There were people--maybe two dozen--in the Knight's Bar, for lunch,
resuscitation, or the pelt of the dog that bit them.
Not Yvonne, though. A bit early.
The city was shockingly quiet. When the traffic lights changed,
sometimes, nothing else did. You could hear one car pass on the street.
Even the buses seemed enfeebled: their special arrangements for
traumatizing man roared, ground, and hammered only at long intervals.
The Musak was trying hymns, or an unreasonable facsimile thereof.
With twenty-one cold shrimps, a couple of ounces of mayonnaise, some
lettuce, and a few gills of iced coffee inside me, I felt better.
When I got out on the sixteenth soaking pit I discovered Yvonne
knocking on my door--my hall door, for a wonder. After a little
bickering, I went back to the cold restaurant with her. Not too much
bickering.
It was the New Yvonne. Anybody could see that. She was dressed up in
dark-blue linen and she ordered crustaceans, too, on my recommendation.
Then she began to talk.
"I'm going back to Pasadena on the afternoon plane," she said. "I've
been talking to Rol about half the morning. I talked away a fortune.
But it was worth it. I told him--everything."
"Everything?"
She nodded. Her gray eyes were gentle, inaccessible, fixed on a
plane-landing a couple of thousand miles away, and night in the
lamplit, lower hills of California, where the eucalyptus trees grow.
She repeated the opening gambit on Long Distance:
It's me, Rol. I want to come back.... I know you want me to.... But I
don't know if you will when.... Look! Think of why I went.... Don't
apologize! Don't _be_ like that! Because--Rol--me, too!
He didn't believe her.
Then he thought it was--masochistic experiment.
Don't you see, darling, that's why I was so extra frantic? So weirdly
angry? I had to find that out.
"Then he was jealous!" Yvonne laughed softly--happily. "I think that
was good for him."
"No doubt."
"In the end--all he could say was, 'Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!'"
"And you feel like hurrying?"