She closed the purse again, done with her primping. Her gaze roamed idly about the room, as if in search of entertainment to while away the time. The way people will pick up a magazine to leaf through while waiting in a doctors anteroom.
“That’s your fiancée’s picture over there, isn’t it?”
The phone came down an inch, from his lips and ear. “Take your eyes off that!”
“Her name is Marjorie Worth.”
The phone came down two inches more, both sections of it together.
“Shut up, I said.”
“She lives at Nineteen East Seventy-ninth Street.”
The phone dropped down to waist-level. He could feel the skin around the corners of his eyes drawn back tight, the way a cat’s ears are pulled flat when it’s at bay.
“Her telephone number is Regent 1200,” she said softly.
His breathing seemed to interfere with his speech.
She went ahead looking at the picture. She gestured with her cigarette. “Well, why don’t you finish your call?”
He didn’t answer.
“She’ll believe you,” she said reassuringly. “She’s bound to. She’s engaged to you. She won’t believe me. Is that what you’re worried about?”
He still didn’t answer, didn’t move.
“She’ll have to hear of it, of course,” she went on. “That’s something else again. You can’t have people arrested without... Is that what’s worrying you?”
He brought the phone up again, stopped a moment. Then he said into it, “I’m sorry Central. Never mind that call.” He bracketed it together and put it down.
“You don’t seem to know what you want to do. First it’s one thing, then the other.”
He came over toward her slowly. He stood over her. He put one hand out finally to the top of the chair she was sitting in.
“I’ve never hit a woman yet in my life, but if you don’t get up out of there and start over to that door...”
She didn’t even cringe or draw her head away.
“When you hit someone there are some screams and a commotion, the whole house’ll be attracted, and that brings us back again to where we were.”
She looked up at him. Her eyes never wavered, never blinked. They were those of a belle listening to compliments being directed toward her by a hovering admirer, on a settee at some dance.
“All I want is fifty dollars,” she said brightly.
“All you want is fifty dollars. Well, the answer is still get out.”
Suddenly, to his surprise, and when he least expected it, she had risen accommodatingly to her feet, was standing before him. “All right, I will. I’ve asked, and you’ve refused, and there’s nothing else to be done...”
She moved toward the door.
“Here,” she finished softly.
She opened the door, and stepped outside. Then and only then she turned and looked back at him, smiling again — now in affable farewell. It was as though a pleasant, though totally unimportant, little call were being concluded.
“What’d you mean just then?” he said sharply, still standing by the now-empty chair where she’d left him.
“Well, I have to get it somewhere,” she said disarmingly. “I can’t go to an absolute stranger for it. There are only three of us involved.” Her eyes flicked briefly toward the photograph, far offside within the room. She moved toward the head of the stairs, beyond, in the hall.
“You wouldn’t dare!” he exclaimed, ripples of shock spreading outward from the pit of his stomach as though somebody had lunged at him there.
She didn’t answer.
“You’ll be thrown out faster than—!”
He couldn’t see her any more from where he was.
“But not until at least they have heard what their reason is for throwing me out,” he heard her say.
He took a quick step after her. She had reached the head of the stairs, was about to descend.
“Do you think she’d take any stock in such a thing?” he said hoarsely.
“She won’t believe me. I don’t expect her to. But those little things are so hard to get out of your mind once they’re put in. It’ll stay with her. It’ll always be there, hiding away somewhere. She’ll always know it’s there. You’ll always know it’s there.”
His face was very white. “What good’ll that do you?”
“None. But what good will it do you, either?”
He came out to the banister rail and leaned across it. She was on the third step down from the top now, passing below him on a descending plane. His breath made his stomach go up and down against the rail that pressed into it.
“Why should a girl go to her with such a story, if it isn’t true?” she shrugged. “Why should a stranger look her up and tell her such a thing, out of a clear blue sky? About you, just you and no one else. How would the stranger know about you, know there was a you, in the first place?” She was halfway down the flight now.
He took a deep breath, inclined over the banister rail.
“Come back here, you,” he surrendered in a low, smothered growl.
She didn’t come back any faster than she’d gone. She sauntered up, just as she’d sauntered down, and then over to the doorway.
He motioned her into the room and closed the door, to bar their being overheard any further.
“I haven’t got that much in ready cash, but...”
“A check will do,” she said affably.
“What makes you think I—”
“You carry an account with the Colonial Bank, Fifty-fifth Street Branch. You’ve got eight hundred dollars in it and seventy-two cents.”
He looked at her with almost a sort of grudging awe.
“You sure have been busy.”
“I woke up earlier than you did that morning. I had nothing to do with myself. If things are left lying around...” She gave her wrist a little deprecatory twist.
She prodded a fingertip against the corner of her mouth in whimsical speculation. “What else, now? Let me see. You’re employed by a brokerage house called Ritter, Pease and Elliott. Customer-accounts man. Your departmental chief is a Mr. Bruce. They wouldn’t like it either, I suppose, if— Shall I go on?”
She didn’t have to. He’d uncapped a fountain pen, seemed to be drawing the ink that flowed through it from his own vein, the one that stood out like a blue rope down the center of his forehead.
“To—?”
She smiled at the ingenuousness of that. “Bearer.”
He gave the completed check a looped toss onto the table, without handing it directly to her. It seemed almost to fly up from there of its own accord and be sucked into her hand, so quickly did she grasp at it.
“Now get out of here!” he said wrathfully, from under an obscuring handkerchief that he was pressing tight to his brow.
But even that paltry dismissal was robbed of whatever salve it might have had for his smarting self-respect. She already had.
6
The street door of his house swung open and he flung in through it. Coming-home time. Outside, the street was gold-plated with the late sunset, and some of the precious substance seemed to have been poured into him, he was so alight and glowing. He was filled with anticipations of the party they were going to tonight. A special dinner party in their honor, his and hers. The engaged couple, everybody’s darlings these days.
He was in such exuberant haste he’d already doffed his topcoat in the short distance from taxi door to house entrance, and he was carrying it slung backward over one shoulder, the way a bather does a used towel. He had no time, no time for anything but joy. You were only young once. You were only in love once. You were only feted like this the once that you were both young and in love. He had to get all togged out — dolled up, that was the jaunty new expression for it they were beginning to use these days — and then he had to dash right on again from here, go over to her house and pick her up. The steps flew by, meanwhile, four and five at a time under his avid, scissoring legs, and he had to grab the banister rail tightly at each turn of the stairs and hold on as he swung around it, to keep himself from flying off his trajectory and into the wall.