Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

She couldn’t decide whether to be contrite or casual or physically solicitous, which would require an effort but would possibly divert him, and the more she thought about it, the more difficult it became to decide and the more fearful she became, for she was truly afraid of him and often had to exercise the most rigid control in order to hide it. She remembered then that there was still another Martini left in the shaker, which was just the thing to reduce her problem to the most absurd simplicity, and so she got up and poured the Martini and sat down again and began to drink it, and she immediately decided that she would be casual. Drinking slowly, she began to watch the two hands of the clock move toward six o’clock. She couldn’t actually see the hands move at all, but nevertheless they constantly came closer and closer to the formation of a straight angle, and her tension kept increasing with the imperceptible movement of the hands, and this meant, of course, that she would be neither contrite nor casual nor solicitous when the time came, but rather coldly courteous, a form of combined hostility and fear that would not make a bad situation better.

Just before six, the hands almost at the point of their farthest separation, she finished her third Martini and got up and carried the shaker and glass and two bottles into the bathroom and set them in the tub. She wished now that she had dressed instead of remaining naked under a robe, which made her feel somehow more vulnerable, but it was too late now, actually six exactly, and while she looked at the clock and wished she were dressed, at fifteen seconds after the hour, Oliver knocked on the door. She went at once and let him in, and he followed her a few steps into the room and stood watching her as if she were some kind of curiosity that interested him mildly. The thin scar along the mandible was livid. “How are you, my dear?” he said.

He often called her his dear, and it made her uneasy. A long time ago, when she was a child, she had gone to a movie in which there was an evil duke, something like that, and the duke, for a reason she couldn’t remember, had kept his little niece locked in a room in a stone tower of his castle, and every time he went to see her, the first thing he said was, “How are you, my dear?” in just the way that Oliver said it. It was something that had stuck in Charity’s mind, and often at night after seeing the movie, she had dreamed that the duke was standing by her bed and smiling and saying, “How are you, my dear?” and she had wakened in terror and lain rigidly without opening her eyes in the fear that the evil duke, if she looked, would actually be there.

“I’m perfectly well, thank you,” she said.

“Are you?” he said. “It seems to me that you’re looking rather tired.”

“No, not at all. I’m feeling perfectly well.”

“Did yon have an interesting time last night?”

“Not particularly. It was rather dull, as a matter of fact. I went to a cocktail party at Samantha Cox’s in the afternoon and to several places afterward.”

“If it was so dull, why didn’t you come home?”

“Oh, I don’t know. You understand how it is when you get started with something. You simply go on and on for no good reason.”

“That’s very interesting, my dear. I’m always interested to know why you do things you don’t want to do. Tell me about it, please.”

“Why I do things?”

“No. What you did last night. The several places you went after Samantha’s.”

“It’s hardly worth while. It was nothing at all that would amuse you.”

“Nevertheless, I’d like to hear about it. Especially how it happened that you didn’t come home. It’s true that you didn’t come home, isn’t it? I was sure that you weren’t in your room when I left this morning.”

“Yes, it’s true that I didn’t come home. I stayed all night with Bernardine Dewitt.”

“I see. Was Bernardine with you all evening?”

“Yes. She was at Samantha’s, and a group of us went to this Italian restaurant because someone said that the food was exceptionally good, but it didn’t particularly appeal to me. As you know, I don’t especially care for Italian food.”

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry you didn’t enjoy your dinner. Tell me where you went after the restaurant.”

“Well, to all those places down in the Village. We all got to drinking quite a bit and going from one place to another, and I don’t remember at all clearly what the places were. After a while, Bernardine began to become ill, which isn’t unusual, and wanted to go home, and we took her there. She was in a pretty bad condition, really, and I went up to her apartment with her and put her to bed, and she kept asking me to stay, and so I finally did because there was nothing else I could do as a friend.”

“Certainly. I understand that. You are very loyal, my dear, if nothing else.”

She thought she detected an inflection in his voice that might have been irony, and she looked at him closely from the corners of her eyes to see if there was any sign of it on his face, but she couldn’t see any in his expression, which was attentive and sober, and she began to think that she was going to get away with the lie much more easily than she’d hoped.

“The only thing I don’t understand,” he said, “is why you didn’t call and let me know where you were. It would only have been considerate to have called.”

“Well, I didn’t think you’d worry, and I’m sorry if you did. I thought you would assume that I was staying all night with someone.”

“Quite right. That’s exactly what I assumed.”

“It’s all right, then, I wouldn’t have wanted you to worry.”

“Thank you, my dear. You’re very kind. You can’t imagine how relieved I am to know that it was Bernardine you spent the night with, for I had the idea it was a cheap little piano player named Joe Doyle.”

He said it so quietly that she didn’t for a second quite grasp the significance of what he’d said, and then, when she did, she felt instantly and terribly sick to the stomach and in imminent danger of losing her Martinis. She understood that she wasn’t going to get away with the lie so easily as she’d begun to think, that she wasn’t, in fact, going to get away with it at all, but she couldn’t see how Oliver could possibly know already about Joe Doyle. Although it was plainly futile to adhere to the story about staying with Bernardine, it was just as futile to try now to make up another one that would be any better, and what she would have to do would be to take a position of being maliciously persecuted and decline to explain anything whatever.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

“Of course you do, my dear. I mean that you are, besides other things, a pathological liar.”

“Well, I can see that you are angry and determined to accuse me of all sorts of things that aren’t true, and I don’t believe I feel like listening to it.”

“Oh, come, my dear. It’s time we were honest with each other. Shall I tell you exactly what you did last night? You went, as you said, to the Italian restaurant, and then you went, as you also said, to several places in the Village. After that, however, you deviated slightly from the truth. Instead of going to Bernardine’s you went off with Milton Crawford to a nightclub in the vicinity of Sheridan Square. You left that place alone and walked down the street to another place named Duo’s, and it was there that you picked up the piano player — and I want to compliment you on your good taste and discrimination in picking the piano player instead of the bartender or the porter. Eventually, omitting the details, you went with him to his room or apartment in a residence south of Washington Square, and you stayed there with him for the rest of the night. What did you do while you were there, my dear? Please tell me what you and the piano player did to amuse yourselves.”