Флетчер Флора - Park Avenue Tramp

“Were they interesting people?” Oliver said.

“No, they were very dull. They were bores, as a matter of fact. Especially her. A number of years ago she won several of these beauty contests you are always reading about in which someone becomes Miss something-or-other, and she seemed to think this was important. Everyone knows perfectly well that such contests mean hardly anything, but she kept referring to them all the time as if having won them was an exceptional accomplishment.”

“I’m sorry you were bored. Was the other guest any better?”

“Yes, he was. He was much better, He’s a professor in a university somewhere and is apparently quite poor, but he’s writing a book that may make some money for him.”

“What’s his name?”

“Clyde Connelly. I don’t remember what university he teaches in, but I believe it’s somewhere in the Middle West, like Ohio or Illinois or somewhere, and if I’m not mistaken he is on sabbatical leave next year and is going to Europe. He came to New York to see a publisher about the book and met Samantha at a party they had both gone to with someone else. You know Samantha. She is always picking someone up and cultivating him for a while and then dropping him. This professor is good-looking and not very old, and it’s probable that they’re having an affair.”

“You think so?”

“Yes, I do. I think it’s probable.”

“Are all your friends always having affairs?”

“Oh, no. Not always. I didn’t intend to give that impression at all. If you think they are, you’re mistaken.”

He laughed and reached over and squeezed her nearer knee in a sudden warm gesture.

“My dear,” he said, rising, “I know practically nothing about your friends, and I think about them just as infrequently as I can.”

He stood looking down at her, smiling, and her feeling of uneasiness returned and grew, not because of what he had said or the way in which he had said it, but simply because his geniality was rare and excessive and therefore suspect.

“I must go change,” he said. “Are you going out this evening?”

“No. I thought I’d stay in and go to bed early. I’m rather tired after the weekend and all.”

“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll not disturb you when I come in.”

When he was gone, her uneasiness began to diminish slowly and after a few minutes was gone. There had simply been no evidence at all that he was informed on her affair, and it was impossible to believe that he was capable of such convincing and monstrous deception. Besides, what would have been the point of it? It was obvious that everything was all right, that there was nothing to worry about, and she began to regret, now that she had convinced herself of this, that she had not planned to go see Joe Doyle tonight instead of tomorrow night. She was tempted to go tonight anyhow, regardless of plans, but perhaps it would be wiser, since she had committed herself to staying in and going to bed early, to wait another twenty-four hours.

The time would pass. Tomorrow she would find something to do, though she didn’t know what, and tonight she would have a simple dinner alone and two or three Martinis afterward, and then she would watch television in bed. Television was commonly so utterly dull that it would probably put her to sleep after a while without the help of soporifics.

Tuesday was a day that was somehow spent.

In the afternoon, the gown and other things were delivered, and she tried on the gown in her room to be sure that it was actually as exciting as she had thought it was in the salon, and it seemed to her that it was. Often she would get enthusiastic about something that she saw and bought, and then later, when she saw it again in different circumstances, she couldn’t understand how she had been so mistaken as to have wanted it, but this time, to her relief, the gown was still right and exciting and just the thing to wear when she went to see Joe Doyle.

After trying it on and looking at herself for a long time in a mirror, she took it off again and laid it across the bed in readiness for later, and then there wasn’t a thing left to do that was tolerable, but it was essential to do something, for doing nothing was most intolerable of all. In this kind of situation, she usually ended up doing things to herself, brushing her hair and trying new effects with her face and fixing her fingernails and toenails, things like that, and she started now doing all these things. Fortunately, this was all meticulous work that required careful attention and had the incidental result of making time pass quickly, and she had just finished with the nail of the little toe on her left foot, the last thing to be done, when Oliver came home and knocked on her door, and she was genuinely astonished to realize that it had become so late so soon.

But there was something terribly wrong. She felt it the moment Oliver came into the room. He closed the door behind him and stood leaning against it, watching her, and the wrongness was immediately present and felt and growing to such enormous dimensions that it seemed to fill the room and press in upon her from the walls. Not that he said anything or did anything or appeared to be in the least angry. He appeared, in fact, to be unusually congenial, as he had been yesterday, and he smiled and nodded his head, watching her, as if he approved of what he saw.

It was strange and irrational how the feeling came over her. One moment she was doing things to herself to pass the time until she could do what she really wanted to do, and everything was all right and getting better, and the next moment everything was all wrong and getting worse, and there didn’t seem to be any reason for it or anything she could do to stop it. She had experienced the same feeling before, however, the sudden terrible conviction of imminent disaster that had no apparent relationship to circumstances as they were at the time, and a doctor at one of the parties where she got most of her spiritual and psychiatric guidance had told her, after an intimate consultation in a corner over several cocktails, that it was a kind of free-floating anxiety that occasionally attached itself to a specific incident or person. This was nice to know, of course, but it wasn’t very effective as therapy and did little or nothing to alleviate matters whenever the free-floating anxiety attached itself afterward to something or someone specific, as it was now attached to Oliver at the door.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Wrong?” He straightened and walked three steps into the room. “Nothing’s wrong, my dear. What makes you think there is?”

“I don’t know. I just had a feeling when you came in that something was.”

“You’re mistaken. Everything is fine. Are you planning to go somewhere tonight?”

“I was thinking that I might. I went to bed early last night, you know, and now I’d like to go somewhere and do something.”

“Do you have something definite arranged?”

“Oh, no. Nothing special at all. There’s always somewhere to go that doesn’t require special arrangements.”

“That’s good. It’s good, I mean, that you haven’t committed yourself to anything definite, for I’ve planned a little surprise for you.”

“Surprise? What kind of surprise?”

He smiled, tracing with the tip of an index finger the thin scar along his mandible, and she watched him with a conviction of personal peril growing stronger and stronger in her morbid certainty of all things going wrong, It was surely a kind of minor revolution when Oliver disrupted his schedule for anything whatever, and it raised the question of whether the disruption was a sign of a change in their relationship which he intended to be good or was, on the other hand, a development of the danger she had sensed and believed, and in either case it threatened to spoil the night she had planned and was therefore bad.