“He is the only person I still know,” she said, “who is going on in the
world where things happen. . . . My sister is a tired old maid.”
“I have understood that, a little,” I said. “You may have heard a good
deal about Noel and me. I have never tried to take what you have kept.”
“I know,” she said, “I have nothing against you. I used to quarrel with
Noel, because he met younger, beautiful women, while not a man this side
of hell will look at me, again. But I’ve got reconciled to that.
Only—now it’s different.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because Noel and I are going to have a baby, in seven months or so.”
I held on to the edge of my desk. The sharp corners cut into my hands.
Noel’s wife became part of a picture—the office walls and ceiling—and
the view of Manhattan lights outside. The picture swung, and swung,
crazily.
I said to myself: “You have been rarely privileged, Patricia. You have
been The Wife, and The Other Woman. You have played ball on both sides
of that net, and been privileged to lose on both. That’s a rare
experience.”
I said to myself: “This finishes you, Patricia . . . that wife that was
a vague fantastic figure on the outskirts of his life—owns him now for
all time. Poor Noel, poor Noel—he’ll never go to Yokohama, he can never
leave New York. He’ll live and die where he is, tied to that half-masked
figure, and the red-haired baby I wanted, that woman will have.”
I said to myself: “No, one doesn’t go insane, one doesn’t scream—one
remembers that the years taught one something. But what, after all, did
they teach? Oh, yes, I remember—that all things pass—that all things
pass.”