MEET YOU DOWNSTAIRS AT 5PM. CAROL.

Therese crushed it in her hand. She pressed it hard with her thumb into

her palm, and watched the messenger boy who was really an old man walk

back toward the elevators. He walked ploddingly, with a stoop that

thrust his knees far ahead of him, and his puttees were loose and

wobbly.

“You look happy,” Mrs. Zabriskie said dismally to her as she went by.

Therese smiled. “I am.” Mrs. Zabriskie had a two months’ old baby, she

had told Therese, and her husband was out of work now. Therese wondered

if Mrs. Zabriskie and her husband were in love with each other, and

really happy. Perhaps they were, but there was nothing in Mrs.

Zabriskie’s blank face and her plodding walk that would suggest it.

Perhaps once Mrs. Zabriskie had been as happy as she. Perhaps it had

gone away. She remembered reading—even Richard once saying—that love

usually dies after two years of marriage. That was a cruel thing, a

trick. She tried to imagine Carol’s face, the smell of her perfume,

becoming meaningless. But in the first place could she say she was in

love with Carol? She had come to a question she could not answer.

At a quarter to five, Therese went to Mrs. Hendrickson and asked

permission to leave a half hour early. Mrs. Hendrickson might have

thought the telegram had something to do with it, but she let Therese go

without even a complaining look, and that was another thing that made

the day a strange one.

Carol was waiting for her in the foyer where they had met before.

“Hello!” Therese said. “I’m through.”

“Through what?”

“Through with working. Here.” But Carol seemed depressed, and it

dampened Therese instantly. She said anyway, “I was awfully happy to get

the telegram.”

“I didn’t know if you’d be free. Are you free tonight?”

“Of course.”

And they walked on, slowly, amid the jostling crowd, Carol in her

delicate looking suede pumps that made her a couple of inches taller

than Therese. It had begun to snow about an hour before, but it was

stopping already. The snow was no more than a film underfoot, like thin

white wool drawn across the street and sidewalk.

“We might have seen Abby tonight, but she’s busy,” Carol said. “Anyway,

we can take a drive, if you’d like. It’s good to see you. You’re an

angel to be free tonight. Do you know what?”

“No,” Therese said, still happy in spite of herself, though Carol’s mood

was disquieting. Therese felt something had happened.

“Do you suppose there’s a place to get a cup of coffee around here?”

“Yes. A little farther east.”

Therese was thinking of one of the sandwich shops between Fifth and

Madison, but Carol chose a small bar with an awning in front. The waiter

was reluctant at first, and said it was the cocktail hour, but when

Carol started to leave, he went away and got the coffee. Therese was

anxious about picking up the handbag. She didn’t want to do it when

Carol was with her, even though the package would be wrapped.

“Did something happen?” Therese asked.

“Something too long to explain.” Carol smiled at her but the smile was

tired, and a silence followed, an empty silence as if they traveled

through space away from each other.

Probably Carol had had to break an engagement she had looked forward to,

Therese thought. Carol would of course be busy on Christmas Eve.

“I’m not keeping you from doing anything now?” Carol asked.

Therese felt herself growing tense, helplessly. “I’m supposed to pick up

a package on Madison Avenue. It’s not far. I can do it now, if you’ll

wait for me.”

“All right.”

Therese stood up. “I can do it in three minutes with a taxi. But I don’t

think you will wait for me, will you?”

Carol smiled and reached for her hand. Indifferently, Carol squeezed her

hand and dropped it. “Yes, I’ll wait.”

The bored tone of Carol’s voice was in her ears as she sat on the edge

of the taxi seat. On the way back, the traffic was so slow, she got out

and ran the last block.

Carol was still there, her coffee only half finished.

“I don’t want my coffee,” Therese said, because Carol seemed ready to

go.

“My car’s downtown. Let’s get a taxi down.”

They went down into the business section not far from the Battery.

Carol’s car was brought up from an underground garage. Carol drove west

to the Westside Highway.

“This is better.” Carol shed her coat as she drove. “Throw it in back,

will you?”

And they were silent again. Carol drove faster, changing her lane to

pass cars, as if they had a destination. Therese set herself to say

something, anything at all, by the time they reached the George

Washington Bridge. Suddenly it occurred to her that if Carol and her

husband were divorcing, Carol had been downtown to see a lawyer today.

The district there was full of law offices. And something had gone

wrong. Why were they divorcing? Because Harge was having an affair with

the woman called Cynthia? Therese was cold. Carol had lowered the window

beside her, and every time the car sped, the wind burst through and

wrapped its cold arms around her.

“That’s where Abby lives,” Carol said, nodding across the river.

Therese did not even see any special lights. “Who’s Abby?”

“Abby? My best friend.” Then Carol looked at her. “Aren’t you cold with

this window open?”

“No.”

“You must be.” They stopped for a red light, and Carol rolled the window

up. Carol looked at her, as if really seeing her for the first time that

evening, and under her eyes that went from her face to her hands in her

lap, Therese felt like a puppy Carol had bought at a roadside kennel,

that Carol had just remembered was riding beside her.

“What happened, Carol? Are you getting a divorce now?”

Carol sighed. “Yes, a divorce,” she said quite calmly, and started the

car.

“And he has the child?”

“Just tonight.”

Therese was about to ask another question, when Carol said, “Let’s talk

about something else.”

A car went by with the radio playing Christmas carols and everyone

singing.

And she and Carol were silent. They drove past Yonkers, and it seemed to

Therese she had left every chance of talking further to Carol somewhere

behind on the road. Carol insisted suddenly that she should eat

something, because it was getting on to eight, so they stopped at a

little restaurant by the roadside, a place that sold fried-clam

sandwiches. They sat at the counter and ordered sandwiches and coffee,

but Carol did not eat. Carol asked her questions about Richard, not in

the concerned way she had Sunday afternoon, but rather as if she talked

to keep Therese from asking more questions about her. They were personal

questions, yet Therese answered them mechanically and impersonally.

Carol’s quiet voice went on and on, much quieter than the voice of the

counter boy talking with someone three yards away.

“Do you sleep with him?” Carol asked her.

“I did. Two or three times.” Therese told her about those times, the

first time and the three times afterward. She was not embarrassed,

talking about it. It had never seemed so dull and unimportant before.

She felt Carol could imagine every minute of those evenings. She felt

Carol’s objective, appraising glance over her, and she knew Carol was

about to say she did not look particularly cold, or perhaps, emotionally

starved. But Carol was silent, and Therese stared uncomfortably at the

list of songs on the little music box in front of her. She remembered

someone telling her once she had a passionate mouth, she couldn’t

remember who.

“Sometimes it takes time,” Carol said. “Don’t you believe in giving

people another chance?”

“But why? It isn’t pleasant. And I’m not in love with him.”

“Don’t you think you might be, if you got this worked out?”

“Is that the way people fall in love?”

Carol looked up at the deer’s head on the wall behind the counter. “No,”

she said, smiling. “What do you like about Richard?”

“Well, he has—” But she wasn’t sure if it really was sincerity. He

wasn’t sincere, she felt, about his ambition to be a painter. “I like

his attitude—more than most men’s. He does treat me like a person

instead of just a girl he can go so far with or not. And I like his

family—the fact that he has a family.”

“Lots of people have families.”

Therese tried again. “He’s flexible. He changes. He’s not like most men

that you can label doctor or—or insurance salesman.”

“I think you know him better than I knew Harge after months of marriage.

At least you’re not going to make the same mistake I did, to marry

because it was the thing to do when you were about twenty, among the

people I knew.”

“You mean you weren’t in love?”

“Yes, I was, very much. And so was Harge. And he was the kind of man who

could wrap your life up in a week and put it in his pocket. Were you

ever in love, Therese?”

She waited, until the word from nowhere, false, guilty, moved her lips,

“No.”

“But you’d like to be.” Carol was smiling.

“Is Harge still in love with you?”

Carol looked down at her lap, impatiently, and perhaps she was shocked

at her bluntness, Therese thought, but when Carol spoke, her voice was

the same as before, “Even I don’t know. In a way, he’s the same

emotionally as he’s always been. It’s just that now I can see how he

really is. He said I was the first woman he’d ever been in love with. I

think it’s true, but I don’t think he was in love with me—in the usual

sense of the word—for more than a few months. He’s never been interested

in anyone else, it’s true. Maybe he’d be more human if he were. That I

could understand and forgive.”

“Does he like Rindy?”

“Dotes on her.” Carol glanced at her smiling. “If he’s in love with

anyone, it’s Rindy.”

“What kind of a name is that?”

“Nerinda. Harge named her. He wanted a son, but I think he’s even more

pleased with a daughter. I wanted a girl. I wanted two or three

children.”

“And—Harge didn’t?”

“I didn’t.” She looked at Therese again. “Is this the right conversation

for Christmas Eve?” Carol reached for a cigarette, and accepted the one

Therese offered her, a Philip Morris.

“I like to know all about you,” Therese said.

“I didn’t want any more children, because I was afraid our marriage was

going on the rocks anyway, even with Rindy. So you want to fall in love?

You probably will soon, and if you do, enjoy it, it’s harder later on.”

“To love someone?”

“To fall in love. Or even to have the desire to make love. I think sex

flows more sluggishly in all of us than we care to believe, especially

men care to believe. The first adventures are usually nothing but a

satisfying of curiosity, and after that one keeps repeating the same

actions, trying to find—what?”

“What?” Therese asked.

“Is there a word? A friend, a companion, or maybe just a sharer. What

good are words? I mean, I think people often try to find through sex,

things that are much easier to find in other ways.”

What Carol said about curiosity, she knew was true. “What other ways?”

she asked.

Carol gave her a glance. “I think that’s for each person to find out. I

wonder if I can get a drink here.”

But the restaurant served only beer and wine, so they left. Carol did

not stop anywhere for her drink as they drove back toward New York.

Carol asked her if she wanted to go home or come out to her house for a

while, and Therese said to Carol’s house. She remembered the Kellys had

asked her to drop in on the wine and fruitcake party they were having

tonight, and she had promised to, but they wouldn’t miss her, she

thought.

