You got up instantly, but without haste, and went and sat on the edge of the couch beside her.
That first night you didn’t stay long; you finally became aware that she was running her hand through your hair and was saying, “It’s so late I guess you’d better go.”
The next day at one you telephoned. She was sorry, she couldn’t see you that evening, she had an engagement. Tomorrow evening, then. No, she was sorry.
“Maybe we could make it Friday,” she said.
Friday evening it was raining and was much cooler, so you gave up your plan for a drive into the country and took her to a theatre instead. You went directly from the theatre to her room on Twenty-second Street. You had decided not to go in, but you went. At two in the morning you were still there, propped against one of the skinny pillows smoking a cigarette.
“I bought a car the other day,” you said. “It will be delivered tomorrow morning. I thought it would be fun for us to drive out of town some of these hot nights.”
She sat munching the chocolates you had brought, with the same old gestures, methodical as some automatic engine of destruction.
“It must have cost a lot of money,” she observed. “I don’t see why we couldn’t use one of your wife’s cars, if she has so many.”
You explained again the risks which a man of your prominence must avoid.
“I couldn’t stay away all night,” she declared. “If I did and Mr. Green found out about it...”
You were glad that her concern for her alimony imposed caution upon her too, but you wished she’d stop calling her husband Mr. Green.
“No, we couldn’t do that,” you agreed. “I meant to drive out in the country for dinner, maybe sometimes have a picnic lunch in the woods somewhere.”
Her eyes closed slightly, as they had a little before, as they have a thousand times since.
“It would be nice to be in the woods with you,” she said. “Last summer I used to go with Mr. Gowan out on Long Island. And Mr. Peft had a boat in the Hudson River — that was two years ago.”
“You know a lot of men, don’t you?”
She chuckled. “Wouldn’t you like to know though,” she said.
“What does Mr. Gowan do?”
“He runs taxicabs. He doesn’t run them himself — he owns thirty-seven of them — the brown ones with a little bird on the door.”
“That’s funny.”
“Why?”
“Oh nothing, only he didn’t look to me like a man who would run a fleet of taxicabs.”
“How do you know what he looks like, you’ve never seen him.”
“Sure I have, that night at the theatre.”
She turned her head; you felt her chin rubbing against your hair; then she bent down and softly bit your ear.
“That wasn’t him,” she said.
“Who was it then?”
She chuckled. “It was Mr. Green.”
Her husband! Of course not. You gave up, exasperated at her petty infantile obscurantism.
It was a week or so later, after you had been out several times in the roadster, that you found courage to speak to her about her clothes. You weren’t sure how she would take it, and you didn’t know what you might be letting yourself in for.
“I’ve never paid much attention to clothes,” she said indifferently. “Even if I had money, it’s so much trouble.”
Later, when you gave her money to buy things herself, underwear and nightgowns, she carefully gave you the exact change the next day, with the cash slips and price tickets in a neat pile, added up. She’s always been straight about money, presumably because she doesn’t care much about it. You might have known better when she handed you that bunk about Dick, though of course that’s not the same thing. Nor the alimony either; there’s no finding out anything she wants to hide; you don’t know to this day whether she actually did get alimony from her husband, nor for that matter whether she was ever married.
Your first suspicion of that came the day up at Briarcliff when you proposed a trip somewhere, and suggested central Pennsylvania as a locality where you would run slight risk of meeting anyone who knew you. When you asked her about that she seemed not at all concerned.
“But not so long ago you were afraid to stay out overnight,” you reminded her.
“Yes. Well... it doesn’t matter.”
“We can stay a week, or two, or a month, just as we like. What say?”
“I think it would be very nice.”
All right; that was settled. From the eminence of the Lodge you looked out across the expanse of woods and meadows to where a strip of the Hudson was flashing in the distant sunshine, and wondered why the devil you were doing this.
You have continued to wonder to this minute.
XIII
Another step or two and his eyes would be on a level with the floor above, and he would be able to see the light in the crack under the door.
He removed his right hand from the rail and thrust it into his overcoat pocket where it closed once more around the butt of the revolver. His other hand, holding the key, rested against the wall; but as he moved up another step and the hand came suddenly into contact with a nail that had been driven into the plaster he jerked it away nervously, and dropped the key, which fell to the edge of the wooden step.
He glanced upwards quickly — had she heard it — of course not — and then stooped and picked up the key, gleaming dully in the dim light.
The voice from the room was no longer heard, but his head seemed more than ever full of voices... it’s you who are the rat... timid, vengeless, actionless...
You’re no good. You’re no good any more for anything. That’s what you told yourself the afternoon you left the office and went to Eighty-fifth Street, the day she moved here. You’re in for it now, you thought, you’ve let this thing ride you into a hole there’s no getting out of.
She was there, moving chairs around and arranging rugs, with a silent concentration that made you laugh in spite of yourself. She changed them back and forth with an intense seriousness that was new to you, while you sat on the divan against the wall, smoking cigarettes and pretending to join in her earnestness. Later you understood that with her when a thing was once placed it was there to stay.
When she agreed, on your return from the Pennsylvania trip, to leave Twenty-second Street and take a place with you as Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, she wanted it to be a furnished flat. It would cost too much, she said, to buy furniture, and would be too much bother. You were pleasantly thrilled, that first time you came up these stairs and opened the door with your key. In a plain clean gingham dress Millicent looked quite domestic, normal, just a woman like any other woman, rather homely to be sure.
“It’s going to be nice here,” she said.
You nodded. “Aren’t you glad we went ahead and bought our own furniture?”
“Yes, it wasn’t as much trouble as I thought it would be. It must have cost a lot of money.”
That was in September — a year ago September. It seems like a hundred.
It was only a few days after you moved in that she said there ought to be more vases and things. In fact you hadn’t bought any bric-a-brac at all except two bronze bowls. The next afternoon you went to a department store and got some candlesticks, and some more vases, and two or three little bronze figures. She tried them here and there and finally got them arranged to her satisfaction.
“It’s very nice,” said Millicent finally, standing in front of you and looking around to view the effect, “but there ought to be something big for the table. A statue or something. I saw one over on Broadway yesterday of some girls, with some bunches of grapes, that was only seven dollars.”