“Perhaps I can make him understand that breakfast is important.”
“It would be a service if you could. He doesn’t take proper care of himself. He drinks black coffee late at night and refuses to have breakfast in the morning.”
“Well, it’s obvious that he’s very opinionated. I have learned that already. He’s very kind, though, for all that, and has given me a warm place to stay. I’m going to live with him for the time being.”
Into the Greek’s amiable countenance, despite his reliable sophistication, there now crept an expression of concern.
“Are you convinced,” he said, “that it’s the best arrangement?”
“We have come to a mutually satisfactory agreement. You needn’t worry about it.”
“I have a natural concern for Henry, you understand.”
“Yes, I do. I noticed it immediately.”
“It’s really the book. It would be too bad if anything interfered with the writing of the book.”
“I promise not to interfere.”
“A certain amount of interference arises inevitably from certain situations.”
“Distractions, you mean. However, you don’t have a full understanding of the arrangement. It’s possible that I may even be helpful in the writing of the book.”
“Let us hope so,” George said.
But it was evident that he was not convinced and was still concerned. He was forced to depart to serve another customer, but he kept glancing at Ivy from the corners of his eyes, evaluating her potential as a distraction as opposed to a help, and when he returned to her after a few minutes it was obvious that he considered the distractive potential, in terms of his own susceptibility to such things in his youth, to be the greater of the two.
“One can only pray for the best,” he said.
“As for me,” Ivy said, “I’ve never found prayer to be particularly helpful. It doesn’t matter, however, because you are concerning yourself needlessly. Do you have a telephone?”
“Yes. A business phone.”
“I wonder if you’d call a taxi for me. I have to go someplace to get a few things.”
He called the taxi, which arrived shortly, and she paid for her breakfast with one of the dollar bills and received her change.
“The breakfast was very good,” she said. “Especially the coffee.”
“I’m famous for my excellent coffee,” he said.
“Your fame is deserved. Well, I must go now. Good-by.”
“Good-by. I hope you will return.”
“It’s more than likely that I shall,” she said.
Outside in the taxi, she told the driver where she wanted to go and sat back in the seat to watch the streets slip past beyond the glass. She was in much better contact with things than she had been for some time, and everything was, in fact, quite ordinary and dependable, exactly what it was represented to be, and not the distorted and treacherous element of a hostile world that was, incongruously, at once remote and imminently threatening. She felt that she had done quite well with the Greek. She was very pleased with the way she had done. She had been, after apologizing for her previous rudeness, amiable and casual. It would be necessary, if she were to succeed in living normally, to achieve an attitude of amiable casualness with people who wished her no harm, if not actually good, and it was certain that she had made a good beginning with the Greek. Her pleasure and confidence were somewhat shaken when she realized suddenly that they were approaching the apartment building in which she had lived with Lila so long ago, but then she remembered that Lila would almost certainly have a modeling engagement for the day, and that it would not, therefore, be necessary to see her or talk with her, and she felt relieved and again pleased and confident.
But she did not have her key to the apartment. She had come away without it, as she had come away without everything else except the clothes she wore, and so she was forced to find the superintendent of the building and ask him to let her in with his key. He was, fortunately, in his own apartment on the ground floor, and they went up together in the elevator, and Ivy, after thanking him for his help, closed the door of the apartment behind her and leaned against it. She shut her eyes and took a deep, deep breath and waited for the slow recession of the familiar, free-floating fear that had risen within her. When she opened her eyes again, Lila was standing in the doorway to the bedroom watching her.
Strangely enough, Lila did not seem at all angry. If the color was heightened in her cheeks, which was often a sign in her of anger, it was nullified by her lips, which were smiling, and her eyes, in which there was relief. She was wearing, Ivy noticed with an appreciation of detail that was rather remarkable under the circumstances, a soft white blouse tucked into the waistband of a pair of tight lounging pants of a style she always wore so beautifully over her slim and elegant legs. She possessed the same kind of perfection that she did in the sleek, full-page photographs in the slick magazines that Ivy had often looked at with an intense resentment that anyone could see and admire her also for no more than the price of the magazine.
“Where in God’s name have you been?” Lila said.
“Away,” Ivy said. “With a friend.”
“A friend? What friend?”
“No one you know. A man.”
“Are you out of your mind? I believe you are.”
“You may think as you please about me. I don’t care.”
“Well, I know I was cruel to you the other night, and I’m sorry. I’m glad you’ve finally regained your sanity and come back where you belong. I’ve been sick with worry about you.”
“I only came to get my clothes and other things. I’m not going to stay. I’m never going to stay here again.”
“Nonsense. Where on earth will you go?”
“Back where I came from.”
“To this man?”
“Yes.”
“Do you imagine for a minute that I believe such an absurdity? You’re lying to me. There’s certainly no man at all.”
She said this with such an air of conviction that it was suddenly imperative to Ivy that the existence of Henry Harper be made absolutely clear and unquestioned as a kind of critical truth from which everything else must develop from this point.