“What a rotten time I give you,” Carol said suddenly. “Sunday and now

this. I’m not the best company this evening. What would you like to do?

Would you like to go to a restaurant in Newark where they have lights

and Christmas music tonight? It’s not a night club. We could have a

decent dinner there, too.”

“I really don’t care about going anywhere—for myself.”

“You’ve been in that rotten store all day, and we haven’t done a thing

to celebrate your liberation.”

“I just like to be here with you,” Therese said, and hearing the

explanatory tone in her voice, she smiled.

Carol shook her head, not looking at her. “Child, child, where do you

wander—all by yourself?”

Then a moment later on the New Jersey highway, Carol said, “I know

what.” And she turned the car into a graveled section off the road and

stopped. “Come out with me.”

They were in front of a lighted stand piled high with Christmas trees.

Carol told her to pick a tree, one not too big and not too small. They

put the tree in the back of the car, and Therese sat in front beside

Carol with her arms full of holly and fir branches. Therese pressed her

face into them and inhaled the dark-green sharpness of their smell,

their clean spice that was like a wild forest and like all the artifices

of Christmas—tree baubles, gifts, snow, Christmas music, holidays. It

was being through with the store and being beside Carol now. It was the

purr of the car’s engine, and the needles of the fir branches that she

could touch with her fingers. I am happy, I am happy, Therese thought.

“Let’s do the tree now,” Carol said as soon as they entered the house.

Carol turned the radio on in the living room, and fixed a drink for both

of them. There were Christmas songs on the radio, bells breaking

resonantly, as if they were inside a great church. Carol brought a

blanket of white cotton for the snow around the tree, and Therese

sprinkled it with sugar so it would glisten. Then she cut an elongated

angel out of some gold ribbon and fixed it to the top of the tree, and

folded tissue paper and cut a string of angels to thread along the

branches.

“You’re very good at that,” Carol said, surveying the tree from the

hearth. “It’s superb. Everything but presents.”

Carol’s present was on the sofa beside Therese’s coat. The card she had

made for it was at home, however, and she didn’t want to give it without

the card. Therese looked at the tree. “What else do we need?”

“Nothing. Do you know what time it is?”

The radio had signed off. Therese saw the mantel clock. It was after

one. “It’s Christmas,” she said.

“You’d better stay the night.”

“All right.”

“What do you have to do tomorrow?”

“Nothing.”

Carol got her drink from the radio top. “Don’t you have to see Richard?”

She did have to see Richard, at twelve noon. She was to spend the day at

his house. But she could make some kind of excuse. “No. I said I might

see him. It’s not important.”

“I can drive you in early.”

“Are you busy tomorrow?”

Carol finished the last inch of her drink. “Yes,” she said.

Therese began to clean up the mess she had made, the scraps of tissue

and snippets of ribbon. She hated cleaning up after making something.

“Your friend Richard sounds like the kind of man who needs a woman

around him to work for. Whether he marries her or not,” Carol said.

“Isn’t he like that?”

Why talk of Richard now, Therese thought irritably. She felt that Carol

liked Richard—which could only be her own fault—and a distant jealousy

prickled her, sharp as a pin.

“Actually, I admire that more than the men who live alone or think they

live alone, and end by making the stupidest blunders with women.”

Therese stared at Carol’s pack of cigarettes on the coffee table. She

had absolutely nothing to say on the subject. She could find Carol’s

perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she

wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.

“It has nothing to do with whether people marry, has it?”

“What?” Therese looked at her and saw her smiling a little.

“Harge is the kind of man who doesn’t let a woman enter his life. And on

the other hand, your friend Richard might never marry. But the pleasure

Richard will get out of thinking he wants to marry.” Carol looked at

Therese from head to foot. “The wrong girls,” she added. “Do you dance,

Therese? Do you like to dance?”

Carol seemed suddenly cool and bitter, and Therese could have wept.

“No,” she said. She should never have told her anything about Richard,

Therese thought, but now it was done.

“You’re tired. Come on to bed.”

Carol took her to the room that Harge had gone into Sunday, and turned

down the covers of one of the twin beds. It might have been Harge’s

room, Therese thought. There was certainly nothing about it that

suggested a child’s room. She thought of Rindy’s possessions that Harge

had taken from this room, and imagined Harge moving first from the

bedroom he shared with Carol, then letting Rindy bring her things into

this room, keeping them here, closing himself and Rindy away from Carol.

Carol laid some pajamas on the foot of the bed. “Good night, then,” she

said at the door. “Merry Christmas. What do you want for Christmas?”

Therese smiled suddenly. “Nothing.”

That night she dreamed of birds, long, bright red birds like flamingos,

zipping through a black forest and making scallopy patterns, arcs of red

that curved like their cries. Then her eyes opened and she heard it

really, a soft whistle curving, rising and coming down again with an

extra note at the end, and behind it the real, feebler twitter of birds.

The window was a bright gray. The whistling began again, just below the

window, and Therese got out of bed. There was a long open-topped car in

the driveway, and a woman standing in it, whistling. It was like a dream

she looked out on, a scene without color, misty at the edges.

Then she heard Carol’s whisper, as clearly as if all three of them were

in the same room together, “Are you going to bed or getting up?”

The woman in the car with her foot on the seat said just as softly,

“Both,” and Therese heard the tremor of repressed laughter in the word

and liked her instantly. “Go for a ride?” the woman asked. She was

looking up at Carol’s window with a big smile that Therese had just

begun to see.

“You nitwit,” Carol whispered.

“You alone?”

“No.”

“Oh-oh.”

“It’s all right. Do you want to come in?”

The woman got out of the car.

Therese went to the door of her room and opened it. Carol was just

coming into the hall, tying the belt of her robe.

“Sorry I wakened you,” Carol said. “Go back to bed.”

“I don’t mind. Can I come down?”

“Well, of _course_!” Carol smiled suddenly. “Get a robe out of the

closet.”

Therese got a robe, probably a robe of Harge’s, she thought, and went

downstairs.

“Who made the Christmas tree?” the woman was asking.

They were in the living room.

“She did.” Carol turned to Therese. “This is Abby. Abby Gerhard, Therese

Belivet.”

“Hello,” Abby said.

“How do you do.” Therese had hoped it was Abby. Abby looked at her now

with the same bright, rather popeyed expression of amusement that

Therese had seen when she stood in the car.

“You make a fine tree,” Abby told her.

“Will everybody stop whispering?” Carol asked.

Abby chafed her hands together and followed Carol into the kitchen. “Got

any coffee, Carol?”

Therese stood by the kitchen table, watching them, feeling at ease

because Abby paid no further attention to her, only took off her coat

and started helping Carol with the coffee. Her waist and hips looked

perfectly cylindrical, without any front or back, under her purple

knitted suit. Her hands were a little clumsy, Therese noticed, and her

feet had none of the grace of Carol’s. She looked older than Carol, and

there were two wrinkles across her forehead that cut deep when she

laughed and her strong arched eyebrows rose higher. And she and Carol

kept laughing now, while they fixed coffee and squeezed orange juice,

talking in short phrases about nothing, or nothing that was important

enough to be followed.

Except Abby’s sudden, “Well”—fishing a seed out of the last glass of

orange juice and wiping her finger carelessly on her own dress—“how’s

old Harge?”

“The same,” Carol said. Carol was looking for something in the

refrigerator, and watching her, Therese failed to hear all of what Abby

said next, or maybe it was another of the fragmentary sentences that

Carol alone understood, but it made Carol straighten up and laugh,

suddenly and hard, made her whole face change, and Therese thought with

sudden envy, she could not make Carol laugh like that, but Abby could.

“I’m going to tell him that,” Carol said. “I can’t resist.”

It was something about a Boy Scout pocket gadget for Harge.

“And tell him where it came from,” Abby said, looking at Therese and

smiling broadly, as if she should share in the joke, too. “Where’re you

from?” she asked Therese as they sat down in the table alcove at one

side of the kitchen.

“She’s from New York,” Carol answered for her, and Therese thought Abby

was going to say, why how unusual, or something silly, but Abby said

nothing at all, only looked at Therese with the same expectant smile, as

if she awaited the next cue from her.

For all their fussing about breakfast, there was only orange juice and

coffee and some unbuttered toast that nobody wanted. Abby lighted a

cigarette before she touched anything.

“Are you old enough to smoke?” she asked Therese, offering her a red box

that said Craven A’s.

Carol put her spoon down. “Abby, what is this?” she asked with an air of

embarrassment that Therese had never seen before.

“Thanks, I’d like one,” Therese said, taking a cigarette.

Abby settled her elbows on the table. “Well, what’s what?” she asked

Carol.

“I suspect you’re a little tight,” Carol said.

“Driving for hours in the open air? I left New Rochelle at two, got home

and found your message, and here I am.”

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably

did nothing all day except what she felt like doing.

“Well?” Abby said.

“Well—I didn’t win the first round,” Carol said.

Abby drew on her cigarette, showing no surprise at all. “For how long?”

“For three months.”

“Starting when?”

“Starting now. Starting last night, in fact.” Carol glanced at Therese,

then looked down at her coffee cup, and Therese knew Carol would not say

any more with her sitting there.

“That’s not set already, is it?” Abby asked.

“I’m afraid it is,” Carol answered casually, with a shrug in her tone.

“Just verbally, but it’ll hold. What’re you doing tonight? Late.”

“I’m not doing anything early. Dinner’s at two today.”

“Call me sometime.”

“Sure.”

Carol kept her eyes down, looking down at the orange juice glass in her

hand, and Therese saw a downward slant of sadness in her mouth now, a

sadness not of wisdom but of defeat.

“I’d take a trip,” Abby said. “Take a little trip away somewhere.” Then

Abby looked at Therese, another of the bright, irrelevant, friendly

glances, as if to include her in something it was impossible she could

be included in, and anyway, Therese had gone stiff with the thought that

Carol might take a trip away from her.

“I’m not much in the mood,” Carol said, but Therese heard the play of

possibility in it nevertheless.

Abby squirmed a little and looked around her. “This place is gloomy as a

coalpit in the mornings, isn’t it?”

