the chair was when she became aware that her glass was empty and got up to fill it. She returned at once and was still there when the light outside had lost its brightness and Avery came home.
He came into the living room and said, “Hello, Lisa.”
“Hello,” she said.
“How was your day?”
“Rotten. My day was rotten.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Please don’t be sorry. I’m sick of people being sorry about things.”
“Perhaps the party will cheer you up. You need to get out more.”
“Do I? Is that what I need? It’s very comforting to know that there is someone around who knows immediately just exactly what it is that I need.”
“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Lisa. Are you drinking a Tom Collins?”
“Yes. That’s what it is. It’s my second one, and earlier I had two straight whiskeys, or maybe three.”
“I wouldn’t drink too much before the party if I were you.”
“I know you wouldn’t. That’s because you are a stronger character than I. You are not I, however, which is your good luck, and it doesn’t matter about the party, anyhow, because I have decided not to go.”
“Not go to the party? Why?”
“Must I have a reason? Very well. I’ll give you several and you can take your pick. I hate the club. I hate your sickening friends. I hate dull parties. I just prefer to stay at home. Is any of those satisfactory?”
“I think you are being unreasonable.”
“Do you? No doubt I am.”
“It would be different if you were ill.”
“Is that what you want me to say? All right, I’m ill. I’m ill and can’t go to the party. That’s what I had planned to tell you, anyhow, and it would have been simpler if I had done it to begin with.”
He was silent for so long a time that she turned her head and looked at him, and she was surprised to see that his face was deathly white with the mouth so distorted that it looked like an ugly, ragged wound. She realized that he was very angry and was controlling himself by a monstrous exertion of will. She had never seen him angry before, and she felt suddenly a stirring of excitement, almost a sense of exhilaration. After a moment, he stepped forward deliberately and slapped her across the face. It was a strong blow that knocked her head around and would have sent her sprawling from the chair if the arm had not prevented it. Her glass dropped from her hand and rolled across the carpet, leaving a trail of wetness and spread slowly through the pile.
“I will tell you something,” he said. “You will go to the party tonight.”
The blow struck, the excitement was gone. In its place was utter acceptance of the inevitable in the belief that nothing could ever have been different from what it had been and nothing could be changed from what it was bound to be. She was a fool ever to have thought otherwise. The bad day was going and the worse night was coming, and she had survived the one in order to fulfill her commitment to the other. So much was quite simple and quite true. She leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes.
“All right,” she said. “If you want me to go, I will go.”
Section 2
The Corinth Country Club hired a live orchestra every Saturday night. Once in a while, for something special, it was an orchestra from Midland City, and sometimes it was even one of the name bands you had probably heard on radio or had at home on platters, but usually it was the Corinth High Flyers, which it was tonight. Besides the piano, there were six instruments in the orchestra, seven if you counted both the saxophone and the clarinet, which were played at different times by the same Flyer, and people were always saying that it didn’t make much sense to lay out all that money for an outside organization when you had something just as good or better right at home. The girl vocalist was good too, a damn sight better than most of the girls up in big time, and it was just one of those things that she wasn’t up there herself, but of course everyone knew that the breaks made all the difference in that sort of success, and for each one who made it there were at least a dozen just as good who didn’t. The vocalist was billed as Flame Farrell, a platinum blonde whose name alluded to temperament and not pigmentation. According to Merlin Collins, who claimed to have learned from experience, her temperament could be incited to fever heat by the sight of a twenty-dollar bill.
In Merlin Collins’ opinion, virility was an obligation. His own was uncertain, as a matter of fact, and he was therefore constantly trying to prove that it wasn’t by attempting to seduce as many women as possible, preferably the wives of his friends in order to give them an idea of what they were missing in their routine engagements. It was part of his technique to call all women baby. Take the average woman at the right time, he always said, you could do almost anything with her if you called her baby. They all liked it, every damn one of them, even the ones who pretended they didn’t, and the ones who liked it most were the ones who were getting a little older than they liked to admit. Like the one old Avery Lawes had picked up in Miami, for instance. Chances were she was pushing thirty, and she tried to act like she was in cold storage or something, but, by God, she was a damn attractive woman in a snotty kind of way, and that was the kind that surprised you. The reserved ones, that was. It was really something to see the way the reserved ones fell apart in the end, all of a sudden with a God-damn bang, and there was always a fire inside. That was why they always acted so cold and snotty, of course, because they knew the fire was there and had to be watched all the time to keep it from getting out of control.
The night had been bad from the beginning, just as Lisa had known it would be, and it kept getting worse as the party progressed, which was true only because it was part of the pattern of degeneration and not because of any particular pressure the party itself imposed. Actually, it was a very casual party, and Lisa’s obligations as hostess were practically nil. Three tables had been pushed together to accommodate the guests in a group and to serve as a base of operations, and once the guests had been greeted and orientated, it was mostly no more than a matter of letting them alone to operate, and of picking up the tab afterward, which was Avery’s concern and not hers. Emerson and Ed Page had not yet come, however, late as it was, and this disturbed her and aroused in her an unreasonable fury, because it was perfectly apparent that they were delaying their arrival in order to deprive her as long as possible of the only pleasure she might have in the party, which was at best a masochistic pleasure, and it was even possible that Emerson had lied to hurt her, had promised that he would come and bring Ed when he really had no intention of doing so at all. She began to curse them silently, calling them in her mind the vilest names she could think of, and when at last she saw them enter the room and come toward the tables, all the strength that had been shored by anger ran out of her like so much water, leaving her drained and depleted and a little ill.
Avery had also seen Emerson and Ed enter, and he went to meet them and escort them to the table, and she understood that he had been watching for them and was anxious to make them feel welcome and at ease in company that was new to them. He started introducing them to the people who were present at that moment, and Lisa watched and waited as they approached her place, and as she waited she listened with accustomed ears to the thin, despairing cry of her desire in the wasteland of her heart. In Ed tonight there was more than loveliness. There was awareness of loveliness, and a pride in it, a conscious assumption of pride made essential by shyness and the necessity to assure herself that she had nothing to fear or to feel ashamed of. And above all, though she didn’t know it, she was the siren of the shining, deadly island, a high, sweet voice in lotus-laden air.