“How much was in it?” he asked indifferently.
“Forty-one dollars,” I told him. “I spent a dollar and a half to get something to eat, so there’s only thirty-nine fifty left in it now.”
He said, “I wouldn’t have known.” He looked at the valet. “Can you imagine that for an honest guy?” There seemed to be some sort of novelty attached to it, as far as he was concerned. “Can you beat that?” he kept saying. “He comes all the way out here with it—”
He turned to me abruptly. “Take it; it’s yours, fellow,” he said to me.
I turned it down. “Thanks just the same,” I said, “but it would be gone inside of two or three days, anyway—”
“I like you,” he said. “I want to show it. What can you do?”
I gave him the rather skinny list. “I can garden a little, carpenter, drive a car—”
He stopped me on that one. “You’ve got yourself a job.”
The man who’d stopped me short of the stairs had come into the room. Or, rather, I looked, and he was there just inside the door. He seemed to have that trick of suddenly appearing from nowhere.
He said, “What about Claybourne? D’you want two of them, Ed?”
“Can him,” Roman said. “Give him twenty minutes to get out of there.” Then when the two of us got to the door he changed his mind. “Make it fifteen,” he called. “I may want to use the car in about half an hour myself, and I don’t want to get held up.”
That was on a Thursday.
I worked for him a whole week before I even saw her, knew that she was in the house at all.
The phone rang in my quarters, and Job’s voice said, “Bring the car around, Scotty. Two and a half minutes, now.” He was the colored butler who’d first opened the door for me the week before.
“Yep,” I said.
I thought it was him again. I put on my jacket and cap and got in and took the car over beside the main house. I braked flush with the entrance and stepped down, opened the back up, and stood there by it at attention. He liked all the trimmings when he got into his car.
And the door opened and a girl came out.
By herself, and beautiful. It’s all right to say beautiful, but it’s not the word that counts; it’s what it does to you.
I blinked, but I kept the rest of my face from showing anything.
She came out slow, as though she didn’t much care whether she got to where she was going or didn’t get there. Not slow so much as listlessly, wiltedly. She closed the door behind her and she came down the steps.
She didn’t even look at me. Her eyes were down, their lids at half-mast. I don’t think she even noticed there’d been a change of drivers. How could she if she didn’t look at me? I was probably just a blurred bottle-green offside to her retinas.
I got her by heart between the entrance steps and the car step. By heart is right.
She wore a cream flannel dress, one of those things that’s practically a slip; no shape to it, just straight down from shoulders to knees. It had a sash of Roman-striped ribbon twisted around the waist. And she had a bandanna or kerchief of the same striped stuff knotted about her head, so that you couldn’t see her hair at all or even tell what color it was. It was completely hidden. The two wings of the knot it was fastened in perked up one on each side of her head and reminded me for some screwy reason of a kitten’s stubby ears. Her right hand was heavy with a diamond that must have tipped over a mountain when they mined it out from under it.
I was already taking prophylactic measures in my own mind, though. I must have had a hunch I needed them. I thought to myself, I can about imagine the type. His speed. Sure, on the outside, beautiful. On the inside, sawdust.
She said, “In toward town, please,” in a low voice that you could hardly hear, and got in.
I closed the door after her. She sat down on the seat with that little precautionary under-leg tuck they give even the scantiest of skirts. Ever watch them?
I got in and drove her. He liked it fast. I took it moderate with her. But she didn’t seem to know or care how we were going.
On the way in she said suddenly, “Stop here a minute.”
I stopped, but when I looked around there wasn’t anything there but the sea. But it was a particularly good place to see it from, a secluded place, with palms framing it on both sides.
We just sat there; I don’t know how long. I watched her in the glass once or twice. She just kept looking out at it. Looking out at it. She was straining slightly forward. She even had her two hands on the car-window sill. There was a yearning, wistful expression on her face, like you’d see on the face of a shut-in peering out from behind a window at the world outside.
She was just looking out at that line where the water met the sky. That imaginary line that isn’t there when you get to it but that promises so much to all of us.
You couldn’t hear a sound from me. A change of opinion doesn’t make any noise. I quit fidgeting on the driver’s seat, like I’d been doing until then, and just looked down at my own lap and stayed that way.
After a while we went on, and she finished her shopping or whatever it was, and I waited for her and brought her back.
On the way back she spoke to me twice. She said suddenly, “What happened to Claybourne?” As if she’d only just then discovered that she wasn’t riding behind the same man.
“He’s gone, miss.”
She said, “It’s Mrs. Roman.”
The surprise was a double-header. Her being it. And then the way she said it. The look on her when she said it. I’d taken it to be just a one-season stand of his. Or maybe even a one-night stand. But it was for her whole life. And she said it in the apologetic, almost shame-faced way in which a woman who is discovered at some messy household task would say, “I’m all covered with grime and soot; I’m not fit to be seen.”
That was all; not another word. And if she’d come out to the car slow, when she left it she went in twice as slow. She almost dragged.
Then Job’s voice on the phone again. “The car, Scotty. Two and a half minutes.” And the drive again, and the stop again.
She said, “Stop here.”
I don’t think it was actually the same spot. But the principle was the same.
I watched her in the mirror, puzzled. I didn’t have it right for a minute. I almost thought she was frightened, or didn’t feel well, until I got it straight. She was taking such deep breaths. I could see her chest rise and fall with their slowness and depth. Like a person who couldn’t breathe freely until now, until she came out here to this lonely spot; who is starved for air, hungry for it, and can’t get enough of it. Like a person who was trying to drink in that invisible line out there that held her eyes so fast.
On the way back she spoke to me twice again.
She said, “By the way, what’s your name?”
“Scott, miss.” Then I remembered about the day before and I said, “I’m sorry; I forgot,” and I answered it over again. “Scott, Mrs. Roman.”
“That’s all right,” she said, more to herself than to me. “I think I like it better the other way, at that.”
We shouldn’t have stopped there at sunset. They say moonlight is risky, but sunset is dangerous too. There was no moonlight for her. The spotlights on the floor shows at his clubs were the only moonlights she knew. But we stopped there at sunset, and twilight’s a sad hour; the day is dying, and your hopes are dying, and your youth is dying, and the dream you’ve had will never come true now.
I saw the watery fill in her eyes. Her face wasn’t twisted up any. The tears were just coming down it slow, the way it was, two to a side.
I should have minded my own business. It’s easy to say that. I turned around to her on the seat and asked her, “Is there anything I can do?”