Bernice didn’t say a word to me going down in the elevator, which the indefatigable doorman had rendered habitable once more, nor in the lobby either, although she turned and playfully blew a kiss to his recumbent, inanimate form.
On the sidewalk she inhaled the fresh air, which the rain had made cool and sweet, deeply and blissfully. “Wade,” she said, “have you got enough money for a taxi? I mean to ride around the park in a couple of times? I’m afraid I can’t go home just yet — there might be some one still up at the place.”
We got a taxi at the next corner, went up to Sixtieth, and cut into the park from there. The gasoline fumes from all the other cars doing the same thing that we were hung over the trees like a diaphanous mantilla, and along every driveway stoplights were strung like a necklace of little red beads.
“Honey,” I said, “what’s the matter? Don’t you own the place you live in?”
“I do.” she said, “Wade, but it’s all mixed up—”
“Why should any one be there if you don’t want them to?”
“I just furnish the background,” she said. “They’re having a conference.”
“Who is?” I asked.
“Nobody,” she answered, and turned her head away.
I reached out and brought her hand over to me and kissed the fingers one by one. “Bernice—” I started to say.
She turned her head my way again and said through clenched teeth. “If you say one word about love to me right now, if you put your hands anywhere near me, if I feel your breath on my neck, I’m going to swing out with all the strength God put in my arm and hit you so hard in the eye you’ll never forget it!” And she threw her head back, stared glassily up at the roof of the cab, and moaned like a person in unbearable pain, “Oh, God, how I hate love! I hate it, hate it!”
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked alarmedly, “what are you getting hysterical like this for?”
But I couldn’t make her stop crying, panting through a shower of tears that she hated love, wanted to die, wished she hadn’t been born.
The driver kept turning his head around anxiously, wondering what I was doing to her, I suppose. Finally, when I saw that I couldn’t control her in any way, I asked him to take us out of the park by the nearest exit and stop at the first drugstore he came to.
When he did, I had him go in and bring her out a glassful of spirits of ammonia mixed with water, being afraid to let her sit in the cab alone if I went in myself and being unable to get her to come in with me, no matter how I coaxed.
When she was quiet once more, I had him take the empty glass back and I sat with my arm around her. “I’m not making love to you, Bernice. Just lean against my shoulder like this until you feel better.”
“You’re a good scout, Wade,” she said, still shuddering a little from the sobbing.
I took a chance and said. “Wade loves you, anyway. You know that, don’t you?” But the phobia or whatever it was had passed, and she just lay there quietly in my arms without attempting to “swing at my eye.” Her knees were drawn up close to her body, and I covered them for her, and gave her form a little tug nearer me.
“I’m sorry I let it all out on you,” she said, as the driver started the engine again. “If I hadn’t been pawed to death the whole evening long, I wouldn’t have gotten into a state like that.”
“Do you want me to take you home now, Bernice?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said with a melancholy air.
When I was paying the cab she said, “You can stay if you want, Wade. You don’t mind using the living room for tonight, do you?”
“All right with me, honey,” I said.
When we got, in the place looked as though a grand rehearsal of the Battle of the Marne had been staged there. Bernice acted as though she were used to finding it like that, or else she was too tired by what she had just been through to notice. Not a light had been lowered, not a thing put back where it belonged. The drinking glasses had been used for ashes, and the ashtrays for cuspidors. A heart-shaped taffeta pillow still bore the imprint of two heels, and a cigar stump that was now merely a cylinder of fine white ash had burned its way through one of the roses of the embroidered shawl and soldered itself to the varnish of the radio cabinet.
“Nice friends you have,” I commented disgustedly.
“Friends?” she answered cynically. “What makes you think they’re friends of mine?” She took off the little cap she had worn all along, sewn with little shiny things, and let it drop on the floor. Then she braced one foot behind the other, and pulled her heel out of her slipper, and when she had repeated the process with the second foot, she let both slippers stand there where they were and walked into the bedroom in her stockinged feet, tossing her little black silk evening bag at the seat of a chair as she went by.
I picked it up when she was gone and tucked it under my arm, and I took the hundred dollars out of my pocket and put it on the table, and looked around for an envelope. I found a yellow one with a little transparent “window” in it, belonging to a telegram that some one must have opened, lying on the floor, and I took a pencil out of my pocket and leaned over the table and wrote on it: “For you, Bernice, from Wade.” Then I put the money in it and folded it over, and opened her little evening bag to put it in. But the marcasite button that I took to be the catch must have been just an ornament at the bottom of it, because while I was fooling with it trying to get it to work, the bag opened at the other end and emptied itself out on the floor. So I swore softly and got down on my knees and started to pick all her little things up: her lipstick and her key and her nail polish and her rabbit’s foot and Lord knows what else. And four fifty-dollar bills, lying there like yellow autumn leaves. I put everything conscientiously back again and put my envelope in on top of it all, and then I closed the bag and went to the door of her bedroom with it. She had left the door ajar, but I rapped on the frame of the doorway without looking in at all. “What is it, Wade?” I heard her call from somewhere inside the room.
“Come out here and find out,” I said shortly.
Presently the door slipped back, and she stood there looking at me.
“You left your bag out here,” I said, and flicked my finger against it as though it were unfit to be touched.
“Oh, you could have left it th—” she started to say.
“Where’d you get the other two hundred from?” I lashed out at her.
“Why,” she said with a peculiar smile, “don’t you realize? You were gone a long time tonight.”
I hit her with it in the face three times, back and forth and then back again, and then I let go of it and flung it at her, and it fell at her feet. She never moved, and as I turned my back to her, I thought I saw her nod her head ever so slightly, as though she understood, as though she agreed with me.
I walked out of the apartment and went out into the street once more. I remembered how I had nearly done this same thing the night I first met her, because she had insulted me about some ring or other she was wearing at the time. But this was different, this was forever, this was good-bye and be damned to you. There was no word for her any more in my vocabulary after what she had done tonight. You can cherish a loathsome toad, grow fond of a snake, tolerate a buzzard that feeds on the dead — but this! — oh, this was good-bye and never again. She had simply put herself beyond the pale. I stood on the street corner in the moonlight, I remember, and covered my eyes with my hands.