Chapter V: Part 5

Therese took it. “So long,” she said. She watched Abby walking toward Washington Square, her step quicker now, her curly head high.

Therese went into the drugstore at the next corner and called Carol. She got the maid and then Carol.

“What’s the matter?” Carol asked. “You sound low.”

“Nothing. It’s dull at work.”

“Are you doing anything tonight? Would you like to come out?”

Therese came out of the drugstore smiling. Carol was going to pick her up at five thirty. Carol insisted on picking her up, because it was such a rotten trip by train.

Across the street, walking away from her, she saw Dannie McElroy, striding along without a coat, carrying a naked bottle of milk in his hand.

“Dannie!” she called.

Dannie turned and walked toward her. “Come by for a few minutes?” he yelled.

Therese started to say no, then as he came up to her, she took his arm. “Just for a minute. I’ve had a long lunch hour already.”

Dannie smiled down at her. “What time is it? I’ve been studying till I’m blind.”

“After two.” She felt Dannie’s arm tensed hard against the cold. There were goose-pimples under the dark hair on his forearm. “You’re mad to go out without a coat,” she said.

“It clears my head.” He held the iron gate for her that led to his door. “Phil’s out somewhere.”

The room smelled of pipe smoke, rather like hot chocolate cooking. The apartment was a semibasement, generally darkish, and the lamp made a warm pool of light on the desk that was always cluttered. Therese looked down at the opened books on his desk, the pages and pages covered with symbols that she could not understand, but that she liked to look at. Everything the symbols stood for was true and proven. The symbols were stronger and more definite than words. She felt Dannie’s mind swung on them, from one fact to another, as if he bore himself on strong chains, hand over hand through space. She watched him assembling a sandwich, standing at the kitchen table. His shoulders looked very broad and rounded with muscle under his white shirt, shifting a little with the motions of laying the salami and cheese slices onto the big piece of rye bread.

“I wish you’d come by more often, Therese. Wednesday’s the only day I’m not home at noon. We wouldn’t bother Phil, having lunch, even if he’s sleeping.”

“I will,” Therese said. She sat down in his desk chair that was half turned around. She had come once for lunch, and once after work. She liked visiting Dannie. One did not have to make small talk with him.

In the corner of the room, Phil’s sofa bed was unmade, a tangle of blankets and sheets. The two times she had come in before, the bed had been unmade, or Phil had still been in it. The long bookcase pulled out at right angles to the sofa made a unit of Phil’s corner of the room, and it was always in disorder, in a frustrated and nervous disorder not at all like the working disorder of Dannie’s desk.

Dannie’s beer can hissed as he opened it. He leaned against the wall with the beer and the sandwich, smiling, delighted to have her here. “Remember what you said about physics not applying to people?”

“Umm. Vaguely.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’re right,” he said as he took a bite. “Take friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two people have nothing in common. I think there’s a definite reason for every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and others don’t—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes hidden forever.”

“Maybe. I can think of a few cases, too.” Richard and herself, for one. Richard got on with people, elbowed his way through the world in a way she couldn’t. She had always been attracted to people with Richard’s kind of self-assurance. “And what’s weak about you, Dannie?”

“Me?” he said, smiling. “Do you want to be my friend?”

“Yes. But you’re about the strongest person I know.”

“Really? Shall I enumerate my shortcomings?”

She smiled, looking at him. A young man of twenty-five who had known where he was going since he was fourteen. He had driven all his energy into one channel—just the opposite of what Richard had done.

“I have a secret and very buried need for a cook,” Dannie said, “and a dancing teacher, and someone to remind me to do little things like take my laundry and get haircuts.”

“I can’t remember to take my laundry either.”

“Oh,” he said sadly. “Then it’s out. And I’d had some hope. I’d had a little feeling of destiny. Because you see what I mean about affinities is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone on the street, there’s always a definite reason somewhere. I think even the poets would agree with me.”

She smiled. “_Even_ the poets?” She thought of Carol, and then of Abby, of their conversation at lunch that had been so much more than a glance and so much less, and the sequence of emotions it had evoked in her. It depressed her. “But you have to make allowances for people’s perversities, things that don’t make much sense.”

“Perversities? That’s only a subterfuge. A word used by the poets.”

“I thought it was used by the psychologists,” Therese said.

“I mean, to make allowances—that’s a meaningless term. Life is an exact science on its own terms, it’s just a matter of finding them and defining them. What doesn’t make any sense to you?”

“Nothing. I was thinking of something that doesn’t matter anyway.” She was suddenly angry again, as she had been on the sidewalk after the lunch.

“What?” he persisted, frowning.

“Like the lunch I just had,” she said.

“With whom?”

“It doesn’t matter. If it did, I’d go into it. It’s just a waste, like losing something, I thought. But maybe something that didn’t exist anyway.” She had wanted to like Abby because Carol did.

“Except in your mind? That can still be a loss.”

“Yes—but there are some people or some things people do that you can’t salvage anything from finally, because nothing connects with you.” It was of something else she wanted to talk about, though, not this at all. Not Abby or Carol, but before. Something that made perfect connection and perfect sense. She loved Carol. She leaned her forehead against her hand.

