“Oh, I’m so happy,” she rejoiced.
“I am too,” he seconded. “And isn’t it funny? I bet if I’d asked for it myself, he would have refused.”
Then when they’d crowed and exhilarated over this for awhile, she in turn related: “Oh, here’s something I nearly forgot to tell you—”
“What?” he beamed.
“There was a man here to see you this afternoon.”
His face and his voice both dimmed. “A man?” he said slowly. “Here?” And then he said bleakly, “Who— was he?”
She was still out in the sunlight. “Some man. I don’t know who he was. I haven’t any idea.”
“Well, didn’t he—?”
“He didn’t give me his name, from first to last. I couldn’t get it out of him. When I asked him if he’d care to leave it, he mumbled something about — that you wouldn’t know it anyway.”
He shot her a swift look for a moment, from under his downcast eyelids. A look that was not at her nor meant for her, perhaps, but was produced by the phrase, ‘you wouldn’t know it anyway,’ lodging itself in among his thoughts, pressing upon them, so that his eyes gave that little flicker.
He was speaking more quietly now, more slowly, than he had been before. “Then if I — wouldn’t know his name, what would he want of me?”
“I waited for him to tell me that, but he didn’t. So, as long as he didn’t I didn’t ask him. I didn’t want him to think I was one of these women who meddle in their husband’s affairs.”
“But he did seem to know that I lived there.”
“Well, he wasn’t any too sure of that, in the beginning, I could tell.”
“But afterwards he was,” he prompted her with an undercurrent of bitterness.
“He asked me if you did, so of course I said you did.”
“What did he look like?” he said dismally.
“Oh, I’m no good at that,” she protested. “If it had been a woman— But it was just a man. How can you describe a man?”
He smiled mirthlessly at that. Friend or enemy, civilian or police official; that’s how, he thought.
“He was young and stocky,” she said. “He... well, he was very sure of himself. There was something a little aggressive about him, I thought.”
A plain-clothes man would be sure of himself, a plain-clothesman would be aggressive.
He tried to read the future in the water at the bottom of his glass, but all he could see was the tablecloth through it, its damask pattern slightly magnified by the crystalline coating.
“Go over it again,” he said. “Maybe I can get something out of it.”
“You dwell on it so,” she said lightly. Then she did as he had asked. “I heard the doorbell ring, and when I went to the door, he was standing out there. I remember he didn’t tip his hat to me, and I didn’t like that. He was holding something in his hand, and looking at that, not at me.”
“What?” he said, looking steadily into his water tumbler as though her voice were coming out of there, and not out of her lips.
“Well, I couldn’t see exactly, since he had the back of his hand up, like this, between us. Whatever it was, it was on the other side of his hand.”
A badge of authority, that he was holding ready to have turned outward the other way, had it been I, instead of she, who answered the door?
“It was either one of these vest-pocket notebooks, or something that had your name on it, a card or a slip of paper, something like that. Because when he asked about you, I could tell he was reading it from there, he had it on there, by the way his eyes went down to it, instead of to my face, He said, ‘Does a Mr. Prescott Marshall live here?’ ”
“He put in ‘a’ like that?”
“Yes, he put in ‘a’ like that.
“Then I told him yes, but that you weren’t in. Then he took a pencil from his pocket, up in here, and put it to the other side of his hand, and made some mark or notch or check against whatever it was that he was holding there. Then he put both the pencil and the — whatever it was — away again, and that seemed to satisfy him, that seemed to be all he wanted. That was when I asked him if he’d care to leave his name, and he said that you wouldn’t know it anyway. That was as far as I got; then before I could say another word, he’d already turned away and left me standing there high and dry. I called after him, ‘Will you be back again?’ ”
He swallowed the water in his glass. “And what did he say to that?” he whispered half audibly.
“He didn’t turn his head to look at me, but from over his shoulder he answered in a — in a most curious voice—”
“What was curious about it?”
“Well, it was so drily emphatic, as though that were the most needless question to ask.”
“And what was it he did answer?”
“He answered, ‘O-o-oh, yes indeed, lady! O-o-oh, yes indeed I will!’ Twice, like that, and sort of drawled out slowly, as I’ve said, in sarcastic emphasis. I didn’t like his whole tone or manner, and if there’s one thing I hate, it’s to be called ‘lady.’ I’m afraid I closed the door rather sharply.”
She changed the subject, yet it was no change. “It’s so close in here tonight. Just look at that, your whole forehead is moist, I can see it from here.”
He dabbed at it with a sort of absent ruefulness. “I don’t know anyone here in town,” he said. “The only ones I know are the men down in the office with me, and they were all down there today, no one was missing.”
“Maybe he was somebody from somewhere else,” she suggested.
Somebody, he agreed unheard, from New York.
She’d finished with it. That was all she said about it. That was all there was to be said about it.
She went on; or rather, back to where they’d been before, to the raise.
“Oh, I’m so happy,” she reveled.
He didn’t say that he was, any more.
3
Still life: their living room. A painter, had he attempted to do it, might have called it “Sudden Interruption,” it was so eloquent of just that. No one in it. But the easy chair he habitually used drawn up close beside the reading lamp. On it, stretched from arm to arm, a collapsed newspaper, like an explosion of paper leaves, attaining such expanse and dishevelment only in one way: by being first held open at double arm-width and then abruptly deflated by the removal of both its supports. On the table by the lamp a little hurriedly scratched note: “Back in a minute, dear. Something I forgot at the grocer’s. Just read your paper awhile. M.”
But two things in the room were not altogether still, and might have eluded the painter had he tried to reproduce them with complete fidelity. One was the chain-pull of the lamp, which swayed ever so slightly, as from a recent violent jerk. The other was the struggling exhalations of a cigarette, suddenly put down and abandoned on the table’s edge.
In the hallway outside the room, also a still life. And this one its would-be painter might have called, with equal appropriateness, “Concealment” or “At Bay.”
On the rack, his hat and coat, Marshall’s, in usual homecoming position, one over the other, as though they adorned a skeletal wooden man, without a face or arms. No motion, though; even less motion than inside in the room beyond. The curtained glass inset in the upper part of the door lighting the scene with a sort of pearly glow from the twilight outside. Looming against this, moleculized into dots by the very fine pores of the curtain, the blurred gloom of a head and shoulders. Not sharp enough to be called a silhouette, but rather more like a dark, watery stain against the curtain and the glass. Immobile.