Флетчер Флора - Wake Up With a Stranger

“That’s a superfluous suggestion, darling. Buying myself a drink is something that still comes naturally, and something for which, apparently, one does not become too old. However, thank you for reminding me. Run along, darling, and have fun. I’ll finish up here and get out myself in a few minutes.”

“All right, Gussie. Goodby, now.”

She went out and caught a taxi and went to the bar between the books and the flowers, and Tyler was waiting for her, and so, as he’d promised, was the Martini. The man who liked Lisbon Antigua was still playing it — probably it had associations for him. He stood leaning against the jukebox and listened to the music and thought about the associations, whatever they were. At the small table with Tyler, Donna lifted her glass and drank from it and set it down again, and Tyler took and held her hand. And her recent panic and sense of crisis, the irrational reaction on the telephone, was instantly and properly reduced to absurdity.

“I’m glad you could come,” he said.

“You only had to ask,” she said.

“I want to explain why I must break our date.”

“It isn’t necessary to explain.”

“Anyhow, I would like to. It’s nothing much, really. Merely that I must drive my wife to the airport.”

“Oh? Is she going away?”

“Yes. For quite a long time. The truth is, she is going to Europe.”

“Did she decide so suddenly to go so far?”

He shook his head. “No. It has been planned for some time, of course. Originally, she intended to leave next week, but she decided all at once to leave earlier in order to have an extra week in New York before sailing.”

“Is she going alone?”

“No.” He looked down at her hand in his, and his voice went curiously flat. “She is going with a friend. Of hers, not ours. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call her a protégée. A young woman who is studying music at the local conservatory. A harpist, I believe. The primary purpose of the trip, I’m told, is to give her training and experience abroad. Harriet is very generous in such matters. Anyhow, it seems that I am expected to drive her to the airport, though I should think a servant would do as well. Perhaps it is merely something a husband is required to do when his wife goes to Europe.”

“It’s all right, of course. There’s nothing else you can do.”

“I’d much prefer keeping our date.”

“Will it be too late after the plane leaves?”

“It will be quite late. Midnight, I suspect, before I could get back to your apartment.”

“That’s all right if you want to come.”

“Would it be all right if I wanted to stay?”

“You’re imposing a condition, and so I won’t answer. If you want to stay, you must ask me directly, and I’ll give you a direct answer.”

“All right. So far as I’m concerned, the preliminary period we agreed upon is over. I want to stay, and I am asking you directly if I may.”

“Are you sure it’s what you want? Do you remember what it commits you to?”

“The shop, you mean?” He smiled and lifted her hand to his lips in an obviously warm and spontaneous gesture that elicited in her a response of tenderness that she had not felt for him before. “I had decided long ago that you should have your shop in any event. Did I neglect to tell you that?”

“I’m afraid you did.”

“Perhaps I should not be telling you now.”

“Why?”

“That should be apparent. I’m not the most astute man in the world, but neither am I naive. I am well aware that the shop has been from the beginning my principal negotiable asset. Perhaps my only one.”

“No. In the beginning it may have been your only one, but now it is not.”

“Nevertheless, since you know that you are going to get anyway what you set out to get, I may have weakened my position.”

“You could always change your mind about the shop.”

“No. Like most men with few virtues, I make great issue of the few. I don’t break my promises, and I promise that you shall have your shop. Now will you give me the direct answer to my direct question?”

“You may stay, of course.”

“Because you’re grateful?”

“Not only that.”

“Good enough. I’m wise enough not to press it any further. And now it’s time I was leaving, and I wish it weren’t.” He lifted her hand to his lips in a repetition of the warm gesture. “Would you like me to take you some place?”

“No, thank you. If you don’t mind, I think I’ll have one more drink before leaving.”

“In that case, I’ll see you tonight.”

He went away, and she watched him go, and she continued to feel for him the new tenderness that seemed to have nothing to do with his generosity. The man in the rear of the bar kept playing Lisbon Antigua; she ordered another Martini and sat drinking it, and she thought that it was really very strange how things eventually culminated so quietly, for better or for worse. She had schemed for the shop and had felt intensely that the shop was absolutely essential to all that she wanted to do and be, that failure to acquire it would somehow be a disaster from which she could never recover completely. Now that she was successful and had achieved all that she wanted through her own efforts and the exploitation of herself, she should have been filled with tremendous excitement and satisfaction, but instead she was only quiet and acceptant of things as they had turned out. She knew that she would have been the same way, exactly the same way, if they had turned out bad instead of good. But she also knew that this was something that would change, that she was now caught in a kind of recuperative lethargy in which she would gather again her emotional energy. Excitement would come in its own time, as despair would have come if she had failed.

After finishing her second Martini, she left the bar and walked several blocks to the restaurant where she had gone previously with Tyler. She ate alone in the restaurant, and then she returned to her apartment, and it was almost eight o’clock when she arrived. She wondered what she could do until midnight, when Tyler would come, and she thought that perhaps she would sleep for two or three hours. She actually did set the alarm and lie down on the bed in the bedroom, but it was impossible to sleep after all. Lying there, she began to review in her mind all that had happened in the last hundred days or so since the death of Aaron, but this involved things about which she would rather not think. After half an hour she got up and went out into the living room and began to read a book called The Sleepless Moon, which she had bought only a few days earlier, about a man and a woman, married to each other, who shouldn’t have been. At first it was difficult to get into the book, and her own thoughts kept interfering with the symbols on the pages, but after a while the symbols became dominant. She continued to read without stopping until the buzzer sounded at the door.

She looked at her watch and saw that it was ten o’clock, much too early for Tyler unless something had happened to change his plans, which wasn’t likely. And even if his plans had been changed, it wasn’t likely that he would simply come along early without calling first. Having considered and discarded the possibility of its being Tyler, she thought at once of Enos Simon, that it might be he at the door. If it was, which would be unfortunate to say the least, she had better see him and get rid of him quickly before Tyler came. While this was in her mind, she was aware also of a kind of subversive hope that he had indeed returned, was standing at that moment outside the door, and that she could somehow devise a way of salvaging him and making him compatible with the plan of her life, but this was impossible, as she knew very well, and was not to be seriously thought of.