Dannie looked at her for a moment, then pushed himself off from the wall. He turned to the stove, and got a match from his shirt pocket, and Therese sensed that the conversation dangled, would always dangle and never be finished, whatever they went on to say. But she felt if she told Dannie every word that she and Abby had exchanged, that he could clear away its subterfuges with a phrase, as if he sprinkled a chemical in the air that would dry up the mist instantly. Or was there always something that logic couldn’t touch? Something illogical, behind the jealousy, the suspicion and the hostility in Abby’s conversation, that was Abby all by herself?

“Everything’s not as simple as a lot of combinations,” Therese added.

“Some things don’t react. But everything’s alive.” He turned around with a broad smile, as if quite another train of thought had entered his head. He was holding up the match that was still smoking. “Like this match. And I’m not talking physics, about the indestructibility of smoke. In fact, I feel rather poetic today.”

“About the match?”

“I feel as if it were growing, like a plant, not disappearing. I feel everything in the world must have the texture of a plant sometimes to a poet. Even this table, like my own flesh.” He touched the table edge with his palm. “It’s like a feeling I had once riding up a hill on a horse. It was in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know how to ride very well then, and I remember the horse turning his head and seeing the hill, and deciding by himself to run up it, his hind legs sank before we took off, and suddenly we were going like blazes and I felt completely in harmony with the horse and the land, as if we were a whole tree simply being stirred by the wind in its branches. I remember being sure that nothing would happen to me then, but some other time, yes, eventually. And it made me very happy. I thought of all the people who are afraid and hoard things, and themselves, and I thought, when everybody in the world comes to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there’ll be a kind of right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I mean?” Dannie had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he still laughed at himself. “Did you ever wear out a sweater you particularly liked, and throw it away finally?”

She thought of the green woolen gloves of Sister Alicia that she had neither worn nor thrown away. “Yes,” she said.

“Well, that’s all I mean. And the lambs who didn’t realize how much wool they were losing when somebody sheared them to make the sweater, because they could grow more wool. It’s very simple.” He turned to the coffeepot that he had reheated, that was already boiling.

“Yes.” She knew. And like Richard and the kite, because he could make another kite. She thought of Abby with a sense of vacuity suddenly, as if the luncheon had been eradicated. For an instant, she felt as if her mind had overflowed a brim and was swimming emptily into space. She stood up.

Dannie came toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and though she felt it was only a gesture, a gesture instead of a word, the spell was broken. She was uneasy at his touch, and the uneasiness was a point of concreteness. “I should go back,” she said. “I’m way late.”

His hands came down, pinning her elbows hard against her sides, and he kissed her suddenly, held his lips hard against hers for a moment, and she felt his warm breath on her upper lip before he released her.

“You are,” he said, looking at her.

“Why did you—” She stopped, because the kiss had so mingled tenderness and roughness, she didn’t know how to take it.

“‘_Why_,’ Terry,” he said, turning away from her, smiling. “Did you mind?”

“No,” she said.

“Would Richard mind?”

“I suppose.” She buttoned her coat. “I must go,” she said, moving toward the door.

Dannie swung the door open for her, smiling his easy smile, as if nothing had happened. “Come back tomorrow? Come for lunch.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I don’t work.”

“And we couldn’t possibly have lunch.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“All right, come Monday.”

“All right.” She smiled, too, and put her hand out automatically and Dannie shook it once, politely.

She ran the two blocks to the Black Cat. A little like the horse, she thought. But not enough, not enough to be perfect, and what Dannie meant was perfect.

chapter eleven

“The pastimes of idle people,” Carol said, stretching her legs out before her on the glider. “It’s time Abby got herself a job again.”

Therese said nothing. She hadn’t told Carol all the conversation at lunch, but she didn’t want to talk about Abby any more.

“Don’t you want to sit in a more comfortable chair?”

“No,” Therese said. She was sitting on a leather stool near the glider. They had finished dinner a few moments ago, and then come up to this room that Therese had not seen before, a glass enclosed porch off the plain green room.

“What else did Abby say that bothers you?” Carol asked, still looking straight before her, down her long legs in the navy-blue slacks.

Carol seemed tired. She was worried about other things, Therese thought, more important things than this. “Nothing. Does it bother you, Carol?”

“Bother me?”

“You’re different with me tonight.”

Carol glanced at her. “You imagine,” she said, and the pleasant vibration of her voice faded into silence again.

The page she had written last night, Therese thought, had nothing to do with this Carol, was not addressed to her. _I feel I am in love with you_, she had written, _and it should be spring. I want the sun throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and bird-calls like Stravinsky. But the tempo is all mine._

“I don’t think Abby likes me,” Therese remarked. “I don’t think she wants me to see you.”

“That’s not true. You’re imagining again.”

“I don’t mean she said it.” Therese tried to sound as calm as Carol. “She was very nice. She invited me to a cocktail party.”

“Whose party?”

“I don’t know. She said uptown. She said you wouldn’t be there, so I didn’t particularly want to go.”

“Where uptown?”

“She didn’t say. Just that one of the girls giving it was an actress.”

Carol set her lighter down with a click on the glass table, and Therese sensed her displeasure. “She did,” Carol murmured, half to herself. “Sit over here, Therese.”

Therese got up, and sat down at the very foot of the glider.

“You mustn’t think Abby feels that way about you. I know her well enough to know she wouldn’t.”

“All right,” Therese said.

“But Abby’s incredibly clumsy sometimes in the way she talks.”

