Fletcher Flora

Park Avenue Tramp

Chapter 1

She had been somewhere with someone, but she couldn’t quite remember the place or the person. As a matter of fact she had a feeling that she had been a number of places with a number of persons, but she couldn’t quite remember that for certain either. Anyhow, wherever she had been and with whomever, it was now certain that she was alone and walking down a narrow street that was dark and dirty and probably not a street that a woman should walk down alone at this hour, which was either very late or very early, depending on which way it happened to be from midnight, but none of this seemed particularly important. What seemed important was to find a place to sit down and have a drink and think calmly about where she had been and where she probably ought to go. Where she had been was surely not far, after all, for she was walking in sandals that were practically nothing but very high heels, and it would be a simple matter, if she could sit down and have a drink and think calmly, to work back to it in her mind.

A place where you could sit down and have a drink and think calmly was a bar, and a bar always had the added advantage of having a bartender, and bartenders were almost always informed, intelligent persons who were just exactly the persons to ask for advice or information on such matters as where you’d been and come from and ought to go. She had had a great deal of experience with bartenders, and on the whole, with very few exceptions, she had found them much superior to psychiatrists, and much less expensive. Perhaps that wasn’t fair, however, for she hadn’t actually been to a psychiatrist that she could remember at the moment, although it was entirely possible that a person who had forgotten where she had been could also forget having gone to a psychiatrist some time or other. But it didn’t make any difference, really, whether she had personally been to a psychiatrist or not, for she was sure that she must have friends who had gone and told her about it, just for the experience if nothing else, and this was also something that she would probably remember after a while, if only she could find a bar with a bartender. And there between two shops, if she was not mistaken, one was.

Yes. Yes, it was. It was certainly a bar. It wasn’t very big or very bright, although there was a small neon identification that she couldn’t quite make out for some odd reason, and it didn’t seem to be a bar that was trying to impose itself on anyone, but just a bar that was only trying in a quiet way to get along and earn a living. She liked that about it. Already she was feeling very compatible with this particular bar. It was extremely refreshing after so many places that were always trying to be impressive, and her compatibility achieved a quality of tenderness that prompted her to stroke its brick face gently with one hand and make a soft crooning sound in her throat that was like a little impromptu lullaby. Opening the door, she went inside and got onto a stool and started to tell the bartender what she wanted, but she couldn’t think what she wanted was, which ought to be whatever she had been having, and she felt rather embarrassed about it.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’ve forgotten what I’ve been drinking. Isn’t that silly?”

“Lots of people forget,” the bartender said.

“It’s nice of you to say that,” she said. “It’s very comforting.”

“That’s all right, lady,” he said. “It’s my pleasure.”

She looked at him gravely and decided that he was undoubtedly a superior bartender, which would make him very superior indeed. It might seem unlikely on first thought that a superior bartender would be working in a little unassuming bar that was only trying to get along, but on second thought it didn’t seem unlikely at all, for it was often the little unassuming places that had genuine quality and character and were perfectly what they were supposed to be, which was rare, and it was exactly such a place in which a superior bartender would want to work, even at some material sacrifice. She felt a great deal of respect for this honest and dedicated bartender. She was certain that she could rely on him implicitly.

“Perhaps you can help me,” she said. “In your opinion, what have I been drinking?”

“You look like a Martini to me,” he said.

“Really? A Martini?”

“That’s right. The second you came in I said to myself that you were a Martini.”

“Is that possible? To look at a person and tell that she’s a Martini or a Manhattan or something or other?”

“Just with the specialists. Some people are slobs who’ll drink anything. You can’t tell with them.”

“Can you tell just by looking whether a person’s a specialist or not?”

“Oh, sure. Sure. Almost always.”

“That’s remarkable. How can you tell?”

“A specialist’s got distinction. Something about him. Once you learn to recognize it, you can’t miss.”

“Never?”

“Well, almost never. If you can’t tell by looking, you can tell by smelling.”

“Oh, now That’s too much.”

“It’s a fact. I can tell you’re a Martini just by looking, but if I were blind I could tell by smelling.”

“How does a Martini smell?”

“Like a Martini,” he said.

She laughed with pleasure at this clever and delightful bartender. Pushing at her pale blonde hair, which had a low part and a tendency to fall forward over her eye on the heavy side, she watched him mix her Martini and tried to guess how old he was. She had made quite a study of the ages of bartenders, and she had discovered that the mean age of all the bartenders she had studied was about forty, but the median age was quite a bit lower, and she thought that the age of this one was about the median, but she couldn’t be sure. That was another thing she had discovered. It was almost impossible to tell the age of a bartender by looking, contrary to what was possible to bartenders with regard to specialists, and she had a theory that this was because they were compelled by their profession to assume certain expressions and attitudes that neutralized the effects of falling hair and dental plates and things of that sort.

She wondered if bartenders away from their bars did the same kinds of things that lawyers and doctors and stock brokers and executives and men in general were inclined to do. She wondered if they were vulnerable to the compelling drives and appetites and incredible caprices that were always complicating things and making them difficult and getting one into trouble that was sometimes serious. She wondered, for instance, if they made love. It was only natural to assume that they did, but somehow what was natural seemed in this instance unnatural. Bartenders were so invariably detached and almost clinical, although attentive and compassionate, that it was as impossible to imagine their being glandular as it was to guess accurately their ages. This one, for example, this clever and delightful bartender who was probably below the mean and about the median and really much better-looking than quite a few men she had made love with willingly — did he ever take off his starched white jacket and do interesting and exciting physical things? She thought it would he amusing to find out, but it was only something that she thought incidentally, and not something that she thought deliberately, or with intention.

“One Martini,” the bartender said. “Very dry.”

“How did you know very dry?” she said. “I distinctly remember not saying anything about very dry. It’s one of the few things I remember.”

“You look very dry,” he said. “Do I smell very dry also?”

“Naturally You naturally smell like you look.”

“Tell me something honestly. What is the very dry Martini look and smell like?”

“Very good. Lots of class.”

“Thank you. You’re sweet and comforting. I’ve never been seen and smelled by a sweeter or more comforting bartender.”

“Besides that, I’m helpful.”

“Yes, you are. You were helpful in telling me what I’ve been drinking, and it would be even more helpful if you’d tell me where I’ve been.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I don’t seem to.”

“Did you walk here from wherever it was?”

“Yes. I don’t remember walking all the way, but suddenly I knew I was walking and remember walking from were I knew.”

“Well, chances are it’s close. It isn’t likely you walked very far.”

“I know. I thought of that myself.”

She said this proudly, as if it were a considerable accomplishment, and he looked at her closely across the bar with a kind of skeptical wariness.

“Do you do this often?” he said.

“Forget where I’ve been and how I got where I am? I wouldn’t say often. Once in a while is more like it. What happens is that I go somewhere with someone and get to drinking quite a bit, and then I apparently just walk off by myself and later have to remember where I was. It’s nothing to be disturbed about. I’ll just sit here and drink my Martini and think about it calmly, and pretty soon it’ll come to me.”

“While you’re thinking, try to think where you live in case it becomes necessary to see that you get home. Will you do that?”

“I don’t have to think about that, because I already know. I live in an apartment house on Park Avenue. I remember that clearly. Would you be interested in the address exactly?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. You’ve been so comforting and helpful that I thought you might come and see me there and mix very dry Martinis for us.”

“I never go see people who live on Park Avenue. Thanks just the same.”

“Why don’t you ever go see people who live on Park Avenue? What’s wrong with us?”

“Nothing’s wrong with you. You’re out of my class, that’s all.”

“Oh, nonsense. Do you know what Park Avenue is? It’s a super-slum. I read that about it in a book, but I don’t remember what book it was or who wrote it.”

“There seems to be a lot you don’t remember, and what I don’t understand about it is how you remember leaving where you live and know where you are but don’t remember where you were in the meanwhile.”

“That’s just the way it is. The beginning’s all right, and the end’s usually all right, but now and then there’s something in the middle that gets lost.”

“All right. You sit here and try to remember the middle, and if there’s any way I can help, like fixing another Martini or something, you let me know.”

He moved away and got very busy catching up with what he’d neglected while talking with her, and she took a drink of her Martini and spun herself slowly half around on her stool and looked at the room and what was going on in it. The room was quite narrow and rather long, dimly lit by lamps in brackets on opposite walls, and it was littered with small tables and chairs and people of various sizes. About half the people were men, and the other half were women, and this was an ideal arrangement. The men were dressed every which way in almost anything, and so were the women, and the clearest difference between them was that the women had tried a little harder to make it look like a night out.

Some of the women were older than others, and some were prettier, and this was, she thought, a condition that prevailed practically everywhere you went, even on Park Avenue, and she conceded gladly that the only immediately apparent distinction of any significance between these women and her, as a representative of Park Avenue, was that none of them was wearing, like her, a gown that cost $750 and sandals that cost $50 and panties that cost about $25, as nearly as she could remember. The last item was not an immediately apparent distinction, of course, but it was at least a fair assumption.

Actually, she didn’t think of this difference of expense as proving any difference of quality, one way or the other. As a matter of fact, she hardly ever thought of money, except amusing ways to spend it or how terrible it would be not to have it, and now, after thinking briefly of clothes and the cost of them, she abandoned this line of thought as being a bore and of less significance than it had at first seemed to be. Down the room, she noticed, was a small cleared space that must have been intended for dancing, which signified music, but she could not remember having heard any music of any kind since her arrival from wherever she’d been. Beyond the cleared space, however, was a little platform, an elevation of about a foot, and on the platform was a piano and a snare drum on a stand. Nothing else, unless you counted the piano bench and a single chair. Except the bench and the chair, just the piano and the drum. She thought they looked deserted and sad and strangely static on the small platform, like a still life painted a hundred years ago by an unhappy artist with too little to eat, and she wanted suddenly to put her head on her arms on the bar and cry.

It wouldn’t do, however. It would only make her look like a hag and would accomplish nothing. What she had to do was have another drink of Martini and try calmly to think of where she’d come from. She revolved slowly on the stool and drank from her glass and began to think. To begin with, she started from where she now was and attempted to go back carefully from there, but the moment she reached the place on the narrow street where she’d become aware of herself and part of her surroundings, the street ended, the buildings dissolved, and she herself became a kind of black hiatus between then and there and another place at an earlier time. It was very discouraging and rather exhausting, but she tried patiently several times before she conceded that it was simply no use. She didn’t really care where she’d been, so far as that went, but it was possible that there were obligations or effects associated with it that she ought to know about and so she reversed her procedure and began trying to reach her present time from the other end, the beginning.

She had left her Park Avenue apartment a little after five and had gone to another Park Avenue apartment where there was a cocktail party. This apartment was the apartment of Samantha Cox, who believed that having lots of money did not excuse one from doing something substantial and making a personal contribution to Life with a capital L. Samantha’s contribution was taking lessons in acting and doing small parts in television shows, nothing yet by Paddy Chayefsky, and how substantial this was as a contribution to Life was something that could be argued. She had met a lot of people at Samantha’s party, and had drunk quite a few Martinis, and after a while several of the people, including her, had decided that it would be a good idea to go somewhere and eat, and someone had said he was feeling a violent urge for some of the marvelous Italian food they served at a place on West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, and that’s where they’d gone.

She hadn’t eaten much of the Italian food, however marvelous, but she had, as she recalled, drunk two or three more Martinis, and afterward they had gone to another place where she had drunk two or three more than that, and still afterward to still another place where there had been a comedian who told dirty jokes that weren’t very funny and several very tall girls in G-strings. She must have switched parties at this place, for she distinctly remembered for the first time riding in the front seat of a white Mark II, and this must mean that she had met and gone away with Milton Crawford, for Milton was the only man she could think of among her fairly close associates who drove a white Mark II.

Yes, it had been Milton. She was certain now. Going from the place they had met to the next place, he had kept patting her thigh, and she had let him, not considering it very important, and at the next place, which was noisy and uninhibited and very crowded, he had asked her if she would stay with him in his apartment, and she had said that she didn’t really feel much like it but might feel more like it later. She didn’t like Milton very much, although she didn’t make a cardinal issue of it, and it was more difficult to feel like it with him than with some others. Anyhow, after making it indefinite about staying with him, she had excused herself and gone to the ladies’ room, and it had been very hot in there and a long way from clean, and she remembered thinking that she wouldn’t use the toilet even if she were saturated with penicillin, and this thought had made her feel even less like staying for what would be left of the night with Milton. She had gone out of the room and out of the larger room with all the noise and people and had stood outside leaning against the building and had taken several deep breaths of air.

There. There, there, there. That was when and where she’d become a dark hiatus. The precise place and time. There was no telling how long exactly the hiatus had lasted, but probably not very long, and it would be an absolute waste of time and effort to try to remember what had been done in it, for she knew from experience that it was no use. Besides, at that moment, the drum and the piano began to talk to each other, and she quit remembering and began listening. She listened for a while without turning, and she thought that it was good dialogue, very clever. Whoever was making the drum talk was doing it lightly with a brush, and whoever was making the piano talk was doing it also lightly with a brush of fingers, and the effect was a delicacy, an intimacy, like lovers whispering. Pretty soon, in the first pause in the dialogue, she revolved half around on the stool and looked over tables and chairs and heads to the platform beyond the small area for dancing.

The young man who was brushing the drum had a round, absorbed face and round, bewitched eyes and little brown curls coiled so tightly all over his head that she was immediately inclined to discount them as being very unlikely.

The young man who was playing the piano was about medium height with slightly stooped shoulders, and if he had been naked she could have counted far too many of his bones, and he had black hair and an ugly, thin, dark face with a slightly twisted nose and twisted mouth. She thought with a kind of strange despair that he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen in all her life.

Chapter 2

Piano and the drum were lovers. After giving thanks to a dark psychotic god, they laughed and wept and made erotic love. What had been in the beginning a jam-session psalm became, in an instant, jazz pornography. The young man with bewitched eyes leaned above the drum, and the young man with the beautiful ugly face leaned above the piano, and the girl from Park Avenue leaned above the bar and listened and held an empty Martini glass, and the superior bartender leaned against the backbar opposite her and felt in his heart a rare and reluctant bitterness.

For a while she had sat sidewise to the bar with her eyes fixed on the piano player, but then she had turned slowly back to face the bar squarely, and that’s the way she was sitting now, in a posture of intent listening, with her shoulders folded slightly forward and her pale hair falling down over her eye on the heavy side. The bartender from his position could see directly past pale hair and short nose and soft mouth into the cleft between her resilient breasts that were half exposed, even when she sat erect, by the décolleté gown that had probably cost more than he made in two long months of mixing drinks and drawing beer. Watching her, he was aware of an exorbitant emotional reaction, but it was not the view of her breasts that stimulated it. He was used to nudity, resistant if not immune, and he was no longer subject as he had once been in his youth, to the hard thrust of instant desire at the sight of suggestive flesh. It was her face that disturbed him and made him feel the reluctant bitterness, for it was a small, sad, lovely face of fine structure in which sadness and loveliness would survive as a shadow of themselves after the erosions of gin and promiscuous love and nervous breakdowns. It was a face, in fact, which he would surely remember, and remembering was almost always the worst kind of mistake. This was something he had learned from a long time of tending bar. A man was a fool to take anything home in his head.

Well, he had learned a lot tending bar, and it had been, on the whole, a good and satisfying kind of life. Maybe it wasn’t the thing he would have done if he could have done what he wanted most to do, but just the same it was far from being the worst thing he might have done, and he had no complaints, no bellyaches, no futile regrets for not having become something more than he was. The only thing he wished: he wished he were not so vulnerable to the faces. Not specific faces. Not the face of this person or that person as distinguished from all other faces that had stared at themselves in the mirror behind the backbar. Composite faces. Type faces. The face of the old man who sat nursing his bourbon and water in the silence of his own dissolution as be listened to the relentless ticking of the metronome of God. The adjusted face of the pro whore who exploited love, and the sick face of the amateur whore that love exploited. The faces of the lost and the tired and the damned. And now, to disturb his peace for an hour or two, the specific, haunting face of a Park Avenue tramp who had stopped in to find out where she’d been. The rare face of a dissolute child.

She was holding the brittle bulb of her glass in the palms of her cupped hands, and pretty soon she looked up with an odd expression of supplication, as if she wanted desperately to have the bulb filled but somehow did not think it would be proper to ask. The bartender moved across the narrow space between the back and front bars.

“Another Martini, lady?” he said.

“Yes, please.”

She pushed the glass toward him and continued to sit in the posture of intent listening while he measured and mixed gin and vermouth. The drum and the piano were now angry with each other. The piano was speaking with censurable profanity.

“Have you remembered where you were?” the bartender said.

“Yes, thank you,” she said. “Not exactly, that is, but in a general way. It was a very noisy place with a band that was much too big and a dirty ladies’ room. I went there with this particular man I know who wanted me to go home with him, but I decided that I wouldn’t. I went outside and leaned against the front of the building and took several deep breaths of air, and that’s all I remember until I was suddenly walking along the street. Do you have any idea what place it was?”

“It could be one of several. Anyhow, it must be near. I can have someone help you look for it, if you like.”

“No. That won’t be necessary. I don’t care to go back. If I did, I would have to explain to Milton why I don’t want to stay with him, and he would probably be difficult. Besides, to tell the truth, I’m not quite sure myself why I don’t.”

“I see. How do you propose to get home?”

“I’ll take a taxi or something. It’s entirely possible that I may not bother to go home at all.”

“Well, you’ll have to go somewhere.”

“That’s true. It’s always necessary to go somewhere. I wonder why.”

“I don’t know, lady. It’s just expected of us, I guess.”

“Yes. You’re right, as usual. We’re always doing what’s expected of us. The trouble is, however, I’m not. I get into quite a bit of trouble that way.”

“I can imagine.”

“You’re very understanding. I can see that. Don’t worry about me, though. I’ll go somewhere else when it becomes necessary, but right now I’m happy to be exactly where I am. I like this place very much. We’re compatible. I believe that I was guided here. After all, I didn’t have the least idea where I was coming, and here I came. Isn’t that logical?”

“You blacked out, lady. You might have wound up anywhere, and you ought to be careful. Something might happen to you some time.”

“Something’s always happening to me. I seem to be the sort of person that things just happen to. Can you believe it?”

“Yes, I can. I believe it.”

The piano was now contrite. It was filled with guilt and sorrow for having been profane. It wept softly, and the drum consoled it, and the sad lovely face of the girl to whom things happened was the compassionate mourner for all the troubled drums and pianos in the world.

“Who is that beautiful guy?” she said.

“What beautiful guy?” the bartender said.

“The one on the platform.”

“There’s no beautiful guy on the platform, lady. There’s only Chester Lewis on the drum and Joe Doyle on the piano.”

“That’s the one. The piano.”

“Joe’s not beautiful, lady He’s only a so-so piano thumper with a twisted nose and a bum pump.”

She lifted her glass in both hands and drank from it and stared at him sadly over the edge. In sadness and disappointment she shook her head slowly from side to side, the pale hair moving back and forth with the motion over the eye on the heavy side.

“I thought you were an understanding and perceptive bartender,” she said, “and I still think so. But now you are being disappointing. The piano is easily the most beautiful guy I’ve ever seen in all my life.”

“Excuse me, lady. Everyone to his own taste.”

“Are you being tolerant? I’m not sure I like that. It means I’m being tolerated, which is not particularly pleasant.”

“All right, lady. Joe’s beautiful. He’s the most beautiful guy in the world.”

“Well, you don’t have to be too agreeable. I admit that the piano has a twisted nose, and I admit that he might even be considered ugly by many people, but that’s because many people are not perceptive, which I was inclined to believe you were. What I mean is, he’s beautiful because he’s so ugly. Do you understand that?”

“Sorry. Explain it to me.”

“At first it may seem paradoxical, but a little thought will show you that it isn’t paradoxical at all. What you must realize is that everything goes in circles by degrees. The moon and the sun and the earth and all the planets. This has been demonstrated. I’ve thought a great deal about this, and I’m certain that everything else goes the same way. Every single thing. Ugliness and beauty, for example. If one becomes too beautiful, he has gone too far around the circle and becomes ugly. If one becomes too ugly, he has gone far enough around the circle to become beautiful. Isn’t that reasonable? Don’t you agree?”

“Sure, sure. I get it. Joe’s so damn ugly he’s come around to being beautiful. It’s simple.”

“That’s right. Now you are being the perceptive person I thought you were.”

He looked at her, at her fine grave face and nearly bare breasts, and he thought tiredly that this one was surely gone. If not gone, going, going. All her life, he thought, she had been doing by compulsion in desperation all the significant things that required the sacrifice of herself, some part of herself, and after they were done, after the sacrifice, she had tried to explain and justify, by circles or squares or Omar Khayyam or almost any too-late God-damned rationalization, whatever she had done, whatever sacrifice made, and in the future she would go on drinking too much gin and sleeping in too many beds and blacking out between bed and bottle, and in the end, if she was lucky, she would wind up jumping off a high place, or taking too many soporifics, or having shock treatments and lying on a couch in an expensive sanitarium trying to remember where she’d been and how she’d got where she was, and weaving bright little rugs on a hand-loom for therapy. The worst of it was, she hit him in his vulnerability; she had a face he would remember, and he would see it in the darkness above his bed, tonight and possibly nights afterward, and a long time from now, between a beer and a bourbon, he would wonder suddenly if she were dead or alive and what the diagnosis had been.

“What did you mean by bum pump?” she said.

“Nothing,” he said. “Forget it.”

“You meant something. Of course you meant something.”

“All right. A pump’s a heart.”

“I know a pump’s a heart. I know all sorts of slang. Once, just for fun, I took two tests. You know. These multiple choice things that you get in school and places. One of them was about highbrow words, and the other was about lowbrow words, to find out which ones you knew best, and I came out knowing a lot more about lowbrow. Would you believe it?”

“And you from Park Avenue? Not quite.”

“It’s true. I came out a much better lowbrow. I was quite proud of myself.”

“Congratulations.”

“Thank you. You’re very kind. Tell me, however. Why does this beautiful piano have a bad heart?”

“It started as a kid, I guess. Rheumatic fever. I don’t know, really. It’s just something I heard about.”

“What’s rheumatic fever?”

“It’s something you get as a kid that gives you a bad heart.”

“I don’t know about this. Is it serious?”

“Anything that gives you a bad heart is serious.”

“I mean the heart. Is the heart serious?”

“Not so much. He may live another year or two.”

She drank what was left of her Martini and looked at the empty glass as if it had somehow deserted her when she needed it most. He thought for a moment that she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She hadn’t cried for a long, long time. Not since crying for a reason that he couldn’t know and she wished to forget. It wasn’t likely that she would ever cry again.

“I love him,” she said.

“Sure,” he said.

“It’s true. I thought I loved him because he was so beautiful by being ugly, and now I know I love him, because he has a bum heart from having rheumatic fever as a small boy. Do you honestly think he will die soon?”

“Not before tomorrow. It’ll be long enough if you love him until tomorrow.”

“Maybe I could give him a little happiness in the end.”

“I doubt it.”

“Why? I’ve given several people a little happiness, I believe. It’s not impossible.”

“Leave him alone. You’d probably only make him more aware of what he’s about to be missing.”

“I feel compelled to try. At least, he should be allowed to accept or reject the proposition for himself. We have no right to make the decision.”

At that moment, the drum and the piano became silent, and she sat silently listening to the silence of the drum and piano that was like an empty space in the sound that continued, and then, after a minute or two, the piano began playing again by itself, and she revolved the half-turn on the stool and looked that way. The drum, whose name was Chester Lewis, was gone. Only Joe Doyle, the piano, remained. Joe Doyle, the piano, was not now playing the clever stuff, the jam stuff. He was playing tunes, the little melodies that reminded people of things that had happened. At the moment of her looking, he was playing something that she remembered by sound but not by name. It had no particular associations.

“What’s he doing?” she said.

“He’s winding it up,” the bartender said. “It’s the routine. Every night, last thing before closing, he plays a few of the little tunes. Requests. It sets people up for whatever they have in mind.”

“Is anyone allowed to make a request?”

“Sure. Anyone. It’s free.”

“In that case, I must make one.”

“I’ll deliver it, if you like. Just name the tune.”

“No. I don’t think so.” She lifted her glass and tipped it, and the olive rolled out onto the bar with two amber drops. “Thank you very much, but I think it would be better if I delivered it myself.”

Chapter 3

Slipping off the stool to the floor, she stood for a few seconds in precarious balance. Then she walked back carefully among the tables to the small platform and took the enormous twelve-inch step upward with elaborate caution and leaned against the piano with a vast feeling of relief and pride in having arrived safely. She looked down at Joe Doyle and smiled, and he looked up and grinned a professional grin in which there was the slightest touch of bitterness.

“Hello, Joe Doyle,” she said.

“Hello, baby,” he said.

“Do you know something? You’re wonderful.”

“Do you know something else? You’re drunk.”

“No. I’ve drunk a number of Martinis in a number of places, and for a little while I was drunk, or at least blacked out, but now I’ve recovered and become perfectly sober.”

“You’re drunk, baby. If you weren’t drunk, you wouldn’t think I was wonderful.”

They were always drunk, he thought, always drunk. That was the way he got them, when the night was running out. Out of a glass in the tail of the night to lean against his piano and ask for the slight and shabby little tunes that had achieved permanence and an exorbitant importance in their minds because they were associated with something that had happened or had not happened or might yet happen, with good luck or bad, some place and time. Mostly they were just women with faces you never saw and names you never heard, and they came and went and in effect had never been, no strain whatever on even a bum heart, but once in a great, great while, a time or two in a couple of thousand nights, there was one with a face and a name who left a memory, and you looked up and saw her leaning over the piano in her expensive gown with her pale hair over her eye on the heavy side, and you felt it suddenly in the bum heart, and you wished it were possible for you to live a little longer than the prognosis, at least long enough to learn in your own way that it would have been better if you hadn’t lived so long.

“If it embarrasses you to be called wonderful,” she said, “I apologize. You’re good. Do you object to that? You’re very good.”

“No, baby. Not even good. Jelly Roll Morton was good. Fats Waller was good. The Duke’s good. Not me. I’m just a thumper.”

“I can see that you’re determined to belittle yourself, and I don’t want to hear it. You’d be surprised to know how sad it makes me to hear it. What I want to hear instead is a particular tune. Will you play me a particular tune, Joe Doyle?”

Sure, he thought, sure. Play me something, Joe. Play me something for me alone. They all came out of a glass in the tail of the night to hear the particular little tunes that stood for a time or a place or a man, and afterward they went away with someone or anyone to someplace or anyplace, and you let them go and remembered them at most for a minute. Even this one who had a face and was felt in the heart and had come, from the looks of her, down into the mean streets from a steel and stone tower, for kicks. Even this one? Especially this one. She was a tramp at best and a nut at worst and probably a lush in either case, and nothing could come of her but trouble in the unlikely event that anything could come of her at all, and whatever she made you feel in the heart in a minute or two of the tail of the night, you had better play her a tune and let her go if you had any concern for what was left of your life.

“You name it, baby,” he said, “I’ll play it.”

“ ‘Rippling Waters,’ ” she said. “I want particularly to hear ‘Rippling Waters.’ ”

He looked down at his fingers that had gone on playing softly the tune they had been playing and were now lightly running scales between the last tune and the next one.

“That’s Willie Smith,” he said. “What do you know about Willie Smith?”

“I know lots of surprising things,” she said.

“I’ll bet you do.”

“It’s the truth. You may ask any of my friends, if you care to. I’m always surprising them with things I know.”

“I don’t know any of your friends, baby. It isn’t like that I ever will.”

“That’s all right. I don’t think you’d like them much, anyhow. Most of the time I don’t like them very much myself.”

“That’s rough. Real rough. What do you do when you don’t like even your friends?”

“I don’t know. It’s a problem that I’ve often thought about myself. When you stop to think seriously about it, it doesn’t seem quite natural, does it? Do you suppose there’s something wrong with me?”

“I suppose there’s something wrong with all of us in one way or another.”

“That’s exactly the conclusion I’ve come to all the times I’ve thought about it. There just doesn’t seem to be any other conclusion to come to. Anyhow, there’s probably no use in thinking about it at all, especially now that I’m waiting for you to play ‘Rippling Waters’ if you happen to know it.”

“I happen to,” he said.

His fingers broke out of the scale and into the tune, and she leaned over the piano and listened, and closed her eyes with the intensity of her listening. Looking up at her, at the small breasts exposed almost entirely by her position and the small face suddenly at peace under the shadow of her lashes, he thought that she looked like a perverse child who played in perversity at being a whore and had gone to sleep in the middle of the game, but he knew that she was no child, and he suspected that she had never in her life been a child truly. Anyhow, what she was or wasn’t or had never been was something that was no concern of his, and all he really knew or wanted to know was that the night had gone on long enough. He stopped playing and dropped his hands from the keys, and she opened her eyes and nodded her head with a kind of grave suggestion of approval and gratitude.

“Thank you very much,” she said. “And now I must buy you a drink for being so kind.”

“That isn’t necessary, baby. It’s part of the routine.”

“Do you refuse to have a drink with me?”

“I didn’t say that. I just said it isn’t necessary to buy me one.”

“I see that I have made a wrong impression, and it’s all my fault because I’m so used to tipping people for everything. What I mean is, will you please give me the pleasure of having a drink with me?”

“Sorry. I don’t drink much.”

“Really? I was always under the impression that musicians drank a great deal. Is it because of having had rheumatic fever as a small boy that you don’t drink much?”

“When you said you knew lots of surprising things, you weren’t fooling, were you? Do you mind telling me how the hell you know what I had as a small boy?”