“There is,” she said. “His name is Henry Harper, and he lives in two rooms over a bookstore on Market Street. I met him the night I left here. I went home with him, and I’ve been there with him ever since. He’s really very kind, although a little contrary and difficult. He has agreed to let me stay with him until I can make other arrangements.”
“You’re out of your mind. You definitely are. Are you trying deliberately to destroy yourself?”
“Perhaps you think it would be better to remain here and be murdered.”
“Murdered! You must be having delusions. What can you possibly mean?”
“You know very well what I mean.”
“I assure you that I haven’t the slightest notion.”
“Don’t bother to deny it. It won’t do you any good. You gave me too much sleeping medicine and left me to go to sleep and die, but I discovered it before it was too late. I walked and walked for hours and hours, and I’m still alive, as you see, and now I’ve come back to get my things and go away again. Don’t worry about it, however. I don’t wish you any harm, in spite of what you did. I promise that I won’t cause you any trouble.”
Lila was now looking at her with such an expression of incredulous shock on her face that Ivy, for the first time, began uneasily to question her position, and to wonder if, after all, the sedative bottle had been as full as she had remembered. Thinking back, she realized, moreover, that she had never, that night, become very drowsy after leaving the apartment, except naturally, in due time, as a result of her exhaustion from so much walking.
&nbs
p; “I shouldn’t have left you alone,” Lila said. “I understand that now. I had no idea you were in such a critical state of mind.”
She walked over to Ivy and took her hand and began to stroke it, and Ivy was somehow powerless to take the hand away or to halt the disintegration of her conviction and resolution that had begun with the first doubt of Lila’s guilt. She felt a compulsion to turn and leave immediately without any of the possessions she had come to get, to run away while there was still time. But the truth was that the time had already passed, and all she could do was to stand and be stroked and seduced.
“Oh, you are much more clever and talented than I,” she said, “but I know what you did, or tried to do, and there is nothing you can say or do now that will change it or make any difference. I’m going away, whether you want it or not. Please let me get my things and leave.”
Lila kept stroking her hand. Her eyes were soft, and her voice was softer.
“Of course you shall go, if that’s what you want. You are perfectly free to do as you please, but surely it will do no harm to talk with me for a while and try to understand that I never attempted to do such a terrible thing to you. Come into the bedroom and sit down, and we’ll have a quiet talk together, and you will surely see how wrong you are. Do you seriously believe that I could wish to harm you? Do you remember, when you were at ho ne, how we used to sit under the tree in the yard, and walk together in the country, and lie on the beach, and all the things we said to each other, and were to each other, and meant to each other? Do you think, after all this, that I could do you the least harm or wish, you anything but good? Come now. We’ll have a quiet talk, and everything will be as it used to be, and afterward, if you still wish it, you can go wherever you please.”
She began to pull gently, leading Ivy away from the door and across the room, and Ivy followed as she had followed in other places and at other times, knowing that she should not and desperately wishing that she would not, but following, nevertheless, because Lila was Lila, the way and the life. She tried to think of Henry, of his kindness and the hope for which he stood, but Henry was at the moment no more than a rather fantastic creature in an impossible world that she had surely dreamed about in a bad dream in a bad night. Now, after the bad dream, there was no one left in the bright and shattering world as it truly was except her and Lila, ineffable Lila, and the world was all green and blue and glittering crystal, above and beyond an expanse of hot, white sand, and they were lying on the beach in a secluded cove at home, not on this bed where she had almost died to music. That was the way it had been in the beginning and still was and would always be.
Lila was stroking her now, speaking in her ear the softest words. Ivy’s strength—what was left of it—was drawn from her body like fluid by the insidious caress of Lila’s fingers. Then Lila’s soft, moist lips were upon hers, hungry and demanding, and the old, familiar sensations rolled through Ivy in a tempestuous tide.
Lila’s full-breasted body was locked closely to her own aching flesh. Lila’s lips moved from Ivy’s mouth, to her cheek, her throat, the soft valley between her breasts. Lila’s hands and body were vitally, excitingly alive against her and Ivy began to lose all sense of time. For this little while nothing mattered but Lila—the savage pressure of her writhing flesh against her own slender body, the touch of Lila’s sure hands on her breasts and flanks, the sweet and tormenting caress of her feverish mouth.
Then, suddenly, through the seething sea of sensation that enveloped Ivy came a random thrust of fear and with it a fleeting thought of Henry and what Henry could mean to her—if she so willed it. Deep inside her a warning voice—faint but insistent—whispered that if she were to lie any longer in submission to Lila’s calculated seduction she would be forever lost.
With a strangled cry that tore at her throat like a claw, Ivy jerked herself free of Lila’s warm, intoxicating embrace. She rose, staggering, to her feet, her vision blurred, all her senses hammering, and stumbled to the closet. She jerked open the door, swung it back so that it banged against the wall, then began pulling clothing from the rack in a kind of frenzied abandon.
From the back of the closet she took a large bag. Opening the bag on the floor, she began to throw the clothing into it without the least care. Lila, sitting up on the edge of the bed, her features flushed watched her with eyes that were slowly, after a moment of wonder, filled with the venom of hatred and icy rage.
“What are you doing?” she said.
