Sometimes they were like pinwheels, revolving around a single colored center. The bright red cherry of a Manhattan. He must have been looking straight down into his own glass when that happened. He was on Manhattans.
He’d never been so drunk at any time before in his whole life.
All at once there was a woman with him. She’d been with him for just a few minutes, she’d been with him for long, endless nights at a time. She kept changing her dress at intervals. And even her hair and face to go with it. First she was in pink. Then suddenly she was in light green. As though a gelatin slide had revolved and cast a different tint over her.
“You changed your dress,” he accused her.
Interlude of more coruscating pinwheels, again like the oversized works of a watch, all flashing and tinseled and rotating at once, but in counter directions.
This time she was in yellow.
“Can’t you stay in one dress?” he complained querulously.
The bars were very unreliable tonight. They looked nice and steady, but he’d lean on them too heavily, or something. They’d tilt way up on one side, and slope all the way down on the other. It was like trying to drink from off the top of a see-saw.
The pinwheels were dimming now, they weren’t nearly so bright.
The bars gave place to a sidewalk. A sidewalk that was straight up and down in front of his face, like a rule measure held to his nose.
The toecaps of shoes made patterns on the surface of it. Sometimes they’d stand around formed into a semicircle. Then this would break up, they’d all resume going this way and that once more. Then a new semicircle would form, adding to itself pair by pair, until it was all ranged around him again complete.
Presently a couple of diminutive pointed vamps ventured forth out of this background row of shoes and poised themselves tentatively close up alongside him.
He split in two at this point. He went on, but memory stopped where it was, didn’t accompany him any further.
4
And now the time had come, the night had come. For asking her.
She had caught up with him. There was nothing further to wait for. In fact, delay might even have been dangerous. She must be caught where she was, at the outskirts, and drawn all the way into love. Bound to him by a formal declaration. Otherwise, a reverse current might set in that would carry her away from him.
You could not stand still in love. It was a moving stream. You floated together, or you drifted apart. It had to be one or the other. There was no such thing as a fixed position. There were no life rafts on these tricky seas.
And so, this never-to-be-forgotten night in both their lives, when “both their lives” became “their lives”; this fateful date, this turning point, this Saturday of May in Nineteen Fifteen.
She was in pale blue satin, the pale blue that lies within the depths of ice, or when moonlight strikes on burnished steel. And at her waist she wore pink roses, his pink roses. And long afterwards, looking back, he could remember her as she was this night. As a man should.
It was so easy to be in love with her, so easy to want to make her your own. Even if she’d been poor, even if her family had lacked all standing, he still would have wanted her, the way she was tonight. She was too much for him, she gave his poor heart amorous indigestion.
An intermission came on, and they left their seats and went out to the foyer.
“I have something to say to you,” he said out there.
“And I can’t hold it back any longer. I’ve tried, and I can’t.”
She smiled. I know, that said, I understand.
“And if we go back in there again, I’m afraid I’ll come out with it right there, with people sitting all around us hearing every word.”
She nodded. I know, that said, I understand.
“Shall we clear out of here?”
She didn’t have to smile or nod or anything else; he knew, he understood.
They never went back to their seats again. They got into a carriage there at the theatre entrance and were driven uptown and into the park at Fifty-ninth Street. There they slowly coursed along the driveway, now a silver-plated lake beside them, now an arbor of trees in lush new leaf closing over their heads for awhile, now a twinkling line of apple-green gas lamps striking off along some walk; the drowsy clop-clop of their horse the only sound to break the magic stillness of the night. There he kissed her, and she met his kiss. There he told her what he had brought her there to say to her.
“Marjorie, I love you. Will you marry me and be my wife?”
The words that are the oldest in the world, the words that are always new again each time. The words that are so short in speaking, the words that last for so long.
“Yes,” she said quite simply, “I will.”
His arms and his lips thanked her.
“I’ll be a good husband, Marjorie, for the rest of my days.”
As simple as that. And as irrevocable.
They had joined their lives, from now on until death.
5
The next day was Sunday.
He always took it easy Sundays. Lazed around and read the papers. He was going up to Marjorie s house for supper later. That wouldn’t be until toward eight.
But then, sometime around five, just as he was applying the lather to his face, there was a knock on the door.
He wasn’t sure he’d heard it at first. He silenced the flow of water and listened a moment. It came again. He wiped his hands off and came out and stopped before the door and called, “Who is it?”
The answer was voiceless, a repetition of the knock.
The maneuver frustrated him, just as it might have been intended to. He opened the door, and he was face to face with an unknown young woman, a girl really, looking at him with a sort of demure insistency.
He recoiled an inch behind the shelter of the door, and said “Oh, excuse me.” In 1915 a man’s undershirt, if not shocking, was at least still reason enough for apology between the sexes.
She kept looking at him with that air of childlike fixity; he could find no other description for it in his own mind.
She was quite young; twenty-two or — four at the utmost. She was quite pretty, but in a run-of-the-mill sort of way. It was not a lifelong beauty of feature and formation such as Marjorie had; it was a transient coloration lent her by the fact of her youth alone, that would disappear with that again some day. She was slim and small; she looked as though she could not have weighed more than a hundred and ten pounds. She was dressed neatly and with a sort of youthful freshness, that avoided being rakish.
She kept looking at him in such an innocently questioning way, as one who has had no previous experience at all with men, particularly at such close quarters, and whose eyes seem to say: “You wouldn’t hurt me, now, would you?”
He gave her a smile meant to be reassuring. “I guess you have the wrong door.”
“No, it’s you I want to see,” she said in a small, almost babyish voice.
He was taken back. “Me? About what? Are you sure?”
Her lips formed into a little smiling pout of rue. “You don’t remember me, do you?”
He simply looked at her blankly. “No, I— I—” Trying to place her, failing completely. Some long-forgotten friend from his old home town?
“I can see you don’t. Doesn’t my face come back to you at all?”
She took a step forward. He took a step back, to avoid having his undershirt and his lathered jowls brush against her. She took a second step forward. She was in now.
She touched the door lightly with her hand, and it closed. “There,” she said, with the elfin, nose-crinkling grin of a mischievous child.