chapter five

Richard was standing on the street corner, waiting for her, shifting from foot to foot in the cold. She wasn’t cold at all tonight, she realized suddenly, even though other people on the streets were hunched in their overcoats. She took Richard’s arm and squeezed it affectionately tight.

“Have you been inside?” she asked. She was ten minutes late.

“Of course not. I was waiting.” He pressed his cold lips and nose into her cheek. “Did you have a rough day?”

“No.”

The night was very black, in spite of the Christmas lights on some of the lampposts. She looked at Richard’s face in the flare of his match. The smooth slab of his forehead overhung his narrowed eyes, strong looking as a whale’s front, she thought, strong enough to batter something in. His face was like a face sculpted in wood, planed smooth and unadorned. She saw his eyes open like unexpected spots of blue sky in the darkness.

He smiled at her. “You’re in a good mood tonight. Want to walk down the block? You can’t smoke in there. Like a cigarette?”

“No, thanks.”

They began to walk. The gallery was just beside them, a row of lighted windows, each with a Christmas wreath, on the second floor of the big building. Tomorrow she would see Carol, Therese thought, tomorrow morning at eleven. She would see her only ten blocks from here, in a little more than twelve hours. She started to take Richard’s arm again, and suddenly felt self-conscious about it. Eastward, down Forty-third Street, she saw Orion exactly spread in the center of the sky between the buildings. She had used to look at him from windows in school, from the window of her first New York apartment.

“I got our reservations today,” Richard said. “The President Taylor sailing March seventh. I talked with the ticket fellow, and I think he can get us outside rooms, if I keep after him.”

“March seventh?” She heard the start of excitement in her voice, though she did not want to go to Europe now at all.

“About ten weeks off,” Richard said, taking her hand.

“Can you cancel the reservation in case I can’t go?” She could as well tell him now that she didn’t want to go, she thought, but he would only argue, as he had before when she hesitated.

“Oh, of course, Terry!” And he laughed.

Richard swung her hand as they walked. As if they were lovers, Therese thought. It would be almost like love, what she felt for Carol, except that Carol was a woman. It was not quite insanity, but it was certainly blissful. A silly word, but how could she possibly be happier than she was now, and had been since Thursday?

“I wish we could share one together,” Richard said.

“Share what?”

“Share a room!” Richard boomed out, laughing, and Therese noticed the two people on the sidewalk who turned to look at them. “Should we have a drink somewhere just to celebrate? We can go in the Mansfield around the corner.”

“I don’t feel like sitting still. Let’s have it later.”

They got into the show at half price on Richard’s art school passes. The gallery was a series of high-ceilinged, plush carpeted rooms, a background of financial opulence for the commercial advertisements, the drawings, lithographs, illustrations, or whatever that hung in a crowded row on the walls. Richard pored over some of them for minutes at a time, but Therese found them a little depressing.

“Did you see this?” Richard asked, pointing to a complicated drawing of a lineman repairing a telephone wire that Therese had seen somewhere before, that tonight actually pained her to look at.

“Yes,” she said. She was thinking of something else. If she stopped scrimping to save money for Europe—which had been silly anyway because she wasn’t going—she could buy a new coat. There would be sales right after Christmas. The coat she had now was a kind of black polo coat, and she always felt drab in it.

Richard took her arm. “You haven’t enough respect for technique, little girl.”

She gave him a mocking frown, and took his arm again. She felt very close to him suddenly, as warm and happy with him as she had been the first night she met him, at the party down on Christopher Street where Frances Cotter had taken her. Richard had been a little drunk, as he had never been since with her, talking about books and politics and people more positively than she had ever heard him talk since, too. He had talked with her all evening, and she had liked him so very much that night for his enthusiasms, his ambitions, his likes and dislikes, and because it was her first real party and he had made it a success for her.

“You’re not looking,” Richard said.

“It’s exhausting. I’ve had enough when you have.”

Near the door, they met some people Richard knew from the League, a young man, a girl, and a young colored man. Richard introduced Therese to them. She could tell they were not close friends of Richard’s, but he announced to all of them, “We’re going to Europe in March.”

And they all looked envious.

Outside, Fifth Avenue seemed empty and waiting, like a stage set for some dramatic action. Therese walked along quickly beside Richard, her hands in her pockets. Somewhere today she had lost her gloves. She was thinking of tomorrow, at eleven o’clock. She wondered if she would possibly still be with Carol this time tomorrow night.

“What about tomorrow?” Richard asked.

“Tomorrow?”

“You know. The family asked if you could come out this Sunday and have dinner with us.”

Therese hesitated, remembering. She had visited the Semcos four or five Sunday afternoons. They had a big dinner around two o’clock, and then Mr. Semco, a short man with a bald head, would want to dance with her to polkas and Russian folk music on the phonograph.

“Say, you know Mamma wants to make you a dress?” Richard went on. “She’s already got the material. She wants to measure you for it.”

“A dress—but that’s so much work.” Therese had a vision of Mrs. Semco’s embroidered blouses, white blouses with rows upon rows of stitches. Mrs. Semco was proud of her needlework. Therese did not feel she should accept such a colossal labor.