Therese wanted to forget the whole thing. Carol was still so distant even when she spoke, even when she looked at her. A bar of light from the green room lay across the top of Carol’s head, but she could not see Carol’s face now.

Carol poked her with the back of her toe. “Hop up.”

But Therese was slow to move, and Carol swung her feet over Therese’s head and sat up. Then Therese heard the maid’s step in the next room, and the plump, Irish-looking maid in the gray and white uniform came in bearing a coffee tray, shaking the porch floor with her quick, eager little steps that sounded so eager to please.

“The cream’s in here, ma’am,” she said, pointing to a pitcher that didn’t match the demitasse set. Florence glanced at Therese with a friendly smile and round blank eyes. She was about fifty, with a bun at the back of her neck under the starched white band of her cap. Therese could not establish her somehow, could not determine her allegiance. Therese had heard her refer to Mr. Aird twice as if she were very devoted to him, and whether it was professional or genuine, Therese did not know.

“Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Florence asked. “Shall I put out the lights?”

“No, I like the lights. We won’t need anything else, thanks. Did Mrs. Riordan call?”

“Not yet, ma’am.”

“Will you tell her I’m out when she does?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Florence hesitated, “I was wondering if you were finished with that new book, ma’am. The one about the Alps.”

“Go in my room and get it, if you’d like it, Florence. I don’t think I want to finish it.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Good night, ma’am. Good night, miss.”

“Good night,” Carol said.

While Carol was pouring the coffee, Therese asked, “Have you decided how soon you’re going away?”

“Maybe in about a week.” Carol handed her the demitasse with cream in it. “Why?”

“Just that I’ll miss you. Of course.”

Carol was motionless for a moment, and then she reached for a cigarette, a last one, and crumpled the pack up. “I was thinking, in fact, you might like to go with me. What do you think, for three weeks or so?”

There it was, Therese thought, as casual as if she suggested their taking a walk together. “You mentioned it to Abby, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “Why?”

Why? Therese could not put into words why it hurt her that Carol had. “It just seems strange you’d tell her before you said anything to me.”

“I didn’t tell her. I only said I might ask you.” Carol came over to her and put her hands on Therese’s shoulders. “Look, there’s no reason for you to feel like this about Abby—unless Abby said a lot else to you at lunch that you didn’t tell me.”

“No,” Therese said. No, but it was the undercurrents, it was worse. She felt Carol’s hands leave her shoulders.

“Abby’s a very old friend of mine,” Carol said. “I talk over everything with her.”

“Yes,” Therese said.

“Well, do you think you’d like to go?”

Carol had turned away from her, and suddenly it meant nothing, because of the way Carol asked her, as if she didn’t really care one way or the other if she went. “Thanks—I don’t think I can afford it just now.”

“You wouldn’t need much money. We’d go in the car. But if you have a job offered you right away, that’s different.”

As if she wouldn’t turn down a job on a ballet set to go away with Carol—to go with her through country she had never seen before, over rivers and mountains, not knowing where they would be when night came. Carol knew that, and knew she would have to refuse if Carol asked her in this way. Therese felt suddenly sure that Carol taunted her, and she resented it with the bitter resentment of a betrayal. And the resentment resolved itself into a decision never to see Carol again. She glanced at Carol, who was waiting for her answer, with that defiance only half masked by an air of indifference, an expression that Therese knew would not change at all if she should give a negative answer. Therese got up and went to the box on the end table for a cigarette. There was nothing in the box but some phonograph needles and a photograph.

“What is it?” Carol asked, watching her.

Therese felt Carol had been reading all her thoughts. “It’s a picture of Rindy,” Therese said.

“Of Rindy? Let’s see it.”

Therese watched Carol’s face as she looked at the picture of the little girl with the white-blond hair and the serious face, with the taped white bandage on her knee. In the picture, Harge was standing in a rowboat, and Rindy was stepping from a dock into his arms.

“It’s not a very good picture,” Carol said, but her face had changed, grown softer. “That’s about three years old. Would you like a cigarette? There’s some over here. Rindy’s going to stay with Harge for the next three months.”

Therese had supposed that from the conversation in the kitchen that morning with Abby. “Is that in New Jersey, too?”

“Yes. Harge’s family lives in New Jersey. They’ve a big house.” Carol waited. “The divorce will come through in a month, I think, and after March, I’ll have Rindy the rest of the year.”

“Oh. But you’ll see her again before March, won’t you?”

“A few times. Probably not much.”

Therese looked at Carol’s hand holding the photograph, beside her on the glider, carelessly. “Won’t she miss you?”

“Yes, but she’s very fond of her father, too.”

“Fonder than she is of you?”

“No. Not really. But he’s bought her a goat to play with now. He takes her to school on his way to work, and he picks her up at four. Neglects his business for her—and what more can you ask of a man?”

“You didn’t see her Christmas, did you?” Therese said.

“No. Because of something that happened in the lawyer’s office. That was the afternoon Harge’s lawyer wanted to see us both, and Harge had brought Rindy, too. Rindy said she wanted to go to Harge’s house for Christmas. Rindy didn’t know I wasn’t going to be there this year. They have a big tree that grows on the lawn and they always decorate it, so Rindy was set on it. Anyway, it made quite an impression on the lawyer, you know, the child asking to go home for Christmas with her father. And naturally I didn’t want to tell Rindy then I wasn’t going, or she’d have been disappointed. I couldn’t have said it anyway, in front of the lawyer. Harge’s machinations are enough.”

