Or else had become conscience-stricken at the eleventh hour at the thought of what she would be doing to Maxine, and decided to leave me behind to her. Or else had just been having a little indoor sport all these weeks, and in the end had gone off with somebody else entirely, letting me hold the bag. This last pleasurable theory was the worst of the lot. It produced a feeling something like taking a red-hot bath with a sunburned back — and scrubbing with a currycomb. But, I told myself, writhing there, what definite proof have you that such couldn’t be the case? What do you really know about her private life, after all? She’s kept you in the dark from beginning to end — told you never to ask for her on the wire if a man’s voice answered, pulled you down emergency staircases with her to keep you from seeing who called on her, cried about something like a child with the colic the night you brought her away from Jerry’s party, gone into convulsions of fear because you told another girl that she was corresponding with someone in Detroit. The whole thing smells fishy from beginning to end. Maybe that Marion person had reason to get jealous, at that; maybe there was more truth in it than you know; maybe there was something between her and this Sonny Boy individual, and maybe that’s where she’s gone right now — to Detroit to be with him!
And then a glance at the long, wide vanity table — which was only a couple of feet away from where I was sitting — but a glance below it instead of above it as heretofore, sent all my suspicions and torments buzzing away from me like a cloud of mosquitoes when some one has lighted a punk-stick. Three pieces of her baggage were standing there side by side, all latched and strapped and ready to be carried downstairs — a big valise, a much smaller one, and a round, shiny, patent-leather thing, looking like a drum, that was probably a hat- or shoe-box.
I could have jumped up in the air and yelled with surprised relief, felt like kissing the neat little “B.P.” marked on each one. I told myself how low I was to have even doubted her for a minute, much less credited her with all kinds of tortuous machinations the way I had. “You have everything going just the way you want it to.” I upbraided myself disgustedly, “and instead of being satisfied, you have to go out of your way and look for trouble!” She had probably only just stepped outside for a minute, to get something to eat most likely. Although — I had never known her not to have it sent up from the drugstore downstairs, and tonight in particular, when she claimed she was too busy even to come down and speak to me on the phone, you’d think she would have — oh, well, some other reason then; she would be back in a minute; she had even left the apartment door unlocked.
I shifted to a more relaxed posture on the chaise longue, raised one knee to scratch my calf, put it down again, lighted another cigarette for lack of something better to do — my second since I had come in here. Thought I’d cut down on them once the two of us were settled out there; no sense in lighting one every five minutes the way I did nowa — I had been there longer than that, though; had been there about ten or twelve minutes now, I guessed. I looked over at the clock and — that thing must be wrong! Was that ten past nine, or had it stopped at quarter to two that afternoon and stayed that way? I got up and took a closer look. More than ten past, twelve past — and I had been up there half an hour! If she didn’t get back inside of the next five minutes we were just going to make that train by the skin of our teeth — if at all! Until we got the bags downstairs, and by the time we got down to Forty-Second Street through all the traffic! I started pacing back and forth. Wished she’d hurry, what was she doing, wished she’d hurry! The radio in there was beginning to get on my nerves; it had played nothing but one dance tune after another ever since I had been up there. I liked quieter pieces — and I didn’t like music of any kind with my timetables, what was more.
I strode in there to turn it off, put up the room light, which she had left off when she went out, and — there she was!
Chapter Seven
Gone from me, and just when I thought I had her closest. Turned from something beautiful into something unmentionable, filthy, fit only to be burned or hurriedly smothered with earth and hidden from sight. The mouth that had known how to smile so beautifully remained open now, where death had gone slinking in. The hands that had roamed in my hair were just white things now on the floor. The blue dress (the omen fulfilled!) that had encircled a living body’s perfection of form, remained now to cover a carcass.
The icy coating of shock that had coagulated all over me held fast for a moment or two — I even had time to do an unnaturally natural thing: reach out and silence the obscene radio — before it shattered abruptly, and red-hot knives of pain began cutting in at me.
I did things that the sane don’t do; got down on my knees, got down on my hands, lay there on my face and gnawed the down of the rug, writhing with the agony that has no seat, knows no physical cause, cannot be stemmed. Tears bubbled from my eyes as though they were percolaters, my nose ran, saliva dripped slowly from between my lips, a drop at a time. My heart pumped under me like a frantic, imprisoned bird caught between me and the floor. I died a hundred times where she had died just once.
The phenomena of grief are banal, after all. Who, seeing some one he loves lie dead, hasn’t spoken aloud, hasn’t pleaded to her to come back? I did all those things. “Bernice, can’t you hear me? It’s Wade, your miserable Wade you’re doing this to. Open your eyes — just for a minute — then you can close them again. Just give me one more look, one more smile, before you go.” I drew nearer and nearer to her, like a human being turned alligator. I kissed her at last, and the kiss brought me only horror and recoil. I cried out sharply at the coldness, the goneness of her, and leaped to my feet and drew back quivering. I stared reproachfully over at the thing lying there that had just tricked me like that.
I knew I hadn’t kissed her just now; that was never Bernice. But where was she, where had she gone? Oh, more almost than I wanted her back again, I wanted an explanation now, I wanted to be told. It was the finality of it that appalled me so, the utter, utter irretrievability. Oh, how much kinder it would have been, how much more consoling, to have belonged to one of those old, gone generations — and been able to kid myself that I would find her again the day I went myself. But knowing that the soil, the earth that trees take root in, never, never can take wings and rise and speak with a human voice — what was there left for me, what solace had I in the world?
What heaven was there for me, what haven, what hope? Our heaven would have been in California, with the things we knew of — the Chevrolet, and she, and I. There would never be any other; we had had our chance, we had muffed it, and — the rest was oblivion.