Blinney recovered nicely.
On the thirtieth day of March he took her home to Mount Vernon. Blinney was sentimental. He asked if he could carry her across the threshhold. She approved. She said she would not go in any other way. He carried her across the threshhold.
Within a month Blinney knew that it would not work. Within a month he knew of his egregious mistake. Within a month he knew that he had set, baited, and snapped a trap upon himself (as which of us has not done sometime during a lifetime)? She was slovenly. She was incapable of caring for a home. She had no interest. She drank at all hours of the day. She lay around in flimsy negligee flipping the pages of picture magazines. She did not prepare meals. She could not cook. They ate in restaurants, or, if they ate at home, Blinney would do the cooking as he had done when he was a bachelor.
There were always dishes in the sink, and the house was dirty. Before he was married, Blinney had had a woman who came in to clean four times a week. After he was married, Blinney discharged her. He was ashamed. His wife drank all day. She was capable of filthy language. She could be uproariously drunk in the afternoon. He could not have a stranger in the house. He was ashamed, and he was fearful of the possibility of gossip in the small town.
She was bored, indifferent, and lazy. She depended solely, as she had always done, upon the snare of her sexual attractiveness. Blinney still required her but panic and revulsion had returned. She neglected the house but she took meticulous care of her body. She lay in scented baths. She preened, creamed, and pomaded. Her chief interests were shopping, the beauty parlor, jazz records which she played interminably, bars and taverns in the afternoon, and nightclubs at night.
The pattern settled into mold, congealed, crystallized, fixed. They were as strangers (or as lovers living in hate). Occasionally they went out together; ate, drank, laughed, and even flirted. He detested her and detested himself when he succumbed to her and learned of the satanic thrill of spasmodic flesh-lust practiced in revulsion, despair, and self-hatred.
Thursdays and Fridays are the busiest days in all banks and The First National Mercantile, at 34th Street and 6th Avenue, was no exception. On Thursdays and Fridays Blinney was about as busy as any man who worked at First National Mercantile.
He had developed time-saving procedures. Each Monday he took home the payroll sheets of the week before, studied them, and had an approximate idea of the amounts which would be required. On Thursday at 9:05 he would call down to the vault for the approximate amount of cash in the approximate denominations customarily requisitioned by his five big Thursday accounts.
By nine-thirty, they would call in the actual amounts needed. Within his cage and behind the shatter-proof window (which he could unlock and raise and lower), he would package the payrolls during the quiet of the early morning and during breaks in the more busy hours when there was usually a long line of customers in front of his window. By twelve-thirty his payroll work was completed and the money lay in his drawer within binder-strips marked $1000, $2000, and $5000.
The business of banking at his level was unadventurous and routine; he was a glorified clerk; a sales person behind a counter dealing in currency. Between one and two o’clock in the afternoon the men would come for their parcels of money; usually men in pairs, big and burly ex-policemen, smiling, and making their jokes. They would wait in line until their turn, slip their requisitions through the slot beneath the window, make their first joke, and wait.
He would raise the window, accept their briefcase, neatly stack the packages of money within its recess, listen to another joke, return the briefcase, lower his window, and see them again the next week, hopeful for a better joke. He was not impressed with himself, his business, or the high adventure it entailed.
And so, on the fifth day of May, at one o’clock, when the phone beside him tinkled, he lifted the receiver without enthusiasm. Flatly he said, “Hello?”
The female voice said, “Mr. Blinney?”
“This is he,” he said.
“Adrienne Moore.”
“Who?” he said.
“Adrienne Moore. This is Mr. Blinney?”
His voice took on timbre. “Oh yes. Of course! Gee, Miss Moore. So good of you to call.” But the line of customers stretched in front of him, impatiently buzzing.
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything,” she said.
“As a matter of fact, you are,” he said. “May I call you back later?”
“Yes, of course. Sorry to have been of trouble.”
“No trouble. No trouble at all.”
“I’m in the phone book, Mr. Blinney. The address is Washington Mews. I’ll be in all day.”
“I’ll call you back. Thank you for calling.”
“Oh, not at all. Good-bye, Mr. Blinney.”
“Good-bye, Miss Moore.”
And as he cashed a check for a beaming rotund lunch-hour lady-customer, hope thrilled within him; there welled within him, unaccountably, an intuitive presendment of succor.
He called her, from a phone booth, at five-thirty. By then, he had made up his mind to skip, for the first time, target practice at the Gun Club. He had not talked with another woman, alone, since the advent of Evangeline Ashley. He had not talked with another woman, alone, since the trap had closed upon him, since despair had become a part of him, since his life, in so short a time, had narrowed to a sense-dulled despondent mechanical existence, somehow incomprehensible.
He remembered her, vividly. He remembered Adrienne Moore. He remembered the soft, feminine, sympathetic beauty, despite the drunkenness of that night, and despite the then overwhelming presence of Evangeline Ashley. He remembered the soft outlines of her face. He remembered her sweet smile. He remembered the muted, melodious, deep-toned, cultured voice.
And he remembered the respect she had engendered within him. Respect. Respect was a part of love. Respect had always been a part of his dream of love. Respect! How mad can you get? Respect! — his dream of respect — the woman on the pedestal — and he had married Evangeline Ashley!
He called, from a phone booth, at five-thirty. He asked Miss Moore to dinner and she accepted. He said he would call for her at seven o’clock. She said that would be perfectly lovely and he thanked her and he hung up. Promptly at seven o’clock he presented himself at her house in Washington Mews near Greenwich Village, but they did not go out for dinner.
She answered his ring, opened the door, and invited him in. She wore black pumps, black tapered slacks, and a black sleeveless sweater. She was tall and slender and well-figured and haughty of carriage, darkly smooth-skinned, high-colored in visage, high-hipped, round-armed, delicate-fingered, red-lipped, and tousle-haired.
“Hi,” she said in her serious deep voice. “So good to see you.”
“Hello, Miss Moore,” he said.
“Come in. Please do come in.”
He entered into a large living room which contained one of the rarities of homes in New York: a wood-burning fireplace — which was burning wood. It was a beautiful room, the walls entirely of a warm thin-stripped wood, the ceiling of a lighter wood with inlaid designs. She took his hat and said, “Would you like a Martini, Mr. Blinney?”
“Yes, thank you.”
She poured gin and vermouth and strirred with a long cocktail spoon. “You’re probably wondering about my motives,” she said. “I still want to do you, and I’d like to start tonight, so, by your leave, I took the liberty of preparing a bit of dinner which we’ll eat in. Was I too hold?”
“No, no, not at all.”
She smiled. “You wouldn’t think me an aggressive sort, now would you, Mr. Blinney?”