They Call Me Patrice

“It’s the lights. I’m going in to powder. You go and dance with someone else.”

He grinned at her. “I don’t want to dance with someone else.”

“Then you go and — and come back for me. The one after.”

“The one after.”

She watched him head for the bar. Then she turned and went the other way.

She walked slowly over to the doors leading outside onto the veranda, and stood in one of them, looking out into the blueness of the night. Wicker chairs, in groups of twos and threes, circled small tables.

The red sequin of a cigarette-tip rose high in a beckoning motion from far down at the end of the porch.

She walked slowly down that way and came to a halt before him. He perched sidewise on the ballustrade, in insolent informality. He repeated what he’d said before. “Who’d he say you were? I didn’t quite get the name.”

The stars were moving. They were making peculiar eddying swirls like blurred pinwheels all over the sky.

“You deserted me,” she said with leashed fury. “You divorced me without my knowledge, left me with only five dollars and a railroad ticket. Now what do you want?”

“What do I want? I don’t want anything. I’m a little confused, that’s all. I’d like to be straightened out. The man introduced you under a mistaken name in there.”

“What do you want? What are you doing out here?”

“Well, for that matter,” he said with insolent urbanity. “What are you doing down here?”

She repeated it a third time. “What do you want?”

“Can’t a man show interest in his ex-wife and child? There’s no way of making children ‘ex,’ you know.”

“You’re either insane or—”

“You know that isn’t so. You wish it were,” he said brutally. “That child is ours.”

She turned on her heel. His hand found her wrist again, flicked around it like a whip. Cutting just as deeply.

“Don’t go inside yet. We haven’t finished.”

She stopped, her back to him now. “I think we have.”

“The decision is mine.”

He let go of her, but she stayed there where she was.

“You still haven’t cleared things up,” he purred. “I’m as mixed-up as ever. This Hugh Hazzard married...  er...  let’s say you, his wife, in Paris, two years ago last June fifteenth. I went to considerable expense and trouble to have the exact date on the records there verified. But two years ago last June fifteenth you and I were honeymooning in our little furnished room in New York. I have the receipted rent-bills to prove it. How could you have been in two such far-apart places at once?” He sighed philosophically. “Somebody has his dates mixed. Either he had. Or I have.” And then very slowly, “Or you have,”

She winced unavoidably at that. Slowly her head came around; she moved as though hypnotized.

“It was you who’s been sending those—?”

He nodded with mock affability, as if on being complimented on something praiseworthy. “I thought it would be kinder to break it to you gently.”

She drew in her breath with an icy shudder of repugnance.

“I first happened on your name among the train-casualties, when I was up in New York,” he said. He paused. “I went there and identified a body as yours, you know,” he went on matter-of-factly. “You have that much to thank me for, at any rate.”

He puffed thoughtfully on his cigarette.

“Then I heard one thing and another, and put two and two together. I went back for awhile first — got the rent-receipts together and one thing and another — and then finally I came on the rest of the way out here, out of curiosity. I became quite confused,” he said ironically, “when I learned the rest of the story.”

He waited. She didn’t say anything. He seemed to take pity on her finally. “I know,” he said indulgently, “this isn’t the time nor place to — talk over old times. This is a party, and you’re anxious to get back and enjoy it.”

She shivered,

“Is there anywhere I can reach you?”

He took out a notebook, clicked a lighter. She mistakenly thought he was waiting to write as she dictated. Her lips remained frozen.

“Seneca 382,” he read from the notebook. He put it away again. His hand made a lazy curve between them. In the stricken silence that followed he suggested after awhile, casually: “Lean up against that chair so you won’t fall. You don’t seem very steady on your feet, and I don’t want to have to carry you inside in front of all those people.”

The rose-amber haze in the open doorway down at the center of the terrace was blotted out for a moment, and Bill was standing there looking for her.

“Patrice, this is our dance,” he said.

Georgesson rose for a second to bow.

She wavered toward Bill, the dim light of the terrace covering her uncertainty of step. She went inside with him and his arms took charge of her from that point on, so that she no longer had to be on her own.

“You were both standing there like statues,” he said. “He can’t be very good company.”

She lurched against him in the tendril-like twists of the rumba; her head drooped to rest on his shoulder.

“He isn’t,” were the only words she could find.

And she knew, inevitably and finally, that peace for her had ended.