They reached Lisa finally, and Avery said, “Here are Ed and Em, Lisa.”
She looked up at them and hated them because they had caused her anguish and were causing her anguish now and weren’t even sensitive enough to know it, and she thought that it would be much better and easier to bear if only they knew or were capable of knowing.
“I had given up,” she said coldly. “I thought you weren’t coming.”
Emerson looked apologetic. “Because we’re late? We’re sorry about that. We had trouble getting away at the last moment.”
“It doesn’t matter. It was inconsiderate of me to invite you in the first place. You will probably find it a very dull party and wish that you had stayed away.”
“I’m sure we won’t. I’m sure we’ll enjoy ourselves.”
“Are you, really? I must say I doubt that very much. I find it impossible to believe that anyone could enjoy one of our parties. However, now that you are here, you might as well try. Why don’t you have a drink the very first thing? I find that it helps if you start drinking immediately. And you mustn’t stop. Whatever you do, you mustn’t stop.”
Avery laughed. “That’s what I call good advice. I think we could make almost anything out of the stuff on the table here. What will you have?”
“A martini?” Ed said.
“Certainly. How about you, Em?”
“That’s good for me too, but couldn’t we make them ourselves?”
“Not the first one. After this, you’re on your own.”
He made the martinis and poured them and handed them to Ed and Emerson.
“As you can see, this is pretty casual,” he said. “People just wander off and wander back. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not.” Emerson tasted the martini and found it below Roscoe’s average. He turned to Ed. “Would you like to dance, honey?”
“I’ll finish this first. Perhaps Lisa will dance with you.”
Lisa shook her head and said coldly, “No, thank you. I don’t think I care to dance.”
At the other end of the room the High Flyers quit playing one tune and began playing another.
Avery excused himself and went off to see about something.
Emerson and Ed finished their martinis and went off to dance.
Almost everyone finished something and went off to start something.
Except Lisa. Lisa sat in a posture of primness and listened to the crying of her desire.
And at the time that must have been established for it, Merlin came and sat down in the chair beside her.
She looked at him with a feeling of contempt and revulsion, and she would certainly have got up and walked away if she had known that he was the catalyst that would change despair to ruin, but this was something she did not know nor even suspect. In fact, she was achieving gradually a precarious remission of emotional tension and was beginning to regret her rudeness to Avery and to Emerson and Ed, and she was thinking that surely she could wear out the rest of the terrible party with superficial friendliness at least.
And so she smiled and said, “Avery’s gone off to see about something. Everyone else is dancing, I think.”
“Except you and me, baby.”
He used the two personal pronouns with a nuance of intimacy that made her flesh crawl, as if he had created an improper understanding between them merely by speaking the words in conjunction, but she only smiled again, feeling inordinately proud of her ability to do it, and lifted the glass she had been holding with the fingers of one hand.
“That’s right, of course,” she said. “Except you and me.
“You like to dance with old Merlin?”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Do you mind?”
“No. Rather not dance myself, to tell the truth. Don’t care much for dancing. Consider it a waste of time.”
He laughed windily and wetly, blowing a fine spray. Some of the spittle struck her cheek, and she jerked her free hand up automatically to wipe it away. He was quite drunk, however, and did not notice either his offense or her reaction. His face was flaccid, the skin loose and ugly under his eyes, the muscles sagging at the corners of his mouth. Fumbling a case out of his pocket, he offered her a cigarette. She took the cigarette and put it between her lips, and he found his lighter after a short search and provided flame. She pulled smoke through the tobacco and into her lungs in an acrid and soothing cloud, creating on the cigarette a bright red head.
“How about a little air?” he said. “Hot in here, don’t you think?”
“It’s hotter outside.”
“Oh. Guess so, at that. No air-conditioning outside. Have to think of a better excuse. Let me see, let me see. Got it. Darker outside. How’s that? Tempted? Does its being darker outside suggest any advantages over being inside?”
“None that I can think of.”
“Really? Old Avery must be neglecting your training. Suspected as much, to tell you the truth. If you don’t mind my saying so, you’ve got a frustrated look. Damn shame. Beautiful women shouldn’t be frustrated. Come on, baby. Let old Merlin unfrustrate you. Greatest little unfrustrater around.”
He leaned forward abruptly, and she felt the minor trespassing of his hand under the table, and then there was a shrill scream of pain, like a woman’s scream, and he was standing on his feet with his chair turned over behind him and one hand clapped to his cheek and tears running out of his eyes, and in the eyes were fear and a kind of foolish incredulity, and he kept saying over and over with a bubbling sound, “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,” and she understood after a moment, though she could never remember the action specifically, that she had thrust the red coal of her cigarette into his face.
Everyone was looking at them, naturally, everyone arrested and fixed in a terrible tableau, and even the High Flyers trailed raggedly to silence in the realization that something had happened and was terribly wrong. Then Merlin turned and ran out of the room with an awkward, loping gait, still holding his seared cheek and whimpering with pain and saying Jesus, Jesus over and over, and someone who turned out to be Avery detached himself from the fixed members of the tableau, and right away the tableau began to break and move in its many parts, and the High Flyers began to play again, and everyone started pretending that nothing had happened. And Avery approached Lisa in the desolate ruins of the worse night that had become worst.
“For Christ’s sake, what have you done?” he said.
“It seems that I have burned the cheek of Merlin Collins with a cigarette.”
“Why? Can you possibly tell me why?”
“Because he is a fool and deserved it.”
“Are you in a position to condemn fools? Anyhow, that is no reason for doing a thing like that.”
“Isn’t it? Then I did it for no reason.”
“I insist on knowing why you did it, Lisa.”
“I have told you the reason. If you don’t believe me, you had better ask Merlin.”
“I shall. I shall also ask him to forgive you for what you have done, though God knows why he should.”