Chapter IV: Part 4

Abby was another one who liked cold air, Therese thought as they picked up speed on the highway. Who rode in an open-topped car in December?

“Where’d you meet Carol?” Abby yelled at her.

Therese felt she might almost, but not quite, have told Abby the truth. “In a store,” Therese yelled back.

“Oh?” Abby drove erratically, whipping the big car around curves, putting on speed where one didn’t expect it. “Do you like her?”

“Of course!” What a question! Like asking her if she believed in God.

Therese pointed out her house to Abby when they turned into the street. “Do you mind doing something for me?” Therese asked. “Could you wait here a minute? I want to give you something to give to Carol.”

“Sure,” Abby said.

Therese ran upstairs and got the card she had made, and stuck it under the ribbon of Carol’s present. She took it back down to Abby. “You’re going to see her tonight, aren’t you?”

Abby nodded, slowly, and Therese sensed the ghost of a challenge in Abby’s curious black eyes, because she was going to see Carol and Therese wasn’t, and what could Therese do about it?

“And thanks for the ride in.”

Abby smiled. “Sure you don’t want me to take you anywhere else?”

“No, thanks,” Therese said, smiling, too, because Abby would certainly have been glad to take her even to Brooklyn Heights.

She climbed her front steps and opened her mailbox. There were two or three letters in it, Christmas cards, one from Frankenberg’s. When she looked into the street again, the big cream-colored car was gone, like a thing she had imagined, like one of the birds in the dream.

chapter eight

“And now you make a wish,” Richard said.

Therese wished it. She wished for Carol.

Richard had his hands on her arms. They were standing under a thing that looked like a beaded crescent, or a section of a starfish, that hung from the hall ceiling. It was ugly, but the Semco family attributed almost magical powers to it, and hung it up on special occasions. Richard’s grandfather had brought it from Russia.

“What did you wish?” He smiled down at her possessively. This was his house, and he had just kissed her, though the door into the living room was open and filled with people.

“You’re not supposed to tell,” Therese said.

“You can tell in Russia.”

“Well, I’m not in Russia.”

The radio roared louder suddenly, voices singing a carol. Therese drank the rest of the pink eggnog in her glass.

“I want to go up to your room,” she said.

Richard took her hand, and they started up the stairs.

“Ri—chard?”

The aunt with the cigarette holder was calling him from the living room door.

Richard said a word Therese didn’t understand, and waved a hand at her. Even on the second floor, the house trembled with the crazy dancing below, the dancing that had nothing to do with the music. Therese heard another glass fall, and pictured the pink foamy eggnog rolling across the floor. This was tame compared to the real Russian Christmases they had used to celebrate in the first week in January, Richard said. Richard smiled at her as he closed the door of his room.

“I like my sweater,” he said.

“I’m glad.” Therese swept her full skirt in an arc and sat on the edge of Richard’s bed. The heavy Norwegian sweater she had given Richard was on the bed behind her, lying across its tissued box. Richard had given her a skirt from an East India shop, a long skirt with green and gold bands and embroidery. It was lovely, but Therese did not know where she could ever wear it.

“How about a real shot? That stuff downstairs is sickening.” Richard got his bottle of whisky from his closet floor.

Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“This’d be good for you.”

She shook her head again. She looked around her at the high-ceilinged, almost square room, at the wallpaper with the barely discernible pattern of pink roses, at the two peaceful windows curtained in slightly yellowed white muslin. From the door, there were two pale trails in the green carpet, one to the bureau and one to the desk in the corner. The pot of brushes and the portfolio on the floor by the desk were the only signs of Richard’s painting. Just as painting took up only a corner of his brain, she felt, and she wondered how much longer he would go on with it before he dropped it for something else. And she wondered, as she had often wondered before, if Richard liked her only because she was more sympathetic with his ambitions than anyone else he happened to know now, and because he felt her criticism was a help to him. Therese got up restlessly and went to the window. She loved the room—because it stayed the same and stayed in the same place—yet today she felt an impulse to burst from it. She was a different person from the one who had stood here three weeks ago. This morning she had awakened in Carol’s house. Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.

