“Told him?”
“About lunches. That I have been meeting you.” After that she never mentioned her husband again. The fifth time they did not lunch. They went to a hotel, they planned it the day before. He discovered that he knew next to nothing about the proper procedure other than supposition and imagination; because of his ignorance he believed that there was a secret to the successful performance of the business, not a secret formula to be followed but rather a kind of white magic: a word or some infinitesimal and trivial movement of the hand such as that which opens a hidden drawer or panel.
He thought once of asking her how to go about it because he was certain that she would know, just as he was certain that she would never be at a loss about anything she wished to do, not only because of her absolute coordination but because even in this short time he had come to realise that intuitive and infallible skill of all women in the practical affairs of love. But he did not ask her because he told himself that, when she told him how to do, which she would, and it would be correct, he might at some later time believe that she had done this before and that even if she had, he did not want to know it. So he asked Flint.
“Jesus,” Flint said. “You have come out, haven’t you? I didn’t even know you knew a girl.” Wilbourne could almost watch Flint thinking swiftly, casting backward. “Was it that brawl at Crowe’s that night? But hell, that’s your business, aint it? It’s easy. Just take a bag with a couple of bricks wrapped up in a towel so they wont rattle, and walk in. I wouldn’t pick the Saint Charles or the Roosevelt, of course. Take one of the smaller ones, not too small of course. Maybe that one down toward the station. Wrap the bricks separately, see, then roll them up together. And be sure to carry a coat with you. Raincoat.”
“Yes. Do you reckon I’d better tell her to bring a coat too?”
Flint laughed, one short syllable, not loud. “I guess not. I dont guess she’ll need any coaching from you or me either.—Here,” he said quickly, “hold your horses. I dont know her. I aint talking about her. I’m talking about women. She could turn up with a bag of her own and a coat and a veil and the stub of a Pullman ticket sticking out of her handbag and that wouldn’t mean she had done this before. That’s just women. There aint any advice that Don Juan or Solomon either could give the youngest fourteen-year-old gal ever foaled about this kind of phenagling.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She probably wont come anyway.” He found that he really believed that. He still believed it even when the cab drew up to the curb where he waited with the bag. She had a coat, but no bag nor veil. She came swiftly out of the cab when he opened the door, her face was hard, sober, her eyes extraordinarily yellow, her voice harsh:
“Well? Where?”
He told her. “It’s not far. We can—” She turned, already getting back into the cab. “We can walk—”
“You damned pauper,” she said. “Get in. Hurry.” He got in. The cab moved on. The hotel was not far. A negro porter took the bag. Then it seemed to Wilbourne that he had never been in his life, and would never be again, so aware of her as he was while she stood in the center of the dingy lobby raddled with the Saturday nights of drummers and of minor race-track hangers-on while he signed the two fictitious names on the pad and gave to the clerk the sixth two dollars which were to have gone to his sister but did not, waiting for him, making no effort for effacement, quiet, contained, and with a quality profoundly tragic which he knew (he was learning fast) was not peculiar to her but was an attribute of all women at this instant in their lives, which would invest them with a dignity, almost a modesty, to be carried over and clothe even the last prone and slightly comic attitude of ultimate surrender.
He followed her down the corridor and into the door which the porter opened; he dismissed the porter and closed the rented door behind him and watched her cross the room to the single dingy window and, still in the hat and coat, turn without pausing and exactly like a child playing prisoner’s base return to him, the yellow eyes, the whole face which he had already come to call beautiful, hard and fixed. “Oh, God, Harry,” she said. She beat her clenched fists on his chest. “Not like this. Jesus, not like this.”
“All right,” he said. “Steady, now.” He caught her wrists and held them, still doubled into fists against his chest while she still wrenched at them to free them to strike his chest again. Yes, he thought. Not like this and never. “Steady now.”
“Not like this, Harry. Not back alleys. I’ve always said that: that no matter what happened to me, whatever I did, anything, anything but not back alleys. If it had just been hot pants, somebody with a physique I just leched for all of a sudden so that I never looked nor thought higher than his collar. But not us, Harry. Not you. Not you.”
“Steady now,” he said. “It’s all right.” He led her to the edge of the bed and stood over her, still holding her wrists.
“I told you how I wanted to make things, take the fine hard clean brass or stone and cut it, no matter how hard, how long it took, cut it into something fine, that you could be proud to show, that you could touch, hold, see the behind side of it and feel the fine solid weight so when you dropped it it wouldn’t be the thing that broke it would be the foot it dropped on except it’s the heart that breaks and not the foot, if I have a heart. But Jesus, Harry, how I have bitched it for you.” She extended her hand, then he realised what she was about and twisted his hips away before she touched him.
“I’m all right,” he said. “You mustn’t worry about me. Do you want a cigarette?”
“Please.” He gave her a cigarette and a light, looking down at the foreshortened slant of her nose and jaw as she drew at it. He threw the match away. “Well,” she said. “So that’s that. And no divorce.”
“No divorce?”
“Rat’s a Catholic. He wont give me one.”
“You mean that he—”
“I told him. Not that I was to meet you at a hotel. I just said, suppose I did. And he still said no soap.”
“Cant you get the divorce?”
“On what grounds? He would fight it. And it would have to be here—a Catholic judge. So there’s just one other thing. And it seems I cant do that.”
“Yes,” he said. “Your children.”
For a moment she looked at him, smoking. “I wasn’t thinking of them. I mean, I have already thought of them. So now I dont need to think of them any more because I know the answer to that and I know I cant change that answer and I dont think I can change me because the second time I ever saw you I learned what I had read in books but I never had actually believed: that love and suffering are the same thing and that the value of love is the sum of what you have to pay for it and any time you get it cheap you have cheated yourself. So I dont need to think about the children. I settled that a long time ago. I was thinking about money.
My brother sends me twenty-five dollars every Christmas and for the last five years I have saved it. I told you the other night I dont know why I have saved it. Maybe it was for this and maybe this is the best joke of all: that I have saved for five years and it’s only a hundred and twenty-five dollars, hardly enough to get two people to Chicago. And you have nothing.” She leaned toward the table at the head of the bed and crushed the cigarette out with slow and infinite care, and rose. “So that’s that. That’s all of it.”
“No,” he said. “No! I’ll be damned if it is.”
“Do you want to go on like this, hanging around and staying green for me like an apple on a limb?” She took his raincoat from the chair and slung it across her arm and stood waiting.
“Dont you want to go first?” he said. “I’ll wait about thirty minutes, then I—”
“And let you walk alone through that lobby carrying the bag for that clerk and that nigger to snigger at because they saw me leave before I would have even had time to take my clothes off, let alone put them back on?” She went to the door and put her hand on the key. He picked up the bag and followed. But she did not unlock the door at once. “Listen. Tell me again you haven’t got any money. Say it. So I can have something my ears can listen to as making sense even if I cant understand it. Some reason why I—that I can accept as the strong reason we cant beat even