“It’s simple. The bartender told me. You mustn’t blame him, in case you didn’t want me to know, because it just came out incidentally when I said you were beautiful and he said you weren’t.”

“All right.” He stood up and touched her suddenly and lightly on one arm, as if he somehow doubted she was really there. “I’m wonderful and beautiful, baby, and the last thing you need tonight is another drink, but I’m needing one more and more all the time. Shall we sit at the bar?”

“Yes. I always prefer sitting at the bar, if possible. It’s much more convenient and gives you a chance to talk with the bartender. I’m making a study of bartenders, you know.”

“I should have guessed,” he said.

They went to the bar and sat on stools and waited for the attention of the superior bartender, who was busy at the moment at the far end of the bar with a woman with very bright red hair and a man with hardly any hair at all.

“If we’re going to have a drink together,” she said, “perhaps I’d better introduce myself. My name is Charity Farnese. I’m a very dry Martini.”

“How do you do.”

“If I hadn’t told you, would you have known from looking that I’m a Martini?”

“Sure. Anyone could tell.”

“Honestly? When I first came in here some time ago, I’d forgotten what I’d been drinking, and the bartender told me I looked like a Martini, which is what I actually am, and I thought then that it was something exceptional, his being able to tell just by looking, but perhaps it wasn’t so clever as I thought.”

“What do you mean, you couldn’t remember what you’d been drinking?”

“Well, it was Martinis, of course, because that’s what it always is, but I couldn’t remember right at the moment. When I have one of these times of blacking out, it’s difficult to remember afterward what happened before. I need to think calmly about it for a while before I can remember.”

“Is blacking out a habit of yours?”

“Not a habit. It only happens sometimes.”

“I see. Nothing to worry about, of course. Did you black out tonight?”

“Yes. That’s what I did. I’d been to all these places with some people, and then I met a man I know named Milton Crawford, and we went to another place that was crowded and noisy. I remember that about it, although I don’t remember its name or where it was exactly. Milton wanted me to go to his apartment and spend the rest of the night with him, but I wasn’t very interested because I really don’t like him very much. I went to the ladies’ room and then outside, and it must have been right then that I blacked out, because I was walking down this street alone when I next knew what I was doing, and I came in here.”

He looked down at his hands, which were lying on the bar. He clenched the fingers and spread them and clenched them again.

“Jesus,” he said.

“What’s the matter?” she said. “Why did you say that?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing’s the matter. Tell me, baby. Doesn’t having these blackouts ever bother you a little?”

“Well, they’re curious and sometimes inconvenient, I admit, but I don’t see any use in worrying about them in particular.”

“I suppose not. No use whatsoever. Do you ever remember afterward what happened during one of them?”

“No. Not during. Just the last thing before and the first thing after. Of course I’m able to get a pretty good idea sometimes from whatever situation I happen to be in when I become aware of things again.”

“Sure, sure. I should imagine.”

“It’s rather depressing when I seem to have been doing something that I wouldn’t ordinarily have done.”

“It must be. It must be real depressing.”

Joe looked down at his hands again, clenching and unclenching the fingers, apparently trying to think of something appropriate to say, and what he was actually thinking was that this one was a real nut, a psycho, and the only thing he ought to say was a quick good-by, and he couldn’t understand why he didn’t. Well, anyhow, he would have the drink that he’d been invited to have, and that would be all of it. After having the drink, he would say the good-by that he ought to say now, and no harm would be done, nothing lost, and he would go home and to bed, and maybe listen before sleeping to Gieseking playing the “Emperor Concerto” the way Joe Doyle would give his soul to play it if you could trade your soul for genius. It was good to lie in the darkness and listen to Beethoven out of Gieseking or Chopin out of Brailowsky. It kept you from wanting what you didn’t have, or missing abortively what you couldn’t.

The superior bartender, who had finished his business with the woman with red hair and the man with practically none, came down along the bar and stopped opposite them, Without asking, he poured rye and water and mixed a Martini, which he also poured. He moved along to two empty masculine beers a couple of stools beyond. Besides Joe and Charity and the redhead and the baldhead, the two beers, who seemed rather despondent, were the only customers now left at the bar. The tables in the room behind were becoming more and more vacant. Joe swallowed his rye quickly and washed it with some of the water.

“Look, baby,” he said, “won’t this friend of yours be wondering what’s happened to you?”

“Milton? He’s not a friend exactly. He’s just a man I happen to know.”

“Won’t he be wondering?”

“I don’t think so. Not seriously, anyhow. Milton’s not very reliable, to be honest, and besides, he knows that I’m apt to go away from anyplace if I take the notion. That’s the way I happened to be with Milton, as a matter of fact. I was somewhere with some other people, and I took the notion to go away with Milton, and I did.”

“Do you have a car?”

“Not here. I have one, of course, but I left it somewhere.”

“How do you expect to get home?”

“Home? I don’t know. I hadn’t thought much about it. I suppose it’s something that has to be considered eventually, but I don’t see the need for being in any hurry about it.”

“It’s late, baby. It’s very late, and there’s another night coming to get ready for. I ought to go home, and so had you, and I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You try real hard to remember this last place you were, and I’ll take you there. Maybe Milton’s still waiting.”

“I’m not sure that I want to find Milton, even if I could remember where it was I left him. He wanted me to stay with him, as I said, and he’s sure to be unpleasant if I refuse.”

“I’m sure you can handle him.”

“You’re right about that. Milton’s rather a weak character. He’s not at all hard to handle.”

“Try to remember the place.”

“It’s no use; I can tell you that without trying. I can remember something about it, but not its name or where it was.”

“All right. Finish your Martini. It can’t be very far if you walked here. We’ll look for it.”

“I’d much rather not. I’m not at all interested in finding Milton or going home. I’d much rather stay with you.”

“Never mind. Finish your Martini and come along.”

He stood up beside her, and when she saw that he was determined, she finished her Martini and stood up also, and they walked back among the tables, which had become almost entirely unoccupied, and down a short hall in the rear to the alley. His car was parked there in a small space that had room for only one more. It wasn’t a Mark II by a long way, but it started and ran, and they went to several places in it in the hour that followed and would have gone to several others if they had not been closed. The ones that were open might have been crowded and noisy earlier, but they were becoming empty and quiet and somehow depressing now, and it seemed helpful in each one to have another drink. Finally he was forced to concede what she had predicted in the beginning, that it was no use. Milton was gone from wherever he’d been, and as far as she could remember it might have been any one or none of the places they went.

“All right,” he said. “To hell with Milton. Tell me where you live, baby, and I’ll take you there myself, which is what I should have done an hour ago.”

She had drunk an incredible number of Martinis before and after the blackout, but she had achieved by the very enormity of excess an illogical reaction with which she was familiar and in which she was able to think with errant clarity and a vast and dangerous indifference to consequences. She remembered perfectly where she lived, the exact address, and she understood that not going there now would result in something unpleasant, or worse, but this did not seem at all important as compared with the experience to which she was committed. She had never had an experience with a beautiful ugly piano player with a rheumatic heart before, and it would surely be a great shame if it were simply to end before coming to anything significant.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I seem to have forgotten.”

“Come off, baby.” They were sitting in his car in the street outside the last place they had been, and he turned and stared at her in the dim light that barely reached them from the nearest lamp. “You trying to say you don’t even know where you live?”

“It’s only temporary, of course. As I said, I forget things for a while, and then later, after thinking calmly, I remember again.”

“Well, start thinking.”

“It won’t do any good immediately. I can tell you that from experience. In the morning it will come to me clearly, but it isn’t at all likely to come before.”

Lifting his hands, he let them drop in a little gesture of despair.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Jesus, Jesus.”

“Please don’t be angry with me,” she said. “I’d hate for you to be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry.”

“You were kind to help me look for Milton, even though I didn’t want to, and now I’m only making trouble for you, and what I really want to do is make you happy. It’s very odd. Since the moment I saw you and the bartender told me about your heart and all, I’ve felt a great wish to make you happy.”

“Never mind. Just tell me where the hell you want to go.”

“Well, I could go to a hotel or someplace, of course, but it would be much more pleasant if I could stay with you.”

He closed his eyes to shut out the sight of her, but all he did was trap her image behind his lids, and he cursed himself for the fool he was going to be. However she looked, however sad and lost and lovely, she was a tramp and trouble and not for him, a dipsomaniac and probably a nymphomaniac and God only knew what other kinds of maniac all told. What he ought to do, he knew very well, was take her at once to the nearest hotel, but what he wanted to do was take her home, and in the end he did what he wanted. He opened his eyes and started the car and drove to the place in which he lived, which was a large room on the third floor of a house not far from Washington Square.

As for her, she didn’t know precisely where she went or how she got there, but her senses had the extraordinary sensitivity they sometimes had in dreams, and she seemed to see and feel and hear with exaggerated intensity and excitement. She was aware of the house and the room and a bed in the room and of a sonata played softly again and again in darkness by someone on a record. Most of all, in the bed, she was aware of his thin body with its bad heart.

Chapter 4

She awoke naked in bed and opened her eyes and was warned at once by a faded pattern of paper on the ceiling that it was not her own bed in her own room in her own apartment. Closing her eyes again, she said to herself in the simple, primer-like sentences that one might use in speaking to a child: “I am Charity McAdams Farnese. I am married to Oliver Alton Farnese. I live in an apartment on Park Avenue, and I didn’t go home last night.”

There was nothing new about this, for she had wakened many times in strange places to repeat the little formula of identification, but this time, though it was nothing new, there was something different. All the other times, it had required several minutes of thinking before she could remember where she had been and was, whom she had been with and was with, but now, this time in this bed, she knew at once what had happened and who was lying beside her. There was another difference, too. The other times, at least most of the other times recently, she had been assailed by regret and suicidal despair, but this time, knowing everything instantly, she felt no regret at all and was almost happy. It was remarkable, really, how well she felt.

Except for her head, of course. It was impossible to feel entirely well when every throb of the tiny pulses in her temples was like a detonation. Besides the detonations, she could hear another sound, to which she listened., and after a few moments she realized that it was the soft, measured sound of the breathing of Joe Doyle. Opening her eyes for the second time since waking, she turned her head slowly on its pillow and looked at him. He was lying on his back, and his eyes were closed, and on his face was an expression of intense concentration, as if sleep were achieved only by the greatest effort under constant tension. He was covered by a sheet to the waist, but the upper part of his body was exposed, and she could see clearly, in the lateral wall of the side nearer her, every one of his seven true ribs. She counted them slowly, forming the shape of the numbers silently with her lips and pointing with a finger at each rib, moving the finger slowly with the counting across the intercostal spaces. She felt, for his ribs and his entire thorax, a passionate tenderness, and this was still another difference between the way she was at this awakening and the way she had been at other awakenings for a long time, for neither passion nor tenderness were emotions she ordinarily was capable of feeling until after quite a long period of adjustment to another day. He looked so very spare, his skin so thinly spread upon his bones, that she had the notion that it would be possible, if she kept staring steadily long enough, to see deeply into him, through skin and beyond bones to the heart that throbbed like a poisonous monster in its dark pericardial cavity. Examining him so, with the extraordinary passionate tenderness in which there was beginning to be a stirring of excitement, she wanted to roll over facing him on her side and take him into her arms, but she didn’t do it, in spite of wanting to very much, because be would surely awaken if she did, and she had already decided that it would be better if he did not waken until after she was gone.

Last night she had thought that she would never want to leave him, at least not permanently, and today she actually didn’t want to leave him, at least not yet, but anyone with any experience knew that what one wanted and what was practical were often entirely different things, and this difference was especially apparent the day after the night. Perhaps she would go on wanting him after leaving him, and if this turned out to be so, she might possibly come back to find him, but it wasn’t probable, and it was exceptional that she wanted him even now, having wakened beside him in the bed. Usually, when she got to drinking and going places, she would also get to wanting a man, and then she would find one and have him, and afterward, the next morning or even the same night, she would be filled with loathing for the man, whoever he was, and it was impossible for her ever to want that particular man again.

There had been two previous exceptions to this since she became Charity McAdams Farnese instead of just Charity McAdams, and they had both turned out badly, and the way they had turned out badly was very odd. She had met these men at different times in different places, and later, after she had been with each of them the first time, she discovered that she wanted to be with them again, and she had gone back and been with them, several times with each, and in both cases they had been severely beaten by someone, without apparent reason. Not just beaten up in the ordinary way that men sometimes came out of fights, but really severely beaten with their jaws and noses broken and their teeth knocked out almost entirely.

This was very odd. If it had happened to only one of them, it would not have seemed significant in relation to her having been with them several times, but its happening to both the way it did was enough to make her wonder if she were not to blame through some kind of strange influence that brought misfortune to anyone she wanted and was with more than once. So far as she knew, it had never happened to anyone she had loathed and left permanently afterward, and this was one reason why it was not probable that she would come back to be with Joe Doyle again, even though it seemed now that she might want to. The two men who had been beaten had been athletic types who played tennis and handball and polo and other physical games, and they had survived without permanent damage, except that their faces were ruined, but Joe was so frail that he would surely suffer more, and there was a chance, his heart being bad, that he might not survive at all. She felt for him far too much passionate tenderness to want that to happen.

She wondered what time it was. She looked around the room for a clock, but she couldn’t see one, and then she thought of Joe’s watch, which he was wearing, but she couldn’t read the dial from her position. Very slowly and carefully so as not to rock the bed or make the springs creak, she got up onto her knees and leaned down in what looked like an exaggerated salaam, her eyes about three inches from the watch on his wrist, and then she could see that it was almost one o’clock of what must be an afternoon.

Oh, God, she thought. Oh, God.

By the simple reading of the time, she was shocked into a realistic consideration of her position, and the despair which she had not felt so far this time came suddenly to claim her. Even in her despair, however, she was able to plan what she would say and do to explain where she had been all night and why she had not come home. It would be necessary not only to tell her husband a lie, but also to get someone reliable to support her in it if necessary. She had told her husband so many lies that she had become expert at it and did not consider it a great problem, and what she usually told him was that she had spent the night with a friend, but the precarious part was to find a friend that you could trust with the knowledge that you had been doing something that needed lying about.

There were a number of friends who were willing to do this once, or even now and then, but no one wanted to do it frequently, and she knelt on the bed, sitting back on her heels, and tried to think of someone she had not used before or not for a long time. She thought first of Samantha Cox, at whose apartment this particular experience had begun, but she was not sure that Samantha would help her, and she was not sure that she wanted to trust Samantha with her confidence, for Samantha was the kind who might use the knowledge against her out of pure spite. She continued to consider various prospects, and finally she decided on a friend named Bernardine DeWitt, who had helped her once before long enough ago that she might be willing to do it again. Besides, now that she thought about it, Bernardine had been in the group that she, Charity, had been in before going off with Milton Crawford, and Bernardine was probably already pretty sure, anyhow, that Charity had done something that would require deception.

Having decided on Bernardine, she lay back and lifted her legs and swung them around and off the bed. Slowly and quietly, avoiding squeaks and bumps, she stood up in anguish and a brief engulfing darkness. Her head was bursting, simply bursting. She stood rigidly in anguish until darkness passed, and then she became aware of the obtrusion of another part of her body, an urgent need to relieve herself, and she wondered if the room had a private bathroom or if it was one of these places where you had to go down the hall to one that was shared. Looking around the four walls of the room, she saw three doors, one of which would be the door to the hall. This, she was sure, was the one that stood alone in the wall directly across from the bed, and one of the other two, standing as a pair in another wall, might be, with luck, a bathroom, and in the bathroom, with more luck, she might even find some aspirin.

Moving carefully to the closer door, she opened it and found a closet behind. On a rod running across the closet were hanging three suits and a topcoat and a raincoat, and on the floor were three pairs of shoes. In spite of her urgency, she took time to stand for a moment and look at the articles of clothing, which seemed inadequate and filled with pathos as compared with the quantity and quality of clothing that you would find in one of the closets of someone like Milton Crawford, for instance. She felt for Joe Doyle’s clothes the same passionate tenderness that she had felt for his thorax.

Closing this door, she moved over a few steps and opened the other. Behind this one was actually a bathroom, and she went in and closed the door after her and relieved herself, and then she looked in a little medicine cabinet above the lavatory and found some aspirin and swallowed two. She would have liked to take a shower, but the running water would have made far too much noise, and so she only turned on the tap a little bit and rinsed her face with cold water that she gathered in her cupped bands. Returning to the other room, she saw her $25 panties and $750 gown lying neatly on a chair, which surprised her, for she never put anything neatly anywhere, not even at home, and she definitely remembered dropping them on the floor last night when she took them off.

Joe Doyle bad picked them up and put them neatly where they were, probably when he’d got up afterward, and this seemed to her extremely thoughtful and considerate.

Filled with gratitude, she walked silently to the bed and looked down at him, feeling with the gratitude a slowly rising sense of excitement. He stirred a little and took a breath that broke the rhythm of his normal breathing and was like a gasp of pain in his throat, and she took three steps backward quickly. She hoped he wouldn’t waken and see her the way she was, without anything on, for that would probably get something started that would go on for quite a long time, and she absolutely had to get home as quickly as possible. Acutely conscious now of the need to hurry, she dressed in a matter off seconds and walked to the hall door. She hesitated there, starting to turn to look once more at Joe Doyle lying on the bed, but then she decided that it would be much better and easier if she didn’t look at him again, and so she went out of the room and down three flights of stairs to the street.

She didn’t know immediately where she was and which way she ought to start walking, but then she was able to relate herself to Washington Square and started walking in that direction. She felt very conspicuous, dressed as she was, and the shoes that were practically nothing but high heels were hard to walk in, and her ankles kept turning. It was essential to find a taxi to take her home, and the thought of the taxi reminded her of the need for money, and she had a moment’s sinking feeling before she realized that she was clutching unconsciously the small jeweled purse that she had somehow kept and carried from place to place through everything that had happened. She continued to walk and watch for a taxi, and after a while she saw one and flagged it and got in with an enormous but short-lived sense of relief and security.

She began to think about her husband. About Oliver Alton Farnese. She didn’t like to think about him and didn’t do it any oftener than was necessary, but sometimes it couldn’t be helped, and one of the times it couldn’t be helped was when she had to deceive him about something. What she had to decide now was whether to go to Bernardine’s and arrange the lie and then home, or to go home directly. She needed Bernardine and wanted to make use of her, but she didn’t feel up to seeing her or talking with her face to face. She preferred to go home, and told the taxi driver to take her there. She was certain that Oliver would not be there at this time of day.

Oliver was a creature of routine. It seemed essential to his survival to do things over and over in the same way at the same time. It was simply pathological the way he did it, and she knew from experience that he would not break his pattern just because his wife had not come home one night, which he was rather used to. Perhaps he would break it if she stayed missing too long or turned up dead somewhere, something like that, but even if she turned up dead he would break it only long enough to bury her and settle the affairs that would arise as a result of her dying. Oliver was peculiar. Sometimes she was afraid of him, and after the two men she had been with several times had been beaten, she had wondered if perhaps Oliver had had something to do with it, but this was an explanation she refused even to consider simply because it was far too frightening.

Thinking, she lost contact with the city and her position in it, not even knowing when they came onto Park Avenue, and the next contact she established was when the taxi stopped in front of her apartment building. She got out of the taxi and paid her fare and went in through the lobby to the elevator. The operator said good afternoon with functional courtesy and did not show the least interest in her appearance, which was not right for the time of day. Riding up in the elevator, in the silent steel car with the world closed out, she again had briefly a deep sense of having achieved security and even peace, but it didn’t last, of course, as it never lasted, and she was faced on her floor with the necessity of walking all the way down to the entrance to her apartment and probably having to cope with Edith, the maid, whom she hated. She might be able to avoid Edith if she had brought or had not lost her key to the door, but there was no such luck. The key was not in her purse, and she was compelled to ring.

Edith opened the door and said, “Good afternoon, Madam,” and Charity answered civilly with an effort and went past Edith and through the foyer and into the living room. Edith always addressed her as Madam, and Charity didn’t like it. It made her feel like the manager of a whore house, and the way Edith said it, in that snotty voice, it was probably exactly what she was meant to feel, or at least like one of the whores.

“I spent the night with a friend,” she said.

She was immediately ashamed and angry that she had felt it necessary to explain anything to a bitch of a maid. It was not that she felt snobbish about servants, for she didn’t, but it was just that Edith was so Goddamned supercilious, an absolute bitch, and she was, besides, a dirty spy who carried stories to Oliver Alton Farnese. That was why Oliver wouldn’t get rid of her, or let Charity get rid of her, saying always when Charity brought up the matter that Edith was a perfectly good servant and would be kept as long as she remained one.

“Yes, Madam,” Edith said.

Charity stopped and turned and looked at her.

“What do you mean by saying that in that way?” she said.

“Nothing, Madam. I only meant that I understand that you spent the night with a friend.”

“The hell you did! You meant something else entirely. Perhaps you were thinking that a friend might include almost anyone of either sex. Is that it?”

“No, Madam.”

“Why are you staring at me that way?”

“I’m sorry, Madam. I didn’t intend to stare.”

“Of course you intended to stare. It’s ridiculous to say that you can stand there staring without intending to. I consider you a dirty, spying bitch, Edith, and I’d fire you instantly if only my husband would permit it. Is that perfectly clear?”

“Yes, Madam.”

“All right. Because you’re such a bitch and would like to think the worst possible things about me, I’ll tell you that I spent the night with my friend Bernardine DeWitt. Do you understand that, Edith? Do you understand that clearly?”

“Yes, Madam. With Mrs. DeWitt.”

Turning, Charity went on through the apartment to her own room. She took off all her clothes, and lay down on her back across the bed and closed her eyes and pressed the eyeballs with the tips of her fingers until the pain became intense. She felt shaken and sickened by the scene with Edith, and every time one occurred, which was frequently, she swore that one would never happen again, but one always did, and the worst of it was that the mistress always seemed to come out of it in the wrong position, Charity the bitch, instead of Edith. Well, this time she had made what might turn out to be a bad mistake, which was what came of losing your temper and saying things without thinking. She had said that she spent the night with Bernardine, had committed herself to the lie before it was secured, and now Bernardine would simply have to help her or she would be in more trouble than she could handle. She would have to call Bernardine without delay, this instant, and secure the lie.

Sitting up on the edge of the bed, she picked up her telephone, which was a private line, not an extension, and held it in her hands and tried to think of Bernardine’s private number, the one to the phone in her bedroom, not the one to the apartment that a servant would answer. After an effort, she remembered the number and dialed it, and fortunately Bernardine was there and answered.

“Hello, Bernie,” Charity said. “This is Charity.”

“Charity!” Bernardine’s voice, which had sounded sleepy when she answered the telephone, became suddenly lively. “My God, darling, whatever in the world became of you?”

“Well, that’s why I called. I want to talk to you about it. I seemed to remember that you were in the group last night that I went several places with, but I wasn’t absolutely sure.”

“I was there all right, darling, but where the hell were you? After a while, I mean. We looked and looked for you, but you had simply disappeared.”

“I met Milton Crawford in that place where we were, the last place, and he wanted me to go away with him to another place, and I did.”

She hesitated, wondering how much she ought to tell Bernardine, but she knew that she might as well tell it all, only leaving out names, for Bernardine was no fool, and a lie that she would know was a lie might just annoy her sufficiently to make her refuse to help. You could tell from the very quality of the silence on the wire that Bernardine was waiting for Charity to ask whatever favor she’d called to ask and was prepared to be contrary about it if there was the least bit of nonsense.

“Well,” Charity said, “I went on to this other place with Milton, and he got to be a bore by patting my leg constantly and urging me to go to his apartment with him, and finally I left by myself and blacked out and ended up in this place where there was a beautiful piano player who tried to help me find Milton, but we couldn’t. That’s about all there is to it, Bernie, except I didn’t come home, and Oliver will want to know where I was.”

“So do I, darling. Where were you?”

“I told you, Bernie. I was with this piano player.”

“Imagine! With a piano player! Darling, how was he?”

“Look, Bernie, I know it’s very amusing and all that, but I’m feeling pretty desperate about it, and what I need is help. You being divorced and all, not having a husband to say anything different to Oliver, I thought maybe you’d be willing to let me tell him I spent the night with you.”

“And to lie for you, of course, if he asks me about it.”

“Obviously it wouldn’t do any good for me to say I had if you said I hadn’t.”

“Obviously. Darling, I don’t want to make a big issue out of a little lie, but I remember doing this for you once before, and I wouldn’t want it to become a habit.”

“I’ll never ask you again, Bernie. Honestly, I won’t.”

“All right, darling. I’ll lie to Oliver for you if it becomes necessary. Sometime you must tell me how it is with a piano player.”

Bernardine laughed as if it were the greatest of jokes, and Charity said thanks and good-by. After replacing the telephone in its cradle, she lay back across the bed and pressed again on her closed eyes with the tips of her fingers. She was pretty sure she could trust Bernardine, so she could quit worrying about that part of it now. What she needed to do was take a hot shower and get into bed properly for a couple of hours, but she was suddenly too exhausted to move.

She wondered if Joe Doyle were still asleep in the room in the house not far from Washington Square, or if he had awakened by now and found her gone.

Chapter 5

He was awake. He had wakened, as a matter of fact, before she left. Waking instantly, he did not instantly open his eyes. When he did open them, he thought for a moment that he was not awake after all, but had only drifted on the verge of waking into a dream, for the first thing he saw was a naked girl who seemed to be performing the second duty of Islam. He closed his eyes and opened them again, and the girl was still there, but now she was erect on her knees, her buttocks resting on her heels, and she was apparently thinking intently about something important.

He was not having hallucinations. Neither had he died in the night and gone to an unlikely paradise with blonde houris. He was Joe Doyle, relatively sane, alive in his own bed, and he was, though not crazy, a fool. In the tag hours, in the recurring span of a man’s greatest vulnerability, he had acquired a fancy dame on a dipso prowl, and he had brought her home, and here she was. Charity. Charity Farnese. Here she was in his bed with the taste in her mouth of the night before, and she was probably wondering for the umpteenth desperate time why she had done what she’d done, and how in God’s name she would account for it to her friends or husband or confessor or whomever she might, in her need for catharsis or shriving, make her accounting to. Watching her through eyes so narrowly open that her body was blurred by his lashes, he felt, as she had in watching him, a stirring of excitement, but he did not move speak, and the reason he didn’t was essentially the same reason she had decided to slip away. Even when it was felt in the heart, there was no percentage in going farther with what had already gone too far because it couldn’t go far enough.

In a little while, she eased back and lifted her legs and swung them off the bed, and she did this carefully and quietly with the obvious purpose of not disturbing him. He couldn’t see her for several minutes after that, but he heard her open the closet door, and then the door to the bathroom. She want into the bathroom, and everything was completely quiet for the time that she was there, and as a matter of fact he did not hear her come out or know that she was near until she was suddenly standing beside the bed looking down at him. He had not opened his eyes any wider than the slit, and so she didn’t know he was awake and had been watching her when she was in sight and listening to her movements when she was not, but now, seeing again so suddenly her slim and nearly perfect body blurred by his lashes, he almost betrayed himself by the minor violence of a reaction that caused his own body to jerk involuntarily and his breath to break off in his throat. Startled, she stepped back and began at once to dress, which was quickly accomplished, and then she walked to the door and hesitated and went out.

After she was gone, he continued to lie in bed, not because there was any possibility of his sleeping again, but because there wasn’t anything he could think of that was worth getting up to do, and after a few minutes he began to listen to his heart. He couldn’t actually hear it, of course, but by placing his right hand flat on his chest above it, he could feel it beating in his palm. By the beat of it, the feel of it, he achieved a sense of the sound of it. He often did this. It prompted in him a morbid speculation, which had also become a kind of morbid pleasure. The speculation was on how many tens or hundreds or thousands of beats were left to go, and the pleasure was derived from his pride in having learned that he could speculate on this without fear of self-pity. It had occurred to him once that it was rather like testing a car for mileage. You put a certain amount of gas in the tank, and then you ran the car until it quit running, and as the mileage meter came closer and closer to what you thought would be the end, you kept waiting more and more expectantly for the cough, the missed beat, the silence. The analogy was adequate only to that point, however. When the car engine stopped, you just gave it more gas and started it again.

Another thing he often did while listening to his heart was to go back over his life and try to find something, a direction or a pattern, that would convince him that he had been significant or essential to some plan or purpose, but he could never find anything. It was not that he felt that his life was a waste, just time pulled for nothing, but only that the most you could say about any ordinary life was that it had been lived. He was only a fifth-rate piano thumper, of course, but this was not the point, for practically everyone was a fifth-rate something or other, and if there was any plan or purpose, the fifth-raters were as much a part of it as anyone else. He was not especially bitter about anything, he decided. It was better to live a short time than no time, and he was glad to have been what he was, since he couldn’t have been anything better.

Once he had tried to be. He had wanted to be a really good pianist, if not concert at least jazz, but he didn’t have the big talent that it took, and he had accepted this, once he was convinced of it, as readily as he had accepted the later understanding that he was going to die before he had lived very long, as average lives went. After high school, he had worked his way through three years of fine arts in college, piano especially, and it was then that he had accepted the reality of what he wasn’t and would never be, and he had left after the three years and played around the country with a fair dance orchestra that finally got to New York in a small spot. In New York, after a while, he began to feel the pain in his heart, and it reminded him for the first time in many years of the pain he had used to feel in the joints of his arms and legs when he was a boy.