Therese stood there, crushing the unlighted cigarette in her fingers. Carol’s voice was calm, as it might have been if she talked to Abby, Therese thought. Carol had never said so much to her before. “But the lawyer understood?”

Carol shrugged. “It’s Harge’s lawyer, not mine. So I agreed to the three-month arrangement now, because I don’t want her to be tossed back and forth. If I’m to have her nine months and Harge three—it might as well start now.”

“You won’t even visit her?”

Carol waited so long to answer, Therese thought she was not going to. “Not very often. The family isn’t too cordial. I talk to Rindy every day on the telephone. Sometimes she calls me.”

“Why isn’t the family cordial?”

“They never cared for me. They’ve been complaining ever since Harge met me at some deb party. They’re very good at criticizing. I sometimes wonder just who would pass with them.”

“What do they criticize you for?”

“For having a furniture shop, for instance. But that didn’t last a year. Then for not playing bridge, or not liking to. They pick out the funny things, the most superficial things.”

“They sound horrid.”

“They’re not horrid. One’s just supposed to conform. I know what they’d like, they’d like a blank they could fill in. A person already filled in disturbs them terribly. Shall we play some music? Don’t you ever like the radio?”

“Sometimes.”

Carol leaned against the window sill. “And now Rindy’s got television every day. Hopalong Cassidy. How she’d love to go out West. That’s the last doll I’ll ever buy for her, Therese. I only got it because she said she wanted one, but she’s outgrown them.”

Behind Carol, an airport searchlight made a pale sweep in the night, and disappeared. Carol’s voice seemed to linger in the darkness. In its richer, happier tone, Therese could hear the depths within her where she loved Rindy, deeper than she would probably ever love anyone else. “Harge doesn’t make it easy for you to see her, does he?”

“You know that,” Carol said.

“I don’t see how he could be so much in love with you.”

“It’s not love. It’s a compulsion. I think he wants to control me. I suppose if I were a lot wilder but never had an opinion on anything except his opinion—Can you follow all this?”

“Yes.”

“I’ve never done anything to embarrass him socially, and that’s all he cares about really. There’s a certain woman at the club I wish he’d married. Her life is entirely filled with giving exquisite little dinner parties and being carried out of the best bars feet first—She’s made her husband’s advertising business a great success, so he smiles on her little faults. Harge wouldn’t smile, but he’d have some definite reason for complaint. I think he picked me out like a rug for his living room, and he made a bad mistake. I doubt if he’s capable of loving anyone, really. What he has is a kind of acquisitiveness, which isn’t much separate from his ambition. It’s getting to be a disease, isn’t it, not being able to love?” She looked at Therese. “Maybe it’s the times. If one wanted to, one could make out a case for racial suicide. Man trying to catch up with his own destructive machines.”

Therese said nothing. It reminded her of a thousand conversations with Richard, Richard mingling war and big business and Congressional witch-hunts and finally certain people he knew into one grand enemy, whose only collective label was hate. Now Carol, too. It shook Therese in the profoundest part of her where no words were, no easy words like death or dying or killing. Those words were somehow future, and this was present. An inarticulate anxiety, a desire to _know_, know anything, for certain, had jammed itself in her throat so for a moment she felt she could hardly breathe. Do you think, do you think, it began. Do you think both of us will die violently someday, be suddenly shut off? But even that question wasn’t definite enough. Perhaps it was a statement after all: I don’t want to die yet without knowing you. Do you feel the same way, Carol? She could have uttered the last question, but she could not have said all that went before it.

“You’re the young generation,” Carol said. “And what have you got to say?” She sat down on the glider.

“I suppose the first thing is not to be afraid.” Therese turned and saw Carol’s smile. “You’re smiling because you think I am afraid, I suppose.”

“You’re about as weak as this match.” Carol held it burning for a moment after she lighted her cigarette. “But given the right conditions, you could burn a house down, couldn’t you?”

“Or a city.”

“But you’re even afraid to take a little trip with me. You’re afraid because you think you haven’t got enough money.”

“That’s not it.”

“You’ve got some very strange values, Therese. I asked you to go with me, because it would give me pleasure to have you. I should think it’d be good for you, too, and good for your work. But you’ve got to spoil it by a silly pride about money. Like that handbag you gave me. Out of all proportion. Why don’t you take it back, if you need the money? I don’t need the handbag. It gave you pleasure to give it to me, I suppose. It’s the same thing, you see. Only I make sense and you don’t.” Carol walked by her and turned to her again, poised with one foot forward and her head up, the short blond hair as unobtrusive as a statue’s hair. “Well, do you think it’s funny?”

Therese was smiling. “I don’t care about the money,” she said quietly.

“What do you mean?”

“Just that,” Therese said. “I’ve got the money to go. I’ll go.”

Carol stared at her. Therese saw the sullenness leave her face, and then Carol began to smile, too, with surprise, a little incredulously.

“Well, all right,” Carol said. “I’m delighted.”

“I’m delighted.”

“What brought this happy change about?”

Doesn’t she really know, Therese thought. “You do seem to care whether I go or not,” Therese said simply.

“Of course I care. I asked you, didn’t I?” Carol said, still smiling, but with a twist of her toe, she turned her back on Therese and walked toward the green room.

