He picked up the phone and gave the number of her rooming house. Then he always had to wait while her landlady yelled all the way up the stairwell to the fourth floor for her to come down. He’d done it so often he knew just how long to allow for it. He left the phone and went over to his coat to get out a cigarette. He saw that third, unopened envelope in his side pocket. He pulled it out, tore it open.
A crimson ticket fell out. There was nothing else in the envelope. “Elgin Theater. Loge A-1. Good only Tuesday evening.” That was tonight. “$3.30” it said in the corner. It couldn’t be good; it must be some kind of dummy. He turned it over and over and over, but there was no catch on it anywhere, no additional payment to be made. It was authentic. Who had sent him such a thing?
The phone was making rasping metallic noises. He went back to it. “She’ll be right down,” Maybelle’s landlady was saying, against background noises of clump, clump, clump. She always came down with her shoes left open and flapping.
“Sorry,” he said firmly, “I got the wrong number,” and hung up.
He started to get ready. It rang back when he was at the hair-smoothing stage. It was Maybelle. “Mitch, was that you just called me here?”
“No,” he lied remorselessly.
“Well, am I gonna see you tonight?”
“Gee, no,” he whined falsely. “I’m laid up in bed with a touch of grippe.”
“Well, should I stop over and keep you company?”
“No, don’t do that,” he said hastily. “You might catch it from me and lose a week’s wages.” He hung up before she could bedevil him with any further unwanted kindnesses.
He was almost sure, when he got down to the Elgin and presented it at the door, that the ticket chopper was going to turn him down. Instead, he accepted it, even passed him in with an extra touch of deference because it was a loge seat.
Then it was good, there could be no further doubt of it. But who had sent it to him? Would the person be up there in the loge when he got there? Suppose there was more than one; how would he know which one it was?
There wasn’t anybody in the loge at all, he discovered to his secret disappointment when the usher had led him to it. Each loge was fitted with four chairs, walled off from its neighbors on either side and from the balcony behind it. There was more privacy to be obtained in them than in any other part of the house, even the boxes.
He felt funny sitting there alone with the three vacant chairs around him, kept looking around to see if anyone was coming. Even kept half expecting to be tapped on the shoulder by the usher and told a mistake had been made and he’d have to leave, there was someone else downstairs at the box office claiming his ticket. But nothing like that happened. All the other loges gradually filled up, but no one came near this center one, which was the choicest of the lot. At overture time, when the house lights went down and plunged the audience into blue twilight, its three remaining chairs were still unspoken for, almost as though they had been bought up ahead of time to make sure they would remain unoccupied.
The play began, and as its glamour and make-believe unfolded before him, little by little he began to forget the strange circumstances that had brought him here, to lose himself in its spell. Then suddenly — at exactly what point during the first act she’d arrived he did not know — there was someone already sitting there next to him. There hadn’t even been a flick of the usher’s flashlight or a rustle of garments to warn him. Or if there had, he’d missed them.
No one ever came to claim those two other chairs just in back of them. He never saw any more of the show than just that first half of the first act. He couldn’t take his eyes off her from then on. She was beautiful; gee, she was beautiful! She was red haired and had a face like a cameo. She had a dark velvet wrap around her, lighter on the inside, and she seemed to rise out of its folds like a — like a nymph out of a seashell.
He would never have dared to speak to her, but suddenly she had turned to him, was holding a cigarette to her lips, waiting for a light. “Would you mind?” she said, with just a trace of foreign accent. “One is allowed to smoke in these loges, I believe.”
And that was the start of the acquaintanceship.
He had everything in readiness long before she could be expected to come. He still couldn’t believe she’d meant it, that she was really coming here to see him. It had been her own suggestion, he would never have dreamed of— He had told her how to reach the room without having to pass through the inquisitive lobby downstairs, by the service stairs at the back of the house that only old-timers like him knew about. And yet, with all that, she had managed to convey, tactfully and deftly, that this wasn’t to be an affair. Certainly it wasn’t; you don’t have an affair with your ideal. You worship her.
He stood back, looking the place over for the tenth time. All those girls’ pictures that he’d taken down from the walls had left yellowed stains behind them from being up so long. What did he want those counterfeits for, now that he’d found the real thing at last? He’d got hold of a screen and put it around the bed. He couldn’t do much else for the room; it still remained a shabby $8-a-week cubbyhole.
He rubbed his hands nervously. He looked in the mirror again to see how the new necktie looked on him.
The phone rang, and he almost tripped all over himself trying to get to it fast enough. Wasn’t she coming? Had she changed her mind? Then he slumped disappointedly, with a wearied grimace. It was only Maybelle.
“How’s your grippe? I been worried about you all day, Mitch. Look, I snitched some of the rest’runt’s chicken broth that goes with our special dolla’ dinna’, I’m gonna bring it over in a container, it’s the best thing for you when you’re laid up like that—”
He writhed agonizedly. God, tonight of all nights! “I thought you had the night shift Wednesday nights,” he snarled ungraciously.
“I changed places with one of the other girls so I could come over and take care of you.”
“No, some other time, I can’t see you tonight—”
She was starting to snivel at the other end of the line. “All right for you! You’ll be sorry!”
He hung up heartlessly just as the delicate tap he’d been waiting to hear sounded on the room door.
He opened the door and Romance came in, just as he’d always daydreamed it would, someday, somewhere. She was muffled in that same velvet cape she’d worn at the theater.
He didn’t know what to say or how to act; he’d never been with an Ideal before. “Did you find those stairs all right? I... maybe I should have gone down and met you at the comer.”
He turned on the radio, but it was a sports commentary, so he turned it right off again.
She brought a bottle of something out from under the folds of her cape. Yet she could even make that act, which would have seemed unspeakably shoddy if committed by anyone like Maybelle, appear gracious and intriguing. “This is for us,” she said. “Arak. I brought it as my contribution to our evening.” It hadn’t been opened yet, foil still sealed its neck, and he had to pull up the cork with a screw.
It was heady stuff, but it made you see the world through rose-colored glasses. It took away his tongue-tiedness, made him speak without difficulty and say the things that came to his mind. “You’re just like I always dreamed of someone being, almost as though you came out of my own head.”
“The really clever woman is all things to all men. Like the chameleon, she takes her coloring from his ideal of her. It is her job to find out what that is. Those pictures on the wall, they told so plainly what you had looked for in women—”