I answered as a fictional character might «in the affirmative»: «Her people,» I added, «wrote you, it appears, about her coming to study in New York, but you never showed me that letter. Tant mieux, she’s a frightful bore.»
Annette looked utterly confused: «I’m speaking,» she said, «or trying to speak, about a student called Lily Talbot who telephoned an hour ago to explain why she missed the exam. Who is your girl?»
We proceeded to disentangle the two. After some moral hesitation («You know, we both owe a lot to her grandparents») Annette conceded we really need not entertain little strays. She seemed to recall the letter because it contained a reference to her widowed mother (now moved to a comfortable home for the old into which I had recently turned my villa at Carnavaux—despite my lawyer’s well-meaning objections). Yes, yes, she had mislaid it—and would find it some day in some library book that had never been returned to an unattainable library. A strange appeasement was now flowing through my poor veins. The romance of her absentmindedness always made me laugh heartily. I laughed heartily. I kissed her on her infinitely tender-skinned temple.
«How does Dolly Borg look now?» asked Annette. «She used to be a very homely and very brash little brat. Quite repulsive, in fact.»
«That’s what she still is,» I practically shouted, and we heard little Isabel crow: «Ya prosnulas'» through the yawn of the window: «I am awake.» How lightly the spring cloudlets scudded! How glibly that red-breasted thrush on the lawn pulled out its unbroken worm! Ah—and there was Ninella, home at last, getting out of her car, with the string-bound corpses of cahiers under her sturdy arm. «Gosh,» said I to myself, in my ignoble euphoria, «there’s something quite nice and cozy about old Ninel after all!»
Yet only a few hours later the light of Hell had gone out, and I writhed, I wrung my four limbs, yes, in an agony of insomnia, trying to find some combination between pillow and back, sheet and shoulder, linen and leg, to help me, help me, oh, help me to reach the Eden of a rainy dawn.
3
The increasing disarray of my nerves was such that the bother of getting a driver’s license could not be contemplated: hence I had to rely on Dolly’s use of Todd’s dirty old sedan in order to seek the conventional darkness of country lanes that were difficult to find and disappointing when found. We had three such rendezvous, near New Swivington or thereabouts, in the complicated vicinity of Casanovia of all places, and despite my muddled condition I could not help noticing that Dolly welcomed the restless wanderings, the wrong turns, the torrents of rain which attended our sordid little affair. «Just think,» she said one especially boggy June night in unknown surroundings, «how much simpler things would be if somebody explained the situation to your wife, just think!»
On realizing she had gone too far with that proposed thought, Dolly changed tactics and rang me up at my office to tell me with a great show of jubilant excitement that Bridget Dolan, a medical student and a cousin of Todd’s, was offering us for a small remuneration her flat in New York on Monday and Thursday afternoons when she worked as a nurse at the Holy Something Hospital. Inertia rather than Eros caused me to give it a try; I kept up the pretext of having to complete the literary research I was supposed to be conducting in the Public Library, and traveled in a crowded Pullman from one nightmare to another.
She met me in front of the house, strutting in triumph, brandishing a little key that caught a glint of sun in the hothouse mizzle. I was so very weak from the journey that I had trouble getting out of the taxi, and she helped me to the front door, chattering the while like a bright child. Fortunately the mysterious flat was on the ground floor—I could not have faced a lift’s closure and spasm. A surly janitrix (reminding me in mnemonic reverse of the Cerberean bitches in the hotels of Soviet Siberia which I was to stop at a couple of decades later) insisted on my writing down my name and address in a ledger («That’s the rule,» sang out Dolly, who had already picked up some intones of local delivery). I had the presence of mind to put down the dumbest address I could produce at the moment, Dumbert Dumbert, Dumberton. Dolly, humming, added unhurriedly my raincoat to those hanging in a communal hallway. If she had ever experienced the pangs of neuralgic delirium, she would not have fumbled with that key when she knew quite well that the door of what should have been an exquisitely private apartment was not even properly closed. We entered a preposterous, evidently ultra-modern living room with painted hard furniture and one lone little white rocker supporting a plush biped rat instead of a sulky child. Doors were still with me, were always with me. The one on the left, being slightly ajar, let in voices from an adjacent suite or asylum. «There’s a party going on there!» I expostulated, and Dolly deftly and softly drew that door almost shut. «They’re a nice friendly group,» she said, «and it’s really too warm in these rooms to choke every chink. Second on the right. Here we are.»