He went to a doctor, who examined him and made an appointment for him at a hospital. At the hospital he was examined more thoroughly and asked detailed questions about the diseases he had had as a boy and as a man, but particularly as a boy, and then he returned to the doctor he had consulted originally. Previously the doctor had been noncommittal, but this time, his tentative diagnosis verified by the hospital, he was as clinically precise and as sympathetic as professional detachment permitted him to be.

“You have rheumatic heart disease,” he said. “It’s caused by fibrosis and scarring of the valves. Usually the mitral valve is affected. Sometimes the aortic valve is also affected. This is true in your case.”

“What does that mean?” Joe said.

“It means that your heart’s been working too hard for too long to do its job.”

“And now it’s wearing out, breaking down. Is that it?”

“That’s it.”

“How long will it last?”

“That’s hard to predict. Cases vary, of course. Average expectancy from the time of the damage is thirteen to fifteen years.”

“You mean this was caused by the sickness I had as a boy? The time I had the fever and the aches in my bones?”

“That’s right. Rheumatic fever.”

“I’d almost forgotten it,” Joe said.

He went away and began to think about what he would do. He knew he was not living the right kind of life for a heart cripple; there was too much tension and too little rest. Too many late hours and too little sleep. Too little eating and too much drinking and smoking. Too much of all that was bad for him and far too little of what was good. But playing the piano was about all he knew, the only way he had to earn a living, and he decided deliberately that he might as well go on with it for all the difference in time it would probably make. Not with a dance orchestra that was always moving around, however. He wanted to stay put, to get used to a place to die in, and New York, so far as he could see, was as good a place as any other.

He started off playing for living expenses in a couple of different bars in the Village, and then he met Chester Lewis, who had just come out of a special kind of hospital where he had gone to get a monkey permanently off his back. Chester was a pretty good drummer who needed a job drumming, and they’d got together, mostly just for fun in the beginning, and developed some of the little conversation pieces between the drum and the piano, and they’d been surprised and delighted by the things that could be said in this way. They’d tried it on the customers one night in the bar where Joe was playing, and it had gone well, and later they’d moved to a better job in the club where they now were, which was about as far from Sheridan Square south as Joe’s room was from Washington Square north.

This was just the outline, of course, the stripped pattern of his life as he saw it, but it was the pattern that would mean something if anything at all meant anything worth knowing, and nothing seemed to. It gave him a very strange feeling to think that he had been dying since he was twelve years old, when he’d had the fever and the aches, but it wasn’t really so strange after all, when you thought about it a while longer, for everyone started dying the instant he was born. The only difference was that Joe Doyle had only been dying a little faster than most others. Anyhow, he had already passed the average that the doctor had mentioned, the thirteen to fifteen years, and this was somehow a monstrous deception, a kind of preternatural con trick to assure him that he was living, from a special point of view, a long life instead of a short one....

And now, lying in bed after the departure of Charity Farnese, he was thinking too much and becoming depressed. Getting up abruptly, he showered and shaved and dressed and went downstairs. He had not eaten since the middle of the afternoon yesterday, and it was past time to eat again, but he was not in the least hungry and knew that the sight and smell of food would only make him sick. What he needed was a couple of ounces of rye, after which he would feel better and possibly able to eat at least a sandwich, and where he might as well go to get both was the club where he worked. Besides, Chester Lewis would probably be there, or would come in later, and they could make a little talk with the piano and the drum before the bar opened at four.

When he reached the club, Chester wasn’t there yet, but Yancy Foster, the superior bartender, was. Joe sat down on a stool at the bar, and Yancy looked at him sourly.

“Hello, beautiful,” Yancy said.

“That was last night,” Joe said.

“You said it, it was last night,” Yancy said. “Did you find Milton?”

“Not a trace. I think Milton was someone who happened to her some other night.”

“Lots of others have happened to her other nights. Lots of others have been left over.”

“Sure, Yancy. Sure.”

“Oh, she had something, all right. Something special. I admit that. She drifts in here out of a black fog, looking like a delinquent angel and talking like a schizy intellectual, and you keep watching her and talking with her and wondering what the hell will finally become of her, and you wish that it wouldn’t.”

“Yeah. That’s right, Yancy. You keep wishing that it wouldn’t.”

“A man’s a fool. He thinks he’s got his immunity built up, and then some little tramp comes along and starts a fever in him.”

“You talking to me or yourself, Yancy?”

“I’m just talking, sonny. Anyone can listen who wants to. Probably nobody will. Not even me.”

“I’m listening, Yancy. Hanging on every word.”

“I can see you are. I can see you’re real interested. Well, what I say is, they’re all a little different from each other in one way or another, but the difference isn’t important, whatever it is, and what’s important is the way they’re alike. These fancy, crazy dames! They come here on the prowl from their plush nests on MacDougal Street or Park Avenue or wherever they happen to live, and they may have different faces and answer to different names and have different fancy names for the crazy things wrong with them, but what they all are without exception is more trouble than any man with any brains would ever want.”

“You’re eloquent, Yancy. You should have been a missionary or something.”

“Sure, sure. I know. You mean I should go to hell.”

“No, Yancy. What I mean is, I was with you before you started. I don’t need the lecture.”

“You don’t think so? Well maybe not. You need something, though, sonny. You look like the wrath of God.”

“I need a couple ounces of rye, Yancy. I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“Like hell you need a couple ounces of rye. What you need is food. How long since you’ve eaten?”

“I don’t remember, Yancy. I eat when I’m hungry.”

“There’s some good beef. I’ll fix you a sandwich.”

“All right, Yancy. While you’re fixing the sandwich, I’ll drink the rye.”

Yancey poured the rye and handed it to him, and he sat hunched over the bar with the strong fumes rising into his nostrils. He looked ahead into the mirror at the reflection of the room behind him, the oppressive litter in stale shadows of tables and chairs on a worn tile floor still wet in spots from mopping, and it didn’t seem at that moment a particular misfortune that he was going to die before long.

Chapter 6

The morning of that day, Oliver Alton Farnese got up at eight o’clock. This could have been predicted by anyone who was aware of his habits. He got up at eight o’clock every day except Saturday, when he got up at nine, and Sunday, when he got up at ten.

After rising, he shaved and bathed and dressed. His clothes had been laid out for him in a particular place in a particular order, and he not only knew exactly what they would be for every change he made during the course of the day, but for every change for every day for the rest of the week, for he composed every Sunday night a detailed list of what he would wear for every occasion of the week following, and this list was deviated from only in emergency, and not even in emergency without specific authorization.

After shaving and bathing and dressing, he went to the dining room. On the way, he stopped in the hall outside the door of the room in which Charity sometimes slept, and he waited for about thirty seconds for the sound or sense of motion or static life in the room beyond the door, but nothing was heard or sensed, as he had suspected nothing would be, and then he went on to the dining room and sat down and had his breakfast of orange juice and bacon and toast and marmalade and coffee, which was served to him by Edith, the maid. He knew that his breakfast this morning would consist of these things, and that breakfast tomorrow would consist of certain other things, and breakfast of the morning of the day after tomorrow of certain others, for he planned his menus, as he planned his wardrobe, precisely and obdurately, every Sunday night, for a week to come.

“Did Mrs. Farnese come home last night?” he said to Edith.

“No, sir.”

“Did she leave any word for me?”

“No, sir.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No, sir. Mrs. Farnese never tells me where she’s going.”

“That’s right. She doesn’t. Do you know why, Edith?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Of course you do. It’s because she despises you. She thinks you’re an informer. Are you an informer, Edith?”

“I know where my first obligation is, sir.”

“That’s nicely put, Edith. Very delicate. You have no idea how much I appreciate your loyalty. You also know where your first advantage is, don’t you, Edith?”

“I think so, sir.”

“You are never a disappointment to me, Edith, You always say precisely the right thing. You know exactly when to lie and when to tell the truth.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Tell me, Edith. Where do you think my wife spent the night?”

“I assume, sir, that she spent it with a friend.”

“Precisely, Edith. There is no doubt in the world that she spent the night with a friend. Can you tell me what a friend is, Edith?”

“No, sir.”

“Oh, come, now. Surely you can. Is a friend someone you have known well for a long time, or is it possible for a friend to be someone you merely meet in the course of a night and decide to be friendly with?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve never had a friend.”

“Edith, Edith, I adore you. I really do.” He laughed softly, a sibilance with no sound of a vowel. “Go away, Edith. Please do. You have been perfect, absolutely perfect, and if you stay another moment you are liable to say something that will spoil everything.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

She went away, and he poured himself a second cup of coffee and glanced at a morning paper while he drank it. He was hardly aware, however, of what he saw. He was savoring, instead, the aftermath of Edith, and the aftermath, constantly recurring, was the substance of anticipation. He was a rich man, incredibly rich to the cold and avaricious bitch who served his table and told him tales, and it amused him enormously to see how she served him and cultivated him in the design and expectation of an eventual expression of gratitude. It would be a truly delectable pleasure when he decided to make it plain, in due time, that he had despised her all along as much as she had ever been despised by Charity, or by anyone else.

He allowed himself a half-hour for dressing and a half-hour for breakfast. At nine, he left the table and walked through the living room and the foyer to the door. Edith, who knew his schedule perfectly, was waiting at the door with his hat. He took it and put it on his head while she opened the door to let him out. On the way into the hall, just before the door closed behind him, he said, “Good morning, Edith,” and she said, “Good morning, sir,” and the last word, the subservient sir, was amputated in the air by the door’s closing. It was always this way. This way exactly.

At the elevator, he pushed the button and stood waiting briefly with indiscernible impatience as the car climbed its shaft in response to his summons. He was not impatient because he was in a hurry or had any place to be at a certain time, although it was part of his schedule to be certain places at certain times, but simply because he felt that his waiting was somehow improper and unnecessary, and that the car should have been waiting, instead, for him. He arrived at the elevator at this minute of the hour five mornings a week, give or take thirty seconds at the most, and it was in effect a personal affront, a deliberate indifference to the reservation he had made of time and space, that the operator did not wait with the car as Edith waited with his hat.

When the car arrived, its door slipping open with a soft gasp after its breathless ascent, he stepped inside and said, “Good morning,” in the identical tone he always used at this time to greet the operator, and the operator said, “Good morning, Mr. Farnese. Beautiful day outside,” and this was an example of another minor irritant that had acquired the cumulative quality of a threat from being repeated so often. The operator always seemed to find it necessary to append a comment to the simple greeting, which would have been tolerable if it had been regularly repeated, but it wasn’t. Sometimes it was a comment like this one, pertaining to the kind of day it happened to be, and sometimes it was something altogether different, pertaining to a current event or something of the sort, and it was impossible to anticipate with any accuracy what it would be on any given morning, and this was disturbing. People who performed repeatedly the same services should say repeatedly the same words and should look consistently the same way. When they did not, it was a violation of the order of things and therefore threatening.

Leaving the building with a word for the doorman, he found that his black Imperial had been brought around from the garage as usual. Getting behind the wheel, he drove by a particular route to the office he maintained in a building on Fifth Avenue, and it was, when he got there, a particular time. Crossing the outer room, he said, “Good morning, Miss Carling,” to the woman he called his secretary and who was actually nothing necessary at all, and went into the inner room and sat down at his desk, and after that there was nothing especially to do.

He didn’t need the office. He didn’t need to go there. Except that the office and his going there were necessary to the survival of the flesh and blood and bones and nerves that existed in the unique identity of Oliver Alton Farnese. Some of his mail was directed there, and this he opened and read and disposed of, and sometimes he even dictated to Miss Carling a reply to one or more of the letters. Now and then he made or granted an appointment with someone, and these appointments were scheduled as strictly for definite times as if he had a full agenda. If a person who had an appointment arrived early, he was kept waiting until the scheduled hour, and if he arrived late, he was advised by Miss Carling that he could not be seen and would have to make another appointment, if he wished, for another day.

Much of the time, after and between the mail and the appointments, if there were any of either, Farnese passed in reading selected newspapers and magazines related to investments and industry and certain sports. He did not handle his investments, nor did he engage in industry or games, but some attention to these matters seemed appropriate to his position, and they bored him somewhat less than art and literature and politics and social affairs. The truth was, he could not possibly have survived the pressures and tensions of any competitive activity whatever, and his father had recognized this and had left him the bulk of a huge family fortune so legally restricted and secured that he really had very little to do with it, except to sign documents occasionally and live richly off the income.

He had practically nothing to do that had to be done, and there was practically nothing that could have been done that he wanted to do, but it was essential to his survival to be constantly committed, if not genuinely occupied. All his life he had lived in private terror under the perpetual threat of personal disintegration. He shored himself with the minutiae of a self-imposed and obsessive regimentation. He substituted rigidity for strength, cruelty for courage. In the observation of the infliction of pain, he took an almost orgiastic pleasure. He was monstrously vain.

Miss Carling, who usually did all her day’s work in thirty minutes and frequently in no minutes, was expected, nevertheless, to be present for seven hours. She arrived at nine and departed for the day at five and took an hour for lunch between noon and one. Farnese lunched between one and half-past two. He went regularly to his club, where he received from the head-waiter a copy of the planned luncheon menu a week in advance, which enabled him to plan his personal menus in advance also, and so he always knew exactly what he would eat on any day, exactly what he would drink before and after the meal, and almost exactly how long it would require to do it. His schedule was rarely disturbed by the claims of other members on his time, for he was not understood or liked, and he usually drank and ate alone. At any rate, he was inevitably at his desk in the office at two-thirty, and often he sat there for the rest of the afternoon and did nothing at all.

This afternoon, however, he had an appointment at three o’clock with a private detective. The detective arrived six minutes early and was compelled to wait in the outer office. He was a grossly obese man whose swollen body with its narrow shoulders and heavy mammae and broad, tremulous hips and rump gave him, in spite of his size, a womanish appearance. His head was bald, his scalp scored and pocked by some kind of skin infection he had once had, and his face was gray and soggy. His name was Bertram Sweeney, and for more than a year it had been his job to shadow Charity McAdams Farnese and report regularly on her activities to Oliver Alton Farnese, her husband.

At three o’clock, he was told by Miss Carling that be could go into the inner office, and he went in and sat down in the chair from which he always made his reports. He removed a notebook from a sagging side pocket of his coat and opened it to the place where Charity had entered it yesterday afternoon, and then, without speaking, he sat holding the open notebook on one knee and looking at Farnese. He hated the man who had hired him. He hated Farnese for many reasons, some of them valid, but mostly he hated him because it was so much easier to hate anyone than to like him or to be indifferent to him.

Farnese also sat without speaking for quite a long time. He sat erect in his chair with his hands folded on the desk in front of him, and there was in the rigid immobility of his posture a cataleptic quality that was almost frightening. A tall, slender man with blond, graydusted hair and a face like a narrow wedge of stone, he might have been in his withdrawal either psychotic or ascetic, but what he was in the opinion of Sweeney could best be expressed in the language of the gutter, which Sweeney spoke fluently, and now to himself in the merest whisper he called Farnese the name of what he was, forming the word with livid lips. He wasn’t fooled, either, by the pose of quietude that Farnese held. He had learned long ago to sense the sickening turbulence beneath the surface of icy reserve, and when he sat and made his reports with quiet malice, he laughed and laughed within himself, the laughter growing and becoming so enormous inside his flabby body that he was sure it would break loose like thunder in the room.

When Farnese spoke at last, his voice, like his face, did not betray his feelings. It was modulated and flat, deviating only slightly from a monotone. His thin lips barely moved to permit the passage of words, and if there was any sign of emotional disturbance at all, it was in the fine line of a scar that followed so precisely for about three inches the line of the mandible that it seemed to have been made deliberately by a scalpel. This scar was ordinarily invisible, but sometimes it turned dead white, as now, and could be seen plainly against darker flesh, and Sweeney found it extremely interesting, and useful as a kind of adrenal barometer. He had thought at first that Farnese was older than he admitted, that the scar was evidence of plastic surgery, but he now knew definitely that this was not so. Farnese was forty-five. He had married Charity McAdams when he was forty-one and she was twenty-five. They had been married, after a fashion, four years. These were vital statistics of which Sweeney was certain.

“All right,” Farnese said. “Begin whenever you’re ready.”

Sweeney began. Using his notes to remind himself of specific times and places, he reported that he had been waiting yesterday afternoon, as per instructions, in the office of the garage in the apartment building on Park Avenue in which the Farneses lived. At exactly 4:57 be had received a telephone message from the Farnese maid that Mrs. Farnese had just left the apartment. He, Sweeney, had picked her up at the front entrance and followed her to the apartment of Miss Samantha Coy, who was not new to Sweeney’s notebook. Mrs. Farnese had remained here for nearly two hours, leaving with a party of six, including herself, at 6:43. The party of six was evenly composed of men and women in pairs, and they had apparently had quite a few cocktails, and they drove in one car, a Cadillac, to an Italian restaurant on Tenth Street. They had arrived at the restaurant at 7:18.

“Never mind the exact timetable,” Farnese said. “I’ve told you before that it isn’t necessary.”

“I like to be accurate,” Sweeney said.

“Never mind it. When I want to know a time, I’ll ask for it. Get on with the report and omit the details.”

Sweeney bowed his head above his notebook and whispered to himself the name of what Farnese was. He continued his report.

After leaving the Italian restaurant, the party of six had driven in the Cadillac to Fourth Street, where they visited three nightclubs in about three hours. While they were in the third of these, Mrs. Farnese had deserted the party and had gone away with a young man in a white Mark II. Sweeney did not know the identity of the man, but he had obtained the license number of the Mark II, and it would be a simple matter from that to get the identity.

“Don’t bother,” Farnese said. “I know who he is.”

“Oh,” Sweeney said.

Mrs. Farnese and the man in the Mark II, he said, had gone to a place in the area of Sheridan Square. Another night spot. The place was very crowded and noisy, filled with confusion, but Mrs. Farnese and the man had sat at a small table not far from the bar, and he, Sweeney, had managed to grab a stool from which he could observe them clearly. After a while, Mrs. Farnese had got up and gone away alone, presumably to the ladies’ room. Since the man had remained at the table, it was a fair assumption that Mrs. Farnese would return, which was the assumption that Sweeney made, and this was a mistake, or had almost been one, for she didn’t return after all, and it was only by the sheerest luck that he had caught a glimpse of her at the last second as she was going out past the check stand.

When he got outside after her, she was standing on the sidewalk in front of the building, just standing there very quietly, and there had been, he thought, an odd expression on her face. Or maybe it had been the absence of any expression at all. A kind of vacancy. It was pretty hard to describe, but about the best word he could think of was gone. She’d looked gone. Not there. Nobody home.

Moving suddenly, as if she’d just remembered something, she’d started walking down the street with him behind her, and she’d walked very rapidly for several blocks and had then stopped in front of still another night spot, a crummy little place identified by a few twists of neon tubing as Duo’s. She’d patted the bricks by the door as if she were in love with them, and had gone inside and sat at the bar and talked for quite a while with the bartender.

“Is this bartender important?” Farnese said.

“What do you mean?” Sweeney said.

“Did she do anything with him, go away with him, give any indication at all that he was any more to her than a common bartender?”

“No. Nothing like that. She just talked with him and drank the Martinis that he made for her.”

“Then why make a point of him? Please get finished.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Sweeney took a deep breath, held it five seconds, released it slowly. “There was a piano player there. A so-so thumper. Name’s Joe Doyle. He’s the one she went away with. After quite a while, that was. I was sitting at the bar talking to a redhead who hit me for a drink.”

“Did you follow or stay with the redhead?”

“Followed. When I’m on a job, the job comes first.”

“I congratulate you on your integrity. Where did they go?”

“They picked up his car in the alley and made a tour of half a dozen places. Didn’t stay long in any one of them. They seemed to be looking for someone, and it’s a good bet it was the guy in the Mark II.”

“Possibly. But they didn’t find him, of course.”

“No. Finally they drove to the place this other guy lives. The piano thumper. Joe Doyle.”

“Where is this?”

“An old residence south of Washington Square. Probably he has a room there. Maybe a small apartment.”

“Quite likely. What did they do then?”

“Well, that’s a matter for speculation.” Watching the stony face of Farnese, Sweeney spoke now with deep, delicious malice. “They went inside together, and they didn’t come out. Not before daylight, anyhow. I waited that long, and then I went home for a nap. A guy has to sleep now and then.”

Farnese said nothing. He sat rigidly erect in the cataleptic pose, and Sweeney kept his eyes on the fine white line of scar tissue along the mandible, and the thunderous mirth grew in Sweeney’s gross body.

“That’s all,” Sweeney said.

“Very well,” Farnese said.

“Shall I continue on the job?”

“Not today. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day. I’ll let you know.”

“All right,” Sweeney said.

He folded his notebook and replaced it carefully in the sagging pocket of his coat. Rising, he walked to the door and let himself out of the room, and Farnese continued to sit unmoving in his chair. He sat with his hands folded and submitted himself to the violations of fury and terror and incongruous desire.

Chapter 7

Bertram Sweeney went directly to his office, which was a small malodorous room at the rear of the third floor of a building that was headquarters for a dozen fringe operations. He stood for a couple of minutes in the center of the room, rubbing his scarred scalp with the palm of his right hand, and then he walked across to a narrow window and stood staring down through dirty glass into the litter of an alley.

The world today, he felt, was even a worse place than it usually was, and this made it intolerably bad. The world was a pustule, and of all the infectious organisms that lived in it, there was none more loathsome than Bertram Sweeney. He didn’t know how he could possibly stand himself and the world for the rest of the day, and so he began to do what he always did when the gross ugliness of the two, the world and Sweeney, became too oppressive for him to bear. He began to slip softly into fantasy.

Turning away from the window, he sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and removed an 8x10 photograph of Charity Farnese from the desk’s belly drawer. He stood the photograph on the desk and rocked back in the chair and sat staring at the face of Charity with a kind of drugged dreaminess in his eyes and an odd, unpleasant slackness in his mouth. He had got the picture at the beginning of his service to Oliver Alton Farnese, and it had been then much smaller, about the size of an identification photo you could carry in a wallet, but he had taken it to a studio and had it blown up and two copies made. One of the copies he kept at home, the rented room in which he slept, and the other one he kept here, in the office, and so he had a picture of Charity, whichever place he was, to look at and talk to and take with him in dreams to a different world in which there lived a different Bertram Sweeney.

“You lovely,” he whispered. “You wanton, prowling little lovely.”

Charity looked back at him with an expression compounded of excitement and tenderness and ineffable sadness, as if she understood quite well that she was surely going to do something for pleasure that would later cause her pain. Her pale hair fell forward on the heavy side, and in her eyes was a capricious solemnity. He could have sworn that her lips moved in the slightest of smiles and shaped the suggestion of a tender word.

They were lovers, of course. They existed in a detached and intimate devotion to each other in this second world of Bertram Sweeney, and Charity in the second world was precisely as she was in the first, except that in the second her dispersed and wasted self and love were reserved entirely for Sweeney, who was a tall, straight man with heavy hair and a fine, plain face and flat belly and long, strong legs. They were restricted only by the resources of fantasy, and they were at different times in many places, but the best and most recurrent place was a long beach of white sand between lush green growth and a bright blue sea in a hot country.

He was standing suddenly on the beach at the edge of the water, and the water whispered up the sand and broke like a salty caress around his ankles, and his strong brown body gleamed like bronze in the tropical sun. Then he heard her call his name, once and clearly, and she was running toward him from a distance, closer and closer to Bertram Sweeney, her body as bare and bronzed as his, so light and fleet and airily moving that it left no prints at all upon the sand.

Her hands solicited his love. She whispered soft salacities. Now they were quiet in the ebb of desire. Now they were roused in its flux and flow. All day they were lovers in the sun. Night came, and they were lovers in the night. They slept entwined on the white sand beneath enormous stars.

So it was with Bertram Sweeney, who consistently spied upon and betrayed the woman he loved in two worlds and possessed in one, and his ability to do this could be explained only as a miracle of adjustment to a complex situation. He had thought at first, when Farnese hired him, that he was being retained simply to obtain evidence of adultery for a divorce, and this would have been simplicity itself, the matter of a minor effort on any one of many nights, and the only thing he couldn’t understand was why Farnese, a man of great wealth, would hire a fringe operator like Bertram Sweeney. Then, as the arrangement continued, he began to understand that Farnese did not want a divorce on grounds of adultery, or any grounds at all, and he had hired a fringe operator because that was the only kind who would serve him in his purpose. What this purpose was precisely, Sweeney did not know, but he knew that it was not pleasant and possibly abnormal. He was no fancy psychiatrist, Sweeney wasn’t, but he had sat and sensed the agony of emotions in the man he served and hated, and what he had sensed besides the natural fury of a cuckold was an intense excitement that was not natural at all.

Well, Sweeney could understand that, in a way, although he was only a fat and ugly man in hopeless love, not a husband with certain claims and rights to assert. It was part of the miraculous adjustment to a complexity, as far as Sweeney was concerned, and he had felt many times the same fury and excitement he sensed in Farnese. He felt it when be stood at the end of a night’s work outside whatever place Charity had gone with whatever man, and afterward he would go home and look at the picture and go south to the white beach.

Farnese was a stinking sadist, of course, and probably it gave him a charge to be on top of the situation, knowing always the truth and saying nothing, knowing that he could, if he chose, exercise the advantage of an executioner at any time. As he had, in fact, exercised it twice in the cases of two selected men. Sweeney had been the agent in both cases. He had arranged the details and had felt afterward that the revenge was as much his as Farnese’s. His conscience did not disturb him appreciably.

Sweeney was certain of Farnese’s sadism, and he was also certain of something else. The sadism was not exercised against Charity Farnese for the sake of a more subtle cruelty, but if it ever was, to Sweeney’s knowledge, then Sweeney would kill Farnese. He had even decided how he would do it. He would simply walk into Farnese’s office, as he had today, and he would sit down in the chair he had sat in today, and he would take from the pocket of his coat, instead of the notebook, a gun. He would look at Farnese and say nothing and shoot him dead, and Farnese would understand clearly in the end why he was dying. There would be a kind of artistry in the simplicity of it, and the necessary sacrifice of Bertram Sweeney would mean nothing much to anyone on earth, not even to Bertram Sweeney.

So he sat at his desk this particular day that followed a particular night. Bertram Sweeney, private detective and consistent betrayer for pay. He sat at his desk in a fantasy of love at the edge of a whispering sea.

Chapter 8

By four o’clock, Charity was needing a Martini very badly The aspirin she had taken had helped her headache a little, but it was still bad enough, and not even a hot bath and a long time of lying quietly on the bed had reduced it appreciably more. What she needed was a very dry, cold Martini, and she was sure that if she had one it would make her head quit aching immediately.

She lay and thought about the Martini for quite a while, the cold, whitish liquid in a crystal shell, the crystal cold in her fingers. She wished there were a way of getting the Martini without getting up and dressing and going to make it, but the only other way was to have Edith make it and bring it to her, and she didn’t want to see Edith or give her the satisfaction of knowing that she, Charity, needed a Martini at four o’clock in the afternoon. She did need the Martini, however, after thinking about it for so long, and so she got up very slowly in deference to her head and put on a robe, which was a compromise with dressing, and went out to the kitchen and got some ice, which she carried into the living room, where she got two bottles and a shaker from a cabinet. She carried the ice and the two bottles and the shaker back to her room, and it seemed to her that it would be very poor economy of effort to mix only one Martini when she could mix two or three with practically the same expenditure, and so she mixed three and poured one and drank it quickly.

Afterward, she poured another and held it in her hands and sat down in a deep chair. This second one she sipped, and she was perfectly right, as she had been before in identical circumstances. Her head began to feel better at once, clearer and less painful, and the only disadvantage to this was that she began to think clearly of Joe Doyle and to want to be with him again. Remembering the night and its excitement, she remembered also his bad heart, and it occurred to her that the excitement had probably not been good for the heart. What if he had died in her arms? This would have been a great shock and a terrible complication, but at the same time there was in the idea a quality of total consummation that was at once thrilling and. terrifying. She did not wish to go on thinking like this about Joe Doyle, and so she began to think instead about her father, who was dead. Thinking about her father always made her feel lost and lonely, even so long after he had died, but thinking about him had at least the comfort of escape, for it was necessary to go away in her mind from this time and place.

When she went away in her mind to think about her father, she seemed always to go to the same place in the beginning, and this place was the street that ran in front of the house in the town in which she used to live, and the time of her arrival there was always evening of a summer day. The street was sad and lovely on summer evenings, and it ran both ways into a kind of eternal bittersweet status quo in which nothing ever changed. Great oaks and elms and maples grew in the parkings on both sides and touched leaves above, and below the overhead arc of limbs and leaves it was cool and shadowed, with just enough filtered light to make things softly visible, and among the leaves were a thousand singing cicadas.

She was standing by the street in front of the house, and she felt very sad and in love with herself, and she turned and walked slowly up the walk from the street to her house, which was one of the finest houses in town, and on the walk coming toward her was her father, whom she loved more than anyone on earth, even including herself. They met on the walk, and her father put his arms around her and held her and stroked her hair. Nothing was said, not a word by either of them, and after a while he released her and went on down the walk, and. she went on in the opposite direction toward the house, and that was the end of the way she seemed always to start thinking about her father. Maybe it was something that had actually happened, but she couldn’t remember that it had happened in just such a way at such a time, and it was more likely that it was only an association of imagery that stood together for the way she had felt about him.

James McAdams, her father, was the only man she ever loved with the simple, asexual love of a child, and all loves that followed were corruptions. When she was fourteen, he died suddenly in an automobile accident, and everyone thought at the time that she was very brave and stoical because she did not cry or display her grief, but the reason she didn’t was that she was too numbed by pain and too terrified by the realization that she lived in a world where something like this could happen to someone like him, and collaterally to her. After his burial, while her mother in smart black was receiving the sympathy of relatives and friends in the living room, she locked herself in her own room alone and finally cried bitterly for a long time in the terrible emptiness in which he had left her, and after that she never cried again for any reason, although many things happened to her that were worth crying about.