“You’re different today,” Richard said so abruptly that a thrill of peril passed down her body.

“Maybe it’s the dress,” she said.

She was wearing a blue taffeta dress that was God knows how old, that she hadn’t put on since her first months in New York. She sat down on the bed again, and looked at Richard who stood in the middle of the floor with the little glass of straight whisky in his hand, his clear blue eyes moving from her face to her feet in the new high-heeled black shoes, back to her face again.

“Terry.” Richard took her hands, pinned her hands to the bed on either side of her. The smooth, thin lips descended on hers, firmly, with the flick of his tongue between her lips and the aromatic smell of fresh whisky. “Terry, you’re an angel,” Richard’s deep voice said, and she thought of Carol saying the same thing.

She watched him pick up his little glass from the floor and set it with the bottle into the closet. She felt immensely superior to him suddenly, to all the people below stairs. She was happier than any of them. Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out—

“Pretty?” Richard said.

Therese sat up. “It’s a beauty!”

“I finished it last night. I thought if it was a good day, we’d go to the park and fly it.” Richard grinned like a boy, proud of his handiwork. “Look at the back.”

It was a Russian kite, rectangular and bowed like a shield, its slim frame notched and tied at the corners. On the front, Richard had painted a cathedral with whirling domes and a red sky behind it.

“Let’s go fly it now,” Therese said.

They carried the kite downstairs. Then everybody saw them and came into the hall, uncles, aunts, and cousins, until the hall was a din and Richard had to hold the kite in the air to protect it. The noise irritated Therese, but Richard loved it.

“Stay for the champagne, Richard!” one of the aunts shouted, one of the aunts with a fat midriff straining like a second bosom under a satin dress.

“Can’t,” Richard said, and added something in Russian, and Therese had a feeling she often had, seeing Richard with his family, that there must have been a mistake, that Richard might be an orphan himself, a changeling, left on the doorstep and brought up a son of this family. But there was his brother Stephen standing in the doorway, with Richard’s blue eyes, though Stephen was even taller and thinner.

“What roof?” Richard’s mother asked shrilly. “This roof?”

Someone had asked if they were going to fly the kite on the roof, and since the house hadn’t a roof one could stand on, Richard’s mother had gone off into peals of laughter. Then the dog began to bark.

“I’m going to make you that dress!” Richard’s mother called to Therese, wagging her finger admonishingly. “I know your measurements!”

They had measured her with a tape in the living room, in the midst of all the singing and present opening, and a couple of the men had tried to help, too. Mrs. Semco put her arm around Therese’s waist, and suddenly Therese embraced her and kissed her firmly on the cheek, her lips sinking into the soft powdered cheek, in that one second pouring out in the kiss, and in the convulsive clasp of her arm, the affection Therese really had for her, that Therese knew would hide itself again as if it did not exist, in the instant she released her.

Then she and Richard were free and alone, walking down the front sidewalk. It wouldn’t be any different, if they were married, Therese thought, visiting the family on Christmas Day. Richard would fly his kites even when he was an old man, like his grandfather who had flown kites in Prospect Park until the year he died, Richard had told her.

They took the subway to the park, and walked to the treeless hill where they had come a dozen times before. Therese looked around her. There were some boys playing with a football down on the flat field at the edge of the trees, but otherwise the park looked quiet and still. There was not much wind, not really enough, Richard said, and the sky was densely white as if it carried snow.

Richard groaned, failing again. He was trying to get the kite up by running with it.

Therese, sitting on the ground with her arms around her knees, watched him put his head up and turn in all directions, as if he had lost something in the air. “Here it is!” She got up, pointing.

“Yes, but it’s not steady.”

Richard ran the kite into it anyway, and the kite sagged on its long string, then jerked up as if something had sprung it. It made a big arc, then began to climb in another direction.

“It’s found its own wind!” Therese said.

“Yes, but it’s slow.”

“What a gloomy Gus! Can I hold it?”

