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“Good night, then.”

“Joke again.”

“What?”

“Suppose we have a nightcap in your room.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t have anything there to drink.”

“No? Well, I’ll just see you safely upstairs.”

She understood then, going up in the elevator, that she had made a wanton commitment to a dangerous man, and when she opened the door of her room and entered she was afraid to try to close it against him. Slowly, with despair, she removed her hat and coat and faced him.

She was horrified to see that Neal too had tom off his own coat and tie, tossing them toward a chair, and was now loosening his belt. Her eyes fastened on the stiff brush of hair at the parting in his shirt, and before she began to shiver with revulsion, she was conscious of a sharp spurt of unwanted excitement within her.

Chick’s clothes had been deceptive in the bar. She saw now that he was brutally formed, and that with such a man there would be no mercy. Not knowing what else to do, she backed slowly away, her frantic gaze fixed on his pale eyes, with their shallow glitter of blind lust. Slowly Chick walked after her.

His pointed tongue flicked wetly over his half-smiling lips, and it dawned on her for the first that he thought she was playing his game, teasing him on, building his passion, and a moan of realization formed in her throat.

This whipped him into action, and suddenly he lunged at her, the veins in his neck swollen and pulsating as if ready to burst. One grimy hand darted out and grabbed the collar of her dress, while he shoved her savagely with the other. The dress ripped like paper and Ivy sank helplessly to the floor.

Laughter exploded in his throat, as his hard flanks imprisoned her sides, and he reached down to draw her to him. Slowly, with calculated brutality, he brought her up against his rigidity, the hard length of his male body pressing into hers at every point. Her senses reeled, unable to cope with this strange and terrifying excitement, then took refuge in the paralysis of pure terror.

His searching hands were now taking rough liberties with every part of her, caressing her breasts, massaging her flanks, exploring her thighs, his mouth ravenous on her neck, her ears, and finally sinking between her lips.

It was in her mouth that her paralysis was shattered, and without warning she bit down on his lip, and tasted blood. He cursed and slapped her back-handed across the face. Like a cornered animal, she lunged for his hand with her teeth, and again he cursed and struck her harder, so that she fell to the floor.

There, between sitting and lying, she stared down with mute shame at the exposed pink of her breasts. How much longer would this go on? And did it really matter any more? Was this not, perhaps, the violation she had been unconsciously seeking from the beginning? No, no, she thought, it was the ultimate degradation that she should lose in violence to a stranger what she had hoped to gain in tenderness from a friend.

With a flicker of regained hope, she looked up almost beseechingly into Chick’s bleeding face, as if somehow he ought to understand this. But Neal was beyond the reach of such sanities, and this time he made no effort to bring her to her feet, but flung himself down upon her with such force that it drove the breath from her body.

In the desperate moments that followed, she cried out once, not loudly, but in a plaintive hopelessness that she knew no one would ever hear.

Chapter 10

Between nine-thirty and ten, while Ivy was enjoying the illusory warmth and security of too much alcohol, Henry was on the way home. He arrived just before ten, and he was already beginning to feel uncertain of a number of things he had accepted as true in Lila’s apartment. He was also beginning to feel guilty in proportion to his growing uncertainty, and he was nagged by the suspicion that Lila, in addition to being beautiful, was extremely clever as well. He had been altogether too ready to accept her diagnosis of Ivy, which was a measure of his own cowardice in trying to justify his own injustice, and now that he was away from her beauty and her assured voice and her willing flesh, he thought that he could detect in her remembered words and behavior a pattern of deception that he had not seen before.

He faced the rather humiliating conclusion that he had probably been seduced for a purpose other than pleasure, and this purpose was simply that of making Lila Galvin appear convincingly something that she was not. After all bisexuality was not particularly rare, and certainly had a far greater incidence than was generally known. Lila was, by the nature of her ambition, especially vulnerable to a kind of disgrace that could destroy her life as she wanted it to be, including probably a marriage for money and position, and her fear of Ivy, what she might say and do, was surely commensurate with her vulnerability. He wondered if this fear could actually become murderous. He had never fully believed Ivy’s story about the sedative, but he had considered it an effect of feverish imagination, not calculated deception, and he had not doubted until tonight, in Lila’s apartment, that Ivy had believed it herself. Now, in his own rooms, where the sense of Ivy’s presence was strong and Lila’s wasn’t, he again began to believe in Ivy’s innocence, if not her reliability.

Lila had said that Ivy was a psychopathic personality, a liar and cheat and egoist as well as deviate, but this was not so. It was Lila who lied, and possibly it was Lila who was the psychopathic personality. Henry’s knowledge of abnormalities was no greater and no broader than his experience of observation and reading, but he was certain that psychopathic personalities did not commit suicide or seriously try to. They destroyed others, never themselves. And Ivy’s suicide attempt had been genuine, there was no question about that, and she had been saved only by the thinnest and most ludicrous of chances, that she could in no way have predicted.

It was Lila who lied. She was very beautiful and very clever and maybe very dangerous. She had lied with her voice and with her body, and he had believed, for a while, both lies.

And where was Ivy? Well, she had gone away, because she had been told to go in anger that was now regretted. The rooms above the bookshop seemed desolate and deserted, and it occurred to Henry that emptiness, against all logic, existed in degrees. He noted the tidiness of the living room, and the tidiness somehow emphasized the absence of the person who had accomplished it. Walking into the bedroom, he saw the packed bag against the wall, and then, looking into the drawer of the chest, saw that the twenty dollars had been taken. The packed bag indicated that she intended to return for it, but this might no be for a long time, or might be never. In the meanwhile, she was gone, because he had sent her away, and where could she possibly be?

Was she, like the night he had found her, roaming the streets? The thought of her doing this was deeply disturbing, increasing his conviction of senseless cruelty and concomitant guilt, and he had a vision of her passing like a lost child through the intermittent areas of light and darkness along the cold streets. She had taken the twenty dollars, however. Having the money, it was unlikely that she would go without shelter and a bed the first night.

Perhaps she would go back to Lila. This thought was in his mind suddenly, and it was the most disturbing possibility of all. If she roamed the streets or stayed somewhere for the night in a cheap room, it was at least a sign of stubborn adherence to rebellion, a refusal to capitulate, but if she returned to Lila it would be a final admission of failure, the definitive submission. She had not been there while he was, that was certain, and he had left late enough so that she should easily have arrived, if she was coming at all. But perhaps it had merely taken her a long while to make a decision, or to be driven to it in desertion and desperation, in which case she might be there at this moment, and it was imperative, now that he had thought of it, to know if it were so or not.