Therese smiled a little. A coalpit, with the sun beginning to yellow the

window sill, and the evergreen tree beyond it?

Carol was looking at Abby fondly, lighting one of Abby’s cigarettes. How

well they must know each other, Therese thought, so well that nothing

either of them said or did to the other could ever surprise, ever be

misunderstood.

“Was it a good party?” Carol asked.

“Mm,” Abby said indifferently. “Do you know someone called Bob

Haversham?”

“No.”

“He was there tonight. I met him somewhere before in New York. Funnily

enough, he said he was going to work for Rattner and Aird in the

brokerage department.”

“Really.”

“I didn’t tell him I knew one of the bosses.”

“What time is it?” Carol asked after a moment.

Abby looked at her wrist watch, a small watch set in a pyramid of gold

panels. “Seven thirty. About. Do you care?”

“Want to sleep some more, Therese?”

“No. I’m fine.”

“I’ll drive you in whenever you have to go,” Carol said.

But it was Abby who drove her finally, around ten o’clock, because she

had nothing else to do, she said, and she would enjoy it.

Abby was another one who liked cold air, Therese thought as they picked

up speed on the highway. Who rode in an open-topped car in December?

“Where’d you meet Carol?” Abby yelled at her.

Therese felt she might almost, but not quite, have told Abby the truth.

“In a store,” Therese yelled back.

“Oh?” Abby drove erratically, whipping the big car around curves,

putting on speed where one didn’t expect it. “Do you like her?”

“Of course!” What a question! Like asking her if she believed in God.

Therese pointed out her house to Abby when they turned into the street.

“Do you mind doing something for me?” Therese asked. “Could you wait

here a minute? I want to give you something to give to Carol.”

“Sure,” Abby said.

Therese ran upstairs and got the card she had made, and stuck it under

the ribbon of Carol’s present. She took it back down to Abby. “You’re

going to see her tonight, aren’t you?”

Abby nodded, slowly, and Therese sensed the ghost of a challenge in

Abby’s curious black eyes, because she was going to see Carol and

Therese wasn’t, and what could Therese do about it?

“And thanks for the ride in.”

Abby smiled. “Sure you don’t want me to take you anywhere else?”

“No, thanks,” Therese said, smiling, too, because Abby would certainly

have been glad to take her even to Brooklyn Heights.

She climbed her front steps and opened her mailbox. There were two or

three letters in it, Christmas cards, one from Frankenberg’s. When she

looked into the street again, the big cream-colored car was gone, like a

thing she had imagined, like one of the birds in the dream.

chapter eight

“And now you make a wish,” Richard said.

Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.

Richard had his hands on her arms. They were standing under a thing that

looked like a beaded crescent, or a section of a starfish, that hung

from the hall ceiling. It was ugly, but the Semco family attributed

almost magical powers to it, and hung it up on special occasions.

Richard’s grandfather had brought it from Russia.

“What did you wish?” He smiled down at her possessively. This was his

house, and he had just kissed her, though the door into the living room

was open and filled with people.

“You’re not supposed to tell,” Therese said.

“You can tell in Russia.”

“Well, I’m not in Russia.”

The radio roared louder suddenly, voices singing a carol. Therese drank

the rest of the pink eggnog in her glass.

“I want to go up to your room,” she said.

Richard took her hand, and they started up the stairs.

“Ri—chard?”

The aunt with the cigarette holder was calling him from the living room

door.

Richard said a word Therese didn’t understand, and waved a hand at her.

Even on the second floor, the house trembled with the crazy dancing

below, the dancing that had nothing to do with the music. Therese heard

another glass fall, and pictured the pink foamy eggnog rolling across

the floor. This was tame compared to the real Russian Christmases they

had used to celebrate in the first week in January, Richard said.

Richard smiled at her as he closed the door of his room.

“I like my sweater,” he said.

“I’m glad.” Therese swept her full skirt in an arc and sat on the edge

of Richard’s bed. The heavy Norwegian sweater she had given Richard was

on the bed behind her, lying across its tissued box. Richard had given

her a skirt from an East India shop, a long skirt with green and gold

bands and embroidery. It was lovely, but Therese did not know where she

could ever wear it.

“How about a real shot? That stuff downstairs is sickening.” Richard got

his bottle of whisky from his closet floor.

Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“This’d be good for you.”

She shook her head again. She looked around her at the high-ceilinged,

almost square room, at the wallpaper with the barely discernible pattern

of pink roses, at the two peaceful windows curtained in slightly

yellowed white muslin. From the door, there were two pale trails in the

green carpet, one to the bureau and one to the desk in the corner. The

pot of brushes and the portfolio on the floor by the desk were the only

signs of Richard’s painting. Just as painting took up only a corner of

his brain, she felt, and she wondered how much longer he would go on

with it before he dropped it for something else. And she wondered, as

she had often wondered before, if Richard liked her only because she was

more sympathetic with his ambitions than anyone else he happened to know

now, and because he felt her criticism was a help to him. Therese got up

restlessly and went to the window. She loved the room—because it stayed

the same and stayed in the same place—yet today she felt an impulse to

burst from it. She was a different person from the one who had stood

here three weeks ago. This morning she had awakened in Carol’s house.

Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this

house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.

“You’re different today,” Richard said so abruptly that a thrill of

peril passed down her body.

“Maybe it’s the dress,” she said.

She was wearing a blue taffeta dress that was God knows how old, that

she hadn’t put on since her first months in New York. She sat down on

the bed again, and looked at Richard who stood in the middle of the

floor with the little glass of straight whisky in his hand, his clear

blue eyes moving from her face to her feet in the new high-heeled black

shoes, back to her face again.

“Terry.” Richard took her hands, pinned her hands to the bed on either

side of her. The smooth, thin lips descended on hers, firmly, with the

flick of his tongue between her lips and the aromatic smell of fresh

whisky. “Terry, you’re an angel,” Richard’s deep voice said, and she

thought of Carol saying the same thing.

She watched him pick up his little glass from the floor and set it with

the bottle into the closet. She felt immensely superior to him suddenly,

to all the people below stairs. She was happier than any of them.

Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It

depended on how much one let the string out—

“Pretty?” Richard said.

Therese sat up. “It’s a beauty!”

“I finished it last night. I thought if it was a good day, we’d go to

the park and fly it.” Richard grinned like a boy, proud of his

handiwork. “Look at the back.”

It was a Russian kite, rectangular and bowed like a shield, its slim

frame notched and tied at the corners. On the front, Richard had painted

a cathedral with whirling domes and a red sky behind it.

“Let’s go fly it now,” Therese said.

They carried the kite downstairs. Then everybody saw them and came into

the hall, uncles, aunts, and cousins, until the hall was a din and

Richard had to hold the kite in the air to protect it. The noise

irritated Therese, but Richard loved it.

“Stay for the champagne, Richard!” one of the aunts shouted, one of the

aunts with a fat midriff straining like a second bosom under a satin

dress.

“Can’t,” Richard said, and added something in Russian, and Therese had a

feeling she often had, seeing Richard with his family, that there must

have been a mistake, that Richard might be an orphan himself, a

changeling, left on the doorstep and brought up a son of this family.

But there was his brother Stephen standing in the doorway, with

Richard’s blue eyes, though Stephen was even taller and thinner.

“What roof?” Richard’s mother asked shrilly. “This roof?”

Someone had asked if they were going to fly the kite on the roof, and

since the house hadn’t a roof one could stand on, Richard’s mother had

gone off into peals of laughter. Then the dog began to bark.

“I’m going to make you that dress!” Richard’s mother called to Therese,

wagging her finger admonishingly. “I know your measurements!”

They had measured her with a tape in the living room, in the midst of

all the singing and present opening, and a couple of the men had tried

to help, too. Mrs. Semco put her arm around Therese’s waist, and

suddenly Therese embraced her and kissed her firmly on the cheek, her

lips sinking into the soft powdered cheek, in that one second pouring

out in the kiss, and in the convulsive clasp of her arm, the affection

Therese really had for her, that Therese knew would hide itself again as

if it did not exist, in the instant she released her.

Then she and Richard were free and alone, walking down the front

sidewalk. It wouldn’t be any different, if they were married, Therese

thought, visiting the family on Christmas Day. Richard would fly his

kites even when he was an old man, like his grandfather who had flown

kites in Prospect Park until the year he died, Richard had told her.

They took the subway to the park, and walked to the treeless hill where

they had come a dozen times before. Therese looked around her. There

were some boys playing with a football down on the flat field at the

edge of the trees, but otherwise the park looked quiet and still. There

was not much wind, not really enough, Richard said, and the sky was

densely white as if it carried snow.

Richard groaned, failing again. He was trying to get the kite up by

running with it.

Therese, sitting on the ground with her arms around her knees, watched

him put his head up and turn in all directions, as if he had lost

something in the air. “Here it is!” She got up, pointing.

“Yes, but it’s not steady.”

Richard ran the kite into it anyway, and the kite sagged on its long

string, then jerked up as if something had sprung it. It made a big arc,

then began to climb in another direction.

“It’s found its own wind!” Therese said.

“Yes, but it’s slow.”

“What a gloomy Gus! Can I hold it?”

“Wait’ll I get it higher.”

Richard pumped at it with long swings of his arms, but the kite stayed

at the same place in the cold sluggish air. The golden domes of the

cathedral wagged from side to side, as if the whole kite were shaking

its head saying no, and the long limp tail followed foolishly, repeating

the negation.

“Best we can do,” Richard said. “It can’t carry any more string.”

Therese did not take her eyes from it. Then the kite steadied and

stopped, like a picture of a cathedral pasted on the thick white sky.

Carol wouldn’t like kites probably, Therese thought. Kites wouldn’t

amuse her. She would glance at one, and say it was silly.

“Want to take it?”

Richard poked the string stick into her hands, and she got to her feet.

She thought, Richard had worked on the kite last night when she was with

Carol, which was why he hadn’t called her, and didn’t know she had not

been home. If he had called, he would have mentioned it. Soon there

would come the first lie.

