Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

“And hotel rooms,” amended the maid, “are a lot like people.”

The other night at a party I met my last love again. By last, I don’t mean latest, I mean my first and yet my final one. We said the things you say, holding tall glasses in our hands to keep us company.

“Where’ve you been?”

“Around. And you?”

“Here and there.”

Then there wasn’t anything more to say. Love is bad for conversation; dead love, I mean. We drifted on. In opposite directions, not together.

It isn’t often that I see him anymore. But when I do, I wonder whatever really did become of her.

I first met him through Jean. Jean collects people, as a velvet evening wrap collects lint. People she has no emotional need for. She is very happily married. In an insulting, slurring way. I’ve never heard her speak a civil word to, or of, him. Example: “Oh, I don’t know why.” (shrug) “I had a spare twin bed and it seemed a shame to let it go to waste.” She is the most gregarious one-man woman I know. Or else she keeps going through brambles, I can’t say. Possibly it has to do with her face. She is not beautiful by wide-screen standards. But there is a winsome, elfin quality to her expression of face. I am not beautiful, either. The similarity ends there, right there.

Even when I was young, I was always the fifth wheel on the wagon. The other girl they had to ring in an extra man for, on dates. She never brought one of her own along. Never had one to bring. And these telephone-directory swains never repeated themselves. It was always someone else, the next time around. Once had been enough, for the one before.

Jean and her husband, the Cipher, stopped by for me in a cab at six-thirty, and the three of us went on together from there. The Cipher wore glasses, was beginning to show baldness, and grew on you slowly. You found yourself beginning to like him after a time lag of about six months. The nickname, Jean’s creation, was not inappropriate at that. The Cipher was singularly uncommunicative, on any and all subjects, after five o’clock in the afternoon. He was resting from business, she and I supposed. “He has a voice,” she had once assured me. “I called for him one day, and I heard it through the office door. I wasn’t at all certain until then.”

He said, on the present occasion, “ ’Lo, Annie,” in a taciturn growl as I joined them in the cab, and that, we knew, was all we were likely to get for the next hour to come, so it had to do. But “ ’Lo, Annie,” when it’s sincere and sturdy and reliable, isn’t bad, either. In fact, it may be better than a lot of facile patter. Jean had settled for it, and Jean was smarter when it came to men than I could ever hope to be.

Number 657 was one of the tall monoliths that run along Park Avenue like a picket fence from 45th to 96th, but a picket fence that doesn’t do its job. It doesn’t seem to keep anyone out; everyone gets in.

“Mr. Dwight Billings,” Jean said to the braided receptionist.

“Sixth floor,” he said.

We entered an elevator that was a trifle small. Space, presumably, was so expensive in this building that only a minimum could be spared for its utilities. We stepped out into a foyer, and there was only a single door facing us. A colored man opened it. His accent was pure university. “Good evening, Mrs. Medill, Miss Ainsley, Sir. If you’ll allow me.” He took the Cipher’s hat. “If you ladies would care—” He indicated a feminine guest room to one side.

Jean and I went in and left our wraps there, and looked at our faces in a wide, triple-winged vanity mirror. She unlidded a cut-crystal powder receptacle, being Jean, and sniffed at it. “Quite good,” she said. “Coty’s, unless I’m slipping. Rachel for brunettes, and” — she unlidded a second one on the opposite side — “flesh for blondes. Evidently there are no redheads on his list.”

I didn’t answer. I’ve been red-headed since I was twenty.

We rejoined the Cipher in the central gallery. It ran on for a length of about three rooms, cutting a wide swath through the apartment, and then you stopped, and turned to your left, and came down two steps onto the floor of the drawing room. It was artfully constructed for dramatic entrances, that room.

Overhead hung two rock-crystal chandeliers. One was lighted and sparkled like a rhinestone hornet’s nest inhabited by fireflies. The other was unlighted, and showed cool blue with frosty crystalline shadow. A man was sitting behind the upturned ebony lid of a grand piano. Desultory notes of “None but the Lonely Heart,” played with one hand alone, stopped short at the bustle of our coming down the two steps. Then he stood up and came forward, one hand out for Jean.

I like to study people. Even people that I think I’m going to see only once.

He was tall, and he was thirty-five; brown eyes and lightish hair, blonde when he was still a boy. He was like — how shall I say it? Everyone’s glimpsed someone, just once in her life, that she thought would’ve been just the right one for her. I say would’ve, because it always works out the same way. Either it’s too late and he’s already married, or if he isn’t, some other girl gets across the room to him first. But it’s a kindly arrangement, because if you had got across the room to him first yourself, then you would have found that he wasn’t just the right one for you after all. This way, the other girl is the one finds it out, and you yourself don’t get any of the pain.

What’s the good of trying to describe him? He was — well, how was that man that you didn’t quite get over to in time?

I like to study people. People that I know I’m going to see lots more than just once. That I want to, that I’ve got to.

“This is Annie,” Jean was saying in that careless way of hers. Nothing could be done about that. I’d given up trying. All the “Anyas” and “Annettes” when I was seventeen and eighteen hadn’t helped any. I was back to plain Annie again, this time to stay. Good old Annie, there’s a good girl.

We all sat down. He looked well sitting: not too far forward, not too far back. Not too straight, not too sunken. Couldn’t he do anything wrong? He should do something wrong. This wasn’t good for me.

We talked for a while, as people do, entering on the preliminaries of social intercourse. We said a lot of things; we said nothing. His man brought in a frost-clouded shaker and poured bacardis and offered them to us. The talk that was talk for the sake of making talk went on, at quickened pace now, lubricated by the cocktails.

“How did you happen to get hold of all this?” Jean blurted out in that pseudonaïve way of hers. We were at the table now.

“An aunt,” he smiled. “The right kind.”

“Old and rich,” she quickly supplied.

“Fond of me,” he contributed.

“Dead,” she topped him.

“It’s a co-operative, she owned it, and when she died two years ago, I found it on my hands.”

“Why don’t I find things like that on my hands?” Jean wondered innocently.

“I didn’t know what to do about it, so I moved in here, along with Luthe. He’s my man. The estate takes care of the upkeep, so that what it amounts to practically is I’m living here rent-free.”

I kept wondering what he did. I didn’t know how to go about asking, though. Jean did. It was a great convenience having her along, I couldn’t help reflecting.