On the way home in a cab he’d made an attempt at conversation, but she had said nothing, not even when they entered the apartment—and this last offended him, for, taking rather female pride in his quarters, he’d expected a complimentary remark. It was one enormously high-ceilinged room, a bath and kitchenette, a backyard garden. In the furnishings he’d combined modern with antique and produced a distinguished result. Decorating the walls were a trio of Toulouse-Lautrec prints, a framed circus poster, D. J.’s painting, photographs of Rilke, Nijinsky and Duse. A candelabra of lean blue candles burned on a desk; the room, washed in their delirious light, wavered.
French doors led into the yard. He never used it much, for it was a place impossible to keep clean. There were a few dead tulip stalks dark in the moonshine, a puny heaven tree, and an old weather-worn chair left by the last tenant. He paced back and forth over the cold flagstones, hoping that in the cool air the drugged drunk sensation he felt would wear off. Nearby a piano was being badly mauled, and in a window above there was a child’s face. He was thumbing a blade of grass when her shadow fell long across the yard. She was in the doorway. “You mustn’t come out,” he said, moving toward her. “It’s turned a little cold.”
There was about her now an appealing softness; she seemed somehow less angular, less out of tune with the average, and Vincent, offering a glass of sherry, was delighted at the delicacy with which she touched it to her lips. She was wearing his terrycloth robe; it was by yards too large. Her feet were bare, and she tucked them up beside her on the couch. “It’s like Glass Hill, the candlelight,” she said, and smiled. “My Granny lived at Glass Hill. We had lovely times, sometimes; do you know what she used to say? She used to say, ‘Candles are magic wands; light one and the world is a story book.’ ”
“What a dreary old lady she must’ve been,” said Vincent, quite drunk. “We should probably have hated each other.”
“Granny would’ve loved you,” she said. “She loved any kind of man, every man she ever met, even Mr. Destronelli.”
“Destronelli?” It was a name he’d heard before.
Her eyes slid slyly sideways, and this look seemed to say: There must be no subterfuge between us, we who understand each other have no need of it. “Oh, you know,” she said with a conviction that, under more commonplace circumstances, would have been surprising. It was, however, as if he’d abandoned temporarily the faculty of surprise. “Everybody knows him.”
He curved an arm around her, and brought her nearer. “Not me, I don’t,” he said, kissing her mouth, neck; she was not responsive especially, but he said—and his voice had gone adolescently shaky—“Never met Mr. Whoozits.” He slipped a hand inside her robe, loosening it away from her shoulders.
Above one breast she had a birthmark, small and star-shaped. He glanced at the mirrored door where uncertain light rippled their reflections, made them pale and incomplete. She was smiling. “Mr. Whoozits,” he said, “what does he look like?” The suggestion of a smile faded, a small monkeylike frown flickered on her face. She looked above the mantel at her painting, and he realized that this was the first notice she’d shown it; she appeared to study in the picture a particular object, but whether hawk or head he could not say. “Well,” she said quietly, pressing closer to him, “he looks like you, like me, like most anybody.”
IT WAS RAINING; IN THE wet noon light two nubs of candle still burned, and at an open window gray curtains tossed forlornly. Vincent extricated his arm; it was numb from the weight of her body. Careful not to make a noise, he eased out of bed, blew out the candles, tiptoed into the bathroom, and doused his face with cold water. On the way to the kitchenette he flexed his arms, feeling, as he hadn’t for a long time, an intensely male pleasure in his strength, a healthy wholeness of person. He made and put on a tray orange juice, raisin-bread toast, a pot of tea; then, so inexpertly that everything on the tray rattled, he brought the breakfast in and placed it on a table beside the bed.
She had not moved; her ruffled hair spread fanwise across the pillow, and one hand rested in the hollow where his head had lain. He leaned over and kissed her lips, and her eyelids, blue with sleep, trembled. “Yes, yes, I’m awake,” she murmured, and rain, lifting in the wind, sprayed against the window like surf. He somehow knew that with her there would be none of the usual artifice: no avoidance of eyes, no shamefaced, accusing pause. She raised herself on her elbow; she looked at him, Vincent thought, as if he were her husband, and, handing her the orange juice, he smiled his gratitude.
