Price Of Salt, The

by Claire Morgan

  All the conversation of that lunch with Abby crashed down on Therese. As Abby saw it, the whole thing was her fault. The letter Florence had found was only the final blunder.

  "When're you coming back?" Abby asked.

  "In about ten days. Unless Carol wants the car sooner."

  "She doesn't. She won't be home in ten days."

  Therese forced herself to say, "About that letter—the one I wrote—do you know if they found it before or after?"

  "Before or after what?"

  "After the detectives started following us."

  "They found it afterward," Abby said, sighing.

  Therese set her teeth. But it didn't matter what Abby thought of her, only what Carol thought. "Where is she in Vermont?"

  "I wouldn't call her if I were you."

  "But you're not me and I want to call her."

  "Don't. That much I can tell you. I can give her any message—that's important." And there was a cold silence. "Carol wants to know if you need any money and what about the car."

  "I don't need any money. The car's all right." She had to ask one more question. "What does Rindy know about this?"

  "She knows what the word divorce means. And she wanted to stay with Carol. That doesn't make it easier for Carol, either."

  Very well, very well, Therese wanted to say. She wouldn't trouble Carol by telephoning, by writing, by any messages, unless it was a message about the car. She was shaking when she put the telephone down. And she immediately picked it up again. "This is room six eleven," she said. "I don't want to take any more long distance calls—none at all."

  She looked at Carol's letter opener on the bed table, and now it meant Carol, the person of flesh and blood, the Carol with freckles and the corner nicked off one tooth. Did she owe Carol anything, Carol the person? Hadn't Carol been playing with her, as Richard had said? She remembered Carol's words, "When you have a husband and child it's a little different." She frowned at the letter opener, not understanding why it had become only a letter opener suddenly, why it was a matter of indifference to her whether she kept it or threw it away.

  Two days later, a letter arrived from Abby enclosing a personal check for a hundred and fifty dollars that Abby told her to "forget about." Abby said she had spoken with Carol, and that Carol would like to hear from her, and she gave Carol's address. It was a rather cold letter, but the gesture of the check was not cold. It hadn't been prompted by Carol, Therese knew.

  "Thank you for the check," Therese wrote back to her. "It's terribly nice of you, but I won't use it and I don't need it. You ask me to write to Carol. I don't think I can or that I should."

  Dannie was sitting in the hotel lobby one afternoon when she came home from work. She could not quite believe it was he, the dark-eyed young man who got up from the chair smiling and came slowly toward her. Then the sight of his loose black hair, mussed a little more by the upturned coat collar, the symmetrical broad smile, was as familiar as if she had seen him only the day before.

  "Hello, Therese," he said. "Surprised?"

  "Well, terrifically. I'd given you up. No word from you in—two weeks." She remembered the twenty-eighth was the day he said he would leave New York, and it was the day she had come to Chicago.

  "I'd just about given you up," Dannie said, laughing. "I got delayed in New York. I guess it's lucky I did, because I tried to telephone you and your landlady gave me your address." Dannie's fingers kept a firm grip on her elbow. They were walking slowly toward the elevators. "You look wonderful, Therese."

  "Do I? I'm awfully glad to see you." There was an open elevator in front of them. "Do you want to come up?"

  "Let's go have something to eat. Or is it too early? I didn't have any lunch today."

  "It's certainly not too early, then."

  They went to a place Therese knew about, that specialized in steaks. Dannie even ordered cocktails, though he usually never drank.

  "You're here by yourself?" he said. "Your landlady in Sioux Falls told me you left by yourself."

  "Carol couldn't come out finally."

  "Oh. And you decided to stay out longer?"

  “Yes."

  "Until when?"

  "Until just about now. I'm going back next week."

  Dannie listened with his warm dark eyes fixed on her face, without any surprise. "Why don't you just go west instead of east and spend a little time in California. I've got a job in Oakland. I have to be there day after tomorrow."

  "What kind of a job?"

  "Researching—just what I asked for. I came out better than I thought I would on my exams."

  "Were you first in the class?"

  "I don't know. I doubt it. They weren't graded like that. You didn't answer my question."

  "I want to get back to New York, Dannie."

  "Oh." He smiled, looking at her hair, her lips, and it occurred to her Dannie had never seen her with this much makeup on.

  "You look grown up all of a sudden," he said. "You changed your hair, didn't you?"

  "A little."

  "You don't look frightened any more. Or even so serious."

  "That pleases me." She felt shy with him, yet somehow close, a closeness charged with something she had never felt with Richard. Something suspenseful, that she enjoyed. A little salt, she thought. She looked at Dannie's hand on the table, at the strong muscle that bulged below the thumb. She remembered his hands on her shoulders that day in his room. The memory was a pleasant one.

  "You did miss me a little, didn't you, Terry?"

  "Of course."

  "Did you ever think you might care something about me? As much as you did for Richard, for instance?" he asked with a note of surprise in his own voice, as if it were a fantastic question.

  "I don't know," she said quickly.

