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

He was holding it taut across his back, and out at each side, in a sort of elongated bow-shape. It was just a posture, a stance, a vagary of nervous preoccupation, I suppose. An odd one, but meaningless.

I flexed my wrist slightly, as if to complete the touching of the doorknob.

The cord tightened to almost a straight line, stopped moving.

His eyes met mine and mine met his, the length of the gallery.

The impulse to annoy him died.

Indifferently, I desisted. I dropped my hand slowly, and let the door be.

His hands dropped too. The taut pull of the cord slackened, it softened to a dangling loop.

I went on to the outside door and opened it.

“Good night, Dwight,” I murmured wanly.

“Good night, Annie,” he echoed.

I saw him reach out with one arm and support himself limply against the wall beside him, he was so tired of me by this time. I closed the outside door.

They tell you wrong when they tell you infatuation dies a sudden death. Infatuation dies a lingering, painful death. Even after all hope is gone the afterglow sometimes stubbornly clings on and on, kidding you, lighting the dark in which you are alone. Infatuation dies as slowly as a slower love; it comes on quicker, that is all.

Twice I went by there in a taxi, in the two weeks following that night. A taxi that didn’t have to go by there, that could have taken me another way; but whose way I altered, I interfered with, so that it would take me by there. And each time it stopped a moment at the door. Not of its own accord, either. “Stop here a moment.”

But then I didn’t get out after all. Just sat there. Perhaps to see if I could sit there like that without getting out, I don’t know. Perhaps to see if I was strong enough.

I was. I just barely made it, both times, but I made it.

“Drive on,” I said heroically, when the driver turned his head around inquiringly after nothing had happened. It was like leaving your right arm behind, jammed in a door; but I left it.

One of the two times, I had been on my way to a party, and the excuse would have been to ask him if he wanted to come along with me. Had I carried the stop out to its ultimate conclusion. But I don’t think we would have gone on to any party, even had I put the invitation to him. It takes two to want to go to any party, when there are two, and one of us wouldn’t have wanted to go — even had he said yes.

(I didn’t, incidentally, even go on to the party myself, after I drove on from his door; I went home and took off the regalia it had taken me an hour’s solid work to array myself in. It hadn’t been meant for the general admiration of any party.)

And the second of the two times I stopped, the excuse was even more flimsy. I was supposed to be on my way somewhere else. To friends, I think, for an evening of bridge.

“Drive on,” I told the driver.

But I was convalescing; it was only like leaving your hand caught in the door, not your whole arm now.

“Your game isn’t what it used to be,” my partner told me acidulously later that evening, after we’d gone down for a grand slam.

“No,” I agreed, word for word, “my game isn’t what it used to be.” (“And I’m a dud at the new one,” I added to myself.)

But the third time, ah the third time, I stopped down there at the door, there was no excuse at all. None whatever. Not even so fragile a one as a secondhand party or a secondhand game. I did it as a sort of test, and I found out what I wanted to.

I was practically over it. I was cured. I made the discovery for myself sitting there in the taxi, taking my own blood pressure, so to speak, holding my own pulse, listening to my own heart. I could drive away now without a wrench, without feeling that I’d left a part of me behind, caught in his door.

I lighted a cigarette and thought with a sigh of relief: It’s passed. It’s finished. Now I’ve got nothing more to worry about. That was the vaccine of love. Now I’m immune. Now I can go on and just work and live and be placid.

“Y’getting out, lady, or what?” the driver asked fretfully.

“Yes,” I said coolly, “I think I will. I want to say good-bye to someone in there.”

And in perfect safety, in perfect calm, I paid him and got out and went inside to visit my recent, my last, love.

But, as I have often said, they tell you wrong when they tell you infatuation dies a sudden death. It doesn’t. I know.

I seemed to have picked an inappropriate time for my farewell visit. Or at least, a nonexclusive one.

There’d been somebody else with him. The apartment door was already open, when I stepped off at his foyer, and he was standing there talking to some man in dilatory leave-taking.

The man was heavily built and none too young. In the milder fifties, I should judge. His hair was silvering, his complexion was florid, and there were little skeinlike red blood vessels threading the whites of his eyes. He had a hard-looking face, but he was being excessively amiable at the moment that I came upon the two of them. Almost overdoing it, almost overly amiable, for it didn’t blend well with the rest of his characteristics, gave the impression of being a seldom-used, almost rusty attribute; he had to push down hard on the accelerator to get it working at all. And he was keeping his foot pressed down on it for all he was worth so that it couldn’t get away from him.

“I hope I haven’t troubled you, Mr. Billings,” he was apologizing just as the elevator panel opened.

“Not at all,” Dwight protested indulgently. There was even something patronizing in his intonation. “I know how those things are. Don’t think twice about it. Glad to—” And then they both turned at the slight rustle the panel made, and saw me, and so didn’t finish the mutual gallantries they were engaged upon. Or rather, postponed them for a moment.

Dwight’s face lighted up at sight of me. I was welcome. There could be no doubt of it. Not like that other night. And yet — How shall I put it? It was not a question of being relieved. I didn’t detect that at all. It was rather that he was already so pleased with himself, and with everything else, this evening, that even my arrival pleased him. And I use the adverb “even” advisedly. So that I was welcome by good-humored reflection — anyone would have been at the moment — and not in my own right.

He shook my hand cordially. “Well. Nice of you. Where’ve you been keeping yourself?” And that sort of thing. But made no move to introduce the departing caller to me.

And his manners were too quick-witted for that to have been an oversight. So what could I infer but that there was a differentiation of status between us that would have made a social introduction inappropriate? In other words, that one call was a personal one and the other was not, so the two were not to be linked.

At the same time, he did not offer to disengage himself from his first caller, conclude the parley, and turn his attention to me. On the contrary, he postponed my playing on his attention and returned to the first matter, as if determined it should run its unhurried course and be completed without any haste, first of all. He even signaled to the car operator not to stand there waiting to take the leavetaker down, as he’d been inclined to do. “We’ll ring,” he said, and motioned the panel closed with his hand.

And to me: “Go in, Annie. Take your things off. I’ll be right with you.”

I went in. My last impression of the man standing there with him was that he was slightly ill at ease under my parting scrutiny; call it embarrassed, call it sheepish, call it what you will. He turned his head aside a moment and took a deep draught of an expensive cigar he was holding between his knuckles. As if: Don’t look at me so closely. I certainly wasn’t staring, so it must have been his own self-consciousness.