“Wait’ll I get it higher.”

Richard pumped at it with long swings of his arms, but the kite stayed at the same place in the cold sluggish air. The golden domes of the cathedral wagged from side to side, as if the whole kite were shaking its head saying no, and the long limp tail followed foolishly, repeating the negation.

“Best we can do,” Richard said. “It can’t carry any more string.”

Therese did not take her eyes from it. Then the kite steadied and stopped, like a picture of a cathedral pasted on the thick white sky. Carol wouldn’t like kites probably, Therese thought. Kites wouldn’t amuse her. She would glance at one, and say it was silly.

“Want to take it?”

Richard poked the string stick into her hands, and she got to her feet. She thought, Richard had worked on the kite last night when she was with Carol, which was why he hadn’t called her, and didn’t know she had not been home. If he had called, he would have mentioned it. Soon there would come the first lie.

Suddenly the kite broke its mooring in the sky and tugged sharply to get away. Therese let the stick turn fast in her hands, as long as she dared to under Richard’s eyes, because the kite was still low. And now it rested again, stubbornly still.

“Jerk it!” Richard said. “Keep working it up.”

She did. It was like playing with a long elastic band. But the string was so long and slack now, it was all she could do to stir the kite. She pulled and pulled and pulled. Then Richard came and took it, and Therese let her arms hang. Her breath came harder, and little muscles in her arms were quivering. She sat down on the ground. She hadn’t won against the kite. It hadn’t done what she wanted it to do.

“Maybe the string’s too heavy,” she said. It was a new string, soft and white and fat as a worm.

“String’s very light. Look now. Now it’s going!”

Now it was climbing in short, upward darts, as if it had found its own mind suddenly, and a will to escape.

“Let out more string!” she shouted.

Therese stood up. A bird flew under the kite. She stared at the rectangle that was growing smaller and smaller, jerking back and back like a ship’s billowed sail going backward. She felt the kite meant something, this particular kite, at this minute.

“Richard?”

“What?”

She could see him in the corner of her eye, crouched with his hands out in front of him, as if he rode a surfboard. “How many times were you in love?” she asked.

Richard laughed, a short, hoarse laugh. “Never till you.”

“Yes, you were. You told me about two times.”

“If I count those, I might count twelve others, too,” Richard said quickly, with the bluntness of preoccupation.

The kite was starting to take arcing steps downward.

Therese kept her voice on the same level. “Were you ever in love with a boy?”

“A boy?” Richard repeated, surprised.

“Yes.”

Perhaps five seconds passed before he said, “No,” in a positive and final tone.

At least he troubled to answer, Therese thought. What would you do if you were, she had an impulse to ask, but the question would hardly serve a purpose. She kept her eyes on the kite. They were both looking at the same kite, but with what different thoughts in their minds. “Did you ever hear of it?” she asked.

“Hear of it? You mean people like that? Of course.” Richard was standing straight now, winding the string in with figure-eight movements of the stick.

Therese said carefully, because he was listening, “I don’t mean people like that. I mean two people who fall in love suddenly with each other, out of the blue. Say two men or two girls.”

Richard’s face looked the same as it might have if they had been talking about politics. “Did I ever know any? No.”

Therese waited until he was working with the kite again, trying to pump it higher. Then she remarked, “I suppose it could happen, though, to almost anyone, couldn’t it?”

He went on, winding the kite. “But those things don’t just happen. There’s always some reason for it in the background.”

“Yes,” she said agreeably. Therese had thought back into the background. The nearest she could remember to being “in love” was the way she had felt about a boy she had seen a few times in the town of Montclair, when she rode in the school bus. He had curly black hair and a handsome, serious face, and he had been perhaps twelve years old, older than she then. She remembered a short time when she had thought of him every day. But that was nothing, nothing like what she felt for Carol. Was it love or wasn’t it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn’t even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions. “Do you think I could?” Therese asked simply, before she could debate whether she dared to ask.

“What!” Richard smiled. “Fall in love with a girl? Of course not! My God, you haven’t, have you?”

