He had no great self-reproach — some, of course, but there were other things dominant in him now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent, he wanted nothing more from life. By her three minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation. However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that had shone through those three minutes. She was beautiful — but especially she was without mercy. He must own that strength that could send him away.
At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony. His clarity of mind, all those endless resources which he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside. Not only for that night but for the days and weeks that followed his books were to be but furniture and his friends only people who lived and walked in a nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape — that world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.
About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry. He went down into Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips. Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though they were on skis. Anthony turned over toward Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his thoughts as not to notice that several passers-by had stared at him. His overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting in, hard and full of merciless death.
… After a while a waitress spoke to him, a fat waitress with black-rimmed eye-glasses from which dangled a long black cord.
“Order, please!”
Her voice, he considered, was unnecessarily loud. He looked up resentfully.
“You wanna order or doncha?”
“Of course,” he protested.
“Well, I ast you three times. This ain’t no rest-room.”
He glanced at the big clock and discovered with a start that it was after two. He was down around Thirtieth Street somewhere, and after a moment he found and translated the
[Illustration: S’DLIHC] [Transcribers note: The illustration shows the word “CHILD’s” in mirror image.]
in a white semicircle of letters upon the glass front. The place was inhabited sparsely by three or four bleak and half-frozen night-hawks.
“Give me some bacon and eggs and coffee, please.”
The waitress bent upon him a last disgusted glance and, looking ludicrously intellectual in her corded glasses, hurried away.
God! Gloria’s kisses had been such flowers. He remembered as though it had been years ago the low freshness of her voice, the beautiful lines of her body shining through her clothes, her face lily-colored under the lamps of the street — under the lamps.
Misery struck at him again, piling a sort of terror upon the ache and yearning. He had lost her. It was true — no denying it, no softening it. But a new idea had seared his sky — what of Bloeckman! What would happen now? There was a wealthy man, middle-aged enough to be tolerant with a beautiful wife, to baby her whims and indulge her unreason, to wear her as she perhaps wished to be worn — a bright flower in his button-hole, safe and secure from the things she feared. He felt that she had been playing with the idea of marrying Bloeckman, and it was well possible that this disappointment in Anthony might throw her on sudden impulse into Bloeckman’s arms.
The idea drove him childishly frantic. He wanted to kill Bloeckman and make him suffer for his hideous presumption. He was saying this over and over to himself with his teeth tight shut, and a perfect orgy of hate and fright in his eyes.
But, behind this obscene jealousy, Anthony was in love at last, profoundly and truly in love, as the word goes between man and woman.
His coffee appeared at his elbow and gave off for a certain time a gradually diminishing wisp of steam. The night manager, seated at his desk, glanced at the motionless figure alone at the last table, and then with a sigh moved down upon him just as the hour hand crossed the figure three on the big clock.
WISDOM
After another day the turmoil subsided and Anthony began to exercise a measure of reason. He was in love — he cried it passionately to himself. The things that a week before would have seemed insuperable obstacles, his limited income, his desire to be irresponsible and independent, had in this forty hours become the merest chaff before the wind of his infatuation. If he did not marry her his life would be a feeble parody on his own adolescence. To be able to face people and to endure the constant reminder of Gloria that all existence had become, it was necessary for him to have hope. So he built hope desperately and tenaciously out of the stuff of his dream, a hope flimsy enough, to be sure, a hope that was cracked and dissipated a dozen times a day, a hope mothered by mockery, but, nevertheless, a hope that would be brawn and sinew to his self-respect.
Out of this developed a spark of wisdom, a true perception of his own from out the effortless past.
“Memory is short,” he thought.
So very short. At the crucial point the Trust President is on the stand, a potential criminal needing but one push to be a jailbird, scorned by the upright for leagues around. Let him be acquitted — and in a year all is forgotten. “Yes, he did have some trouble once, just a technicality, I believe.” Oh, memory is very short!
Anthony had seen Gloria altogether about a dozen times, say two dozen hours. Supposing he left her alone for a month, made no attempt to see her or speak to her, and avoided every place where she might possibly be. Wasn’t it possible, the more possible because she had never loved him, that at the end of that time the rush of events would efface his personality from her conscious mind, and with his personality his offense and humiliation? She would forget, for there would be other men. He winced. The implication struck out at him — other men. Two months — God! Better three weeks, two weeks — —
He thought this the second evening after the catastrophe when he was undressing, and at this point he threw himself down on the bed and lay there, trembling very slightly and looking at the top of the canopy.
Two weeks — that was worse than no time at all. In two weeks he would approach her much as he would have to now, without personality or confidence — remaining still the man who had gone too far and then for a period that in time was but a moment but in fact an eternity, whined. No, two weeks was too short a time. Whatever poignancy there had been for her in that afternoon must have time to dull. He must give her a period when the incident should fade, and then a new period when she should gradually begin to think of him, no matter how dimly, with a true perspective that would remember his pleasantness as well as his humiliation.