She knew other men, of course, and as she grew older she knew far too many for her own good, but she never quite knew why she did, or why she kept making the complete concessions that she made, the repeated sacrifice of herself. The truth was, having lost the best man of all, she despised all others. Having given to the best man her best love, she was compelled to give a lesser love to all who followed, and the love she gave, although she would never know it, was a necessary expression of her contempt and despair.

At the age of eighteen, she was sent to a good college for young women in New York. She was already becoming a considerable problem, having acquired a limited notoriety at home, and it was felt that college would give her new interests and a new direction, but it didn’t. As a matter of fact, it proved to be an almost intolerable burden, so far as she was concerned, and after completing the first year and slightly more than half the second, she was suspended for failure to make satisfactory marks. Her scholastic failure was genuine enough, but it was also a fortunate convenience for the authorities at the school, for there were other matters for which she could have been suspended or expelled, and it was practically certain the punitive action could not have been avoided much longer.

Home again, she was again a problem. She seemed always to be in a fever of excitement or in a paralysis of depression, and in the fever there were far too many affairs with random men and far too much of the drinking that increased steadily as she grew older, and in the paralysis there was also too much drinking, although she did not then see any men or want to see any. Her mother suggested that she consult a doctor, meaning specifically a psychiatrist, but Charity refused. Three times she considered deliberately what it would be like to die, and what would be the most agreeable way to accomplish death, but she never even came to any conclusion, let alone reaching a point of taking any action, and she wondered afterward if she were actually seriously considering death at all, and if she would not be too great a coward to kill herself for any reason whatever.

Then she met Oliver Alton Farnese. There was a local Farnese, a cousin to Oliver and a relatively poor relation, although he was by local standards affluent enough. Oliver had come from New York on a matter which was a combination family-business deal that was not publicized and not generally known but concerned, in fact, a loan that the local Farnese was trying to secure. Oliver usually had nothing much to do with Farnese business, but in this case, since it was a relatively unimportant matter that concerned a cousin, he was allowed to handle it. It gave him something to do and made him feel useful.

Charity met him at a dinner party to which she went reluctantly with her mother, and three weeks later, two weeks after Farnese had planned to return to New York, she married him quietly in the chapel of the Episcopal church. The marriage was considered by Charity’s mother as an incredible stroke of the best possible luck. In a way this was so, for it solved for her a serious problem that she was utterly incapable of solving herself. For Charity it really solved nothing, but she at least thought rationally about it and married Farnese deliberately for two good reasons. In the first place, she thought it would be pleasant to live on Park Avenue in New York City and have all the money she could possibly spend. In the second place, she did not love him in the least and therefore felt no emotional commitment to him. If she had loved him, she wouldn’t have married him.

Now she had thought herself from Joe Doyle to James McAdams to Oliver Farnese, and she was in danger of coming around the circle to Joe Doyle again, the same way one came by her theory around the circle from good to bad or bad to good, and what she needed to do and had better do was to think constructively about Oliver, how she could most convincingly tell him all necessary lies when he came home, which would be soon. She looked at the little electric clock beside her bed and saw that it would be, in fact, exactly twenty-five minutes from now, at six o’clock, and she knew this definitely because Oliver always knocked on her door at six o’clock if he did not see her first in some other part of the apartment. Of course, she wasn’t always in the apartment at all, when he came home, but she was certain that he knocked on the door of her room those times too, for it was part of his schedule.

She couldn’t decide whether to be contrite or casual or physically solicitous, which would require an effort but would possibly divert him, and the more she thought about it, the more difficult it became to decide and the more fearful she became, for she was truly afraid of him and often had to exercise the most rigid control in order to hide it. She remembered then that there was still another Martini left in the shaker, which was just the thing to reduce her problem to the most absurd simplicity, and so she got up and poured the Martini and sat down again and began to drink it, and she immediately decided that she would be casual. Drinking slowly, she began to watch the two hands of the clock move toward six o’clock. She couldn’t actually see the hands move at all, but nevertheless they constantly came closer and closer to the formation of a straight angle, and her tension kept increasing with the imperceptible movement of the hands, and this meant, of course, that she would be neither contrite nor casual nor solicitous when the time came, but rather coldly courteous, a form of combined hostility and fear that would not make a bad situation better.

Just before six, the hands almost at the point of their farthest separation, she finished her third Martini and got up and carried the shaker and glass and two bottles into the bathroom and set them in the tub. She wished now that she had dressed instead of remaining naked under a robe, which made her feel somehow more vulnerable, but it was too late now, actually six exactly, and while she looked at the clock and wished she were dressed, at fifteen seconds after the hour, Oliver knocked on the door. She went at once and let him in, and he followed her a few steps into the room and stood watching her as if she were some kind of curiosity that interested him mildly. The thin scar along the mandible was livid. “How are you, my dear?” he said.

He often called her his dear, and it made her uneasy. A long time ago, when she was a child, she had gone to a movie in which there was an evil duke, something like that, and the duke, for a reason she couldn’t remember, had kept his little niece locked in a room in a stone tower of his castle, and every time he went to see her, the first thing he said was, “How are you, my dear?” in just the way that Oliver said it. It was something that had stuck in Charity’s mind, and often at night after seeing the movie, she had dreamed that the duke was standing by her bed and smiling and saying, “How are you, my dear?” and she had wakened in terror and lain rigidly without opening her eyes in the fear that the evil duke, if she looked, would actually be there.

“I’m perfectly well, thank you,” she said.

“Are you?” he said. “It seems to me that you’re looking rather tired.”

“No, not at all. I’m feeling perfectly well.”

“Did yon have an interesting time last night?”

“Not particularly. It was rather dull, as a matter of fact. I went to a cocktail party at Samantha Cox’s in the afternoon and to several places afterward.”

“If it was so dull, why didn’t you come home?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You understand how it is when you get started with something. You simply go on and on for no good reason.”

“That’s very interesting, my dear. I’m always interested to know why you do things you don’t want to do. Tell me about it, please.”

“Why I do things?”

“No. What you did last night. The several places you went after Samantha’s.”

“It’s hardly worth while. It was nothing at all that would amuse you.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like to hear about it. Especially how it happened that you didn’t come home. It’s true that you didn’t come home, isn’t it? I was sure that you weren’t in your room when I left this morning.”

“Yes, it’s true that I didn’t come home. I stayed all night with Bernardine Dewitt.”

“I see. Was Bernardine with you all evening?”

“Yes. She was at Samantha’s, and a group of us went to this Italian restaurant because someone said that the food was exceptionally good, but it didn’t particularly appeal to me. As you know, I don’t especially care for Italian food.”

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy your dinner. Tell me where you went after the restaurant.”

“Well, to all those places down in the Village. We all got to drinking quite a bit and going from one place to another, and I don’t remember at all clearly what the places were. After a while, Bernardine began to become ill, which isn’t unusual, and wanted to go home, and we took her there. She was in a pretty bad condition, really, and I went up to her apartment with her and put her to bed, and she kept asking me to stay, and so I finally did because there was nothing else I could do as a friend.”

“Certainly. I understand that. You are very loyal, my dear, if nothing else.”

She thought she detected an inflection in his voice that might have been irony, and she looked at him closely from the corners of her eyes to see if there was any sign of it on his face, but she couldn’t see any in his expression, which was attentive and sober, and she began to think that she was going to get away with the lie much more easily than she’d hoped.

“The only thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you didn’t call and let me know where you were. It would only have been considerate to have called.”

“Well, I didn’t think you’d worry, and I’m sorry if you did. I thought you would assume that I was staying all night with someone.”

“Quite right. That’s exactly what I assumed.”

“It’s all right, then, I wouldn’t have wanted you to worry.”

“Thank you, my dear. You’re very kind. You can’t imagine how relieved I am to know that it was Bernardine you spent the night with, for I had the idea it was a cheap little piano player named Joe Doyle.”

He said it so quietly that she didn’t for a second quite grasp the significance of what he’d said, and then, when she did, she felt instantly and terribly sick to the stomach and in imminent danger of losing her Martinis. She understood that she wasn’t going to get away with the lie so easily as she’d begun to think, that she wasn’t, in fact, going to get away with it at all, but she couldn’t see how Oliver could possibly know already about Joe Doyle. Although it was plainly futile to adhere to the story about staying with Bernardine, it was just as futile to try now to make up another one that would be any better, and what she would have to do would be to take a position of being maliciously persecuted and decline to explain anything whatever.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Of course you do, my dear. I mean that you are, besides other things, a pathological liar.”

“Well, I can see that you are angry and determined to accuse me of all sorts of things that aren’t true, and I don’t believe I feel like listening to it.”

“Oh, come, my dear. It’s time we were honest with each other. Shall I tell you exactly what you did last night? You went, as you said, to the Italian restaurant, and then you went, as you also said, to several places in the Village. After that, however, you deviated slightly from the truth. Instead of going to Bernardine’s you went off with Milton Crawford to a nightclub in the vicinity of Sheridan Square. You left that place alone and walked down the street to another place named Duo’s, and it was there that you picked up the piano player — and I want to compliment you on your good taste and discrimination in picking the piano player instead of the bartender or the porter. Eventually, omitting the details, you went with him to his room or apartment in a residence south of Washington Square, and you stayed there with him for the rest of the night. What did you do while you were there, my dear? Please tell me what you and the piano player did to amuse yourselves.”

“I’ve already told you where I went and what I did, and it’s obvious that you have decided not to believe that or anything else I may say, so I don’t care to talk about it.”

She kept watching him from the corners of her eyes, her fear of him assuming a kind of supernatural quality, for she felt that he must surely be at least a minor malignant deity who was capable of knowing by extrasensory perception everything she did and thought, and every place she went. He was still looking at her as if she were a curiosity, and his voice had not raised or shaken while he was telling her about last night and Joe Doyle, but the thin scar was now dead white against his skin, and there was a bright sheen to his eyes that made him appear to be blind. She knew that he was certainly furious, but she was suddenly aware that he was also feeling something besides fury, a violent ambivalence of some sort, and then immediately she realized what it was he was feeling. He was looking at her and thinking about what he had just asked, what she and Joe Doyle had done together in the room in the house just south of Washington Square, and he was by his thinking excited carnally. Knowing this, she had the oddest notion that her robe had simply disintegrated to leave her naked in front of him, and she was ashamed of her nakedness, which was something she had not been for a long time.

“Surely you’ll tell me,” he said. “Remember that I’m your husband, my dear. Don’t you think that I have earned your confidence?”

She merely shook her head, not answering, and he walked across to her slowly, and she thought with a queer kind of detachment that the sheen of blindness on his eyes was very much like the shimmering intense heat on the surface of the streets on a blistering day.

“Did you do this?” he said. “And this? And this?”

She had not dreamed his hands could be so compelling and strong, nor that they could draw from her imperiously what she did not wish to give, and afterward, long after he was gone, she lay exhausted and immobile in her shame.

Chapter 9

She lay and listened and heard Oliver leave at seven. She concentrated for a few minutes on remembering what day it was and what Oliver regularly did in the evening of that day, and pretty soon she remembered that it was the day when he had dinner at his club and played bridge afterward. He would be home again not earlier than ten-thirty and not later than eleven.

A few minutes after Oliver had gone, Edith knocked on the door and asked through it if Madam was dining in, and Charity replied that she was not dining in or out or anywhere, not dining at all, and Edith said, “Very well, Madam,” and went off. After that, Charity began to think about how much she hated Edith and to wonder what she could possibly do to make Edith suffer in some way, but there didn’t seem to be anything possible that wouldn’t take far too much effort.

Thinking of Edith made her feel hot and angry, and feeling hot and angry made her feel thirsty. She wanted another Martini, which surely wouldn’t hurt her, and so she got up and went into the bathroom and got the bottles and shaker out of the tub and carried them into the bedroom and set them on the table beside her bed. She had no ice, however, and if she didn’t want to drink her Martini warm, which she didn’t, it would be necessary to go again to the kitchen for ice. She stood looking at the bottles and shaker, considering the problem, and she decided that it was just as well that she had to go to the kitchen anyhow, for she was simply going to have to eat something, in spite of what she’d told Edith, if she expected to continue having Martinis without unfortunate results, or results even more unfortunate than she frequently had.

Carrying the shaker, she went to the kitchen softly, without encountering Edith. She set the shaker on a table and opened the refrigerator, but there wasn’t a thing to eat there that appealed to her, and after considering several things and rejecting them, she got some ice and put it in the shaker and closed the refrigerator door. What she wanted, she thought, was something quite salty. Not caviar; caviar was salty enough, but she didn’t much care for it otherwise. Something more like anchovies was what she wanted. Yes, anchovies were just right. They were extremely salty and had, unlike caviar, no objectionable quality besides.

She found a can of anchovies and opened it with difficulty and put the anchovies on a small plate. Then she found a box of cocktail crackers and put several of them on the small plate beside the anchovies. Carrying the shaker in one hand and the plate in the other, she returned to her room, still without encountering Edith. There, she ate one of the anchovies on one of the crackers and then mixed three more Martinis in the shaker and poured one of them into her glass.

This is all, she thought This is absolutely all. I’ll drink these three Martinis slowly during the entire evening, and when they’re gone I’ll not drink another single one, not even a very last one the last thing before sleeping.

She sipped the first one while she ate all the salty anchovies on the little crackers, after which she began a difficult period of resolutely refusing to drink the second one too soon. Refusing would have been much easier if only she had had something to do to occupy her mind and time, but there wasn’t anything she wanted to do, and as a matter of fact almost everything she thought of was something she positively didn’t want to do. Television was depressing, and listening to hi-fi would have necessitated leaving her own room, and reading was something she hadn’t done for such a long time that it didn’t really occur to her as a serious possibility. One of her big problems was occupying her mind and time when she didn’t have anywhere to go. Once she had thought that she would occupy herself at such times by writing down her personal story, but she had learned in thinking about it that there was hardly a thing she had ever done for which she could give a credible reason, and it would be incredible to write about herself doing all those things for no reasons at all.

She wished she could dress and go out, but she didn’t think it would be wise in the situation that had developed. Not that she was given to doing what was wise in most situations, but sometimes, as now, she was compelled to do what would have been wise if she had done it a little sooner. Anyhow, though she couldn’t go, she could at least think about where she would go if it were possible, and the moment she began to think along this line, the place she wanted to go was Duo’s, and the reason she wanted to go there was to see Joe Doyle. It had been about twenty hours since she had first seen him, and only about eight since she had last seen him, and now she actually wanted to see him again already, instead of never wanting to see him again, as was usual regarding men in such cases, and this was disturbing. Especially in the situation as it had developed.

How had Oliver learned about last night? And how long, if there were to be another night, would it take him to learn about it too? Her rational mind insisted that he had been informed by a spy, either a hired professional or someone who had seen her and followed her and told Oliver out of pure malice, but she couldn’t lose the irrational feeling that there was something super-normal about it, the employment by him of some frightening ability to know things that an ordinary person couldn’t possibly know. More disturbing still, now that his information had been secured by whatever means, how many other instances did he know about? How many times, when she had thought him deceived, had he known everything all along? And why had be never before said anything or done anything to her directly?

This line of thinking took her inevitably to the men who had been mysteriously beaten, which was a direction she didn’t want to go, and she decided that enough time had lapsed since the last Martini to justify another. She poured it and drank half of it too fast and went on wanting to see Joe Doyle. She didn’t want to want to, for she didn’t want, incidentally, to get him into trouble and herself into more trouble than she was already in, but the knowledge that it was perilous and unwise to see him again actually made her desire it all the more. Finishing more slowly the second half of the second Martini, she began to see him again with remarkable clarity as she had seen him in various situations from the beginning to the end of their experience, and she was just counting his true ribs when Edith interrupted by knocking on the door.

She wished Edith would go away, and she remained silent in the hope that Edith would, but after a few moments Edith knocked again and called through the door, and Charity went across to the door and opened it. Edith was standing with the expression on her face that managed to be poisonously insulting by being so carefully courteous, and the instant Charity saw her, she began to feel angry and compelled to say something that would make a scene.

“What do you want?” she said.

“Do you have any further use for me, Madam?” Edith said. “If not, I’d like to retire.”

“Certainly I have no further use for you, Edith,” Charity said. “Surely it’s always been perfectly clear that I’ve never had any use whatever for you at any time.”

“Yes, Madam. I understand.”

“Furthermore, now that you’ve brought it up, Edith, why is it that you always retire and never simply go to bed? What, precisely, is the difference between retiring and going to bed? Is there something vulgar in going to bed, Edith? Is it somehow more proper to retire?”

“I’m sorry, Madam. I didn’t mean to offend you. May I go to bed?”

“No. I think you’d better retire, after all. Now that you’ve said it, I can see that going to bed doesn’t suit you in the least. I am more the type who goes to bed. Isn’t that so, Edith?”

“If you say so, Madam.”

“Yes. I was sure you’d agree with me. I simply can’t imagine your going to bed, no matter how hard I try, but you, on the other hand, certainly have no difficulty in imagining it of me.”

“I have never thought about it at all, Madam.”

“Oh, nonsense, Edith. There’s no use in trying to be deceitful. You not only have thought of it, but have made innumerable points of suggesting it to my husband. Isn’t it true that you discuss such matters with my husband?”

“No, Madam.”

“Well, you’re a dreadful liar, of course, and I didn’t expect you to admit it. Tell me, Edith, how long has my husband been having me followed?”

“I don’t know what you mean, Madam.”

“Of course you know what I mean. I have no doubt at all that you are somehow mixed up in it.”

“I never discuss your personal affairs with your husband, Madam.”

“Really? That’s very honorable of you, Edith. I’m convinced that you’re the most honorable spy and liar and bitch alive.”

“Thank you, Madam.”

“Not at all. I’m very happy to tell you.”

“May I retire now, Madam?”

“Certainly. Retire, Edith. Please do. Perhaps you will never wake up.”

Well, she had made another scene, as she had known she would, but this time she did not feel bad about it, not at all ashamed and degraded, and as a matter of fact she felt rather exhilarated. Closing the door, she went back and stood looking at the shaker. She wished that there were something left in it, or at least that she had not resolved to mix no more Martinis tonight, not even a last one before sleeping. It disturbed her when she broke resolutions almost immediately after making them, which she almost always did, and now she tried to think back to what the resolution had been exactly, if it had not possibly been just a random thought instead of a genuine resolution, and while she was thinking she mixed a last, large Martini just in case she was enabled to drink it by finding a loophole in the resolution. The resolution seemed to be impregnable, however, and so she finally acknowledged that she had trapped herself in another unpleasant commitment and would have to avoid it simply by ignoring it. Pouring what she could of the large Martini into her glass, she left the glass sitting on the table beside her bed while she took off her robe and turned out the lights, and then she sat down and picked up the glass and emptied it slowly and lay back on the bed and tried to go to sleep.

Sleeping was always made difficult by thinking. She had often tried to discover a way of making her mind a perfect blank, and she had been told once by a strange little man at a cocktail party that this was actually possible if you could only learn the trick, but he had been unable to tell her how to learn it, although he claimed to know it himself, and she had had no success in discovering it by her own methods or in finding anyone else who knew it and could explain it more clearly than the strange little man. Another thing she had tried was thinking only of pleasant things, and once in a while she was able to accomplish this, but unfortunately thinking was a matter of association, and every pleasant thing she could think of was associated in some way with unpleasant things, or was both pleasant and unpleasant in itself.

Tonight she tried to think of her father, which was something wholly pleasant, except when it came to the time when he had died, and then, to avoid most of everything that had happened since his dying, she jumped all the way in her mind to Joe Doyle, and she still wanted to see him and be with him again, but she couldn’t think of him without thinking of Oliver in association, and that was bad. She tried, however; she lay quietly trying for more than an hour before she finally decided that she would absolutely have to have two or three sleeping pills after all. But while she was getting up to go after the pills, she remembered the part of the large Martini that hadn’t fitted into the glass, and she thought that maybe it would be just the right amount more to get her to sleep with the soporifics.

She poured it and drank it and tried the sleeping again for a whole half hour, but it was no use. This time she got the pills from the bathroom and swallowed them on top of the Martinis, and eventually, because of one or the other or both, she went to sleep and slept fairly well until after noon of the next day.

She thought instantly of Joe Doyle. His name and image were waiting patiently in her mind for the return of her consciousness, as one might wait all night in a dark room for the coming of light, and it seemed only last night that she had been with him, instead of the night before, as if the time between had never been, although the things that had happened were remembered and real. Considering all the gin and soporifics, she felt remarkably good. She even felt moderately hungry and capable of thinking seriously of food, and she decided that she would dress and go out somewhere for lunch.

She went into the bathroom and bathed and returned to the bedroom and dressed, and then, as she brushed her hair and fixed her face, she tried to decide if it would be a good idea to find someone to go to lunch with, but she came to the conclusion that it wouldn’t. It would be too much trouble and take too much time, and it might interfere with what she had better do afterward, which was to go to Bernardine DeWitt’s apartment on MacDougal Street and tell her that it would be unnecessary, after all, to lie about the night before last, which seemed like last night. Having arranged these details, she finished her face and called the garage on the telephone.

“This is Mrs. Oliver Alton Farnese,” she said crisply. “Have my car brought around immediately. The Jaguar, please.”

After saying this, she wondered if the Jaguar was the car she had recently left somewhere that she couldn’t recall, but apparently it either wasn’t or had been returned by someone, for the attendant in the garage said he would have it taken around right away, and when she got downstairs it was waiting for her. She drove to a restaurant on Fifth Avenue and had most of a large salad for lunch, and it wasn’t until after she had finished eating that she had a Martini. This was not a record or anything like that, but at least it was unusual and indicated that this might turn out to be one of her moderate days. She didn’t make any resolution concerning it, however.

After drinking the Martini, she left the restaurant and drove to Bernardine’s on MacDougal Street, and the day began at once to be less moderate than she had thought it might. It was about three o’clock when she got there, and several people were drinking cocktails and talking in groups of two or three about various things, and it had the feel to Charity of something that had just begun and would go on for a long time and become quite a lot bigger. Bernardine was being vivacious with a blond young man with an incredibly perfect profile, and she smiled across the room at Charity and lifted a hand with a glass in it, and Charity went to find a glass of her own, which she found on a tray in the hands of a maid. What she intended to do was have one cocktail, or possibly two, and talk with Bernardine and go home, and so, with this intention in mind, she went over to where Bernardine was talking vivaciously to the profile, and it was apparent that Bernardine didn’t particularly like it.

“Hello, darling,” Bernardine said. “Do you know Perry Humferdill? I’ve only just met him myself, to tell the truth. Someone brought him. Perry, this is Charity Farnese.”

Perry Humferdill took Charity’s free hand and held it and exposed a great many teeth that had the perfection of plates. The day had obviously not been moderate in his case for several hours at least. His full face wasn’t as good as his profile, but it was superior, nevertheless, if you cared for beautiful men, which Charity didn’t especially, unless they were beautiful by being exceptionally ugly.

“Really?” she said. “Is your name really Humferdill?”

He released her hand and covered his teeth.

“Yes,” he said. “Perry Humferdill. From Dallas.”

“Well,” she said. “Imagine.”

“Never mind Charity,” Bernardine said. “She is almost always insulting until after the third or fourth Martini, and then it’s simply amazing how friendly she becomes with almost anyone. Darling, have you taken any more piano lessons lately?”

“No,” Charity said. “I’ve decided to give up the piano, as a matter of fact, and I merely dropped in to tell you that it won’t be necessary for you to do what we arranged yesterday. I didn’t know, of course, that you were having a party.”

“Well, I didn’t know it myself, actually, but it seems that I am. It’s just something that got started as a result of several people coming at almost the same time, and apparently they have been calling other people, who will also call other people, and I’m sure there’s no way in the world to stop it even if I wanted to.”

“I know. It’s remarkable how something can simply get started and keep going and going. It’s happened to me a number of times. I’m sure it will be a very good party, anyhow, and I wish I could stay, but I can’t. I’ll just have one more Martini, if you don’t mind, before I go.”

Bernardine said she didn’t mind, and Charity smiled at Perry Humferdill from Dallas as if she didn’t quite believe in either one, and Perry Humferdill uncovered his teeth again and said that it had been a pleasure meeting her, which she knew wasn’t true. Moving away, Charity was still feeling fairly resolute and still intended to leave after one more Martini, but the party was growing quite rapidly, and she kept meeting someone else she knew with whom she was compelled to have a cocktail out of politeness, and somehow or other it got to be six o’clock in the sudden way that time has, and at six o’clock she saw Milton Crawford, who had not yet seen her and who was certain to be sullen and difficult about her having deserted him. She didn’t feel like making up any lies to explain why she had done it, and so she decided that she had definitely better leave, but it was a little too late and far too early to return home.

She began to think of other places to go, and all the time she knew perfectly well that the only place she wanted to go and was certainly going was the little bar near Sheridan Square in which Joe Doyle played the piano.

Chapter 10

Charity crawled onto a stool in the bar near Sheridan Square.

“Well,” said Yancy, the superior bartender.

“You remember me,” she said, and smiled with delight. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

“Oh, I remember you, all right,” Yancy said.

“You can’t imagine how pleased I am. Do you customarily remember all your customers?”

“Just the opposite, as a matter of fact. I customarily forget them.”

“Really? That makes me rather special, doesn’t it?”

“Special’s the word, lady.”

“Well, as you know, I have great respect for your opinion, and I’m extremely flattered that you think so. Would you be willing to tell me why you have remembered me instead of forgetting me in the customary way?”

“I just told you, lady. You’re special.”

“How special?”

“You’re rich and beautiful.”

“Is that special? Surely lots of women are rich and beautiful.”

“Not in this place. Sometimes we get beautiful ones, and now and then we get rich ones, but hardly ever anyone who’s both.”

“Nevertheless, I’m not so flattered as I was. I was hoping for something quite a lot more special than merely being rich and beautiful.”

“I can mention other things, if you insist.”

“I do. I insist that you mention them.”

“Well, let’s put it this way, lady. You’re nuts. You wander around in blackouts and don’t remember where you’ve been or how you got where you are.”

“That’s better. Much better. Now you are really getting into the special things.”

“Did you have another blackout today?”

“No. Not at all. I went to an unexpected party and had a few Martinis, but not nearly enough to cause a blackout.” She pushed at her hair on the heavy side and looked up at him through her lashes. “I’ve been rather moderate, to tell the truth. You can see that for yourself. You can see that I’ve been here for several minutes already and haven’t even asked for a drink.”

“I admit that it struck me. Congratulations on your moderation.”

She laughed, bringing her hands together above the bar.

“I like that! Congratulations on your moderation. There’s a kind of swing to it. However, now that a drink has been mentioned, I believe I’d like to have one. Do you think having one would be immoderate?”

“Not unless it led to too many more.”

“Well, it probably will; unfortunately, that seems to be what happens practically every time. At this party I went to unexpectedly this afternoon, for instance, I was determined to have two Martinis before leaving, but I kept meeting people who brought me more, and I was compelled to drink them out of politeness, naturally.”

“Naturally.”

She looked at him sharply past the edge of the heavy hair.

“Did you say that sarcastically?”

“Not I, lady I was only being agreeable.”

“Yes. Of course you were. You’re a superior, agreeable bartender, and I admire you very much. I apologize for my suspicions.”

“It’s all right, lady. No apologies necessary.”

“Looking back, I confess that I wasn’t quite so moderate as I thought I was.”

“Well, what’s moderate for one isn’t for another.”

“That’s true. You’re exactly right. I have quite a capacity for drinking Martinis, and I’m positive it would do me no harm to have another now.”

“Sure, lady. Very dry.”

He mixed it and poured it and went away to wait on another customer who had arrived a minute or two before. The new customer was a grossly fat and ugly man with a scarred hairless scalp. He ordered a beer and sat looking into it with a slack, transported expression, as if he saw in the brew a vision of another place — a white sand beach, perhaps, in a far, hot country. Yancy, after drawing the beer and ringing up the price, returned to Charity. She had drunk half the Martini and was waiting to mention something she had just thought of and was concentrating on until it could be mentioned.

“Why did you ask me if I’d had another blackout?” she said.

“Because you came back here. I thought maybe you repeated yourself in them.”

“Oh. I see. I don’t, however. I never do exactly the same thing over. I’m perfectly aware of where I’ve been and how I got where I am now and why I came from there to here.” She revolved half around on the stool, looked down the room, revolved back. “Where’s that beautiful Joe Doyle who plays the piano?”

“He’s not here.”

“I can see that he’s not here. That’s apparent. I want to know where he is, not where he’s not.”

“He’s home, I guess. That’s where he’s supposed to be, anyhow.”

“Will he be here later?”

“No.”

“Why not? Is it his night off or something?”

“He’s sick.”

“Sick? What do you mean, sick? I wish you wouldn’t just answer each question one at a time. Can’t you simply tell me everything at once?”

“He’s sick, lady. A real sick guy. I told you that before. He was here last night, playing piano to Chester Lewis’s drum as usual, and about eleven, a little after, he fainted. Went out like a light and fell over on the keys.”

“Is this true? Are you only trying to make me feel bad?”

“I’ve got no reason to want to make you feel bad.”

“That’s right. You haven’t. And even if you had, you probably wouldn’t do it. Do you think it was a heart attack?”

“No. I don’t think so. He just fainted.”

“Isn’t it rather odd and unusual for a man to faint? What do you think could have caused it?”