“No,” Therese said, in an odd, inconclusive tone, but Richard did not seem to notice the tone.

“It’s going again. Look, Terry!”

The kite was wobbling straight up, faster and faster, and the stick was whirling in Richard’s hands. At any rate, Therese thought, she was happier than she had ever been before. And why worry about defining everything.

“Hey!” Richard sprinted after the stick that was leaping crazily around the ground, as if it were trying to leave the earth, too. “Want to hold it?” he asked, capturing it. “Practically takes you up!”

Therese took the stick. There was not much string left, and the kite was all but invisible now. When she let her arms go all the way up, she could feel it lifting her a little, delicious and buoyant, as if the kite might really take her up if it got all its strength together.

“Let it out!” Richard shouted, waving his arms. His mouth was open, and two spots of red had come in his cheeks. “Let it out!”

“There’s no more string!”

“I’m going to cut it!”

Therese couldn’t believe she had heard it, but glancing over at him, she saw him reaching under his overcoat for his knife. “Don’t,” she said.

Richard came running over, laughing.

“Don’t!” she said angrily. “Are you crazy?” Her hands were tired, but she clung all the harder to the stick.

“Let’s cut it! It’s more fun!” And Richard bumped into her rudely, because he was looking up.

Therese jerked the stick sideways, out of his reach, speechless with anger and amazement. There was an instant of fear, when she felt Richard might really have lost his mind, and then she staggered backward, the pull gone, the empty stick in her hand. “You’re mad!” she yelled at him. “You’re insane!”

“It’s only a kite!” Richard laughed, craning up at the nothingness.

Therese looked in vain, even for the dangling string. “Why did you do it?” Her voice was shrill with tears. “It was such a beautiful kite!”

“It’s only a kite!” Richard repeated. “I can make another kite!”

chapter nine

Therese started to get dressed, then changed her mind. She was still in her robe, reading the script of _Small Rain_ that Phil had brought over earlier, and that was now spread all over the couch. Carol had said she was at Forty-eighth and Madison. She could be here in ten minutes. Therese glanced around her room, and at her face in the mirror, and decided to let it all go.

She took some ash trays to the sink and washed them, and stacked the play script neatly on her worktable. She wondered if Carol would have her new handbag with her. Carol had called her last night from some place in New Jersey where she was with Abby, had told her she thought the bag was beautiful but much too grand a present. Therese smiled, remembering Carol’s suggesting that she take it back. At least, Carol liked it.

The doorbell sounded in three quick rings.

Therese looked down the stairwell, and saw Carol was carrying something. She ran down.

“It’s empty. It’s for you,” Carol said, smiling.

It was a suitcase, wrapped. Carol slipped her fingers from under the handle and let Therese carry it. Therese put it on the couch in her room, and cut the brown paper off carefully. The suitcase was of thick lightbrown leather, perfectly plain.

“It’s terribly good looking!” Therese said.

“Do you like it? I don’t even know if you need a suitcase.”

“Of course, I like it.” This was the kind of suitcase for her, this exactly and no other. Her initials were on it in small gold letters—T.M.B. She remembered Carol asking her her middle name on Christmas Eve.

“Work the combination and see if you like the inside.”

Therese did. “I like the smell, too,” she said.

“Are you busy? If you are, I’ll leave.”

“No. Sit down. I’m not doing anything—except reading a play.”

“What play?”

“A play I have to do sets for.” She realized suddenly she had never mentioned stage designing to Carol.

“Sets for?”

“Yes—I’m a stage designer.” She took Carol’s coat.

Carol smiled astonishedly. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” she asked quietly. “How many other rabbits are you going to pull out of your hat?”

“It’s the first real job. And it’s not a Broadway play. It’s going to be done in the Village. A comedy. I haven’t got a union membership yet. I’ll have to wait for a Broadway job for that.”

Carol asked her all about the union, the junior and senior memberships that cost fifteen hundred and two thousand dollars respectively. Carol asked her if she had all that money saved up.

