“You dirty phoney!” Leventhal cried huskily. “You ugly bastard counterfeit. I said it because you’re such a liar, with your phoney tears and your wife’s name in your mouth, every second word. The poor woman, a fine life she must have had with you, a freak like you, out of a carnival. You don’t care what you say. You’ll say anything that comes into your head. You’re not even human, if you ask me. No wonder she left you.”
“It’s very interesting that you should take her part. She was like me. What do you think of that? We were alike,” he shouted.
“Well, get out! Beat it! I told you to leave when the woman did.”
“What about your promise?”
Leventhal pushed him toward the door. Allbee fell back a few steps and, seizing a heavy glass ash tray, he aimed it menacingly and cried, “Keep off me!” Leventhal made a rush at him and knocked the ash tray down. Pinning his arms, he wheeled him around and ran him into the vestibule.
“Let go, I’ll leave,” he panted.
The door, as Leventhal jerked it open, hit Allbee in the face. He did not resist when Leventhal thrust him out on the landing and, without looking back, he started down the stairs.
Winded, Leventhal stumbled into a chair, pulled at his collar. The sweat ran into his eyes and a pain, starting at his shoulders, passed downward through his chest. Suddenly he thought, “Maybe he’s still hanging around. I’d better look.” He forced himself up and went to the stairs. Holding the rail, he stared into the shaft. It was silent. He thought as he returned to the flat, “He didn’t even have the courage to fight back. As much as he hates me. And he’s bigger; he could have killed me.” He wondered whether Allbee was stunned by the door when it struck him in the face. The sound of that did not leave him.
He stopped to examine the chain. The staple was only loosened and might have been hammered in. But one of the links had given. He tossed the severed half away. Over the furrows of the rug in the front room there was a long, curving trail of ashes. He wiped his sweat with his sleeve and took in the room, angry, but exultant also; he felt dimly that this disorder and upheaval was part of the price he was obliged to pay for his release.
The radiators were spitting and the room was unendurably hot. He flung up the window and bent out. Instantly he heard the tumultuous swoop of the Third Avenue train rising above the continuous, tidal noise of the street. People were walking among the stripes of light on the pavement, light that came from windows opening on carpeted floors and the shapes of furniture; they passed through the radiance of the glass cage that bulged before the theater and into shadows, tributaries that led into deeper shadows and led, still further on, into mighty holes filled with light and stifled roaring. “Is he around somewhere?” Leventhal asked himself. He doubted that Allbee was near. Certainly he knew he had nothing more to hope for here after tonight. And what he had hoped for in the first place remained a mystery. The idea of an introduction to Shifcart lost all its substance; it was a makeshift demand, improvised. That he was able to see this gave Leventhal the feeling that he was becoming himself again after a long lapse.
The breeze was cooling him too rapidly. He drew his head in, shivering, and sat down, wiping the grit of the sill from his palms. His throat was bitter and raw, and there was a deadening weight in his side. But he sat and rested briefly and soon felt better. When he rose, he began unsystematically to set the flat in order, going slowly and desultorily from task to task.
He stripped the linen from the beds and threw it in the laundry hamper. Then, without taking the trouble to clean out the scraps in the drain, he spilled soap powder over the dishes in the kitchen sink and let the hot water run until the foam boiled up and covered them. He made up his bed with clean sheets, awkwardly shaking the pillows into pillow cases and dragging the bed away from the wall in order to tuck in the blankets. In the dining-room, he turned over the mattress of the day bed and forced up the seldom-opened windows. On one of the chairs he found a glossy haberdasher’s bag with a Second Avenue address. It contained Allbee’s old shirt and a few other articles that he did not examine. He threw the bag into the dumb-waiter, together with the socks and undershirts and the newspapers Allbee had accumulated. Next, in the bathroom, he took down the towels, turned on the shower to rinse the tub, and made an effort to clean the basin. After a few strokes he gave this up and returned the rag to its pipe beneath the sink.
He was moving chairs into place when he saw a comb on the carpet. It must have been the mate to the one the woman had fastened in her hair. Studying it, he could not help breathing its odor. It was a white comb, white bone, its teeth darkened yellow in an uneven fringe. On one side it was decorated with a diamond-shaped piece of glass; on the other, the bit of glass had fallen out of its setting. He did not linger over the comb very long; he let it fall into the waste-basket. He recalled the women in the wrangle he had watched on the corner several weeks back and even reflected that she might have been one of them. She might, easily. After all, where had Allbee picked her up? Probably in a tavern in the neighborhood.
A breeze blew through the flat while he swept the ashes from the rug. It brought the cold and vacancy of the outside into the room. Nevertheless, the smell of the comb occasionally returned, coming over him with some fragment of what had occurred that evening in its wake, like a qualm. It must have been frightening, sickening for her to hear the crash of the door and then to run out of bed — still another bed. And even granting that she could endure roughness better than another (many a woman would have cried from terror or sheer mortification), he was sorry to have subjected her to it. He found himself regretting the whole incident because of her and almost wished that he had listened to Allbee and gone away. He could have attended to him later. A few impressions of her remained vividly with Leventhal — the heaviness of her figure in the skirt, the way she had crouched to work her foot into the shoe, the look he had received from her queerly shaped eyes. It now struck him that there was more amusement in it than fear, and he could see, too, how with a grain of detachment it was possible for her to find the incident amusing. He began to remember how Allbee had stumbled in pulling up his pants and how comically he had held out the woman’s stockings to her. It was low, it was painful, but it was funny. He grinned, his eyes dilated and shone; he gave way explosively to laughter, driving the broom at the floor. “The stockings! Those damn stockings! Standing there without a stitch and passing those stockings!” He broke suddenly into a cough. When he was done laughing and coughing, his face remained unusually expressive. Yes, and he ought not to leave himself out of the picture, glaring at them both. Meanwhile, Allbee was burning, yet trying to keep his head. The woman must have grasped that he did not dare say what he felt. Perhaps he had been boasting to her, telling lies about himself, and that was why his predicament amused her.
But when he sat down for a moment on the bed, all the comedy of it was snatched away and torn to pieces. He was wrong about the woman’s expression; he was trying to transform it into something he could bear. The truth was probably far different. He had started out to see what had happened with her eyes and had ended by substituting his own, thus contriving to put her on his side. Whereas, the fact was that she was nearer to Allbee. Both of them, Allbee and the woman, moved or swam toward him out of a depth of life in which he himself would be lost, choked, ended. There lay horror, evil, all that he had kept himself from. In the days when he was clerking in the hotel on the East Side, he had been as near to it as he could ever bear to be. He had seen it face on then. And since, he had learned more about it out of the corner of his eye. Why not say heart, rather than eye? His heart was what caught it, with awful pain and dread, in heavy blows. Then, since the fear and pain were so great, what drew him on?