“Joe’s a guy who doesn’t give himself much chance, lady. He doesn’t eat right or sleep right or do anything right that he can do wrong. He oughtn’t even be playing a lousy piano in a joint like this.”

“Perhaps he needs someone with him.”

“He’s getting along all right. I went to see him this morning, and he was all right. He needs to eat and sleep a little, that’s all.”

“Just the same, I think I had better go and see him. Don’t you think it would be a good idea if I went?”

“No. I think it would be a good idea if you let him alone.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s already got all the trouble he needs.”

“Do you think I want to bring him trouble?”

“What you want is something I couldn’t begin to guess, lady, but what you’ll do is something else entirely. You remember what I said when you walked in here out of a black fog night before last? I said you looked like a Martini and smelled like a Martini, and I was mostly just joking, but there was something else you looked and smelled like, and I’ll tell you what it was, and this time I won’t be joking at all. You looked and smelled like trouble, lady. Bad trouble. Joe’s got all he needs without you bringing him any more, and you ought to leave him alone.”

“Why are you talking to me this way? I thought we were becoming good friends, and now you are saying these cruel things to me.”

“We can’t be friends, lady. Not you and me. You’re one thing, and I’m another, and that’s the way it is. I mix you Martinis, and you pay me for them and drink them, and we talk a little and maybe kid each other a little, but that’s all there is, there isn’t any more. Maybe you think it’s different with Joe, and maybe it really looks a little different on the surface, but underneath it’s the same with you and him as it is with you and me. You make a little of what passes for love, and you think what a big difference that is, but there’s no difference, not really, and all he’s really done is mix you another Martini.”

“I don’t believe I want to sit here and listen to you say such things,” she said.

“I don’t blame you, lady, and I’m sorry I had to say them.”

“Do you want me to leave?”

“You can stay as long as you like, and you can leave when you want.”

“I don’t suppose, under the circumstances, that you’d care to mix me another Martini.”

“It’s my business to mix Martinis for anyone who wants them. You’re no exception.”

“Very well. I’ll have another.”

When it was in her glass, she drank it slowly, finishing it in silence. Then she pushed the glass away with the tips of her fingers and stood up.

“It’s apparent that you dislike me,” she said, “and I’d better go.”

“I don’t dislike you, lady. Just the contrary.”

“In spite of what you said?”

“In spite of it.”

“Perhaps you didn’t really mean it.”

“I meant it. Every word.”

“In that case, I must go even if you don’t dislike me and want me to.”

“If you’re going to see Joe, I might as well tell you where he lives. It won’t make any difference as far as he’s concerned, and it’ll save you some time.”

“You’re very kind, I’m sure, but it isn’t necessary for you to tell me. I’ve been there before.”

“I thought you probably had,” he said.

She went out and got into the Jaguar and drove toward Washington Square, toward the house in which Joe Doyle lived, and she had no difficulty at all in reaching it, in spite of her condition now and the condition she had been in the first time she had gone there. Her assurance was rather astonishing, everything considered, and she even remembered exactly the floor and exactly the door, and she knocked on the latter without the least thought of being mistaken, and she wasn’t. Joe Doyle opened the door and looked at her across the threshold, and whatever surprise he may have felt, he didn’t show.

“Why are you up?” she said. “You’re supposed to be in bed.”

He grinned wryly.

“Ever since yesterday morning? I’ve been up twice since then.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean because you’re sick. I went to the place you work, and the bartender told me you fainted last night and were home sick.”

“Yancy likes to talk. It gets to be a habit with bartenders.”

“He likes you and worries about you. I can tell. He dislikes me, but he likes you very much.”

“Don’t let Yancy fool you. It’s just a professional attitude.”

“No. It’s true. He said you don’t eat right or sleep right or do anything right that you can do wrong.”

“All right, all right. Never mind Yancy. What are you doing here?”

“That’s surely obvious. I’ve come to see you.”

“Visiting the sick?”

“As it turns out, I am, but I’d have come to see you anyhow.”

“What do you want?”

“First of all, I want to come in. Don’t you know it’s very rude to keep someone standing so long outside your door?”

“I don’t think you’d better.”

“Come in?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I just think it would be better if you didn’t.”

“Will you kindly tell me what’s wrong with me? Everywhere I go, everyone wants me to go away again.”

“I didn’t say I want you to. I said it would be better if you did.”

“Oh. I see that I misunderstood. Well, now that you’ve explained it, I’d still be happy to come in, if you’d only ask me.”

“All right. Come in.”

He stepped aside, and she walked past him into the room with a warm feeling of familiarity with it and all its contents, and this was pleasant and rather unusual, for often when she walked into most rooms, even rooms she’d been in many times or even lived in, she had a feeling of being a stranger who had never been there before. Turning, she looked at Joe Doyle, and the light was now fully on his face, which had not been so when he was standing in the doorway, and she saw that he did look sick, exhausted, the flesh drawn in his face and making him appear not so much an older man as a young man who looked older than he ought to look.

“You need someone to take care of you,” she said.

“Look,” he said, “I appreciate your concern and all that, but you’re giving too much credence to Yancy’s talk.”

“Its not that. It’s the way you look. It makes me want to cry. Do you know that it’s been a very long time since I’ve wanted to cry?”

“I’m all right. All I need is a little rest.”

But he was not all right, and he needed far more than a little rest. What he needed was something that neither she nor anyone else could ever give him. Turning she crossed to a worn sofa and sat down at one end, right against the arm, and looked gravely at a bright framed splash of hot color that might have been a copy of a Gauguin.

“What was it you were playing on the phonograph?” she said. “You remember. Over and over when I was here before.”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“I want you to play it again.”

“I’d play it if I could remember. Maybe you could hum a little of it.”

“All right. I’ll try.”

She hummed a little, softly and off-key, still looking at what was probably a Gauguin copy, and he listened, watching her and smiling and wanting suddenly to laugh.

“That’s enough,” he said. “See if this is it.”

He went to the phonograph and put on a record and started it spinning. After the first few bars of music, she nodded and looked from the Gauguin copy to him.

“That’s it,” she said, “Now come and lie down and put your head in my lap. Please do.”

She had about her the compelling quality of an earnest child. It would have been no more than perversity, he thought, to refuse what she asked. He lay down on his back on the sofa with his head in her lap, and she began to rub his forehead lightly with the tips of her fingers, and. she felt then, for a few minutes, closer than she had felt in a decade to the girl in the vision of the street and the father, closer than she would ever feel again.

“Are you happy that I’ve come back?” she said.

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“It’s quite remarkable that I have. Usually I never want to be with a man a second time.”

“Why with me?”

“I’m not sure. I don’t believe it’s wise to try to diagnose something like that, as if it were a case of something. I only knew I wanted to be with you a second time, and I know now that I’ll want to be with you a third time, and every time I’m with you from now on I’ll be thinking about being with you next time.”

“You think so?”

“It’s true. You’ll see.”

“You have a husband. Have you forgotten? Husbands complicate matters.”

“How do you know I have a husband? I don’t recall mentioning him.”

“You didn’t. Maybe it’s just because your not having one would be better luck than I’m likely to have.”

“Well, you mustn’t let it make you feel bad. I’ll simply have to arrange things.”

“Is it so simple?”

“Not actually. Sometimes it may be quite difficult, but I’m prepared to do it. I’m quite clever when I need to be. You’ll see.”

“All right. I’ll believe it for the present.”

“That’s fair. It’s only necessary to believe it each time for as long as the time lasts. Now it’s this time, and we believe it, and it’s all right. Everything’s all right.”

“How about between times? Between times I probably won’t believe it at all.”

“You’ll have to try. After a while you’ll begin to believe it even between times. Tell me. Were you angry when you woke up and found me gone?”

“No.”

“Why not? You’d have been justified. It was really rather rude of me to go away without a word.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“Oh, now. Of course you were asleep. I looked at you carefully several times. I even counted your ribs.”

“I was awake. Even before you got up.”

“If you were awake, tell me what I did.”

“When I first saw you, you seemed to be pointing toward Mecca.”

“What?”

“You know. The way Mohammedans pray. On their knees and bending way over.”

“Oh. Is that when you wakened? I must have looked perfectly ludicrous.”

“No. Curiously charming. What were you really doing, by the way? I’ve been wondering.”

“I was trying to read the time on your wrist watch.”

He began to laugh softly, and she continued to rub his forehead and waited for him to stop.

“Is it so funny?” she said.

“Yes.”

“But charming?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good, then. Do you know what I’d like to know?”

“No.”

“I’d like to know all about you as a boy. Where you lived and what you did and all about everything.”

“I was a very dull boy. It was dull where I lived.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Take my word for it. I’d rather talk about you.”

“Oh, no. I don’t even like to think about me, let alone talk. It’s too depressing.”

“Tell me about your husband.”

“That would be even more depressing.”

“Is he rich?”

“Yes. He’s very rich.”

“Is that why you married him?”

“That’s one reason.”

“What others?”

“Nothing important. It was a kind of convenience. It solved a few problems for some people.”

“Including you?”

“Well, it’s very nice to have lots of money. I don’t think I’d care to live without lots of money.”

“I see your point of view. Not having lots of money is a problem that’s worth solving, even by marriage.”

She sat quietly, stroking his forehead and looking from his face to the Gauguin copy and back again, listening to the music with a feeling that was like the one she used to have when she listened as a girl in summer evenings to the music of countless cicadas.

“I’m sorry that I won’t be able to stay all night,” she said.

“That’s all right. You needn’t apologize.”

“It wasn’t an apology. It was a regret. I want to stay, but I can’t.”

“I understand. Even a marriage of convenience requires certain concessions.”

“Are you being bitter about it?”

“No. Why should I? It’s none of my business.”

“Do you suppose if we had met years ago that we’d have fallen in love and been married?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I didn’t have any money then and have never had any since.”

“That would have been a handicap. I admit it. At least, however, we might have fallen in love. Falling in love doesn’t require any money.”

“It requires money to make it last.”

“I suppose you’re right. Yes, I’m certain that you are. I have lots of money, though, so it’s no particular problem for us.”

“That’s a nice way to look at it. Very generous. Is it your money or your husband’s?”

“Well, it’s his, actually, but I’m permitted to use all of it that I want.”

“Even on another man?”

“I’m not asked to submit a statement of expenses. It isn’t necessary for him to know how I spend the money.”

“I see. He seems to be quite liberal, to say the least. Maybe he doesn’t deserve to be deceived.”

“No, no. You don’t understand at all. It’s impossible to think of Oliver as being liberal. It’s just that he’s always had so much money that he’s never learned to consider it important.”

“I doubt that I’d ever be able to understand that.”

“Yes. That’s so. It’s possible only to people who have always been rich.”

“Anyhow, the money aside, he must be liberal regarding you in other respects. What I mean is, you seem to do a lot of moving around on your own. Aren’t you ever required to account for your time?”

The conversation had now become suddenly threatening, and she wished that he had not asked the last question. It compelled her to think of how Oliver had known last night precisely where she had been the night before, and to wonder if he would know tomorrow where she was tonight. This was something she did not wish to think of, and she refused to believe, in spite of what she had thought, or said to Edith, that he was having her followed or possessed supernatural powers to know what it was clearly impossible for him to know normally. It was much more likely that he had learned what he knew by accident. Yes, that was almost certainly it. Someone had seen her and followed her, someone she knew who did not like her and wished her harm. This person, whoever he was, had told on her to Oliver out of pure malice, and the more she thought about it, the more she became convinced that it was probably Milton Crawford, for it was just the sort of mean trick Milton would be capable of playing when his vanity was hurt. Of course. It became clearer and clearer as one thought about it. Milton had seen her leaving the place they had been, and he’d followed her and told on her. It might seem rather incredible that anyone would go to all that degrading trouble just to play a mean trick, but not if you knew Milton, and she was convinced, because she wanted to be, that this was the explanation for everything.

“Well,” she said, “he frequently asks me where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing, but I’m always able to explain things satisfactorily.”

“You mean that you’re an accomplished liar.”

“I don’t think it’s fair to put it that way. I’m only doing good to everyone concerned by not telling things that would get everyone disturbed and cause a lot of unnecessary trouble.”

He closed his eyes. The tips of her fingers worked a kind of cool, dry magic.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said.

“What? Why did you say that?”

“Never mind. I’m just wondering if you’re sublimely rational or completely in left field.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, and I don’t think I care to. What I think is, we’re wasting too much time in talking about depressing things. As I said, I can only stay for a while, perhaps until eleven or twelve, and I’d like to talk about something cheerful or nothing at all.”

“All right. What shall we talk about?”

“I’d like to talk about what we’ll do tomorrow, and I’ve already decided what it will be.”

“Is that so? Tell me.”

“I’ve decided that we will drive out on Long Island in my Jaguar. It’s plain that getting out of the city would be very good for you, and it’s fun to drive out somewhere in a Jaguar. Have you ever done it?”

“I’ve never owned a Jaguar.”

“You’ll love driving out on Long Island in one. Wait and see.”

“What if I were to decide that I don’t want to drive out on Long Island in a Jaguar?”

“Are you serious?”

“No.”

“You’ll go?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That’s settled, then. I’ve also got an idea about what we might do the weekend. Would you like me to tell you?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Well, I have a friend who has a house in Connecticut, and I’m sure it would be all right with her if we went up there and used it. Have you been in Connecticut?”

“Probably not to the same places in Connecticut that you’ve been.”

“Oh, Connecticut isn’t very big. You can hardly go there at all without going practically everywhere.”

He began to laugh again very softly, scarcely audibly, stopping after a minute or two with a strangled sound in his throat.

“Why are you laughing again?” she said.

“I don’t know. I have a feeling that I shouldn’t be laughing at all.”

“Will you go to Connecticut with me?”

“Can you explain a weekend to your husband?”

“I’ll think of something. Probably this friend who owns the house will be willing to say she wants me to go up with her. Will you go?”

“I have an idea that I will.”

“That’s sensible. Do you see how good I am for you? The bartender where you work said I would be bad for you, but you can see that it isn’t so. Already you’re laughing and looking forward to doing things.”

“I told you about Yancy. He worries too much.”

“That’s true. He means well, but he worries too much. What time is it?”

He lifted his left arm so that he could see the watch on his wrist.

“Almost nine-thirty. Why?”

“I was wondering how much time was left before eleven or twelve. I’m sure I can safely stay till twelve. It’s becoming rather tiring, sitting here this way, however. I think it would he more comfortable for both of us if we moved over to the bed.”

There was no denying the validity of this, and so they moved, but after a while they went to sleep while the music on the record kept repeating itself, and it was after one when she wakened and went away.

Chapter 11

Thursday on Long Island was wonderful, a fine day, and they drove from Jamaica to the North Shore and all the way along the North Shore to Orient Point, where they had a very interesting time in a secluded place, and the next day, Friday afternoon, they drove northeast into Fairfield County, Connecticut. They went directly to the Early American house of Charity’s friend, which had been arranged for, and they were alone there that night and the day after, and in the evening of the day after, which was Saturday, they lay side by side on a pair of chaises longues on a terrace and felt domestic, as if Joe had just a little while ago got off the 6:02 from the city. From where they were on the terrace, they could see across quite a lot of grass to a bluestone drive that ran down to the road through a split-rail fence with a hitching post beside it. The split-rail fence didn’t keep anything in or out, and nothing was ever hitched to the hitching post, but they were pretty and effective and were something nice to look at in the cool evening.

“Exurbia,” Joe said.

“What?” Charity said.

“I said Exurbia. You know. A place beyond Suburbia where people live.”

“Oh. Like in the book, you mean. I didn’t read it, because I hardly ever read anything at all, but I remember people talking about it at cocktail parties and places, and some of them were quite angry. The ones who live here, I guess. My friend, Samantha Cox, who owns this house, said that it presented a very distorted picture of things, but she was forced to admit in fairness that it was very clever. Samantha makes quite a point of being absolutely fair about books.”

“Well, I gather that your friend Samantha isn’t a real Exurbanite. It was probably easier for her to be fair than it was for some of the others.”

“That’s true. Samantha only comes out for short periods every once in a while. She really prefers to live in her apartment in town.”

“Why does she bother with the house at all, then?”

“It’s no particular bother. She has lots of money and can afford it easily, and she feels that it’s important to her career.”

“Career? Does she have a career?”

“Oh, yes. Didn’t I tell you? She’s very serious about being a TV actress, but she hasn’t had much luck at it yet.”

“Sorry. I don’t get the connection.”

“Lots of important TV people live in Fairfield County. Don’t you remember that from the book?”

“Yes, I do, now that you mention it. TV and advertising.”

“That’s the reason she keeps the house. She has parties sometimes and invites certain people to them.”

“I see. Wasn’t it fortunate that she hadn’t planned a party for this weekend?”

“It was. It was very fortunate.”

“How does it happen that you don’t have a country house of your own?”

“I don’t care for one. I wouldn’t want to live here or come here as a regular thing, and I have no other reason like Samantha’s to make it worthwhile.”

“Wouldn’t your husband care to live here either?”

“Oliver? Not at all. Oliver wants to live in the same place all the time and do the same things over and over. He’s really quite abnormal about it. He has a kind of schedule that he keeps. That’s why it’s possible for me to go around different places with little or no interference.”

“Even on weekends?”

“Yes. Isn’t it convenient?”

“At least. Do you really believe that he’s ignorant of what you do?”

“Well, most of it. Anyhow, even when be learns something, it doesn’t seem to make much difference in the long run.”

“That’s convenient, too. Do you think he’s learned anything about us?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Why not? Because he has?”

“To tell the truth, someone saw us that first night and told him, and I’m of the opinion that it was Milton Crawford. He’s the one I was with when I walked away and blacked out and went to where you were. Milton’s just the kind of sneak who would tell on someone if it suited him.”

“What did he say?”

“Milton?”

“No. Your husband.”

“Nothing much. He was sarcastic and nasty, the way he can be, but now it’s over and forgotten.”

“Oh, God. Just over and forgotten and nothing more to it.”

“I’ve told you and told you that Oliver’s odd. If you knew him, you’d understand. You can’t expect him to react to anything the way someone else probably would.”

“Thanks for telling me anyhow.”

“Are you angry because I didn’t tell you sooner?”

“No. I’m not angry.”

“I didn’t want to worry you, and I was afraid, besides, that you might decide it would be better if we didn’t see each other any more.”

“I have no doubt at all that it would have been better.”

“You see? If I’d told you, you would have refused to see me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“In spite of Oliver’s knowing about the first night?”

“In spite of it.”

“Why?”

“Because I couldn’t have. Because I’m weak or strong or don’t care. Because I’ve wanted you constantly almost the whole week I’ve known you.”

“Isn’t it marvelous, the way it’s lasted? I’ve wanted you all the time, too, and as far as I’m concerned it’s very unusual. I’d not have thought in the beginning that it was possible. Do you think it will go on and on until we die?”

“For me or for you?”

“For both.”

“No.”

“For either?”

“Not for you.”

“For you?”

“Possibly. It won’t have as far to go in my case, you see, which makes a difference.”

“Don’t talk like that. You know very well that it makes me sad. Anyhow, it has lasted this long and is still lasting, and I don’t want to talk about it, or my husband, or anything depressing and unpleasant like that.”

He turned his head to look at her and saw that she had been looking at him all along. Reaching for his near hand, she smiled the smile that was somehow sad even when she was relatively happy She was wearing a white blouse and short white shorts, even though it was quite cool now in the evening, and her skin was smoothly golden all over, where it showed and didn’t show, for the color had been acquired by lamps in privacy and not by the sun, which she didn’t particularly like and generally avoided.

“What do you think it would be amusing to do tonight?” she said.

“Honestly?”

“Of course honestly.”

“What we did last night.”

“Well, naturally That’s assumed. I meant besides that.”

“Nothing especially. Do you have an idea?”

“There are always lots of parties around different places on Saturday night. It’s true that we haven’t been invited to any, since no one knows we’re here, but we could undoubtedly find one where we would be welcome if we wanted to go.”

“Do you think we’d better?”

“I guess not. I don’t much want to go, anyhow. Do you?”

“I don’t want to go at all. I’d rather lie here and hold hands and look at the split-rail fence.”

“It’s very pleasant, isn’t it? And that’s another surprising and unusual thing. Ordinarily I’m not content to sit quietly for any length of time. Ordinarily I’d much rather be going somewhere and doing something exciting.”

“I’ll go somewhere with you if you want to go.”

“No. I agree that it’s much more pleasant here than it would be anywhere else. It’s beginning to get quite dark, isn’t it? It reminds me of under the trees on the street where I lived as a girl. That was in another town in another state. Light filtered through the leaves into the shadows and there were thousands of cicadas in the trees.”

“I thought you were a native New Yorker.”

“No. Not at all. Why did you think so?”

“I don’t know. I just assumed that you were.”

“Well, I’m not. I lived in another town in another state.”

“Tell me about living there.”

“I don’t think I want to. It would depress me. It’s better here and now than it’s ever been anywhere else at any other time. Don’t you think so?”

“Yes. I think so. I was even thinking that it would be pleasant and easy to die here. Just lying here looking at the split-rail fence. It’s strange. You’re subject to the absolute indifference of the universe, and you take comfort and courage in a split-rail fence.”

“It’s nice, I admit, but I don’t think you need to be so gloomy about it. You seem determined to make me sad, and I wish you wouldn’t do it.”

“I’m sorry. I wasn’t feeling gloomy or trying to make you feel sad. As a matter of fact, I’m feeling very happy.”

“Truly?”

“Yes. In my frame of reference, at least.”

She lifted his hand and pressed it flat against her breast and held it there. Between the hand and her heart was only the thin fabric of her blouse. After a moment, she slipped the hand inside the blouse, and the heart quickened and became urgent, pounding in his palm.

“Darling,” she said, “the bartender was wrong, wasn’t he? I’ve been good for you, haven’t I?”

“You’ve been good for me for almost a week.”

“Did you like it out on Long Island? Did you think it was good on Orient Point?”

“I liked it on Long Island. Especially on Orient Point. You told me how it would be, and that’s the way it was.”

“Was it better on Long Island or is it better now in Connecticut?”

“I don’t know. How can you say one time in one place is better than another time in another place when they’re both as good as they can be?”

“No, no. Surely one is a little better than the other. Nothing is exactly the same as something else.”

“On Long Island I think it’s better, and in Connecticut I think it’s better. Whichever place we are.”

“That’s good. You’ve said exactly the right thing, for it means that right now is best of all so far. Darling, it’s really becoming quite dark. Do you think we could be seen if anyone happened to come along unexpectedly?”

“I think we could.”

“Well, I don’t believe I can continue to lie here like this much longer.”

“We could go inside.”

“It would be a shame to have to. It’s much nicer outside.”

“Would you like to take a walk until it becomes darker?”

“Walk to where?”

“Just down to the fence. We could lean against it for a while and be part of the stigmata. A split-rail fence needs someone leaning against it.”

“What’s stigmata? I don’t like the sound of it.”

“It’s all right. Stigmata are the things you find around a certain place that are characteristic.”

“Really? I thought it meant something bad.”

“You’re thinking of stigmas. That’s different. Stigmas are marks of disgrace or something like that.”

“All right, then. We’ll be stigmata. First, however, I think we should have a Martini. We’ve sat here for quite a long while without having any at all.”

“I’ll mix some. The shaker’s empty.”

“If you get up to mix the Martinis, you’ll have to take your hand away from where it is. I’m not certain that I want you to do that.”

“Not even for a Martini?”

“Well, I suppose one can’t have everything all the time. After all, mixing Martinis isn’t anything permanent. It’s only a temporary interruption at worst.”

“True. I’ll mix them.”

He got up and walked a few steps to a table that was nothing more than a thick circle of clear glass on wrought iron legs. The shaker and bottles and glasses and a bucket of ice were on the table. He mixed the Martinis in the shaker and poured two into two glasses and carried the glasses over to the chaises longues.

“I’m not as good at this as Yancy,” he said, handing her one of the two.

“Yancy’s a superior bartender,” she said, “and he makes superior Martinis, but his judgment isn’t always reliable as to who’s good for whom.”

“That’s right. Yancy’s mortal and therefore he is fallible.”

He resumed his place on the longue, and she replaced his hand, and they drank the Martinis slowly, and it got a little darker.

“Are these all the Martinis?” she said.

“No. I thought it was as easy to mix four as two, and that’s what I did.”

“That’s the way I usually think about it. It seems a shame to waste the energy and the space in the shaker.”

“Shall I pour the other two?”

“Yes, pour them. After drinking them, we’ll walk down to the fence and be stigmata, and then it will surely be dark.”

“Martinis are stigmata too, when you come to think of it. They’re just as much stigmata as hitching posts and split-rail fences and people.”

“Everything and everyone are stigmata.”

“Correct. As stigmata, let’s drink these last two stigmata.”

He got up again and poured them, and they drank them, and afterward they walked down the bluestone drive to the split-rail fence. Leaning against the fence, they listened to some kind of bird making a sad sound in the gathering darkness, but neither of them knew what kind of bird it was.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he said.

“What about Sunday?” she said.

“We have to go back.”

“Oh. I suppose we do. I suppose it wouldn’t be wise to stay any longer. Anyhow, Samantha agreed to let me use the house only for the weekend. If I didn’t keep the agreement, she might become annoyed and say something to somebody.”

“Would she do that?”

“Samantha’s capable of it. I don’t trust her very much, to tell the truth. I only asked her for the house because I couldn’t think of anyone else who had one that was suitable. She’s sometimes malicious and does sneaky things.”

“In that case, we’d certainly better not annoy her.”

“Yes, we’d better go back tomorrow. However, there will be other places we can go at other times. You see how it is? Far from not wanting to see you again, I’m already planning how it can be arranged.”

“I’ll have to go back to work Monday night.”

“Playing the piano?”

“That’s my work.”

“That’s true. It is, isn’t it? Somehow one doesn’t think of playing the piano as being work exactly.”

“It’s work, all right. Sometimes it gets to be very hard work.”

“I suppose it does. The hours and the people and all. Do you like it? Do you wish you were doing something else?”

“I never wish I were doing something else besides playing the piano. I wish all the time that I were playing the piano differently in a different place.”

“Why don’t you, then?”

“Its not that easy. I’m as well off playing where I am as anywhere else they’d let me play.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m not good enough to do what I’d like to do, even if there were time to do it.”

“I think you’re extremely good. When I was there that night and heard you suddenly start playing, I thought you were wonderful.”

“Thank you, but I’m not.”

“Are you sure? Perhaps you are merely lacking confidence.”

“No. It’s just tricks, what Chester and I do. It’s clever sometimes, but it’s never really good.”

“I refuse to believe it. I don’t like to hear you talk about yourself that way.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

“Monday night I’ll come listen to you play, and it will be very good. Will you play something especially for me if I come listen?”

“I’ll play everything especially for you.”

“Perhaps it better hadn’t be Monday, though, after all. For the sake of appearances, after being gone for the weekend, I think I’d better stay home Monday night. I’ll come Tuesday.”

“All right. Tuesday.”

“Will you let me go to your place with you afterward?”

“If you want to.”

“I’ll want to. I’m positive already of that. Are you positive that you’ll want to let me?”

“Yes. Quite positive.”

“That’s arranged, then. And now we must stop thinking about tomorrow or Tuesday or any time but now, and you must stop being despondent and critical of yourself. Do you agree?”

“I agree.”

It was now as dark as it was going to be. Stars were out, but no moon. The sad-sounding bird was vocal in the darkness.

“Well, please don’t just stand there,” she said.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to hold me.”

“Like this?”

“No. Put your hand here. Right here.”

“Like this?”

“Yes. Oh, yes, yes. Darling, can’t we go now? Right now?”

“By the road? Someone might come.”

“I don’t care.”

“Afterward you would.”

“Oh, God, God, God! Don’t you want to? Are you going on and on finding reasons not to?”

“I want to. On the terrace. Let’s go back to the terrace.”

“All right. Right, darling. But hurry! Please hurry!”

So they went back to the terrace, hurrying as if they had only a few minutes instead of all night.

Chapter 12

Bertram Sweeney was ten minutes early for his appointment at three. He sat in the outer office with Miss Carling and cursed himself for having arrived before the appointed time. He had cursed himself a dozen times before for the same reason, and every time he had sworn that he would never arrive as much as five seconds early again, and then, sooner or later, he did. He knew very well that Farnese was doing nothing beyond his closed door, and he had come to interpret the unnecessary waiting as a sign of Farnese’s contempt. He wondered what would happen if he were to come late just once, but he never quite had the nerve to try it and find out, and what he decided was that he would come late the very last time, the day he came to kill Farnese, if that day came. He liked to think of killing Farnese. Of all his fantasies, the only ones that gave him more pleasure were those concerning Farnese’s wife.

Now, waiting and cursing himself and Farnese, he watched Miss Carling. He didn’t like Miss Carling. The only thing that kept him from hating her was the exhaustion of his hatred in the hating of so many others with priority. He was aware that she loathed him, found him physically revolting, and after the passing of the first feeling of pain and degradation that this reaction always aroused in him, it delighted him that she did. In his mind he became a kind of vulgar and artless Cyrano, exploiting his ugliness to elicit her horror. He kissed the back of her neck and pinched her bottom and whispered obscenities in her ear. He rocked with laughter at her terror and disgust. He would not kill Miss Carling the day he killed Farnese, but he might, for the pleasure of it, make her grovel for her life. The memory of her fear would expunge the memory of her disdain. Afterward he would always hear her pleading for Sweeney’s mercy instead of telling Sweeney arrogantly that he was early and would have to wait.