Suddenly the kite broke its mooring in the sky and tugged sharply to get

away. Therese let the stick turn fast in her hands, as long as she dared

to under Richard’s eyes, because the kite was still low. And now it

rested again, stubbornly still.

“Jerk it!” Richard said. “Keep working it up.”

She did. It was like playing with a long elastic band. But the string

was so long and slack now, it was all she could do to stir the kite. She

pulled and pulled and pulled. Then Richard came and took it, and Therese

let her arms hang. Her breath came harder, and little muscles in her

arms were quivering. She sat down on the ground. She hadn’t won against

the kite. It hadn’t done what she wanted it to do.

“Maybe the string’s too heavy,” she said. It was a new string, soft and

white and fat as a worm.

“String’s very light. Look now. Now it’s going!”

Now it was climbing in short, upward darts, as if it had found its own

mind suddenly, and a will to escape.

“Let out more string!” she shouted.

Therese stood up. A bird flew under the kite. She stared at the

rectangle that was growing smaller and smaller, jerking back and back

like a ship’s billowed sail going backward. She felt the kite meant

something, this particular kite, at this minute.

“Richard?”

“What?”

She could see him in the corner of her eye, crouched with his hands out

in front of him, as if he rode a surfboard. “How many times were you in

love?” she asked.

Richard laughed, a short, hoarse laugh. “Never till you.”

“Yes, you were. You told me about two times.”

“If I count those, I might count twelve others, too,” Richard said

quickly, with the bluntness of preoccupation.

The kite was starting to take arcing steps downward.

Therese kept her voice on the same level. “Were you ever in love with a

boy?”

“A boy?” Richard repeated, surprised.

“Yes.”

Perhaps five seconds passed before he said, “No,” in a positive and

final tone.

At least he troubled to answer, Therese thought. What would you do if

you were, she had an impulse to ask, but the question would hardly serve

a purpose. She kept her eyes on the kite. They were both looking at the

same kite, but with what different thoughts in their minds. “Did you

ever hear of it?” she asked.

“Hear of it? You mean people like that? Of course.” Richard was standing

straight now, winding the string in with figure-eight movements of the

stick.

Therese said carefully, because he was listening, “I don’t mean people

like that. I mean two people who fall in love suddenly with each other,

out of the blue. Say two men or two girls.”

Richard’s face looked the same as it might have if they had been talking

about politics. “Did I ever know any? No.”

Therese waited until he was working with the kite again, trying to pump

it higher. Then she remarked, “I suppose it could happen, though, to

almost anyone, couldn’t it?”

He went on, winding the kite. “But those things don’t just happen.

There’s always some reason for it in the background.”

“Yes,” she said agreeably. Therese had thought back into the background.

The nearest she could remember to being “in love” was the way she had

felt about a boy she had seen a few times in the town of Montclair, when

she rode in the school bus. He had curly black hair and a handsome,

serious face, and he had been perhaps twelve years old, older than she

then. She remembered a short time when she had thought of him every day.

But that was nothing, nothing like what she felt for Carol. Was it love

or wasn’t it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she

didn’t even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she

knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither

she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed

all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions. “Do you think I

could?” Therese asked simply, before she could debate whether she dared

to ask.

“What!” Richard smiled. “Fall in love with a girl? Of course not! My

God, you haven’t, have you?”

“No,” Therese said, in an odd, inconclusive tone, but Richard did not

seem to notice the tone.

“It’s going again. Look, Terry!”

The kite was wobbling straight up, faster and faster, and the stick was

whirling in Richard’s hands. At any rate, Therese thought, she was

happier than she had ever been before. And why worry about defining

everything.

“Hey!” Richard sprinted after the stick that was leaping crazily around

the ground, as if it were trying to leave the earth, too. “Want to hold

it?” he asked, capturing it. “Practically takes you up!”

Therese took the stick. There was not much string left, and the kite was

all but invisible now. When she let her arms go all the way up, she

could feel it lifting her a little, delicious and buoyant, as if the

kite might really take her up if it got all its strength together.

“Let it out!” Richard shouted, waving his arms. His mouth was open, and

two spots of red had come in his cheeks. “Let it out!”

“There’s no more string!”

“I’m going to cut it!”

Therese couldn’t believe she had heard it, but glancing over at him, she

saw him reaching under his overcoat for his knife. “Don’t,” she said.

Richard came running over, laughing.

“Don’t!” she said angrily. “Are you crazy?” Her hands were tired, but

she clung all the harder to the stick.

“Let’s cut it! It’s more fun!” And Richard bumped into her rudely,

because he was looking up.

Therese jerked the stick sideways, out of his reach, speechless with

anger and amazement. There was an instant of fear, when she felt Richard

might really have lost his mind, and then she staggered backward, the

pull gone, the empty stick in her hand. “You’re mad!” she yelled at him.

“You’re insane!”

“It’s only a kite!” Richard laughed, craning up at the nothingness.

Therese looked in vain, even for the dangling string. “Why did you do

it?” Her voice was shrill with tears. “It was such a beautiful kite!”

“It’s only a kite!” Richard repeated. “I can make another kite!”

chapter nine

Therese started to get dressed, then changed her mind. She was still in

her robe, reading the script of _Small Rain_ that Phil had brought over

earlier, and that was now spread all over the couch. Carol had said she

was at Forty-eighth and Madison. She could be here in ten minutes.

Therese glanced around her room, and at her face in the mirror, and

decided to let it all go.

She took some ash trays to the sink and washed them, and stacked the

play script neatly on her worktable. She wondered if Carol would have

her new handbag with her. Carol had called her last night from some

place in New Jersey where she was with Abby, had told her she thought

the bag was beautiful but much too grand a present. Therese smiled,

remembering Carol’s suggesting that she take it back. At least, Carol

liked it.

The doorbell sounded in three quick rings.

Therese looked down the stairwell, and saw Carol was carrying something.

She ran down.

“It’s empty. It’s for you,” Carol said, smiling.

It was a suitcase, wrapped. Carol slipped her fingers from under the

handle and let Therese carry it. Therese put it on the couch in her

room, and cut the brown paper off carefully. The suitcase was of thick

lightbrown leather, perfectly plain.

“It’s terribly good looking!” Therese said.

“Do you like it? I don’t even know if you need a suitcase.”

“Of course, I like it.” This was the kind of suitcase for her, this

exactly and no other. Her initials were on it in small gold

letters—T.M.B. She remembered Carol asking her her middle name on

Christmas Eve.

“Work the combination and see if you like the inside.”

Therese did. “I like the smell, too,” she said.

“Are you busy? If you are, I’ll leave.”

“No. Sit down. I’m not doing anything—except reading a play.”

“What play?”

“A play I have to do sets for.” She realized suddenly she had never

mentioned stage designing to Carol.

“Sets for?”

“Yes—I’m a stage designer.” She took Carol’s coat.

Carol smiled astonishedly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she asked

quietly. “How many other rabbits are you going to pull out of your hat?”

“It’s the first real job. And it’s not a Broadway play. It’s going to be

done in the Village. A comedy. I haven’t got a union membership yet.

I’ll have to wait for a Broadway job for that.”

Carol asked her all about the union, the junior and senior memberships

that cost fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars respectively. Carol

asked her if she had all that money saved up.

“No—just a few hundred. But if I get a job, they’ll let me pay it off in

installments.”

Carol was sitting on the straight chair, the chair Richard often sat in,

watching her, and Therese could read in Carol’s expression that she had

risen suddenly in Carol’s estimation, and she couldn’t imagine why she

hadn’t mentioned before that she was a stage designer, and in fact

already had a job. “Well,” Carol said, “if a Broadway job comes out of

this, would you consider borrowing the rest of the money from me? Just

as a business loan?”

“Thanks. I—”

“I’d like to do it for you. You shouldn’t be bothered paying off two

thousand dollars at your age.”

“Thanks. But I won’t be ready for one for another couple of years.”

Carol lifted her head and blew her smoke out in a thin stream. “Oh, they

don’t really keep track of apprenticeships, do they?”

Therese smiled. “No. Of course not. Would you like a drink? I’ve got a

bottle of rye.”

“How nice. I’d love one, Therese.” Carol got up and peered at her

kitchenette shelves as Therese fixed the two drinks. “Are you a good

cook?”

“Yes. I’m better when I have someone to cook for. I can make good

omelettes. Do you like them?”

“No,” Carol said flatly, and Therese laughed. “Why don’t you show me

some of your work?”

Therese got a portfolio down from the closet. Carol sat on the couch and

looked at everything carefully, but from her comments and questions,

Therese felt she considered them too bizarre to be usable, and perhaps

not very good either. Carol said she liked best the _Petrushka_ set on

the wall.

“But it’s the same thing,” Therese said. “The same thing as the

drawings, only in model form.”

“Well, maybe it’s your drawings. They’re very positive, anyway. I like

that about them.” Carol picked up her drink from the floor and leaned

back on the couch. “You see, I didn’t make a mistake, did I?”

“About what?”

“About you.”

Therese did not know exactly what she meant. Carol was smiling at her

through her cigarette smoke, and it rattled her. “Did you think you

had?”

“No,” Carol said. “What do you have to pay for an apartment like this?”

“Fifty a month.”

Carol clicked her tongue. “Doesn’t leave you much out of your salary,

does it?”

Therese bent over her portfolio, tying it up. “No. But I’ll be making

more soon. I won’t be living here forever either.”

“Of course you won’t. You’ll travel, too, the way you do in imagination.

You’ll see a house in Italy you’ll fall in love with. Or maybe you’ll

like France. Or California, or Arizona.”

The girl smiled. She probably wouldn’t have the money for it, when that

happened. “Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?”

“Always,” Carol said, smiling, too. She pushed her fingers through her

hair. “I think I shall take a trip after all.”

“For how long?”

“Just a month or so.”

Therese set the portfolio in the closet. “How soon will you be going?”

“Right away. I suppose as soon as I can arrange everything. And there

isn’t much to arrange.”

Therese turned around. Carol was rolling the end of her cigarette in the

ash tray. It meant nothing to her, Therese thought, that they wouldn’t

see each other for a month. “Why don’t you go somewhere with Abby?”

