A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

He sat down next to her on the edge of the bed at first, embarrassed. Then presently, growing a little bolder, reclined alongside of her, but with his legs still on the floor. Then at last, as he became more confident, drew them up and lay there full length beside her. Both staring upward at the ceiling.

Wanting to say something, and not knowing what to say, he asked her: “You like it here?”

It wasn’t so bad, she said resignedly.

They talked a little then, she doing most of it. Until finally, excited more by the drift of her conversation than by her proximity, he began to make ultimate love to her, still without looking into her face.

She sighed at first with age-old professional boredom. Then, compassionately, she laughed a little. “I’ll show you. You’re a real young ’un, aren’t you! Wait, I’ll show you.”

Then it was already over, and he was sitting bent over on the edge of the bed retying the laces of his shoes, which were the only thing he had discarded. On the floor before his eyes, something glistened against the light. He picked it up, and she saw him do it and said instantly, “Whatch’ got there?” thinking perhaps it was a coin.

But it was only a cuff-link, and he showed it to her. There was a small light-red stone in the center of it, opaque not vitreous, on the order of a carnelian, and around it an oblong of perhaps silver, perhaps some lesser metal.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” she said admiringly.

“Wonder whose it is. Got any idea?” he asked her.

“Party just before you,” she answered laconically. “I noticed them on him.” She chuckled. “Must’ve torn off his shirt in too much of a hurry.”

She held out her hand for it, and he gave it to her.

“I’ll turn it over to Miss Norma when I go downstairs,” she said. “We have to do that with anything we find in the rooms, she’s very strict about it. She’ll hold it for him in case he comes back for it.” Then she added, as though this honesty on her part had its flexibility at times, “It’s no good to me, one half of a pair of cuff-links.”

He tipped her, she thanked him casually (“Much obliged, sonny”), then let him know point-blank that it was time for him to go. “You’d better leave now, or Miss Norma’ll start calling up the stairs. She blames us if a visitor overstays his time.”

He came down the stairs feeling much older than when he’d gone up them.

The sleek-haired young man was still beside the table, but the coffee mugs had disappeared. Opposite him now sat the lady of the house, shuffling a deck of cards in a very smooth way. Again a cigarette burned over the edge of the table, but this time it was indubitably his, for the lady of the house had one stuck into the extreme corner of her mouth, as far over as it could go. The colored woman was no longer in there.

“Your friend’s waiting for you outside,” she told Bruce when he came into the room. “You can let yourself out through here, only be sure to close the door quickly behind you.”

They laughed as he passed through the kitchen. Not to him, but to one another. He heard the young man remark, “First time out. Just the same, I wouldn’t mind being back there again myself.”

The lady said, “Ah, come on now, what’re you giving us?”, and freeing one hand momentarily from her card-deck, flung it toward him loosely.

The door closed behind him and he was out. And much as he’d wanted at first to go in, he was awfully glad to be outside again. A square of cobwebbed light from the lace-curtained pane in the lower half of the window settled across his head and shoulders like a dusting of ashes for a moment, and then as he moved on away, it fell flat on the gritty floor of the alley and lay there inert and out of true.

The red wink of a cigarette was Warren waiting for him at the end of the alley, and he was very glad to go leaving this place and starting home together side by side.

“What took you so long?” Warren wanted to know when he’d come up to him. “Did you go around twice?”

“Na. We were talking a little at first,” he answered glumly.

“Talking?” was all Warren said to that, taken back.

The lights of downtown were fewer now, and the people on the sidewalk were fewer too. There were still lights and there were still people, but the edge had been taken off the pristine dazzle of the earlier part of the evening. All three theatre-marquees were dark now, but the lobbies were still dimly lighted, and there were still audiences inside watching the last of the late showings.

Saturday night was about over.

They said hardly a thing the whole way back. They only spoke twice to one another, as a matter of fact. After they’d left Main Street behind and gone across the viaduct, Warren rebuked: “Don’t walk so fast, this is uphill.” Bruce had been unconsciously straining to get home as quickly as he could.

And a little while later Warren remarked: “I’ll get you back that three you lent me by the end of next week.” It was said as ungraciously as though Bruce had asked him for it.