Therese watched her go, her hands in her pockets and her moccasins making light slow clicks on the floor. Therese looked at the empty doorway. Carol would have walked out exactly the same way, she thought, if she had said no, she wouldn’t go. She picked up her half-finished demitasse, then set it down again.

She went out and across the hall, to the door of Carol’s room. “What are you doing?”

Carol was bending over her dressing table, writing. “What am I doing?” She stood up and slipped a piece of paper into her pocket. She was smiling now, really smiling in her eyes, like the moment in the kitchen with Abby. “Something,” Carol said. “Let’s have some music.”

“Fine.” A smile spread over her face.

“Why don’t you get ready for bed first? It’s late, do you know that?”

“It always gets late with you.”

“Is that a compliment?”

“I don’t feel like going to bed tonight.”

Carol crossed the hall to the green room. “You get ready. You’ve got circles under your eyes.”

Therese undressed quickly in the room with the twin beds. The phonograph in the other room played “Embraceable You.” Then the telephone rang. Therese opened the top drawer of the bureau. It was empty except for a couple of men’s handkerchiefs, an old clothesbrush, and a key. And a few papers in the corner. Therese picked up a card covered in isinglass. It was an old driver’s license that belonged to Harge. Hargess Foster Aird. Age: 37. Height: 5'8½". Weight: 168. Hair: blond. Eyes: blue. She knew all that. A 1950 Oldsmobile. Color: dark blue. Therese put it back and closed the drawer. She went to the door and listened.

“I am sorry, Tessie, but I did get stuck after all,” Carol was saying regretfully, but her voice was happy. “Is it a good party?... Well, I’m not dressed and I’m tired.”

Therese went to the bed table and got a cigarette from the box there. A Philip Morris. Carol had put them there, not the maid, Therese knew, because Carol remembered that she liked them. Naked now, Therese stood listening to the music. It was a song she didn’t know.

Was Carol on the telephone again?

“Well, I don’t like it,” she heard Carol say, half angry, half joking, “one damn bit.”

_... it’s easy to live ... when you’re in love ..._

“How do I know what kind of people they are?... Oh-ho! Is that so?”

Abby, Therese knew. She blew her smoke out and snuffed at the slightly sweet smelling wisps of it, remembering the first cigarette she had ever smoked, a Philip Morris, on the roof of a dormitory at the Home, four of them passing it around.

“Yes, we’re going,” Carol said emphatically. “Well, I am. Don’t I sound it?”

_... For you ... maybe I’m a fool but it’s fun ... People say you rule me with one ... wave of your hand ... darling, it’s grand ... they just don’t understand ..._

It was a good song. Therese closed her eyes and leaned on the half-open door, listening. Behind the voice was a slow piano that rippled all over the keyboard. And a lazy trumpet.

Carol said, “That’s nobody’s business but mine, is it?... Nonsense!” and Therese smiled at her vehemence.

Therese closed the door. The phonograph had dropped another record.

“Why don’t you come say hello to Abby?” Carol said.

Therese had ducked behind the bathroom door because she was naked. “Why?”

“Come along,” Carol said, and Therese put on a robe and went.

“Hello,” Abby said. “I hear you’re going.”

“Is that news to you?”

Abby sounded silly, as if she wanted to talk all night. She wished Therese a pleasant trip, and told her about the roads in the corn belt, how bad they could be in winter.

“Will you forgive me if I was rude today?” Abby said for the second time. “I like you O.K., Therese.”

“Cut it, cut it!” Carol called down.

“She wants to talk to you again,” Therese said.

“Tell Abigail I’m in the tub.”

Therese told her, and got away.

Carol had brought a bottle and two little glasses into the room.

“What’s the matter with Abby?” Therese asked.

“What do you mean, what’s the matter with her?” Carol poured a brown colored liquor into the two glasses. “I think she’s had a couple tonight.”

“I know. But why did she want to have lunch with me?”

“Well—I guess a lot of reasons. Try some of this stuff.”

“It just seems vague,” Therese said.

“What does?”

“The whole lunch.”

Carol gave her a glass. “Some things are always vague, darling.”

It was the first time Carol had called her darling. “What things?” Therese asked. She wanted an answer, a definite answer.

Carol sighed. “A lot of things. The most important things. Taste your drink.”

Therese sipped it, sweet and dark brown, like coffee, with the sting of alcohol. “Tastes good.”

“You would think so.”

“Why do you drink it if you don’t like it?”

“Because it’s different. This is to our trip, so it’s got to be something different.” Carol grimaced and drank the rest of her glass.

In the light of the lamp, Therese could see all the freckles on half of Carol’s face. Carol’s white looking eyebrow bent like a wing around the curve of her forehead. Therese felt ecstatically happy all at once. “What’s that song that was playing before, the one with just the voice and the piano?”

“Hum it.”

She whistled part of it, and Carol smiled.

“‘Easy Living,’” Carol said. “That’s an old one.”

“I’d like to hear it again.”

“I’d like you to get to bed. I’ll play it again.”

Carol went into the green room, and stayed there while it played. Therese stood by the door of her room, listening, smiling.

_... I’ll never regret ... the years I’m giving ... They’re easy to give, when you’re in love ... I’m happy to do whatever I do for you ..._

That was her song. That was everything she felt about Carol. She went in the bathroom before it was over, and turned the water on in the tub, got in and let the greenish looking water tumble about her feet.

