They had avoided thinking about the draft. Luckily, Noah's number was among the highest. The Army hung somewhere in the future, like a dark, distant cloud in the sky.
"No," said Roger, judiciously, from the floor, "I have only two things against the girl. One, she keeps you from getting any sleep. Two, you know what. Otherwise, she's done you a world of good."
Noah glanced at his friend gratefully.
"Still," Roger said, "she ought to go to bed with you."
"Shut up."
"Tell you what. I'll go away this week-end and you can have the place." Roger sat up. "Nothing could be fairer than that."
"Thanks," Noah said. "If the occasion arises, I'll take your offer."
"Maybe," Roger said, "I'd better talk to her. In the role of best friend, concerned for his comrade's safety. 'My dear young lady, you may not realize it, but our Noah is on the verge of leaping out of the window.' Give me a dime, I'll call her this minute."
"I'll manage it myself," Noah said, without conviction.
"How about this Sunday?" Roger asked. "Lovely month of June, etc., the full bloom of summer, etc…"
"This Sunday is out," said Noah. "We're going to a wedding."
"Whose?" Roger asked. "Yours?"
Noah laughed falsely. "Some friend of hers in Brooklyn."
"You ought to get a wholesale rate," Roger said, "from the Transit System." He lay back. "I have spoken. I now hold my peace."
The wedding on Sunday was held in a large house in Flatbush, a house with a garden and a small lawn, leading down to a tree-shaded street. The bride was pretty and the minister was quick and there was champagne.
It was warm and sunny and everyone seemed to be smiling with the tender, unashamed sensuality of wedding guests. In corners of the large house, after the ceremony, the younger guests were pairing off in secret conversations. Hope had a new yellow dress. She had been out in the sun during the week and her skin was tanned. Noah kept watching her proudly and a little anxiously as she moved about, her hair dark and tumbled in a new coiffure above the soft golden flash of her dress. Noah stood off to one side, sipping the champagne, a little shy, talking quietly from time to time to the friendly guests, watching Hope, something inside his head saying, her hair, her lips, her legs, in a kind of loving shorthand.
He kissed the bride and there was a jumbled confusion of white satin and lace and lipstick-taste and perfume and orange blossom. He looked past the bright, moist eyes and the parted lips of the bride to Hope, standing watching him across the room, and the shorthand within him noted her throat, her waist. Hope came over and he said, "There's something I've wanted to do," and he put out his hands to her waist, slender in the tight bodice of her new dress. He felt the narrow, girlish flesh and the intricate small motion of the hipbones. Hope seemed to understand. She leaned over gently and kissed him. He didn't mind, although several people were watching, because at a wedding everybody seemed licensed to kiss everyone else. Besides, he had never before drunk champagne on a warm summer's afternoon.
They watched the bride and bridegroom go off in a car with streamers flying from it, the rice scattered around, the mother weeping softly at the doorstep, the groom grinning, red and self-conscious, at the rear window. Noah looked at Hope and she looked at him, and he knew they were thinking about the same thing.
"Why," he whispered, "don't we…?"
"Sssh." She put her hand over his lips. "You've drunk too much champagne."
They made their goodbyes and started off under the tall trees, between the lawns on which water-sprinklers were whirling, the flashing fountains of water, brilliant and rainbow-like in the sun, making the green smell of the lawns rise into the waning afternoon. They walked slowly, hand in hand.
"Where are they going?" Noah asked.
"California," Hope said. "For a month. Monterey. He has a cousin there with a house."
They walked side by side among the fountains of Flatbush, thinking of the beaches of Monterey in the Pacific Ocean, thinking of the pale Mexican houses in the southern light, thinking of the two young people getting into their compartment on the train at Grand Central and locking the door behind them.
"Oh, God," Noah said. Then he grinned sourly. "I pity them," he said.
"What?"
"On a night like this. The first time. One of the hottest nights of the year."
Hope pulled her hand away. "You're impossible," she said sharply. "What a mean, vulgar thing to say…"
"Hope…" he protested. "It was just a little joke."
"I hate that attitude," Hope said loudly. "Everything's funny!" With surprise, he saw that she was crying.
"Please, darling." He put his arms around her, although two small boys and a large collie dog were watching them interestedly from one of the lawns.
She slipped away. "Keep your hands off me," she said. She walked swiftly on.
"Please." He followed her anxiously. "Please, let me talk to you."
"Write me a letter," she said, through her tears. "You seem to save all your romance for the typewriter."
He caught up with her and walked in troubled silence at her side. He was baffled and lost, adrift on the irrational, endless female sea, and he did not try to save himself, but merely let himself drift with the wind and tide, hoping they would not wreck him.
But Hope would not relent, and all the long way home on the trolley car she sat stubborn and silent, her mouth set in bitter rejection. Oh, God, Noah thought, peering at her timidly as the car rattled on. Oh, God, she is going to leave me.
But she let him follow her into the house when she opened the two doors with her key.
The house was empty. Hope's aunt and uncle had taken their two small children on a three-day holiday to the country, and an almost exotic air of peace hung over the dark rooms.
"You hungry?" Hope asked dourly. She was standing in the middle of the living-room and Noah had thought he would kiss her, until he saw the expression on her face.
"I think I'd better go home," he said.
"You might as well eat," she said. "I left some stuff in the icebox for supper." He followed her meekly into the kitchen and helped as unobtrusively as possible. She got out some cold chicken, a jug full of milk and made a salad. She put everything on a tray and said, curtly, "Outside," like a sergeant commanding a platoon.
He took the tray out to the back garden, a twilit oblong now, that was bounded on two sides by a high board fence, and on the far end by the blank brick wall of a garage that had Virginia creeper growing all over it. There was a graceful acacia tree shading the garden. Hope's uncle had a small rock garden at one end and beds of common flowers, and there was a wood table with shielded candles and a long, sofa-like swing with a canopy. In the hazy blue light of evening, Brooklyn vanished like mist and rumour, and they were in a walled garden in England or France or the mountains of India.
Hope lit the candles and they sat gravely opposite each other, eating hungrily. They hardly spoke while they ate, just polite requests for the salt and the milk. They folded their napkins and stood up on opposite sides of the table.
"We don't need the candles," Hope said. "Will you please blow out the one on your side?"
He leaned over the small glass chimney that guarded the candle and Hope bent over the one on her side of the table. Their heads touched as they blew, together, and in the sudden darkness, Hope said, "Forgive me. I am the meanest female in the whole world."
Then it was all right. They sat side by side, in the swing, looking up at the darkening sky with the summer stars beginning to bloom above them one by one through the single tree. Far off the trolley, far off the trucks, far off the aunt, the uncle and the two children of the house, far off the newsboys crying beyond the garage, far off the world, as they sat there in the walled garden in the evening.