“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I seem to have forgotten.”
“Come off, baby.” They were sitting in his car in the street outside the last place they had been, and he turned and stared at her in the dim light that barely reached them from the nearest lamp. “You trying to say you don’t even know where you live?”
“It’s only temporary, of course. As I said, I forget things for a while, and then later, after thinking calmly, I remember again.”
“Well, start thinking.”
“It won’t do any good immediately. I can tell you that from experience. In the morning it will come to me clearly, but it isn’t at all likely to come before.”
Lifting his hands, he let them drop in a little gesture of despair.
“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Jesus.”
“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I’d hate for you to be angry with me.”
“I’m not angry.”
“You were kind to help me look for Milton, even though I didn’t want to, and now I’m only making trouble for you, and what I really want to do is make you happy. It’s very odd. Since the moment I saw you and the bartender told me about your heart and all, I’ve felt a great wish to make you happy.”
“Never mind. Just tell me where the hell you want to go.”
“Well, I could go to a hotel or someplace, of course, but it would be much more pleasant if I could stay with you.”
He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of her, but all he did was trap her image behind his lids, and he cursed himself for the fool he was going to be. However she looked, however sad and lost and lovely, she was a tramp and trouble and not for him, a dipsomaniac and probably a nymphomaniac and God only knew what other kinds of maniac all told. What he ought to do, he knew very well, was take her at once to the nearest hotel, but what he wanted to do was take her home, and in the end he did what he wanted. He opened his eyes and started the car and drove to the place in which he lived, which was a large room on the third floor of a house not far from Washington Square.
As for her, she didn’t know precisely where she went or how she got there, but her senses had the extraordinary sensitivity they sometimes had in dreams, and she seemed to see and feel and hear with exaggerated intensity and excitement. She was aware of the house and the room and a bed in the room and of a sonata played softly again and again in darkness by someone on a record. Most of all, in the bed, she was aware of his thin body with its bad heart.
Chapter 4
She awoke naked in bed and opened her eyes and was warned at once by a faded pattern of paper on the ceiling that it was not her own bed in her own room in her own apartment. Closing her eyes again, she said to herself in the simple, primer-like sentences that one might use in speaking to a child: “I am Charity McAdams Farnese. I am married to Oliver Alton Farnese. I live in an apartment on Park Avenue, and I didn’t go home last night.”
There was nothing new about this, for she had wakened many times in strange places to repeat the little formula of identification, but this time, though it was nothing new, there was something different. All the other times, it had required several minutes of thinking before she could remember where she had been and was, whom she had been with and was with, but now, this time in this bed, she knew at once what had happened and who was lying beside her. There was another difference, too. The other times, at least most of the other times recently, she had been assailed by regret and suicidal despair, but this time, knowing everything instantly, she felt no regret at all and was almost happy. It was remarkable, really, how well she felt.
Except for her head, of course. It was impossible to feel entirely well when every throb of the tiny pulses in her temples was like a detonation. Besides the detonations, she could hear another sound, to which she listened., and after a few moments she realized that it was the soft, measured sound of the breathing of Joe Doyle. Opening her eyes for the second time since waking, she turned her head slowly on its pillow and looked at him. He was lying on his back, and his eyes were closed, and on his face was an expression of intense concentration, as if sleep were achieved only by the greatest effort under constant tension. He was covered by a sheet to the waist, but the upper part of his body was exposed, and she could see clearly, in the lateral wall of the side nearer her, every one of his seven true ribs. She counted them slowly, forming the shape of the numbers silently with her lips and pointing with a finger at each rib, moving the finger slowly with the counting across the intercostal spaces. She felt, for his ribs and his entire thorax, a passionate tenderness, and this was still another difference between the way she was at this awakening and the way she had been at other awakenings for a long time, for neither passion nor tenderness were emotions she ordinarily was capable of feeling until after quite a long period of adjustment to another day. He looked so very spare, his skin so thinly spread upon his bones, that she had the notion that it would be possible, if she kept staring steadily long enough, to see deeply into him, through skin and beyond bones to the heart that throbbed like a poisonous monster in its dark pericardial cavity. Examining him so, with the extraordinary passionate tenderness in which there was beginning to be a stirring of excitement, she wanted to roll over facing him on her side and take him into her arms, but she didn’t do it, in spite of wanting to very much, because be would surely awaken if she did, and she had already decided that it would be better if he did not waken until after she was gone.
Last night she had thought that she would never want to leave him, at least not permanently, and today she actually didn’t want to leave him, at least not yet, but anyone with any experience knew that what one wanted and what was practical were often entirely different things, and this difference was especially apparent the day after the night. Perhaps she would go on wanting him after leaving him, and if this turned out to be so, she might possibly come back to find him, but it wasn’t probable, and it was exceptional that she wanted him even now, having wakened beside him in the bed. Usually, when she got to drinking and going places, she would also get to wanting a man, and then she would find one and have him, and afterward, the next morning or even the same night, she would be filled with loathing for the man, whoever he was, and it was impossible for her ever to want that particular man again.
There had been two previous exceptions to this since she became Charity McAdams Farnese instead of just Charity McAdams, and they had both turned out badly, and the way they had turned out badly was very odd. She had met these men at different times in different places, and later, after she had been with each of them the first time, she discovered that she wanted to be with them again, and she had gone back and been with them, several times with each, and in both cases they had been severely beaten by someone, without apparent reason. Not just beaten up in the ordinary way that men sometimes came out of fights, but really severely beaten with their jaws and noses broken and their teeth knocked out almost entirely.
This was very odd. If it had happened to only one of them, it would not have seemed significant in relation to her having been with them several times, but its happening to both the way it did was enough to make her wonder if she were not to blame through some kind of strange influence that brought misfortune to anyone she wanted and was with more than once. So far as she knew, it had never happened to anyone she had loathed and left permanently afterward, and this was one reason why it was not probable that she would come back to be with Joe Doyle again, even though it seemed now that she might want to. The two men who had been beaten had been athletic types who played tennis and handball and polo and other physical games, and they had survived without permanent damage, except that their faces were ruined, but Joe was so frail that he would surely suffer more, and there was a chance, his heart being bad, that he might not survive at all. She felt for him far too much passionate tenderness to want that to happen.