Корнелл Вулрич - Manhattan Love Song

First she was just a figure moving toward me in the distance, among a great many others doing the same thing. A second later she was a girl. Then she became a pretty girl, exquisitely dressed. Next a responsive girl, whose eyes said “Are you lonely?” whose shadow of a smile said, “Then speak.” And by that time we had reached and were almost passing one another. Our glances seemed to strike a spark between us in midair.

I retraced my steps while she continued hers. It had been too sudden to be crude, or even noticeable at all. And I had raised my hat. You raise your hat when you meet some one. And I had met her, as any one could see. Not at all new under the sun, all that. But it was she and it was I. That made all the difference imaginable.

She was dressed almost entirely in blue, but her stockings were the color of a rifle-barrel glistening in the sunlight, and their texture was so thin that it merged into the pink of her skin, which showed through. She had eyes with sprites in them that came and went: little capering symbols of whimsicality and amusement, dancing figurines of mockery. And at times she drawled, “If you see what I mean,” and a horrible expression that she had, “On the level?”

“Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s Third Avenue.”

“Well?”

“You’re — at any rate, Madison.”

“That,” she said, “is a thing I’ve never done before in all my life.”

I smiled and asked her what that was.

“That, back there,” she explained.

“You mean, meeting me this way?”

“Meeting any one this way. No, really—”

“Wade.”

“No, really, Wade, I could tell by looking at you—”

It seemed absurd for her to think me nice. “You ought to know me!”

The street was gone now, and the lights of the street, and the taxis and the dangerous crossings, where one had to start forward and then shrink back, and stay close beside one another. We sat for a while somewhere along Seventh Avenue, and every so often a monstrous top set in the ceiling, all tin and bits of broken mirror, would begin spinning and throwing off a fine spray of drops of light that got in our eyes and rained down the walls like a new plague in a newer Egypt.

She extinguished her cigarette in the remains of the chop suey. “So much for that. To go back: Is there love at this table?”

Probably at every one of these tables, I told her, except perhaps the one at which the Cantonese cashier was sitting by himself. I already knew one could use a term like “Cantonese” in speaking to Bernice.

“Here, I’ll put it this way. I don’t feel love; now is there love at this table?”

“Half-love,” I remarked. Said she, “I’d rather have a baked apple.”

The whining music ebbed into the distance, the dancers melted away, the lanterns and the prismatic top faded from view, and in the tall, white apartment house Bernice said, “Put your hat down any place at all.”

One knee was bent and her leg folded under her. Up and down the other, which touched the floor, coursed a mobile silvery gleam, oily as mercury. That was the electric light in the room, come to a head upon the silk that encased her calf. She alone could have lent grace and relaxation to so grotesque a posture.

The noises that came to us from the world outside were fewer now, but more distinct, meaning it had grown late. The lights were like planets now, ringed with luminous disks that were not there at all. To swallow was more stringent now, not as cool and grateful to the palate. I set a glass down, and the sound rang and then hummed in my ears for a long time afterward. This, like the halos about the lights, was not there at all, I realized.

“My birthstone,” she said, showing me a ring. “I was born in May.”

And then she looked at me more narrowly and did a strange thing. She took the ring off and dropped it on the inside of her dress.

“Once I had a ring,” she explained, “and a friend. I lost them both at about the same time. If you see what I mean.”

“Oh, I’d better scram,” I told myself disconsolately. Only my feet wouldn’t move.

“I’m going,” I said.

“Well, go, then!” she answered.

But once I read about a flower that looks very harmless and sweet, yet when an insect comes near it, it suddenly folds around it and captures it; that’s how it lives, by capturing the things that come too near it.

I took one of her hands and slowly disengaged it to hold it in mine. I studied it as though I had detached a part of her and the rest of her wasn’t there any more. It was very soft, it was graceful, tapered and unlined, and ended in five little glazed ovals, like porcelain baked in an oven. It had, no doubt, stroked kittens, puppies, possibly a man or two. A lucky man or two. It had, no doubt, clasped playing cards in fan shape, roadsters’ wheels, tall beaded glasses, and maybe even, in jest or white-faced deadliness, a purse-sized automatic revolver. How did I know, how could I tell? I pressed it to my lips, as though to assimilate at a stroke all its past experiences that I had had no share in. Then I grew weary and desperate with the kind of loneliness I had known so often and so well before now. The room, like a clumsy, improvised carousel, began to revolve about me, as though I were its pivot. For calliope it had my heart. Bernice shared in the general flux of everything I beheld. I was gazing up at her now from the floor.

“Loosen your collar,” she murmured. “I’m a little afraid of you,” she said. “You are the most perfect actor in New York, or else — I’ve met you eight years too late.”

She laughed, as though in derision of some long-established value of her own which had just been set aside. “And I thought I knew them all! Oh, I was so sure at twelve o’clock that there was nothing could surprise me any longer and now, at three, I find myself back where I was eight years ago, believing that it could happen like this and should happen like this. That it should make the room reel around you and your knees play you false. Yes, that is what it should be; not clammy hands under tablecloths and laprobes, and checks in scaled envelopes handed to you by the colored doorman downstairs the morning after.”

Her eyes sank to the level of mine as she dropped down beside me; our checks were pressed together now.

“The past is a lie. The past is something that no longer exists.”

“Yes,” she said docilely.

“And can you call a thing that no longer exists, true?”

“No.”

“And has the past ever existed? Hasn’t it always been just something in your mind?”

“Oh, no!” she contradicted. “For instance, eight years ago the past was still the future.”

“You mustn’t try to think like a man, that’s one thing,” I informed her sullenly. “Eight years ago the past was just as nonexistent as today. There never is a past, don’t you see?”

“Because you don’t want there to be any. Oh, Wade, what blows you’re letting yourself in for!”

“Did you ever know any one before you knew me? Did any one ever love you before I did? Then why aren’t they here beside you, as I am?”

“The room would be filled with people,” she breathed.

“Where are they?” I persisted. “How can you prove you knew them, prove they loved you, prove they really existed?”

“Oh, Wade,” she cried piteously, “I can’t! All I have to show for it is canceled checks!”

Rebelling, I kissed the past away from her lips. I kissed her eyes, and saw them droop. We were like two frantic, dying things, suffocating in a catastrophe of our own unchaining.