He nearly dropped the glass he was holding, stared at her wide-eyed. “How did you know there were pictures on the wall? Have you ever been in this room before?”
She drank a sip of liquor, coughed very slightly. “No,” she said. “But it is easy to see from the stains that there were pictures there. And anyone who does that is a romantic and romanticizes women.”
“Oh,” he said, and took up his glass again. His perceptions were already a little dulled. He was too happy to be captious. “It’s funny—”
“What is?”
“Just by being here, you change this mangy room into something warm and glamorous. You take away twenty years and make me feel — like I useta feel walking down the bullyvards on leave under a tin hat, and around every corner I was sure I’d find...”
“What?”
“I don’t know, something wonderful. I never did, but it didn’t matter, because there was always another corner. It was the feeling that mattered. It made your footsteps sing. I’ve always wanted it back again, but I was never able to get it any more after that. You must be magic.”
“Black or white?”
He smiled vacantly. He evidently didn’t get the allusion.
“I’ll have to go now.” She stood up, crossed over to the dresser. “One more drink before I do. I think there’s enough in it for one more.” She held up the bottle, eyed it against the light. They had been using the bureau top for a serving table. She filled the two glasses, then interrupted herself, letting them stand there on it a moment, a considerable distance apart. “I must make myself beautiful — for your last look at me,” she smiled across her shoulder.
A little metal powder holder flashed open in her hand. She leaned across the bureau top toward the mirror. She made little flurried motions that bespoke the will rather than the deed, for the vast majority of them failed to come anywhere near the surface of her nose. She was really powdering the air between it and the mirror.
He sat there, smiling over at her in hazy benevolence.
Her nose didn’t grow any noticeably whiter — but then maybe that was the whole art of powdering it, so that it wouldn’t show. A grain or two of white had fallen on the dark-wood surface of the dresser. She bent down toward them, the epitome of neatness. Her breath stirred them off into oblivion.
She picked up the glasses and went back to him.
He looked up at her with an almost doglike devotion. “I can’t believe all this is really happening to me. That you’re really here. That you’re bending over me like this, handing me a glass. That your breath is stirring my hair. That there’s just a little sweetness, like one carnation in a whole room, in the air around me—”
He’d put his glass down meanwhile, and so had she, as if in some kind of obligatory accompaniment.
“When you go outside the door, I’ll know it wasn’t true. I’ll dream about you tonight, and in the morning I won’t know which was the dream and which was the real part. I don’t already.”
“Drink.” And then as he reached for the wrong one, “No, that one’s yours, over there. And you forgetting?” she said with unexpected sharpness.
“To what—?”
“To the coming dream. May it be a long and pleasant one.”
He hitched his glass. “To the coming dream.”
She eyed it as he set it down again half-drained. “This isn’t our first meeting,” she remarked thoughtfully.
“No, last night at the theater—”
“Not there, either. You saw me once before. On the steps of a church. Do you remember?”
“On the steps of a church?” His head lolled idiotically; he straightened it with an effort. “What were you doing there?”
“Getting married. Now do you remember?”
Absently, absorbed in what she was saying, he finished what was in his glass. “Was I at the wedding?”
“Ah, yes, you were at the wedding — very much so.” She got up abruptly, snapped the switch of the midget radio. “We’ll have a little music at this point.”
A gutteral, malevolent trombone seemed to snarl into the air about them. She began to pivot about him, turning faster and faster, skirt expanding about her knees.
He backed his hand to his forehead. “I can’t see you so clearly — what’s happening — are the lights flickering?”
Faster and faster went the solo dance, the dance of triumph and obsequy. “The lights are still, it’s you that is flickering.”
His glass fell, crashed on the floor. He started to writhe, clutch at himself. “My chest — it’s being torn apart^ Get help, a doctor—”
“No doctor could reach here in time.” She was like a spinning top now, seeming to recede down the long vista of the walls. His dimming eyes could see her as a blur of brightness; then, like white metal cooling, little by little she seemed to go out forever in the dark.
He was on the floor now at her feet, moaning out along the carpet in a foaming expiration: “...only wanted to make you happy...”
From far away a voice whispered mockingly, “You have... you have...” Then trailed off into silence.
She backed the room door after her, about to close it inextricably into the frame, then froze to statuesque stillness, holding it ajar that fraction of an inch that meant reentry could be gained at her volition.
They looked at each other, a foot apart. Maybelle was blond and buxom and blowsy, and holding a cylinder of some sort done up untidily in brown paper. The woman in the velvet cape, flung around her in a sort of jaunty defiance that somehow suggested a toreador, eyed her calculatingly, watchfully.
The other spoke first, pouting with overreddened, full-blown lips. “I brought this over to Mitch. If he doesn’t want to see me, he doesn’t have to; I understand now. But tell him—”
“Yes?”
“Tell him I said he should drink it while it’s still hot.”
The woman in the cape glanced over her shoulder at the hairbreadth crack of door, too narrow to permit vision. “They saw you come in just now, downstairs?”
“Yes, sure.”
“They saw you carrying that soup?”
“Yes, sure.”
How easy to have inveigled her into the room. She had moved the screen out and around his body, concealing it, when the first warning knock at the door had come. How easy, in the moment or two before this stupid heifer discovered him, to have silenced her forever, with the same glass he had just drunk from. Or to have left her there, involved, too stupid ever to clear herself.
She turned back to her. The door clicked definitely shut behind her. “Get down there where you come from, get away from here fast.” It wasn’t said in menace, but in whispered warning.
Maybelle just opened China-blue eyes and stared at her stupidly.
“Quick! Every minute that you spend up here alone will count against you. Be sure you take that container down with you again, unopened. Let them know you couldn’t get in — gather people around you, protect yourself!” She gave the slow-thinking lummox a push that started her involuntarily down the corridor toward the front of the building. From the turn at the end of it the blonde looked back dazedly. “But wha-what’s wrong? What happened?”
“Your friend is dead in there and I killed him. I’m only trying to save you from becoming involved yourself, you fool. I have nothing against — other women.”
But Maybelle hadn’t waited to hear the last. She emitted a series of noises like a nail scratching glass, fled from view with a great surging wallow.