Everything was Hawaiian in the entertainment and nightlife world this year. That was the latest rage. In their wake the band struck up an explosive cacophony intended for general dancing.
Everyone got up, and the tiny space was inundated. Within a moment, nobody could move any more, but the way they danced now, they didn’t have to. The women just shook their shoulders and bosoms — the shimmy — and the men just stood still and held onto them.
He and she, however, stayed on at their little table, with its intimate shaded electric lamp glowing upward into their faces. Dancing was for when you were happy. And though her eyes were bright — too sparkling bright, in the lamplight — that didn’t come from happiness.
He shifted his chair a little closer, so that she could hear him above the clattering cowbells and heehawing trumpets over there across the room. He poured her more champagne.
“Then I do have a chance? I must, or you wouldn’t be here in New York. I must, or you wouldn’t be here at this table with me.”
“I have to be someplace, so it might as well be here,” she said pensively.
“I do have a chance.”
“Don’t ask me that now.”
“I will ask you it, but don’t answer it now. Don’t answer it. I can wait. Time is on my side.” He poured some more champagne.
“I shouldn’t drink so much. I never have before.”
“You’re not drinking too much. And if you do? You’re among friends.”
She said it over. “I am among friends. Among friends at last. You don’t know how good that sounds. To be among friends. There’s no more worry, there’s no more fear. I am safe now. It was like a nightmare. But the bad dream is over. I am awake now.” She raised her goblet. “And I hear music. And I hear laughter. And I see a friend, across the table from me.”
She drained it, and seemed about to shiver, but she didn’t.
“Oh, it’s so good to be with a friend. So good.”
He swallowed some of his own, but with an asperity.
“What did he do to you? What was it? You have that year stamped all over you. Oh, not in your looks, but I can see it in your eyes and hear it in your voice. What went on, all that time, out in that place where he had you?”
“Don’t ask me to tell you anything. If I did, it would be the champagne telling you, and not I. And you wouldn’t want to hear it from the champagne, you’d want to hear it from me.”
“I’d kill him if he hurt a... a hair of your head!”
She gulped her champagne down almost voraciously, this time using both hands to the goblet stem. “Oh, my God. My God. Don’t use that word. That’s the one word you shouldn’t use. Don’t let me hear it. Just when I was beginning to forget a little.”
“So you don’t like that word,” he brooded. “Who does? I don’t either.” He tilted his glass. “I never have. For a year now, I haven’t. Your year and mine.”
She was suddenly staring at him transfixed, her lips afraid to ask what her eyes so plainly did ask.
“Maybe this is the champagne telling you, now. My champagne telling you, instead of yours telling me. Telling you there’s nothing for you to tell. No need.” He turned his head briefly aside toward the jangled clatter. “Yes, play louder, louder still. But she’s going to hear it just the same. I can’t keep it in any longer. Maybe I know, Marjorie. Maybe I understand. Maybe there are three in on the secret, and not just two.”
Even the lamp couldn’t tint her face now, nor the champagne flush it any more; its whiteness overcame both of them. “What are you saying? I don’t know what you’re trying to say!”
“I know. I’ve always known. That’s what I’m trying to say. I’ve known ever since an hour afterward.”
“And yet—”
“Yes, ‘and yet,’ ” he agreed sorrowfully. “Those ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ and ‘and yets.’ Short little words, but they cover so much ground. Would I stick a knife in your heart? Is that what I felt for you then, and what I feel for you now? No, I was the chum, the pal, the game loser. The little gentleman. That’s me all over, Marjorie. The loyal friend who kept his mouth shut.” His fist banged down in heavy contradiction. “The God-damned fool, you mean. Who could have had you a year sooner, but wouldn’t hit below the belt.”
She couldn’t say anything. She wasn’t looking at him now any more, she was looking at the past. Down at the bottom of her goblet where the champagne froth was. Not the past that had been, perhaps, but an alternate past, that might have been.
“For what?” he went on. “For who? To see you as you are now? To miss you as I have, to want you as I do, to be lonely as I am? Does one man do that for another? God didn’t make us that way, and God was right. Why shouldn’t I have my happiness, when it’s right out there in front of my arms, and all I have to do is reach? What am I, an angel or a saint? No, I’m what I said before; a fool, a Goddamned fool.”
“And I am too, I guess,” she sighed.
“But your eyes were closed, and mine were open.”
“How did you come to...?” It wavered, and it stopped; as though she weren’t really interested any more, at this late day; it was just a reflex question.
“I was the best man at your wedding. I went back to his room that day. I’d seen something I didn’t like, when I’d been there the first time, to pick him up. I didn’t know what it was myself, just something in the atmosphere. The way he took a drink with me, the way a burning cigarette on the edge of a table nearly sent him into convulsions. A cigarette that had lip rouge on it. I didn’t know why myself, but I went back. I found her there. And I helped him. Or was it you? I... saw to it that no one else would find her there. Don’t ask me what I did, it doesn’t matter now any more.”
“And I don’t want to know it anyway. My heart has too much to carry already, it’s heavy as lead. He told me the part before, in that faraway town one night. And every hour since, I’ve wished he never had.”
“And now I’m here, and now you’re here. With it. But he isn’t. We make a peculiar threesome.”
“What’ll I do? Oh, Lance, what’ll I do? I’m afraid to go back to him. And even if I don’t — I’m still not free of him.”
“Don’t do anything. Just be you, be Marjorie.” And low so that she scarcely heard, “Let others — do it for you.”
They were somnolently silent for awhile, and then she said, “I’m drinking too much. What have we been talking about? It’s gone now, but — I’m afraid I’ll remember.”
“I’m drinking too much too,” he said, draining his glass. “And I’m afraid I’ll forget.”
She saw him push back his chair and stand.
“Will you sit here for a moment? I want to get some cigarettes.”
“But you have some right there before you.”
“Another kind of cigarettes. A much better kind. Just sit here. And remember — always remember — you’re with friends. And no one will ever hurt you again.”
He closed himself into the booth.
He could still see her sitting there across the room from him. Still see her in all her lovely, downcast, heart-quickening desirableness. It made him want to cry out in anguish, he wanted her so. It was important to keep looking at her. It was important to keep her like that before his eyes, the whole time, and not turn them to what he was doing.
The coin chinked home.
“Spring three, one hundred,” he said quietly above the glass-dimmed roar of the jazz band, worshiping her with his eyes there where she sat, lonely, lost, waiting to be claimed, across the room. A Madonna in an evening gown, an angel baffled with champagne. His hope of heaven, his religion...