From there on he said nothing either. She went directly into the lobby, him behind her. She turned and looked at him a moment. Her face was dead, utterly dead.
“Goodbye,” she muttered suddenly and turned and walked quickly into the elevator.
He walked out of the lobby and down the street. The city spun around him like a Coney Island ride.
* * * *
He waited a week.
He lay on his bed and thought of her. He walked the streets and thought of her. The memory of that night with her grew and grew in his mind until it seemed to displace everything else.
He wrote her a letter. Thinking as he wrote it, of another letter he’d written to Sally. A different kind of letter, years before. He stopped writing once and felt a sinking sensation as he realized fully all the years that were gone. And, for a moment, looked at the world with clear eyes and the room was seen and himself in it and he saw how frightening it was to live in an empty present.
Then his particular grief came to the fore and he finished writing the letter.
The very second he dropped it in the mailbox, he regretted it. The letter hadn’t said a thing really. And suddenly he knew he didn’t want to start it all over again, even though he thought that he loved her. He didn’t want to start again because he had spent days doing nothing, sleeping late, going to movies with his last money, pounding the streets, throwing rejected stories in a pile rather than sending them out again.
He never wanted to see her again.
He was at Lynn’s place three days after he’d sent the letter. Lynn was home from work, nursing an ingrown toe nail. He was stretched out on the couch, his leg hanging over the edge, the foot stuck in a pan of hot water.
“What the hell are you moaning about?” he said, “She isn’t worth it. No girl is. And you know it.”
“Ask the man who owns one,” Erick said, bitterly.
“What do you want from me?” Lynn said, “Sympathy? I told you I don’t like her. I told you it would make you sick and it did. What can I do? Any girl that spends two years laying with another man and then starts acting fussy … well, to coin a phrase, fug her.”
Erick was in the livingroom when the phone rang. Lynn had limped into the kitchen to make coffee. He came in with a disgusted look on his face.
“Well, there she is,” he said, “I hope you’re satisfied. I should have followed my impulse to tell her you were dead.”
Erick felt a sudden burning sensation in him. He jumped up, his heart beating rapidly. His hands were shaking as he picked up the phone.
“Hello, Erick” she said.
There was silence for a moment. “Did you … get my letter?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, “I got it this morning. I’ve been away for the weekend.”
“Oh,” he said. “I wondered why you … didn’t get it before.”
“I’ve been away.”
“I … yes.”
Silence.
“Erick, could you come over to the hotel tonight?” she asked, “I’d like to talk to you about something.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“What time?”
“About nine thirty.”
“Oh. All right. Shall I call your room?”
“I’ll meet you down in the bar,” she said.
He hung up and went back to the livingroom, breathing nervously. Lynn looked up from his book.
“Well?” he asked, something threatening to break in his voice.
“We’re off again,” Erick said.
“She’s probably knocked up,” Lynn said with a smile as he started to read again.
Erick’s body jolted. He looked at Lynn with fear.
“In two weeks?” he said, his voice thin.
Lynn looked up with an obvious held smile. “Sure,” he said with cruel confidence, “Why not?”
Pregnancy. The idea appalled Erick. A child of his growing in her body. He knew it was impossible. Yet it might be true. He tried to remember what she’d said. I’d like to talk to you … about something. Not just—talk to you. Talk to you about something.
It horrified him. He wanted to turn away from her, never see her again. He wanted to push away the world with a shudder of revulsion and run. Fast.
Lynn looked up again, timing his words perfectly.
“Troubles?” he asked.
He put down his book. “Male and female, created he them,” he said cheerfully, “Gad, what a mistake.”
He looked amusedly at Erick. Erick was staring at his hands.
“One minute you’re hot for her and the next minute you’re scared to death of her,” Lynn said.
“Is it possible Lynn?”
“Anything’s possible,” he said, wringing out his point.
“Oh God”
Erick looked at his watch. It wasn’t even eleven in the morning. He got up and paced around. He stood restively before the window looking out, feeling Lynn’s eyes on him.
“How the hell can I last all day without knowing?” he said.
Lynn shrugged.
Erick was in agony by lunch. Lynn looked up from his plate and shook his head, eyes half closed.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said wearily, “Stop worrying. I was only kidding you.”
“Yes, but …”
“Listen,” Lynn said, “Bitches don’t get pregnant. They haven’t got the time to spare nine months for anything natural.”
Erick twisted his head. “Oh, how do you …” he started again.
“Call her up then,” Lynn interrupted irritably, “Tell her you have an appointment. Tell her to meet you earlier. Tell her anything, just stop whining!”
Erick leaped at the suggestion. Even knowing that it was somehow wrong. But he couldn’t stand the waiting. He couldn’t eat, he was so wracked by fear and worry.
He called her after lunch when Lynn was back in the livingroom soaking his toe.
