Then one day Billy Hunt came in with his suitcase of samples, and although he was not her type-his coloring was something like her own, and she knew for a fact that a woman should never go with a man of the same skin type as herself-she smiled at him and let him know that she was paying attention as he did his salesman's pitch to Mr. Plunkett. Afterwards, when he came to talk to her, she listened to him with a concentrated look, and pretended to laugh at his silly, schoolboy jokes, even managing to make herself blush at the risky ones. On his next time round he had asked her out to the pictures, and she had said yes loud enough for Mr. Plunkett to hear, making him scowl.
Billy was a lot older than she was, nearly sixteen years older, in fact-was there something about her, she wondered ruefully, that was especially attractive to older men?-and he was not good-looking or clever, but he had a clumsy charm that she liked despite herself and that in time allowed her to convince herself she was in love with him. They had been going together only a few months when one night as he was walking her home-she had a little room of her own now, over a butcher's shop in Kevin Street-he started to stammer and all of a sudden grabbed her hand and pressed a little square box into it. She was so surprised she did not realize what the box was until she opened it.
That was the first time she let him come up to her room. They sat side by side on the bed and he kissed her all over her face-he was still stammering and laughing, unable to believe she had said yes-and talked about all the plans he had for the future, and she almost believed him, holding her hand out in front of her with the fingers bent back and admiring the thin gold band with its tiny, flashing diamond. He was from Waterford, where his family kept a pub that his Da would probably leave to him, but he said he would not go back, though she noticed that when he spoke of Waterford city he called it home. He told her about Geneva, where he was summoned twice a year for a meeting at Head Office, as he called it, of all the top bosses worldwide, hundreds of them. He was so proud to be brought all that way, him, who was only a salesman! He described the lake, and the mountains, and the city-"so clean, you wouldn't believe it!"-and said he would take her there one day. Poor Billy, with his big ideas, his grand schemes.
So the years went on, and so it seemed they would go on forever, until the day the Doctor walked into the shop. Although his name was Kreutz, which sounded German, she thought he must be an Indian-an Indian from India, that is. He was tall and thin, so thin it was hard to know where there would be room inside his body for his vital organs, and he had a wonderfully long, narrow face, the face, she thought immediately, of a saint in one of those books they had in school about the foreign missions. He wore a very beautiful suit of dark-blue material, silk it might be except that it had a weight that made it hang really elegantly from his sloped, bony shoulders and his practically nonexistent hips. She had never been this close to a colored man before and she had to stop herself from staring at him, especially his hands, so slender and dark, with a darker, velvety line along the edges where the pale, dusty-pink skin of the palms began. He had a smell that also was dark, she thought, spicy and dark-she caught it distinctly when he came in; she was sure it was not cologne or shaving lotion but a perfume produced by his skin itself. She found herself wanting to touch that skin, to run her fingertips along it, just to feel the texture of it. And his hair, very straight and smooth and black, black with a purplish sheen, and combed back from his forehead in smooth waves; she wanted to touch that, too.
He had come in to ask for some herbal medicine stuff that Mr. Plunkett had never heard of. His voice was soft and light, yet deep, too, and he might almost have been singing rather than speaking. "Ah, this is most strange," he said when Mr. Plunkett told him he did not have the particular thing he wanted, "most most strange." Yet he did not seem put out at all. He said he had been to a number of chemist's shops but no one could help him. Mr. Plunkett nodded sympathetically but obviously could think of nothing else to say, yet the man went on standing there, frowning not in annoyance but only what seemed to be polite puzzlement, as if waiting for something more that he was sure was coming. Even when the chemist turned away pointedly the man still made no move to depart. This was something about him she would come to know well, this curious way he had of lingering in places or with people when there seemed nothing more that could happen; his manner was always relaxed and calm yet quietly expectant, as though he thought there must surely be something more and he was waiting to see if it might occur after all. She never heard him laugh, in all the time she knew him, nor did he smile, not what you would call a smile, but still he gave the impression of being quietly, benignly amused at something-or everything, more like.
That first time he did not look at her once, not directly, but she could feel him taking her in: that was how it felt to her, that he was somehow absorbing her. Most of the men who came into the shop were too timid to look at her, and would stand turned away a little from her, fidgeting, and grinning like fools with a tongue tip showing between their teeth. But Dr. Kreutz was not timid, oh, no-she had never before encountered a person of such self-confidence, such assurance. Contented, that was the word she thought of to describe him, quite contented-or quite quite contented, for that was another of his habits, the way he had of saying words twice over, so rapidly he made a single word of them, mostmost, quitequite, in his soft, amused, singsong voice.
He took out a little leather-bound notepad from the inside pocket of his jacket and tore a page out of it and insisted on writing down his address for Mr. Plunkett, in case the stuff he wanted should come in-it was only aloe vera, although she thought that day it was 'allo he was saying, like a Frenchman in a cartoon trying to say hello-and then left at last, ducking his dusky, narrow head as he went through the door, like a pilgrim, she thought, or one of those holy men, bowing devoutly on the threshold of a temple. He had such beautiful manners. When he had gone, Mr. Plunkett muttered something under his breath about darkies, and dropped the slip of paper with the address on it into the wastebasket. She waited awhile and then, when the chemist was not looking, retrieved the paper.
Dr. Kreutz had his consulting room-that was what he called it-in an old house on Adelaide Road, in the basement flat there. When she saw it first she was disappointed. She was not sure what she had expected, but it was not this poky, dingy place with a single window, the top half of which looked out on a narrow strip of fusty grass and a bit of black iron railing. On the day after he had come into the shop, a Wednesday, which meant early closing and therefore she had the afternoon off, she told Billy she was going to visit her mother and took the bus to Leeson Street Bridge and walked down Adelaide Road, keeping to the opposite side, under the trees in front of the Eye and Ear Hospital. She passed by the house once and made herself go all the way to the top of Harcourt Street before turning round and coming back, this time on the right-hand side. She glanced at the house as she went past, and read the brass plate mounted on a wooden board on the railings.