He kept telling himself, “The showdown is coming” — guiltily, for at heart he had no hope. The word itself was an evasion, and he, not the doctor, had introduced it. But it was a comprehensive word; it embraced more than Mickey’s crisis, or Elena”s, or his own trouble with Allbee. These were included; what had been going on with Allbee, for example, could not be allowed to continue indefinitely. But what he meant by this preoccupying “showdown” was a crisis which would bring an end of his resistance to something he had no right to resist. Illness, madness, and death were forcing him to confront his fault. He had used every means, and principally indifference and neglect, to avoid acknowledging it and he still did not know what it was. But that was owing to the way he had arranged not to know. He had done a great deal to make things easier for himself, toning down, softening, looking aside. But the more he tried to subdue whatever it was that he resisted, the more it raged, and the moment was coming when his strength to resist would be at an end. He was nearly exhausted now.
It was nearly midnight when he came home on Wednesday. Even before he unlocked the door, he heard the refrigerator panting as though it were trying to keep up a charge of energy in the air of the empty flat. He turned on the lights in the front room and in the bathroom where he undressed and put on pajamas. Opening the medicine chest, he stared like someone who has forgotten what he is looking for; in reality, his mind was empty. His hand touched his razor and, unthinkingly, he changed the blade and set it back in the red velvet groove of the case. Barefooted he walked into the front room. There was paper on the desk, and it occurred to him to send a note to Mary. He sat down, twisting his legs around the legs of the chair, wrote a few words, and stopped to consider what he ought or ought not to say. There was plenty to choose from. That he missed her? That it was still hot? He put down the pen and leaned on the desk, pressing his chest against the edge of the leaf. Dumb and motionless in the silent room, he heard the slamming of car doors and the racing of motors outside. Suddenly there was a prolonged, tearing peal of the bell. A finger screwed the pusher mercilessly in the socket. Hurrying to the door he shouted, “Yes?” He heard his name pronounced several times and called back, “Who is it?” Stooping over the banister, he caught sight of Allbee on the landing below and he withdrew into the vestibule and shut the door. Presently the handle was turned, turned again quietly, and then shaken.
“Yes, yes, what do you want now? What do you want?” he said.
Allbee knocked. Leventhal jerked the door open and saw him with his knuckles raised, ready to knock again.
“Well?”
“I want to see you,” said Allbee.
“Well, you’re seeing me.” He made as if to close the door, and Allbee brought his head forward quickly in a movement of melancholy protest, looking at Leventhal without rancor, however.
“That isn’t fair,” he said. “I work up my courage to come and see you. It takes me nearly a day to do it.”
“To cook up something new.”
Allbee’s expression was serious. The insane element usually manifested in his smiles was absent.
“The other night-last week-I was getting around to something,” he said. “There was something I wanted to say to you.”
“I don’t want any more discussions. I won’t stand for any. Anyhow, it’s after midnight.”
“Yes, I know it’s late,” Allbee conceded. “But there was something important to say. We were sidetracked.”
“You were,” Leventhal said heavily. “I wasn’t even in it.”
“I guess I know what you’re referring to. But whatever I did say, I didn’t intend to be personal. You shouldn’t consider…”
“What? It was all theory, theoretical?” he said sarcastically.
“Well, partly. It was partly joking,” Allbee explained painfully. “That’s an ingrained habit with me. I know it’s bad.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t understand you. Maybe I don’t understand Emerson either. It goes together.”
“Please…” he said despondently.
There was a hush in the hall under the dull spokes of the skylight and the filmy glass.
“You take it all in the wrong spirit,” he went on.
“How should I take it?”
“You ought to realize that I’m not entirely…” he stumbled, “that I’m not entirely under control.” The slant of the shadows on his pale, fleshy face made it look infirm. The marks beneath his eyes brought to Leventhal’s mind the bruises under the skin of an apple. “Things get away from me. I’m not trying to excuse myself. But you wouldn’t believe how much…”
“Say, nowadays you can believe almost anything,” Leven-thal said, and he laughed a little but without relish.
With a grave look, Allbee appealed to him not to persist in this. His brows went up, he pushed his fingers through his dirtyish blond hair, and Leventhal remarked to himself that there was an element of performance in all that he was doing. But suddenly he had a strange, close consciousness of Allbee, of his face and body, a feeling of intimate nearness such as he had experienced in the zoo when he had imagined himself at Allbee’s back, seeing with microscopic fineness the lines in his skin, and the smallest of his hairs, and breathing in his odor. The same sensations were repeated; he could nearly feel the weight of his body and the contact of his clothes. Even more, the actuality of his face, loose in the cheeks, firm in the forehead and jaws, struck him, the distinctness of it; and the look of recognition. Allbee bent on him duplicated the look in his own. He was sure of that. Nevertheless he kept alive in his mind the thought that Allbee hated him, and his judgment, although it was numbed by his curious emotion of closeness — for it was an emotion — did not desert him. His burly, keen-set figure did not budge from the doorway any more than the spokes in the skylight moved.
“Will you let me in?” Allbee said at last.
“What for?”
“I want to talk to you.”
“I told you, it’s late.”
“It’s late for you, but it’s all the same to me what time it is. You said you’d help me.”
“I don’t want to start discussing your future now. Go away.”
“It’s the present, not the future.”
Leventhal felt inexplicably weak against him. “Am I forgetting all the things he said to me, how mad I was, all that ugly stuff?” he asked himself. And it was true that his sense of injury had not remained sharp; his self-reproach did not make it any sharper. The hall was airless, just as Mickey’s room had been. He was starved for a free breath of air. His eyes were hot and tired, and the feeling of closeness seemed to have superseded and made faint all other feelings.
“What, the present?” he said.
“Well, you can go in, turn off the lights, and go to sleep,” said Allbee. “It’s nothing you have to think about. But I have nowhere to go. Not for the last few nights. I was put out.”
Leventhal studied him silently. Then he moved aside and said, “All right. Come on.” He let Allbee precede him into the front room and pointed to a chair. He himself went to the window and put his head out, getting a glimpse of the reddened and darkened heavy forms of the street as he drew a long breath. He sat down on the creaking bed. It had not been made for a week, and papers and cardboard crescents the laundry put inside his collars were scattered over it. In crossing his legs, Allbee gave a twitch to his stained, loose-hanging trousers. His manner in some things was persistently gentlemanly. He knit his fingers around his knee.
“Now let’s have it again. What happened, you were thrown out? Where were you, in a hotel, a room?”
“A furnished room. My landlord confiscated my stuff. Not that there was much of it.” Allbee’s smile crept for a moment into the corners of his mouth and then was gone. “But such as there was.”