Carol looked up at her, and then at the ceiling. “I don’t think she’s

free in the first place.”

Therese stared at her. She had touched something, mentioning Abby. But

Carol’s face was unreadable now.

“You’re very nice to let me see you so often,” Carol said. “You know I

don’t feel like seeing the people I generally see just now. One can’t

really. Everything’s supposed to be done in pairs.”

How frail she is, Therese felt suddenly, how different from the day of

the first lunch. Then Carol got up, as if she knew her thoughts, and

Therese sensed a flaunt of assurance in her lifted head, in her smile as

she passed her so close their arms brushed, and went on.

“Why don’t we do something tonight?” Therese asked. “You can stay here

if you want to, and I’ll finish reading the play. We can spend the

evening together.”

Carol didn’t answer. She was looking at the flower box in the bookshelf.

“What kind of plants are these?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

They were all different, a cactus with fat leaves that hadn’t grown a

bit since she bought it a year ago, another plant like a miniature palm

tree, and a droopy red-green thing that had to be supported by a stick.

“Just plants.”

Carol turned around, smiling. “Just plants,” she repeated.

“What about tonight?”

“All right. But I won’t stay. It’s only three. I’ll give you a ring

around six.” Carol dropped her lighter in her handbag. It was not the

handbag Therese had given her. “I feel like looking at furniture this

afternoon.”

“Furniture? In stores?”

“In stores or at the Parke-Bernet. Furniture does me good.” Carol

reached for her coat on the armchair, and again Therese noticed the long

line from her shoulder to the wide leather belt, continued in her leg.

It was beautiful, like a chord of music or a whole ballet. She was

beautiful, and why should her days be so empty now, Therese wondered,

when she was made to live with people who loved her, to walk in a

beautiful house, in beautiful cities, along blue seacoasts with a long

horizon and a blue sky to background her.

“Bye-bye,” Carol said, and in the same movement with which she put on

her coat, she put her arm around Therese’s waist. It was only an

instant, too disconcerting with Carol’s arm suddenly about her, to be

relief or end or beginning, before the doorbell rang in their ears like

the tearing of a brass wall. Carol smiled. “Who is it?” she asked.

Therese felt the sting of Carol’s thumbnail in her wrist as she released

her. “Richard probably.” It could only be Richard, because she knew his

long ring.

“Good. I’d like to meet him.”

Therese pressed the bell, then heard Richard’s firm, hopping steps on

the stairs. She opened the door.

“Hello,” Richard said. “I decided—”

“Richard, this is Mrs. Aird,” Therese said. “Richard Semco.”

“How do you do?” Carol said.

Richard nodded, with almost a bow. “How do you do,” he said, his blue

eyes stretched wide.

They stared at each other, Richard with a square box in his hands as if

he were about to present it to her, and Carol standing with a new

cigarette in her hand, neither staying nor leaving. Richard put the box

on an end table.

“I was so near, I thought I’d come up,” he said, and under its note of

explanation, Therese heard the unconscious assertion of a right, just as

she had seen behind his inquisitive stare a spontaneous mistrust of

Carol. “I had to take a present to a friend of Mamma’s. This is

_lebkuchen_.” He nodded at the box and smiled, disarmingly. “Anybody

want some now?”

Carol and Therese declined. Carol was watching Richard as he opened the

box with his pocketknife. She liked his smile, Therese thought. She

likes him, the gangling young man with unruly blond hair, the broad lean

shoulders, and the big funny feet in moccasins.

“Please sit down,” Therese said to Carol.

“No, I’m going,” she answered.

“I’ll give you half, Terry, then I’ll be going too,” he said.

Therese looked at Carol, and Carol smiled at her nervousness and sat

down on a corner of the couch.

“Anyway, don’t let me rush you off,” Richard said, lifting the paper

with the cake in it to a kitchen shelf.

“You’re not. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Richard?”

“Yes.” He popped some loose icing into his mouth, and looked at Carol,

poised because he was incapable of being unpoised, Therese thought, his

eyes frank because he had nothing to hide. “Are you a painter, too?”

“No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.”

“The hardest thing to be.”

“Is it? Are you a good painter?”

“I will be. I can be,” said Richard, unperturbed. “Have you got any

beer, Terry? I’ve got an awful thirst.”

Therese went to the refrigerator and got out the two bottles that were

there. Richard asked Carol if she would like some, but Carol refused.

Then Richard strolled past the couch, looking at the suitcase and the

wrappings, and Therese thought he was going to say something about it,

but he didn’t.

“I thought we might go to a movie tonight, Terry. I’d like to see that

thing at the Victoria. Do you want to?”

“I can’t tonight. I’ve got a date with Mrs. Aird.”

“Oh.” Richard looked at Carol.

Carol put out her cigarette and stood up. “I must be going.” She smiled

at Therese. “Call you back around six. If you change your mind, it’s not

important. Good-by, Richard.”

“Good-by,” Richard said.

Carol gave her a wink as she went down the stairs. “Be a good girl,”

Carol said.

“Where’d the suitcase come from?” Richard asked when she came back in

the room.

“It’s a present.”

“What’s the matter, Terry?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“Did I interrupt anything important? Who is she?”

Therese picked up Carol’s empty glass. There was a little lipstick at

the rim. “She’s a woman I met at the store.”

“Did she give you that suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite a present. Is she that rich?”

Therese glanced at him. Richard’s aversion to the wealthy, to the

bourgeois, was automatic. “Rich? You mean the mink coat? I don’t know. I

did her a favor. I found something she lost in the store.”

“Oh?” he said. “What? You didn’t say anything about it.”

She washed and dried Carol’s glass and set it back on the shelf. “She

left her billfold on the counter and I took it to her, that’s all.”

“Oh. Damned nice reward.” He frowned. “Terry, what is it? You’re not

still sore about that silly kite, are you?”

“No, of course not,” she said impatiently. She wished he would go. She

put her hands in her robe pockets and walked across the room, stood

where Carol had stood, looking at the box of plants. “Phil brought the

play over this morning. I started reading it.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“What makes you think I’m worried?” She turned around.

“You’re in another of those miles-away moods again.”

“I’m not worried and I’m not miles away.” She took a deep breath. “It’s

funny—you’re so conscious of some moods and so unconscious of others.”

Richard looked at her. “All right, Terry,” he said with a shrug, as if

he conceded it. He sat down in the straight chair and poured the rest of

the beer into his glass. “What’s this date you have with that woman

tonight?”

Therese’s lips widened in a smile as she ran the end of her lipstick

over them. For a moment, she stared at the eyebrow tweezers that lay on

the little shelf fixed to the inside of the closet door. Then she put

the lipstick down on the shelf. “It’s sort of a cocktail party, I think.

Sort of a Christmas benefit thing. In some restaurant, she said.”

“Hmm. Do you want to go?”

“I said I would.”

Richard drank his beer, frowning a little over his glass. “What about

afterward? Maybe I could hang around here and read the play while you’re

gone, and then we could grab a bite and go to the movie.”

“Afterward, I thought I’d better finish the play. I’m supposed to start

on Saturday, and I ought to have some ideas in my head.”

Richard stood up. “Yep,” he said casually, with a sigh.

Therese watched him idle over to the couch and stand there, looking down

at the manuscript. Then he bent over, studying the title page, and the

cast pages. He looked at his wrist watch, and then at her.

“Why don’t I read it now?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” she answered with a brusqueness that Richard either didn’t

hear or ignored, because he simply lay back on the couch with the

manuscript in his hands and began to read. She picked up a book of

matches from the shelf. No, he only recognized the “miles away” moods,

she thought, when he felt himself deprived of her by distance. And she

thought suddenly of the times she had gone to bed with him, of her

distance then compared to the closeness that was supposed to be, that

everyone talked about. It hadn’t mattered to Richard then, she supposed,

because of the physical fact they were in bed together. And it crossed

her mind now, seeing Richard’s complete absorption in his reading,

seeing the plump, stiff fingers catch a front lock of his hair between

them and pull it straight down toward his nose, as she had seen him do a

thousand times before, it occurred to her Richard’s attitude was that

his place in her life was unassailable, her tie with him permanent and

beyond question, because he was the first man she had ever slept with.

Therese threw the match cover at the shelf, and a bottle of something

fell over.

Richard sat up, smiling a little, surprisedly. “’S matter, Terry?”

“Richard, I feel like being alone—the rest of the afternoon. Would you

mind?”

He got up. The surprise did not leave his face. “No. Of course not.” He

dropped the manuscript on the couch again. “All right, Terry. It’s

probably better. Maybe you ought to read this now—read it alone,” he

said argumentatively, as if he persuaded himself. He looked at his watch

again. “Maybe I’ll go down and try to see Sam and Joan for a while.”

She stood there not moving, not even thinking of anything except of the

few seconds of time to pass until he would be gone, while he brushed his

hand once, a little clingy with its moisture, over her hair, and bent to

kiss her. Then quite suddenly she remembered the Degas book she had

bought days ago, the book of reproductions that Richard wanted and

hadn’t been able to find anywhere. She got it from the bottom drawer of

the bureau. “I found this. The Degas book.”

“Oh, swell. Thanks.” He took it in both hands. It was still wrapped.

“Where’d you find it?”

“Frankenberg’s. Of all places.”

“Frankenberg’s.” Richard smiled. “It’s six bucks, isn’t it?”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

Richard had his wallet out. “But I asked you to get it for me.”

“Never mind, really.”

Richard protested, but she didn’t take the money. And a minute later, he

was gone, with a promise to call her tomorrow at five. They might do

something tomorrow night, he said.

Carol called at ten past six. Did she feel like going to Chinatown,

Carol asked. Therese said, of course.

“I’m having cocktails with someone in the St. Regis,” Carol said. “Why

don’t you pick me up here? It’s the little room, not the big one. And

listen, we’re going on to some theater thing you’ve asked me to. Get

it?”

“Some sort of Christmas benefit cocktail party?”

Carol laughed. “Hurry up.”

Therese flew.

