A gong announced the rising of the curtain. The crowd pushed them back into the theater. “Come up for cocktails,” she called across several heads and shoulders. “I’ll leave my phone number at your office.”
Her place was magnificent, two penthouses made into a single apartment with a four-way view of Manhattan. It was modern in the best sense, simple, and without excess decoration.
It was a warm evening. They sat on the terrace, Nancy perched on the ledge, her back against the iron rail. The scene had the quality of an Italian primitive, in which foreground figures are large and solid, and in the background every minute object sharply outlined. Nancy had become so thin that her bones showed. This was not unbecoming, for she was well constructed and her face cut into interesting planes. She wore blue trousers and a white blouse with the sleeves rolled up, and on her right hand an enormous star sapphire.
“How handsome you are,” Mike said.
Nancy’s smile was cynical. “Don’t kid me.”
“Who’s kidding? You’re a handsome wench.”
She flipped her cigarette stub over the iron rail. “I don’t kid myself, Mike. I’ve survived so far without being beautiful and I guess I can get along for the rest of my life.” He was about to remonstrate, when she said, “Have you seen Phyllis lately?”
There was a sudden crash of thunder.
“She’s all right,” Mike said. “Happily married to your cousin.”
“Grandma thinks she’s wasting her life. Fred isn’t half good enough for her, Grandma says. He’s a stick, according to Grandma.”
“I disapprove of your grandmother,” Mike said.
“She’s always been mad about Phyllis. When I was a little girl, a horrid, fat child with bushy eyebrows, I’d get dressed up in a starched dress and sash, and Grandma would look at me and say, ‘You’ll have to be good, Nancy; you’ll never be beautiful.’ Mamma bought me the most exquisite things, handmade, imported, designed by children’s couturiers, but Grandma would never forgive me for having these things while Phyllis, who was so lovely, was poor. Even when we were tiny children she made Phyllis hate me.”
“Phyllis hate you?” Mike remembered how Phyllis’s face had been scarred by the catalpa tree’s shadow.
“I don’t blame her. It was Grandma’s fault; she instigated it and kept it alive. Even today she’s resentful because Phyl’s beauty deserves the luxury and I, who am homely and unworthy, get it all. I do think Phyllis hates me so much that she’s often wished me dead.”
Nancy walked to the opposite end of the terrace and stared down at the toy boats and bridges on the East River.
Thunder rolled above their heads and a bright arrow of lightning pierced the sky.
“Don’t you hate Phyllis?” Mike asked.
Nancy wheeled around. “Why should I? She’s always seemed a poor, pathetic little thing. If she didn’t hate me so horribly, I’d be fond of her. But she’s always been so resentful, I could feel her bitterness. She’d look at me with those big, soft eyes as if I were a monstrosity. Once at a party — it was my first big party and I had a beautiful silver dress, but whenever Phyllis looked at me, I felt like a big, ugly pig and my dress seemed hideous, and the evening was ruined.”
“Do you remember what Phyllis wore that night?”
Nancy shook her head.
“It was blue, I think. Blue thin stuff with flowers on it.”
Nancy stiffened. “Yes, of course I remember now. It was a dress of mine. Mother had given it to her.”
“Phyllis cried before the party. I always wondered why.”
Nancy came across the terrace slowly, looking down at her tanned feet in rope sandals. “I teased her about the dress. Most of the girls knew it had been mine. We giggled.”
Drops of rain, as big as pennies, spattered the terrace. Mike and Nancy gathered up the cocktail things and went inside. Nancy threw herself upon the yellow couch.
“She paid me out with Johnnie Elder.” Nancy rolled over, picked up her glass, drank, and rolled on her back again.
“Were you in love with him?”
“He was the handsomest boy in town, all the girls were mad about his eyelashes, and I felt that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t pretty if he loved me. When a man proposes, you think he’s in love with you.” Nancy shuddered. “Women often call their own feelings love, Mike, when it’s just balm for sore pride. Or fear that they’ll be left behind. Probably I ought to be grateful to Phyllis, because Johnnie and I’d never have gotten along. But it was hell while it lasted.”
Mike lit the fire. The room was cozy. And that was the last time, for many months, that they spoke of Phyllis.
They became close friends. Mike went with the sleek Broadway and prosperous Greenwich Village crowds. These people, after her life in France, were the sort Nancy liked. She had no talent of her own, but an enormous appreciation and excellent taste. Along with the boarding-school inflection had gone her admiration for romance and rococo. She was a realist, a product of the period, yet sufficiently independent to disagree, when it pleased her, with popular taste.
Mike soon fell into the habit of bringing her his short stories, asking for criticism and, more often than not, accepting it. They quarreled a lot, but these clashes were tonic to their friendship.
They had other quarrels which were not so healthy. Nancy pretended to be tough, but she was actually as thin-skinned as an adolescent. The old wounds had never healed. The scar tissue was frail. Some careless word, forgotten as soon as Mike had spoken it, would cause her to turn upon him cruelly.
Often Mike vowed never to see her again. But as suddenly as she had begun to brood, she relaxed, was herself again, tough, critical, merry, and tireless when there was any chance for fun.
When Nancy was called away by her grandmother’s last illness, Mike realized that he had begun to depend upon her companionship. He wrote long letters, confessed that he found New York dull without her, outlined the plots of his new stories.
The day her grandmother was buried, she called Mike and told him she’d arrive at Grand Central the next afternoon. She promised a surprise. Knowing Nancy, he thought she’d bought a Great Dane or dyed her hair. He bought himself a new suit, filled her apartment with flowers, and decided that he’d bury the hard boiled act and tell her sentimentally how much he had missed her.
The surprise was Phyllis. Arm in arm, the girls confronted Mike. “She thought I ought to warn you,” Nancy told him, “but I wanted a glimpse of your face when you saw us together.”
Both kissed him.
Phyllis said, “I’m so happy, Mike. It’s like old times again, almost as if we were kids.”
“It’s new times,” Nancy laughed. “Grandma always set us against each other, but, now she’s gone, the spell’s broken and we can be friends.”
Mike felt that he did not understand women at all. He could not believe that their grandmother’s death had turned the girls’ lifelong loathing into love. “Whence springs this sudden affection for your dear cousin?” he asked Nancy when they arrived at the apartment and Phyllis had gone off to change her clothes.
“Oh, Mike! If you only realized how deadly life is in that town. Fred and Fred’s family would drive me to arsenic if I had to dine with them more than once every five years, and poor Phyllis has to have dinner there every Sunday.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t because you want to show her how much better your life is than if you’d married Johnnie Elder?”
Nancy turned scarlet. Mike was immediately remorseful. During her absence he had resolved to guard his tongue and her sensitivity. Instead of sulking, Nancy slapped his face.
For the rest of that season there was little emotion in their relationship. They fell back into an easygoing camaraderie, and gave themselves to the pleasure of entertaining Phyllis.