“She loves it,” Richard said. “Well, what about tomorrow? Want to come out around noon?”

“I don’t think I want to this Sunday. They haven’t made any great plans, have they?”

“No,” Richard said, disappointed. “You just want to work or something tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’d rather.” She didn’t want Richard to know about Carol, or even ever meet her.

“Not even take a drive somewhere?”

“I don’t think so, thanks.” Therese didn’t like his holding her hand now. His hand was moist, which made it icy cold.

“You don’t think you’ll change your mind?”

Therese shook her head. “No.” There were some mitigating things she might have said, excuses, but she did not want to lie about tomorrow either, any more than she had already lied. She heard Richard sigh, and they walked along in silence for a while.

“Mamma wants to make you a white dress with lace edging. She’s going crazy with frustration with no girls in the family but Esther.”

That was his cousin by marriage, whom Therese had only seen once or twice. “How is Esther?”

“Just the same.”

Therese extricated her fingers from Richard’s. She was hungry suddenly. She had spent her dinner hour writing something, a kind of letter to Carol that she hadn’t mailed and didn’t intend to. They caught the uptown bus at Third Avenue, then walked east to Therese’s house. Therese did not want to invite Richard upstairs, but she did anyway.

“No, thanks, I’ll shove on,” Richard said. He put a foot on the first step. “You’re in a funny mood tonight. You’re miles away.”

“No, I’m not,” she said, feeling inarticulate and resenting it.

“You are now. I can tell. After all, don’t you—”

“What,” she prompted.

“We aren’t getting very far, are we?” he said, suddenly earnest. “If you don’t even want to spend Sundays with me, how’re we going to spend months together in Europe?”

“Well—if you want to call it all off, Richard.”

“Terry, I love you.” He brushed his palm over his hair, exasperatedly. “Of course, I don’t want to call it all off, but—” He broke off again.

She knew what he was about to say, that she gave him practically nothing in the way of affection, but he wouldn’t say it, because he knew very well that she wasn’t in love with him, so why did he really expect her affection? Yet the simple fact that she wasn’t in love with him made Therese feel guilty, guilty about accepting anything from him, a birthday present, or an invitation to dinner at his family’s, or even his time. Therese pressed her finger tips hard on the stone banister. “All right—I know. I’m not in love with you,” she said.

“That’s not what I mean, Terry.”

“If you ever want to call the whole thing off—I mean, stop seeing me at all, then do it.” It was not the first time she had said that, either.

“Terry, you know I’d rather be with you than anyone else in the world. That’s the hell of it.”

“Well, if it’s hell—”

“Do you love me at all, Terry? How do you love me?”

Let me count the ways, she thought. “I don’t love you, but I like you. I felt tonight, a few minutes ago,” she said, hammering the words out however they sounded, because they were true, “that I felt closer to you than I ever have, in fact.”

Richard looked at her, a little incredulously. “Do you?” He started slowly up the steps, smiling, and stopped just below her. “Then—why not let me stay with you tonight, Terry? Just let’s try, will you?”

She had known from his first step toward her that he was going to ask her that. Now she felt miserable and ashamed, sorry for herself and for him, because it was so impossible, and so embarrassing because she didn’t want it. There was always that tremendous block of not even wanting to try it, which reduced it all to a kind of wretched embarrassment and nothing more, each time he asked her. She remembered the first night she had let him stay, and she writhed again inwardly. It had been anything but pleasant, and she had asked right in the middle of it, “Is this right?” How could it be right and so unpleasant, she had thought. And Richard had laughed, long and loud and with a heartiness that had made her angry. And the second time had been even worse, probably because Richard had thought all the difficulties had been gotten over. It was painful enough to make her weep, and Richard had been very apologetic and had said she made him feel like a brute. And then she had protested that he wasn’t. She knew very well that he wasn’t, that he was angelic compared to what Angelo Rossi would have been, for instance, if she had slept with him the night he stood here on the same steps, asking the same question.

“Terry, darling—”

“No,” Therese said, finding her voice at last. “I just can’t tonight, and I can’t go to Europe with you either,” she finished with an abject and hopeless frankness.

Richard’s lips parted in a stunned way. Therese could not bear to look at the frown above them. “Why not?”

“Because. Because I can’t,” she said, every word agony. “Because I don’t want to sleep with you.”

“Oh, Terry!” Richard laughed. “I’m sorry I asked you. Forget about it, honey, will you? And in Europe, too?”

Therese looked away, noticed Orion again, tipped at a slightly different angle, and looked back at Richard. But I can’t, she thought. I’ve got to think about it sometime, because you think about it. It seemed to her that she spoke the words and that they were solid as blocks of wood in the air between them, even though she heard nothing. She had said the words before to him, in her room upstairs, once in Prospect Park when she was winding a kite string. But he wouldn’t consider them, and what could she do now, repeat them? “Do you want to come up for a while anyway?” she asked, tortured by herself, by a shame she could not really account for.

“No,” Richard said with a soft laugh that shamed her all the more for its tolerance and its understanding. “No, I’ll go on. Good night, honey. I love you, Terry.” And with a last look at her, he went.