His stomach pulsed as the phone buzzed in his ear. When the secretary answered the phone he forgot at first and said, “Hello, Leo?” and she said, in a cool, impersonal voice, “With whom do you wish to speak?”
He shuddered and swallowed fast. “Miss Peck,” he said.
“Thank you,” said the secretary.
A long pause.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello, L-Leo?”
“Yes.” Coldly.
“Look, Leo, when you called before, I forgot that I have an appointment tonight.”
He knew immediately that she’d realize he was lying. He didn’t know anyone to have appointments with and she knew it.
“So, I thought I … could, maybe, meet you after work and we could …”
“I’m sorry, I have an appointment then.”
“Oh,” he said.
“Never mind,” she said, “It isn’t important.”
His first sensation was one of relief flooding mercifully over him, relaxing every knotted, torturing fear in him.
Then, almost immediately he was torn by a similarly disturbing pang of ambivalence. It was not what he had thought and that relieved him. But with that fear gone he heard her voice objectively again and heard the misery and the sorrow in it. And knew she had just wanted to see him again to talk to him.
“Don’t say that Leo,” he said, “I want to see you. You know that. I just can’t, that’s all.”
The sound of sincerity in his own voice almost made him shudder. For the first time in his life, he realized how wonderfully sincere a liar he was. And felt deeply the shame for it.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” he said, feeling twisted by regret and yet feeling a certain sense of elation that he was in complete mastery of the situation now. And could afford to be generous.
“Look,” he said munificently, “If you change your mind, let me know.”
He hung up after she did. And, suddenly, the feeling of elation departed.
He
felt like an ass. A cruel, stupid ass. It was incredible, he thought, how one feeling succeeded another in our minds. From fear we can slide to elation then sorrow mixed with elation and then a sudden shame can bathe us. All these in the space of moments. What a fantastic quick change artist was the brain with its wardrobe of sensations.
He went back into the livingroom. Lynn didn’t even look up.
“Well?” he said, as if grudgingly concerned.
“It wasn’t a baby,” Erick said, “She just wanted to see me. But now we’re not even getting together.”
“That’s awful,” Lynn said, returning to his book.
* * * *
They were watching television when the phone rang. Erick went into the kitchen.
“Hello?” he said.
“Lynn?” asked the voice, “Is Erick there?”
“This is Erick.”
There was a pause. “This is Leo.” She sounded dreadfully ill.
“What is it Leo?”
“Can you … come over to the hotel? I’d like to talk to you.”
There was no hesitation. “All right,” he said, “I’ll be right over.”
“All right.”
“Will you be in your room?”
“I’ll be in the bar.”
He hung up and passed through the livingroom to get his coat from the bedroom. Lynn looked up.
“No,” he said flatly.
“Yes.”
Lynn shrugged. And Erick thought that in the old days at school if something like this happened there would be earnest discussion, heated demands, cries of “For Christ’s sake, don’t butcher your talent!”
Now Lynn shrugged. And Erick left him behind.
He walked to her hotel quickly, his mind always running ahead of him like an anxious dog, looking behind to see what his slowpoke of a body was doing. He wanted to run but he didn’t. He felt every urge to break into a run and run until his side was cut with a violent stitch. He just walked. And reached the hotel twenty times in his imagination before he reached it with his feet.
She was in the bar.
He went in and took off his coat and sat down beside her on the cool feeling, cool-smelling leather.
“Hello,” he said.
She smiled a trifle. She looked terrible, half drugged, about ready to topple over. Her eyes were dark rimmed. A tray full of half-smoked cigarettes lay in crushed heaps before her on the table. There were two sidecars standing there, hers half empty.
It was silent for a moment. And he felt the moment in every nerve, felt the surroundings, the darkness, not intimate somehow, but cool and crouching about them like a waiting animal. The dull wall lights, the music flowing from the speaker over the bar. Her sitting there in a low cut black blouse.
She drew deeply on her cigarette as if he had come uninvited and she were absorbed and had not the slightest intention of speaking to him.
“Well?” he said, feeling his heart beat sharply and erratically.
She looked at him. This she turned away with a convulsive sigh.
“I … don’t know,” she said, “I can’t tell you now. I thought I could. I had it all made up. But now you’re here I can’t even get started.”
She sighed again and stamped out the cigarette with shaking fingers. She bit her lower lip. He never felt a moment of more strength in their relationship. It was the only moment that he’d ever felt she was a helpless girl, afraid and timid.
“I … probably wouldn’t even have called you if I wasn’t full of sleeping pills,” she said, “I’m groggy.”
Then she snickered bitterly to herself. “But I can’t sleep. Can you beat that? Full to the brim of sleeping pills and I can’t sleep. That’s the first time that ever happened.”
He swallowed. He didn’t like it. Her smoking so desperately and gulping down the drink and being full of sleeping pills. It struck him as terribly unnatural. Yet he didn’t want to leave her.
“You look tired,” he said.
