unable to confirm your reservation west of Salt Lake. I think we’ll have it in another hour or two, however. Shall we call you then, or wait till morning?”
I heard a barely audible gasp and then she came through beautifully. “Thank you. Tomorrow morning will be all right. Just call me at Room Three-twelve here at the hotel.”
“Thank you,” I said. I hung up.
It was still hot in the street where the neon was beginning to die. A street-cleaning truck went by, swishing water into the gutters, and the traffic lights were flashing amber along the emptying canyon. Two yellow cabs stood idle at the stand up by the corner.
“State Hotel,” I said, feeling the rasping of impatience.
I didn’t have any name. I was nobody. I didn’t exist. I stood with the pen in my hand, sweating, poised above the blank white card while the man behind the desk regarded me with the supercilious detachment of all hotel clerks. It had never occurred to me until this moment that if I was no longer Jack Marshall I must be somebody else, and that everybody had to have a name.
I had to put down something. He was watching me. “J. K. Mallard, Nashville, Tenn.,” I scrawled across the card. He hit the bell.
The boy would never leave. He turned on the light in the bath. He turned on a floor lamp. He looked inside a closet. What does he expect to find? I thought. Ten million boys have looked inside ten million closets searching for something they’ve never found. I took two quarters out of my pocket and tossed them in my hand. “Will there be anything else, sir?”
“No,” I said, waiting.
He went out and I heard his footsteps going away. Give him two more minutes, I thought, to get out of the corridor. The way he moves...I put the key in my pocket and went out and closed the door. My room was on the fifth floor, but I bypassed the elevators and walked down the two flights of stairs. I went along looking at the numbers on the doors, going softly on the carpet through the quiet, dim, impersonal tunnel that is the same identical corridor of a thousand different hotels. I walked past doors bearing the numbers 340 and 338; I was going the wrong way. I retraced my steps and started down the other way. I found 308, then 310. I stopped before the next door. I knocked softly, twice, and then once, the sound lost and absorbed in the empty, noise-proofed tunnel walled in by darkened cubicles of sleep. “Jack?” The whisper was very faint, barely reaching me through the door. “Yes,” I said.
I heard the night latch click and the door opened a minute crack. “Give me just a minute,” she whispered. I waited. She doesn’t have a robe, I thought, and not even a nightgown unless she’s bought one. I pushed open the door, stepped quickly inside, and latched it. The room was dimly lighted by a single small bulb in the floor lamp in one corner, and she sat up in bed with the sheet clutched to her breast. The dark hair fell down across her shoulder and she was very beautiful and all at the same time a little afraid and full of yearning and inarticulate happiness as I came across the room. It’s the same with her as it is with me, I thought. We’ve both dreamed of this minute for all this time, and we don’t know—there isn’t any way we can know—what it will be like with us now. Would we ever be alone again? Had we escaped from Shevlin, or had we tied him to ourselves forever? I stood looking down at her, wanting to tell her how beautiful she was and what I felt, but no words would come. She forgot the sheet and lifted her arm up to me, letting it slide unnoticed from her breast and the cheap, peach-colored nightgown she had bought. I sat down on the side of the bed and gathered her up to me with my face down against her throat. And then when I raised my head and looked at her I knew that neither Shevlin nor anybody, nor anything, could ever reach us as long as we were together.
“You’re not afraid now, are you?” I asked.
“No,” she whispered. “It’s all right now.”
“Everything is just the same.”
“Yes,” she said simply. She was silent for a moment, looking up at me