She turned and stared at me. In the shaded lights, she looked stunning.
“Why, yes — is that a crime?”
I felt my palms turn moist.
“I can’t stay. You should know that.”
She continued to stare at me, her eyebrows lifting.
“Are you so frightened of my father then?”
“It’s not a matter of being frightened of your father,” I said, angry that she had so shrewdly put her finger right on the point. “I can’t stay here alone with you, and you must know it.”
“Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said impatiently. “Can’t you act like an adult? Just because a man and a woman are alone together in an apartment, do they have to misbehave themselves?”
“That’s not the point. It’s what other people will think.”
“What other people?”
She had me there. I knew no one had seen us enter the apartment.
“I could be seen leaving. Besides, it’s the principle of the thing…”
She suddenly burst out laughing.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake! Stop acting like a Victorian and sit down.”
I should have grabbed my hat and walked out. If I had done that I would have saved myself a lot of trouble, and that’s an understatement. But I have a reckless, irresponsible streak in me that occasionally swamps my usual cautions judgment, and that’s what it did at this moment.
So I sat down and took a stiff rye and crushed ice she gave me and watched her while she fixed a gin and tonic.
I’ve kicked around Rome for four years now and I haven’t led an entirely celibate life. Italian women are good and exciting.
I have had my big moments with them, but as I sat there, looking at Helen in her white dress, I knew this could be the biggest moment of all my moments: this was something special, something that made me short of breath and a little crazy in the head.
She went over to the fireplace and leaned against the overmantel while she regarded me with a half-smile.
Because I knew this was dangerous, and I wouldn’t need much encouragement to walk right into trouble, I said, “Well, how are you making out at the university?”
“Oh, that was just a gag,” she said carelessly. “I had to tell my father some story or he wouldn’t have let me come here alone.”
“You mean you don’t go to the university?”
“Of course I don’t.”
“But won’t he find out?”
“Why should he? He’s too busy to bother about me,” she returned and I caught the bitterness in her voice. “He’s only really interested in himself and his latest woman. I was in the way, so I told him I wanted to study architecture at the university at Rome. As Rome is miles away from New York, and once here, I couldn’t suddenly walk into his room where he might be trying to convince some little gold digger that he is much younger than he looks, he fell over himself to send me here.”
“So the horn specs, the flat-heeled shoes and the scraped-back hair were part of the gag, too?” I said, realizing by telling me this she was making me an accessory, and if Chalmers found out, the chopper might come down on my neck as well as hers.
“Of course. When I’m at home I always dress like that. It convinces my father that I am a serious-minded student. If he saw me as I am now, he would have hired some respectable old lady to chaperone me.”
“You’re pretty cold-blooded about it, aren’t you?”
“Why not?” She moved over and dropped into a lounging chair. “My mother died when I was ten. My father has had three other wives: two of them were only two years older than I am now, and the other was younger. I was as welcome to all of them as an outbreak of polio. I like being on my own: I have lots of fun.”
Looking at her, I could believe she did have lots of fun: probably more than was good for her.
“You’re just a kid, and this is no way for you to live,” I said.
She laughed.
“I’m twenty-four and I’m no kid, and this is the way I want to live.”
“Why tell me all this? What’s to stop me sending a frantic cable to your father, telling him what’s going on?”
She shook her head.
“You won’t do that. I’ve talked to Giuseppe Frenzi about you. He gives you a very good reference. I wouldn’t have brought you up here if I wasn’t sure of you.”
“Just why did you bring me up here?”
She stared at me: the expression in her eyes made me suddenly breathless. There was no mistaking that expression: she was giving me an invitation to go ahead and make love to her.
“I like the look of you,” she said. “One can get very tired of Italian men. They’re so intense and so direct. I asked Giuseppe to bring you to the party, and here we are.”
Don’t imagine I wasn’t tempted. I knew all I had to do was to get up and take her in my arms and there would be no opposition. But it was all a little too blatant; too cold-blooded, and this attitude of hers shocked me. There was also the question of my job. I was more interested in holding on to that than fooling around with her. I got to my feet.
“I see. Well, it’s getting late. I’ve got some work to do before I turn in. I’ll be moving along.”
She stared up at me, her mouth tightening.
“But you can’t go now. You’ve only just come.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve got to go.”
“You mean, you don’t want to stay?”
“It’s not what I want to do: it’s what I’m going to do.”
She lifted her arms and ran her fingers through her hair. That is perhaps the most provocative gesture a woman can make. If she has the right shape, there is no more telling move she can make than to raise her arms and look at a man as she was looking at me. I nearly fell for it, but not quite.
“I want you to stay.”
I shook my head.
“I really have to go.”
She studied me for a long moment, her eyes expressionless. Then she shrugged, lowered her arms and stood up.
“All right, if that’s the way you feel.” She crossed to the door, opened it and went out into the hall. I went after her and picked up my hat that I had left on the hall chair. She opened the front door, glanced out into the corridor and then stood aside.
I was reluctant to go. I had to force myself out into the corridor.
“Maybe you might like to have dinner with me one night or take in a movie.”
“That would be very nice,” she said politely. “Good night.” She gave me a distant smile and shut the door in my face.
III
Of course it didn’t remain like that. I wish it had, but a relationship between a man like myself and a girl like Helen is certain sooner or later to become complicated.
I tried to put her out of my mind, but I didn’t succeed. I kept seeing the expression in her eyes when I had left her, and that did things to me. I knew I was inviting trouble, and yet there was this fascination about her that made any trouble seem unreal. In my saner moments, I told myself that as far as I was concerned she was rank poison, but in my less saner moments I told myself — who cares?
For the next five or six days she was constantly in my mind. I didn’t tell Gina that I had met Helen at the party, but Gina has an awkward knack of being able to know to some extent what is going on in my mind, and I caught her looking at me several times with a puzzled, inquiring expression.
By the sixth day I was more or less a dead duck. I had got this blonde, lovely girl so much on my mind that I found I wasn’t concentrating on my job. I decided to ease the strain, and when I returned to my apartment, I called her.
There was no answer. I called three times during the evening. At the fourth try, around two o’clock in the morning, I heard the receiver lift and her voice said, “Hello?”