“I am,” she said, “The office work is killing me. And that weekend …” Her voice trailed off and, instantly, he saw the weekend as some new hideous element in their relationship, some carnal debauch that she had thrown herself into to forget about him. “I shouldn’t have gone,” she said, quietly.
He tried not to sound nervous. “Where did you go?”
“To a friend’s house in Connecticut,” she said.
He took the drink in front of him and sipped it. Then he felt a sudden shaming alarm which he tried to ignore but which could not be eradicated. He swallowed, then said, “I … hope you have some … some money. I’m broke.”
“I’ll sign for them,” she said.
Silence. It hung over them. He felt ill at ease. He held onto the narrow stem of the glass and stared at the circles of wetness on the slick table top.
“I … guess the letter didn’t help much,” he suggested.
She lit another cigarette.
“It didn’t say much,” he said.
“It didn’t say anything,” she said.
He almost flared up and said—Oh is that so, well, I thought it was rather expressive myself!
“Well,” he said, suddenly hating the word for a poor man’s way of getting talk started. “I … think it said something. I still think it’s impossible to go on without, well, love. I don’t know whether you’re capable of it. But I’m not.”
“At least it might have told me more,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Well,” she said, “How you felt. After that night I thought you were the cruelest person I’d ever met. I thought it was all a lark to you. Just another one night stand.”
He turned to her, incredulous. “What!”
He stared.
“You thought that?” he said, “My God, you should only know how I’ve … suffered.” It sounded weak and melodramatic but it was the only word.
She sighed heavily.
“I’m glad I’m not the only one,” she said.
“You mean it actually meant something to you?”
She turned and faced him. Her face was the blank face she had worn the night they’d parted. He saw now that it was a face that bespoke complete unhappiness and sorrow.
“Look at me,” she said, “Do I look as if it didn’t mean anything to me?”
“I … never knew,” he said, “I thought it was, well, unimportant to you.”
She shook her head, breathing with difficulty.
“Well,” he said, as if winding up a pedantic discussion, “It’s obvious that we’ve both been laboring under a misapprehension.” Hic jacet, he thought. That’s that. Good night all.
They sat in silence, unrelieved by the mutual realization that they’d both been disturbed by the incident.
After a while he finished his drink and put it down.
“Where does that leave us?” he asked directly as if it were her place to answer.
She didn’t answer. She seemed afraid to. She had to skirt the edges of it.
“I’ve never been as happy since I was a kid,” she started, “With you I mean. It made me feel like a high school kid, not like an older woman. I felt young and excited. It was wonderful to act my age again.”
“I’m glad,” he said, “I was happy with you too.”
He knew he’d said it because it seemed called for. He wasn’t sure whether he felt it or not.
“I’ve known a number of girls. But, outside of … Sally, you’re the …”
He noticed how her face tightened when he spoke of Sally. And it made him nervous talking about Sally with the girl who had lived with Sally. He was afraid Leo would say something against Sally, reveal some terrible secret about her. Sally was a secret in his heart, too precious to take out into the light and hold up for prying eyes; even eyes that already knew of it.
“I’m glad,” she said, as if he had finished what he was saying, “I … I thought I could love you. But now I … I don’t know.”
She turned to him, s
oftness in her face for the first time that night.
“I’m glad you’re not cruel,” she said.
“Believe me,” he said, feeling a sudden overwhelming desire to tell her everything, “I suffered. And not only physically.”
They sat in silence again. The red neon lights around them shone on the green leather and on them sitting there in the dimness. It was like a make-believe world, divorced of reality. He felt her hand touch his and then their fingers locked.
He felt two things. A sudden rush of pitying love for her. A sudden rush of fear that it had started again and his freedom was gone. Responsibility. It tottered over him again like a giant.
“Was Sally so much to you?” she asked.
He swallowed. “Not really,” he said, shivering at his own words.
After a moment he said, “I’m glad you called.”
“And if I hadn’t,” she said, “It would have ended?”
“Probably.”
She smiled weakly. “Thank God for sleeping pills,” she said. Her fingers tightened on his. He put his arm around her and held her against himself, resting his cheek against hers.
“You’re shaggy,” she said, “How long since you’ve shaved?”
“Two days,” he said.
“My God,” she said, “It scratches.”
“Would you rather I had peach fuzz?”
“No.”
After a little while he kissed her. Her lips were warm and yielding. He could smell the cigarettes and the pills on her breath and it excited him. He slid his hand down and felt the soft flesh of her stomach through the skirt.
“You don’t have on your girdle,” he said.
She smiled wearily. “No.”
The she pressed close. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” she said, her breath short now. Her hand closed over his leg under the table and she kissed his neck. He felt heat rising in him. And the words tore themselves loose without effort, he wanted to say them.
“Shall we talk of love?” he whispered, kissing her cheek, “Is it too early? Is it wrong?” He wondered if it was himself talking.
She was breathing harshly now. Her throat kept moving convulsively.