“To someone like who, then?”
“We’ve talked about it before.”
“Oh yes. The nice sensible widow my own age with a little cash and some real estate.”
“There must be lots of women like that.”
“In my business I don’t meet them. Most of the ones I see are already married again, to a bottle.”
“Well, I keep looking around.”
“Do you?”
“Naturally I do. I’d like to see you settled down. It would be a load off my mind, in fact. I can’t seem to — well, to get interested in anyone myself until I see you settled.”
He glanced at her dryly. “Is that supposed to be an insult or a compliment?”
“It’s how I feel anyway.”
“So you’re looking around for a nice sensible widow for me?”
“Sure. Sure I am. Just today at lunch in the cafeteria I met a very—”
“What a liar you are, Hazel. You almost make me laugh.”
“Laugh yourself sick if you want to. I’m going back to bed. I have to get up early for work.”
“Wait a minute.”
“Why should I? All you can do is swear at me and call me names.”
“I can do more than that.”
“I wish you’d—”
“I can do a lot more than that, even without your cooperation.”
“You’d better leave. I think you’re drunk.”
She stepped back, pulling her bathrobe closer around her throat.
“Afraid of me, Hazel?”
“No.”
“You are, though. You’re shaking like a leaf. What do you think I’m going to do to you?”
She shook her head.
“What would you like me to do?”
“Take — take your hands off me.”
“That’s what you really want?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.”
“When I touch you like this you feel no response?”
“No.”
“Sure?”
“No! Yes! I’m sure.”
“All right. I just thought I’d ask.”
He took his hands away, looked at them for a moment as if they were strange new parts of his body, and put them in his pocket. The color had drained out of his face and his eyes bulged, dark and glassy like marbles.
Walking over to the table he pulled out a chair and sat down and crossed his legs, moving stiffly as if he was in pain.
He said in a low voice, “You’d better start looking a little harder for that widow. I don’t like living alone.”
“George.”
“I guess I owe you an apology. All right. I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“You? What for?”
“The money.”
“The money,” he repeated with a grim little smile. “That seems like a long time ago. It hardly matters any more.”
“What does matter?”
“Nothing that I can think of.”
“Did you—” Hazel stopped and swallowed hard. “Did you love her very much?”
“Christ. What a question.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I thought about her a lot. When she was away I wanted to see her, but when I saw her she made me nervous, I couldn’t stand her sometimes. If that’s love, I loved her.”
“That isn’t how you used to feel about me, is it, George?”
“No.”
“We had a lot of laughs together, didn’t we? Remember the time you brought home that wrestler from New Jersey and he damn near wrecked the place and finally you had to pin him down?”
“I didn’t pin him down,” he said flatly. “He practically passed out. He could have broken my neck if he’d have been sober.”
“That’s not true. You’re very strong.”
“Oh stop it, Hazel.”
“Well, you are.”
“Stop it. I’m tired, I’m sick of myself. I’m a big fat nothing, let’s face it.”
“You’re just feeling a little low tonight. Tomorrow morning you’ll—”
“Tomorrow morning, next week, next month. It seems to me that all I’ve had for the past year is a future. The hell with it. I’d sell thirty years of future for ten minutes of present.”
“You’re pretty hard up then.”
“Sure I am. What do you expect? I haven’t had a wife for over a year.”
The phone began to ring in the dining room and Hazel went to answer it. It was impossible to tell from her expression whether she was relieved or disappointed by the interruption, but when she spoke into the telephone she sounded quite cross.
“Hello? Yes, it’s me... Now wait a minute, take it easy. Are you sure?... Well, lock all the doors and call the police... Who cares what she’d think, she’s halfway to Chicago by this time... You’re sure you’re not imagining things?... Well, wait a minute. George is here. Talk to him.”
She turned to call George but he was already there at her elbow.
He said, “Who is it?”
“Ruth. She’s staying with the Foster kids while Elaine’s away. She says there’s a burglar trying to get into the house.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“I know, but suppose there really is?”
“I’ll talk to her.” He took the phone from Hazel’s hand. “Ruth, it’s George. Now what’s this about a burglar?”
Ruth’s voice came over the wire, dripping bitterness. “Oh, I heard what you said. I know what you’re thinking, that it’s all in my imagination. Well, I didn’t imagine the dog barking, I didn’t imagine someone trying the back door, I didn’t im—”
“All right, Ruth, you didn’t.”
“He’s out there now. I saw him with my own eyes, standing in the yard. And there’s a car parked out on the street. I can’t see if anyone’s in it but there might be, there might even be a whole gang of them. A man came around this afternoon trying to sell vacuum cleaners. I told him the Fosters were away, I was only the housekeeper. It could be the same man. I can’t tell, it’s too foggy.”
“Well, sit tight until I get there.”
“I hate to put you to this trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” George said dryly. “I haven’t anything else to do. It’ll keep me out of mischief.”
Hazel followed him to the front door. “I could go with you, George.”
“I’m in a hurry and you’re not dressed.”
“I could slip a coat on. It won’t take me a minute. I’d like to go.”
“Why?”
“Well, the excitement, I guess.”
“Is that all?”
She shook her head, rather shyly.
“What’s the real reason, Hazel?”
“I don’t know.”
“I do,” George said. “You don’t want to be left alone. You’d rather come with me, not because it’s me — I’m nothing special as far as you’re concerned — but just to get out of an empty house.”
“That’s not true, not all of it is, anyway.” She opened the door for him and the fog drifted into the room like ectoplasm. “You could come back and tell me all about it.”
“I could. Do you want me to?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll be damned,” George said and went out to his car. He walked very quickly as if purposely gathering momentum to carry him along in case his decision to leave should begin to falter.
Ruth put down the phone, and tiptoed through the darkness to the front hall. Here, on the bottom step of the staircase, she sat with the brass poker across her lap and the little dog at her feet, a pair of strange sentinels guarding the sleeping children.
The whole house was quiet. All the noise and confusion, the screams for help, the wail of sirens, the shriek of brakes, she had heard merely in her own mind. The only real noises had been the barking of the little dog and the faint but unmistakable click of the back-door latch.
She was afraid, but pushing its way up through the cold layers of fear was a feeling of triumph. The prowler outside was her enemy, the synthesis of all her enemies; he was real and alive and identifiable, and she was armed against him, guarding the children, with help on the way.