Nancy spoke from the other side of the room.
“You’ll never tell this story,” she said. “Stories have a way of getting around.”
“There isn’t any story,” he hesitated. But he thought: So she was a bad little girl.
And now suddenly he was filled with wild raging jealousy of little Donald Bowers—he who had banished jealousy from his life forever. In the five steps he took across the room he crushed out twenty years and the existence of Walter Gifford with his stride.
“Kiss me again, Nancy,” he said, sinking to one knee beside her chair, putting his hand upon her shoulder. But Nancy strained away.
“You said you had to catch a plane.”
“It’s nothing. I can miss it. It’s of no importance.”
“Please go,” she said in a cool voice. “And please try to imagine how I feel.”
“But you act as if you don’t remember me,” he cried, “—as if you don’t remember Donald Plant!”
“I do. I remember you too… But it was all so long ago.” Her voice grew hard again. “The taxi number is Crestwood 8484.”
On his way to the airport Donald shook his head from side to side. He was completely himself now but he could not digest the experience. Only as the plane roared up into the dark sky and its passengers became a different entity from the corporate world below did he draw a parallel from the fact of its flight. For five blinding minutes he had lived like a madman in two worlds at once. He had been a boy of twelve and a man of thirty-two, indissolubly and helplessly commingled.
Donald had lost a good deal, too, in those hours between the planes—but since the second half of life is a long process of getting rid of things, that part of the experience probably didn’t matter.
