There had been a time when such a reward would have filled Vince with mouth-watering anticipation. But that time had ended somewhere in the last month, and now, instead, he wondered where the romance and ad-venture had gone, and he wondered further if it wouldn’t be a good idea to just step out of this hot little car the next time Anita decided to obey a traffic light, and wander off into the city again.
But it was nearly one o’clock in the morning, and Anita was offering, besides her body, a place to sleep. That would be nice. And in the morning he could begin again and afresh, and henceforward he would ignore all weeping girls, even weeping girls who look like Spring and dress like money.
Anita was silent now, and so was Vince, and they drove and they drove. They crossed a bridge, and that startled him at first, until he realized that a girl like this, wealthy and all, undoubtedly would live on Long Island. So he relaxed and lit a cigarette, and they drove and drove.
And they kept on driving, they just kept on diving, and Vince noticed that they were on a major highway.
“Hey! Where do you live, anyway?” he asked.
“Boston,” she said, and kept on driving.
So that was how Vince happened to go to Boston. He hadn’t planned on going to Boston, he hadn’t even ever thought much about Boston, one way or the other. But there he was, at six o’clock in the morning, in Boston. They drove around the Common, and up Beacon Hill, and then they stopped, and they were parked in a driveway beside a mansion.
“Come in,” said Anita, and she got out of the car and walked away, toward the back of the mansion.
Vince scrabbled for his suitcase, and once more he trotted after the girl, and they went in a back door and down three steps and they were in a kitchen. A huge kitchen, with three white walls and the fourth wall of unpainted brick. There was a big wooden table and wooden chairs and a strange combination of the most modern (refrigerator and freezer and dishwasher) with the most antique (a wood-burning stove and shelves lined with intricately designed china).
“Sit down,” Anita said, and Vince sat down.
“I bet you could use some coffee,” Anita said, and Vince nodded.
He was stunned and he was exhausted. It had been quite a while since he’d slept, and so everything that happened in the world outside his eyes happened in a strange slow-motion sort of way, and he had plenty of leisure to be stunned about things that were surprising.
And Anita was surprising. And Boston was surprising. And his presence in this kitchen was surprising. So he just sat there and waited for whatever was going to happen next.
And he knew something was going to happen next. He’d been feeling strange ever since he’d first noticed Anita, weeping and black-eyed, go walking by him, back on 42nd Street in New York. And now, like Anita’s shiner, that strange feeling within him had grown and grown, and he knew that something fantastic was going to happen, and he didn’t know what it was, and he didn’t even know if it were going to be good or bad.
She had a hell of a shiner by now, a swollen black discoloration around the left eye, but instead of marring her, it merely emphasized the beauty of the rest of her. A beautiful girl, who moved like a racehorse and looked like a debutante’s self-delusion, and who was going to be a prime mover in the strange happenstance that Vince could feel coming upon him.
She sat down with him at the table, bringing with her two steaming mugs of black coffee, and she said, “Tell me about yourself.”
“You first,” he countered, not knowing why, but only knowing that that was the thing to say.
“All right,” she said. She smiled and shrugged, and said, “I’m Anita Merriweather. My parents have lots of money. I’m twenty years old and I don’t know what I want, but it isn’t anything I have. I hate Archer Danile and everybody like him, parasites, drifters. That’s what the argument was about. I went to college two years and then I stopped, because there wasn’t anything there I wanted. I’ve been to Europe and I’ve been to Japan, and I don’t feel as though I’ve been anywhere. I’m young and I feel young, and I want to grow up. And now it’s your turn.”
“I’m Vince,” he said. And then he told her about himself, and he told her the truth. He told her about his summer, about his virgin hunt and about Saralee and about pimping and leaving the car and telling his father he was going out into the big wide world to seek his fortune. She laughed at the right places, and she looked serious at the right places, and when he was finished she said, “I wish I’d been with you. I wish I’d been along for every minute of that. I don’t know anything. I’ve never had anything except money, and that isn’t enough.”
He looked at her, and he felt the happening coming on, getting ready to burst, and he opened his mouth to give it a chance to happen, and when his mouth was open he said, “Will you marry me?” And he hadn’t known that was what was going to happen.
And she smiled at him. And she said, “Yes.”
“Anita,” he said. It was all he could say. He didn’t even know her, and a million pieces of common sense were clamoring for his attention, were hollering at him that he couldn’t propose marriage to a girl he’d met six hours ago, and he ignored them all.
“Vince,” she said, and looked at him, and her one good eye was as deep as a bottomless abyss, and he knew he was teetering on the edge of that bottomless abyss, and he knew he was going to topple in.
He got to his feet. “Come on,” he said.
“Yes,” she said.
She had to lead the way, because it was her house and not his and he didn’t know where her room was. They left the kitchen and they walked through one room after another, and through halls and corridors, and up a flight of stairs, and around them all the way was the kind of richness Vince had only seen in old movies on television.
And finally they came to a closed door and Anita opened it and they went in and she closed the door behind them. It was a big room, as big as the whole cottage had been back at the miserable lake, and across on the other side of the room were three windows, with the early morning sunshine pouring in. And midway between the door and the windows, its headboard against the right-hand wall, was a bed, Anita’s bed.
She turned to him to say, “You haven’t even kissed me yet.” And her voice broke when she said it, and he knew that she was as terrified as he.
He reached for her, and she came slim-waisted and eager into his arms, and he kissed her. And her lips were soft and cool-warm, and her tongue was a slender reed playing with his thick bear of a tongue, and her body was slender and like Spring against him.
He kissed her, and then she moved away, crossing the room, making a wide berth around the bed, going to the window, looking out and down, her face and hair high-lighted by the sun, and she was the slimmest, youngest, most beautiful, most heart-wrenchingly perfect thing he had ever seen in all his life. Betty and Rhonda and Del and Saralee and all the others ceased to exist. He could feel them receding away from him, like smoke, evaporating, and he felt a momentary sadness at their departure, and then he didn’t care anymore, because the blonde-haired girl dressed in blue, made up for all of them, and was all he would ever need.
He came across the room to her, feeling himself lumbering and clumsy, wishing he were lighter, more graceful, more accomplished, more an ideal, to match the ideal that she was. He came across the room, and he touched her arm, as he had done years ago in New York on 42nd Street near Eighth Avenue, and he said, “I love you, Anita.”
“I love you, Vince,” she said.
It was a ritual, like the marriage ceremony, except that it was much more solemn and much more binding. And he held her arm and turned her around and kissed her again. And their clothes seemed to float away, like gossamer and lace in the barest of breezes. They were naked, and hand in hand they walked to the wide sunlit bed.