“And trembling like a frightened gazelle. Ah, Sonya, why don’t you tremble for me like that any more?”
“I do, darling, I still do; but with laughter now, every time I look at you.”
When the first effusion of appraisal and praise was over, she managed to draw Ferguson aside. “I have to go—”
“But why?”
“I don’t want all these people to — to see me — I’m not used to it—”
He misunderstood. “On account of the picture, you mean? Because it’s a semi-nude?” He found this so charming, he promptly repeated it to the whole assemblage at the top of his voice.
They found it charming, too; it was that thing they were always looking for, the unusual. This brought on another group formation around her. The girl named Sonya seized her hand, clasped it protectively between her two, blew upon it as if to cherish some impalpable virtue it possessed. “Ah, she’s still so innocent!” she condoled, no sarcasm intended. “Never mind, dear. Just spend ten minutes in my Gil’s company and you’ll get over it.”
“Did you?” somebody asked her.
“No,” she shrugged. “He spent five minutes in my company and he got it.”
They meant well. Ferguson backed the canvas to the wall. “Nobody look at that picture. Nobody so much as think about it!”
“She ends below the shoulders!” somebody else proclaimed.
“She is a bust,” Sonya added fervently. Then with a quick clutch at her arm, “Not in the slang sense, dear.”
If her unease had stemmed from the cause they ascribed it to, she could not have helped but overcome it; they all tried so heartily to make her feel at home. Since it didn’t, it persisted. She finally acquiesced to the extent of sitting on the floor against the far wall, a cup of untasted red wine on one side of her, an intense young man reciting some of his own blank verse on the other. She sat there passively, but her eyes kept calculatingly measuring the distance between herself and the studio door. Her hands suddenly clenched spasmodically on the floor, slowly opened out again.
“Ah!” the blank-verse poet exulted. “That last line struck home. Its beauty pierced your heart. I could tell by the change that came over your face.”
He was wrong.
Corey had just turned up across the room from her, was standing there over by the entrance — drawn as unerringly by a party, any party, even one going on all the way across town from him, as a bloodhound is by the scent he has been set to track down.
Seconds hung like moments in the air, moments hung like quarter hours. Her eyes, which had sought refuge on the floor, slowly, unwillingly traveled the ascending arc of the figure that had come to halt directly before her.
“Wait, let him finish first,” she had said in a smothered voice. The intense young man’s blank verse had never been as highly appreciated before as at this moment, would never be again.
Thick soles with welt edges. Heavy brown brogues with punctured scrollwork on their toes. Ten-dollar shoes. Then long legs, in trousers of a fuzzy tweed mixture. The hands — they’d tell, wouldn’t they? Still unflexed. One hooked onto a side coat pocket by its thumb, the other negligently holding a cigarette just a little above hip level. Signet ring on its little finger. Golden glint of hair on its back, visible only by indirection. Two-button jacket, top one left open. The face was coming, the face was coming, couldn’t be dodged any longer. The tie, the collar, the chin. The face at last. The two looks, fusing just as the last line of blank verse died into silence.
Then Ferguson’s jovial voice, somewhere close beside them: “Now call his bluff, Diana!”
She got up slowly, at bay against the wall, working her back against it a little to aid her legs. “I can’t,” she said to where the voice had come from, without looking that way, “until you tell me what it is — and until you introduce me.”
“There you are, there’s your answer!” Ferguson jeered at him.
Corey wouldn’t take his eyes off her. She couldn’t take hers off him, as though afraid to trust him out of their sight a single instant. He said, “All kidding aside, haven’t I met you before?”
Even if she’d given an answer, even if she’d wanted to, it would have been drowned in the howl of friendly derision that went up.
“Look, there are moths flying around from that one!”
“You should oil up that technique.”
“Is that the best the Great Lover can get off?”
Sonya squalled informatively to someone, with that dead-earnest mannerism of hers, “Yes, didn’t you know? That’s how they make girls in the upper-middle classes. A friend of mine who went uptown once told me. She had it said to her three times in one night.”
Corey was laughing with them at his own expense, shoulders shaking, facial muscles working, everything humorously attuned except those coldly speculative eyes that wouldn’t leave hers.
The girl they held pressed to the wall with their stabbing stare shook her head slightly, smiled a little in regretful negation. She stood there a moment, then maneuvered her way out of the comer pocket he had her backed into, sauntered across the room, conscious his head had turned to look after her, conscious his eyes were following her every aimless step of the way.
She found refuge on the other side of the studio for a while, took shelter with almost the entire personnel of the party between them for a buffer. In fifteen minutes he had marked her down again, came bringing a cup of red wine over, for an excuse.
She seemed to grow rigid when she saw what he was bringing her, swallowed hard, as though there lay some danger in the imminent courtesy itself, apart from the fact of his approach.
He reached her finally, held it out to her, and the pupils of her eyes dilated. She seemed afraid to accept it and equally afraid to refuse it, afraid to drink it and equally afraid to set it aside untasted — as though anything she did with it bore a penalty of flashing recollection. She took it finally, touched it toward her lips, then held it behind her with one hand, safely out of sight.
He said, blinking troubledly: “I nearly had it for a minute when I handed you that just then, and then I lost it again.”
“You’re torturing the hell out of me, quit it!” she flared with unexpected savagery. She turned away from him and went into the dressing room.
He followed her even in there after a decent interval of ten minutes or so. There was no impropriety in it, the room was open to the party now.
She began busily tapping at her nose with a puff before the mirror the instant that she saw him nearing the outside of the doorway. Until then—
He came up behind her. She saw him in the glass but didn’t seem to. Standing at her shoulder he placed his hands one at each side of her face, as if trying to obliterate the dark luxuriant masses of hair that framed it.
She stood motionless under the ministration, without breathing. “What’ve you doing that for?” She didn’t pretend to misunderstand it as a caress.
He sighed and his hands fell away. He hadn’t been able to cover her entire head with them after all.
She turned partly aside from him, folded her arms, chafed their upper parts uncomfortably, bent her head downward. It was a pose strangely suggestive of penitence. She wasn’t thinking in terms of penitence. She was seeing in her mind’s eye a sharp little paint-scraping knife of Ferguson’s that was somewhere about the place. She was seeing in her mind’s eye the masses of people there were in the adjoining room. Perhaps, too, the diagonal line of escape that led from this dressing room to the outside studio door.
He’d finished lighting a cigarette. He spoke through smoke. “It wouldn’t bother me like this if it weren’t so.”