Carol’s friend was a man called Stanley McVeigh, a tall and very

attractive man of about forty with a mustache and a boxer dog on a

leash. Carol was ready to go when she arrived. Stanley walked out with

them, put them into a taxi and gave the driver some money through the

window.

“Who’s he?” Therese asked.

“An old friend. Seeing more of me now that Harge and I are separating.”

Therese looked at her. Carol had a wonderful little smile in her eyes

tonight. “Do you like him?”

“Soso,” Carol said. “Driver, will you make that Chinatown instead of the

other?”

It began to rain while they were having dinner. Carol said it always

rained in Chinatown, every time she had been here. But it didn’t matter

much, because they ducked from one shop to another, looking at things

and buying things. Therese saw some sandals with platform heels that she

thought were beautiful, rather more Persian looking than Chinese, and

she wanted to buy them for Carol, but Carol said Rindy wouldn’t approve.

Rindy was a conservative, and didn’t like her even to go without

stockings in summer, and Carol conformed to her. The same store had

Chinese suits of a black shiny material, with plain trousers and a

high-collared jacket, and Carol bought one for Rindy. Therese bought the

sandals for Carol anyway, while Carol was arranging for Rindy’s suit to

be sent. She knew the right size just by looking at the sandals, and it

pleased Carol after all that she bought them. Then they spent a weird

hour in a Chinese theater where people in the audience were sleeping

through all the clangor. And finally they went uptown for a late supper

in a restaurant where a harp played. It was a glorious evening, a really

magnificent evening.

chapter ten

On Tuesday, the fifth day of work, Therese sat in a little bare room

with no ceiling at the back of the Black Cat Theatre, waiting for Mr.

Donohue, the new director, to come and look at her cardboard model.

Yesterday morning, Donohue had replaced Cortes as director, had thrown

out her first model, and also thrown out Phil McElroy as the second

brother in the play. Phil had walked out yesterday in a huff. It was

lucky she hadn’t been thrown out along with her model, Therese thought,

so she had followed Mr. Donohue’s instructions to the letter. The new

model hadn’t the movable section she had put into the first, which would

have permitted the living room scene to be converted into the terrace

scene for the last act. Mr. Donohue seemed to be adamant against

anything unusual or even simple. By setting the whole play in the living

room, a lot of the dialogue had to be changed in the last act, and some

of the cleverest lines had been lost. Her new model indicated a

fireplace, broad French windows giving onto a terrace, two doors, a

sofa, and a couple of armchairs and a bookcase. It would look, when

finished, like a room in a model house at Sloan’s, lifelike down to the

last ash tray.

Therese stood up, stretched herself, and reached for the corduroy jacket

that was hanging on a nail in the door. The place was cold as a barn.

Mr. Donohue probably wouldn’t come in until afternoon, or not even today

if she didn’t remind him again. There was no hurry about the scenery. It

might have been the least important matter in the whole production, but

she had sat up until late last night, enthusiastically working on the

model.

She went out to stand in the wings again. The cast was all on stage with

scripts in hand. Mr. Donohue kept running the cast through the whole

play, to get the flow of it, he said, but today it seemed to be only

putting them to sleep. All the cast looked lazy except Tom Harding, a

tall blond young man who had the male lead, and he was a little too

energetic. Georgia Halloran was suffering from sinus headaches, and had

to stop every hour to put drops in her nose and lie down for a few

minutes. Geoffrey Andrews, a middle-aged man who played the heroine’s

father, grumbled constantly between his lines because he didn’t like

Donohue.

“No, no, no, no,” said Mr. Donohue for the tenth time that morning,

stopping everything and causing everybody to lower his script and turn

to him with a puzzled, irritated docility. “Let’s start again from page

twenty-eight.”

Therese watched him waving his arms to indicate the speakers, putting up

a hand to silence them, following the script with his head down as if he

led an orchestra. Tom Harding winked at her, and pulled his hand down

his nose. After a moment, Therese went back to the room behind the

partition, where she worked, where she felt a little less useless. She

knew the play almost by heart now. It had a rather Sheridanesque comedy

of errors plot—two brothers who pretend to be valet and master in order

to impress an heiress with whom one of the brothers is in love. The

dialogue was gay and altogether not bad, but the dreary, matter-of-fact

set that Donohue had ordered for it—Therese hoped something could be

done with the color they would use.

Mr. Donohue did come in just after twelve o’clock. He looked at her

model, lifted it up and looked at it from below and from both sides,

without any change in his nervous, harassed expression. “Yes, this is

fine. I like this very much. You see how much better this is than those

empty walls you had before, don’t you?”

Therese took a deep breath of relief. “Yes,” she said.

“A set grows out of the needs of the actors. This isn’t a ballet set

you’re designing, Miss Belivet.”

She nodded, looking at the model, too, and trying to see how it possibly

was better, possibly more functional.

“The carpenter’s coming in this afternoon about four. We’ll get together

and have a talk about this.” Mr. Donohue went out.

Therese stared at the cardboard model. At least she would see it used.

At least she and the carpenters would make it something real. She went

to the window and looked out at the gray but luminous winter sky, at the

backs of some five-story houses garlanded with fire escapes. In the

foreground was a small vacant lot with a runted leafless tree in it, all

twisted up like a signpost gone wild. She wished she could call Carol

and invite her for lunch. But Carol was an hour and a half away by car.

“Is your name Beliver?”

Therese turned to the girl in the doorway. “Belivet. Telephone?”

“The phone by the lights.”

“Thanks.” Therese hurried, hoping it was Carol, knowing more likely it

was Richard. Carol hadn’t yet called her here.

“Hello, this is Abby.”

“Abby?” Therese smiled. “How’d you know I was here?”

“You told me, remember? I’d like to see you. I’m not far away. Have you

had lunch yet?”

They agreed to meet at the Palermo, a restaurant a block or two from the

Black Cat.

Therese whistled a song as she walked there, happy as if she were

meeting Carol. The restaurant had sawdust on the floor, and a couple of

black kittens played around under the rail of the bar. Abby was sitting

at a table in the back.

“Hi,” Abby said as she came up. “You’re looking very chipper. I almost

didn’t recognize you. Would you like a drink?”

Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“You mean, you’re so happy without it?” Abby asked, and she chuckled

with that secret amusement that in Abby was somehow not offensive.

Therese took the cigarette that Abby offered her. Abby knew, she

thought. And perhaps she was in love with Carol, too. It put Therese on

guard with her. It created a tacit rivalry that gave her a curious

exhilaration, a sense of certain superiority over Abby—emotions that

Therese had never known before, never dared to dream of, emotions

consequently revolutionary in themselves. So their lunching together in

the restaurant became nearly as important as the meeting with Carol.

“How is Carol?” Therese asked. She had not seen Carol in three days.

“She’s very fine,” Abby said, watching her.

The waiter came, and Abby asked him if he could recommend the mussels

and the scaloppine.

“Excellent, madame!” He beamed at her as if she were a special customer.

It was Abby’s manner, the glow in her face as if today, or every day,

were a special holiday for her. Therese liked that. She looked

admiringly at Abby’s suit of red and blue weave, her cuff links that

were scrolly G’s, like filigree buttons in silver. Abby asked her about

her job at the Black Cat. It was tedious to Therese, but Abby seemed

impressed. Abby was impressed, Therese thought, because she did nothing

herself.

“I know some people in the producing end of the theater,” Abby said.

“I’ll be glad to put in a word for you any time.”

“Thanks.” Therese played with the lid of the grated cheese bowl in front

of her. “Do you know anyone called Andronich? I think he’s from

Philadelphia.”

“No,” Abby said.

Mr. Donohue had told her to go and see Andronich next week in New York.

He was producing a show that would open this spring in Philadelphia, and

then on Broadway.

“Try the mussels.” Abby was eating hers with gusto. “Carol likes these,

too.”

“Have you known Carol a long time?”

“Um-hm,” Abby nodded, looking at her with the bright eyes that revealed

nothing.

“And you know her husband, too, of course.”

Abby nodded again, silently.

Therese smiled a little. Abby was out to question her, she felt, but not

to disclose anything about herself or about Carol.

“How about some wine? Do you like Chianti?” Abby summoned a waiter with

a snap of her fingers. “Bring us a bottle of Chianti. A good one. Builds

up the blood,” she added to Therese.

Then the main course arrived, and two waiters fussed around the table,

uncorking the Chianti, pouring more water and bringing fresh butter. The

radio in the corner played a tango—a little cheesebox of a radio with a

broken front, but the music might have come from a string orchestra

behind them, at Abby’s request. No wonder Carol likes her, Therese

thought. She complemented Carol’s solemnity, she could remind Carol to

laugh.

“Did you always live by yourself?” Abby asked.

“Yes. Since I got out of school.” Therese sipped her wine. “Do you? Or

do you live with your family?”

“With my family. But I’ve got my own half of the house.”

“And do you work?” Therese ventured.

“I’ve had jobs. Two or three of them. Didn’t Carol tell you we had a

furniture shop once? We had a shop just outside of Elizabeth on the

highway. We bought up antiques or plain second-hand stuff and fixed it

up. I never worked so hard in my life.” Abby smiled at her gaily, as if

every word might be untrue. “Then my other job. I’m an entomologist. Not

a very good one, but good enough to pull bugs out of Italian lemon

crates and things like that. Bahama lilies are full of bugs.”

“So I’ve heard.” Therese smiled.

“I don’t think you believe me.”

“Yes, I do. Do you still work at that?”

“I’m on reserve. Just in time of emergency, I work. Like Easter.”

Therese watched Abby’s fork cutting the scaloppine into small bites

before she picked any up. “Do you take trips a lot with Carol?”

“A lot? No, why?” Abby asked.

“I should think you’d be good for her. Because Carol’s so serious.”

Therese wished she could lead the conversation to the heart of things,

but just what the heart of things was, she didn’t know. The wine ran

slow and warm in her veins, down to her finger tips.

“Not all the time,” Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface

of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her

say.

The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was

stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that

would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

“How’d you meet Carol?” Abby asked.

“Didn’t Carol tell you?”

“She just said she met you at Frankenberg’s when you had a job there.”