“What is today?”
“Sunday,” he told her, bundling under the quilt, and settling the tray across his legs.
“But there are no church bells,” she said. “And it’s raining.”
Vincent divided a piece of toast. “You don’t mind that, do you? Rain—such a peaceful sound.” He poured tea. “Sugar? Cream?”
She disregarded this, and said, “Today is Sunday what? What month, I mean?”
“Where have you been living, in the subway?” he said, grinning. And it puzzled him to think she was serious. “Oh, April … April something-or-other.”
“April,” she repeated. “Have I been here long?”
“Only since last night.”
“Oh.”
Vincent stirred his tea, the spoon tinkling in the cup like a bell. Toast crumbs spilled among the sheets, and he thought of the Tribune and the Times waiting outside the door, but they, this morning, held no charms; it was best lying here beside her in the warm bed, sipping tea, listening to the rain. Odd, when you stopped to consider, certainly very odd. She did not know his name, nor he hers. And so he said, “I still owe you thirty dollars, do you realize that? Your own fault, of course—leaving such a damn fool address. And D. J., what is that supposed to mean?”
“I don’t think I’d better tell you my name,” she said. “I could make up one easy enough: Dorothy Jordan, Delilah Johnson; see? There are all kinds of names I could make up, and if it wasn’t for him I’d tell you right.”
Vincent lowered the tray to the floor. He rolled over on his side, and, facing her, his heartbeat quickened. “Who’s him?” Though her expression was calm, anger muddied her voice when she said, “If you don’t know him, then tell me, why am I here?”
Silence, and outside the rain seemed suddenly suspended. A ship’s horn moaned in the river. Holding her close, he combed his fingers through her hair, and, wanting so much to be believed, said, “Because I love you.”
She closed her eyes. “What became of them?”
“Who?”
“The others you’ve said that to.”
It commenced again, the rain spattering grayly at the window, falling on hushed Sunday streets; listening, Vincent remembered. He remembered his cousin, Lucille, poor, beautiful, stupid Lucille who sat all day embroidering silk flowers on scraps of linen. And Allen T. Baker—there was the winter they’d spent in Havana, the house they’d lived in, crumbling rooms of rose-colored rock; poor Allen, he’d thought it was to be forever. Gordon, too.
Gordon, with the kinky yellow hair, and a head full of old Elizabethan ballads. Was it true he’d shot himself? And Connie Silver, the deaf girl, the one who had wanted to be an actress—what had become of her? Or Helen, Louise, Laura? “There was just one,” he said, and to his own ears, this had a truthful ring. “Only one, and she’s dead.”
Tenderly, as if in sympathy, she touched his cheek. “I suppose he killed her,” she said, her eyes so close he could see the outline of his face imprisoned in their greenness. “He killed Miss Hall, you know. The dearest woman in the world, Miss Hall, and so pretty your breath went away. I had piano lessons with her, and when she played the piano, when she said hello and when she said good-bye—it was like my heart would stop.”
Her voice had taken on an impersonal tone, as though she were talking of matters belonging to another age, and in which she was not concerned directly. “It was the end of summer when she married him—September, I think. She went to Atlanta, and they were married there, and she never came back. It was just that sudden.”
She snapped her fingers. “Just like that. I saw a picture of him in the paper. Sometimes I think if she’d known how much I loved her—why are there some you can’t ever tell?—I think maybe she wouldn’t have married; maybe it would’ve all been different, like I wanted it.” She turned her face into the pillow, and if she cried there was no sound.
ON MAY TWENTIETH SHE WAS eighteen; it seemed incredible—Vincent had thought her many years older. He wanted to introduce her at a surprise party, but had finally to admit that this was an unsuitable plan. First off, though the subject was always there on the tip of his tongue, not once had he ever mentioned D. J. to any of his friends; secondly, he could
