“You said last night that you have some money at the place you came from. Why don’t you go there and get it?”
“I don’t want to.”
“You mean you’re afraid to?”
“No. Not exactly. I just don’t want to.”
“Where are you going?”
“When I leave here?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know. Somewhere.”
“Jesus Christ,” he said with quiet despair. “You don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t have any money to get you there. What’s going to happen to you?”
“I don’t know that, either. Something.”
“Well, it’s not my fault. I’m not responsible for what you are, or what you’ve done, or anything that may happen.”
“That’s true. You’re not. I don’t blame you for not giving me any money, and I don’t blame you for being angry.”
“I’m not angry. I was angry in the bedroom, but I’m over it.”
“You were right to be angry. You’ve been very kind, and I’ve been a perfect bitch. I’m ashamed of myself.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be.”
“I am. I’m grateful and ashamed. Thank you for giving me a warm place to stay.”
“It’s all right. It was nothing.”
“I think I’d better go now. Good-by.”
Looking at her, his despair mounting, he knew already, although he was not ready to admit it, that he could not send her off to somewhere with nothing. He wondered, if she would try again to commit suicide, and if she would succeed if she tried. It did not seem possible that she could go on and on failing. He had a mental picture of her in the city morgue, a slim and childish body in a stark box that pulled out of a wall like a drawer. He had never been in a morgue and had no clear idea of what one was like, but he was certain that it would be bleak and cold and inhospitable to the dead.
“Look,” he said. “There’s no hurry about leaving. Sit down for a while.”
“I thought you wanted me to leave as soon as possible.”
“I was angry when I said that. I told you I’ve got over it.”
“Nevertheless, I ought to leave at once. It will only be harder to go if I delay.”
“Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“How long has it been since you’ve eaten?”
“I don’t know. Quite a while. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not hungry.”
“I might be able to spare you a little money after all.”
“I wouldn’t want to take it. I’d be ashamed.”
“Oh, nonsense. I wish you’d sit down and stay a little longer. I’d like to talk with you.”
She shrugged and sat down in a chair facing him, smoothing the skirt of her wool dress over her knees. Her legs, he saw, were quite good, with slender ankles and clean lines curving nicely to the calves. She was, in fact, a pretty girl altogether, and she would be, he felt, even prettier if only she would take the trouble to make the most of what she had. It would be a pity if she were actually to come, sooner or later, to the bad end she seemed to be looking for. As he watched her, he was reminded suddenly of someone else he had once known.
“What is there to talk about?” she said.
“Tell me about yourself.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“There must be something.”
“Nothing interesting. Nothing you’d care to hear.”
“If you want me to give you some money or try to help you, you could at least tell me the truth.”
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“It’s pretty obvious.”
“I don’t see why.”
“Because you tried to kill yourself, and almost did. No one tries to kill himself over nothing.”
She folded her hands in her lap and sat looking at them. He thought at first that she was considering an answer, but after a long period of silence it seemed that she had merely decided not to make any answer at all.
“All right,” he said. “If you don’t want to talk, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
Then she looked up from her folded hands, and he saw that his first impression had been right, that she had been considering an answer all the while.
“It’s evident,” she said, “that I tried to kill myself because I didn’t want to go on living. The truth is, someone I loved tried to kill me last night, and I saved my life by walking and walking and refusing to die, and then later, this morning, I decided it would be better to die after all, and so I tried, as you know, but it was no use. It’s rather silly, isn’t it, when you stop to think about it?”
“Who tried to kill you?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’d rather not tell you.”
“Because no one did?”
“No. It’s true. Why should I lie about it?”
“Why should you lie about anything? I’ve got a notion you’re pretty good at it. Maybe you think it’s fun. Maybe it’s essential to your ego.”
“If I tell you what happened, will you believe me? There’s no point in telling you if you won’t.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“All right, then. I’ve been living with my cousin. Her name is Lila Galvin. Her father, who is dead, was my father’s brother. She’s very beautiful and clever, and I loved her, and for a long time she loved me, but then I began to bore her and become a nuisance, and she doesn’t love me anymore. I don’t think she trusts me, either, and she’s afraid that I may destroy her. Or destroy, at least, the kind of life she has made for herself. It isn’t true, I wouldn’t do anything deliberately to hurt her, but she thinks I might, and that’s why she tried to kill me. Because she wants to be rid of me and is afraid of what I may say or do. Do you understand?”
She was looking at him levelly, holding his eyes, and he saw in hers an expression that he thought was composed of the pride and pain of masochism. He was convinced that she was deriving, now that she had begun to talk, a kind of intense and morbid pleasure from exposing in herself what he would surely consider shameful, even if she did not. And it was true that he did. He considered it shameful, and it made him sick. Not the aberrance itself, which was common enough, but the specific existence of the aberrance in this particular person—this thin girl with folded hands and pained eyes who was beginning to be someone he liked, and who might have become, with better luck on different terms, someone he could have loved.
