“Do you suppose they will have a fight in the bedroom?” She said. “Ben has such a violent temper. He’s perfectly ferocious when he imagines he’s been offended.”
“Oh, hell. How could you have been sleeping with this man for ages without learning that he’s a perfect puppy? All you need to do is pat him on the head, and he starts licking your hand immediately.”
“Really? Honest to God, Annie, I admire you tremendously. You are so truly clever at analyzing people and knowing just how they are. What I would like to know, however, is how you know what is to be learned about Ben from sleeping with him.”
“What we had better do,” Annie said, “is combine our strength and move the furniture back for dancing.”
“You would do well,” Clara said, “to concentrate on sleeping with Henry and quit thinking about what is to be learned from sleeping with Ben.”
“Darling,” Annie said, “if you will get off your tail and take the other end of the sofa, I’m certain we can push it back out of the way easily.”
“It serves you right that Henry has taken up with someone else.” Clara turned to Ivy. “Is it true that you’ve been staying here with Henry?”
“Yes,” Ivy said.
“You see?” Clara turned back to Annie. “While you have been being so clever, Henry has taken up with Ivy.”
“She’s welcome,” Annie said. “Ivy, you are more than welcome.”
“It’s a practical arrangement,” Ivy said. “He has only given me a place to stay for a while.”
“Everyone keeps trying to explain everything,” Annie said. “It’s quite unnecessary.”
At that moment Henry and Ben returned with the radio. Ben had said that he hadn’t meant to sound patronizing, and Henry had said that it was all right, and everything apparently was. Ben got a D.J. program, the top tunes, and Henry began to push the furniture around. When a space had been cleared, Ben began to dance with Clara, and Henry began to dance with Annie. Ivy sat and watched. Clara danced beautifully, even in the congested area. She was not very bright, but she always did beautifully anything that was purely physical. Between one tune and another, Ben approached Ivy and asked her to dance.
“No, thank you,” she said.
“Oh, come on,” he said. “If you don’t, I’ll think you find me offensive or something.”
He had been a little drunk when he arrived, and he was now a little drunker on the sparkling burgundy, and she felt for a moment a powerful compulsion to tell him that she did, indeed, find him offensive, though not for the reason that he had been drinking or any reason that would have occurred to him, but she remembered that she had promised Henry to be good, which seemed little enough to be in return for what he had been to her, and she was determined to keep her promise if she possibly could.
“I don’t know how,” she said. “I’ve never learned.”
“All you have to do is move with the music,” he said. “I’ll show you.”
Rising, she began to dance stiffly, resisting his efforts to draw her close. It was not true that she didn’t know how, and she was really rather good at it, with a true sense of time and rhythm, but the dance was, nevertheless, somewhat more unsatisfactory than a simple failure. When the tune ended, she sat down in the place and position she had held before and was ignored again thereafter, except when her glass was filled and handed to her. Covertly, through her lashes, she watched Henry under the influence of the burgundy and the music and the two girls. Her own head was strangely light, and she had the most peculiar sensation of becoming detached from her familiar emotional moorings. It frightened her a little, but at the same time she was acutely aware of concomitant excitement. She wished with sudden intensity that the intruders, this man and these women whom she did not know or wish to know, would go away and leave her alone with Henry. They were drinking, she noticed, the last of the four bottles. Perhaps, when the bottle was empty, they would go.
Although Ivy did not know it, Henry also wished that his guests would leave. At first he had been pleased to see them, especially Annie Nile, but after a while he began to get bored and to feel unreasonably irritated by things that were said and done in all innocence and good humor. He had been, in the beginning, uneasy in the fear that Ivy would say something to offend the others, or that she might, even worse, deliberately and defiantly expose herself for what she was, but then, when she had stepped forward from her corner to be introduced, he realized suddenly that it was really she for whom he was concerned, for she was the vulnerable one, after all, who would certainly be hurt the most by casual affronts or her own inverted cruelty. He felt for her a painful possessiveness, an exorbitant desire for her to come off well, and he was not alienated even by her brazen admission to being picked up in the street, which was, he understood, no more than abortive defiance of anticipated rejection. Later on, after they began dancing, he kept watching her as she sat primly apart with closed knees and folded hands, and all at once her thin and vibrant intensity under a pose of quietude reminded him so powerfully of someone else that he was for an instant in another place: in another time, and the wine in his glass and blood was sweet port instead of burgundy.
The last of the four bottles was empty at last, and he went, about midnight, into the bathroom. He did not go because it was necessary, but only because he wanted to get away for a few minutes by himself. Closing the door, he sat down on the edge of the tub and put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. The radio continued to play in the living room, and he heard a shriek of laughter from Clara in response to something that amused her, which would not need to be, for Clara, anything very amusing. He liked Clara, and she could be very amusing herself in certain circumstances, especially in bed, but he wished she would go home. He wished she would go home and take Ben with her, and that Annie Nile would go alone to wherever, leaving here, she intended to go. He knew that Annie had not, when she came, intended to go anywhere, at least not until tomorrow, and he felt in the knowledge a vague regret for something else lost that could not be recovered. He had met her about a year ago at a party Ben had taken him to, and his relationship with her since had been generally agreeable and sporadically passionate, but it could not be, after tonight, anything at all, and he did not care.
But Annie had behaved quite well in a difficult situation, he had to admit that. It was no more than the way he would have expected her to behave, though, and it was certain, aside from a slight sense of shame and humiliation, that she cared less, if possible, than he. She had liked him for her own reasons, and he had amused her and given her pleasure in his turn among other men who had done the same in the same period of time, but she had always considered him, as he knew, quite impossible for permanence or other purposes. She would not have cared in the least if he had made love to a dozen women besides her, for she was fair enough not to deny him what she allowed herself, but she would never forgive him for letting her intrude in a situation that was humiliating. She had carried it off well, though. You would never have guessed, not knowing, that she was a bit humiliated or had any reason to be. She would merely sustain the pretension, which she had already established tonight, that no intimacy had ever existed between her and Henry Harper, and soon it would seem actually incredible to both of them that any ever had.
Well, Henry thought, he had better get back to the others. Standing, he went out of the bathroom into the bedroom and found Ben Johnson in his hat and overcoat seated on the edge of the bed.
“Are you leaving, Ben?” Henry said.
“Yes,” Ben said, “you can stop stewing now. We’re going.”