Her voice was like the edge of a razor. She might have been, from the sound of it, speaking to a guest who had been intolerably vulgar.
“You can see what I’m doing,” Ivy said. “I’m taking my things, and I’m going away, as I said I was.”
“Go, then. I thought I could stop you from making an incredible fool of yourself, possibly from destroying yourself, but I see now that I can’t, and I’m not certain, since you have become such a bore, that I even want to, or would if I could. It will be a satisfaction to me to be rid of you.”
Ivy continued her abandoned packing, and Lila continued to sit on the bed and watch. After a while, Lila got up and went over to the dressing table and got an emery board and returned to the bed. She began shaping her fingernails carefully with the emery board, now paying absolutely no attention to Ivy, who had closed the large bag and was filling a smaller one with toilet articles and other small possessions. Lila did not look up from her meticulous work until Ivy had finished at last and was standing erect beside the large bag, the smaller one in her hand, strangely irresolute in the end, as if, now that the time had come to go, she could not quite believe in her ability to take such definitive action.
“Do you have everything?” Lila said.
“I’m not sure. I think so.”
“Please be absolutely sure to take everything. I want nothing left to remind me that you were ever here, or that I ever knew you.”
“Do you hate me so much?”
“I don’t hate you at all. I despise you, which is something quite different. I despise your whining and your eternal, sickly depression. You may call your moods and attitudes by whatever euphemisms you may choose, but the fact is that you are simply a coward, and that’s your whole trouble. I can’t understand how I’ve tolerated you so long. It’s much better that you are leaving, since you insist, for sooner or later I might have felt compelled to send you away anyhow.”
“I’m not such a coward as you think. You’ll see.”
“Oh, you’ll come crawling back when you reach the miserable end of whatever stupid arrangement you’ve got yourself involved in. I suppose, since I have some responsibility for you, that I’ll take you in again.”
“I won’t come back.”
Lila stood up slowly. She made no threatening gesture, no overt sign at all of violence, and her voice, when she spoke, was rigidly restrained. But the quality of her fury was all the more deadly for its restraint.
“For God’s sake, then, will you kindly quit talking about it and go? Go at once. I want you to get out of my apartment and out of my sight and out of my mind. Before you go, however, I want you to understand one thing clearly. If you do anything or say anything to harm me, I’ll find a way to make you regret it.”
“I have no wish to harm you,” Ivy said. “I’ve told you so before, and it’s true.”
The room was menacing, a place of danger in which all objects were in a conspiracy against her. Bending at the knees, holding her body rigid in precarious balance, she picked up the large bag and walked carefully out of the bedroom and through the living room to the door. She set the large bag down, opened the door, picked the bag up again, went through into the hall, once more set the bag down while she closed the door firmly behind her. She did all this with an air of conscious calculation, as if it were terribly complex and difficult, and afterward, standing safely in the hall at last, she had a sense of
exhilaration that she had actually done under the most difficult circumstances, after being subjected to the most seductive influence, what she had come to do.
Carrying the bags, she walked downstairs, preferring not to use the elevator. There was no taxi in sight on the street outside, and so she began to walk and had walked several blocks before a taxi came along and stopped at her signal. This also seemed to her a major and significant accomplishment, stopping the taxi so easily, and she got into it and gave the address on Market Street with a feeling of authority that was quite satisfying. She had one bad moment when she saw that the meter registered an amount larger than the balance of what Henry had left for her, but then she remembered her own money in the small bag, and she got safely to where she was going and paid the fare fully and everything was all right, or nearly so.
CHAPTER 5
In the following days of their chaste cohabitation, Henry became accustomed to having Ivy around the place and would have missed her if she had gone away. Most surprisingly of all, he discovered that he worked better when she was there, somehow supported and sustained in his efforts by the slight sounds of her movement, her breathing, the occasional remarks she made aloud to herself without any expectation of a response from him. When he came back in the evenings from his small job with a minor publisher of three obscure trade journals, he came with a sense of expectancy that was never quite sure of fulfillment, and he always discovered her presence with mixed feelings of relief and astonishment that she had not, while he was gone, packed her things and departed without a sign or word.
Now, on a night in December, he looked up and around from his work at the table and saw her lying on her belly on the sofa with a thick book propped against the sofa’s arm in front of her eyes. It was a childish and appealing position, her knees bent and her heels waving back and forth above her narrow stern. He got up suddenly and walked across the room to one of the windows overlooking the street. Christmas was coming on, and the street lamps spaced along the curb were decorated with large red-and-white striped candy canes. The windows of the shops across the street had been dressed for the season with monotonous similarity in bright tinsel and piper above cotton and glitter in the semblance of snow. It had snowed in reality for a day and a night, but the snow was now slush on the sidewalk and street. On the nearest corner, seen at a sharp angle from the window where Henry stood, a large black pot of the Salvation Army hung from a tripod to receive alms for the poor. A soldier of the Army stood beside the pot and rang his bell in largo tempo, calculated to survive the long hours of supplication. The sound of the bell did not reach Henry, but he imagined, each time the soldier’s arm rose and fell, that he could hear the clapper strike.
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