“I think I do,” he said.
“Well, then,” she said, “that’s the way I am, and that’s what happened, and now I hope we needn’t talk about it any more.”
“How do you know she tried to kill you? Your Cousin Lila. What did she do?”
“Oh, it was very clever and almost worked, and it would probably have been much better if it had. It would have been so easy, simply a matter of going to sleep and never waking, and there was even music to die by. I wasn’t feeling well, very depressed, which is the way I often feel, and she put me to bed and gave me too much sleeping medicine and went away. You see how it would have been? She’d have come back and found me dead, and it would have seemed like suicide, and that’s exactly what everyone would have thought it was.”
“How do you know she gave you too much sleeping medicine? How did you discover it? Are you sure you didn’t imagine it?”
“No. I didn’t imagine it. She had been angry with me and had said that I would be better off dead, and later, after she had gone and I was lying in bed in the dark with the music playing. I suddenly remembered what she had said, and I was certain that I would die if I didn’t do something to prevent it. I got up and looked at the bottle the medicine had been in, and the bottle was empty, and I had seen earlier that it was almost full. There was no questio
n about it. None at all. She had given me too much, and I was dying painlessly, as she wished, and when I knew this, although I had no particular desire to live, it was somehow imperative that I not die. It makes no sense at all, does it? Anyhow, that’s the way it was, and I had heard that the thing to do was to keep moving and not, above all, to go to sleep, and so I dressed and started walking in the streets. After a long time I was too tired to walk any farther, and that’s when I went into the diner where we met. You were nasty and chintzy about the coffee.”
“Never mind the coffee. If all this is true, what do you intend to do about it?”
“Nothing. What is there to do?”
“Well, if this cousin of yours tried to kill you, you should at least report it to the police.”
“No, no. That’s not possible. Surely you can see that. Anyhow, it would do no good, and possibly a great deal of harm. I don’t want to cause Lila any trouble.”
“By God, if she tried to kill me, I’d want to make all the trouble for her that I could.”
“You don’t understand. You’re just like all the others I’ve known. You’re ignorant and bigoted and don’t understand in the least how things can be.”
“Look, now. Don’t start abusing me again. I have trouble enough getting along with you as it is. If this lovely cousin of yours tried to kill you, as you said, we’ve got to do something about it, and that’s ail there is to it. Would you like me to go and see her?”
“God, no! Why should I want that? What could you do?”
“I could scare the hell out of her, at least. I could give her as bad a time as she’s given you.”
“You leave her alone. Do you-hear me? Leave her alone. If I’d thought you were going to have a lot of crazy ideas about doing things, I wouldn’t have told you what happened.”
“Oh, all right. She’s your cousin, and it’s your life she tried to take. If it pleases you to be generous with a murderous queer, go right ahead.”
“And don’t call her names. Just keep still about her if you can’t speak decently.”
“I didn’t call her anything she isn’t. You’d better start learning to face the truth. And you’d better start learning to know who wants to be your friend and who doesn’t”
“Do you want to be my friend? Is that what you mean?”
“I doubt that anyone could be your friend. You wouldn’t allow it. You’re so damned abusive and offensive that you’d alienate anyone after a little while.”
“Is that so? I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
He grinned suddenly, and she grinned back, her small face lighting and assuming a loveliness that almost made it another face altogether, and then all at once they were laughing and laughing, together and at each other, and when they were done and quiet again, they felt relieved and much better and nearly comfortable.
“If we’re both difficult and offensive,” he said, “we at least have something in common.”
“Is it possible to be friends with a man? I hope so. It would be nice to be friends if he didn’t eventually want to be something more.”
“Maybe if you were good friends long enough you would begin to feel different about being something more.”
“Do you think so? It would make everything so much simpler and better if I could.”
“It might be possible. I don’t know. It seems reasonable to me that you learned to be what you are, and it’s just as reasonable, though probably harder, that you could learn to be something else.”
“It’s encouraging to hear you say so. I like you very much, and I’m sorry I’ve been so bitchy, even though I know very well that I’d be bitchy again and again if we were going on knowing each other.”
“Would you like to go on knowing each other?”
“I think so. I think I’d like to try. Would you?”
“Whether I would or not is beside the point. The point is, you don’t want to leave, because you have no place to go, and I’m not going to kick you out, because I’m not tough enough or mean enough or smart enough, whatever it would take to do it, and so you will have to stay here with me, and later we may be able to work something out. There’s one thing you’ve got to stop, however, and that’s thinking all the time that I’m about to ravish you, or some damn thing like that. I may want to, and probably will want to under the circumstances, but I won’t.”