“Well, that’s how,” Therese said, feeling a resentment in her against

Abby building up, incontrollably.

“You just started talking?” Abby asked with a smile, lighting a

cigarette.

“I waited on her,” Therese said, and stopped.

And Abby waited, for a precise description of that meeting, Therese

knew, but she wouldn’t give it to Abby or to anyone else. It belonged to

her. Surely Carol hadn’t told Abby, she thought, told her the silly

story of the Christmas card. It wouldn’t be important enough to Carol

for Carol to have told her.

“Do you mind telling me who started talking first?”

Therese laughed suddenly. She reached for a cigarette and lighted it,

still smiling. No, Carol hadn’t told her about the Christmas card, and

Abby’s question struck her as terribly funny. “I did,” Therese said.

“You like her a lot, don’t you?” Abby asked.

Therese explored it for hostility. It was not hostile, but jealous.

“Yes.”

“Why do you?”

“Why do I? Why do you?”

Abby’s eyes still laughed. “I’ve known Carol since she was four years

old.”

Therese said nothing.

“You’re awfully young, aren’t you? Are you twenty-one?”

“No. Not quite.”

“You know Carol’s got a lot of worries right now, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s lonely now,” Abby added, her eyes watching.

“Do you mean that’s why she sees me?” Therese asked calmly. “Do you want

to tell me I shouldn’t see her?”

Abby’s unblinking eyes blinked twice after all. “No, not a bit. But I

don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want you to hurt Carol either.”

“I’d never hurt Carol,” Therese said. “Do you think I would?”

Abby was still watching her alertly, had never taken her eyes from her.

“No, I don’t think you would,” Abby replied as if she had just decided

it. And she smiled now as if she were especially pleased about

something.

But Therese did not like the smile or the question, and realizing her

face showed her feelings, she looked down at the table. There was a

glass of hot zabaglione standing on a plate in front of her.

“Would you like to come to a cocktail party this afternoon, Therese?

It’s uptown at about six o’clock. I don’t know if there’ll be any stage

designers there, but one of the girls who’s giving it is an actress.”

Therese put her cigarette out. “Is Carol going to be there?”

“No. She won’t be. But they’re all easy to get along with. It’s a small

party.”

“Thanks. I don’t think I should go. I may have to work late today, too.”

“Oh. I was going to give you the address anyway, but if you won’t come—”

“No,” Therese said.

Abby wanted to walk around the block after they came out of the

restaurant. Therese agreed, though she was tired of Abby now. Abby with

her cocksureness, her blunt, careless questions made Therese feel she

had gotten an advantage over her. And Abby had not let her pay the

check.

Abby said, “Carol thinks a lot of you, you know. She says you have a lot

of talent.”

“Does she?” Therese said, only half believing it. “She never told me.”

She wanted to walk faster, but Abby held their pace back.

“You must know she thinks a lot of you, if she wants you to take a trip

with her.”

Therese glanced and saw Abby smiling at her, guilelessly. “She didn’t

say anything to me about that either,” Therese said quietly, though her

heart had begun pumping.

“I’m sure she will. You’ll go with her, won’t you?”

Why should Abby know about it before she did, Therese wondered. She felt

a flush of anger in her face. What was it all about? Did Abby hate her?

If she did, why wasn’t she consistent about it? Then in the next

instant, the rise of anger fell and left her weak, left her vulnerable

and defenseless. She thought, if Abby pressed her against the wall at

that moment and said: “Out with it. What do you want from Carol? How

much of her do you want to take from me?” she would have babbled it all.

She would have said: “I want to be with her. I love to be with her, and

what has it got to do with you?”

“Isn’t that for Carol to talk about? Why do you ask me these things?”

Therese made an effort to sound indifferent. It was hopeless.

Abby stopped walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her. “I think I

understand better now.”

“Understand what?”

“Just—that you win.”

“Win what?”

“What,” Abby echoed with her head up, looking up at the corner of a

building, at the sky, and Therese suddenly felt furiously impatient.

She wanted Abby to go so she could telephone Carol. Nothing mattered but

the sound of Carol’s voice. Nothing mattered but Carol, and why did she

let herself forget for a moment?

“No wonder Carol thinks such a lot of you,” Abby said, but if it was a

kind remark, Therese did not accept it as such. “So long, Therese. I’ll

see you again no doubt.” Abby held out her hand.

Therese took it. “So long,” she said. She watched Abby walking toward

Washington Square, her step quicker now, her curly head high.

Therese went into the drugstore at the next corner and called Carol. She

got the maid and then Carol.

“What’s the matter?” Carol asked. “You sound low.”

“Nothing. It’s dull at work.”

“Are you doing anything tonight? Would you like to come out?”

Therese came out of the drugstore smiling. Carol was going to pick her

up at five thirty. Carol insisted on picking her up, because it was such

a rotten trip by train.

Across the street, walking away from her, she saw Dannie McElroy,

striding along without a coat, carrying a naked bottle of milk in his

hand.

“Dannie!” she called.

Dannie turned and walked toward her. “Come by for a few minutes?” he

yelled.

Therese started to say no, then as he came up to her, she took his arm.

“Just for a minute. I’ve had a long lunch hour already.”

Dannie smiled down at her. “What time is it? I’ve been studying till I’m

blind.”

“After two.” She felt Dannie’s arm tensed hard against the cold. There

were goose-pimples under the dark hair on his forearm. “You’re mad to go

out without a coat,” she said.

“It clears my head.” He held the iron gate for her that led to his door.

“Phil’s out somewhere.”

The room smelled of pipe smoke, rather like hot chocolate cooking. The

apartment was a semibasement, generally darkish, and the lamp made a

warm pool of light on the desk that was always cluttered. Therese looked

down at the opened books on his desk, the pages and pages covered with

symbols that she could not understand, but that she liked to look at.

Everything the symbols stood for was true and proven. The symbols were

stronger and more definite than words. She felt Dannie’s mind swung on

them, from one fact to another, as if he bore himself on strong chains,

hand over hand through space. She watched him assembling a sandwich,

standing at the kitchen table. His shoulders looked very broad and

rounded with muscle under his white shirt, shifting a little with the

motions of laying the salami and cheese slices onto the big piece of rye

bread.

“I wish you’d come by more often, Therese. Wednesday’s the only day I’m

not home at noon. We wouldn’t bother Phil, having lunch, even if he’s

sleeping.”

“I will,” Therese said. She sat down in his desk chair that was half

turned around. She had come once for lunch, and once after work. She

liked visiting Dannie. One did not have to make small talk with him.

In the corner of the room, Phil’s sofa bed was unmade, a tangle of

blankets and sheets. The two times she had come in before, the bed had

been unmade, or Phil had still been in it. The long bookcase pulled out

at right angles to the sofa made a unit of Phil’s corner of the room,

and it was always in disorder, in a frustrated and nervous disorder not

at all like the working disorder of Dannie’s desk.

Dannie’s beer can hissed as he opened it. He leaned against the wall

with the beer and the sandwich, smiling, delighted to have her here.

“Remember what you said about physics not applying to people?”

“Umm. Vaguely.”

“Well, I’m not sure you’re right,” he said as he took a bite. “Take

friendships, for instance. I can think of a lot of cases where the two

people have nothing in common. I think there’s a definite reason for

every friendship just as there’s a reason why certain atoms unite and

others don’t—certain missing factors in one, or certain present factors

in the other—what do you think? I think friendships are the result of

certain needs that can be completely hidden from both people, sometimes

hidden forever.”

“Maybe. I can think of a few cases, too.” Richard and herself, for one.

Richard got on with people, elbowed his way through the world in a way

she couldn’t. She had always been attracted to people with Richard’s

kind of self-assurance. “And what’s weak about you, Dannie?”

“Me?” he said, smiling. “Do you want to be my friend?”

“Yes. But you’re about the strongest person I know.”

“Really? Shall I enumerate my shortcomings?”

She smiled, looking at him. A young man of twenty-five who had known

where he was going since he was fourteen. He had driven all his energy

into one channel—just the opposite of what Richard had done.

“I have a secret and very buried need for a cook,” Dannie said, “and a

dancing teacher, and someone to remind me to do little things like take

my laundry and get haircuts.”

“I can’t remember to take my laundry either.”

“Oh,” he said sadly. “Then it’s out. And I’d had some hope. I’d had a

little feeling of destiny. Because you see what I mean about affinities

is true from friendships down to even the accidental glance at someone

on the street, there’s always a definite reason somewhere. I think even

the poets would agree with me.”

She smiled. “_Even_ the poets?” She thought of Carol, and then of Abby,

of their conversation at lunch that had been so much more than a glance

and so much less, and the sequence of emotions it had evoked in her. It

depressed her. “But you have to make allowances for people’s

perversities, things that don’t make much sense.”

“Perversities? That’s only a subterfuge. A word used by the poets.”

“I thought it was used by the psychologists,” Therese said.

“I mean, to make allowances—that’s a meaningless term. Life is an exact

science on its own terms, it’s just a matter of finding them and

defining them. What doesn’t make any sense to you?”

“Nothing. I was thinking of something that doesn’t matter anyway.” She

was suddenly angry again, as she had been on the sidewalk after the

lunch.

“What?” he persisted, frowning.

“Like the lunch I just had,” she said.

“With whom?”

“It doesn’t matter. If it did, I’d go into it. It’s just a waste, like

losing something, I thought. But maybe something that didn’t exist

anyway.” She had wanted to like Abby because Carol did.

“Except in your mind? That can still be a loss.”

“Yes—but there are some people or some things people do that you can’t

salvage anything from finally, because nothing connects with you.” It

was of something else she wanted to talk about, though, not this at all.

Not Abby or Carol, but before. Something that made perfect connection

and perfect sense. She loved Carol. She leaned her forehead against her

hand.

Dannie looked at her for a moment, then pushed himself off from the

wall. He turned to the stove, and got a match from his shirt pocket, and

Therese sensed that the conversation dangled, would always dangle and

never be finished, whatever they went on to say. But she felt if she

told Dannie every word that she and Abby had exchanged, that he could

clear away its subterfuges with a phrase, as if he sprinkled a chemical

in the air that would dry up the mist instantly. Or was there always

something that logic couldn’t touch? Something illogical, behind the

jealousy, the suspicion and the hostility in Abby’s conversation, that

was Abby all by herself?