“Hey!” Carol called. “Have you ever been to Wyoming?”

“No.”

“It’s time you saw America.”

Therese lifted the dripping rag and pressed it against her knee. The water was so high now, her breasts looked like flat things floating on the surface. She studied them, trying to decide what they looked like besides what they were.

“Don’t go to sleep in there,” Carol called in a preoccupied voice, and Therese knew she was sitting on the bed, looking at a map.

“I won’t.”

“Well, some people do.”

“Tell me more about Harge,” she said as she dried herself. “What does he do?”

“A lot of things.”

“I mean, what’s his business?”

“Real estate investment.”

“What’s he like? Does he like to go to the theater? Does he like people?”

“He likes a little group of people who play golf,” Carol said with finality. Then in a louder voice, “And what else? He’s very, very meticulous about everything. But he forgot his best razor. It’s in the medicine cabinet and you can see it if you want to and you probably do. I’ve got to mail it to him, I suppose.”

Therese opened the medicine cabinet. She saw the razor. The medicine cabinet was still full of men’s things, after-shaving lotions and lather brushes. “Was this his room?” she asked as she came out of the bathroom. “Which bed did he sleep in?”

Carol smiled. “Not yours.”

“Can I have some more of this?” Therese asked, looking at the liqueur bottle.

“Of course.”

“Can I kiss you good night?”

Carol was folding the road map, pursing her lips as if she would whistle, waiting. “No,” she said.

“Why not?” Anything seemed possible tonight.

“I’ll give you this instead.” Carol pulled her hand out of her pocket.

It was a check. Therese read the sum, two hundred dollars, made out to her. “What’s this for?”

“For the trip. I don’t want you to spend the money you’ll need for that union membership thing.” Carol took a cigarette. “You won’t need all of that, I just want you to have it.”

“But I don’t need it,” Therese said. “Thanks. I don’t care if I spend the union money.”

“No back talk,” Carol interrupted her. “It gives me pleasure, remember?”

“But I won’t take it.” She sounded curt, so she smiled a little as she put the check down on the table top by the liqueur bottle. But she had thumped the check down, too. She wished she could explain it to Carol. It didn’t matter at all, the money, but since it did give Carol pleasure, she hated not to take it. “I don’t like the idea,” Therese said. “Think of something else.” She looked at Carol. Carol was watching her, was not going to argue with her, Therese was glad to see.

“To give me pleasure?” Carol asked.

Therese’s smile broadened. “Yes,” she said, and picked up the little glass.

“All right,” Carol said. “I’ll think. Good night.” Carol had stopped by the door.

It was a funny way of saying good night, Therese thought, on such an important night. “Good night,” Therese answered.

She turned to the table and saw the check again. But it was for Carol to tear up. She slid it under the edge of the dark-blue linen table runner, out of sight.

chapter twelve

January.

It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: the woman she saw peering anxiously by the light of a match at the names in a dark doorway, the man who scribbled a message and handed it to his friend before they parted on the sidewalk, the man who ran a block for a bus and caught it. Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.

A young man named Red Malone and a baldheaded carpenter worked with her on the _Small Rain_ set. Mr. Donohue was very pleased with it. He said he had asked a Mr. Baltin to come in and see her work. Mr. Baltin was a graduate of a Russian academy, and had designed a few sets for theaters in New York. Therese had never heard of him. She tried to get Mr. Donohue to arrange an appointment for her to see Myron Blanchard or Ivor Harkevy, but Mr. Donohue never promised anything. He couldn’t, Therese supposed.

Mr. Baltin came in one afternoon, a tall, bent man in a black hat and a seedy overcoat, and looked intently at the work she showed him. She had brought only three or four models down to the theatre, her very best ones. Mr. Baltin told her of a play that was to start in production in about six weeks. He would be glad to recommend her as an assistant, and Therese said that would work out very well, because she would be out of town until then, anyway. Everything was working out very well in these last days. Mr. Andronich had promised her a two-week job in Philadelphia in the middle of February, which would be just about the time she would be back from the trip with Carol. Therese wrote down the name and address of the man Mr. Baltin knew.

“He’s looking for someone now, so call him the first of the week,” Mr. Baltin said. “It’ll just be a helper’s job, but his helper, a pupil of mine, is working with Harkevy now.”

“Oh. Do you suppose you—or he could arrange for me to see Harkevy?”

“Nothing easier. All you have to do is call Harkevy’s studio and ask to speak to Charles. Charles Winant. Tell him that you’ve spoken with me. Let’s see—call him Friday. Friday afternoon around three.”

“All right. Thank you.” Friday was a whole week off. Harkevy was not unapproachable, Therese had heard, but he had the reputation of never making appointments, much less keeping them if he did make them, because he was very busy. But maybe Mr. Baltin knew.

“And don’t forget to call Kettering,” Mr. Baltin said as he left.

Therese looked again at the name he had given her: Adolph Kettering, Theatrical Investments, Inc., at a private address. “I’ll call him Monday morning. Thanks a lot.”

That was the day, a Saturday, when she was to meet Richard in the Palermo after work. It was the seventh of January, eleven days before she and Carol planned to leave. She saw Phil standing with Richard at the bar.

“Well, how’s the old Cat?” Phil asked her, dragging up a stool for her. “Working Saturdays, too?”

“The cast didn’t work. Just my department,” she said.

“When’s the opening?”

