Джеймс Кейн - The Moth

“All right, but I’m taking you.”

“It’s I who owe you. And besides, I’m a very successful widow, as I’ll probably tell you all evening, now we’ve discussed you a little bit. Quite a high-pressure girl, and today I put something over, as I think I said.”

“I’m not exactly a failure, myself.”

“Well, listen to him!”

“I too can pick up a check.”

“Can’t we match for it?”

She was standing beside me and we both laughed. Then her eyes crinkled up in a way that made me like her even better than I had liked her, and we both got out quarters and cupped our hands and rattled them around. “You’re matching me, Mrs. Lucas, and if you win the drinks are on me.” So she won, and I got up and bowed, and she picked up her letters and I put the clipping in mine and stamped it and sealed it. Then we went out and across the lobby to the mail chute. Then she headed for the elevators. “I’ll have to put something on.”

“I have no evening clothes with me.”

“All right, but I can’t go in a suit.”

“Then I’ll wait here.”

“Why? Come on up.”

It was my first contact with a suite, because while my father always took one, it was on account of the gang he always had with him, his sisters, me, and like as not some friends, and I hadn’t known that one person, if they just take that sitting room extra, can have anybody up there they please. She was on the ninth or tenth deck, her windows overlooking the Hudson, and as soon as she turned on the radio she excused herself and went in the bedroom. I sat and listened and looked out at the lights, but it seemed to me my heart was a little high in my throat, and why I didn’t exactly know. Everything was straight down the middle, exactly according to Hoyle. And yet here we were, the two of us alone together in a strange city, and I was excited. The buzzer rang and the bedroom door opened a little bit. “Will you see if that’s the boy? I thought we could have something before we started. Just let him in and ask him to wait.”

I opened the door, and a bellboy was there with a pitcher of ice, some fizz water, and two glasses. She came out in a kimono and paid him and he went. Then she went into the bedroom and came out with a pint of rye. “It’s prescription stuff, so it’s all right. You like it plain or highball?”

“Highball.”

I’m glad, looking back on it now, that I said nothing about training. For all I knew, this was about nothing whatever, but if it was about anything at all, it was a lot more important than football. She made the drinks, then sat across from me with the cocktail table between, and talked about herself. Her husband had been in the hard-coal business, the mining end, but died on a trip to Cuba. They had lived in Easton, Pennsylvania. She had to do something, and got a job in their big department store. Soon she was children’s buyer, and had come piling to town yesterday to stop shipment of stuff ordered for Christmas. She seemed pretty stuck on herself that she’d found a clause in the contract to let her off the hook, on account of some delay in deliveries. That there was any connection between those toys and my stock never entered my mind, and fact of the matter, I’d been too busy running, kicking, and passing to pay any attention to finance. They tell me now it was all over the front pages, but if so, it must have been on days when I was looking for my picture inside.

So I just listened, sipped my drink, and once or twice, for no reason I could see, my heart would give a little bump. After a while she said she’d better get her things on, then drank out and went in the bedroom. I tried not to see it but my heart kept reminding me: she hadn’t closed the door. Pretty soon, sounding like a homesick foghorn, I heard myself say: “You need any help?”

“No, thanks... Of course now, wanting a little help, that might be different.”

Somehow, my legs took me in there. She was in a little pair of filmy pants, bra, shoes, stockings, and nothing else, standing in front of the mirror looking at herself. She had a round, perky little figure, and it did things to me. She stood first on one foot, then on the other foot, with her hand on her hip and one little finger sticking out. Then: “For an old woman of twenty-five, I do look young.”

“You look young, beautiful and — kissable.”

“What are you trembling about, Jack?”

“Am I?”

“The bubbles in that glass are making a regular razzle-dazzle. If it shakes any worse the ice will be clinking.”

“Reaction, maybe. Hard game today.”

“Why don’t you ask why I’m trembling?”

“All right, why?”

“Reaction — or something... I knew we weren’t going out, Jack. That we were just pretending. So I could blow smoke at you and muss up your hair — will you ever stop pasting it down like that? It would have a nice wave if you’d let it wave. I knew all that, but I never did anything like this.”

“Did you say children?”

“That’s different. And you never did, either. All right, I suppose it’s the worst insult you can offer a man, to insinuate, or even hint that he could be anything but an expert on the subject. Just the same, I know what I know. And I want it like this. It’s a lot sweeter that you come to me — as a little child might. As a little taffy-haired boy entering a new and beautiful garden, a little forbidden, and utterly mysterious...”

“Mrs. Lucas, what is your other name?”

“June.”

“June, come here... It’s all true, what you know.”

“Does it hurt, to admit it?”

“No.”

I told her about the car, the way Denny and I had chased girls, and the afternoon on the bay. She listened, then went to the window and stood looking up at the stars. Then: “Jack, I’m so glad it made you sick!... I guess I understand it, how those girls felt, how your friend felt — I wasn’t born yesterday. They want to be exalted but all they’re capable of is to be excited. What was it Wilde said? ‘Each man kills the thing he loves’—? Except that such people don’t kill it, they merely befoul it. I’m proud of you that you didn’t and couldn’t. Tonight is a night you can never have twice, and it’s wonderful you saved it — for me. I’m happy it’s me. And that it’s silly, romantic, and cockeyed. Can I give you one little ideal, I’d like you to keep?... Let it always be beautiful. Don’t ever befoul it.”

She kissed me then, and through the night spread the color of the moth.

The rest of that fall, I guess we played some football, but who we played and how it came out I wouldn’t know. I wrote her or wired her or sent her something every day, and then after the Hopkins game, which was played in Baltimore, I called up Doc Henry, that had tended me ever since I could remember, and got him to certify by wire to the college that I needed a little toe-nail-ectomy, something like that. Then without any more than calling up the house, I beat it for the station and took the train for Easton. I saw her a little sooner than I expected. I got in late at night, and next morning went down in the dining room and had breakfast, wondering if I could ever make the clock go around until it would be time to ring her telephone. But I had sent her a wire I was coming, and when I looked up, who should be there, following the waiter over to my table, but her, even younger-looking than she had been, with a little brown hat over her blonde hair, a fur coat, and a flower for my buttonhole. I was so glad to see her I could hardly eat my eggs. “Well, June, what would you like to do? I put a few lies on the wire and had a doctor send some, so I’m free till this time next week, if you are. I mean, we played our last game yesterday, and I’ve fixed it so I’m not due back to the kiddy-pen until after the Thanksgiving holidays.”