“Do you realize we haven’t exchanged a word with anyone tonight?” he said.
She smiled wryly. “I think of pretty dull things to do, don’t I?” she said, and when he started to protest, “Yes, I’m afraid you would have had a lot more fun with Marcia…or with Midge’s girl-friend.”
“Say, you do have a memory,” he said in surprise. “I wouldn’t have dreamed you’d—”
He stopped. She had ducked her head. He couldn’t make out whether she was crying or laughing.
“…Midge’s girl-friend…” he heard her repeat chokingly.
“Don’t you know Tom Elvested?” he pressed suddenly.
She disregarded the question and looked up at him with an uneven smile. “But since you haven’t got a date with anyone but me,” she said, “you’ll just have to make the best of my antisocial habits. Let’s see, this time of night I’m apt to wander off to Rush Street or to South State, to feel the hour and watch the dead faces. I could take you there, or—”
“That’d be fine,” said Carr.
“Or—”
They walked close to the curb, skirting the crowd. They were passing the painfully bright lobby of a movie house, luridly placarded with yellow and purple swirls which seemed to have caught up in their whirlwind folds an unending rout of golden blondes, grim-eyed heroes, money bags, and detached grasping hands. Jane stopped.
“Or I could take you in here,” she said.
He obediently veered toward the box-office, but she kept hold of his arm and walked him past it into the outer lobby.
“I will prove it to you,” she told him, half gaily, half desperately, he thought. “I showed you at the bar and the music shop, but—”
Carr shrugged and held his breath for the inevitable.
They walked straight past the ticket-taker and through the center-aisle door.
Carr puffed out the breath and grinned. He thought, maybe she knows someone here.
Or else—who knows?—maybe you could get away with almost anything if you did it with enough assurance and picked the right moments.
The theatre was only half full, there were several empty rows at the back. They sidled away into one of these, through the blinking darkness, and sat down. Soon the gyrations of the gray shadows on the screen took on a little sense.
There were a man and a woman getting married, or else remarried after a divorce, it was hard to tell which. Then she left him because she thought he was interested only in business. Then she came back, but he left her because he thought she was interested only in social life. Then he came back, but then they both left each other again, simultaneously.
From all around came the soft breathing and somnolent gum chewing of drugged humanity.
Then the man and woman both raced to the bedside of their dying little boy, who had been tucked away in a military academy all this time. But the boy recovered, and then the woman left both of them, for their own good, and a little while afterwards the man did the same thing. Then the boy left them.
“Do you play chess?” Jane asked suddenly.
Carr nodded.
“Come on,” she said. “I know a place.”
They hurried out of the theatre district into a region of silent gray office buildings.
Carr remarked, “I suppose it must be because they don’t have an audience while the picture is being made, that movie actors sometimes seem so unmoved. Having a real audience puts an actor on the spot.”
“Yes,” she agreed, her voice fast and low, “watching you every minute, waiting for you to make one false move…” Her hand tightened on his arm and she looked up at him. “I hope you don’t ever have to learn to act that way. I mean when it isn’t a matter of appearing convincing to an audience that, after all, can’t really hurt you, but where the slightest slip…” She stopped.
“You mean, for instance,” said Carr, “as if a person had been confined, perhaps falsely, in an insane asylum, and then escaped?”
“No,” she said shortly, “I don’t mean that.”
She turned in at a dusky black cave-mouth, flanked by unlighted windows dimly displaying, to the left, knives and other menacing hardware, to the right, behind slim bars, ornate engagement rings. Pushing through a side door next to the locked revolving one, they came into a dingy lobby floored with tiny marble tiles and surrounded by the iron grille-work walls of ancient elevators. A jerkily revolving hand showed that one was still in operation, but Jane headed for the shadow-stifled stair.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s thirteen stories, but I can’t stand elevators.”
Carr grinned resignedly.
They emerged into a hall where the one frosted door that wasn’t dark read: CAISSA CHESS CLUB.
Behind the door was a long room. A drab and careless austerity, untidy rows of small tables, and grimy floor littered with trodden cigarettes, all proclaimed the place to be the headquarters of a somber monamania.
Some oldsters were playing near the door, utterly absorbed in the game. One, with a dirty white beard, was silently kibitzing, occasionally shaking his head, or pointing out, with palsied finger, the move that would have won.
Carr and Jane walked quietly to the far end near the windows, found a box of men as battered by long use as the half-obliterated board, and started to play.
Soon the maddening, years-forgotten excitement had Carr gripped tight. He was back in that relentless little universe where the significance of things is narrowed down to the stratagems whereby turreted rooks establish intangible walls of force, bishops slip craftily past bristling barricades, and knights spring out in sudden sidewise attacks, as if from crooked medieval passageways.
They played three slow, merciless games. She won the first two. Carr was too intent to feel much chagrin. He had never seen a woman play with such sexless concentration. She sat leaning forward in a way that emphasized her slightness—feet on the chair’s rung, knees together, head poised like a bird’s. One hand held an elbow. From between two fingers of the other, cigarette smoke curled. Her face was at once taut and serene—Carr thought of the portrait bust of Nefertiti, the millennia-dead Egyptian princess—as if Jane had lost herself in a quietness near eternity or the grave.
He finally drew the third game, his king just managing to nip off her last runaway pawn. It felt very late, getting on toward morning, when they finished.
She leaned back, massaging her face.
“Nothing like chess,” she mumbled, “to take your mind off things.” Then she dropped her hands.
They walked down the stairs. An old woman was wearily scrubbing across the lobby, on her knees, her head bent, as if forever.
In the street they paused uncertainly. It had grown quite cold.
“I’ll see you home,” said Carr.
Her lips formed the word “No,” but she didn’t say it. Instead she looked around at him and, after a moment: “All right. But it’s a long walk.”
The Loop was deserted except for the chilly darkness and the hungry wind. They walked rapidly. They didn’t say much. His arm was linked tightly around hers.
They crossed the river over the Michigan Bridge, where the wind had an open channel. Moored, perhaps a block up the river, was a large black hulk that looked to Carr like the motor-barge he had seen earlier in the evening. Now it seemed a funeral boat, coffin-shaped, built to carry coffins—a symbol of endings.
Carr’s vague notion of making himself a friend of this girl, of solving the mystery of her existence, of helping her get a real hold on life, died in the cold ebb of night. No. Marcia was his girl—he’d patch things up with her somehow. This was just…a weird night.