“The twenty-first.”

“Look,” Richard said. He pointed to a spot of dark-green paint on her skirt.

“I know. I did that days ago.”

“What would you like to drink?” Phil asked her.

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll have a beer, thanks.” Richard had turned his back on Phil, who stood on the other side of him, and she sensed an ill-feeling between them. “Did you do any painting today?” she asked Richard.

Richard’s mouth was down at both corners. “Had to pinch hit for some driver who was sick. Ran out of gas in the middle of Long Island.”

“Oh. That’s rotten. Maybe you’d rather paint than go anywhere tomorrow.” They had talked of going over to Hoboken tomorrow, just to walk around and eat at the Clam House. But Carol would be in town tomorrow, and had promised to call her.

“I’ll paint if you’ll sit for me,” Richard said.

Therese hesitated uncomfortably. “I just don’t feel in the mood for sitting these days.”

“All right. It’s not important.” He smiled. “But how can I ever paint you if you’ll never sit?”

“Why don’t you do it out of the air?”

Phil slid his hand out and held the bottom of her glass. “Don’t drink that. Have something better. I’ll drink this.”

“All right. I’ll try a rye and water.”

Phil was standing on the other side of her now. He looked cheerful, but a little dark around the eyes. For the past week, in a sullen mood, he had been writing a play. He had read a few scenes of it aloud at his New Year’s party. Phil called it an extension of Kafka’s _Metamorphosis_. She had drawn a rough sketch for a set New Year’s morning, and showed it to Phil when she came down to see him. And suddenly it occurred to her, that was what was the matter with Richard.

“Terry, I wish you’d make a model we can photograph from that sketch you showed me. I’d like to have a set to go with the script.” Phil pushed the rye and water toward her, and leaned on the bar close beside her.

“I might,” Therese said. “Are you really going to try to get it produced?”

“Why not?” Phil’s dark eyes challenged her above his smile. He snapped his fingers at the barman. “Check?”

“I’ll pay,” Richard said.

“No, you won’t. This is mine.” Phil had his old black wallet in his hand.

His play would never be produced, Therese thought, might not even be finished, because Phil’s moods were capricious.

“I’ll be moving along,” Phil said. “Drop by soon, Terry. Cheerio, Rich.”

She watched him go off and up the little front stairs, shabbier than she had ever seen him in his sandals and threadbare polo coat, yet with an attractive nonchalance about his shabbiness. Like a man walking through his house in his favorite old bathrobe, Therese thought. She waved back at him through the front window.

“I hear you took Phil sandwiches and beer New Year’s Day,” Richard said.

“Yes. He called up and said he had a hangover.”

“Why didn’t you mention it?”

“I forgot, I suppose. It wasn’t important.”

“Not important. If you—” Richard’s stiff hand gestured slowly, hopelessly. “If you spend half the day in a guy’s apartment, bringing him sandwiches and beer? Didn’t it occur to you I might have wanted some sandwiches, too?”

“If you did, you had plenty of people to get them for you. We’d eaten and drunk everything in Phil’s house. Remember?”

Richard nodded his long head, still smiling the downward, disgruntled smile. “And you were alone with him, just the two of you.”

“Oh, Richard—” She remembered, and it was so unimportant. Dannie hadn’t been back from Connecticut that day. He had spent New Year’s at the house of one of his professors. She had hoped Dannie would come in that afternoon at Phil’s, but Richard would probably never think that, never guess she liked Dannie a lot better than Phil.

“If any other girl did that, I’d suspect something was brewing and I’d be right,” Richard went on.

“I think you’re being silly.”

“I think you’re being naïve.” Richard was looking at her stonily, resentfully, and Therese thought, it surely couldn’t be only this he was so resentful about. He resented the fact that she wasn’t and never could be what he wished her to be, a girl who loved him passionately and would love to go to Europe with him. A girl like herself, with her face, her ambitions, but a girl who adored him. “You’re not Phil’s type, you know,” he said.

“Whoever said I was? Phil?”

“That twerp, that half-baked dilettante,” Richard murmured. “And he has the nerve to sound off tonight and say you don’t give a damn for me.”

“He hasn’t any right to say that. I don’t discuss you with him.”

“Oh, that’s a fine answer. Meaning if you had, he’d know you didn’t give a damn, eh?” Richard said it quietly, but his voice shook with anger.

“What’s Phil suddenly got against you?” she asked.

“That’s not the point!”

“What is the point?” she said impatiently.

“Oh, Terry, let’s stop it.”

“You can’t find any point,” she said, but seeing Richard turn away from her and shift his elbows on the bar, almost as if he writhed physically under her words, she felt a sudden compassion for him. It was not now, not last week that galled him, but the whole past and future futility of his own feelings about her.

Richard plunged his cigarette into the ash tray on the bar. “What do you want to do tonight?” he asked.

Tell him about the trip with Carol, she thought. Twice before she had meant to tell him, and put it off. “Do you want to do anything?” She emphasized the last word.

“Of course,” he said depressedly. “What do you say we have dinner, then call up Sam and Joan? Maybe we can walk up and see them tonight.”

