peace, and maybe she wants me. I hope she wants me, but maybe she never will in the way that I have to have her. She needs me because she is afraid now when she’s alone, and because she is first and last a man’s woman who needs a man and who could see no point in life without one, and because she likes me and maybe she loves me, but I don’t think it’s the obsession it has become with me.
No, I thought angrily, I’ve got no right to think that about her. How do I know how deeply she feels? Is she some flirtatious idiot with everything on the surface where it shows? And do you expect her to dredge up all her feelings right now when she’s trying so hard to bury some of them? Things are still terribly mixed up for her, and she’s scared, and what she’s gone through would have driven some women out of their minds.
But, on the other hand, I thought, staring straight ahead across the dimness of the bar and seeing nothing but a still-faced girl with tortured eyes and that beautiful, dark, and mutilated hair—on the other hand, hadn’t it been only the loneliness that had driven her to me in the first place? Hadn’t it been just the loneliness and neglect and the sordid way she’d had to live for almost a year, seeing him come apart that way in drunkenness and suspicion? Minutely, step by step, I went back over every one of our pitifully few hours together, looking for something and not even knowing what it was. I saw her again down on her knees scouring the floor with that agonized fury as if it were herself under the harsh scrubbing brush instead of the already whitened planks. Neglect? That was part of it. What was it she had cried out once, almost in self-reproach? “I can’t help the way I am, can I, Jack? Is it my fault I’m that way?” But it wasn’t only that, I thought. It had to be more than that with her. She would have gone on punishing herself until she wore the floor out with the brush before she’d have surrendered to what she would have considered the cheapness of that alone. It had just been little of this and a little of that, all adding up until it whipped her. No, I thought savagely. No, that wasn’t it. I must have been more to her than just a means of escape. But I don’t know. How could I know? How could I ever be sure?
I’ve got to stop this, I thought. Is this the kind of thing I’m going to go through when I’m away from her? Do I have to go on tormenting myself this way? I tried to drink the beer, but it was flat and warm by now and completely tasteless. I lighted another cigarette, forgetting I already had one burning on the tray. Suddenly, sitting still was unbearable again, and I threw fifty cents on the table and went out without waiting for my change. Sunlight blasted into the street and the glare hurt my eyes after the dimness of the bar, and heat boiled up from the sidewalk in suffocating waves. She’ll be back by now, I thought. She must be back.
She wasn’t. I stood outside the door and knocked again, and then a third time in an empty hot eternity of silence before I would admit to myself she wasn’t there. I was cut off, alone, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but sit down in the lobby through the hell of another hour of waiting.
I heard the elevator door and turned around. She had just stepped out of it and was coming toward me down the corridor with her arms stacked high with bundles.
Twenty-one
I took them from her while she unlocked the door. We went inside and she closed it and turned to me to take them. “Let me show you, Jack. Let’s open them now, darling.”
“No,” I said. I threw them on the dresser, but there were too many and some of them fell off onto the floor. “No. Later on. They’re not important.”
She looked at me wonderingly. “But I thought you wanted—”
“Yes. I did. I still do. But they can wait.” I was conscious of thinking I must not make much sense to her. Or to myself, for that matter, I thought. She was still regarding me with