“Everything’s not as simple as a lot of combinations,” Therese added.

“Some things don’t react. But everything’s alive.” He turned around with

a broad smile, as if quite another train of thought had entered his

head. He was holding up the match that was still smoking. “Like this

match. And I’m not talking physics, about the indestructibility of

smoke. In fact, I feel rather poetic today.”

“About the match?”

“I feel as if it were growing, like a plant, not disappearing. I feel

everything in the world must have the texture of a plant sometimes to a

poet. Even this table, like my own flesh.” He touched the table edge

with his palm. “It’s like a feeling I had once riding up a hill on a

horse. It was in Pennsylvania. I didn’t know how to ride very well then,

and I remember the horse turning his head and seeing the hill, and

deciding by himself to run up it, his hind legs sank before we took off,

and suddenly we were going like blazes and I felt completely in harmony

with the horse and the land, as if we were a whole tree simply being

stirred by the wind in its branches. I remember being sure that nothing

would happen to me then, but some other time, yes, eventually. And it

made me very happy. I thought of all the people who are afraid and hoard

things, and themselves, and I thought, when everybody in the world comes

to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there’ll be a kind of

right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I

mean?” Dannie had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he

still laughed at himself. “Did you ever wear out a sweater you

particularly liked, and throw it away finally?”

She thought of the green woolen gloves of Sister Alicia that she had

neither worn nor thrown away. “Yes,” she said.

“Well, that’s all I mean. And the lambs who didn’t realize how much wool

they were losing when somebody sheared them to make the sweater, because

they could grow more wool. It’s very simple.” He turned to the coffeepot

that he had reheated, that was already boiling.

“Yes.” She knew. And like Richard and the kite, because he could make

another kite. She thought of Abby with a sense of vacuity suddenly, as

if the luncheon had been eradicated. For an instant, she felt as if her

mind had overflowed a brim and was swimming emptily into space. She

stood up.

Dannie came toward her, put his hands on her shoulders, and though she

felt it was only a gesture, a gesture instead of a word, the spell was

broken. She was uneasy at his touch, and the uneasiness was a point of

concreteness. “I should go back,” she said. “I’m way late.”

His hands came down, pinning her elbows hard against her sides, and he

kissed her suddenly, held his lips hard against hers for a moment, and

she felt his warm breath on her upper lip before he released her.

“You are,” he said, looking at her.

“Why did you—” She stopped, because the kiss had so mingled tenderness

and roughness, she didn’t know how to take it.

“‘_Why_,’ Terry,” he said, turning away from her, smiling. “Did you

mind?”

“No,” she said.

“Would Richard mind?”

“I suppose.” She buttoned her coat. “I must go,” she said, moving toward

the door.

Dannie swung the door open for her, smiling his easy smile, as if

nothing had happened. “Come back tomorrow? Come for lunch.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I don’t work.”

“And we couldn’t possibly have lunch.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“All right, come Monday.”

“All right.” She smiled, too, and put her hand out automatically and

Dannie shook it once, politely.

She ran the two blocks to the Black Cat. A little like the horse, she

thought. But not enough, not enough to be perfect, and what Dannie meant

was perfect.

chapter eleven

“The pastimes of idle people,” Carol said, stretching her legs out

before her on the glider. “It’s time Abby got herself a job again.”

Therese said nothing. She hadn’t told Carol all the conversation at

lunch, but she didn’t want to talk about Abby any more.

“Don’t you want to sit in a more comfortable chair?”

“No,” Therese said. She was sitting on a leather stool near the glider.

They had finished dinner a few moments ago, and then come up to this

room that Therese had not seen before, a glass enclosed porch off the

plain green room.

“What else did Abby say that bothers you?” Carol asked, still looking

straight before her, down her long legs in the navy-blue slacks.

Carol seemed tired. She was worried about other things, Therese thought,

more important things than this. “Nothing. Does it bother you, Carol?”

“Bother me?”

“You’re different with me tonight.”

Carol glanced at her. “You imagine,” she said, and the pleasant

vibration of her voice faded into silence again.

The page she had written last night, Therese thought, had nothing to do

with this Carol, was not addressed to her. _I feel I am in love with

you_, she had written, _and it should be spring. I want the sun

throbbing on my head like chords of music. I think of a sun like

Beethoven, a wind like Debussy, and bird-calls like Stravinsky. But the

tempo is all mine._

“I don’t think Abby likes me,” Therese remarked. “I don’t think she

wants me to see you.”

“That’s not true. You’re imagining again.”

“I don’t mean she said it.” Therese tried to sound as calm as Carol.

“She was very nice. She invited me to a cocktail party.”

“Whose party?”

“I don’t know. She said uptown. She said you wouldn’t be there, so I

didn’t particularly want to go.”

“Where uptown?”

“She didn’t say. Just that one of the girls giving it was an actress.”

Carol set her lighter down with a click on the glass table, and Therese

sensed her displeasure. “She did,” Carol murmured, half to herself. “Sit

over here, Therese.”

Therese got up, and sat down at the very foot of the glider.

“You mustn’t think Abby feels that way about you. I know her well enough

to know she wouldn’t.”

“All right,” Therese said.

“But Abby’s incredibly clumsy sometimes in the way she talks.”

Therese wanted to forget the whole thing. Carol was still so distant

even when she spoke, even when she looked at her. A bar of light from

the green room lay across the top of Carol’s head, but she could not see

Carol’s face now.

Carol poked her with the back of her toe. “Hop up.”

But Therese was slow to move, and Carol swung her feet over Therese’s

head and sat up. Then Therese heard the maid’s step in the next room,

and the plump, Irish-looking maid in the gray and white uniform came in

bearing a coffee tray, shaking the porch floor with her quick, eager

little steps that sounded so eager to please.

“The cream’s in here, ma’am,” she said, pointing to a pitcher that

didn’t match the demitasse set. Florence glanced at Therese with a

friendly smile and round blank eyes. She was about fifty, with a bun at

the back of her neck under the starched white band of her cap. Therese

could not establish her somehow, could not determine her allegiance.

Therese had heard her refer to Mr. Aird twice as if she were very

devoted to him, and whether it was professional or genuine, Therese did

not know.

“Will there be anything else, ma’am?” Florence asked. “Shall I put out

the lights?”

“No, I like the lights. We won’t need anything else, thanks. Did Mrs.

Riordan call?”

“Not yet, ma’am.”

“Will you tell her I’m out when she does?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Florence hesitated, “I was wondering if you were finished

with that new book, ma’am. The one about the Alps.”

“Go in my room and get it, if you’d like it, Florence. I don’t think I

want to finish it.”

“Thank you, ma’am. Good night, ma’am. Good night, miss.”

“Good night,” Carol said.

While Carol was pouring the coffee, Therese asked, “Have you decided how

soon you’re going away?”

“Maybe in about a week.” Carol handed her the demitasse with cream in

it. “Why?”

“Just that I’ll miss you. Of course.”

Carol was motionless for a moment, and then she reached for a cigarette,

a last one, and crumpled the pack up. “I was thinking, in fact, you

might like to go with me. What do you think, for three weeks or so?”

There it was, Therese thought, as casual as if she suggested their

taking a walk together. “You mentioned it to Abby, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Carol said. “Why?”

Why? Therese could not put into words why it hurt her that Carol had.

“It just seems strange you’d tell her before you said anything to me.”

“I didn’t tell her. I only said I might ask you.” Carol came over to her

and put her hands on Therese’s shoulders. “Look, there’s no reason for

you to feel like this about Abby—unless Abby said a lot else to you at

lunch that you didn’t tell me.”

“No,” Therese said. No, but it was the undercurrents, it was worse. She

felt Carol’s hands leave her shoulders.

“Abby’s a very old friend of mine,” Carol said. “I talk over everything

with her.”

“Yes,” Therese said.

“Well, do you think you’d like to go?”

Carol had turned away from her, and suddenly it meant nothing, because

of the way Carol asked her, as if she didn’t really care one way or the

other if she went. “Thanks—I don’t think I can afford it just now.”

“You wouldn’t need much money. We’d go in the car. But if you have a job

offered you right away, that’s different.”

As if she wouldn’t turn down a job on a ballet set to go away with

Carol—to go with her through country she had never seen before, over

rivers and mountains, not knowing where they would be when night came.

Carol knew that, and knew she would have to refuse if Carol asked her in

this way. Therese felt suddenly sure that Carol taunted her, and she

resented it with the bitter resentment of a betrayal. And the resentment

resolved itself into a decision never to see Carol again. She glanced at

Carol, who was waiting for her answer, with that defiance only half

masked by an air of indifference, an expression that Therese knew would

not change at all if she should give a negative answer. Therese got up

and went to the box on the end table for a cigarette. There was nothing

in the box but some phonograph needles and a photograph.

“What is it?” Carol asked, watching her.

Therese felt Carol had been reading all her thoughts. “It’s a picture of

Rindy,” Therese said.

“Of Rindy? Let’s see it.”

Therese watched Carol’s face as she looked at the picture of the little

girl with the white-blond hair and the serious face, with the taped

white bandage on her knee. In the picture, Harge was standing in a

rowboat, and Rindy was stepping from a dock into his arms.

“It’s not a very good picture,” Carol said, but her face had changed,

grown softer. “That’s about three years old. Would you like a cigarette?

There’s some over here. Rindy’s going to stay with Harge for the next

three months.”

Therese had supposed that from the conversation in the kitchen that

morning with Abby. “Is that in New Jersey, too?”

“Yes. Harge’s family lives in New Jersey. They’ve a big house.” Carol

waited. “The divorce will come through in a month, I think, and after

March, I’ll have Rindy the rest of the year.”

“Oh. But you’ll see her again before March, won’t you?”

“A few times. Probably not much.”

Therese looked at Carol’s hand holding the photograph, beside her on the

glider, carelessly. “Won’t she miss you?”