“So you feel like kidding, do you?”
She moaned disconsolately. “Oh, I knew it. I knew it. You don’t understand. It’s because I love you!”
“Well, in that case, how about taking a dislike to me, so I can stick around?”
She nodded and put her hand on my arm in quick, nervous agreement. “Exactly. If I disliked you, the dirtiest trick I could play you would be to have you around me all the time. Wanna know why?”
“May as well,” I said, “the show at the Palace is rotten this week.”
“Oh, if I could only illustrate it concretely,” she said, “but I can’t! It’s just a feeling, a surmise. I know you won’t believe it. But I have a hunch, oh, such a hunch, honey, that if you get in too thick with me you’re coming to a quick, bad finish. You’re different from the types I’ve gone around with. Oh, you do the things that all men do, but Wade, you’re clean, you’re straight. Those are always the ones that get it in the neck!”
“I don’t follow you,” I said grouchily. “What do you do, associate with crooks?”
“I don’t, personally,” she said meekly. And then, all anxiety again. “Wade, won’t you break away? I’ll go on loving you. Maybe forever that way and not just for today.”
“You could tell me that you don’t want me, that would be squarer. Look,” I said, wheeling around toward her, “you tell me honestly that you don’t want me, and I’ll go, I’ll do what you want. Is that a go?” And I slipped the knot of my tie determinedly up to the base of my throat, where it belonged.
“I can’t tell you that,” she said dismally, “it wouldn’t be true.” Then suddenly she flared up furiously at no one in particular and flung one of her embroidered mules violently across the room by the heel. “What is this love racket? I’d rather have a baked apple! Get this and keep it got,” she said, turning to me. “As I understand love, I love you. I don’t want to have anything to do with your laundry, don’t want you around me every day, but how I love you is nobody’s business!
“So stay if you must, honey,” she said after a while, “but tomorrow I won’t love you any more.”
I only laughed. “I’ll take my chances. Who could be a big enough fool to let you slip out of his life?”
“Poor Wade,” she said pensively, “good-bye to you!”
Chapter Three
Tomorrow she didn’t love me any more. And tomorrow, and tomorrow. But that was all right; at least I was with her, if only to hear her say so.
“She is in, I tell you!” I barked at Tenacity. “I just heard her say to you, ‘Go see who’s at the door.’ ”
This startling revelation so robbed Tenacity of her presence of mind that by the time she had recovered it, I, at any rate, was in, whether Bernice was or not. “You’re certainly stubborn,” she commented disgustedly, shaking her head after me. “If it was me, I wouldn’t want to come in after they told me—”
“But I haven’t got your finesse,” I interrupted, crossing my legs in the chair.
“I’ll say you haven’t — nor anybody else’s!” Bernice agreed tempestuously from the doorway of her room.
I turned to Tenacity. “You see, she was in after all.” Tenacity scratched her head as though intensely surprised at this fact herself.
“Maybe I am in,” Bernice continued, “but I’m going out so fast that about all you’ll get is the breeze as I pass you by.” Whereupon she commenced putting this threat into operation by entering at one door and crossing the room diagonally toward the other, the outside one. Without looking at me. She was dressed informally for the evening, in something that had big peach-colored flowers printed all over it, and she had a little cap on made up of shiny black discs all sewn together. And she looked good to the eye — but wasn’t kind to the ear. “Never mind, stay right where you are,” she said with false solicitude. “I’ll be seeing you some other time.”
But I got in front of her just the same. “No, you’ll be seeing me now,” I said.
“I knew it would come to that,” she said. “Give them an inch and they take a yard.” And she gave Tenacity a hard, calloused laugh.
I gave Tenacity a hard, dirty look and she ambled out of the room with the cryptic remark, “I’d rather be a nun anytime.”
“What’s the matter,” I said, “ain’t I even good enough to talk to any more?” And I put my hands on her arms and turned her persuasively around the other way, away from the door. She just laughed a little more, and found a chair and sat in it, with her legs crossed up to her waist.
“Oh, it isn’t that,” she said, and waved her head wearily. “What is it, then?”
“You walk in like this, unannounced, and expect me to drop everything—”
“I phoned you first, and you weren’t in.”
“I was in,” she snapped. “I’ve been in since lunch.”
“Well, you didn’t come to the phone yourself, and the room was full of voices—”
She clenched her little fists over the arms of the chair. “They’re coming back, too. That’s why I wanted to get out. While I had the chance. I’m sick of them.” And then she said, like a sad little girl who’s been promised something three Christmases away, “I’ve been invited to a party, and I thought I’d go.”
“Who are they?” I asked. “What do you use this place for, some sort of a hangout?”
She made an upward gesture with her hand, from her chest to her chin, as though she were fed up about something. “Don’t ask me to explain,” she said indifferently.
She seemed so tired all of a sudden, so inert, sitting there like that, all dressed for going out and yet not minding terribly much whether she went or whether she didn’t. Her head was back a little ways, and her eyes were looking up at the invisible line where the ceiling met the opposite wall. She was thinking about something. Her foreshortened upper lip came down over her lower one and hid it, rouge and all, so that her mouth almost disappeared for awhile, leaving just a short pink scratch. I had never seen her like that before; so tired and all. I felt sorry for her. I went over to her and lifted one of her hands to my mouth and began to munch it. Only the slight rising and falling of the big peach flowers across her chest told that she was alive at all.
She took her hand away and let it pass gently down the side of my arm. “You’re nice, Wade,” she said. “I’m never scared with you.”
I couldn’t understand what she meant by that, but then, still without moving, she said, “I’ll have to go. You can’t stay here either.”
“Why?”
“Because you can’t. Because I don’t want you to. Because — because I still care more for you than others I know.”
“What’s the good talking, Bernice,” I said gently, “unless you say things I can understand?”
She turned and looked at me with a mocking little smile. “Do you want to go for a ride?” she said.
Thinking she was proposing it, I said, “What do you say we do?” with cheerful alacrity.
She shuddered comically. “God forbid! Just stay here on the premises about an hour longer—”
I had started to say “Will you come back?” when the speaking tube out in the foyer buzzed with alarming vehemence, as though it were about to split in two.
With that, all tiredness left her, fright took its place, and she started up from where she was sitting, caught me by the hand somehow, and had me at the door with her before I could grasp what it was all about. She opened it and listened, although there was no one there. I looked over her shoulder. A little jewel-like white light over the elevator door flashed on and twinkled impudently at us.