They Call Me Patrice

She had opened Patrice’s closet-door, meanwhile, and was peering helpfully inside. “How about this?” She took down a flowered linen with a gay contrasting jacket, and held it up appraisingly. “It’ll do nicely.” The dress landed on the bed. “They’re not very formal there. Bill will buy you an orchid or gardenia on the way, that will dress it up enough. You just go and get the feel of the place tonight. You’ll get back in the swing of things little by little. I’ll tell Bill you’re getting ready.”

He was standing waiting for her just inside the door when she came downstairs.

“Am I all right?” she asked.

He was suddenly shy with her. “Gee, I...  I didn’t know how you could look in the evening,” he said haltingly.

For the first few moments of the drive, there was a sort of tenseness between them, almost as though they’d met tonight for the first time. He turned on the radio in the car. Dance music rippled back into their faces. “To get you into the mood,” he said, a little self-consciously.

He stopped, and got out, and came back with a corsage of gardenias. “Somehow these seemed to suit you better than an orchid,” he said with a grin. “Mother always did think orchids wow the girls... ”

“They’re beautiful Bill. Here, pin them on for me.”

Abruptly, he balked at that — all but shied away. “Oh no, that you do yourself,” he said. “I might stab myself,” he added lamely as an afterthought. The pause was a little too long.

“Why, you great big coward.”

His hands were a trifle unsteady, she noticed, when he first put them back to the wheel. Then they quieted.

They drove the rest of the way through open country, the stars only finger-tip distance above them.

“I’ve never seen so many!” she marveled.

“Maybe you haven’t been looking up enough,” he said gently.

Toward the end, just before they got there, a peculiar sort of tenderness seemed to overcome him for a minute. He slowed the car a little, and turned his head toward her.

“I want you to be happy tonight, Patrice,” he said earnestly. “I want you to be very happy.”

“I’ll try, Bill,” Patrice said. “And I know I will be.”

And she was happy. For dance after dance. She always remembered that afterward. She was dancing with Bill. For that matter she’d been dancing with him steadily ever since they’d arrived. She wasn’t watching, she wasn’t looking around her. She wasn’t thinking of anything but the two of them.

Smiling dreamily, she danced. Her thoughts were like a little brook running swiftly but smoothly over harmless pebbles, keeping time with the tinkling music.

I like dancing with him. He dances well, you don’t have to keep thinking about your feet. He’s turned his face toward me and is looking down at me. I know it. Well, I’ll look up at him, and then he’ll smile at me. But I won’t smile back at him. Watch. There, I knew that was coming. I will not smile back. Oh, well, what if I did? Why shouldn’t I smile at him, anyway? That’s the way I feel about him — smilingly fond.

A hand touched Bill’s shoulder from behind. She could see the fingers slanted downward for a second, without seeing the person they belonged to.

A voice said, “May I cut in on this one?”

And suddenly they’d stopped. Bill’s arms left her. A shuffling motion took place, Bill stepped aside, and there was someone else there in his place. Someone like a bad dream out of the past. It was like a double exposure, where one person dissolves into another.

Their eyes met, hers and the new pair. They had been waiting for hers, and hers had foolishly run into them. They couldn’t move again after that.

The rest was sheer horror. Horror such as she’d never known.

“Steve Georgesson’s the name,” he murmured unobtrusively to Bill. His lips hardly seemed to stir at all. His eyes didn’t leave hers.

Bill completed the ghastly parody of an introduction. “Mrs. Hazzard, Mr. Georgesson.”

“How do you do?” he said to her.

She felt his arms close about her, her face sank into the concealing shadow of his shoulder. Bill’s face faded away in the background.

“We’ve met before, haven’t we?”

Keep me from fainting, she prayed.

“Who’d he say you were?” he asked sardonically.

“Don’t—” she whimpered. “Don’t.”

The music stopped. They stopped.

His arm released her, but his hand stayed tight about her wrist, holding her there beside him for a moment.

He said, “There’s a veranda outside. Over there, out that way. I’ll go out there and wait for you, and we can — talk.”

She hardly knew what she was saying. “I can’t— Don’t ask me to.” Her neck wouldn’t hold firm; her head kept trying to lob over limply.

“I think we can. We were once married to one another, remember? Perfectly proper for an ex-husband to talk over old times with his ex-wife.”

Bill was coming back toward them from the sidelines.

“I’ll be out there where I said. Don’t keep me waiting too long, or— I’ll simply have to come in and look you up again.” His face didn’t change. His voice didn’t change. “Thanks for the dance,” he said, as Bill arrived.

“Are you all right?” asked Bill. “You look pale.”