When she returned with his drink, they chatted generally for a while and then, somewhat to his surprise, he found himself talking about the novel he was writing. It wasn’t one of his normal topics, since he had rather an exaggerated dread of turning into a talking writer, long on conversation and short on production. He knew what he was trying to do in his book, and he wanted to get it done and let it stand by itself. But he had been upset and off-balance the last two days, and there was a release now in talking about something that was, in a sense, personal and impersonal at the same time.
“Writing about war is difficult, I find, because all the clichés about it are true,” he said. “It’s a dull flat business for everyone involved ninety-nine percent of the time, and if you show that side of it faithfully you run the same risk as when you do a take-off on a bore. You make the point, all right, but are equally boring in the process.” He smiled at her over his drink. “Or am I being sufficiently boring?”
“No, you’re doing just fine,” she said. “May I ask the one question you’re never supposed to ask? What’s your book about?”
He told her something about the book, and he found somewhat to his amusement that he was working very hard to make it sound honest and significant. Hail, the talking writer, he thought, taking a sip of his drink.
When he was leaving he realized that he was in a fine mood. Two drinks couldn’t have done that, he knew.
“I’m glad I stopped by,” he said. “This book is good therapy for our troubles, I guess.”
“I think it’s more than that,” she said. “I think it’s going to be fine, Mark.”
They stood together at the door a moment, an odd awkwardness between them, and then she smiled at him and patted his arm in a curiously intimate gesture.
“I’m glad you stopped by, too, Mark,” she said.
She opened the door then and let him out, and he went down the steps with a smile on his lips. It was raining harder, he saw, so he turned up his coat collar and walked rapidly toward the nearest intersection. From the middle of the block a car pulled away from the curb and came slowly toward him along the street. It was a black sedan traveling without lights.
Mark stopped at the corner and saw that he had plenty of time to cross the street ahead of the approaching car; and, glancing in the other direction, he stepped off the curb.
He heard the sudden swelling roar of the motor and the hissing noise of wet tires on the pavement, before the headlights caught him in their blinding brilliance. Mark wheeled, instinctively aware of danger, and saw the car hurtling at him, its motor whining in second gear.
The impact of the fender against his thigh knocked him sprawling into the gutter. His forward dive, automatic, unthinking, had barely got him clear of the front of the car.
Mark lay still, his cheek pressed flat against the wet cement, and he could feel the water in the gutter damming up slightly in back of his left foot. The car had stopped ten or fifteen yards down the street; and the instinct that had first warned him of danger now forced him to lie still with his eyes closed.
He heard footsteps coming toward him, heavy squishing footsteps that stopped near his head. For a moment the only sound in the silence of the night was the gentle fall of the rain and the thudding of his own heart; and then he heard a low laugh and again the footsteps sounded, retreating now. An instant later the motor speeded up and he heard the car roar off down the street.
Mark crawled painfully to his knees and watched its fading stoplight, hoping to catch the license number when the car went past a street lamp; but the rain was too heavy and all he saw was the bright orange flash of a Pennsylvania plate. That was a lot to go on, he thought, as he got slowly to his feet.
He felt along his left thigh and winced. Nothing seemed to be broken, but a king-sized bruise was in the making. He thought of returning to Linda’s to call the police, but decided it would be pretty pointless to call the police anyway.
Mark knew it had been Nolan behind the wheel of that car. He couldn’t prove it, of course; but he would bet his life on it. And he might have to, he thought bitterly, as he turned and limped slowly toward Chestnut Street where he knew he would find a cab.
Nolan drove back to his rooming house in a bitter mood. He was at a loss to understand what he’d done; and that added a frustrating confusion to his anger. Something had caught hold of him when he’d seen Brewster leave Linda’s apartment...
In his room he undressed to the waist, carried a glass in from the bathroom and poured himself a drink of rye from the bottle on his dresser. He drank it off in one gulp and sat down, breathing heavily and beginning to perspire in the muggy closeness of the room. For several moments he stared at the floor, consciously thinking of nothing at all, and letting the whisky work on him; and then he had another drink and lit a cigar. He was trying to keep his thoughts away from her, trying to exclude everything from his mind but the quietness, the whisky, the cigar.
Rubbing his forehead tiredly, he poured another drink, and then, sure that he could sleep, he rolled onto the bed without removing his shoes or trousers. But instantly he was wide awake, alert; in the stillness his thoughts seemed to be revolving with painful slowness and clarity.
She wasn’t for him, he knew. He was attempting to use her as counter-balance against his gray and empty life, as a substitute for the cheapness and meanness of his background, his job, his friends. And in a clear quiet area beyond drunkenness he knew that it couldn’t work out that way.
Nothing had ever worked out for him, he realized. He remembered one summer when he had tried desperately to go to a boys’ camp that was sponsored by the parish. Everything was free, but you had to bring your own clothes. He could still see the scrawled list he had brought home to his mother: four pairs of khaki shorts, four khaki shirts, sneakers, socks, a sweater and raincoat. The total came to sixteen dollars. His mother said she’d see about it. Barny felt it was all set, and bragged with the other kids at school about what he was going to do at camp. Then the dream burst. His father shouted that he was no millionaire, and to get those camp ideas out of his head. Even the parish priest, Father Tim Monahone, hadn’t been able to help. Father Tim said he’d lend him the money, but both his father and mother were affronted at that. “We can do without his charity,” his mother had sniffed. And his father had claimed that he needed no help in caring for his family, and that he wished the priests would stop putting these fancy ideas in his son’s head.
That was when he was eleven, Nolan thought, counting the years carefully. Even at that age he hadn’t been surprised by his father’s and mother’s attitude. Even then things hadn’t worked out in his favor...
Finally he fell asleep.
The next morning he woke at eleven, nervous and irritable, his mouth sour, his head aching intolerably. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor and looked about the drab room with distaste. The one window faced an iron fire-escape, and the occasional air that came in smelled of heat and rust.
Nolan showered, shaved and dressed, careful not to notice the things hovering on the edge of his mind. He looked indecisively at the almost empty bottle of whisky but finally turned away from it and went downstairs. He drove to the nearest drugstore and went into the telephone booth.
He wanted to call Linda but the thought of her brought a surge of anger and confusion; and so he sat unmoving in the heat of the booth, conscious of his body and the hard starched rim of his collar and the dull pain that spread across his forehead and down to the base of his skull.
Then after a while it occurred to him that he could have been wrong about her. Mark Brewster might have called on her, unwanted, unexpected; and she had probably been too polite to tell him to clear out. That could have been it, he thought. Cheered by this rationalization he dropped his nickel and dialed her number.