  "But you're not still thinking about Richard, are you?"

  "You must know I'm not."

  "Who is it then? Carol?"

  She felt suddenly naked, sitting there opposite him. "Yes. It was."

  "But not now?"

  Therese was amazed that he could say the words without any surprise, any attitude at all. "No. It's—I can't talk to anyone about it, Dannie," she finished, and her voice sounded deep and quiet in her ears, like the voice of another person.

  "Don't you want to forget it, if it's past?"

  "I don't know. I don't know just how you mean that."

  "I mean, are you sorry?"

  "No. Would I do the same thing again? Yes."

  "Do you mean with somebody else, or with her?"

  "With her," Therese said. The corner of her mouth went up in a smile.

  "But the end was a fiasco."

  "Yes. I mean I'd go through the end, too.”

  "And you're still going through it.”

  Therese didn't say anything.

  "Are you going to see her again? Do you mind if I ask you all these questions?"

  "I don't mind," she said. "No, I'm not going to see her again. I don't want to."

  "But somebody else?"

  "Another woman?" Therese shook her head. "No."

  Dannie looked at her and smiled, slowly. "That's what matters. Or rather, that's what makes it not matter."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, you're so young, Therese. You'll change. You'll forget."

  She did not feel young. "Did Richard talk to you?" she asked.

  "No. I think he wanted to one night, but I cut it off before he got started."

  She felt the bitter smile on her mouth, and she took a last pull on her short cigarette and put it out. "I hope he finds somebody to listen to him. He needs an audience."

  "He feels jilted. His ego's suffering. Don't ever think I'm like Richard. I think people's lives are their own."

  Something Carol had said once came suddenly to her mind: every adult has secrets. Said as casually as Carol said everything, stamped as indelibly in her brain as the address she had written on the sales slip in Frankenberg's. She had an impulse to tell
Dannie the rest, about the picture in the library, the picture in the school. And about the Carol who was not a picture, but a woman with a child and a husband, with freckles on her hands and a habit of cursing, of growing melancholy at unexpected moments, with a bad habit of indulging her will. A woman who had endured much more in New York than she had in South Dakota. She looked at Dannie's eyes, at his chin with the faint cleft. She knew that up to now she had been under a spell that prevented her from seeing anyone in the world but Carol.

  "Now what are you thinking?" he asked.

  "Of what you said once in New York, about using things and throwing them away.”

  "Did she do that to you?"

  Therese smiled. "I shall do it."

  "Then find someone you'll never want to throw away.”

  "Who won't wear out," Therese said.

  "Will you write to me?"

  "Of course."

  "Write me in three months."

  "Three months?" But suddenly she knew what he meant.

  "And not before?"

  "No." He was looking at her steadily. "That's a fair time, isn't it?"

  "Yes. All right. It's a promise."

  "Promise me something else—take tomorrow off so you can be with me. I've got till nine tomorrow night."

  "I can't, Dannie. There's work to do—and I've got to tell him anyway that I'm leaving in another week." Those weren't quite the reasons, she knew. And perhaps Dannie knew, looking at her. She didn't want to spend tomorrow with him, it would be too intense, he would remind her too much of herself, and she still was not ready.

  Dannie came round to the lumberyard the next day at noon. They had intended to have lunch together, but they walked and talked on Lake Shore Drive for the whole hour instead. That evening at nine, Dannie took a plane westward.

  Eight days later, she started for New York. She meant to move away from Mrs. Osborne's as soon as possible. She wanted to look up some of the people she had run away from last fall. And there would be other people, new people. She would go to night school this spring. And she wanted to change her wardrobe completely. Everything she had now, the clothes she remembered in her closet in New York, seemed juvenile, like clothes that had belonged to her years ago. In Chicago she had looked around in the stores and hungered for the clothes she couldn't buy yet. All she could afford now was a new haircut.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Therese went into her old room, and the first thing she noticed was that the carpet corner lay flat. And how small and tragic the room looked. And yet hers, the tiny radio on the bookshelf, and the pillows on the studio couch, as personal as a signature she had written long ago and forgotten. Like the two or three set models hanging on the walls that she deliberately avoided looking at.

  She went to the bank and took out a hundred of her last two hundred dollars, and bought a black dress and a pair of shoes.

  Tomorrow, she thought, she would call Abby and arrange something about Carol's car, but not today.

  That same afternoon, she made an appointment with Ned Bernstein, the co-producer of the English show for which Harkevy was to do the sets. She took three of the models she had made in the West and also the Small Rain photographs to show him. An apprentice job with Harkevy, if she got it, wouldn't pay enough to live on, but there were other sources, other than department stores, anyway. There was television, for instance.

