But now the yokel was looking at the monster itself and Wilbourne stood before the paintings in complete absorption. It was not at what they portrayed, the method or the coloring; they meant nothing to him. It was in a bemusement without heat or envy at a condition which could supply a man with the obvious leisure and means to spend his days painting such as this and his evenings playing the piano and feeding liquor to people whom he ignored and (in one case, at least) whose names he did not even bother to catch. He was still standing there when someone behind said, “Here’s Rat and Charley”; he was still standing there when Charlotte spoke at his shoulder:
“What do you think about it, mister?” He turned and saw a young woman a good deal shorter than he and for a moment he thought she was fat until he saw it was not fat at all but merely that broad, simple, profoundly delicate and feminine articulation of Arabian mares—a woman of under twenty-five, in a print cotton dress, a face which laid no claim even to prettiness and wore no makeup save the painted broad mouth, with a faint inch-long scar on one cheek which he recognised as an old burn, doubtless from childhood. “You haven’t decided yet, have you?”
“No,” he said. “I dont know.”
“Dont know what you think, or whether you are trying to decide or not?”
“Yes. Probably that. What do you think about it?”
“Marshmallows with horseradish,” she said, too promptly. “I paint too,” she added. “I can afford to say. I can afford to say I can beat that, too. What’s your name, and what have you got all this on for, just to come slumming? So we can all know you are slumming?”
He told her and now she looked at him and he saw that her eyes were not hazel but yellow, like a cat’s, staring at him with a speculative sobriety like a man might, intent beyond mere boldness, speculative beyond any staring. “I borrowed this suit. It’s the first time in my life I ever had one on.” Then he said, he did not intend to, he didn’t even know he was going to say it, he seemed to be drowning, volition and will, in the yellow stare: “This is my birthday. I’m twenty-seven years old.”
“Oh,” she said. She turned, she took him by the wrist, a grasp simple, ruthless and firm, drawing him after her. “Come on.” He followed, awkwardly, not to tread on her heels, then she released him and went on before him, across the room to where three men and two women stood about the table on which the bottles and glasses sat. She stopped, she grasped his wrist again and drew him toward a man of his own age about, in a dark double-breasted suit, with blond wavy hair going a little thin, a face not quite handsome and reasonably insensitive and shrewder than intelligent yet on the whole gentler than not, assured, courteous and successful. “This is Rat,” she said. “He is the senior living ex-freshman of the University of Alabama. That’s why we still call him Rat. You can call him Rat too. Sometimes he is.”
Later—it was after midnight and Flint and the woman who had kissed him were gone—they stood in the court beside the jasmine bush. “I’ve got two children, both girls,” she said. “That’s funny, because all my family were brothers except me. I liked my oldest brother the best but you cant sleep with your brother and he and Rat roomed together in school so I married Rat and now I’ve got two girls, and when I was seven years old I fell in the fireplace, my brother and I were fighting, and that’s the scar. It’s on my shoulder and side and hip too and I got in the habit of telling people about it before they would have time not to ask and I still do it even when it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Do you tell everybody like this? At first?”
“About the brothers or about the scar?”
“Both. Maybe the scar.”
“No. That’s funny too. I had forgotten. I haven’t told anybody in years. Five years.”
“But you told me.”
“Yes. And that’s funny twice. No, three times now. Listen. I lied to you. I dont paint. I work with clay, and some in brass, and once with a piece of stone, with a chisel and maul. Feel.” She took his hand and drew his finger-tips along the base of her other palm—the broad, blunt, strong, supple-fingered hand with nails as closely trimmed as if she had bitten them down, the skin at the base and lower joints of the fingers not calloused exactly but smoothly hardened and toughened like the heel of a foot. “That’s what I make: something you can touch, pick up, something with weight in your hand that you can look at the behind side of, that displaces air and displaces water and when you drop it, it’s your foot that breaks and not the shape.
Not poking at a piece of cloth with a knife or a brush like you were trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle with a rotten switch through the bars of a cage. That’s why I said I could beat that,” she said. She didn’t move, she didn’t even indicate by a motion of her head the room behind them. “Not just something to tickle your taste buds for a second and then swallowed and maybe not even sticking to your entrails but just evacuated whole and flushed away into the damned old sewer, the Might-just-as-well-not-have-been. Will you come to supper tomorrow night?”
“I cant. I’m on duty tomorrow night.”
“The next night then? Or when?”
“Dont you have engagements yourself?”
“There are some people coming the night after tomorrow. But they wont bother you.” She looked at him. “All right, if you dont want a lot of people, I’ll put them off. The night after tomorrow? At seven? Do you want me to come to the hospital for you in the car?”
“No. Dont do that.”
“I can, you know.”
“I know it,” he said. “I know it. Listen—”
“Let’s go in,” she said. “I’m going home. And dont wear that. Wear your own clothes. I want to see.”
Two evenings later he went to dinner. He found a modest though comfortable apartment in an irreproachable neighborhood near Audubon Park, a negro maid, two not particularly remarkable children of two and four, with her hair but otherwise looking like the father (who in another dark obviously expensive double-breasted suit made a cocktail not particularly remarkable either and insisted that Wilbourne call him Rat) and she in something he knew had been purchased as a semi-formal garment and which she wore with the same ruthless indifference as she had the garment in which he had first seen her, as if both of them were overalls.
After the meal, which was considerably better than the cocktails, she went out with the older child, who had dined with them, but she returned presently to lie on the sofa smoking while Rittenmeyer continued to ask Wilbourne questions about his profession such as the president of a college fraternity might ask of a pledge from the medical school. At ten oclock Wilbourne said he must go. “No,” she said, “not yet.” So he remained; at half past ten Rittenmeyer said he must work tomorrow and was going to bed and left them. Then she crushed out the cigarette and rose and came to where he stood before the cold hearth and stopped, facing him. “What to—Do they call you Harry? What to do about it, Harry?”
“I dont know. I never was in love before.”
“I have been. But I dont know either.—Do you want me to call a cab for you?”
“No.” He turned; she moved beside him across the room. “I’ll walk.”
“Are you that poor? Let me pay for the cab. You cant walk to the hospital. It’s three miles.”
“That’s not far.”
“It wont be his money, if that’s what you mean. I have some of my own. I have been saving it for something, I dont know what.” She handed him his hat and stood with her hand on the door knob.
“Three miles is not far. I would walk—”
“Yes,” she said. She opened the door, they looked at one another. Then the door closed between them. It was painted white. They did not shake hands.
During the next six weeks they met five times more. This would be downtown for lunch, because he would not again enter her husband’s house and his destiny or luck (or ill-luck, since otherwise he might have discovered that love no more exists just at one spot and in one moment and in one body out of all the earth and all time and all the teeming breathed, than sunlight does) brought him no more second-hand invitations to parties. It would be in Vieux Carre places where they could lunch on the weekly two dollars which he had been sending to his sister to apply on the note. At the third of these