Here we were. Nurse Dolan for the sake of atmosphere and professional empathy had rigged up her bedroom in hospital style: a snow-pure cot with a system of levers that would have rendered even Big Peter (in the Red Topper) impotent; whitewashed commodes and glazed cabinets; a bedhead chart dear to humorists; and a set of rules tacked to the bathroom door.
«Now off with that jacket,» cried Dolly gaily, «while I unlace those lovely shoes» (crouching nimbly, and nimbly recrouching, at my retreating feet).
I said: «You have lost your mind, my dear, if you think I could contemplate making love in this appalling place.»
«What do you want then?» she asked, angrily brushing away a strand of hair from her flushed face and uncoiling back to her natural length: «Where would you find another such dandy, hygienic, utterly—«
A visitor interrupted her: a brown, gray-cheeked old dackel carrying horizontally a rubber bone in its mouth. It entered from the parlor, placed the obscene red thing on the linoleum, and stood looking at me, at Dolly, at me again, with melancholy expectation on its raised dogface. A pretty bare-armed girl in black slipped in, grabbed the animal, kicked its toy back into the parlor, and said: «Hullo, Dolly! If you and your friend want some drinks afterwards, please join us. Bridget phoned she’d be home early. It’s J.B.’s birthday.»
«Righto, Carmen,» replied Dolly, and turning to me continued in Russian: «I think you need that drink right away. Oh, come along! And for God’s sake leave that jacket and waistcoat here. You are drenched with sweat.»
She forced me out of the room; I went rumbling and groaning; she gave a perfunctory pat to the creaseless cot and followed the man of snow, the man of tallow, the dying lopsided man.
Most of the party had now invaded the parlor from the next room. I cringed and tried to hide my face as I recognized Terry Todd. He raised his glass in delicate congratulation. What that slut had done to ensure a thwarted beau’s complicity, I shall never know; but I should never have put her in my Krasnyy Tsilindr; that’s the way you breed live monsters—from little ballerinas in books. Another person I had once seen already—in a car that kept passing us somewhere in the country—a young actor with handsome Irish features, pressed upon me what he called a Honolulu Cooler, but at the eoan stage of an attack I am beyond alcohol, so could only taste the pineapple part of the mixture. Amidst a circle of sycophants a bull-size old fellow in a short-sleeved shirt monogrammed «J.B.» posed, one hairy arm around Dolly, for a naughty shot that his wife snapped. Carmen removed my sticky glass on her neat little tray with a pillbox and a thermometer in the corner. Not finding a seat, I had to lean against the wall, and the back of my head caused a cheap abstract in a plastic frame to start swinging above me: it was stopped by Todd who had sidled up to me and now said, lowering his voice: «Everything is settled. Prof, to everybody’s satisfaction. I’ve kept in touch with Mrs. Langley, sure I have, she and the missus are writing you. I believe they’ve already left, the kid thinks you’re in Heaven—now, now, what’s the matter?»
I am not a fighter. I only hurt my hand against a tall lamp and lost both shoes in the scuffle. Terry Todd vanished—forever. The telephone was being used in one room and ringing in the other. Dolly, retransformed by the alchemy of her blazing anger—and now untellable from the little girl who had hurled a three-letter French word at me when I told her I found it wiser to stop taking advantage of her grandfather’s hospitality—virtually tore my necktie in two, yelling she could easily get me jailed for rape but preferred to see me crawling back to my consort and harem of baby-sitters (her new vocabulary, though, remained richly theatrical, even when she shrieked).
I felt trapped like a silver pea teased into the center of a toy maze. A threatening crowd, held back by J.B., the head doctor, separated me from the exit; so I retreated
