“Why didn’t you tell me before I left that you weren’t coming downtown today, instead of making me hold down the street corner for two solid hours waiting for you like a goddam fool!” I shouted at her.
“I was downtown, and then I came home again,” she said quietly.
“What was the bright idea of doing that? Didn’t you remember you had an appointment with me? Couldn’t you at least have gone past here and told me you were going home? What am I supposed to be, anyway, a flagpole sitter?” And more along the same lines.
Finally she said, “Oh, what do I care? I’m standing here dazed, I can hardly hear what you’re saying at all. I’m going to hang up; you better tell me first whether you’re coming home or not.”
“You talk like you were drunk,” I said to her.
“I wish I was,” she answered. “That’d be something, anyway.”
“What’s the matter, don’t you feel well?” I asked solicitously.
I heard her say to herself: “He asks me whether I feel well!” and then she did hang up. I immediately tried to get her back again, but she wouldn’t answer the operator’s calls.
So I gave up and took the subway home, wondering what had got into her now. “I know it hasn’t anything to do with me, this time,” I reasoned on the way back. “Maybe somebody she knows just died; why couldn’t she have told me over the phone just now? Or maybe she’s going down with the flu— That’d be a real treat; doctor bills at a time like this, when I’m trying to hang on to every cent I’ve got!”
I couldn’t wait until I got up the steps again, those subway steps that I seemed to spend so much of my life going up and down; and over to the place, and in the door. I could’ve saved my breath and energy: she was as well as I was. Not only that, she looked much better than she did at other times. Sartorially, if not physically. For she had on full makeup instead of just half makeup or none at all. And she had a pair of her 1920-model glass prisms dangling below her ears. And a dress that I associated vaguely with the words, “Oh, I can’t wear that; it’s too good!” And perfume escaped from her at all angles, although rather faintly, as though it had been doing so for a considerable number of hours now. All in all, her getup denoted that she aimed, or had aimed, to please and charm.
For a moment I even misled myself to the extent of thinking that I might be the object of her pleasure-giving efforts, or whatever you want to call them. But she hadn’t met me as she had promised, and somehow I had an idea that all this finery dated from earlier in the day. I knew darn well she hadn’t put it on just to greet me when I came home. Only a year ago, and I would have been open to jealousy at a juncture like this. Worrying, wondering if she had been seeing someone. The time for that was gone, though, now. She could have done what she wanted. What would I have cared any more?
“Boy, you look classy!” I remarked cordially, sticking my thumbs into my vest pockets and studying her with my elbows akimbo.
“I tried to make myself look that way today,” she said dully. “I meant to change when I got back here, and then I forgot to, I guess.”
“You act all down-in-the-mouth, though,” I remarked. “What was the matter with you over the phone just now? Why didn’t you show up today?”
“Sit down,” she said indifferently, brushing my questions aside with a limp drop of her wrist, as though they were of no moment at all. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”
Not her appearance but still her attitude, even the very way she had just seated herself sidewise on the chair and rested her forearm and her chin along the back of it, suggested a gin-soaked old scrubwoman to me. One of those old crones tired out with life and chronically stewed to the gills.
I wondered if thirty or forty years from now she was really going to wind up that way, the way she had just now struck me as seeming for a moment. I wouldn’t know her any more in those still-far-off days, and she wouldn’t know me any more, but too bad if it had to happen: the little flapper I had danced the Japanese Sandman with eight years ago! She had been the youthful of the youthful—
She began to speak.
“I went to see her today. And, honey, she was nice. I expected her to laugh at me, I expected her to make me eat dirt. And, honey, she was nice. Honey, you won’t believe me, but she was nice to me—”
I could feel my eyes growing bigger.
“—real nice to me. Honey, you’ll only laugh, I know, but we cried together, me for her and she — she for herself, I guess. But I mustn’t lose you. Honey, I mustn’t lose you.”
“Who?” I panted. “Who?”
“You. Who else? You.” She tried to stretch out her arms toward me. I pushed them aside. “No, who? Who were you with?” I could hardly talk with my windpipe all closed up.
“Bernice,” she said. And as I heard the name on her lips for the first time, but spoken so casually, as though shock or grief had turned all values upside down for her and made a name like that seem like an everyday household name to her ears, I simply sat back; I was beyond surprise, regret, humiliation, or anger. “Here,” I remember thinking, “is either an unusually wonderful person, whom I have no longer the wish nor the time to understand, or the biggest dumbbell in the world, who doesn’t deserve any better than she’s going to get.”
She smiled ruefully and said. “I wish I had worn that stocking that had the little hole in it, and left when you did this morning. I mightn’t have ever found out. But I guess it’s better that I know about it—” And looked at me almost as though expecting me to confirm her judgment in this. “That taxi driver came to the door a little while after you’d gone — you know, the one you promised to pay — and he said you knew where his stand was but you’d never come near him to pay him since that night, and he said he wasn’t going to wait any more, he’d come here to collect. I had quite an argument with him and told him he was drunk and — oh, what’s the use going into it? He didn’t purposely tell me anything, but the few things he let drop fitted in so well with what I knew already — about your staying away from me all the time and getting in wrong at the office and walking around so crazy all day yesterday and the day before — so I thought maybe it would do some good if I — had a talk with her, just had a talk with her — and at least find out what I was up against or what was going to happen to me. I found out from him where it was, and I tried to make myself look as pleasing as I could, and—” She gave a pathetic little shrug. “I drank a tablespoonful of your gin and went there—”
“Wasn’t I the one to talk to? What’s she got to do with it? What do you mean by dragging her in it for? All right! You’ll see how much you gained by it, you’ll see what good it does you!”
“It did this much good, anyway,” she said humbly, “whatever happens now, I know she won’t be to blame and I know I won’t — it’ll be all up to you, Wade.”
“You’re telling me,” I said ungraciously. And sneered. “Now just what was it you said to her makes you so sure of that? Let’s have it!”
“Oh, I didn’t walk in there like they do in the movies and say, ‘Give my back my husband!” Why, Wade, Bernice didn’t know you were married! I know she didn’t. Leaving me out of it altogether, I wouldn’t even call that fair to her herself—”