She wondered what time it was. She looked around the room for a clock, but she couldn’t see one, and then she thought of Joe’s watch, which he was wearing, but she couldn’t read the dial from her position. Very slowly and carefully so as not to rock the bed or make the springs creak, she got up onto her knees and leaned down in what looked like an exaggerated salaam, her eyes about three inches from the watch on his wrist, and then she could see that it was almost one o’clock of what must be an afternoon.
Oh, God, she thought. Oh, God.
By the simple reading of the time, she was shocked into a realistic consideration of her position, and the despair which she had not felt so far this time came suddenly to claim her. Even in her despair, however, she was able to plan what she would say and do to explain where she had been all night and why she had not come home. It would be necessary not only to tell her husband a lie, but also to get someone reliable to support her in it if necessary. She had told her husband so many lies that she had become expert at it and did not consider it a great problem, and what she usually told him was that she had spent the night with a friend, but the precarious part was to find a friend that you could trust with the knowledge that you had been doing something that needed lying about.
There were a number of friends who were willing to do this once, or even now and then, but no one wanted to do it frequently, and she knelt on the bed, sitting back on her heels, and tried to think of someone she had not used before or not for a long time. She thought first of Samantha Cox, at whose apartment this particular experience had begun, but she was not sure that Samantha would help her, and she was not sure that she wanted to trust Samantha with her confidence, for Samantha was the kind who might use the knowledge against her out of pure spite. She continued to consider various prospects, and finally she decided on a friend named Bernardine DeWitt, who had helped her once before long enough ago that she might be willing to do it again. Besides, now that she thought about it, Bernardine had been in the group that she, Charity, had been in before going off with Milton Crawford, and Bernardine was probably already pretty sure, anyhow, that Charity had done something that would require deception.
Having decided on Bernardine, she lay back and lifted her legs and swung them around and off the bed. Slowly and quietly, avoiding squeaks and bumps, she stood up in anguish and a brief engulfing darkness. Her head was bursting, simply bursting. She stood rigidly in anguish until darkness passed, and then she became aware of the obtrusion of another part of her body, an urgent need to relieve herself, and she wondered if the room had a private bathroom or if it was one of these places where you had to go down the hall to one that was shared. Looking around the four walls of the room, she saw three doors, one of which would be the door to the hall. This, she was sure, was the one that stood alone in the wall directly across from the bed, and one of the other two, standing as a pair in another wall, might be, with luck, a bathroom, and in the bathroom, with more luck, she might even find some aspirin.
Moving carefully to the closer door, she opened it and found a closet behind. On a rod running across the closet were hanging three suits and a topcoat and a raincoat, and on the floor were three pairs of shoes. In spite of her urgency, she took time to stand for a moment and look at the articles of clothing, which seemed inadequate and filled with pathos as compared with the quantity and quality of clothing that you would find in one of the closets of someone like Milton Crawford, for instance. She felt for Joe Doyle’s clothes the same passionate tenderness that she had felt for his thorax.
Closing this door, she moved over a few steps and opened the other. Behind this one was actually a bathroom, and she went in and closed the door after her and relieved herself, and then she looked in a little medicine cabinet above the lavatory and found some aspirin and swallowed two. She would have liked to take a shower, but the running water would have made far too much noise, and so she only turned on the tap a little bit and rinsed her face with cold water that she gathered in her cupped bands. Returning to the other room, she saw her $25 panties and $750 gown lying neatly on a chair, which surprised her, for she never put anything neatly anywhere, not even at home, and she definitely remembered dropping them on the floor last night when she took them off.
Joe Doyle bad picked them up and put them neatly where they were, probably when he’d got up afterward, and this seemed to her extremely thoughtful and considerate.
Filled with gratitude, she walked silently to the bed and looked down at him, feeling with the gratitude a slowly rising sense of excitement. He stirred a little and took a breath that broke the rhythm of his normal breathing and was like a gasp of pain in his throat, and she took three steps backward quickly. She hoped he wouldn’t waken and see her the way she was, without anything on, for that would probably get something started that would go on for quite a long time, and she absolutely had to get home as quickly as possible. Acutely conscious now of the need to hurry, she dressed in a matter off seconds and walked to the hall door. She hesitated there, starting to turn to look once more at Joe Doyle lying on the bed, but then she decided that it would be much better and easier if she didn’t look at him again, and so she went out of the room and down three flights of stairs to the street.
She didn’t know immediately where she was and which way she ought to start walking, but then she was able to relate herself to Washington Square and started walking in that direction. She felt very conspicuous, dressed as she was, and the shoes that were practically nothing but high heels were hard to walk in, and her ankles kept turning. It was essential to find a taxi to take her home, and the thought of the taxi reminded her of the need for money, and she had a moment’s sinking feeling before she realized that she was clutching unconsciously the small jeweled purse that she had somehow kept and carried from place to place through everything that had happened. She continued to walk and watch for a taxi, and after a while she saw one and flagged it and got in with an enormous but short-lived sense of relief and security.
She began to think about her husband. About Oliver Alton Farnese. She didn’t like to think about him and didn’t do it any oftener than was necessary, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped, and one of the times it couldn’t be helped was when she had to deceive him about something. What she had to decide now was whether to go to Bernardine’s and arrange the lie and then home, or to go home directly. She needed Bernardine and wanted to make use of her, but she didn’t feel up to seeing her or talking with her face to face. She preferred to go home, and told the taxi driver to take her there. She was certain that Oliver would not be there at this time of day.
Oliver was a creature of routine. It seemed essential to his survival to do things over and over in the same way at the same time. It was simply pathological the way he did it, and she knew from experience that he would not break his pattern just because his wife had not come home one night, which he was rather used to. Perhaps he would break it if she stayed missing too long or turned up dead somewhere, something like that, but even if she turned up dead he would break it only long enough to bury her and settle the affairs that would arise as a result of her dying. Oliver was peculiar. Sometimes she was afraid of him, and after the two men she had been with several times had been beaten, she had wondered if perhaps Oliver had had something to do with it, but this was an explanation she refused even to consider simply because it was far too frightening.