“Press, this is your wedding day,” she reminded him, in the tone of someone seeking to restore a spoilsport to good humor.
“And if I don’t, you’ll go there to the very church itself, won’t you?”
“I would like to see a real society wedding,” she said almost contritely.
He was shaking all over.
“How much this time?” he said simply. He tried to turn from the table, and had to hold it for a moment to support himself. Then he turned from it and went over to the dresser.
“The same as last. Two-fifty.”
He opened a drawer, looked in it, then closed it again, as if not seeing what he sought.
She pointed briefly. “It’s up there, on top,” she said.
He picked up the checkbook from the top of the dresser, and brought it over to the table. Then he turned and looked helplessly across his shoulder in search of something else. A slight impact on the tabletop brought his eyes back, and his fountain pen lay there uncapped, barrel toward him in readiness.
“It was clipped to your vest pocket, on the back of that chair over there,” she said. “I saw it from here.” She examined her fingers to make sure no trace of ink was on them.
His hand was shaking too much. The pen point regurgitated a great glossy blot, left it behind as it swept on.
He tore the check out of the folder, began again on the one below.
“Don’t be so nervous, Press.” There was a note of laughter in the observation, but it wasn’t unkind laughter; it was rather the good-natured, indulgent kind apt to be exchanged between two close friends at times.
He didn’t look up at her. He heard a match snap, and a thin panoply of smoke drifted horizontally past his nose.
He signed his name, and he had finished it.
He relaxed his thumb, and the pen slid from his hand and fell to the floor at his feet.
“It’s a good thing it’s not your rug,” she said.
She took the check and made sure it was dry by blowing her breath along it, passing it back and forth below her lips as she did so, as if it were a harmonica. Then she folded it carefully, opening the handbag, put it inside.
He was still standing where he’d written it, quavering hands to the edge of the table, as if incapable of releasing it.
“Now go to your wedding,” she said, with an inflection almost of fondness. She surveyed him with a sort of kindly interest. “You make a good-looking groom. Wait, your tie ends aren’t straight. I wonder why it is men can never— Do you want me to fix it for you before I go? That’ll be my wedding present to you, Press, a nice even tie.”
She set her cigarette down against the rim of the table, and came around it to his side.
Her hands reached toward his tie, and she was right before him for a maddening moment.
She shouldn’t have come so close to him.
He didn’t see what happened next. Missed seeing it as completely as if he were outside the room, on the other side of the closed door. There was a singeing flash of six weeks of accumulated hate, fear, and torment, as blinding to his senses as a literal combustive explosion would have been. She disappeared completely behind it. He didn’t feel anything, or know what any part of his body was doing. He heard a stifled scream come through from the other side of the sheet of fire, as though it were a visible thing that had shocked and seared her too, as well as himself.
Then it dimmed, and she peered through at him again. He could see her once more.
They were locked together in a serpentine double arm-clasp. Her throat was between his hands. They were turned inward, thumb-joint toward thumb-joint, pressing in upon the soft front part of it. Feeling it give, and circle, and try to swim away in ripples of flesh. While the firmer structure beneath held fast in columnar hollowness, a column that he was trying to cave in and crush closed.
He kept his face back beyond her reach. He had a longer arm-span than she, and her hands flickered helplessly upon his arms, like wriggling snakes trying to clamber up a pair of fallen tree trunks.
They were moving, but he couldn’t feel it. Taking little steps, this way, that way, now forward, now back, like a pair of drunken dancers. And as in a conventional dance his steps — the man’s — led, her steps — the woman’s — followed. Whichever way he stepped, she stepped a moment later.
One time they were very near the door. Her mouth opened abortively, and closed, frustrated; opened again, then closed once more; and he could feel a little straining lump or sac come up in her throat, under his thumbs, and he squeezed it flat again.
Then the door moved past along the wall, and she was gone to the far end of the room. And still the silent music played, and still they rocked to it.
The bedstead came nosing toward them diagonally, one corner of it forward like the prow of a ship. Then like a ship that suddenly changes course, it too veered aside. But not quickly enough. The back of her heel must have struck the bottommost part of its leg, where its caster nosed the floor. The jar coursed through both of them, passing from her arms to his, and from them into his body, just as though it were he himself had struck the obstacle. There was a hollow, tubular ring from the bedpost, as when a faulty anvil is struck. Then suddenly she began to lean acutely away from him, and pull him violently downward after her with her whole weight, and it was only after the act had been half completed that he realized it was a bodily fall, involuntary.
He couldn’t brace against it. The two of them went down together, still locked together at her neck. They fell crosswise, in the little clear space between the foot of the bed and the bulky steam radiator against the wall. She fell upon her back and he fell face forward. She fell uncushioned to the floor, and he fell partly upon her body, due to the overlap from their formerly vertical position. His face fell upon her breast, as if in amorous indolence.
And as the fall completed itself, again there was a hollow, knell-like ring, this time from the steam radiator. It ebbed and dwindled into silence, and they didn’t move.
She was completely supine, except for her head, and that was tilted a bare inch or two by the radiator behind it. It was as though she were trying to look down her own length at the top of his head, nestled on her breast.
Their eyes met, in a strange stillness. His hands had burst open with the fall, but they still formed an unclosed half-circle toward her neck, and lying within its compass, like an overripe fruit, lay her silent inert head. Like a giant seedling of death, that had just burst free from its pod.
A little blood twinkled at the seam of her lips, like a new kind of rouge applied from the inside out. But over-applied, for it ran over at last, at one corner, and started tremulously down her chin, then stopped again and ran no more.
He flung his arms wide in sudden, explosive gesture of riddance, and her own fell off them like disengaged tendrils, lay sodden on the floor.
He shook her at the shoulders, then, and her arms moved; but when he stopped, they stopped, were still again.
He made spasmic squirming motions backward away from her, and reared on the points of his knees, on the floor beside her.
“You can have the money,” he whispered. “Go ahead, take it, and get out of here.”
He shook her urgently, this time by one shoulder alone, and she seemed to say “No,” for her head went slightly from side to side.
“Come on, get up. Take the money, and get out.”
He pulled at her, tried to draw her up toward him.
“Cut it out, do you hear me? Get up, will you?”
Her head came erect, and then overbalanced itself, came forward against the white front of his shirt, as if in a smothered kiss. He quickly pried it away and held it at a distance. It went over to the side, and lay thus, as if cocked at him in macabre quizzical interrogation.