It was so big, so cavernous. It gave you vertigo. Shoals of lighted taxis went by, like regimented fireflies executing precision maneuvers. And their horns went squawk, squonk, squonk, squa-a-awk. An El train flashed across the air like a flaming concertina, the next block down, at Third, with a sound like somebody playing the kettledrums.
He didn’t even know how to walk any more in crowds; he’d lost the New York knack. He kept trying to give way, as you did in other places. But as he did that on one side, he kept colliding on the other. He was buffeted along.
He shivered. It was so big, it was so dangerous. He couldn’t stay here very long. He’d have to get out again as quickly as he could. Tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow he could persuade her to start back with him. Take the night train back with him to... to... to where it wasn’t New York.
Just this one night. He’d have to shave first, he’d have to do something about his clothes. He’d make himself look good, then he’d go to her...
There was one right across the street, the Belmont, but he couldn’t go there. He walked east a block, and then up a couple, and found one there, on Third Avenue, and bought a room for a dollar. The kind of place where they gave you a key and let you find the room yourself.
“Davis,” he put down for a name, in their book.
He locked the door on the inside first, before he even put on the light. He struck a match, and found the tap, and found a tumbler, and filled it and drank from it, without caring whether it was foul or not. (It’s not half so foul as my insides, it occurred to him.)
Every few minutes, regularly, the whole room seemed to burst into flame, as an El train roared by right on the other side of the windowpane. And then the fire went out, and the room was still uncharred.
He took off his coat and his shoes, for the first time since leaving that faraway town.
Then he pulled down the shade, and he sat there peeping out at the side of it. Peeping out at New York.
The enemy, the bad place, the trap.
The mouse was within the trap, but it wasn’t caught yet. The way out was still open behind it.
6
How strange, he thought, to deck yourself out like this for a wife of two years’ standing. As though she were a strange sweetheart you were courting.
Some people, he realized, might have thought it pathetic, pitiful. He didn’t. He thought of it as good strategy. He was, he intended, using the only weapon he really had, her love for him. And to help that along all he could, he had to make its object, himself, as attractive to her as possible. She had to see him as she first had seen him, not as she last had seen him.
He kept feeling his newly razored cheeks, as if to make sure they were smooth enough for her. He traced the back of his neck, to make sure the man had trimmed it just right.
He took out his handkerchief, and though he had only just had his shoes shined, he dusted their tops off all over again.
He bought a new shirt. He even bought a new tie.
“No,” he said to the salesman’s preferred selection, “no stripes. My wife likes solid colors, in a man’s tie. And I’m wearing it for her.”
He put on the new shirt right there in the haberdashery, behind a mirrored partition. He put on the new tie. He came out with it left loose and had the salesman knot it for him. “I never was very good at that,” he said. “She used to do it for me. Give me a good one, that’ll stay in place.”
He bought her flowers; two dozen fresh young roses, just beginning to open.
There wasn’t anything else he could think of, to make her love him more.
Then, outwardly confident, inwardly trembling and agonized, he hailed a taxi and got in.
“Seventy-ninth, just west of Madison,” he said. “I’ll show you the house when we get there.”
7
They still had the same servants, apparently, as during his courtship days. He recognized the man who came to open the door, Cochrane, but if the man recognized him, he made it difficult to determine.
“Good afternoon,” he said neutrally.
“Is Mrs. Marshall in?” Marshall asked. He couldn’t move past him as unhesitatingly as he’d intended to, because the man wasn’t adroit enough in getting out of his way.
“Mrs. Marshall?” Cochrane acted surprised.
“My wife,” said Marshall, a trifle impatiently. “You remember me, don’t you?”
“Yes, of course, sir,” the man said drily. “But Miss— Mrs. Marshall isn’t staying here at the house with us.”
The roses went down like a flag about to be lowered in defeat.
“She isn’t? Well, where can I find her? Where is she staying?” As a suspicious afterthought flitted through his mind, he gave it voice. “Are you quite sure of that? Or were you just told to say that?”
The man took no umbrage. “I’m quite sure, sir. She visits here quite regularly, but she has an apartment somewhere downtown.”
“Could you tell me where it is?” said Marshall, choking down a rising resentment at what he took to be a premeditated evasiveness.
“Mr. Worth would know, of course, sir...” the man said uncertainly.
“Well, is he in?”
“You missed him by half an hour. He’s gone to his club. I could ring him there for you, sir, and find out. Shall I do that?”
“No,” said Marshall with asperity, “don’t ring him. Don’t ring anybody at all. There must be somebody in this house that knows my wife’s address. Or is it just because you’re not sure she’d approve your giving it out to me? I happen to be her husband, after all.”
“No, sir,” said the man guilelessly, “it isn’t a question of that at all. It’s just that I don’t happen to know it myself, and Mr. Worth isn’t here at the moment. I’ll see if Mrs. Davis knows, or one of the others. Would you care to step inside and wait?”
“I’ll wait out here where I am,” said Marshall stonily.
He didn’t want anything to do with her house. He only wanted her.
Cochrane reopened the heavy iron-grilled glass door after several moments and offered him a card.
“Mrs. Davis found it for you, sir. It’s on Fifty-fourth Street, she has the exact house number on here. The telephone is—”
“I don’t need that,” said Marshall, curtly turning away. “I’m not a stranger.”
8
There was a myopic moment in which the whole world was a blind, white-painted wooden panel. Nothing more than that, before his eyes. And his heartbeats seemed to swell and throb against it, playing the part his hand and the knocker should have played between them. While he held his hat in one hand, the paper cone of flowers poignantly head-down in the other. Suppliant. Abject.
Knowing that this was the turning point of his whole life. That nothing that had gone before had counted as this did, that nothing that would come after would count as this did. Praying. Give her back to me. Let me have her back. I can’t go on without her.
Then he heard her step draw near. Then the knob turned. Then the blind wood panel fell away. Then the whole world was her face, there close before him. The most beautiful world any man could see. The complete world: the sun, the moon, the stars, all in one. The shield against loneliness. The buffer against weariness. The balm against pain. The face that in every man’s life is a little glimpse of God, perhaps the only one he’ll ever be given. The face of the girl that is his wife.