I didn’t pull the door smartly enough to after me, and it slipped back and stayed on a crack, so after I’d punched the button for the elevator, I stepped back to it to close it more firmly, and glancing through into our living room, saw her in there with her head buried in her arms on the sill before her, crying soundlessly to herself. I felt mean about it for a while afterward, but I couldn’t see what there was to do about it even if I had felt inclined to do something about it. “She ought to save her tears,” I told myself, “she’s going to need them a few months from now.”
I went into a lunchroom near where we lived, collected far more unsavory dishes than were necessary on a tin tray, and sat myself down at a table to eat and think it over, commingling the two processes without any difficulty on account of being, as Maxine had said, a man.
Bernice’s attitude occupied me principally. Had she really meant that when she said that if Maxine could persuade me into not seeing any more of her, it was all right with her? “She couldn’t have really meant it,” I assured myself. “She can’t possibly be that indifferent if she’s ready and willing to throw everything over and go away with me!” But the gruesome thought kept presenting itself: “Suppose she’s just been stringing you along, taking you for a sleigh ride, as they say; suppose she never intended to go away with you from the beginning, and that’s why she’s so complacent about Maxine putting the crusher on you if she can?” It was all I could do to keep away from the telephone and sound her out on it then and there. But something told me it would be wiser not to ring her up right on top of Maxine’s visit that afternoon. “She may be sore about it; it may have riled her a little, even if she didn’t let on to Maxine. And you never can tell about women — she may take it all out on me, if I ring her up right now. Better if we both sleep over it; better if I wait till tomorrow.” And I consoled myself in this wise: Bernice hadn’t let a word drop about our intentions to Maxine, she had confined the discussion (from what Maxine told me) to what had gone oh between us in the past few weeks; didn’t that argue that she had been acting a part to bluff Maxine, that she had no idea of relinquishing our scheme of going off together? I felt that it did, and felt a whole lot better about it than I had at any time since the bad news had broken two or three hours before.
“I’ll make it my business to see her tomorrow,” I said, slipping spoonfuls of rice pudding and raisins in and out of my mouth with relentless accuracy, “and I bet I’ll find out I’m right!”
Maxine was in bed when I went back, and though I felt sure she wasn’t asleep, her eyes were closed, so I didn’t speak to her. I noticed a little shiny thing, like a pearl, under one of her eyelids when I put the light on. A tear, I guess.
Chapter Five
I didn’t bother phoning Bernice the next day but went right up there to see her a little before two. I felt unusually cheerful, as though Maxine’s visit and the revelation of the day before had cleared the air for all parties concerned. It didn’t feel as though I were double-crossing her any more to come up here — although I hadn’t told her that I was going to, just the same.
“Hello, hand-shoes,” I greeted Tenacity, “is my lady in?”
Tenacity said she was eating her lunch, and when Bernice wanted to know who it was through the door, called back with unreproved familiarity, “Wade!”
She was sitting at her vanity table when I went in, or whatever you call those low things with triple mirrors and no drawers of any kind under them, and had all her beautification implements pushed aside to make room for a little tray containing a cucumber sandwich and a glass of frothy pink stuff that I took to be a strawberry soda. She pointed the second cucumber sandwich toward me, not offering it to me but indicating me by it, and waiting until she had finished chewing and had swallowed, remarked: “I thought you’d be around today!” At the same time, there was a mischievous, bantering light in her eyes that boded well.
“Sit down,” she said, pointing the sandwich at a chaise lounge. “Be through in a minute. I never do this, but I didn’t have any breakfast this morning.”
I had made up my mind before coming not to say anything to her until she had mentioned the subject first. About Maxine’s visit, I mean. Because, for all she knew, Maxine mightn’t have even told me and I might still be in the dark about it, so I wanted to hear what she had to say first. Therefore I made casual conversation while she bit her way busily through the second sandwich and sucked up the pink stuff through two straws.
“Gee, it’s a pipe of a day today, gold dust ’round your feet. You shoulda been out hours ago. What was the matter, hangover from last night?”
“No,” she said, “I simply overslept. Tenacity never wakes me, you know, and for the first time since I’ve been living in this place, the phone didn’t ring once all morning! Don’t know what to put it to. I even had her call the operator and have it tested, I was so sure it must be out of order. Nothing the matter with it, just an off-day for me, I guess.” This while she bent her head forward over the tray and the pinkish stuff drew together at the bottom of the glass and then was gone. “Not that it worries me; some relief, let me tell you. ’Jever try answering a phone with your eyes closed and a lot of cobwebs over your mouth?” She threw her arms back over her chair and stretched, turning her wrists out, then in again and beat them idly together. “And I never yet got in the tub but what I got a call and had to hop out again. Didn’t seem like a bath at all today. Light me one too.” She straightened up in her chair once more, tumbled her hair over her eyes, and blew smoke through it. She looked like a haystack beginning to catch fire. “By the way,” she said, turning half-around toward me, “I don’t know whether you know it or not, I had a visitor yesterday.” And her eyes crinkled mischievously at me.
Here it comes, I told myself; let’s have it! And let’s hear what really went on between the two of them.
“What’s the catch?” I said innocently. “That’s no event in your young life, is it?”
“Wade,” she smiled, shaking a finger at me, “you’ve been holding out on me.”
“I have? What do you mean?”
“You see, in Europe,” she laughed, “the married men wear rings just like the women do. It has its advantages.”
“What’s it all about, Bernice?” I said genially. “Let me in on it.”
She reached across, picked up my hand, and looked at it ostentatiously, turning it this way and that. “Tell the truth, Wade,” she said then, cocking her brows at me, “are you married?”
“Yes, sure I am,” I said readily. “Why?”
“You wouldn’t fool a girl, would you?”
“I wouldn’t fool a girl like you.”
“Well, do you think that’s nice?” she asked. “Why didn’t you tell me that all along?”
I knew all this was just byplay. “ ’Cause you didn’t ask me,” I said.
“We’ll let that go,” she laughed. “Anyway, your wife was here to see me yesterday.”
“All right, I’m listening.”
She glanced over my shoulder. “Close the door,” she murmured.
When I had returned to the chaise longue once more, she went on, “Say, Charlie, my boy, does it take a stick of dynamite to jar you, or didn’t you quite get what I just said to you?”
“You say Maxine was here to see you,” I said, enjoying myself hugely.
“Yes, Maxine,” she said. “And let me tell you she’s a darn nice kid, too.”