He fixed, finally, on six weeks as approximately the interval best suited to his purpose, and on a desk calendar he marked the days off, finding that it would fall on the ninth of April. Very well, on that day he would phone and ask her if he might call. Until then — silence.
After his decision a gradual improvement was manifest. He had taken at least a step in the direction to which hope pointed, and he realized that the less he brooded upon her the better he would be able to give the desired impression when they met.
In another hour he fell into a deep sleep.
THE INTERVAL
Nevertheless, though, as the days passed, the glory of her hair dimmed perceptibly for him and in a year of separation might have departed completely, the six weeks held many abominable days. He dreaded the sight of Dick and Maury, imagining wildly that they knew all — but when the three met it was Richard Caramel and not Anthony who was the centre of attention; “The Demon Lover” had been ac
cepted for immediate publication. Anthony felt that from now on he moved apart. He no longer craved the warmth and security of Maury’s society which had cheered him no further back than November. Only Gloria could give that now and no one else ever again. So Dick’s success rejoiced him only casually and worried him not a little. It meant that the world was going ahead — writing and reading and publishing — and living. And he wanted the world to wait motionless and breathless for six weeks — while Gloria forgot.
TWO ENCOUNTERS
His greatest satisfaction was in Geraldine’s company. He took her once to dinner and the theatre and entertained her several times in his apartment. When he was with her she absorbed him, not as Gloria had, but quieting those erotic sensibilities in him that worried over Gloria. It didn’t matter how he kissed Geraldine. A kiss was a kiss — to be enjoyed to the utmost for its short moment. To Geraldine things belonged in definite pigeonholes: a kiss was one thing, anything further was quite another; a kiss was all right; the other things were “bad.”
When half the interval was up two incidents occurred on successive days that upset his increasing calm and caused a temporary relapse.
The first was — he saw Gloria. It was a short meeting. Both bowed. Both spoke, yet neither heard the other. But when it was over Anthony read down a column of The Sun three times in succession without understanding a single sentence.
One would have thought Sixth Avenue a safe street! Having forsworn his barber at the Plaza he went around the corner one morning to be shaved, and while waiting his turn he took off coat and vest, and with his soft collar open at the neck stood near the front of the shop. The day was an oasis in the cold desert of March and the sidewalk was cheerful with a population of strolling sun-worshippers. A stout woman upholstered in velvet, her flabby cheeks too much massaged, swirled by with her poodle straining at its leash — the effect being given of a tug bringing in an ocean liner. Just behind them a man in a striped blue suit, walking slue-footed in white-spatted feet, grinned at the sight and catching Anthony’s eye, winked through the glass. Anthony laughed, thrown immediately into that humor in which men and women were graceless and absurd phantasms, grotesquely curved and rounded in a rectangular world of their own building. They inspired the same sensations in him as did those strange and monstrous fish who inhabit the esoteric world of green in the aquarium.
Two more strollers caught his eye casually, a man and a girl — then in a horrified instant the girl resolved herself into Gloria. He stood here powerless; they came nearer and Gloria, glancing in, saw him. Her eyes widened and she smiled politely. Her lips moved. She was less than five feet away.
“How do you do?” he muttered inanely.
Gloria, happy, beautiful, and young — with a man he had never seen before!
It was then that the barber’s chair was vacated and he read down the newspaper column three times in succession.
The second incident took place the next day. Going into the Manhattan bar about seven he was confronted with Bloeckman. As it happened, the room was nearly deserted, and before the mutual recognition he had stationed himself within a foot of the older man and ordered his drink, so it was inevitable that they should converse.
“Hello, Mr. Patch,” said Bloeckman amiably enough.
Anthony took the proffered hand and exchanged a few aphorisms on the fluctuations of the mercury.
“Do you come in here much?” inquired Bloeckman.
“No, very seldom.” He omitted to add that the Plaza bar had, until lately, been his favorite.
“Nice bar. One of the best bars in town.”
Anthony nodded. Bloeckman emptied his glass and picked up his cane. He was in evening dress.
“Well, I’ll be hurrying on. I’m going to dinner with Miss Gilbert.”
Death looked suddenly out at him from two blue eyes. Had he announced himself as his vis-à-vis’s prospective murderer he could not have struck a more vital blow at Anthony. The younger man must have reddened visibly, for his every nerve was in instant clamor. With tremendous effort he mustered a rigid — oh, so rigid — smile, and said a conventional good-by. But that night he lay awake until after four, half wild with grief and fear and abominable imaginings.