“All right.” She hated it. Two of the most boring people she had ever met, a shoe clerk and a secretary, happily married on West Twentieth Street, and she knew Richard meant to show her an ideal life in theirs, to remind her that they might live together the same way one day. She hated it, and any other night she might have protested, but the compassion for Richard was still in her, dragging after it an amorphous wake of guilt and a necessity to atone. Suddenly, she remembered a picnic they had had last summer, off the road near Tarrytown, remembered precisely Richard’s reclining on the grass, working ever so slowly with his pocketknife at the cork in the wine bottle, while they talked of—what? But she remembered that moment of contentment, that conviction that they shared something wonderfully real and rare together that day, and she wondered now where it had gone to, on what it had been based. For now even his long flat figure standing beside her seemed to oppress her with its weight. She forced down her resentment, but it only grew heavy inside her, like a thing of substance. She looked at the chunky figures of the two Italian workmen standing at the bar, and at the two girls at the end of the bar whom she had noticed before, and now that they were leaving, she saw that they were in slacks. One had hair cut like a boy’s. Therese looked away, aware that she avoided them, avoided being seen looking at them.

“Want to eat here? Are you hungry yet?” Richard asked.

“No. Let’s go somewhere else.”

So they went out and walked north, in the general direction of where Sam and Joan lived.

Therese rehearsed the first words until all their sense was rubbed out. “Remember Mrs. Aird, the woman you met in my house that day?”

“Sure.”

“She’s invited me to go on a trip with her, a trip West in a car for a couple of weeks or so. I’d like to go.”

“West? California?” Richard said surprisedly. “Why?”

“Why?”

“Well—do you know her as well as that?”

“I’ve seen her a few times.”

“Oh. Well, you didn’t mention it.” Richard walked along with his hands swinging at his sides, looking at her. “Just the two of you?”

“Yes.”

“When would you be leaving?”

“Around the eighteenth.”

“Of this month?—Then you won’t get to see your show.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think it’s so much to miss.”

“Then it’s definite?”

“Yes.”

He was silent a moment. “What kind of a person is she? She doesn’t drink or anything, does she?”

“No.” Therese smiled. “Does she look like she drinks?”

“No. I think she’s very good looking, in fact. It’s just damned surprising, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“You so seldom make up your mind about anything. You’ll probably change your mind again.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Maybe I can see her again sometime with you. Why don’t you arrange it?”

“She said she’d be in the city tomorrow. I don’t know how much time she’s got—or really whether she’ll call or not.”

Richard didn’t continue and neither did Therese. They did not mention Carol again that evening.

Richard spent Sunday morning painting, and came to Therese’s apartment around two. He was there when Carol telephoned a little later. Therese told her that Richard was with her, and Carol said, “Bring him along.” Carol said she was near the Plaza, and they might meet there in the Palm Room.

Half an hour later, Therese saw Carol look up at them from a table near the center of the room, and almost like the first time, like the echo of an impact that had been tremendous, Therese was jolted by the sight of her. Carol was wearing the same black suit with the green and gold scarf that she had worn the day of the luncheon. But now Carol paid more attention to Richard than to her.

The three of them talked of nothing, and Therese, seeing the calm in Carol’s gray eyes that only once turned to her, seeing a quite ordinary expression on Richard’s face, felt a kind of disappointment. Richard had gone out of his way to meet her, but Therese thought it was even less from curiosity than because he had nothing else to do. She saw Richard looking at Carol’s hands, the nails manicured in a bright red, saw him notice the ring with the clear green sapphire, and the wedding ring on the other hand. Richard could not say they were useless hands, idle hands, despite the longish nails. Carol’s hands were strong, and they moved with an economy of motion. Her voice emerged from the flat murmur of other voices around them, talking of nothing at all with Richard, and once she laughed.

Carol looked at her. “Did you tell Richard we might go on a trip?” she asked.

“Yes. Last night.”

“West?” Richard asked.

“I’d like to go up to the Northwest. It depends on the roads.”

And Therese was suddenly impatient. Why did they sit here having a conference about it? Now they were talking about temperatures, and the state of Washington.

“Washington’s my home state,” Carol said. “Practically.”

Then a few moments later, Carol asked if anyone wanted to take a walk in the park. Richard paid the check for their beer and coffee, pulling a bill from the tangle of bills and change that bulged a pocket of his trousers. How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him. He was looking down at the table now, the thin careless line of his mouth half smiling as he straightened up and shoved his hand quickly through his hair.

They walked from the entrance of the park at Fifty-ninth Street toward the zoo, and through the zoo at a strolling pace. They walked on under the first bridge over the path, where the path bent and the real park began. The air was cold and still, a little overcast, and Therese felt a motionlessness about everything, a lifeless stillness even in their slowly moving figures.

“Shall I hunt up some peanuts?” Richard asked.

Carol was stooped at the edge of the path, holding her fingers out to a squirrel. “I have something,” she said softly, and the squirrel started at her voice but advanced again, seized her fingers in a nervous grip and fixed its teeth on something, and dashed away. Carol stood up, smiling. “Had something in my pocket from this morning.”

“Do you feed squirrels out where you live?” Richard asked.

“Squirrels and chipmunks,” Carol replied.

What dull things they talked of, Therese thought.

Then they sat on a bench and smoked a cigarette, and Therese, watching a diminutive sun bring its orange fire down finally into the scraggly black twigs of a tree, wished the night were here already and that she were alone with Carol. They began to walk back. If Carol had to go home now, Therese thought, she would do something violent. Like jump off the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge. Or take the three benzedrine tablets Richard had given her last week.