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

Then she looked over at me and said, “You didn’t have to do that,” but with polite insincerity. It was as insincere as it was polite, but it was as polite as it was insincere.

Not to expose it to view, that had been chic, I reflected to myself; but not to have acknowledged it at all, that somehow would have smacked of underhandedness, surreptitiousness. A quality that I liked her for being entirely without, as far as I had been able to discover, up to this point.

I said, “But what would you have done if I hadn’t?” But in a lazy, objective sort of way, as if in academic question, not likely to give offense.

“Oh,” she admitted, “asked you, I guess. ‘For a loan,’ I guess. At the last minute, as I was on my way out.”

I liked the candor of her answer. Any other would have been an untruth, but I liked her refusal to skirt around it. I liked her.

She smiled in offered good-night to me, without speaking it. Most of her was through the doorway now, all but her partingly tilted head and one back-slanted shoulder.

I wanted to ask her something. I don’t know why, but I did. And there was no other moment but this to ask it in, so on the spur of the moment I asked it.

“Were you ever in love?” I blurted out.

She stopped as she was, head and one shoulder still all to be seen. ‘‘Once,” she said quite simply. “Just once.” Her good-night smile had not faded.

I wondered why it had stopped, why it hadn’t gone on, why it had ended in this. A tensile hand within a handbag.

I didn’t ask, because I had no right to know. I hadn’t even had any right to ask as much as I had.

“I’ll tell you about it some time. The next time we run into each other.” Her smile had concluded its goodnight. Her head, her shoulder, had left the doorway. The door closed.

Then she put the comb back, took the lipstick out. Made just two swift passes with it, to the right for the upper lip, to the left for the lower. Then she put the lipstick back. Then her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there.

Then she looked over at me and said, “You didn’t have to do that,” with polite sincerity. It was as polite as it was sincere, but it was at least as sincere as it was polite.

I didn’t answer. There wasn’t anything to say.

She came back toward my side of the room, for her cigarette, left there beside mine, tip nudging tip. To finish it outside, along her latebound way, I suppose. I thought of her wending her shadowy, solitary way, just this one little transported spark for courage and for company. The streets were so empty and glooming, and she was so alone. She should have more than just a cigarette, I thought. Everyone in this world should have more than just a cigarette. None of us, really, has.

Perhaps that’s why I reminded her, of her promise of the time before. I thought it would be kind to keep her here just a little longer. Kind to her, or kind to me, or kind to both of us.

“You said you were in love once.”

“Everyone is,” she said tiredly.

Then she added with resignation: “You can’t expect to be that lucky: to have it miss you.”

I took her glass, from dose beside mine (everything about us was so close, I thought, except our pasts, our destinies), and swirled it, and emptied it, and filled it up afresh.

“Here,” I said. “Here, sit down here, at the foot.”

She took the glass and she lounged back with it, upright on her elbow.

“But don’t embroider it,” I cautioned her. “Tell it just the way it really was, or else don’t tell it at all. I don’t want stories. I can get those from a book.”

All she said was, “You couldn’t embroider this any.”

Ruby knocked on her door and called through it: “Marie, somebody wants you down at the door.”

Marie reared up on the bed, outraged, and let the newspaper she’d been browsing through disintegrate into separate sheets, a number of which slid to the floor.

“Not on your life!” she shouted back angrily. “It’s four o’clock in the afternoon. These aren’t calling hours. I wouldn’t see anybody right now for love nor money. Tell him to go jump in the river, for all I care.”

“It’s not a visitor,” Ruby tried to explain in a conciliatory voice. “It’s a man got some kind of special-delivery letter you got to sign for. You know Mrs. Burnside won’t let anybody like that in the house, so you’ve got to go down and see him about it yourself.”

“Oh,” said Marie, only partially mollified. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“Why didn’t you give me a chance?” came back in answer. “I don’t get paid for carrying your messages.”

Marie got up off the bed, tightened her lounging-sack around her, and thrust her bare feet into a pair of straw sandals.

“I guess I better tip him,” she thought, and took a quarter out of her secret cache in a small leather change-purse hidden under the lining-paper of her bureau-drawer. Then she changed her mind and made it two dimes instead. It was only a special-delivery letter after all, not a package or anything like that. She tried to be thrifty whenever she thought of it, but it was hard to remember to be at all times.