Chapter Four
“I came back to return your key to you,” I said.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” she said. “You could have left it downstairs with the doorman just as well, couldn’t you? I happen to know you stopped by twice yesterday and once the day before — asking about the weather, I suppose.”
I laid the key down on the table beside me.
“I wanted to be good and sure you got it yourself.”
She sighed. “In the face, I suppose, like the pocketbook the other night.”
“You got off easy,” I told her. “I should have broken your arms for you.”
“Houdini,” she remarked to herself.
“No — just one of those that are born every minute.”
“And since this seems to be the day for returning presents or what have you,” she went on, “I have something for you, before I forget it.” She opened a drawer and took out the folded telegram envelope I had put the money in three nights before. “Returned with thanks,” she commented, and held it out to me.
I made a pass with my hand at it. “Give it to Tenacity.”
“Tenacity gets paid good wages.” she informed me dryly. “It’s yours; you can’t pull that millionaire-playboy stunt while you’re wearing that kind of a suit — every time you turn around, I can see my reflection on the back of it.” And stabbed the envelope toward me once again, less patiently than before.
“It isn’t mine,” I scowled ungraciously.
“You gave it to me, didn’t you?” she told me.
“I gave it to you, all right,” I said, “but if you must know, I held somebody up for it Saturday night, so either keep it or stuff it down the sink. I don’t care what you do with it!”
She didn’t say anything for such a long time, just looked at me, while I kept thinking: “Dumbbell! What’d you have to tell her that for? Now wait’ll you hear the flock of insults she’s getting ready to unload on you.”
Finally she said in such a funny, quiet way: “Is that true, Wade?” I didn’t answer. “Is that how you got that money? You did that for me, Wade?” And kept looking at me with eyes that weren’t hard any more.
She spun the envelope away over her shoulder with a reckless sort of gesture, as though it wasn’t important any more one way or the other, as though there was something else she wanted to talk about now. She came closer, and put her hands on my arms and shook me a little bit back and forth, just a very little, hardly noticeable bit.
“If I could only live up to you,” she said, “what a girl I’d be!”
I could feel little pinpoints of sweat coming out on my forehead, and I said, “Don’t fool me anymore; you’ve fooled me so much — I can’t stand it if you fool me anymore! It may be fun for you, but it’s awful for me. It’s inhuman and unkind. We should only suffer pain in dentists’ chairs and on operating tables, Bernice, and not day and night, night and day, without a letup ever. It can’t be done; it shouldn’t be done.”
She was the maternal Bernice this time; a madonna of tenderness and consolation. Oh, I found all things in her. She seemed older than me for a little while that afternoon; our profane love took on a semblance of sanctity. Her cheek was pressed to mine, cool, caressing, reassuring; our intertwined fingers were held before our faces in what unconsciously resembled an attitude of prayer. From the sky outside, the sun pierced the windowpanes and shot downward toward our feet in thin, golden tubes that were like the pipes of an organ. We neither of us moved, we each of us heard music and were fanned by benign wings.
“Bernice, Bernice, I’m not afraid any more. My love for you is stronger than anything you can do. That was the crisis, just past. Now it’s immune, now nothing can affect it ever again; it goes right through to the end. So live as you’ve lived and do as you’ve done, and don’t think twice about it — ’cause always, always, from now on, you’ll be right and I’ll be wrong. And if you do things that seem strange to me or new to me, the error is mine, not yours. Just give me a moment’s breathing spell each time, and then the strange won’t be strange and the new will be customary. Vice and crime and all those other words — how do I know when to tack them on and when to leave them off? There’s just you, and just me, and the rest is none of my business.”
“My baby,” she hummed, “my boy, my lover. I’ve loved you on and off now since I first began to really know you. Even Saturday night, when all that happened, I still loved you, Wade, I still loved you. In that room, up on that chair, I saw your face looking at me. Across the whole room I saw your face and no one else’s; saw you trying to get near me, knew that I was torturing you — and yet, Wade, I couldn’t get off that chair. No one made me get up there, no one would have stopped me from getting down. And yet I couldn’t, I tell you, I couldn’t! There was a scream way down inside me, a louder scream than all the noise in the room — oh, you would have heard it so clearly. “Wade! I am going to get down. Look! Watch! I am getting down.” But it couldn’t get to my lips, I couldn’t bring it to my mouth. I didn’t want to smile — and yet there I was braying with laughter. I didn’t want to take my dress off — oh, God, I didn’t want to after I saw your face — and yet I felt my own hands reach up to my shoulders and snap open the fasteners. Oh, Wade, are there two of us in each of us, a good and a bad — or what is it? What makes us do the very things we don’t want to, know we shouldn’t?”
We were silent for a long time, both of us. Almost it seemed as though we didn’t have to speak to know what we were saying to each other. Then she went on: “The moment after you’d gone out the door, the moment after you couldn’t see me any more, the moment that it was too late to ease your pain a little — I pulled up my dress around me like a flash of lightning, I got off that chair with a jump! Ask Jerry, ask Marion, ask anyone who was there what I said; they all heard me. I called out, ‘All bets are off!’ Some of them thought I was just trying to save face, I guess. One or two came up to me later on, on the sly, when they thought no one was looking, and tried to speak their pieces. I took a hundred dollars from the first one just as a joke and faked an appointment with him for the next evening, which I never kept. The second one followed me into another room when I went to get my things just before you came back. He took my pocketbook from me, opened it, and put the hundred in. He was drunk and couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, so when Jerry came to tell me you were there, I sneaked out and locked the door on him. That was the hammering you heard, remember? That’s all there was to it,” she said. “It was bad enough; but it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”
I was convinced — that it wasn’t true as she told it; that the true version was the one that had gnawed at my vitals for three whole days — from the moment I had found the money in her pocketbook until the moment I had come back here today. But how easy to forgive her when the lie was for my sake!
Or maybe this was the culminating irony of it all — that having believed her each and all of the many times that she was lying to me, when it didn’t matter much to her whether I believed or not, now at last, when she was telling the truth and wanted to be believed (for there were tears in her eyes) — she failed utterly. I was inalterably convinced that she had lain with some one in that side room in Jerry’s apartment.
But whether I believed her or not had nothing to do with my loving her; my love for her had now reached a stage where it could forgive anything she did. Only, perhaps, it was forgiving her once more than she needed to be forgiven.