A flicker of interest showed in her eyes. “These tickets must be used up at all costs?”
“It’s a matter of principle,” he said sullenly.
“This could be mistaken for a very crude attempt at, shall we say, striking up an acquaintanceship,” she let him know. “The reason I don’t think it is, is it’s so blunt, so unvarnished, it couldn’t be anything but just what you say it is.”
“It isn’t.” His face was still set in flinty lines.
She had veered slightly toward him on her chair by now. Her way of accepting was to remark, “I’ve always wanted to do something of this sort. I’d better do it now. The chance mayn’t recur — at least not in a genuine form — for a long time.”
He armed her down. “Shall we make an agreement before we start? It may make it simpler afterward, when the show is over.”
“That depends on what it is.”
“We’re just companions for an evening. Two people having dinner together, seeing a show together. No names, no addresses, no irrelevant personal references and details. Just—”
She supplied, “Two people seeing a show together, companions for an evening. I think that’s a very sensible, in fact necessary, understanding, so let’s abide by it. It does away with a great deal of self-consciousness, and perhaps even an occasional lie.” She offered him her hand, and they shook briefly on it. She smiled for the first time. She had a rather likable smile; reserved, not too sugary.
He motioned the barman over, tried to pay for both drinks.
“I’d already paid for mine before you came in.” she told him. “I was just coasting along on it.”
The barman took a small tablet out of the pocket of his jacket, penciled 1 Scotch — 60 on the top leaf, tore it off and presented it to him.
They were numbered, he noticed, and he saw that he’d drawn a large, beetling, black 13 in the upper corner. He gave a wry grin, handed it back with the requisite amount, turned and went after her.
She had preceded him toward the entrance. A girl ensconced with a companion in one of the wall booths leaned slightly outward to stare after the glowing hat as it went by. He, coming up in the rear, was just in time to catch that.
Outside she turned to him, questioningly. “I’m in your hands.”
He forefingered a taxi waiting a few car lengths away. One cruising past at the moment, for whom the signal had not been intended, tried to chisel in on the hail. The first one frustrated it by rolling up into position ahead of it, but not without a slight scraping of fenders and snatches of belligerent repartee. By the time the competition had sidled off again and the first driver had cooled sufficiently to turn his attention to his fares-to-be, she was already ensconced inside.
Her host had waited a moment by the driver’s seat to give him the destination. “Maison Blanche,” he said, and then followed her in.
The light was on, and they let it stay that way. Perhaps because to have turned it out would have been a suggestion of intimacy, neither one felt a dim-out was appropriate to the occasion.
Presently he heard her give a little gratified chuckle, and following the direction of her eyes, grinned sparingly in accompaniment. Cabmen’s license-photos are seldom examples of great portrait beauty, but this one was a caricature, with its pitcher ears, receding chin, and pop eyes. The name identifying it was memorably curt and alliterative: Al Alp.
His mind took note of it, then let it go again.
The Maison Blanche was an intimate type dining room, renowned for the excellence of its food. It was one of those places over which a hush of appreciation seems to hang, even at their busiest hours. No music nor distraction of any other sort was allowed to interfere with its devotees’ singleness of purpose.
In the foyer she separated from him. “Will you excuse me a moment while I go in and repair the ravages of time? Go in and sit down awhile, don’t wait, I’ll find you.”
As the powder room door opened to admit her, he saw her hands start upward toward her hat, as if she intended to remove it. The door closed after her before she completed the gesture. It occurred to him that a temporary lapse of courage was probably the real reason behind this whole maneuver; that she had separated from him and was about to remove the hat in order to be able to enter the dining room singly after he did, and thereby attract a degree less attention.
A headwaiter greeted him at the dining room entrance. “One, sir?”
“No, I have a reservation for two.” And then he gave the name. “Scott Henderson.”
He found it on his list. “Ah, yes.” He glanced over the guest’s shoulder. “Are you alone, Mr. Henderson?”
“No,” Henderson answered noncommittally.
It was the only vacant table in sight. It was in a secluded position, set back into an indentation in the wall, so that its occupants could only be seen frontally, were screened from the rest of the diners on three sides.
When she appeared at the dining room entrance presently, she was hatless, and he was surprised at how much the hat had been able to do for her. There was something flat about her. The light had gone out; the impact of her personality was soggy, limp. She was just some woman in black, with dark brown hair; something that blocked the background, that was all. Not homely, not pretty, not tall, not small, not chic, not dowdy; not anything at all, just plain, just colorless, just a common denominator of all feminine figures everywhere. A cipher. A composite. A Gallup poll.
Not a head that turned remained turned a second longer than necessary, or carried back any continuing memory of what it had seen.
The headwaiter, momentarily engaged in tossing a salad, was not on hand to guide her. Henderson stood up to show her where he was, and she did not strike directly through the room, he noticed, but made her way unobtrusively around two sides of it, which was the longer but the far less conspicuous way.
The hat, which she had been carrying at arm’s length beside her, she placed on the third chair of their table, and partly covered it with the edge of the cloth, possibly to protect it from stains.
“Do you come here often?” she asked.
He pointedly failed to hear her.
“Sorry,” she relented, “that comes under the heading of personal background.”
Their table waiter had a mole on his chin. He couldn’t help noticing that.
He ordered for them without consulting her. She listened attentively, gave him an appreciative glance when he had finished.
It was uphill work getting started. There were heavy restrictions on her choice of topics, and she had his leaden mood to combat as well. Manlike, he left most of the effort to her, made very little attempt to keep his own end up. Though he gave a sketchy appearance of listening, his thoughts were obviously elsewhere most of the time. He would bring them back again each time, and with an effort that was almost a physical wrench, only when his abstraction had become so noticeable it threatened to be flagrantly discourteous.
“Don’t you want to take your gloves off?” he said at one point. They were black, like everything else about her but the hat. They hadn’t appeared awkward with the cocktail or puree, but with the sole came a slice of lemon that she was trying to mash with her fork.
She stripped the right one off immediately. She took a little longer with the left, seemed about to leave it on after all. Then finally, with a touch of defiance, she followed suit with that.
He carefully refrained from seeing the wedding band, looked out and across at something else. But he could tell she knew that he had.
She was a good conversationalist, without being spectacular about it. She was dexterous, too, managed to eschew the obvious, the banal, the dry; the weather, the newspaper headlines, the food they were engaged with.