If she were still in Baltimore, he would have gone down for the holiday. But unless he flew, he could not get back from Charleston by Tuesday. And besides there was her mother in Charleston, recently widowed and no doubt difficult. He would wait and have Mary to himself in a few weeks, when things were quieter. She would make them quieter. He had great faith in her ability to restore normalcy.
The thought of reunion made entering the house all the harder. He listened at the door before going in. He wanted to avoid being taken by surprise again. There were no sounds. “Let him just come back drunk,” Leventhal said to himself. “That’s all I ask.”
Within a few days the flat had become dirty. The sink was full of dishes and garbage, newspapers were scattered over the front-room floor, the ash trays were spilling over, and the air stank. Depressed, Leventhal opened the windows. Where was Wilma? Didn’t she generally come on Wednesdays? Perhaps Mary had forgotten to ask her to continue in her absence. He decided to ask Mrs Nunez tomorrow to clean the place. Picking up an ash tray, he took it to the toilet to empty. The tiles were slippery. He grasped the shower curtains for support; they were wet. In the dark his foot encountered something sodden and, setting the ash tray in the sink, he bent to the floor and picked up his cotton bathrobe. He took a quick, angry step into the front room and spread the dripping robe to the light. There were shoeprints on it and, around the pocket, pale blue stains that looked like inkstains. He emptied it and found several ads torn from the paper, Jack Shifcart’s business card, the one jokingly intended for Schlossberg, and, bent and smeared, the two postcards he had received from Mary a few weeks ago. He hurled the robe furiously into the tub. His face was drawn, his mouth gaping with rage. “The… sucking bitch!” he brought out, almost inarticulate and struggling ferociously against a stifling pressure in his throat. He flung aside the chair before his desk, threw the writing leaf down, tore papers out of the pigeonholes and drawers, and began to go through them — as if, in his numbness and blindness, he could tell what was missing. Awkwardly, his hands stiff, he spread them out: letters, bills, certificates, bundles of canceled checks, old bankbooks, recipes that Mary had pasted on cards and put away. Heaping them together again he picked up the blotter, banged up the leaf with his knee, and pushed them, blotter and all, into a drawer. He locked it, put the key in his watch pocket, and sat down on the bed. He still retained the cards and the clippings he had taken from the pocket of the robe. “I’ll kill him!” he cried, bringing his fist down heavily on the mattress between his knees; and then he was silent and his large eyes stared as though he were trying to force open an inward blindness with the sharp edge of something actual. He rubbed his fingers thickly on his forehead. Presently he began to read Mary’s cards, the words of intimacy meant only for him. There were a few private references and abbreviations that no one else could understand; the drift of the rest was hard to miss. “To carry them around like that, to keep them to look at!” he thought. He felt a drench of shame like a hot liquid over his neck and shoulders. “If that isn’t nasty, twisted, bitching dirty!” It sickened him. If Allbee had seen them accidentally… that too would have been hateful to him. But it was not accidental; Allbee had gone into his things, his desk — Shifcart’s card proved that, for Leventhal was certain he had put it away — and snooped over his correspondence and kept these cards to amuse himself with. And perhaps he had seen Mary’s earliest letters, the letters of reconciliation after the engagement was broken. They were in the desk, somewhere. Was that the reason he had made those remarks today about marriage and the rest? He might have made them without knowing, on the chance that he was susceptible. Nearly everyone was. Leventhal thought with a stab of that incident before his marriage and Mary’s behavior, which he still did not understand. How could she have done that? But he had long ago decided to accept the fact and stop puzzling about the cause. To Allbee, who might have read the letters, it must have seemed a wonderful opportunity: Mary away, and so why not drop a hint? What he did not know was that Leventhal’s old rival was dead. He had died of heart-failure two years ago. Mary’s brother had brought the news on his last visit North. It wasn’t to be found in a letter.
To himself he said, “A lot a dirty drunk like that would know about a woman like Mary.”
18
THE dark came on. He did not light the bed lamp but sat, still with the cards in his hand, waiting for Allbee, listening for footsteps and hearing instead a variety of sounds from below, the booming of radio music through the floor, mixed voices, the rasping of the ropes in the dumb-waiter; the cries of boys scudding down the street rose above the rest, as distinct as sparks from fire. With the setting of the sun, the colored, brilliant combers of cloud rolled more and more quickly into gray and blue, while red lights appeared on the peaks of buildings, pilot warnings, like shore signals along a coast. The imperfections of the pane through which Leventhal gazed suggested the thickening of water at a great depth when one looks up toward the surface. The air had a salt smell. A breeze had begun to blow; it swayed the curtains and rattled among the papers on the floor.
After a time, Leventhal held his wrist up to the faint, gold bits of light under the window and studied his watch. It was well past eight; he had been sitting for more than an hour. He looked meditatively into the street. His first anger had passed over. From waiting to confront Allbee, he had lapsed gradually into a state of inert rest and now he felt hungry and got up to go to dinner. No use waiting for Allbee, who was probably drinking up the last of the five dollars in some bar and was in that case disposing of himself the quickest way. It was just as well, he reflected, that Allbee had not showed up, for what he obviously wanted was to be taken seriously. Once he had succeeded in this he could work him, Leventhal, as he liked. And that, quite plainly, was his object.
The restaurant was full; there was a crowd around the small bar. He moved to the rear in search of a table. “I got customers next at the bar,” the bony, dark waiter said, “but I’ll see what I can do for you.” He had a cup of coffee in either hand and he hurried away. Leventhal was undecided whether to wait with the others or stand at the kitchen door. It was not very likely that the waiter would give him a table out of turn if he got into the crowd. He continued toward the leaning wall of the kitchen passage. Through the arch he saw one of the cooks beside the brick oven wiping the flour from his arms and waving his apron to cool his face. Leventhal brushed against someone who seemed to have stretched an arm into his path accidentally. Without looking, he said, “Beg your pardon.” A man said laughingly, “Why don’t you watch?” And though it was peculiar that this should be said with a laugh, he did not turn but merely nodded, and he was going on when he felt his jacket being pulled. It was Williston. Phoebe was with him.
“Well, hello,” she said. “Don’t you talk to people any more?” It came over Leventhal that she was accusing him of deliberately avoiding them.