Into the Night

It wasn’t news to her, of course, but now that she’d worked it so that he’d seemed to tell her himself, they could go on from there without further hindrance.

Nothing memorable was said, but then it was too early in the game for that, anyway.

She learned little things about him, tiny facets, nothing more. He drank slowly, and he left an inch of liquor in the glass. That meant he didn’t qualify as a heavy drinker nor even as a moderate one, he qualified as a light sociability drinker. He was not a nervous nor a restless type of person. At one point what must have been an oversized truck backfired with a thunderous detonation immediately outside the window somewhere. She jarred an inch above her seat in recoil. He never moved at all, just gave her a humorously rueful smile. Also, soon after he sat down, she noticed that he crossed his legs, the left one over the right. At the very end, when they were both ready to get up and go, they were still that way, the left one over the right. He was placid, restful to have around.

She watched the play of his hands a great deal. They were sensitive, dexterous hands, good for the work he did. The nails were cut square across the top. A home job, obviously; he wasn’t one of these male popinjays that go in for manicures. But they were faultlessly clean. She could detect no cruelty or meanness in his hands. And yet could one be sure? They were only hands, no matter what was said, and not the mind that ruled them. She wondered if they’d ever clenched and struck a blow in anger and in hate at Starr.

He still wore Starr’s gold wedding ring, one of the pair they must have exchanged.

Somehow she knew then, though she could not have told why, that no, he’d never struck a blow in anger or in hate at Starr.

He seemed to feel comfortable with her, made no drastic attempt to get up and go. She purposely procrastinated, prolonged the interlude until all the light outside had faded away and it was almost too late for him to go anywhere else for his dinner.

Then craftily she went inside to the phone and asked for two menus to be sent up, without letting him near her.

“What’re you doing?” he said to her, when the waiter showed up at the door.

“I’m ordering dinner for us,” she said sleekly.

He half rose to his feet in protest, but she could see that he was flattered. “I can’t let you do that—!” And then, “Well, only if you’ll let me buy it—”

“I live here,” she said firmly. “The next one will be your buy.”

In the end they compromised, went downstairs and sat at the corner table she usually occupied, and she signed the tab and he paid the tip.

Once dinner was taken care of, it was easy to get him back upstairs again. He could not have left her right after the meal without being guilty of the classic “eat-and-run” offense.

And he had a very strong sense of social responsibility, she could tell that much about him already.

Once upstairs and with a symbolic rather than utilized cognac in front of each of them, they found themselves on more intimate terms than before. The dinner and the predinner drink had mellowed him, and she found it easy, with an adroit question or two for a lead, to get him started talking about himself. Not the private inner self that Starr had known, of course. She didn’t dare reach for that. It was too soon, it would only have evaded her. But the self of his outer life, his work, his experiences.

“How did you get started in photography?”

“It was born in me,” he told her candidly. “I couldn’t have been anything else.”

At ten or eleven his father had given him a camera as a birthday gift, one of the elementary Kodaks of those days. Nearly all boys are given cameras at one time or another, and to nearly all boys it becomes a hobby for a while, just like collecting stamps or coins or things of that sort. And then it passes and is forgotten.

But from the minute he first put his hands on it, something happened.

“I knew right then what I was going to be. I knew right then what I wanted to be, had to be. I was holding my whole life’s work in my hands.”

He quickly learned the mechanics of the thing, the developing of his own prints. Most boys do, anyway, and it cost too much to take them down to the corner drugstore, even at those days’ thrifty prices.

But there was much more than that to it. It was as though there had been pent up in him until now this force, this drive, this reservoir of creative ability, and this outlet came along and released it, acted as catalyst to it, so that it poured forth unslackening from then on, for the rest of his days.

From the beginning he wasn’t interested in snapping his friends’ grinning faces, or their pups, or their little sisters. Or the school team in their baseball togs.

Odd shots and angles. That was all that ever interested him. He was always looking for new and different angles. That intrusion of self between the lens and the object that transmutes a mere mechanical process into art.