WEAKNESS
And one day in the fifth week he called her up. He had been sitting in his apartment trying to read “L’Education Sentimental,” and something in the book had sent his thoughts racing in the direction that, set free, they always took, like horses racing for a home stable. With suddenly quickened breath he walked to the telephone. When he gave the number it seemed to him that his voice faltered and broke like a schoolboy’s. The Central must have heard the pounding of his heart. The sound of the receiver being taken up at the other end was a crack of doom, and Mrs. Gilbert’s voice, soft as maple syrup running into a glass container, had for him a quality of horror in its single “Hello-o-ah?”
“Miss Gloria’s not feeling well. She’s lying down, asleep. Who shall I say called?”
“Nobody!” he shouted.
In a wild panic he slammed down the receiver; collapsed into his armchair in the cold sweat of breathless relief.
SERENADE
The first thing he said to her was: “Why, you’ve bobbed your hair!” and she answered: “Yes, isn’t it gorgeous?”
It was not fashionable then. It was to be fashionable in five or six years. At that time it was considered extremely daring.
“It’s all sunshine outdoors,” he said gravely. “Don’t you want to take a walk?”
She put on a light coat and a quaintly piquant Napoleon hat of Alice Blue, and they walked along the Avenue and into the Zoo, where they properly admired the grandeur of the elephant and the collar-height of the giraffe, but did not visit the monkey house because Gloria said that monkeys smelt so bad.
Then they returned toward the Plaza, talking about nothing, but glad for the spring singing in the air and for the warm balm that lay upon the suddenly golden city. To their right was the Park, while at the left a great bulk of granite and marble muttered dully a millionaire’s chaotic message to whosoever would listen: something about “I worked and I saved and I was sharper than all Adam and here I sit, by golly, by golly!”
All the newest and most beautiful designs in automobiles were out on Fifth Avenue, and ahead of them the Plaza loomed up rather unusually white and attractive. The supple, indolent Gloria walked a short shadow’s length ahead of him, pouring out lazy casual comments that floated a moment on the dazzling air before they reached his ear.
“Oh!” she cried, “I want to go south to Hot Springs! I want to get out in the air and just roll around on the new grass and forget there’s ever been any winter.”
“Don’t you, though!”
“I want to hear a million robins making a frightful racket. I sort of like birds.”
“All women are birds,” he ventured.
“What kind am I?” — quick and eager.
“A swallow, I think, and sometimes a bird of paradise. Most girls are sparrows, of course — see that row of nurse-maids over there? They’re sparrows — or are they magpies? And of course you’ve met canary girls — and robin girls.”
“And swan girls and parrot girls. All grown women are hawks, I think, or owls.”
“What am I — a buzzard?”
She laughed and shook her head.
“Oh, no, you’re not a bird at all, do you think? You’re a Russian wolfhound.”
Anthony remembered that they were white and always looked unnaturally hungry. But then they were usually photographed with dukes and princesses, so he was properly flattered.
“Dick’s a fox terrier, a trick fox terrier,” she continued.
“And Maury’s a cat.” Simultaneously it occurred to him how like Bloeckman was to a robust and offensive hog. But he preserved a discreet silence.
Later, as they parted, Anthony asked when he might see her again.
“Don’t you ever make long engagements?” he plea
ded, “even if it’s a week ahead, I think it’d be fun to spend a whole day together, morning and afternoon both.”
“It would be, wouldn’t it?” She thought for a moment. “Let’s do it next
Sunday.”
“All right. I’ll map out a programme that’ll take up every minute.”
He did. He even figured to a nicety what would happen in the two hours when she would come to his apartment for tea: how the good Bounds would have the windows wide to let in the fresh breeze — but a fire going also lest there be chill in the air — and how there would be clusters of flowers about in big cool bowls that he would buy for the occasion. They would sit on the lounge.
And when the day came they did sit upon the lounge. After a while Anthony kissed her because it came about quite naturally; he found sweetness sleeping still upon her lips, and felt that he had never been away. The fire was bright and the breeze sighing in through the curtains brought a mellow damp, promising May and world of summer. His soul thrilled to remote harmonies; he heard the strum of far guitars and waters lapping on a warm Mediterranean shore — for he was young now as he would never be again, and more triumphant than death.
Six o’clock stole down too soon and rang the querulous melody of St. Anne’s chimes on the corner. Through the gathering dusk they strolled to the Avenue, where the crowds, like prisoners released, were walking with elastic step at last after the long winter, and the tops of the busses were thronged with congenial kings and the shops full of fine soft things for the summer, the rare summer, the gay promising summer that seemed for love what the winter was for money. Life was singing for his supper on the corner! Life was handing round cocktails in the street! Old women there were in that crowd who felt that they could have run and won a hundred-yard dash!
Complete Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald UK (Illustrated) Page 38