Into the Night

It was. It was called The Connection, and it had something to do with narcotic addiction. Other than that, what it was about was completely undecipherable. The stage was set in the center of the audience the way a boxing ring is. It was furnished with two or three wood-backed chairs and that was all. Two or three men stood in one corner of it talking. Occasionally one or the other of them would move about a little, then rejoin the others. And that was the extent of the dramatic action.

Madeline wasn’t too put out about it; she was there on behalf of dramatic action of her own, and not to watch that of others. What did jar her occasionally was to glimpse other faces in the audience looking her way through the actors’ legs whenever they made a move or took a stand. It destroyed all chances the play might have had of weaving an illusion.

At one point they both turned simultaneously and looked at one another.

“I can hear them perfectly,” she said under her breath. “Their delivery is good. But I can’t make out what they’re talking about.”

“I was just going to say the same thing to you,” he chuckled. “I think a lot of it is users’ slang, that’s why. Drug users, you know.”

They stayed on for a rather valiant length of time at that, but finally gave up the struggle and left when it showed no signs of stopping.

“I don’t know how we would have known when it was over, anyway,” she remarked on their way out. “They had no curtain.”

“One way of telling it wasn’t going on anymore might have been by the general perking up in the surrounding atmosphere. I really owe you an apology.”

“No, you don’t at all. It’s part of the scene around us today. A tiny part, but still a part. Maybe drug addicts do stand around like that and just wait; I’ve never known any of them. Still, I’m glad we took it in.”

“It was very avant-garde, I suppose. But why couldn’t it be that and at the same time lucid? They never are.”

“I don’t care for any of that stuff,” she told him decidedly. “I must have been born a hundred years too late.”

It was true. She was a formalist. She had been born old-fashioned. She wanted plot in her plays (à la Shakespeare); she wanted a melody in her music (à la Verdi, à la Strauss); she wanted a reproduction of the natural image in her paintings, her art (à la Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael). Those men were good enough for her.

She wasn’t interested in kindergarten-age children’s crayon daubings when done by grown-ups. Or reefer dreams improvised out of a slide trombone without any notes to back them up. Or sculpture done with chicken wire. Or people on a stage who talked but didn’t move.

For her it had to be laid on the line, circle-perfect, rounded out, no gaps left to be filled in.

And it must have been something of this feeling for completion, for symmetry, that lay at the bottom of her compulsion to finish out Starr’s life for her. The original guilt complex wasn’t solely responsible for it any longer; that would have worn thin by this time.

A modernist would have walked away with a laugh. I should finish up somebody else’s life for them? I got my own, and one at a time’s enough.

But the nineteenth century would have understood. The nineteenth century with its idealism.

They found a little espresso coffee place, dim as a flickering match flame but a good place to talk in. They sat way over in a corner in the gloom, barely able to see one another’s eyes. A girl with her back against the wall lazily picked at a mandolin, but she never seemed to finish more than the first bar of anything she started.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said, the way you drop a small pebble into a smooth sleek pool of water and wait to see the ripples slowly widen around it.

But no ripples came; it suddenly solidified, seemed to harden over. The way his eyes did too. And the ease of talk was gone for a moment.

It’s too soon, she realized. He won’t tell me yet. Maybe he never will.

“Tell you what about her?” he said guardedly.

“I only meant — her looks,” she corrected. “It’s hard to tell from that picture at the studio, she’s so much in shadow.”

“Oh,” he relented. And he thought for a minute. And he probably saw her face in the flame of the candle she could see him staring at. It reflected itself doubly in his eyes, once in each pupil, like two small tapers shining at an altar of recollection.

“She’s stunningly beautiful,” he murmured reverently.

Madeline had held her in her arms when she was dying, had looked into her face, had seen it. True, she was in pain, she was in shock, life was flowing out of her. But even with that allowed for, she had not been stunningly beautiful. Attractive, yes; pleasing to look upon; the structure and the proportions of her face did that for her. Above all, youth did that for her. But she had not been stunningly beautiful. Yet to him she was, she had been.

Therefore: He had really loved her.