They Call Me Patrice

The room was warm with occupancy. The coat and hat he’d worn with her in the car just now were slung over a chair. A cigarette that he’d incompletely extinguished a few short moments ago was wrinkled and bent into a V, but one end of it was still stubbornly smouldering in a dish. The drink that he was coming back to finish in a moment, the drink with which he’d celebrated tonight’s successful enterprise, stood there on the edge of the table. But he wasn’t in the room. He must have stepped into the next one, beyond, just as she arrived outside at the door. He must be in there now, offside light was coming through the open doorway.

“Steve,” she said quietly in the stillness, “come out here a second.”

No fear, no love, no hate, no anything.

She opened her handbag, and took out the gun, and fitted her hand to it.

Then she went forward.

“Steve,” she said dully, “your wife is here.”

She made the turn of the doorway. The second room was at a right angle to the first. The light was less in here, just a shaded nightlamp over by his empty bed.

The rug bunched up around her foot, impeding her. She tried to dislodge it. She looked down and it wasn’t the rug. He was lying there, still, looking up at her, Indolence, his attitude seemed to express — too much trouble to get up. There was a cigarette between his outstretched fingers, she noticed. It had burned down to the skin, adhered, and then gone out, and miraculously failed to ignite the carpet.

You could hardly tell anything was the matter. There was a little dark line by the outside of his eye, where something had run down— His eyes seemed to be fixed on her, watching her, with that same mockery they’d always shown toward her.

It was that that made her cower back and strangle on a scream. The way his eyes seemed to be fixed on her. Not the thin dark line, nor the way he lay there, relaxed and still.

She was in the outside room now. She must have gone into it backward, not daring to take her eyes off that empty doorway, for she was still facing that way, when it came, The knock came.

It wasn’t soft and tempered, as hers had been. It didn’t space itself, and wait between. It was aggressive, demanding, continuous — already angered, and feeding on its own anger at every second’s added delay. It drowned her second choked scream, the scream that held real fear. Agnonizing fear, trapped fear such as she’d never known existed before. For the voice that riddled it, that sounded through it and with it and over it, in stern impatience, was Bill’s. She would have known it anywhere.

“Patrice! Open this door. Patrice! Do you hear me? I know you’re in there. Open this door and let me come in there, or I’ll break it down—”

In a moment, in a second, he’d discover that it was unlocked, just as she had earlier. She flung herself bodily against it, with a cry of despair, just as the knob turned and the door started to spring open.

“No!” she breathed. “No!” She threw the full weight of her body against the door.

“Patrice, you must let me in. You must!”

He could see her now, and she could see him, through the fluctuating gap the opening door made, now narrow, now wider. And still she tried to bar him, pressing against it, hands straining to hold it on the inside.

“No, Bill, no!” she wailed. “Stay out of here. Oh, if you love me, don’t come in here! Don’t Bill, don’t!”

Then suddenly she was swept back on the arc of the whole door, like a leaf, and he was standing beside her.

“Where is he? I’ll kill him—” he said breathlessly.

She clung to him now, and his arm went around her, tight, firm. There is a point beyond which you can’t be alone any more. You have to have someone to cling to. You have to cling to someone, even if they are to reject you again in another moment or two.

“Somebody has — already.” She shuddered, hiding her face against him. “He’s in there, dead, Bill!”

Suddenly his arm dropped and he’d left her. It was terrible to be alone, even just for a moment. She wondered how she’d stood it all these months, these years.

Then he reappeared in the doorway. She saw his head give a grim nod, before her face had found refuge against him again. That sanctuary that all her life she’d been trying to find.

He was turning her, propelling her, within the curve of his protective arm. “Come on, you have to get out of here! You can’t be found here. You must be out of your mind to do such a— What the devil got into you to make you—?”

She was struggling against him a little now, short of the door. She pried herself away from him suddenly, and stood there facing him.

“No, wait! Listen to me! There’s something you must hear first. Something you have to know.”

“Not now! Can’t you understand? Any minute somebody’s likely to stick his head into this place— Let me get you out of here! Patrice, if you won’t think of yourself, think of Mother, Don’t you know what it means if you’re found here?”