It was almost time to go in. The clock on the wall above Miss Carling’s severe head showed two minutes before the hour. Well, it was going to be an interesting report, the very best yet, for several pages of the notebook in Sweeney’s coat pocket were filled on both sides with Sweeney’s cramped writing. It would even be worth the waiting, the humiliation and contempt and effluvial disgust, and in the last two minutes of the waiting, Sweeney closed his eyes and anticipated the turbulence, all the more violent for being controlled, that he was going to arouse in the man he served and hated and dreamed of killing. Abortive laughter began and grew. With appreciative malice, as if he were expressing his gratitude, he began to curse Farnese again. Slowly, one by one from his full repertory of obscenities, he selected and pronounced in the barest whisper the appropriate words.

At three precisely, Miss Carling looked across at Sweeney and nodded once sharply to indicate that he could now go in. Sweeney did not see her nod, for his eyes were closed and he was not at the moment faced in her direction, but he had developed a kind of sensitivity to Miss Carling’s movements, feeling what he didn’t see, and he stood up at once and walked across to Farnese’s private door and let himself in. Farnese was sitting behind his desk in his usual posture, his fingers laced in front of him on the desk’s top, his eyes focused on the fingers. He didn’t look up or speak or give any sign whatever that he was aware of Sweeney’s presence, and Sweeney, crossing to the chair, resumed his inaudible obscenities. He sat down heavily and removed his notebook from his coat pocket and waited.

“Make it concise,” Farnese said. “Give me only essentials, please.”

Sweeney took a deep breath, releasing on the breath the last vile word, and began his report. He did not read verbatim from his notes, and this disturbed and angered him, for he took pride in the detail and accuracy of his observations and would have preferred presenting them exactly as he had set them down. He was all the more angered because he knew there was no real necessity for brevity. Farnese was a phony son of a son with nothing to do that needed doing, but he always had to act, nevertheless, as if the time he gave to Sweeney was taken from other matters much more important and pressing. What Sweeney wanted to know was, what the hell was more important and pressing than a prowling nympho wife? Nothing was more important and pressing, that was what, and Sweeney knew it, and Farnese knew it, and both of them knew that the other knew it, and who the hell was fooling who? Well, Bertram Sweeney wasn’t fooled for a minute, that was sure, and it was really funny the way the stinking phony sat there like a God-damn stone, trying to act as if nothing he was hearing made any difference in the long run, and all the time his guts were in an uproar and he was sick to death inside with the rising violence of his fury. Realizing this, Sweeney felt almost compensated for the butchery of his report. His resentment gave way to his silent internal glee.

“Wednesday afternoon,” he said. “I followed subject, Mrs. Farnese, to a restaurant on Fifth Avenue. She was alone. She drove a Jaguar car. I waited until she left the restaurant and then followed her to an apartment building on MacDougal Street. Subsequent investigation disclosed that she went to the apartment of a Mrs. DeWitt, a divorcee. She was there for approximately three hours, after which she again left alone and drove in the Jaguar to the small nightclub in the Village which is known as Duo’s and which I had occasion to mention in my last report. Leaving Duo’s, still alone, she drove to the residence near Washington Square which I also mentioned in my last report in connection with the piano player known as Joe Doyle. She remained in this residence until approximately one o’clock. She then returned home.”

Pausing, he lifted his eyes to the little barometer of Farnese’s passions, the fine line of scar tissue along the lower mandible. The tissue was already livid, but Farnese’s face was in perfect repose. His laced fingers held one another quietly on top of the desk.

“Thursday?” he said.

“Thursday morning,” Sweeney said, “approximately eleven o’clock. Mrs. Farnese left in the Jaguar and drove directly to the residence she had left at one o’clock of the same morning. She went inside and remained there until almost noon, at which time she came out in the company of Joe Doyle. They crossed the East River into Kings County and drove east to Jamaica. Since my area of operation is restricted by your orders to New York City, I turned around there and came back. At regular intervals during the rest of the day, I called the apartment on Park Avenue to see if Mrs. Farnese had returned. The maid said she hadn’t. At nine o’clock that night I went to Duo’s to see if Joe Doyle was there or was expected. He wasn’t there and wasn’t expected. The bartender told me that he was on sick leave and wouldn’t return until Monday. Tonight, that is.”

“I know what day it is,” Farnese said.

“Yes. Of course.” Sweeney’s thick lips formed the shape of a sound that was not part of the report. “From Duo’s I drove to the residence of Joe Doyle. The Jaguar was not parked in front or in the vicinity. I parked across the street and down the block where I could watch the house. It was about a quarter to eleven when they returned. At twelve-thirty Mrs. Farnese left alone and went home.”

Sweeney paused again, awaiting comments, but Farnese had none to make. He unlaced his fingers, flexed them, replaced them.

“That’s enough,” he said.

“What?” Sweeney said.

“I said that’s enough. The rest of your report would be superfluous.”

Sweeney folded his notebook slowly, leaving a fat index finger between the pages as a marker. He felt as if he had been slapped in the face, and his resentment was commensurate.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“I’m quite easily understood, I believe. I already know how my wife spent the weekend. Do you find it incredible that I should learn something about my wife without your professional assistance? I’ll tell you how I know. I know because my wife has the obvious mind of a perverted child. Her deceptions, even when she elaborates on them, are transparent. Friday she informed me that she was spending the weekend at the Fairfield County house of Samantha Cox. She went there, all right, but not with Miss Cox. She went with this Joe Doyle. Isn’t that true?”

“She sure as hell went to Fairfield County. As you say, with Joe Doyle. I don’t know what particular place in the county they went to, because I left them at the line.”

“I know. Your area of operation is only the City. All right, Sweeney. Your devotion to orders has been sufficiently established. When you’re speaking to me, however, please avoid profanity. I don’t like profanity. I think I’ve told you this before.”

Sweeney didn’t reply. He lowered his eyes and removed his index finger from the notebook in a sign of complete capitulation. His report and his pride were now thoroughly mutilated, and he sought expression for his feelings in the deepest and vilest cavity of his brain. Farnese, after silence, spoke again. His voice was soft and measured, as if he were weighing his thoughts and words with special care.

“Mr. Doyle has become a fixture,” he said.

“He hangs on,” Sweeney said with concealed relish.

“Yes.” Farnese unlaced his fingers and made a tent of them, placing their tips together with a careful exactness that seemed to reflect the quality of his thinking. “It’s unfortunate. As you have reason to know, I am, for reasons of my own, exceedingly tolerant of my wife’s social activities. There are times, however, when it becomes advisable to interfere, and I’m inclined to believe that now is one of the times.”

Sweeney was offended by Farnese’s oblique approach to brutality. It made him sick. He had no such reaction to brutality in itself, however. In the pustule world, he had suffered and administered it far too often himself to make of it a particular issue. It was only the indirection, the tone and posture of sadistic piety, that offended him. There was a kind of minor salvation from the worst of hell, he thought, in calling a spade a spade.

“The same as before?” he said.

“Yes. Do you still have your contact with Mr. Chalk.”

“Sure. Chalk’s always available.”

“Arrange it.”

Sweeney put his notebook away in his pocket. He sighed and coughed and wiped his thick lips with a soiled handkerchief. He sat staring intently at the handkerchief as if he expected to find it stained with blood.

“The price will be up,” he said.

“It was up last time.”

“I know. From five hundred to seven-fifty. This time it’ll be a thousand. That’s Chalk’s schedule.”

“Very well. A thousand.”

“When do you want it?”

“As soon as possible. Tonight?”

“I don’t think so. Chalk’s a careful organizer. He doesn’t like to be pressed. Maybe tomorrow night.”

“All right. Take care of it and let me know.”

“Sure. You want to be there?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll talk with Chalk.”

He heaved himself to his feet and stood waiting for a few seconds to give Farnese a chance to say anything more that he might want to say. Apparently Farnese wanted to say nothing, for he remained silent, and Sweeney walked out of the office and past Miss Carling in the outer office and down ten floors to the street. It was a long descent that taxed the endurance of his obese body, and he did not ignore the elevator because he enjoyed the exercise. It was rather because the small steel box in its deep shaft was suddenly the fearful instrument of a developing encroachment. Cornered and confined in his own gross self by what he had become and was and could expect to be, he was aware of a claustrophobic fear that he didn’t understand and refused to admit.

In his car, a plain black Ford, not new, he drove to lower Broadway and was lucky enough to find a spot to park. He was compelled to walk two blocks, however, to reach his destination, which was a small cigar and tobacco shop. This shop was operated by the man named Chalk, and Chalk himself, in a continuation of Sweeney’s luck, was sitting on a high stool behind a high glass counter. He was a thin man with a curiously flat face, plastered hair so glossily black that it was plainly dyed, and skin that looked burned out by some former terrible fever of the flesh, brittle and checked and gray-white, the color that his name denoted.

In Chalk’s shop you could actually buy cigars and tobacco and cigarettes and numerous items essential or incidental to smoking, but the sale of this merchandise, although he made a profit from it, was not Chalk’s principal source of revenue. Most of his income came from the sale of marijuana, which was distributed in cigar boxes by half a dozen pushers operating from his rear room. Besides this, he was usually prepared to contract various lucrative odd jobs. Like, for instance, the odd jobs he had done for Bertram Sweeney acting as the agent of Oliver Alton Farnese.

“Hello, Chalk,” Sweeney said now, placing one elbow on the metal frame of the glass counter and leaning heavily.

Chalk nodded.

“Hello, Sweeney,” he said. “Watch the glass.”

“Sure,” Sweeney said.

He shifted his weight a little as a concession to Chalk’s concern, but he didn’t remove the elbow. Chalk watched him with a worried expression until it became apparent that the glass was safe, at least for the present, and then he relaxed and sucked noisily at the sodden end of a dead cigar.

“What’s on your mind, Sweeney?” he said.

“I was wondering if Cupid’s around.”

“Not now. Couple days since I’ve seen him.”

“I didn’t mean that. I mean, is he available?”

“Could be. He usually is. You got a job for Cupid?”

“For someone. Client of mine wants a guy taken care of.”

“How much care of?”

“Nothing final. Just a good lesson he’ll remember.”

“Oh. I see. Just dressed up a little.”

“That’s right. You interested?”

“Depends. What client, for instance?”

“Same as last time. Same as time before last. Farnese.”

“Jesus! That guy must hate a lot of people.”

“He hates the ones his wife likes. That’s a lot.”

“This would be the third job. It’d run to a grand.”

“I know.”

“You better tell him.”

“I already told him.”

“Okay. Who’s the guy he wants handled?”

“Name’s Joe Doyle. You know Duo’s? It’s a little joint down in the Village near Sheridan Square. Doyle plays the piano there. A young guy. Ugly. Real thin. Looks like he doesn’t eat regular.”

“A lousy piano thumper? Honest to God? How’d a guy like that ever make Park Avenue?”

Sweeney shifted his weight again, and the frame of the glass counter creaked beneath it. He felt angry, filled with a tepid and sluggish resentment, as if Chalk were referring facetiously to the betrayal of Sweeney himself. Which he was, of course, in the crossing of Sweeney’s worlds.

“Who knows?” Sweeney said. “Who predicts a woman? Anyhow, it’s neither here nor there. Doyle’s the guy. He sleeps up in the Washington Square area, but I figure it would be better if you snatched him at Duo’s, when he comes out from work. He quits around one, usually, sometimes earlier, now and then later. He keeps his car parked in the alley behind the place and goes out the back way when he’s through. That would be the time and place.”

“Not tonight. It’s too quick.”

“No. I figured that. Tomorrow night.”

“I’ll see. You want Cupid in particular? I’ve got other reliable boys willing to work.”

“I like Cupid. There’s something poetic about him. He looks the part.”

“He does. He sure as hell does. No denying that.”

“Tomorrow night, then. Cupid working. He’ll have an audience.”

“I’ll fix it,” Chalk said.

Sweeney moved, shoving his bulk erect. He took out his soiled handkerchief and wiped his mouth and stared down through the glass into the case.

“Gimme a couple of those Roi Tan blunts,” he said.

“Sure, Sweeney,” Chalk said. “Twenty cents, please.”

Sweeney dug out a couple of dimes and dropped them on the glass. Chalk produced the blunts and rang up the dimes, and Sweeney walked out into the street and back to the plain black Ford. In it, he drove to the shabby hotel in which he kept a room. He went up to the room and let himself in with his key and sat down on the edge of the bed. He removed his hat and rubbed his scarred scalp and began looking at the picture of Charity Farnese that stood beside the bed on the night table.

And at that instant the first world disintegrated and became the second world, and Sweeney stood with arms akimbo on the white sand beach beside the whispering sea, and his body was straight and strong and golden in the hot white light of the sun.

Charity was running down the beach. Lightly, lightly, scarcely disturbing the sand. She cried out once, his name, and he turned with his heart pounding and swelling to see in her face the light of anticipated ecstasy. Then the second world was in an instant, without warning, distended and blurred and bursting apart. It vanished completely in a pink froth and was gone for a minute and then returned. The sun returned, and the sea and the sand, and Sweeney was standing where be had stood. But he was now, in the second world, the first world Sweeney. His body was blue-veined and bloated, a profanation of light.

Charity had stopped running. She stood in the sand as still as stone. On her face, instead of ecstasy, was an expression of utter loathing.

Sweeney closed his eyes and lay back across his bed.

Chapter 13

Monday was not one of Charity’s better days, but neither, on the other hand, was it one of her really bad days, and on the whole it was just a day in between. She wakened in the middle of the morning and lay thinking for a while of Connecticut, how fine and exciting and yet restful it had been there with Joe Doyle, but this was not good, for it made her begin to want Joe again, and it was much too soon to begin this, for it was far too long a time until Tuesday night. If she began thinking about him and wanting him already, it would make the passing of time much more difficult to bear, and she was quite likely to do something precipitate and unfortunate instead of waiting patiently and sensibly as she had planned. In order to avoid this, she began thinking of what she could do to fill in the rest of this day that she had now started. The first thing that occurred to her was breakfast, and she was surprised, the moment it occurred to her, to discover that she was really quite hungry, which she scarcely ever was at the beginning of any day, no matter what time she began it.

She got up at once and had a shower and dressed and then went out to the dining room, where she ate a substantial breakfast, even including an egg, that would eliminate the necessity for lunch. The breakfast was served by Edith, who said good morning in a respectful voice and didn’t say anything more all the while she was serving and Charity was eating. She hovered about, however, usually in a position in which Charity could not see her without turning her head, and this made Charity uncomfortable. She wished that Edith would go away, but she didn’t say anything about it until she was ready for a second cup of coffee and a cigarette, and then she said something as politely as she could with the definite intention of not being unpleasant.

“Edith,” she said politely, “I wish you would go the hell away.”

“I beg your pardon, Madam?” Edith said with a rising inflection which implied that she had either not heard correctly or could not believe what she had heard.

“You heard me quite clearly, Edith,” Charity said. “I said very politely that I wish you would go the hell away.”

“Certainly, Madam. Is there anything more I can do for you before I go?”

“No, there is nothing more you can do. I am only going to have a second cup of coffee and a cigarette, and I am perfectly capable of doing it without any help from you.”

“Shall I pour the coffee?”

“I’ll pour it myself, Edith. I’ll also light my cigarette myself.”

“Very well, Madam.”

Edith walked around the end of the table and across the room to the door. She stopped there and turned and smiled and stood with her hands folded under her breasts in the kind of posture taught to offensive children by teachers of elocution. It was a kind of posture that was meant to be ingratiating but only succeeded in being annoying,

“I hope you had a pleasant weekend, Madam,” she said.

“I had a very pleasant weekend,” Charity said, “I went with Miss Samantha Cox to her house in Connecticut.”

“So I understood, Madam. I was certain that I saw Miss Cox drive past on the Avenue Saturday afternoon, but obviously I was mistaken, since she was in Connecticut.”

“Obviously you were, Edith.”

“Probably it was only someone who looks like Miss Cox and happens to drive exactly the same kind and color of car.”

“It’s more probable that you are trying to be malicious and troublesome, Edith, which I understand clearly.”

“Pardon me, Madam. I’m sorry if I’ve offended you. Would you like me to make your bed while you’re having your coffee and cigarette?”

“Yes, you may go make my bed, Edith, and please don’t help yourself to any of my things while you are there.”

“Very well, Madam.”

Edith smiled again and unfolded her hands and went out, and Charity poured a second cup of coffee and lit a cigarette and was furious.

The bitch! she thought. The sneaky, unreliable bitch!

She wasn’t thinking of Edith, however. She was thinking of Samantha. It was just like Samantha to have driven right by the place innumerable times and to have made no effort at all to be inconspicuous during the time she was supposed to be in Connecticut, and it was Charity’s opinion that she had probably let herself be seen deliberately. You simply couldn’t rely on Samantha to do her part faithfully in anything, and it was bad luck that she had been the only one with a suitable house to borrow for the weekend. She was more than unreliable, as a matter of fact. She was absolutely treacherous when it pleased her to be, with no conscience whatever, and it wouldn’t be the least surprising to discover that she had actually called Oliver on the telephone on some pretext just to let him know that Charity had lied about going with her to Connecticut. But if this were done and she were charged with it, she would simply be too contrite and exuding apologies for being so careless and forgetful and utterly undependable, which she wouldn’t have been deliberately for the world, of course, and she was absolutely a bitch, bitch, bitch!

While thinking of Samantha, she had been drawing deeply and methodically on her cigarette without realizing what she was doing, and suddenly she became aware that her tongue was hot and the cigarette was tipped with a long red coal that was almost half as long as what was left of the cigarette itself. She crushed it in a tray and drank the coffee in her cup. She was beginning now to wish that she hadn’t eaten such a hearty breakfast. It had tasted good, and she had enjoyed it, even the egg, but it was beginning to feel like a mass of sodden facial tissue in her stomach, and she couldn’t imagine how it had got as far as it had, or how it would ever get the rest of the way it had to go.

Well, it served her right for being such a glutton. Ordinarily she had very little taste for food of any kind, and she ate lightly as a necessity whenever her body demanded it, and she simply couldn’t understand people who made a big issue of eating, a kind of religious ceremony, with all kinds of specifications as to how things were to be prepared and served. It was disgusting, when you stopped to think about it, making such a thing over eating flesh and eggs and things like that, a lot more disgusting than some of the natural appetites some people professed to find disgusting, and anyone who did it, as she had just done it, deserved to have an uncomfortable stomach at least.

Getting up abruptly from the table, she went out of the dining room and into a hall and down the hall to a library with two or three thousand books that no one ever read. Once she had gone through a period of resolving to be something different from what she was, and then she had decided to start reading the books in the library with the intention of becoming dedicated to a reclusive life, and she had actually taken a few of them down and read snatches in them here and there, but she had never got around to starting one at the beginning and reading through to the end. It was just as well that she hadn’t started, anyhow, because the period had been pretty brief, and she probably wouldn’t have had time in the length of it to read a whole book. Now, starting Monday morning to wait for Tuesday night, she put several records on the hi-fi and sat down in a chair to listen.

Not that she really listened. Not, that is, with an understanding of scores and a genuine appreciation of execution. The music simply became a part of her emotional content and gave a kind of splendid quality to things remembered and anticipated that had not really been splendid at all, or would not be. Eventually, this effect became flattened, and she became bored. She wondered what she could possibly do with the rest of the day without going out somewhere to do it. There was nothing she could do with it, she decided. Nothing in the apartment. She had determined as a matter of sagacity to stay home until tomorrow night, but it would surely do no harm to go shopping, which was something she had not done for quite a long time, and so she went to her room with a freshly made bed and dressed appropriately and went.

There was nothing she needed or especially wanted, but then she thought that she would buy a new gown to wear tomorrow night for Joe Doyle, and this became at once a rather exciting venture. She tried to decide what he would probably like in the way of a gown, and she realized that she didn’t have the least idea. It was astonishing. They had actually known each other intimately for a long while, almost a week, and she did not know about him such a simple thing as what he might like in the way of a gown. Perhaps this was significant, and it bothered her slightly for a moment because she thought it might indicate a deficiency or basic indifference in their relationship. But this was not true, she assured herself, and what it really indicated was a kind of stripped and unqualified acceptance of each by the other. What she would have to get was something that she especially liked herself, and the chances were, since they were so compatible and acceptable to each other in all ways, that Joe would like it too.

She went to a salon and looked at some original gowns on two sleek models, and by a stroke of uncommon luck the third one on the first model was a gown that she knew immediately was exactly right and that she must certainly have. It was simply designed and seemed to be precariously secured, which added a quality of anticipation to its effect on whoever was watching whoever was almost in it, and it was a gown, most importantly, which clearly required other prerequisites than merely the considerable sum of money it took to buy it. After paying for the gown and arranging to have it sent, she went to two other places and bought lingerie in one and shoes in the other, which she also arranged to have sent, and then it was definitely late enough to have the Martini she had been thinking about, between other thoughts, all afternoon.

In the cocktail lounge that happened to be nearest to where she bought the shoes, she sat at a small round table in cool shadows and drank one Martini quickly and another slowly. While slowly drinking the second one, she began to think deliberately about something she had been deliberately not thinking about, or at least trying not to think about and this was what Oliver might know about the weekend, and what he might say or do about it when she saw him this evening for the first time since returning last night. She didn’t see how Oliver could possibly know anything, unless Samantha had given it away, damn her, but Samantha couldn’t have given away anything specific, at least, because she only knew that Charity had used the house, not with whom or why, although she could surely guess the latter. If it turned out that he knew about Joe’s being there, or about Long Island or the night before Long Island, then that would be additional evidence of an abnormal capacity to learn things, or of some method of systematic spying, and she didn’t know which of these would be worse, but either would be too bad. They were both threatening and frightening, and that was why she had deliberately not thought of them, and she would not have thought of them now if she had not been compelled by the time and supported by gin.

Having considered the issue at last, whether Oliver would know anything or not, she felt a strong compulsion to find out as quickly as possible, and for that reason she wanted to be home when he arrived at six, which it would be in less than an hour according to the tiny watch on her wrist. Resisting the desire to have a third Martini, she left the lounge and returned to the apartment and went directly to her room. After she had changed into something more casual and comfortable, there were only ten minutes left of the time before Oliver would return on schedule to dress and do whatever else he regularly did before going out again this particular night of the week for dinner and bridge at his club. Or was it Tuesday night that he went for dinner and bridge? She was uncertain about it, but it didn’t matter, anyhow, for she definitely remembered that he went somewhere for something this night.

She had intended waiting here in her room, but in considering his coming and what might happen, she remembered what had happened the other time, the time about a week ago right after he had told her all about her first experience with Joe, and so she decided suddenly to wait instead in the living room, where the same thing might still happen again but was less likely. Going into the living room, she sat on a sofa and looked at pictures in a magazine and spent the remaining minutes, and when Oliver arrived at six she was vastly relieved to see that he was quite normal and apparently not suspicious or angry about anything.

“Hello, my dear,” he said. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” she said. “Do I look as if I were not?”

“On the contrary Your weekend in the country seems to have agreed with you. Perhaps we should have a place of our own. Not in Fairfield County, however. I think I’d prefer Bucks.”

“Well, I’d not prefer either one as a regular thing. As a regular thing, I prefer the city. We’d only want to go to the country now and then, and it would hardly be worthwhile having a place for no more than that. It’s always possible to get invited to someone’s house when you want to go.”

“You’re right, of course. I didn’t really offer my suggestion seriously.”

He walked over and sat down on the sofa near her, turning sidewise to face her in an unusually companionable position. He was behaving so graciously, as a matter of fact, that it made her uneasy and inclined to listen sharply for significant nuances in his voice.

“Did you and Samantha get along all right?”

“Perfectly. Usually I can’t tolerate her for more than a few hours at a time at most, but this time we didn’t have the slightest difficulty.”

“That’s good. Who else was there?”

“You mean all the time or just everyone who happened to come and go?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t expect you to account for all of Samantha’s casual visitors. Just the guests.”

“There were only three besides me. There were a couple, a Wesley Bussy and his wife, who were from Hollywood. He has something or other to do with motion pictures, production or administration or something like that, not acting or directing or anything. An executive is what he is. His wife’s name is Andrea, and she went to Hollywood from someplace like Texas to become an actress, but he saw her there and married her, and she’s given it up. Acting, I mean. Neither of them is anyone you’d be likely to hear about.”

She said all this naturally, with a perfect accent of truth, and even the names, which were imaginary, were produced without hesitation. To anyone who heard her give such a performance and knew all the while that she was lying, which was frequently the situation, it seemed an incredible accomplishment, but it was not actually as remarkable as it seemed. The truth was, she often amused herself by thinking up names and circumstances that might become useful to her, and when she needed to tell something convincing in an emergency, they were always available. She was really rather proud of her ability to file them away in her mind, and she was very particular about the names, evaluating them carefully to be certain that they were neither too common nor too odd, which would have made them excite suspicion in either event. The only thing that concerned her sometimes was the feeling that she had, in lying to someone it was necessary to deceive, given certain names to certain imaginary people that she had previously given to other imaginary people who were obviously altogether different in all other respects. She tried never to use the same name over in telling lies to any given person, but she couldn’t always be sure she hadn’t slipped. She was sure now, however, of the Bussys. She had only imagined them recently and had definitely never used them before.

“Were they interesting people?” Oliver said.

“No, they were very dull. They were bores, as a matter of fact. Especially her. A number of years ago she won several of these beauty contests you are always reading about in which someone becomes Miss something-or-other, and she seemed to think this was important. Everyone knows perfectly well that such contests mean hardly anything, but she kept referring to them all the time as if having won them was an exceptional accomplishment.”

“I’m sorry you were bored. Was the other guest any better?”

“Yes, he was. He was much better, He’s a professor in a university somewhere and is apparently quite poor, but he’s writing a book that may make some money for him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Clyde Connelly. I don’t remember what university he teaches in, but I believe it’s somewhere in the Middle West, like Ohio or Illinois or somewhere, and if I’m not mistaken he is on sabbatical leave next year and is going to Europe. He came to New York to see a publisher about the book and met Samantha at a party they had both gone to with someone else. You know Samantha. She is always picking someone up and cultivating him for a while and then dropping him. This professor is good-looking and not very old, and it’s probable that they’re having an affair.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do. I think it’s probable.”

“Are all your friends always having affairs?”

“Oh, no. Not always. I didn’t intend to give that impression at all. If you think they are, you’re mistaken.”

He laughed and reached over and squeezed her nearer knee in a sudden warm gesture.

“My dear,” he said, rising, “I know practically nothing about your friends, and I think about them just as infrequently as I can.”

He stood looking down at her, smiling, and her feeling of uneasiness returned and grew, not because of what he had said or the way in which he had said it, but simply because his geniality was rare and excessive and therefore suspect.

“I must go change,” he said. “Are you going out this evening?”

“No. I thought I’d stay in and go to bed early. I’m rather tired after the weekend and all.”

“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll not disturb you when I come in.”

When he was gone, her uneasiness began to diminish slowly and after a few minutes was gone. There had simply been no evidence at all that he was informed on her affair, and it was impossible to believe that he was capable of such convincing and monstrous deception. Besides, what would have been the point of it? It was obvious that everything was all right, that there was nothing to worry about, and she began to regret, now that she had convinced herself of this, that she had not planned to go see Joe Doyle tonight instead of tomorrow night. She was tempted to go tonight anyhow, regardless of plans, but perhaps it would be wiser, since she had committed herself to staying in and going to bed early, to wait another twenty-four hours.

The time would pass. Tomorrow she would find something to do, though she didn’t know what, and tonight she would have a simple dinner alone and two or three Martinis afterward, and then she would watch television in bed. Television was commonly so utterly dull that it would probably put her to sleep after a while without the help of soporifics.

Chapter 14

Tuesday was a day that was somehow spent.

In the afternoon, the gown and other things were delivered, and she tried on the gown in her room to be sure that it was actually as exciting as she had thought it was in the salon, and it seemed to her that it was. Often she would get enthusiastic about something that she saw and bought, and then later, when she saw it again in different circumstances, she couldn’t understand how she had been so mistaken as to have wanted it, but this time, to her relief, the gown was still right and exciting and just the thing to wear when she went to see Joe Doyle.

After trying it on and looking at herself for a long time in a mirror, she took it off again and laid it across the bed in readiness for later, and then there wasn’t a thing left to do that was tolerable, but it was essential to do something, for doing nothing was most intolerable of all. In this kind of situation, she usually ended up doing things to herself, brushing her hair and trying new effects with her face and fixing her fingernails and toenails, things like that, and she started now doing all these things. Fortunately, this was all meticulous work that required careful attention and had the incidental result of making time pass quickly, and she had just finished with the nail of the little toe on her left foot, the last thing to be done, when Oliver came home and knocked on her door, and she was genuinely astonished to realize that it had become so late so soon.

But there was something terribly wrong. She felt it the moment Oliver came into the room. He closed the door behind him and stood leaning against it, watching her, and the wrongness was immediately present and felt and growing to such enormous dimensions that it seemed to fill the room and press in upon her from the walls. Not that he said anything or did anything or appeared to be in the least angry. He appeared, in fact, to be unusually congenial, as he had been yesterday, and he smiled and nodded his head, watching her, as if he approved of what he saw.