“Do you really want me to stay?”
“Let’s not press the point. I’m willing to have you if you behave yourself and quit giving me hell for every little thing I do, or that you imagine. I haven’t enough money to buy you clothes or other things you’ll need, however. One of us will simply have to go and get what you have in the place you came from.”
“All right. I’ll go myself tomorrow. I’ll go and come right back. I’m determined not to be a coward about it any longer.”
She got up suddenly and sat down beside him on the sofa. Leaning toward him, very carefully not touching him the least bit more than she intended, she brushed her lips softly across his cheek, and he was aware of the enormous effort it required and the exorbitant concession that it was.
“Thank you,” she said. “I hope we can be friends. I’ll try very hard, honestly.”
“Oh, hell,” he said with quiet despair. “Oh, hell.”
CHAPTER 4
The next morning, which was the morning of Monday, Henry Harper was gone when Ivy Galvin wakened. There was a penciled note on his work table, and under the note there were five one-dollar bills. The note said that Henry had gone to work, and it was the first time, reading the words, that she realized that he must surely have a job of some kind, since he was earning nothing from his writing, and that he would have to go to his job today, since it was Monday. The five dollars, the note said, were for breakfast and lunch and taxi fare to and from the place she needed to go, and he hoped that it was enough, for it was, in any event, all he had to spare.
She had slept well in the night for a change, no dreams at all, and she was feeling better this particular Monday morning than she had felt any morning of any day for a long, long while. The note was encouraging too. It made her feel warm and important in a minor way, giving her at least five dollars’ worth of significance to someone who was under no obligation to do anything for her that he did not really want to do. She was sorry she had called him chintzy and a son of a bitch and all the bad names she had called him. She resolved hereafter to be as good as possible as much of the time as possible, but she was honest enough with herself to concede that it was unlikely that she could suddenly start being good consistently when she had so little practice at it.
After bathing and dressing, she decided that she would start immediately for the apartment to get her possessions. There was no telephone in the rooms with which to call a taxi, however, and the street outside was not the kind of street on which taxis would ordinarily cruise. Anyhow, surprisingly enough, she was hungry and wanted something to eat before starting. Late yesterday afternoon, after they had settled things between them, she and Henry had gone down to the Greek’s to eat a really substantial dinner that Henry had paid for, and here she was already hungry again the morning after. She could not remember the last time she had been hungry in the morning, it had been so long ago, and she thought that her hunger was surely a good sign of things getting better generally.
She went downstairs to the street and down the street to the Greek’s. The little diner was beginning to assume in her mind a position of priority. She was fond of it for the part it had played in the changes she had made, or was making, and she was prepared to be just as fond of the Greek himself if he was willing to forgive her for calling him fat and greasy. He came down behind the counter to where she sat, his fat face creased amiably, and it was apparent that either he did not remember her at all or was willing to start over on better terms.<
br />
“Do you remember me?” she said.
“To be sure,” he said. “You’re the girl with trouble and no dime, and I’m a fat, greasy Greek.”
“I’m sorry I called you that. I hope you will forgive me.”
“It’s not necessary to forgive the truth. It’s true that I’m fat, and it’s true that I’m a Greek. I’d prefer not to be called greasy, however, even though that’s also true.”
“Nevertheless, I hope you’ll forgive me.”
“Willingly.”
“Fat men are very pleasant, I think, and the Greeks have an honorable history.”
“It’s agreeable of you to say so. Will you have something to eat?”
“Yes. I’d like some toast and coffee.”
“I suggest an egg and some bacon besides.”
“No egg. I can’t tolerate an egg. Two strips of bacon, perhaps.”
While the toast and bacon were being prepared, she sat on the stool at the counter with her sense of acceptance growing warmer and bigger inside her. It was very pleasant to sit there in amiable association with the fat, honorable Greek. It was even more pleasant to know that one had been accepted on reasonable terms by someone who knew the worst about her. The pretense of being what one is not, the sustenance over a long period of time of an enormous deception, is at best difficult, and at worst destructive, as it had nearly been with her. It was such a relief to be honestly understood in one way by one person that she wished now to be understood in all ways by all persons. She wished her young relationship with Henry Harper, for instance, to be clearly understood by this fat, honorable Greek who was at the moment bringing her toast and bacon and coffee. There was also, she saw, a little paper cup of jelly.
“Did Henry come here for breakfast this morning?” she said.
“Henry Harper?” George said.
“Yes. He was gone this morning when I woke up.”
The Greek possessed, after all, being the proprietor of a successful diner, his full share of sophistication. He attached naturally to her stark statement an embroidery of details that were not true, but even so, allowing for his ignorance of all the facts, it was creditable that he showed no reaction except a polite interest in her small affairs “Henry’s a problem,” he said. “He hardly ever eats breakfast.”
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