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

She was smiling rather venomously as she bound a towel about her hair and put on a street make-up. Tamper with her act, would he? She’d see about that. Not that there had been anything disrespectful in the note or the gift of flowers (sweet peas, she admitted to herself, were not expensive enough to be very insinuating); it was simply that she intended to repay him in kind. Especially since he laid himself open this way. It was too good to miss.

Dressed and ready to leave, she selected two or three of the flowers and pinned them to her coat. She emerged into the obscurity of the alley backstage, with its single light in a wire basket throwing a pool of light downward over the cement, and reached the street at the end of it without meeting a soul. It was a little too early yet for them to be coming out.

There were not more than four people waiting in the lobby when she got around to the front of the house. Two of them were women and one was a colored man with a mop and pail, which made the task of identifying him much simpler. He was, if anyone, the individual peering through the oval panes at the end-numbers of the show. He turned around just then and she lowered her head to smell the flowers on her coat. He caught the signal they had agreed upon and came over to her at once. They studied each other for a split-second like a pair of prizefighters measuring distances at the stroke of the bell.

“Good evening,” he said.

“What makes you think you have the right to speak to me?” she asked, detachedly curious.

“I haven’t the right, only the wish.”

“Well, your wish has been granted.” She pretended to move away. “Good night,” she said. That, she knew, would bring him after her. It did.

“Wait!” he said. “You’re not going so soon?”

“Why not?” she answered. “Do you think I came out front here on purpose to meet you?”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “You’re wearing the flowers to identify yourself.”

She unpinned them and threw them away. He picked them up and put them in his wallet.

“I suppose now you’ll carry them around with you for the rest of your life,” she said mockingly. “Until you fall for somebody else.”

“I’m not that kind,” he said.

“What do you do?” she asked.

“When your partner goes in to buy a shirt,” he said, “why, I wait on him.”

“No, you don’t,” she corrected. “He’s only got one and the last time he changed it was when the boys came back from overseas. The other night the collar-band dropped off and started to walk away of its own accord — he just stepped on it in the nick of time.”

He laughed appreciatively.

She was finding it harder to dislike him as the minutes wore on. He made a good listener at any rate. The show was out now and the lobby was filling with people.

“It’s warm,” she said. “I’d like a Coca-Cola.”

They went to get one.

“Listen,” she said, “why did you crab my act last night? Don’t you know that wasn’t regular? You should have played up to me.”

“I wasn’t thinking of the act, I was thinking of you.”

“Now really,” she said, “isn’t that going a little too fast?”

“The first night I came, I bought one of your records in the lobby to take home with me. And when I put it on, it wasn’t you at all; it was someone else singing it.”

“Were you disappointed?”

“I never got to the end. I broke it right then and there.”

Who wouldn’t have been very gentle with him after hearing a thing like that? And she was not so hard-boiled inside herself after all. She knew that now. Through barely parted lips he heard her murmur, “Almost thou persuadest me.” As they walked out of the drugstore together, she was certain of only one thing — she would not do what she had planned to do to him. She stopped him at the door with a little gesture.

“You stay here, and don’t look which way I go. Tomorrow night if I am thirsty, I may drop by here for another Coca-Cola.”

Tomorrow night she was thirsty.

She did not have to pin flowers to her coat now, or identify him by eliminating everyone else nearby. In the taxi driving to the theater she had said to herself, “What is the matter with me?” and could find no explanation. She made one last feeble attempt to fight off this thing that she had sung about so often from the boards and was now meeting for the first time. “If you’re a dreamer,” she said, “you’d better get someone else for your dreams. I can’t see you any more.”

The next night she found that she needed a new lipstick and she stepped in to buy it. All he said was, “How lucky for me you needed that lipstick.” She refused to admit even to herself that she had just thrown a brand new one away in the alley in back of the theater. They were Marty and Zelda to each other now. And Coca-Cola no longer seemed a very commonplace drink.

At times she still stopped a moment and tried to understand what it was that had happened to her. “It seems that this is love,” she said. She wasn’t laughing at this the way she would have a little while ago.