It was strange and irrational how the feeling came over her. One moment she was doing things to herself to pass the time until she could do what she really wanted to do, and everything was all right and getting better, and the next moment everything was all wrong and getting worse, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for it or anything she could do to stop it. She had experienced the same feeling before, however, the sudden terrible conviction of imminent disaster that had no apparent relationship to circumstances as they were at the time, and a doctor at one of the parties where she got most of her spiritual and psychiatric guidance had told her, after an intimate consultation in a corner over several cocktails, that it was a kind of free-floating anxiety that occasionally attached itself to a specific incident or person. This was nice to know, of course, but it wasn’t very effective as therapy and did little or nothing to alleviate matters whenever the free-floating anxiety attached itself afterward to something or someone specific, as it was now attached to Oliver at the door.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Wrong?” He straightened and walked three steps into the room. “Nothing’s wrong, my dear. What makes you think there is?”

“I don’t know. I just had a feeling when you came in that something was.”

“You’re mistaken. Everything is fine. Are you planning to go somewhere tonight?”

“I was thinking that I might. I went to bed early last night, you know, and now I’d like to go somewhere and do something.”

“Do you have something definite arranged?”

“Oh, no. Nothing special at all. There’s always somewhere to go that doesn’t require special arrangements.”

“That’s good. It’s good, I mean, that you haven’t committed yourself to anything definite, for I’ve planned a little surprise for you.”

“Surprise? What kind of surprise?”

He smiled, tracing with the tip of an index finger the thin scar along his mandible, and she watched him with a conviction of personal peril growing stronger and stronger in her morbid certainty of all things going wrong, It was surely a kind of minor revolution when Oliver disrupted his schedule for anything whatever, and it raised the question of whether the disruption was a sign of a change in their relationship which he intended to be good or was, on the other hand, a development of the danger she had sensed and believed, and in either case it threatened to spoil the night she had planned and was therefore bad.

“Dinner and dancing to begin with,” he said. “Afterward I have something rather unusual in mind. I think it will amuse you.”

“What is it?”

“If I told you now it would spoil the surprise. I want you to anticipate it, my dear.”

“Well, I know you don’t really like to do things like this and are only doing it now for my sake. It’s very kind of you, I’m sure, but it isn’t necessary.”

“On the contrary, I’m quite enthusiastic about it. Do you think I’m incapable of enjoying anything out of the routine?”

“You’ll have to admit that you always plan things ahead very carefully and hardly ever deviate from them.”

“That’s true. I like an ordered life, as you say, but I’ve been thinking that perhaps you should be included more often in the order. I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting you shamefully, my dear, and you’ve been exceedingly generous and understanding about it.”

This remark seemed to indicate that he was only trying to alter their relationship with good intentions, which was a relief from fear but would certainly become a great nuisance if she permitted it to continue, for it would prevent her from going places and doing things as she pleased, or at least as frequently as she pleased. It was extremely unlikely, however, that Oliver would deviate from his established order for any length of time, and the acute problem now was tonight, how she could possibly go to Joe Doyle while Oliver was imposing himself upon her in this extraordinary way, and her going, which had up to now been no more than desirable, became imperative as it became imperiled.

“Thank you very much,” she said, “but I don’t think I’d care to become part of an order. I prefer to do things more spontaneously.”

“I know. We are quite different in that respect. An adjustment will demand concessions from us both. Is that a new gown on the bed?”

“Yes, it is. I bought it yesterday, and it was delivered this afternoon.”

“It’s nice. I’m sure you’ll look charming in it. Were you planning to wear it tonight?”

“Yes. I was trying it on before you came.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come earlier. No matter, though. I’ll see it on you later when we go out together.”

“Are you certain you want to go? If you prefer, we could go another night when you have more time to prepare for it.”

“No, no. It’s all arranged. We’ll go to the Empire Room for dinner and dancing, and later we’ll have our little surprise.”

He moved toward her suddenly and took her by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth with a lightness and tenderness that were rare and would have been deeply moving in the kiss of anyone else. In his, they were somehow frightening, the qualities of mockery. She was ravished by the kiss as she had never been by his occasional brutality, and at the same time, paradoxically, she felt far more rejected than all his customary coldness had ever made her feel. Worst of all, she was compelled to recognize with an exorbitant sense of loss and despair that he was determined to take her with him to the Empire Room and wherever else afterward he had planned, and there was nothing, nothing at all, that she could do to prevent it.

“We’ll leave at a quarter to eight,” he said.

He released her and went out, and she sat on the edge of the bed in her despair and tried and tried to think of something she could do to save the night, to make it possible still to go to Joe Doyle, but she could think of nothing, and she knew that there was nothing to be done by her or anyone else in the world. It would be necessary, then, to call Joe and tell him that she couldn’t be there, and why she couldn’t, and how terribly sorry she was, and that she would surely come as soon as she could, which would be tomorrow if she could possibly manage it.

Having decided to call, she tried to remember if there was a telephone in his room, and she couldn’t remember any. If there had been one she would certainly have remembered it, and so she concluded that there wasn’t, which meant that there was a house phone in the hall that would probably be listed under the name of whoever owned the house, and the trouble was that she didn’t know who owned it. Then it occurred to her that he might be at Duo’s already, where he worked, and that she could at least leave word for him there if he wasn’t actually there himself to be talked to.

She turned in the classified directory to the nightclubs and found Duo’s number and dialed it, and while she was doing this she kept hoping very hard that Joe would be there to be talked to, for she wanted to tell him personally how much she wanted to come and how sorry she was that she couldn’t. It was imperative that he understand this and believe it, for he was inclined to lack faith in her anyhow, and he might decide that she had simply had enough of him, which wasn’t, surprisingly enough, yet true. After she had finished dialing, she waited and waited while the phone rang in long bursts at the other end of the line, and she had about concluded in despair that Duo’s was one of those places that absolutely ignored telephone calls whenever it suited them, but then, just as she was preparing to cut the connection, someone answered. It was Yancy.

“Duo’s,” he said. “Yancy speaking.”

“Hello, Yancy,” she said. “This is Charity Farnese. You know. The dry Martini.”

“I know.”

“Where in the world have you been? The phone rang and rang, and I was about to hang up.”

“I was here all the time. I was busy.”

“Well, I’m glad I waited. It just shows you that it doesn’t pay to give up too soon, doesn’t it?”

“Not always. Sometimes it pays to give up as soon as possible.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean, and I don’t think I want to know. What I do want to know is, is Joe there?”

“Joe Doyle?”

“Of course Joe Doyle. You know perfectly well I mean Joe Doyle. Please don’t be so evasive, Yancy.”

“Sorry. He isn’t here.”

“Do you suppose he will be there soon?”

“I don’t think so. Not soon.”

“Do you know his telephone number?”

“It’s a house phone. I don’t know the number.”

“Perhaps you could tell me the name the number is listed under.”

“I can’t. I don’t know it.”

“Are you merely being contrary, Yancy?”

“No. If I knew I’d tell you.”

“Thank you. That’s very kind of you. Will you please give him a message from me when he comes in?”

“I might.”

“What do you mean, you might? Will you or won’t your?”

“It depends on the message.”

“Please tell him that I won’t be able to come tonight. Something has developed that makes it impossible.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“Tell him also that I’m truly sorry and will see him as soon as I can. Will you tell him that?”

“Reluctantly.”

“What’s the matter with you, Yancy? Do you still think it’s wrong for me to see him and that no good will come of it?”

“You know what I think. I told you.”

“Well, in the beginning there may have been an excuse for your scepticism, but now there is none whatever, and you are only being stubborn and unpleasant. I can tell you that some good has already come of it, and Joe will tell you the same if you will only ask him.”

“Not me. What’s good or what’s bad is for you and Joe to figure, and you don’t owe any accounting to anyone but each other and maybe your husband. I just decided. Good-by, now. I’ve got customers.”

He hung up without giving her a chance to say good-by in return, and she listened for a few moments to the humming of the wire and hung up too. It was still earlier than she needed to start dressing for the evening, but she started anyhow, because there was nothing else to do and doing something was a necessary defensive mechanism, taking a long bath and brushing her hair for a long while deliberately. Finally, after everything else was done, she took the new gown off the bed and hung it in a closet and selected another, which she hardly looked at, and put it on. She was compelled under the circumstances to go out with Oliver if he demanded it, but she was not compelled to wear the gown she had bought particularly to wear for Joe Doyle, and she was not going to do it. She would think of something to say in explanation if Oliver noticed it was not the new gown and said something about it, and that, of course, as it happened, was the first thing Oliver did when he knocked on the door at a quarter to eight and entered.

“I thought you were going to wear the new gown,” he said. “Or did you buy it for a special occasion?”

“No,” she said. “I decided it isn’t suitable for the Empire Room, that’s all.”

“Really? I thought it looked quite suitable.”

“No. It’s not suitable at all.”

“Whatever you think, of course. The gown you’re wearing is nice. You look lovely in it.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s time to leave now. Are you ready?”

“Yes, I’m ready.”

Edith let them out of the apartment and closed the door silently after them, and they went down to the Avenue and found Oliver’s Imperial, which had been ordered around, waiting for them at the curb. They drove on the Avenue to the Waldorf-Astoria and went immediately to the Empire Room and were shown to the table that Oliver had reserved. She should have known, of course, that he had made a reservation, but she had not considered the details of the situation that carefully, and now that they were exposed and she was compelled to consider them in spite of herself, she was possessed by a most terrible feeling of absolute impotence. Without consulting her or conceding anything whatever to her rights or wishes, he had reserved the table and the night and her, and all the time that she had been planning to make certain things happen, quite different things had actually been happening already and were still happening, and there had been nothing she could have done to change the order of events then, before she even knew about it, and there was nothing she could do to stop it or change it now. Nothing at all. What she had hoped and almost believed yesterday and earlier today, that Oliver’s unusual geniality was only a sign that he might become a nuisance and not a menace, she no longer hoped or believed in the least. She was resigned to disaster, and as her resignation increased, her fear diminished. She hardly cared what the form of disaster might be precisely, or when, exactly, it might come.

A waiter placed a menu before her, but she had no interest in it. She pushed it away with the tips of her fingers as if it were something contagious. Oliver watched her, smiling. He traced and retraced lightly the line of his scar.

“Will you order now, my dear?” he said.

“I don’t believe I care to order,” she said. “I’m only interested in having a very dry Martini immediately.”

“Would you like me to order for both of us?”

“If you wish.”

It was apparent that dinner was part of the established order in which she was involved and impotent, and it would be quite futile to say that she did not want it or to resist it in any way. While Oliver ordered from the menu, she thought of her Martini, which she wanted desperately, and looked around the room, which she did not like. She never came here voluntarily and would have been depressed, even if everything else were all right, at being brought here under compulsion. It was not that there was anything wrong with the place itself. It was only that she and the place were not compatible. It was always filled with people who were supposed to be important or interesting or both, and they always seemed to be working very hard at being whatever they were supposed to be, and she always had, watching them, a very strong feeling that there was actually no such thing as importance and that anyone who assumed it or pretended to it was a kind of imposter. It was her experience, moreover, that the most interesting people were usually found in places where no one expected to find them, and that these interesting people, when they were found, hadn’t the faintest idea that they were interesting. This experience had been supported by her study of bartenders in odd places, as well as by other contacts in other places she had gone to accidentally or on purpose, and it was her impression now that by far the most interesting person in this incompatible room was the attractive Negress who was singing sultry songs in a tigerish manner. Charity was sure that the singer was someone she ought to know, for anyone who sang songs in the Empire Room was bound to be someone that everyone ought to know, but she couldn’t think of the singer’s name, although she was positive it was a name she would recognize if someone mentioned it.

Her Martini was served and she nursed it with a kind of greediness because she knew that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to get another before dinner. Oliver did not have a cocktail. She had never seen him have a cocktail or a drink of any kind in all the time she had known him and been married to him, which was about the same amount of time in either case.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he said.

“Yes,” she lied. “It’s very pleasant.”

“You don’t seem to be. You look bored.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t particularly care for this place. It depresses me.”

“Really? You just said it was pleasant.”

“I was only being agreeable. I would never come here if I had my choice.”

“I should have consulted you I suppose, but I wanted it to be a surprise. We’ve gone out together so seldom that I don’t know the places you like to go.”

“Well, you probably wouldn’t like the places I like, so it would make no difference anyhow.”

“Perhaps you could convert me.” He reached out and touched her right hand, which was lying palm down on the table, and his eyes glistened for the first time with overt malice. “As I said before, I’m feeling quite guilty for having neglected you. It might be amusing for both of us to become more familiar with each other’s habits.”

“I don’t wish to interfere with your life. It isn’t necessary for you to make concessions that you don’t really want to make.”

“You’re too generous. It only makes me more determined to emulate you.” He touched her hand again and laughed, and the malice in his eyes was in the laugh also. “However, here is our dinner, and I hope you are pleased with what I ordered. Afterward, we’ll dance. It has been a long time since I’ve danced with you, hasn’t it? I’m sure I’ll be awkward in the beginning, but you must be patient until I improve. The music is by Nat Brandywynne, I believe. Are you familiar with his orchestra? Do you like it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve beard it.”

“Well, no matter. To tell the truth, we are only killing time as pleasantly as possible until we can go to the special event I’ve arranged for you. However bored you may be by all this, I promise that you’ll not be bored by that. I promise that you’ll find it most interesting.”

He looked across the table at her, waiting for her to ask again what the special event was to be, but she did not ask because she was afraid to know, because she knew by feeling already that it was going to be, whatever developed specifically, the bad end of this bad night in which waiting and waiting and waiting was to be one of the worst of all bad things. Dinner was served, and the remains of dinner were taken away. Afterward they danced, and their dancing was a kind of cold and acceptable social sodomy. She refused after the first time to dance again, and so they sat and sat and did not even talk, and eventually it became eleven-thirty and time to leave.

In the Imperial, she shrank against the door and closed her eyes as a frightened child closes his eyes in the night, trading one darkness for another, the living and breathing outer darkness of a thousand threats for the sealed and solacing inner darkness secured by the thin membranes of the lids. She was conscious of moving, of riding for a long time on different streets, but she had no sense of direction, and when the car stopped and she opened her eyes at last, she had no idea of where she was, except that it was an incredibly dark and narrow and filthy street that turned out not to be a street at all, but an alley.

“Where have you brought me?” she said. “What are you going to do to me?”

“Do to you?” He took her face between thumb and fingers and turned it up and around and looked down into it smiling. “What a fantastic idea. I only brought you here to see something amusing. I told you that.”

Releasing her, he got out of the car and came around to her side and opened the door, and she got out beside him. A bulky shadow separated itself from the deeper shadow of a recession in a crumbling brick wall. The shadow moved toward them and became an obese man, and she had the most peculiar feeling that it was a man she had seen somewhere before, but this was probably only a contingent of terror and not so.

“You didn’t say you were bringing anyone,” the obese man said.

“Was I obligated to inform you?” Oliver’s voice was a soft expression of utter animosity, and Charity was aware that between these two men, in whatever strange relationship they had established, there was deep and abiding hatred. “Are you suggesting that I have no right to bring my wife as a guest if I please?”

“It’s not smart,” the man said. “It may be dangerous.”

“I think not. And if you’re worried about its compromising your usefulness in the future, you needn’t worry any more. I had already decided that your usefulness has been exhausted.” Oliver turned his head slightly toward Charity. “My dear, this is Mr. Sweeney. You’ll hardly believe it, I know, but you and he are old friends after a fashion. Isn’t that so, Sweeney?”

The man called Sweeney didn’t answer. Turning, he moved back to the dark recession and disappeared. Guided by Oliver’s hand on her arm, Charity followed and saw that there was in the recession a metal door which was now standing open, and she went through the doorway onto the concrete floor of a long dark building, a single enormous room, that was or had been almost certainly a garage. High, small windows at the far end were like blind eyes reflecting the feeble light from a lamp on the street outside. A single dim bulb burned in a conical tin shade at the end of a cord descending from shadows at the ceiling and cast upon the stained concrete a dirty yellow perimeter of defense against the darkness.

Sweeney brushed by, opened a door to a small enclosure that was mostly glass above a low wall of rough boards fixed vertically. The enclosure projected from one side of the room and was or had been the improvised office of what was or had been the garage.

“In here, please,” Sweeney said. “It will probably be a while yet, so you had better sit down and take it easy.”

“Yes, my dear,” Oliver said. “Here is a chair with a cushion beside the desk. I’m sure you will be quite comfortable in it.”

She sat down and folded her hands in her lap. It was hot in the small and dark enclosure, but she felt icy cold. Quietly she waited for the bad end of the bad night. Regret she felt, and fear and despair, and the greatest of these was despair.

Chapter 15

The drum and the piano were tired. In the shag end of the night, in the rise and drift of sound from a litter of people at a litter of tables, the die-hards, the last dogs, the ones who never wanted to go home, their voices lagged and faltered and fell silent. The drum, in the end, had the final word. The piano, too tired to care, declined to answer. The litter heard no silence that was not its own.

In a tiny room off the short hall to the alley, Chester Lewis put a hat over his wiry hair, lit a cigarette, looked with his expression of chronic surprise at the miracle of thin blue smoke that issued from his lungs.

“It wasn’t good tonight,” he said. “I wasn’t with it.”

“You were all right,” Joe said. “You were fine.”

“No. It wouldn’t come. Not the good stuff. What came was gibberish.”

“You’re tired, that’s all. We’re both tired.”

“That’s right, Joe. We’re both tired. We’re a pair of tired guys, Joe.”

“Everyone gets tired.”

“Everyone doesn’t stay tired.”

“All right, Chester. You better get some sleep and forget it.”

“Sure, Joe. You better, too.”

“I’ll get along in a little.”

“You going to play again?”

“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll skip it.”

“How about a sandwich and a glass of milk somewhere?”

“I don’t think so, Chester. Thanks anyhow.”

Chester drew on his cigarette, examined with astonishment the miracle, of smoke.

“We’ve been good partners, Joe. You think so?”

“I think so, Chester.”

“I needed you. You came along just right.”

“We needed each other, Chester. It was right for both of us.”

“Yeah. I guess so. We’ve never said much to each other, though. There are lots of things we could have said that we never did.”

“Just with the drum and the piano.”

“That’s right. The drum and the piano. You hear what the drum was saying tonight, Joe? Tonight and last night?”

“I heard it.”

“The piano didn’t answer, Joe. It didn’t say a word back. Just changed the subject.”

“There wasn’t anything to say.”

“Yeah. I guess not. Nothing to say.” Chester dropped his cigarette on the bare floor and stepped on it, reducing his little miracle to a dead butt. “Maybe we’re more than partners, Joe. Maybe we’re friends.”

“We’re friends, Chester.”

“Funny how it begins and goes on, isn’t it? What makes and keeps two guys friends, Joe?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to say.”

“Probably it helps if each of them pretty much minds his own business.”

“Probably.”

“Sure. That’s what I’ve been thinking. Well, be careful. Be real careful. I think I’ll be going along now, Joe. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Chester.”

Chester went out and back to the alley, and Joe went out after him and up to the bar where Yancy was.

“How’s everything, Yancy?” he said.

“No complaints,” Yancy said. “I’ll have rye and water.”

“You sure? No Martini?”

“You heard me. Rye and water.”

“I had a notion you’d switched to Martinis. Funny how I got such a notion.”

“Very funny, Yancy. I’ll laugh later.”

“You needn’t bother. Truth is, I don’t think it was funny myself.” Yancy poured rye and added water and set it out. “I got a message. I’m supposed to tell you something.”

“All right. Tell me.”

“She can’t come. Something happened. I’d have told you sooner, but you were late getting in and I didn’t have the chance.”

“What was it happened?”

“I don’t know. Something to prevent her coming. She said she was sorry, and she sounded like she really was. She said to tell you she’d come as soon as she could. Tomorrow, maybe.”

“She telephoned?”

“That’s right. Between six and seven. Nearer six, I think. She sounded all right, just like she was sorry.”

“Thanks, Yancy.”

He drank some of the good strong rye and water and sat looking into what was left. Behind him was the sound of the last dogs in the litter of the night. Between now and daylight were five long hours. In five hours a man could count perhaps twenty-two thousand heart beats.

All right, he thought, all right. There was a night and a part of a night in the room, and there was most of a day and a night on Long island, and there was a night and a day and a night and a day in Connecticut, and now there’s the finish, the end, nothing more. Whatever there was and however long it lasted, it was more and longer than you thought it would be or had any reason to expect it to be, and so you had now better have your rye and water and go home and to bed, and if you can forget it in the little time that’s left for forgetting, that’s something else you had better do, and if you can’t forget it, you can at least remember it and her with kindness and pleasure and pity, for she will probably need kindness and pity and the remembrance of pleasure far more in the end than you will ever need them.

In the depths of the golden rye and water, she raised her face and looked up at him sadly from under her hair on the heavy side, and he lifted the glass and emptied it of the rye and water and her.

“You still here?” Yancy said.

“I may be here for quite a while. What’s the matter, Yancy? You need the space?”

“I didn’t mean that. I meant you looked gone. Like part of you had walked off and left the rest of you.”

“I was thinking.”

“Well, that’s a bad habit to get into. A guy gets along pretty well until he starts thinking too much about things, and then he’s in for trouble. Trouble with himself, I mean, which can sometimes be the worst kind of trouble there is. I read a poem about that once. According to this poem a guy can survive pretty well on a diet of liquor, love and fights and stuff like that, but the minute he starts thinking he’s a sick bastard.”

“Is that the way the poem went?”

“Well, not exactly. That’s just the general idea.”

“I didn’t know you read poetry, Yancy.”

“Of course you didn’t. You didn’t even know I could read. You thought I was just an ignorant, illiterate slob.”

“Not me, Yancy. I’ve always had the greatest respect for you. I value your friendship and solicit your counsel.”

“Oh, sure, sure. Funny boy. What if I told you to go to hell?”

“You won’t.”

“That’s right. I won’t. Where I’ll tell you to go is home, but you won’t be in any more hurry to go there than the other place. You got no brains to speak of, that’s the thing about you.”

“Sometimes, Yancy, one place is much like another.”

“Yeah. I know that myself. You want another rye?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you would. I was only doing my duty to my lousy conscience. You going to play requests tonight?”

“I don’t think so. I don’t feel like it.”

“I know you don’t feel like it. You didn’t feel like it earlier with Chester, far as that goes. You were working.”

“It’s uncanny how you know things, Yancy. You must have some kind of special power or something. It makes a guy feel uneasy.”

“Well, I know when something’s fun and when it’s work, and playing the piano used to be fun for Joe Doyle, at least part of the time, but now it’s all work and when anything gets that way, all work, it’s no good any longer and ought to be stopped. Why don’t you quit, Joe?”

“Maybe I ought to quit eating and paying rent, too.”

“There are other ways to eat and pay rent. There are other places to go than a lousy club every night, and there are other things to do than play piano for a lot of God-damn tramps and lushes with nothing better to do than get maudlin over some cheap little tune that stirs up some cheap little memory.”

“I admire you when you’re eloquent, Yancy. You’re real impressive.”

“Okay. I ought to know better than to try. Maybe you’ll think about it, though. Maybe you’ll think about all the other things there are to do.”

“I know there are other things to do, if you know how. I don’t know how. All I know is how to play the piano, and I don’t know that a tenth as well as I wanted to and tried to.”

“Forget I said anything. I tell you I ought to know better, and then I try again before I can even get my mouth shut, and what I learn from the effort is that I ought to know better. It’s your business. If you want the last thing you see to be a bloodshot eye and the last breath you breathe to be a lungful of second-hand cigarette smoke, it’s your business.”

“Thanks, Yancy. What you say brings us to an interesting question, and it happens to be a question, believe it or not, that I’ve done quite a bit of thinking about at one time or another. The question is, Yancy, what do you do with what’s left of a life when only a little’s left. When I was a kid in high school I took a course in public speaking. We got up and talked about things. One of the things we talked about was this particular question of what we would do if we only had so long to live. Only a little while. I remember some of the things that were said, including what I said, and it was all foolishness. Everyone was running around in his little talk doing the little thing he liked the very best, and that just isn’t the way it is, when the time comes. No, Yancy, they’re doing pretty much what they were doing yesterday and the day before and the day before. They’re doing what they’ve always done and know how to do. They’re playing the piano, Yancy, the same as me.”

“Here,” Yancy said. “You need another rye.” He mixed it with water and pushed it across the bar. “You call me eloquent? I’m practically a mute, sonny.”

“It’s the rye, Yancy. It’s two ryes on an empty stomach. And maybe something else a little. I won’t say I haven’t thought about it, though. About what I’d like to do best the last thing. There are several things I’ve thought about, and the trouble with all of them is that they’re things that have already been done and can’t be done again. You know what one of the things is I’ve been thinking about and wanting to do? I’ll tell you. Listen to me and two ryes, Yancy. Two and a half ryes. I’ve been thinking about how I used to walk on hot summer afternoons out from town to the creek for a swim. That was when I was a little kid and lived in a little town, long before I got big and started living in this biggest of all big towns. I’d walk out about two miles on a country road, and the dust was white and hot under my feet, and it raised clouds around me as I walked. It got in my throat and made me very thirsty, and being thirsty was a great pleasure, because it made so much cooler and better the water that I drank from a well on the farm that the creek ran through. I drank the water from a tin dipper that hung from a nail driven into a tree a few feet away, and then I walked down across fields to the creek and swam naked, and afterward I came back and had another drink from the well and walked home. You can see that this is something a man might want to do again, Yancy, but you can also see that it’s something he can’t possibly do. Not again. He can’t do it again because it requires a certain time as well as certain circumstances, and time is something that can’t be done over.”

“Cut it out,” Yancy said. “Goddamn it, I was just suggesting it would be better for you if you went somewhere and did something that would give you a little peace and quiet and you could keep decent hours doing. I didn’t ask for any hearts and flowers, Goddamn it.”

“Excuse me, Yancy. I’ll have another rye.”

“The hell you will!”

“Are you refusing me service, Yancy?”

“Call it what you like. You’ve had three ryes already.”

“I know how many ryes I’ve had. I can count up to three ryes as well as anybody.”

“Three are plenty.”

“Am I creating a disturbance, Yancy? Have I given you any reason to discriminate against me? It seems to me that you are being very highhanded, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“I don’t mind at all. You can say anything you like, and you can drink as many ryes as you like, and I’m damned if I’ll try to talk sense to you ever again.”

“Thank you, Yancy. You’re a very understanding bartender.”

“Superior, sonny. Superior’s what I am. I’ve been told by an expert.” Yancy supplied the fourth rye and water with a kind of angry abruptness of motion that plainly expressed his disapproval, and Joe looked into the tiny golden sea in a crystal bed and saw again the face of Charity smiling up at him with sad finality He lifted the glass and tipped it against his mouth, and she slipped over his tongue and down his throat as easily as an aspirin tablet. “Hey!” Yancy said. “Take it easy.”

Lifting the empty glass against the light, Joe looked through it, into and through the empty crystal bed of the vanished golden sea. He felt for a moment purged of his sins and wholly well, shriven by rye and cured of his ills by the swallowed vision. Then, instantly afterward, he felt terribly sick. He was sick to his stomach and afraid that he was going to humiliate himself by vomiting on the bar. Closing his eyes and mouth tightly, he bowed his head and sat very quietly until his stomach stopped churning, or stopped, at least, churning so violently. He became aware after a minute or two that Yancy was repeating something he had said before.

“You sick, Joe?” Yancy said. “You sick?”

“No.” Joe lifted his head and set the empty glass, which he had continued to hold, gently on the bar. “I’m all right.”

“The hell you are! You’re sick. You feel like fainting again?”

“I’m all right now, Yancy. Four quick ryes on an empty stomach are too many. You were right as usual. In a minute I’m going home.”

“I’ll tell you what. You go lie down in your back room, and I’ll drive you home after closing.”

“I can drive myself. Thanks anyhow, Yancy.”

“You have one of those fainting spells while you’re driving, you’ll pile up and kill yourself, that’s what you’ll do.”

“Don’t worry about it, Yancy. I’ll get home all right.”

He slipped off the stool suddenly, and his stomach began to churn again immediately with the movement, and he stood gripping the edge of the bar until it and his stomach settled and became still in a precarious resumption of their proper places and conditions. Yancy watched him warily. Anger and anxiety were equal parts of Yancy’s expression.

“Okay,” he said. “Maybe I’ll read about you in the papers.”

“Not me.” Joe shook his head and managed a grin. “You’d never find a couple lines in all those pages.”

“Sure. Big joke. Go ahead and be a hero, sonny. See who gives a damn.”

“All I want to do is go home, Yancy. Does it take a hero to go home?”

“Go on home, then. Go on.”

“I’m going. Right now.”

He turned and started carefully across the room among the tables, some of them empty and some still occupied by the last sad dogs of the night. Yancy stood watching him for a few seconds, and then, prompted by remembrance of something he’d wanted to mention, he walked around the end of the bar and followed. In the short hall to the alley, he caught up.

“I don’t need any help, Yancy,” Joe said. “I keep telling you.”

“Who’s helping?” Yancy said. “I just thought of something I wanted to tell you, that’s all.”

“What’s that?”

“A guy was in here asking about you. Last Thursday, it was. A fat slob with a bald head with little scars all over it. Ugly bastard. You know him?”

Joe stopped just inside the alley door, thinking and shaking his head.

“I don’t think so. I can’t think of anyone I know who looks like that.”

“Well, he was in here asking about you. Where you were. When you were expected back in town. Things like that.”

“Maybe he wanted to sell me some insurance or something.”

“More jokes. More big laughs. You in the market for insurance?”

“Not quite. I’m not considered what they call a good risk.”

“Just be careful you don’t get to be an even worse one.”

“Worrying again, Yancy?”

“Over you? Hell, no. I told you it wasn’t worth the trouble. Anyhow, he’s probably just a guy who’s got fat and dropped his hair since you knew him somewhere sometime, and since you don’t seem to give a damn who he is or why he was here, I’m sorry I bothered to tell you. Go on home.”

