She lay quietly on her back, after having looked up through the window at the sky, wondering idly why she had thought of that other morning the first thing this morning. Reasons existed that made the thinking appropriate, but they were reasons not yet known to her. She could think just then of no good reason at all. The reasons which made the memory appropriate on this morning which she did not yet know and therefore could not think of, were that the first day began what this day would end, and that death figured in both in some kind of significant or symbolic relationship to what happened between. It was good, of course, that she did not now know these things and had no way of knowing or anticipating them, for if she had known through premonition, the day would have been destroyed, or at least impaired, in its beginning. Actually, her day was already being injured, even as she awakened and began to think and looked up through her window at the bright scrubbed sky, but she did not know this and would not know it until the day was almost past. From her viewpoint that morning it was a good day, and it was to remain for its duration a good day in which good things happened, or at least in which she got things she wanted.
She thought again about getting up and going to the shop, but she decided to lie quietly a little longer and think about how things had been going — a pleasure because things had been going well. In the first place, after her mother’s death, in the release from old ties and old claims, she had entered a phase of extreme fecundity that had sustained itself and was still continuing. Her mind had expanded with fresh conceptions, and she worked with pleasure and intensity for long hours without tiring, and in most of the hours when she was not working or sleeping there was William Walter Tyler, now Bill. From those times, the times she worked and slept, he was excluded, or in the latter excluded himself — from what obscure compulsion on his part to be perfectly fair or absolutely certain she did not know or care — but she could sense clearly when they were together that she had lost no ground in the mild intimacy that had developed. For her part, she found him much more interesting and compatible than she had expected, and she was quite willing to be agreeable in any reasonable way in return for what he offered or could offer if he chose.
Thinking of Tyler, she began after a while to think of Enos Simon. She did not want to think of him, because thinking of him was disturbing, but it was impossible to exclude him from her mind entirely, though she had tried. She had decided then that it was much less disturbing in the long run merely to think of him voluntarily and reasonably, when it was necessary to think of him at all, and so, by admitting him freely to her mind, avoid creating the conflict of keeping him out. In the first few days after the night he struck her and ran from her apartment, she had worried excessively about him because she now understood what she had previously only felt vaguely — that he was quite ill in a frightening sort of way and had been so for a long time, probably even back in that spring and summer they had shared. To be exact, she was not so much worried about him as about herself. This was not because of the violence he had displayed in the final seconds of the night she sent him away, for she did not believe that he had really meant to attack her at all. He had only been lashing out blindly at something, some threat or force that pressed upon him, and she had been at the moment in the way, and that was all. The reason she worried about herself was because of what he might do to himself, for if he hurt himself or killed himself, as she now felt was quite possible, it would place upon her, rationally or not, a burden of guilt that was dreadful to consider.
Anticipating this, she had tried to reason it away, to justify herself in relation to him and what had happened between them, and she tried again now, lying in bed and thinking for a while before getting up. What she thought was that she had been kind to him and generous and had at least given him something for some time, and it would certainly be insane of her to blame herself because she had been unable to give him more, when no one else had given him anything at all. This was true enough, but what nullified it and disturbed her was the realization that he would have been better off, much better, if she, like all the others, had given him nothing. There was no sense in this, however, no sense at all, and there was no sense, either, in lying and thinking about it and anticipating something that had not happened — and would surely never happen as a result of anything she had done — now that three weeks had passed. It was a fine day, a spring day with a bright sky, and the sensible thing was to get out of bed at once and start living it.
She walked barefooted through the living room and into the kitchen and put the coffee on, and then walked back into the living room and through it and into the bedroom and from the bedroom into the bathroom. It was a pleasure, a subtle and sensual delight, to feel on the soles of her feet the sequence of sensations incited by the soft looped pile of the bedroom rug and the stiffer clipped pile of the living room carpet and the smooth cool surface of the kitchen linoleum, the same sequence in reverse when she returned, and finally, almost like a tender bruise, the cold and absolutely ungiving bathroom tile. Showering, she remembered again how on that other morning she had walked naked and arrogant through Shirley Burns’ room, had showered and later dressed in the inappropriate scarlet sheath, and had finally walked downstairs to discover Aaron dead. This had all happened only a hundred days or so ago, and it was incredible that it had been no longer, and that so much had happened, and was still happening, since that time.
But she was thinking again of the day that had happened instead of the day that was happening; this accomplished nothing and was likely, besides, to become depressing. So she turned off the shower and toweled herself vigorously and returned to the bedroom. Retrieving her glasses from the bedside table where she had laid them last night, she put them on, the first act of dressing, then she stood for a minute before her mirror and smiled at herself and received a smile back. There was in this a kind of renewal, as if she had been bored and had met unexpectedly someone she had known and found stimulating and had almost forgotten; and with the renewal of pleasure there was also a renewal of the old resolve, that nothing should be wasted or lost before it was used, not talent or training or time or the fortunate arrangement and quality of flesh and bones. Now, however, that other morning kept intruding upon this morning, actually seemed to keep repeating itself in small parts removed from the whole. She was, for an instant before she moved, looking at herself in another mirror in another house three months ago, and everything that had occurred since would have to be repeated just as her image was now repeated in glass. Moving away from the glass and out of the glass, she dressed and fixed her face and went back to the kitchen where the coffee was ready.
Sitting at the tiny kitchen table with the coffee hot and black in its cup before her, she began for the first time to plan the day precisely around the things that were already established. There were two appointments, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon, with two women who wanted gowns designed for specific occasions. It would be necessary to listen to their ideas and then modify them, or transform them completely to conform with her own which were already definite and partially on paper, and this was a delicate process requiring time and tact but which would mean at least a thousand dollars between the two of them and possibly even more. It would also be necessary to talk with Earl Joslin regarding the business, since it was still owned by Shirley Burns for whom Joslin acted, but this would be, because everything was going so well at the shop, no more than a routine conference. It would be, besides, a pleasure to talk with Joslin, who had been kind and helpful from the beginning, and still was. In the beginning, as a matter of fact, she had thought that he was possibly motivated by something more than kindness and a genuine respect for her ability and had expected him to make eventually some kind of overt bid for concession. She had wondered how she would respond if he did, but he had never made it and now quite palpably never would. She was thankful for this, especially since things had developed as they had with Tyler, and it was with Tyler, now that she had reached him in her mind, that the day she was planning would end, in this apartment in whatever development of their relationship he determined or succumbed to. But between now and then there were all these other things to do, and it was certainly time that she started to do them.