He had no goal, or even conscious direction, but he kept in his flight, or pursuit, or both, to darker streets where fewer people walked. And he continued his awkward loping gait in the empirical knowledge, though it was not specifically recognized as such, that there was a balance of sorts to be held in motion that could not be held when motion ceased, that it would require, once he became static, an impossible exertion of will ever to move again. His body was soon wet with sweat, but he went on and on across intersections and around corners and down the dark streets until, after many miles and a long time, he slipped off the edge of a curb and fell on his knees in the gutter. He remained on his knees for almost a minute, and then he stood up slowly. He felt stunned, incredulous that he had done such an idiotic thing, falling in the gutter as if he were drunk, and he realized dully that he must have veered gradually toward the curb without knowing it. His right knee burned, and there was, he saw, a tear in his trousers. Moreover, now that he was not moving, his wet body began to chill. He was exhausted, and it was necessary to find a place to rest. Stepping back onto the sidewalk, he began to walk again, much slower than before, and a couple of blocks farther along the street he came to a bar and entered.
The room was long and narrow, dimly lighted, the bar stretching the length of one side. Tables and chairs were scattered without order or design over a bare floor that had begun to splinter, darkened and greasy from innumerable applications of sweeping compound. Some of the tables were occupied. A man and a woman sat drinking at the bar. Two other women sat drinking pale drinks at the bar alone, separated by an intervening empty stool. The two lone women were wearing cheap evening gowns, short-skirted, that clung to the upper slopes of their breasts, and they were obviously part of the place. Enos sat at the bar and ordered whisky and water. He drank the whisky at a gulp, gagging a little before he could lift the water and wash the taste from his mouth. His body was drying now, and not so chilled. The bartender refilled his glass, and he drank again, only part of the whisky this time, holding his breath after swallowing and washing the taste away at once with the water. The nearer of the two lone women moved down and sat beside him. She was wearing a thick and sickening scent, and he could see, looking sidewise and down from the corners of his eyes, a swell of flesh below the cleavage of her breasts. The gown was pale green and looked like rayon.
“Buy me a drink, honey?” she said.
He did not want to offend her, but neither did he want to buy her a drink or have anything at all to do with her. All he wanted, with an intensity of desire that was almost nauseous, was to be left alone by everyone on earth. Specifically, in his general withdrawal, he wanted the woman to go away, and he told her so with an exorbitantly precise articulation of syllables, as if he were afraid she would not clearly understand him and thereby force him to the monstrous effort of repeating himself. “Go away,” he said.
The woman understood him, all right, and for a moment she considered him with eyes reduced to slits of venom. Then she laughed with professional resiliency and laid a hand on his arm in a placating gesture.
“What’s the matter, honey? Something bothering you? Lost your best girl or something?”
Her persistence was an affront, her touch a violation, and her remark was unfortunate, to say the least. He reached across his own body and knocked her hand from his arm with a degree of violence that he did not actually intend.
“Go away,” he said. “I don’t want you here.”
The woman sucked in her breath with a hiss, and darkened lids slipped down again like purple bruises over gathering venom. She spat an epithet and slapped like a cat with her claws. He saw the attack from the corners of his eyes, as he had seen her breasts and swell of flesh, and he tried to avoid it, but he was not quick enough, and he felt on his cheek the burning mark of a nail. Down the bar, the woman sitting with the man had twisted on her stool to watch them, and beyond her her escort leaned far forward over the bar with his face turned toward them, split in cruel pleasure by a stained grin. Behind the bar, the bartender began to laugh, a windy expulsion without body. Quickly, neither speaking nor retaliating in any way, Enos got up and left. Laughter behind him grew and followed, and the woman, for good measure, added another epithet.
When he reached the sidewalk, he knew already what it was that he had to do next, but it was necessary to stop at the curb and think, for he did not know exactly where he was in relation to the place to which he wanted to go. It was imperative, he knew now, to return to Donna’s apartment. It was not that he hoped to salvage anything of what was surely lost, but only because there was a kind of negative security in establishing definitively that there was nothing to be salvaged, the kind of dark security he had felt in the end that had been no end before the remembered pines.
Moving abruptly, he walked to the corner and read on an iron post the names of the streets. He was able then to orient himself in relation to Donna’s apartment, which was an astonishingly long distance away, and he was dully incredulous that he had walked so far. He began to walk in the direction he needed to go, lunging forward again with the awkward, loping gait that carried him with remarkable swiftness over asphalt and concrete; and he reached the doorway in which he had stood before, just as a Chevrolet drove up from the opposite direction and stopped. He stood quietly and watched as Tyler got out and went around the car and opened the door for Donna. He felt within himself the silent, unbearable beat of pain that was somehow coordinated with the beat of his blood but was separate and stronger and not at all the same. In the brick wall of the apartment house light came up where darkness had been, from Donna’s windows. Time passed, and Tyler reappeared and drove away, and the time that had passed was no more than ten minutes, though it seemed longer than a night could be. After waiting yet a little longer in the distorted night where time, and all things, were deceptions, he crossed the street and went up to the floor on which Donna’s apartment was and pressed the button beside the door.