  Mr. Bernstein looked at her work indifferently. Therese said she hadn't spoken to Mr. Harkevy yet, and asked Mr. Bernstein if he knew anything about his taking on helpers. Mr. Bernstein said that was up to Harkevy, but as far as he knew, he didn't need any more assistants. Neither did Mr. Bernstein know of any other set studio that needed anyone at the moment. And Therese thought of the sixty-dollar dress. And of the hundred dollars left in the bank. And she had told Mrs. Osborne she might show the apartment any time she wished, because she was moving. Therese hadn't yet any idea where. She got up to leave, and thanked Mr. Bernstein anyway for looking at her work. She did it with a smile.

  "How about television?" Mr. Bernstein asked. "Have you tried to start that way? It's easier to break into."

  "I'm going over to see someone at Dumont later this afternoon." Mr. Donohue had given her a couple of names last January. Mr. Bernstein gave her some more names.

  Then she telephoned Harkevy's studio. Harkevy said he was just going out, but she could drop her models by his studio today and he could look at them tomorrow morning.

  "By the way, there'll be a cocktail party at the St. Regis for Genevieve Cranell tomorrow at about five o'clock. If you care to drop in," Harkevy said, with his staccato accent that made his soft voice as precise as mathematics, "at least we'll be sure to see each other tomorrow. Can you come?"

  "Yes. I'd love to come. Where in the St. Regis?" He read from the invitation. Suite D. Five to seven o'clock.

  "I shall be there by six."

  She left the telephone booth feeling as happy as if Harkevy had just taken her into partnership. She walked the twelve blocks to his studio, and left the models with a young man there, a different young man from the one she had seen in January. Harkevy changed his assistants often. She looked around his workroom reverently before she closed the door. Perhaps he would let her come soon. Perhaps she would know tomorrow.

  She went into a drugstore on Broadway and called Abby in New Jersey. Abby's voice was entirely different from the way it had sounded in Chicago. Carol must be much better, Therese thought. But she did not ask about Carol. She was calling to arrange about the car.

  "I can come and get it if you want me to," Abby said. "But why don't you call Carol about it? I know she'd like to hear from you." Abby was actually bending over backward.

  "Well—" Therese didn't want to call her. But what was she afraid of? Carol's voice? Carol herself? "All right. I'll take the car to her, unless she doesn't want me to. In that case, I'll call you back."

  "When? This afternoon?"

  "Yes. In a few minutes."

  Therese went to the door of the drugstore and stood there for a few moments, looking out at the Camel advertisement with the giant face puffing smoke rings like gigantic doughnuts, at the low-slung, sullen-looking taxis maneuvering like sharks in the after-matinee rush, at the familiar hodgepodge of restaurant and bar signs, awnings, front steps and windows, that reddish-brown confusion of the side street that was like hundreds of streets in New York. She remembered walking in a certain street in the West Eighties once, the brownstone fronts, overlaid and overlaid with humanity, human lives, some beginning and some ending there, and she remembered the sense of oppression it had given her, and how she had hurried through it to get to the avenue. Only two or three months ago. Now the same kind of street filled her with a tense excitement, made her want to plunge headlong into it, down the sidewalk with all the signs and theater marquees and rushing, bumping people. She turned and walked back to the telephone booths.

  A moment later, she heard Carol's voice.

  "When did you get in, Therese?"

  There was a brief, fluttering shock at the first sound of her voice, and then nothing. "Yesterday."

  "How are you? Do you still look the same?" Carol sounded repressed, as if someone might be with her, but Therese was sure there was no one else.

  "Not exactly. Do you?"

  Carol waited. "You sound different."

  "I am."

  "Am I going to see you? Or don't you want to. Once." It was Carol's voice, but the words were not hers. The words were cautious and uncertain. "What about this afternoon? Have you got the car?"

  "I've got to see a couple of people this afternoon. There won't be time." When had she ever refused Carol when Carol wanted to see her? "Would you like me to drive the car out tomorrow?"

  "No, I can come in for it. I'm not an invalid. Did the car behave itself?"

  "It's in good shape," Therese said. "No scratches anywhere."

  "And you?" Carol asked, but Therese didn't answer anything. "Shall I see you tomorrow? D
o you have any time in the afternoon?"

  They arranged to meet in the bar of the Ritz Tower on Fifty-seventh Street at four thirty, and then they hung up.

  Carol was a quarter of an hour late. Therese sat waiting for her at a table where she could see the glass doors that led into the bar, and finally she saw Carol push open one of the doors, and the tension broke in her with a small dull ache. Carol wore the same fur coat, the same black suede pumps she had worn the day Therese first saw her, but now a red scarf set off the blond lifted head. She saw Carol's face, thinner now, alter with surprise, with a little smile, as Carol caught sight of her. "Hello," Therese said.

  "I didn't even know you at first." And Carol stood by the table a moment, looking at her, before she sat down. "It's nice of you to see me."

  "Don't say that."

  The waiter came, and Carol ordered tea. So did Therese, mechanically.

  "Do you hate me, Therese?" Carol asked her.

  "No." Therese could smell Carol's perfume faintly, that familiar sweetness that was strangely unfamiliar now, because it did not evoke what it had once evoked. She put down the match cover she had been crushing in her hand. "How can I hate you, Carol?"