The driver was one of those nervous New York types who believe in round comers and can only see green, never red. That was all right. No matter haw fast he went, he couldn’t go fast enough for me. I had a feeling then that if we had gone into something and I had been smashed up, my heart would have leaped out of my breast and gone on to her alone, with the hundred dollars wrapped around it. But we got there with me still all around my heart, and the hundred in my pocket. The driver took half of the extra fifteen, and I realized that I had no right to argue with him, because after all, I was paying with another man’s money. “I could’ve got ten tickets on your account.” he explained. I contented myself with remarking, “I only wanted to hire your cab, not buy it,” and ran in the doorway. He seemed to think I was running indoors because I was afraid of him, and called after me, “Come back and say that to my face.” I answered by making a noise with my mouth that really belonged someplace else. Thus we parted dissatisfied with one another.
The young, rotund doorman was busy on the floor with a pail and mop. He looked up with an impersonal scowl and complained, “You tell those ladies up there, if any more of ’em are gonna get sick, to get it over with up on the roof or else wait’ll they get out on the street, and not make any more midway stops. This is the third time tonight I’ve been over this territory!”
“Is the one I brought with me, the one that did the dance down here, still there?” I asked him eagerly.
“Don’t ask me to keep tabs on ’em,” he said aggrievedly. “They’ll be coming down in parachutes yet! The only tenants in the building that haven’t complained about the noise is the couple that went to Greenwich over the weekend. The station house on Fifty-Third is so tired of getting calls from here that they won’t even answer any more.” Which argued either that the party had gotten beyond all control since my leaving it or else that he was subject to flights of vivid imagery.
I got the elevator, which unfortunately he had not been able to attend to yet. A vanity compact had been stepped on and burst open in the corner, spraying flowery pink powder over everything. There was also an empty bottle rocking about the floor like on the deck of a boat at sea. And one of the mirrors and the plush seat at the back of the car had something much worse the matter with them. All of which did not make for a pleasant upward journey.
I crossed the roof and entered the bungalow expecting to see some Babylonian orgy in progress, according to the doorman’s account. But either he had been carried away by righteous indignation or the chief offenders were those who had left, because there was far less noise than when I had left three-quarters of an hour (or was it a couple of years?) before. Two or three nondescript males of the parasitical variety were still present as long as the last bottle of liquor remained. One had already drunk himself into a doze in a chair in the comer, and the other two, without wasting any unnecessary words, were fast approaching that stage. Jerry was sitting on the floor with her head thrown back resting against the seat of a chair, and her co-hostess Marion was standing quietly looking out of the window.
They turned and looked when I came in. Marion stayed indifferently on at the window, but Jerry scrambled up and came over to me. “What happened?” she said in a low, amused voice. “Couldn’t you get the money?”
“I got it, all right,” I said ominously. “Where’s Bernice?”
“She’ll be right out,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”
“Wait a minute,” I said, catching her by the arm. “Tell me first — what went on? She... she waited for me, didn’t she?”
Jerry screwed up her eyes and smiled at me indolently. I never saw her again after that night, but whenever I thought about her, I saw that lazy, murky smile she gave me then. “Oh, she got tired of that game,” she said. “And a hundred years from now, it won’t make a bit of difference, anyway.”
I took her hand in both of mine and wrung it. “Oh, thanks, Jerry!” I whimpered. “You’re swell! Now I feel like I was alive again.”
But she kept on smiling, didn’t stop smiling a minute, and all the way to the door she kept looking back over her shoulder at me, smiling, still smiling. “A precious little thing called love,” I heard her say.
Marion came over to me then and said: “By the way! Does Bernice ever get any letters postmarked Detroit?”
“How should I know?” I shrugged. “I’m not her janitor.”
“With handwriting like that of a ten-year-old kid?” she went on.
“What’re you getting at, anyway?” I said gruffly.
“If you’re ever sore at her,” she persisted, “and you want to get her all scratched up by a girlie that knows how, just you pick up the phone and tell me you found a letter postmarked Detroit in her mailbox.”
“Since when is the population of Detroit just one?” I wanted to know.
She turned around and stalked away again, as Bernice came out, followed by Jerry. My eyes lighted up as they found her, as though I had two batteries in my head for just such an occasion and, like a spotlight on a stage or like a lighthouse at sea, threw a halo around her to the exclusion of everyone, everything else, in the room. And every peach-colored flower on her dress seemed to glow back at me in the iridescent haze of love that drenched her. But she must have had an impalpable umbrella up, for she was as cool and arrogant as could be. “Well, Wade,” she said, “back on the job again?”
I felt as though I had lost the Bernice I knew in the shuffle and was taking a stranger home.
“Good night, Marion,” she called out politely, “and thank you for the swell party.”
Marion never even turned her head, but her answer came at once, as though she had been plotting it for some time. “You’re welcome,” she said huskily, “and that goes for anything I’ve got. And if you’re in touch with Sonny Boy at all, why, tell him I was asking for him.”
Jerry, who had stayed behind at the door Bernice had just come through and seemed to be standing there listening carefully to something, raised a finger warningly and said, “You’d better go, Bernice. See you some more.” So we walked out of the bungalow together.
While we were standing out on the roof waiting for the elevator, I heard a sound of hammering coming from inside. It was not very distinct, quite muffled. “Sounds like they’re beginning to tap-dance again,” I remarked. Bernice said, “No, that’s some drunk who fell asleep in there; someone must have locked the door on him accidentally.” But she moved around to the other side of me and kept digging at the elevator door with her fingernails before it was ready to open.