“For God’s sake,” Donna said, “what’s happened to you?”
She was shocked at his appearance, almost frightened. He wore no hat, and his hair was tousled, as if he had raked his fingers through it in every direction. His clothes were rumpled and stained in spots, his trousers torn at the knee. The side of his face where he had been clawed was smeared with blood and a little swollen. It was perfectly apparent to her that he had been making some kind of fool of himself, and it was quite likely that he had been impelled to do it simply because she had not been at home to meet him. This made her react immediately with compassion and anger, which were ambivalent, which was a kind of reaction she resented strongly because she had had too much of it and wanted no more of it.
“You had better come in,” she said.
He walked past her into the room and sat down. Turning away from him, glad for the moment of the necessity for petty action that would delay her facing fully what was now apparent, that she had taken upon herself an intolerable burden and perhaps a greater responsibility than she had imagined, she went into the bathroom and returned with a wet washcloth and a bottle of merthiolate. She cleaned his face and painted the scratch and carried the cloth and the antiseptic back into the bathroom. Returning, she stood and inspected him from a distance of two paces, feet spread and hands on hips, in a posture that seemed to suggest between them a difference of at least two generations.
“Now, then,” she said, “please tell me what kind of idiocy you have been up to.”
“You weren’t here,” he said, “and you didn’t come, though I waited for a long time, and so I went for a walk and walked for a long way.”
“Did you get yourself in such a mess merely by walking?”
“I fell down. I don’t quite know how it happened. Somehow or other I slipped off a curb and fell down.”
“How did you get your face scratched?”
“A woman did it. I went into a bar, and she wanted me to buy her a drink, and I didn’t want to. It made her furious because I didn�
��t want to buy her a drink.”
“Jesus Christ, are you completely without any kind of capacity to cope with things? Do you intend to go on forever letting every little emotional disturbance threaten you with ruin?”
“Why weren’t you here? You said you’d be, but you weren’t.”
“I know. I’m sorry. There was something I had to do.”
“You were with a man. I was outside, across the street. I saw him bring you home.”
“All right. I was out with a man. I’d have told you so, if only you’d given me time. We had some drinks and went to dinner, but it was really a matter of business. This man may loan me the money to buy the shop, which is very important to me. Right now, it is the most important thing that could happen to me.”
He did not respond, would not even look at her, and she resisted a compulsion to kneel beside him and hold his head against her breasts. This would have been a concession, she knew, which would not be good in the long run for him, and perhaps be worse for her. It was clear that she must, this night, refuse to carry any further something that had already been carried too far. Now that her life had taken the direction and gained momentum in the last few hours, he was clearly impossible. He was quite incapable of being reasonable or of accepting a simple and undedicated relationship that might have been pleasant for both of them and possible to maintain, and it was practically certain that he would destroy all her chances absolutely if he were allowed to hang on. She had been disturbed all the way home by the fear that he might be waiting in the hall to create a scene in front of Tyler. She did not wish to be unkind — actually she would have preferred not to give him up entirely — but it was essential she act decisively, in spite of her feelings, for the sake of what otherwise might be lost.
She got a straight chair and placed it directly in front of him and sat down and took one of his hands in both of hers.
“I want to talk with you,” she said.
“All right.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes, I’m listening.”
“You must understand that all this is impossible. Don’t you see yourself that it is? For a while it has been all right, and I hope it has even been good for us, something we can remember later without regret. But neither of us is committed or bound to each other, and it will surely be the worse for us from now on if we permit it.”
He looked up at her with eyes which were curiously flat.
“Do you mean that you don’t want to see me any more?”
“I mean, at least, that I don’t want to see you any more in the way that I have been. I don’t deny that I wanted it and was largely responsible for it. I admit also that even now I wish it were not necessary to say what I am trying to say, but it will be better for both of us if we do not try to go on any longer.”
“Can’t I stay tonight?”
“No. Not tonight. Nor any other night.”
He drew his hand slowly from hers and looked down at it with his flat eyes, turning it over and over and peering at it intently, inspecting it, it seemed, for marks or stains or some strange sign of contamination. Suddenly, without warning, he folded the fingers into a fist and struck out with the fist savagely, emitting at the same time a hoarse cry of animal anguish.
The blow caught Donna on the side of the head above the ear and knocked her to the floor, the straight chair falling after her. She was stunned for a few moments, blind and deaf, and when she recovered he was already gone. Reaching out for the chair in which he had sat, she pulled herself into it and put her head into her hands and sat quietly for some time.
She was thankful he had struck her. She felt a little better because he had.
