And then suddenly, sweeping around like that, he floundered to an awkward, eddying stop, too short, that left him swaying and tipping almost face-downward with his own checked velocity.
She was sitting there on the topmost step. Just above him. Like an elfin small girl docilely waiting to be let in by one of her elders, since she is not of an age to be trusted with the key herself. Knees to chin, the way a child waits on a stair, skirts demurely tucked close about her ankles, arms in turn clasped about them to hold them in place.
“Hello,” she said brightly. “You’re home early tonight. I just got here myself.”
7
A sudden shower had come up, one of those violent almost tropical affairs that sometimes belt New York in the warm season of the year. The precipitation was rigidly vertical, and so thick it had the look of a sheet of warped glass standing static before one’s face. The lightning was so continuous it gave the darkness the effect of wearing spangles that kept coruscating.
The subway kiosk — they still had the enclosed domed kind later removed as traffic hazards — was like a little glass casket imprisoning a pack of tightly wedged upright corpses. Some kind of fluid running down all around outside it to preserve them. Their outlines peered swollen (as though decomposition had already set in) through the wire-meshed glass, lighted from within.
He stood there in the front rank, at the very lip of the orifice, toecaps of his shoes and forward brim of his hat just impinging on the watery curtain, but unable to edge back because of the bodies jammed behind him. He was umbrellaless and cursing himself for not having been on the train just ahead of the one that had brought him. It had still been dry when he’d boarded it at the Wall Street station.
A furled umbrella suddenly slanted outward over his shoulder from somewhere just behind, flared open with a comfortable cottony pop. Somebody wanted to get through. He tried to crush himself sideward to allow the person to pass.
Instead, a hand undulated edgewise under his arm. He thought for a moment it was an honestly accidental entanglement, that the hand, seeking an outlet, had become caught between his arm and body. He tried to lift his arm. Instead, it fastened on it, hooked curled about it, the hand.
He swung half about, in a sort of shocked impersonal outrage, as when some anonymous member of a crowd has trodden on you or jostled you unwarrantedly.
Her face was there, close, smiling into his. The next face to his, the nearest of all.
“Coming?” she suggested familiarly.
He turned outward to the rain again, as though he hadn’t seen or heard her. A moment later, no doubt because the continuing presence of her hand upon his arm interfered with this negation, he reached down, plucked it off, and cast it back where it belonged.
“No need to be standoffish about it,” she continued in a slightly risible tone. “I have an umbrella, and we’re both going the same way.”
“Are we?” he said through clenched teeth, continuing to face the rain.
“You know we are,” she answered indulgently. “Come on, be a good boy.”
Faces, he knew, without having to turn his own, were all turned now to look at the two of them. Faces, he knew, were smiling, were amused. She wanted that, she enjoyed it. It strengthened her position; it did the reverse for his.
“Come on, don’t be stubborn,” she coaxed. “I’m offering you my umbrella.”
Faces were grinning outright now; he could tell by the inchoate little sounds there were, still short of overt laughter, but that was on its way, and she was fanning it.
He extricated himself the way most men would have, being the unheroic creatures that they are, took a pull at his hatbrim to tighten his hat on his head, and suddenly plunged unprotected into the downpour, and away from her baiting.
He ran in sweeping strides, kicking up little silvery cuffs about his ankles. The rain drummed hollowly on the glass-studded pavement topping the subway in this immediate vicinity, for there was no fill below it, just the open track-well itself, but not loudly enough to drown the laughter of the crowd.
In a moment he became aware she was coming after him. “Hey, wait!” her voice came through the torrent, funneled to a foglike density.
He ran on full tilt, and around the corner, and into the side street that would lead him eventually to his own door, but only after a length of three maelstromlike blocks. The rain pellets seemed to be beating holes through his clothing, each one to let its successor a little further in turn.
He had to stop, paste his oozing shoulders up against a doorway finally. It was impossible to cover the entire distance in this; it was like running through upended surf, it was only a little less dense than actual surf would have been. No one was abroad, no one (and he was the one felt he would have liked to have help, not she).
He stood there, chest flickering wetly under a shirt soaked to the sheen of oil silk. His face was sweating raindrops, as though he were crying all over, from his crown down.
A moment later she had run into the shallow shelter after him, ranged herself there alongside him, shoulder to shoulder, facing outward as he was. She had not suffered so; it was a windless perpendicular rain, and the umbrella had let her retain a core of dryness.
“Get out of here,” he said, but too out of breath to put more than a whispered venom into it.
She ignored the imprecation, as if it were simply an understandable peevishness due to his uncomfortable bodily condition, and not his own real feelings toward her, that was speaking. “It’s so foolish for the two of us to stand here like this,” she argued comfortably. “What’s the good of my having the umbrella with me at all?”
“You’re even lucky in that, aren’t you!” he spat out bitterly. “How’d you happen to have that with you, when a lot of decent people were caught on the streets without one?”
“It’s been threatening since before five,” she answered as evenly as if it were a courteous question. “I brought it with me when I came out. You see, I didn’t know how long I might have to wait for you.”
“And you’ve been standing waiting for me at the top of those subway steps since five?”
“They’re the ones you use coming home every night,” she said with matter-of-fact simplicity. “What other ones would you use? The next station’s eight blocks too far up for you.”
He choked down his discomfiture by breaking from the doorway, running on again, in a long, gradual loop that brought him in at last to another doorway further down.
Within minutes she had done the same thing, was beside him again, breathing quickly in time to his own quick breathing.
He gave her a violent push out into the downpour. She staggered, but kept her footing. The umbrella, however, she lost for a moment, and it rolled circularly around on its own handle as an axis. She quickly retrieved it, backed up into the trough of dryness from which he had ejected her.
“I’m going to slap your head off, if you keep this up!” he threatened, his face pulled taut with rancor.
She smiled at her own thoughts. “You never slapped a woman in your life,” she told him, almost contemptuously. “You’re not the kind.” Almost as if to say. You would have long ago, if you were going to.