So when I heard her feet on the stairs I didn’t even think For God’s sake take off your shoes or at least tiptoe. What I thought was How can you move and make that little noise, with only the sound of trivial human feet: who should have moved like Wagner: not with but in the sonorous sweep of thunder or brass music, even the very limbs moving in tune with the striding other in a sound of tuned wind and storm and mighty harps. I thought Since making this more or less secret date to meet me here at this hour of night is her idea, at least she will have to look at me.
Which she had never done yet. If she had ever even seen me yet while I was too busy playing the fool because of her to notice, buffoon for her, playing with tacks in the street like a vicious boy, using not even honest bribery but my own delayed vicious juvenility to play on the natural and normal savagery (plus curiosity; dont forget that) of an authentic juvenile — to gain what? for what? what did I want, what was I trying for: like the child striking matches in a hay-stack yet at the same time trembling with terror lest he does see holocaust.
You see? terror. I hadn’t even taken time to wonder what in hell she wanted with me: only the terror after the boy put the note in my hand and I found privacy to open and read it and still (the terror) in the courage, desperation, despair — call it whatever you like and whatever it was and wherever I found it — to cross to the door and open it and think as I always had each time I was that near, either to dance with her or merely to challenge and give twenty or thirty pounds to an impugner of her honor: Why, she cant possibly be this small, this little, apparently standing only inches short of my own six feet yet small, little; too small to have displaced enough of my peace to contain this much unsleep, to have disarranged this much of what I had at least thought was peace.
In fact I might have said she stood almost eye to eye with me if she had looked at me that long, which she did not: that one quick unhasting blue (they were dark blue) envelopment and then no more; no more needing to look — if she ever had — at me, but rather instead one single complete perception to which that adjective complete were as trivial as the adjective dampness to the blue sea itself; that one single glance to add me up and then subtract and then dispense as if that calm unhasting blueness had picked me up whole and palped me over front and back and sides and set me down again. But she didn’t sit down herself. She didn’t even move yet. Then I realised suddenly that she was simply examining the office as women examine a room they have never seen before.
“Wont you sit down?” I said.
“All right,” she said. And, sitting in that ordinary chair across the desk, she was still too small to hold, compass without one bursting seam all that unslumber, all that chewed anguish of the poet’s bitter thumbs which were not just my thumbs but all male Jefferson’s or actually all male earth’s by proxy, that thumb being all men’s fate who had earned or deserved the right to call themselves men; too small, too little to contain, bear those … I had, must have, seen her at least five years ago though it was only last summer that I must have looked at her; say only since last summer since until then I had been too busy passing bar examinations to have had time to prone and supine myself for proper relinquishment; call it two hundred for round numbers from June to January with some (not much) out for sleeping — two hundred nights of fevered projection of my brother’s mantle to defend and save her honor from its ravisher.
You see? It still had not once occurred to me to ask her what she wanted. I was not even waiting for her to tell me. I was simply waiting for those two hundred nights to culminate as I had spent at least some of them or some small part of them expecting when this moment came, if it did, would, was fated: I to be swept up as into storm or hurricane or tornado itself and tossed and wrung and wrenched and consumed, the light last final spent insentient husk to float slowing and weightless, for a moment longer during the long vacant rest of life, and then no more.
Only it didn’t happen, no consumption to wrench wring and consume me down to the ultimate last proud indestructible grateful husk, but rather simply to destroy me as the embalmer destroys with very intactness what was still life, was still life even though it was only the living worm’s. Because she was not examining the office again because I realised now that she had never stopped doing it, examining it rapidly once more with that comprehensive female glance.
“I thought it would be all right here,” she said. “Better here.”
“Here?” I said.
“Do it here. In your office. You can lock the door and I dont imagine there’ll be anybody high enough up this late at night to see in the window. Or maybe—” Because she was already up and probably for a moment I couldn’t have moved, just watching as she went to the window and had already begun to pull down the shade.
“Here?” I said again, like a parrot. “Here? In here?” Now she was looking at me over her shoulder. That’s right. She didn’t even turn: just her head, her face to look back at me across her shoulder, her hands still drawing the shade down across the window in little final tucking tugs against the sill. No: not again. She never had looked at me but that once as she entered.
She simply confronted me across her shoulder with that blue envelopment like the sea, not questioning nor waiting, as the sea itself doesn’t need to question or wait but simply to be the sea. “Oh,” I said. “And be quick, hurry too maybe since you haven’t got much time since you really ought to be in bed this minute with your husband, or is this one of Manfred’s nights?” and she still watching me though turned now, standing, perhaps leaning a little against the window-sill behind her, watching me quite grave, just a little curious.
“But of course,” I said. “Naturally it’s one of Manfred’s nights since it’s Manfred you’re saving: not Flem. — No, wait,” I said. “Maybe I’m wrong; maybe it is both of them; maybe they both sent you: both of them that scared, that desperate; their mutual crisis and fear so critical as to justify even this last desperate gambit of your woman’s — their mutual woman’s — all?” And still she just watched me: the calm unfathomable serenely waiting blue, waiting not on me but simply on time. “I didn’t mean that,” I said. “You know I didn’t. I know it’s Manfred. And I know he didn’t send you. Least of all, he.” Now I could get up. “Say you forgive me first,” I said.
“All right,” she said. Then I went and opened the door. “Goodnight,” I said.
“You mean you dont want to?” she said.
Now I could laugh too.
“I thought that was what you wanted,” she said. And now she was looking at me. “What did you do it for?” Oh yes, I could laugh, with the door open in my hand and the cold dark leaning into the room like an invisible cloud and if Grover Winbush were anywhere on the Square now (which he would not be in this cold since he was not a fool about everything) he would not need merely to see all the lights. Oh yes, she was looking at me now: the sea which in a moment more would destroy me, not with any deliberate and calculated sentient wave but simply because I stood there in its insentient way. No: that was wrong too. Because she began to move.
“Shut the door,” she said. “It’s cold” — walking toward me, not fast. “Was that what you thought I came here for? because of Manfred?”
“Didn’t you?” I said.
“Maybe I did.” She came toward me, not fast. “Maybe at first. But that doesn’t matter. I mean, to Manfred. I mean that brass. He doesn’t mind it. He likes it. He’s enjoying himself. Shut the door before it gets so cold.” I shut it and turned quickly, stepping back a little.
“Dont touch me,” I said.
“All right,” she said. “Because you cant.…” Because even she stopped then; even the insentient sea compassionate too but then I could bear that too; I could even say it for her.
“Manfred wouldn’t really mind because just I cant hurt him, harm him, do him any harm; not Manfred, not just me