CHAPTER VII
She awakened one morning, about three weeks after sending Enos Simon away. Her first thought was of that other morning when she had awakened in the house of Aaron Burns. There were certain things about the two mornings that were the same, but there were other things that were different. She had the feeling now, as she had had then, that it was late and that she would have to get up at once and go to the shop. But that other day had been a Sunday, with no urgency about going anywhere. This morning was Friday and it was necessary to go to the shop, although there was after all, perhaps, no particular urgency. The other morning of awakening had been in early January, and it had been snowing; and this morning was at the end of April, with over a hundred other mornings and awakenings between, and it was a clear day with a bright scrubbed sky which she could see by turning her head on her pillow and looking up through the window of her room. Now, as then, she was a certain kind of person with a certain kind of day ahead of her, but she was a different certain kind of person and the day was a different certain kind of day, for no person is the same when there have been over a hundred days between what they were and are.
She lay quietly on her back, after having looked up through the window at the sky, wondering idly why she had thought of that other morning the first thing this morning. Reasons existed that made the thinking appropriate, but they were reasons not yet known to her. She could think just then of no good reason at all. The reasons which made the memory appropriate on this morning which she did not yet know and therefore could not think of, were that the first day began what this day would end, and that death figured in both in some kind of significant or symbolic relationship to what happened between. It was good, of course, that she did not now know these things and had no way of knowing or anticipating them, for if she had known through premonition, the day would have been destroyed, or at least impaired, in its beginning. Actually, her day was already being injured, even as she awakened and began to think and looked up through her window at the bright scrubbed sky, but she did not know this and would not know it until the day was almost past. From her viewpoint that morning it was a good day, and it was to remain for its duration a good day in which good things happened, or at least in which she got things she wanted.
She thought again about getting up and going to the shop, but she decided to lie quietly a little longer and think about how things had been going — a pleasure because things had been going well. In the first place, after her mother’s death, in the release from old ties and old claims, she had entered a phase of extreme fecundity that had sustained itself and was still continuing. Her mind had expanded with fresh conceptions, and she worked with pleasure and intensity for long hours without tiring, and in most of the hours when she was not working or sleeping there was William Walter Tyler, now Bill. From those times, the times she worked and slept, he was excluded, or in the latter excluded himself — from what obscure compulsion on his part to be perfectly fair or absolutely certain she did not know or care — but she could sense clearly when they were together that she had lost no ground in the mild intimacy that had developed. For her part, she found him much more interesting and compatible than she had expected, and she was quite willing to be agreeable in any reasonable way in return for what he offered or could offer if he chose.
Thinking of Tyler, she began after a while to think of Enos Simon. She did not want to think of him, because thinking of him was disturbing, but it was impossible to exclude him from her mind entirely, though she had tried. She had decided then that it was much less disturbing in the long run merely to think of him voluntarily and reasonably, when it was necessary to think of him at all, and so, by admitting him freely to her mind, avoid creating the conflict of keeping him out. In the first few days after the night he struck her and ran from her apartment, she had worried excessively about him because she now understood what she had previously only felt vaguely — that he was quite ill in a frightening sort of way and had been so for a long time, probably even back in that spring and summer they had shared. To be exact, she was not so much worried about him as about herself. This was not because of the violence he had displayed in the final seconds of the night she sent him away, for she did not believe that he had really meant to attack her at all. He had only been lashing out blindly at something, so
me threat or force that pressed upon him, and she had been at the moment in the way, and that was all. The reason she worried about herself was because of what he might do to himself, for if he hurt himself or killed himself, as she now felt was quite possible, it would place upon her, rationally or not, a burden of guilt that was dreadful to consider.
Anticipating this, she had tried to reason it away, to justify herself in relation to him and what had happened between them, and she tried again now, lying in bed and thinking for a while before getting up. What she thought was that she had been kind to him and generous and had at least given him something for some time, and it would certainly be insane of her to blame herself because she had been unable to give him more, when no one else had given him anything at all. This was true enough, but what nullified it and disturbed her was the realization that he would have been better off, much better, if she, like all the others, had given him nothing. There was no sense in this, however, no sense at all, and there was no sense, either, in lying and thinking about it and anticipating something that had not happened — and would surely never happen as a result of anything she had done — now that three weeks had passed. It was a fine day, a spring day with a bright sky, and the sensible thing was to get out of bed at once and start living it.
She walked barefooted through the living room and into the kitchen and put the coffee on, and then walked back into the living room and through it and into the bedroom and from the bedroom into the bathroom. It was a pleasure, a subtle and sensual delight, to feel on the soles of her feet the sequence of sensations incited by the soft looped pile of the bedroom rug and the stiffer clipped pile of the living room carpet and the smooth cool surface of the kitchen linoleum, the same sequence in reverse when she returned, and finally, almost like a tender bruise, the cold and absolutely ungiving bathroom tile. Showering, she remembered again how on that other morning she had walked naked and arrogant through Shirley Burns’ room, had showered and later dressed in the inappropriate scarlet sheath, and had finally walked downstairs to discover Aaron dead. This had all happened only a hundred days or so ago, and it was incredible that it had been no longer, and that so much had happened, and was still happening, since that time.
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