Into the Night

One, just coming back after being called outside to answer a phone, was anything but complacent. His face was flushed with sulkiness and wounded vanity, and after he’d reseated himself to wait some more, he drummed anger-expressing fingers on the table.

One was breaking a roll open, preparing it for buttering.

One had his hand inside his pocket to get out money, and with the other one was good-naturedly waving off his friend’s attempt to pay.

One was holding a vivaciously twinkling lighter across the table to the cigarette of his woman companion.

— to turn someone like that, or that, or that, into something that didn’t move anymore. And soon rotted away. That didn’t smile at some girl anymore, or look at a watch anymore. Or flick on a lighter anymore. Or take money out of his pocket.

Well, what was so terrible about it? God in His infinite wisdom — or infinite indifference — did that every day, stopped lives by the score and by the hundreds. Blind Nature did it too, in a multitude of ways, if any distinction could be made between the two.

Yes, but she wasn’t God, and she wasn’t Nature. That was what was terrible about it.

Death took only an instant, a second. It couldn’t by its nature take more than that. Even a lengthy dying was still life up until that final second. To destroy in less than a second, then, what it had taken twenty-five, thirty, forty years to grow and shape. To efface, to wipe out, what some mother had nurtured and cherished. What some younger woman had loved and joined her life to. To blank out the collected knowledge inside that mind, the specialties, the talents, the knacks, the lacks; never again to be reassembled in just that identical collectivity and ratio and proportion and degree. Unique, each single mind, out of all the millions of others. Irreplaceable. The memories, the experiences, the disappointments, the hates, the loves, the plans, the hopes.

All this — in just an instant, erased, extinguished, annihilated.

And yet it had to be. It was to be. It would be.

She wanted her own peace of mind back. She was entitled to it. She couldn’t live without it, life would be unendurable.

She took up an unused table knife and slowly drew an invisible line along the tablecloth.

This is his path, slowly coming toward mine. Nearer as the days go by, nearer each hour and each day.

She drew another line toward the first one, but stopped it short before they encountered one another.

This is my path, slowly going toward his. Inevitably, they will come together. After they meet, mine will keep going on again. His won’t. His will have stopped.

The shadow of a man’s head and shoulders dimmed the whiteness of the table a little, and the waiter asked her if there was anything more.

She shook her head inattentively without looking up at him, and watched the faint outline efface itself from the cloth again.

Like that, life left you, went away from you. Like a faint shadowing slipping off the blankness of some empty tablecloth. Just like that.

It is at one and the same time both the easiest and yet the hardest thing in the world for a girl to meet a certain designated man, who is a stranger to her and within whose orbit she does not naturally fall: that is, with whom she does not share mutual friends nor gravitate within the same business or professional background as he does. It is easy if her long-range motive is marriage or her short-range one simply a love affair. Or for that matter, even just a quick sex-kick. Because then all she does is place herself in his way, go somewhere where she knows he’ll be and where he can’t help see her, and let the rest follow automatically from there. Either let him pick her up, or else pick him up and let him think he did.

But if her motive is something else again, if there is not the slightest possibility of love on her part, and even less on his, so that even the phony promise of love-yet-to-come cannot be used as an inducement or come-on in helping to break the ice, and if they have no mutual friends, no complementary backgrounds, then the difficulty becomes almost insurmountable.

Madeline’s motive was murder, no more, no less. She was honest enough to admit to herself that that was all it could be called in the final analysis, no matter how she tried to gloss it over by calling it a deed of retribution, or atonement, or vindication, or whatever. It was death by violence, at her hands, and that was murder.

There had to be a relationship to precede this act. She couldn’t just shoot him down at sight. One very good reason being she didn’t know him by sight. All she’d seen was his smile, in one torn photograph. She had to know he was the right one, she had to make sure. Since love was barred, and there was no business or professional empathy, the only possible relationship had to be friendship. No matter how false, but still a friendship.

And that was where the problem came in. A woman cannot suddenly meet and commence a friendship with a strange man, just like that.