Yancy turned and went back through the hall to the front room and the bar, and Joe, opening the door and pulling it shut behind him, stepped out into the alley and stood for a moment breathing deeply of the night air. Even the effluvium of things that gather in alleys seemed crisp and pure and invigorating after the stale air of the club. Lifting one arm, he placed the hand flat against a brick wall, and a coolness crept from the brick into the hand and seemed slowly to move up the arm into his body. He wondered if it were true that the coolness did so move into him, or if it were only, instead, a matter of suggestion. His stomach was feeling much better. He was reasonably sure now that he was not going to be sick after all.

Letting his arm drop to his side, he began to walk carefully along the wall toward the space in which he had left his car, and he had reached the space and almost the car when two men took shape in the darkness and moved toward him. He thought at first that they were merely going to separate and pass on either side and go on, but they stopped abruptly with him between them, and he was forced to stop also by strong hands gripping his arms. He understood then that the positions were accomplished by design and that the two men were in effect the jaws of a sprung trap in which he was caught for a reason not yet clear.

One of the men was a kind of exemplary average. He could have walked all day on a hundred streets without being particularly noticed or remembered at all, and even now, in the dark alley, he was not impressive, except that he was, in his implicit purpose, a threat. The other man was, on the other hand, a monstrous deviation from the average. He was the result of a terrible joke played by a gland on an organism, and if he had walked one street for one-half of one hour, he would have been noticed and remembered reluctantly by everyone he met. His appearance was brutish. Huge head with jutting stony jaw. Enormous hands and feet that swung and shuffled with a suggestion of anthropoid power. The total effect was one of deformity, distortion and disproportion of bones, and there was a name for it, this glandular joke, but Joe couldn’t think of the name or precise cause, only that the soft bones of extremities continued to grow when other bones did not.

“Hello, Lover,” the monstrous man said. “We thought you were never coming. We waited and waited and we thought you were never coming.”

He pronounced the term of endearment lingeringly, fondling it with his tongue as if he were loathe to release it, laughing softly afterward as if it were a joke at least as good as the one that had been played by a gland on him. Average laughed too, a brief burst of air that was more like a snort than an expression of amusement

“Cupid’s a comedian,” he said. “Always with the humor, that’s Cupid. You’ll like him.”

Joe stepped back, trying to release his arms from the hands that held them, but he was not strong, could not hope to prevail or even compete, not even with the unusual strength that is created by the strange chemistry of fear.

“What do you want?” he said.

“You, Lover,” Average said. “Like Cupid told you, we been waiting and waiting.”

“Why? What do you want with me?”

“Well, it seems you been a bad boy. It seems you been keeping company you had no business keeping, and someone figures you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Someone figures you ought to be taught what happens to bad boys who keep the wrong company.”

Cupid lifted his enormous free hand and cupped it beneath Joe’s chin, tipping the head back and looking down into the tilted face with an expression that was a caricature of affection. His voice was an incongruous croon.

“I like you,” he said. “We’re going to be good friends. Lover and Cupid are going to get along fine.”

Average laughed again, the explosive snort, and Joe felt shriveled and incredibly old and sick with shame, knowing now that what he had thought was dead had yet to be killed. Park Avenue ending in an alley. After the North Shore and Connecticut, violence and degradation in some dark corner. Most shameful of all in the evaluation of himself, a fear of physical pain that he had never accorded the anticipation of death. Despite this, aware of what was certainly coming, he felt a desperate and inconsistent urgency to get it over with as quickly as possible.

“All right,” he said. “If you’ve been hired to give me a beating, why don’t you do it?”

“No, Lover.” Average gave Joe’s arm a little squeeze. “We can’t do it that way Not here in the alley. We got a nice place all set up for it. You can see how it is. You been doing someone wrong, and this someone wants to be sure you get what he figures is coming to you. Since he’s paying for it, he’s got a right to be sure. You admit that’s fair? Come along quietly now with Cupid and me. We’ll take you to this nice place where no one’ll bother us, and everything will be fine. You’ll see. Everything fine.”

They walked together down the alley to a side street and got into a waiting sedan, Average behind the wheel, Joe and Cupid in the back seat. Average drove slowly, apparently in no hurry to get to the nice place or anyplace, and after a few minutes he began to whistle cheerfully through his teeth. Cupid leaned back and opened his mouth in the shape of a laugh, but he began to make, instead of the sound of laughter, a very soft crooning sound, oddly musical, that might have been made by a mother to comfort her child. The sedan, under the guidance of Average, turned many corners and traveled on many streets, and after a while Joe no longer had any idea of where they were or might be going, except that the streets were narrow and littered and dark, lighted at long intervals by inadequate lamps at the curb.

Average whistled and Cupid crooned, and the shameful fear of physical pain was a malignancy in Joe’s mind. Watching Cupid from the corners of his eyes with a slyness made acute by growing fear and diminishing time, he began to think positively of escape, how he might accomplish it, and then, all at once, in a slight change of circumstances in his favor, he was acting instinctively without slyness or calculation or any regard for chances or consequences. The sedan slowed for a corner, turning left, and in an instant he was clawing at the handle of the door beside him, in another instant was sprawling headlong into the street. Vaguely conscious of fire in his flesh where it was seared by asphalt, he doubled and rolled and came onto his feet running.

Ahead of him was a high board fence stretched between two shabby buildings, and in the fence a wide gate sagged open on a length of chain. Hardly slackening his speed, he slipped through the opening and ran down an aisle between high piles of scrap iron and steel to another board fence at the rear. He ran along the fence to his right, pounding the boards with his fists in search of a gate, but he reached the juncture of fence and building, and there was no gate. Reversing himself, he ran back along the fence the other way, still pounding the boards, now beginning to sob softly, but still there was no gate. He looked up to the top of the fence, but it seemed incredibly high and impossible to scale, and there was, moreover, no time to try, for Average and Cupid were coming into the yard from the street, and it was imperative to hide from them at once.

Sinking to his hands and knees, he crawled along the building behind the piles of scrap, and after half a minute he found a sanctuary, a small hollow in one of the piles, and he crawled into this and vomited and lay very still, sucking in his breath between clenched teeth and releasing it slowly, a little at a time, to avoid making the slightest noise.

Average and Cupid ran down the aisle to the rear fence. Joe listened to the pounding of their feet and measured the distance between him and them by the sound. He knew very well that now was the time to act, that he should now get up and make a break for the front gate and the street and perhaps someone on the street who would save him, but he couldn’t move, could find nowhere in himself the strength or will to take what was plainly his best chance, and so he continued to lie quietly in his false sanctuary, sucking his breath between his teeth, the sour taste and smell of his own vomit on his tongue and in his nostrils. He could hear Average and Cupid examining the length of the fence. He could hear their footsteps, hear their fists beat upon the wood for evidence of a gate or a loose plank through which he might have gone.

“Maybe he went over the top,” Cupid said.

“No,” Average said. “I don’t think so. It’s a high fence, eight feet at least, and we’d have seen him going over. Probably he’s hiding somewhere in this junk.”

“It’s not nice of him to cause us so much trouble,” Cupid said. “Why did he want to run away and hide and cause us so much trouble?”

“Never mind that,” Average said. “What we got to do is find him. If we don’t, we’re in big trouble. Chalk don’t like guys to fumble a job. It’s bad for business. You take one side of the yard, and I’ll take the other. He’s got to be in here somewhere.”

Obediently, Cupid started through the piles of scrap on the side of the sanctuary. His huge feet shuffled slowly, scraping against the hard ground and disturbing a piece of metal now and then with a sharp clatter. Coming closer and closer to the sanctuary, he began to talk in his soft, incongruous crooning way.

“Come out, Lover. This is Cupid, Lover. Come out to Cupid, Lover.”

The crooning voice was more terrifying than a curse as a threat of evil. Joe pressed his face against the ground and covered his ears with his hands, and then he could not hear the terrible soft threat any longer, could not hear the shuffle of feet coming nearer and nearer, and after a few moments in the silence and darkness achieved by hands and closed lids he began to have a strange sense of peace and security, and he was lying so, in the false security of the false sanctuary, when great hands took hold of him gently and lifted him up and held him erect.

“Here’s Lover,” Cupid crooned. “Poor Lover’s dirtied himself. It wasn’t nice of you to run away and hide and cause Cupid so much trouble, Lover. Cupid’s angry because you ran away.”

Average came across the aisle from the other side of the yard. Saying nothing, he took Joe by one arm and started immediately toward the street. Joe did not resist. He had no longer any desire to resist or to suffer again the unbearable ordeal of escape. In submission, he achieved a kind of miraculous detachment from whatever was happening or might happen to Joe Doyle, an emotional immunity to Joe’s fear and Joe’s pain and Joe’s ultimate end, whatever it turned out to be. In the car, he leaned back beside Cupid and closed his eyes and sank briefly into exquisite physical lethargy. Charity was waiting for him in the vast, illimitable night behind his lids. She smiled at him sadly, and he could see, shining like traces of phosphorous in the darkness, the paths of tears across her thin cheeks. He nodded and returned her smile and tried to make her understand without words the miracle of acceptance and submission that had made all right everything that had been, a few minutes ago, all wrong.

The sedan turned a corner and stopped at last, and Cupid, crooning again, took him by the arm with his incongruous, monstrous gentleness and helped him out onto the sidewalk. They were standing now near the entrance to an alley. Average got out on the street side and walked around the front of the sedan and went into the alley without looking back, as if he had forgotten entirely that anyone was with him. Cupid and Joe stood waiting on the sidewalk, Cupid crooning and Joe quietly with his head bowed in a posture of prayer or reflection, and after a minute or two Average returned.

“It’s all right,” he said.

Together, Joe between the two, they went into the alley and past a parked car and into an enormous room with a concrete floor. Small windows were glazed with faint light at the far end. At the rear, near the alley entrance, a weak bulb in a conical shade cut a circle of light in the darkness. Joe stood in the light under the conical shade, his arms hanging, his head still bowed in the prayerful posture. He thought he heard, somewhere in the room, a whisper of movement, a ghost of sound, but it was not significant, whatever it was, in his present vast indifference. Cupid had taken off his coat in the darkness and stepped into the light without it. He was smiling and saying something, and Joe raised his eyes and listened intently in an effort to hear clearly what was being said, but for some strange reason he could not quite understand. He saw that Cupid was wearing a pink shirt with very thin white stripes, and he thought that the shirt was silk, but he wasn’t absolutely certain of this, either. He saw also that Cupid’s eyes actually seemed to be red, and this struck him as extremely odd. He wondered if it was just a trick of light and shadow. The eyes of Siamese cats looked red in certain circumstances, he knew, but he had never heard of the eyes of a man looking red in any circumstances whatever. He was so fascinated by Cupid’s red eyes that he did not even see Cupid’s huge fist when it was driven at his face. He was only aware of splitting flesh and splintering bone. Not even precisely of these. Only of the monstrous, incredible pain of them. Crying out with the pain, he fell spiraling in an immeasurable thunderous night to the concrete floor.

Aware after an age that he was on the floor, he decided that the floor was a good place to be. He thought that he would simply remain forever on the floor. Someone, however, did not want him to stay there. Someone was asking him to get up, pleading with him in a crooning voice, but he knew perfectly well that this was only a trick, an effort to get him to do what he did not want to do, and he could avoid this simply by lying very still and pretending that he didn’t hear. This did not work, however, for whoever was talking was now also lifting him to his feet and holding him erect, and he was suddenly ashamed that he was not even capable of standing on his own feet without help. He spread his legs, trying to establish a balance. Deliberately, with a great effort, he raised his head and tried to focus his eyes. It was a foolish and painful thing to do, which would surely accomplish nothing, but he was compelled by an irrational conviction that it was somehow essential to pride and manhood to stand erect and see clearly in that instant.

It was the instant he died. Cupid’s second and last blow detonated above the bad heart that was ready to quit, and Joe collapsed again in a final recapitulation of pain and engulfing darkness. The. pain was as brief as the instant of dying, but the darkness endured with death.

Chapter 16

Oliver knocked and opened the door and came into the room. Charity was lying on her back on her bed. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling. She didn’t look at Oliver when he entered. She didn’t stir in the slightest.

“There’s a man here to see you, my dear,” Oliver said.

“I don’t wish to see anyone,” Charity said.

Oliver walked over beside the bed and stood looking down at her. She was fully dressed, wearing even her shoes. Her wide-open eyes were hot and dry and unblinking. They continued to stare at the ceiling.

“I’m afraid you had better see this man whether you want to or not,” Oliver said. “He’s a policeman.”

“Why does a policeman want to see me?” she said. “I’ve done nothing that should be of any interest whatever to a policeman.”

“Of course you haven’t, my dear. He’s only trying to get some information about a man who was killed. This man’s name was Joe Doyle. The policeman seems to have some evidence that you and the dead man knew each other. Naturally, he wants to ask you some questions.”

“Am I required to answer his questions?”

“I think you are. After all, he’s really being very considerate. He might have forced you to go to police headquarters.”

“All right. If I’m required to answer them, I’ll come.”

“I’d like to make a suggestion first, if you don’t mind. Please be very careful of what you say. There’s always a danger that an inexperienced person may incriminate himself or others in these things when there is really no need for it at all. It would be most unfortunate if you were so careless.”

“I know. You needn’t worry.”

“I’m not worried, my dear. Not for myself. I’m only thinking of your welfare.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll be with you all the time, supporting you, and I’m sure there’s nothing to be concerned about. Shall we go in together?”

“Yes.”

She got up and smoothed the skirt of her dress and pushed back the heavy side of her hair. She did not look at Oliver at any time. Walking with a kind of rigidity, as if she had been drinking too much and were exercising the greatest effort to conceal it, which was not true, she walked out of the bedroom and down the hall into the living room, where a man rose at once from a chair to meet her. He was slender, below average height, with sparse, sandy hair brushed straight back from a high forehead, and his eyes were covered with thick, rimless lenses. He leaned slightly forward from the hips, which gave him the appearance of peering intently at whomever he was merely looking, and he had, she learned after a moment, an odd habit of pinching the lobe of his right ear with the thumb and index finger of his right hand. He did not conform at all to her idea of a policeman. To her, he looked much more like a clerk in a department store, although he was not dressed quite well enough for it, and he was so palpably uneasy that she felt sorry for him and wanted immediately to say something to reassure him.

“My dear,” Oliver said, “this is Mr. Bunting of the police.”

“Lieutenant,” Bunting said.

“Excuse me. Lieutenant Bunting. He would like to ask you some questions.”

“How do you do,” Charity said. “I’m sure I can’t imagine what I could tell you that would be of any help to you.”

“Well, it’s just routine, Mrs. Farnese.” Bunting sounded apologetic. “You know how these things are.”

“No, I don’t,” Charity said. “What things?”

“Oh, police matters in general. It’s necessary to investigate them, you know. I’ll not disturb you any longer than necessary. Perhaps it would be better if we sat down.”

“Certainly. Please sit down, Lieutenant.”

Bunting hesitated with an air of desperation and then sat down slowly in the chair from which he had risen. Afterward, Charity went to another chair and sat down too. They faced each other across five feet of deep pile. Oliver continued to stand.

“I understand that you knew a man named Joseph Doyle,” Bunting said.

“Do you?” Charity said.

“Yes. He played the piano in a nightclub called Duo’s. You’re familiar with the place, I believe. The bartender there told me that you and Doyle became acquainted there one night about a week ago and later left the club together. He said you saw each other at other times.”

“Is he certain of that? That we saw each other at other times afterward?”

“Well, no, he isn’t, as a matter of fact. He can’t prove it, that is. He assumes it, but he feels sure you did.” Bunting shot a glance at Oliver Farnese and looked more apologetic than ever. “I don’t want to embarrass you, of course.”

“I am not embarrassed, Lieutenant. I only want to know if you are accusing me of something just because someone chooses to make assumptions.”

“I am not accusing you of anything for any reason.” Bunting pinched the lobe of his ear, glanced at Oliver Farnese and back to Charity. “I thought it was understood that I’m only after information. I’m not very good at saying things, however, and maybe I didn’t make my position clear. What do you say we start over? Joseph Doyle is dead. Maybe it was murder, but more likely it was manslaughter. He was found yesterday morning in an alley. His jaw was broken and his face and lips lacerated, and several teeth were loosened. He had been struck, from the evidence, by the fist of a strong man. But it wasn’t this blow that killed him. He had been struck a second time in the body. Above the heart. Post mortem showed that he had a bum heart, and it was the body blow that he didn’t survive.”

“He had rheumatic fever as a boy,” Charity said.

Bunting smiled at her, pinching the ear lobe, and silence stretched out for seconds. His attitude seemed suddenly more relaxed, suggesting that everything would now surely be pleasant and productive for everyone since he had clarified his position and his problem.

“That’s fine, Mrs. Farnese,” he said finally. “I knew you would want to cooperate with us when you understood the circumstances.”

“I’m willing to cooperate,” she said, “but I still don’t understand how I can help you.”

“You do admit that you knew Joseph Doyle?”

“What do you mean, admit it? I don’t like the way that sounds. You make it sound as if it were something shameful or incriminating or something.”

“No, no. I’m sorry if I gave that impression. I only want a statement as to whether you knew him or not.”

“It has been established that I knew him, and it is perfectly clear that you know all about it. I don’t see why you keep going over and over it.”

“Sorry. If you will only be patient a little longer, I’ll appreciate it. Was this night at the Club about a week ago the first time you met Doyle?”

“Yes. I had been somewhere else and went in there to have a Martini and think about things. He was playing the piano, and someone else was playing a drum. It was quite clever, like a conversation that you kept trying to understand. Afterward, when it was quite late, Joe Doyle played requests on the piano, and I asked him to play a particular song. I thought he was very good, but he said that he wasn’t. We had Martinis together at the bar. At least, I had a Martini. He may have had something else.”

“I see. Did you leave the Club with him?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see him again after that night?”

“I don’t know that I should answer that. I can’t see that it makes any difference.”

“Perhaps you’re right.” Bunting looked miserable, and the lobe of his ear was red from the mauling of thumb and finger. “I hope you believe that I have no desire to embarrass you, and that I have no interest at all in your personal affairs. Let me come to the point directly. Do you have any idea who might have killed Doyle?”

She was silent, sitting with her hands folded and her bead bowed. She wondered if he would hear, as she did, from some remote and indeterminable source, the soft, incessant sound of cosmic weeping.

“No,” she said at last. “How could I?”

“I thought he might have mentioned someone who held a grudge against him. Something like that.”

“No. Nothing of the sort. He didn’t talk about other people he knew or what had happened to him before we became acquainted. As you see, I learned practically nothing about him.”

“Except that he had had rheumatic fever as a boy.”

“Yes, of course. He told me that. Also that he wanted to be an exceptional pianist, but didn’t have the ability. I thought that he was very sad about it, not having the ability and all, and I felt sorry for him and tried to make him feel that it was still possible, but he didn’t believe me.”

“I see. It’s tough, sometimes, learning to accept our limitations.” Bunting looked embarrassed again, as if he were suddenly aware that his remark sounded presumptuous. He had not looked at Oliver Farnese since his one previous glance, but at this moment he somehow gave the impression that he was deliberately, with an effort, refraining from looking. “There is one other point I’d like to mention, Mrs. Farnese, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all. You may mention whatever points you choose.”

“Thank you. According to my information, you had arranged to see Joseph Doyle at the club where he worked on the night he was killed. Night before last, that was. Between six and seven o’clock, you called the Club and talked to the bartender and asked him to relay the message that you would be unable to come. Is that true?”

She would have lied about this if there had been any chance at all for a lie to be believed, but there wasn’t any, not the slightest, and so the only thing she could do was to tell the truth, or at least part of it, and try to make what had happened seem as natural and insignificant as possible.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s true. I called and said that I couldn’t come.”

“May I ask what made you change your plans?”

“Why do you continually ask if you may ask? Since you are obviously going to ask whatever you please, its rather ridiculous and a waste of time.”

“You needn’t answer any of my questions if you don’t want to. Not at this time, anyhow.”

“Later, however, you would force me to answer them. Is that what you mean?”

“I hope it would not be necessary.”

“In other words, if you were inclined to be honest, it is exactly what you mean. Well, it doesn’t matter, for I don’t mind answering at all, and I only wish you would not try to pretend that things are different from what they are.”

“I apologize. Please tell me why you were unable to go to the Club that night.”

“There was a very simple reason. I had promised I would go hear the piano and the drum again, because I liked them and wanted to, but at the last minute my husband wanted me to go out somewhere with him instead, and I felt compelled to go.”

Now Bunting did look sidewise at Oliver Farnese for verification, and Farnese smiled and nodded. It was apparent from his serenity that he found nothing disturbing in his wife’s activities and did not object in the least to her interest in pianos and drums and whoever played them.

“That’s right, Lieutenant,” he said. “We went to the Empire Room, where I had made a reservation. I suppose you can check that if you feel inclined.”

“I’m sure it won’t be necessary.” Bunting sighed and stood up. “I won’t intrude any longer, and I appreciate your kindness. These things are tough. The toughest. You find a body in a street or an alley, and there doesn’t seem to be any reason for it, no leads, no connections. We’ll be lucky if we ever get anything definite on this one. I mustn’t impose my troubles on you, however. I’ve already been bother enough, I’m afraid. Thank you again for your kindness, Mrs. Farnese. You’ve been very patient.”

“Not at all,” she said.

For a moment she was afraid that he was going to offer to shake hands on leaving, and she was exorbitantly relieved when he did not, turning abruptly, instead, and starting for the door with Oliver following. She remained motionless in her chair, her hands folded in her lap, and pretty soon Oliver returned from the door and stood a few feet away looking at her amicably.

“You did quite well, my dear,” he said. “I’m proud of you.”

“Are you?” she said.

“Yes, I am. You were admirable. I’ve never heard anyone avoid the truth so cleverly. You had poor Bunting on the defensive from the beginning.”

“I wasn’t trying to put him on the defensive. I only wanted him to get finished and go away.”

“I can understand that, my dear. You’ve gone through a difficult time. I was certain, however, that I could depend on you to be sensible. You’re feeling tired and despondent now, but you’ll recover in a little while. I’ve noticed before how remarkably durable and resilient you are.”

“Thank you very much.”

“You owe me no gratitude, my dear. You have earned everything I’ve said.”

“And done?”

“Yes. Said and done.”

He laughed and took half a step toward her, and she wondered what she would do if he were to touch her. Perhaps she would begin to scream, she thought, or rake him with her nails, or merely be sick on herself and the carpet. He did not touch her, however. He stood for a second with one foot before the other and one hand lifted toward her, but then he lowered the hand slowly and drew the forward foot back.

“I think you had better rest now,” he said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go to the office for the rest of the afternoon.”

“I don’t mind. Please go where you wish.”

“Will you be all right?”

“Certainly.”

“It disturbs me to be off my routine. I want to resume it without any further delay, and I hope that it will not be necessary to disrupt it again soon.”

She didn’t know if this was a warning or not, but it was of no great importance. She sat without moving or answering, and he turned and went out of the room, and she continued to sit with her hands folded after he was gone, and she was still there, in the exact position she had been in when he left, when he returned and crossed the room and left the apartment.

Now I will think very carefully about everything that has happened, she thought. It is absolutely essential now to think clearly and sanely and not to allow myself to become deceived by emotion or excessively depressed by what has occurred and can’t be helped. Let me see how it was exactly. I went accidentally to the place where he worked, which was nothing for which I can be blamed and was no offense of any kind, and I saw him there and heard him play the piano, and I thought that he was beautiful and played beautifully, and I loved him, I did love him, and now he is dead because of it, but that is no reason to accuse myself or to assume responsibility for what I did not want or directly do.

I did not want him to be hurt or to die. All I wanted was to make him happy and to be happy myself, and that’s what I did and almost was. He said himself that he was happy, that each time we were together was the best time of all, and this was good. It’s true, of course, that it would not have continued indefinitely, or even much longer, which I’ll not try to deny, but it was good for the time it lasted and better than no good at all. This is only logical, that something is better than nothing, and it is surely not my fault that it ended badly.

So. I have reasoned calmly and rationally, there is no question about that, and it is clearly preposterous for me to have this terrible and oppressive feeling of guilt, as if I had personally done a great wrong or had deliberately permitted the great wrong that was done. Commitment to grief is one thing, and commitment to guilt is another. That’s the distinction I must understand and believe. I saw him die, however. There’s no getting away from that. I saw him beaten and killed by a monster, and I said nothing afterward to anyone, and just a little while ago when the policeman was here I still said nothing, and the reason I have said nothing and will say nothing is because I am afraid of Oliver, and I know that he would find a way to destroy me if I gave him cause. I could go away, of course, but he could certainly find me if he wanted to, and even if he couldn’t I still wouldn’t go away, because there is no place for me in the world but this place and no way to survive but this way. I’m a coward, to tell the truth. I do not care to make a gesture that would change nothing that has happened and would only make things worse.

There. I have faced things fairly as they are, and myself as I am. There is supposed to be a kind of catharsis in this, and one is supposed to feel much better after having done it. In a little while, if I sit here quietly, I shall surely begin to feel better.

She sat quietly and waited to begin feeling better, but she didn’t feel better at all, and pretty soon it was impossible to wait any longer for anything or to stay any longer in the apartment than it would take her to change her clothes and get out. Unfolding her hands and rising, she walked stiffly to her room with the strangest and most disturbing sense of being precariously contained, as if the slightest exaggerated motion would cause her to fly apart in all directions. In her room, she changed her clothes and brushed her hair and came out again to the telephone and called down to the garage for the Jaguar. When she got downstairs and outside to the street, the Jaguar was there, and she got in it and drove away, and then for the first time she began to think of where she would go, and she knew, even as she began to think, that she was going to Duo’s, where Joe Doyle had worked, and this was for some reason imperative, something she had to do.

It was after four o’clock when she got there, and Yancy was at the bar. He saw her enter and watched her approach, and then, just as she reached the bar, he turned his back and spoke to her reflection in the long mirror behind a row of beer glasses.

“Get the hell out of here,” he said.

“What?” she said.

“You heard me,” he said. “Get the hell out of here and don’t ever come back.”

She stared past him into the mirror, meeting his eyes sadly, and he was almost convinced for a moment that he had hurt her inexcusably and should be ashamed of himself.

“Why are you abusing me?” she said. “Don’t you believe that I am as sorry as you for what happened?”

“No.”

“Do you believe that it happened because of me?”

“Yes.”

“Is it because you hate me so much that you want to think so badly of me?”

“I don’t hate you. What would be the use? It would be like hating cancer.”

“If you don’t hate me, why don’t you look at me?”

“I don’t want to look at you. I don’t want to see you or talk to you or have you near me. I’m sick of you, and I’m afraid of you. You’re contagious. I told you before what you were, and I told Joe, but it didn’t do any good, and now it’ll never do any good. He’s dead, and there’s no way of proving who did it, I guess, but you know and I know why it happened, that it was because of you and what you are and did. I wish it had been you instead of him, but it wasn’t, and probably that’ll be all right, after all. In the end, you’ll probably find a harder and slower way to die.”

She shook her head from side to side, as if she would not believe that he was saying such cruel things to her, and the heavy side of her hair moved slowly back and forth over one sad eye.

“All right,” she said. “I can see that I had better go away. Good-by.”

He didn’t answer, and she turned and walked to the door and stopped and looked back, but he continued to look into the mirror silently, and so she went on out and got into the Jaguar, and it was remarkable how she had begun suddenly to feel. She felt vastly relieved and lightened, purged and almost exonerated by Yancy’s castigation. Driving away in the Jaguar, she started thinking about somewhere else to go in order to avoid being alone, and she decided that Bernardine DeWitt’s apartment on MacDougal Street was the closest place that appealed to her, and so she went there.

She was admitted to the apartment by the maid, and there were, as usual, several people talking and moving around and drinking cocktails, but Bernardine wasn’t among them. Perhaps she had merely gone off somewhere for a few minutes, or even for a few hours, which wouldn’t be exceptionally odd of Bernardine, who was very casual about guests, but it didn’t matter, anyhow, where she had gone or when she would come back. Everyone would simply drink as much as he wanted, and leave when he was ready.

Charity had one Martini quickly, and then took another to carry around the room. She had drunk about half of it and spoken amicably to three or four persons when she came to a young man in a corner. He was sitting alone with an empty glass in his hand, and he had an interesting, angular face and stubborn hair that went in different directions in several places. She stopped and looked down at him, pushing her hair back on the heavy side with the hand that did not hold her glass.

“Hello,” she said.

He stood up with a kind of awkward, spasmodic motion, as if he moved by sections, one after the other. He returned her look with fierce intensity.

“Hello,” he said. “I was just watching you.”

“Were you? Why?”

“Because you’re the only woman here worth watching.”

“Do you really think so? Even if you don’t, it was a charming thing to say. I don’t believe anyone has ever said anything so charming to me before.”

“Please don’t accuse me of being charming. I was only telling the truth. I’d like to paint you.”

“Are you a painter?”

“Yes, I have a studio in the Village. You needn’t ask who I am, however, because you’ve never heard of me.”

“Possibly I’ll hear of you in the future.”

“Possibly. It doesn’t matter. Will you come to my studio and let me paint you? I couldn’t pay you, of course. I’m very poor.”

“I wouldn’t want you to pay me.”

“Will you come, then?”

She heard in his voice the same kind of urgent fierceness that she saw in his eyes. She was aware of the stirring of incipient excitement. “Perhaps,” she said. “Let’s sit down and talk about it.”

Content

Fletcher Flora
Park Avenue Tramp

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16