“No—just a few hundred. But if I get a job, they’ll let me pay it off in installments.”

Carol was sitting on the straight chair, the chair Richard often sat in, watching her, and Therese could read in Carol’s expression that she had risen suddenly in Carol’s estimation, and she couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t mentioned before that she was a stage designer, and in fact already had a job. “Well,” Carol said, “if a Broadway job comes out of this, would you consider borrowing the rest of the money from me? Just as a business loan?”

“Thanks. I—”

“I’d like to do it for you. You shouldn’t be bothered paying off two thousand dollars at your age.”

“Thanks. But I won’t be ready for one for another couple of years.”

Carol lifted her head and blew her smoke out in a thin stream. “Oh, they don’t really keep track of apprenticeships, do they?”

Therese smiled. “No. Of course not. Would you like a drink? I’ve got a bottle of rye.”

“How nice. I’d love one, Therese.” Carol got up and peered at her kitchenette shelves as Therese fixed the two drinks. “Are you a good cook?”

“Yes. I’m better when I have someone to cook for. I can make good omelettes. Do you like them?”

“No,” Carol said flatly, and Therese laughed. “Why don’t you show me some of your work?”

Therese got a portfolio down from the closet. Carol sat on the couch and looked at everything carefully, but from her comments and questions, Therese felt she considered them too bizarre to be usable, and perhaps not very good either. Carol said she liked best the _Petrushka_ set on the wall.

“But it’s the same thing,” Therese said. “The same thing as the drawings, only in model form.”

“Well, maybe it’s your drawings. They’re very positive, anyway. I like that about them.” Carol picked up her drink from the floor and leaned back on the couch. “You see, I didn’t make a mistake, did I?”

“About what?”

“About you.”

Therese did not know exactly what she meant. Carol was smiling at her through her cigarette smoke, and it rattled her. “Did you think you had?”

“No,” Carol said. “What do you have to pay for an apartment like this?”

“Fifty a month.”

Carol clicked her tongue. “Doesn’t leave you much out of your salary, does it?”

Therese bent over her portfolio, tying it up. “No. But I’ll be making more soon. I won’t be living here forever either.”

“Of course you won’t. You’ll travel, too, the way you do in imagination. You’ll see a house in Italy you’ll fall in love with. Or maybe you’ll like France. Or California, or Arizona.”

The girl smiled. She probably wouldn’t have the money for it, when that happened. “Do people always fall in love with things they can’t have?”

“Always,” Carol said, smiling, too. She pushed her fingers through her hair. “I think I shall take a trip after all.”

“For how long?”

“Just a month or so.”

Therese set the portfolio in the closet. “How soon will you be going?”

“Right away. I suppose as soon as I can arrange everything. And there isn’t much to arrange.”

Therese turned around. Carol was rolling the end of her cigarette in the ash tray. It meant nothing to her, Therese thought, that they wouldn’t see each other for a month. “Why don’t you go somewhere with Abby?”

Carol looked up at her, and then at the ceiling. “I don’t think she’s free in the first place.”

Therese stared at her. She had touched something, mentioning Abby. But Carol’s face was unreadable now.

“You’re very nice to let me see you so often,” Carol said. “You know I don’t feel like seeing the people I generally see just now. One can’t really. Everything’s supposed to be done in pairs.”

How frail she is, Therese felt suddenly, how different from the day of the first lunch. Then Carol got up, as if she knew her thoughts, and Therese sensed a flaunt of assurance in her lifted head, in her smile as she passed her so close their arms brushed, and went on.

“Why don’t we do something tonight?” Therese asked. “You can stay here if you want to, and I’ll finish reading the play. We can spend the evening together.”

Carol didn’t answer. She was looking at the flower box in the bookshelf. “What kind of plants are these?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

They were all different, a cactus with fat leaves that hadn’t grown a bit since she bought it a year ago, another plant like a miniature palm tree, and a droopy red-green thing that had to be supported by a stick. “Just plants.”

Carol turned around, smiling. “Just plants,” she repeated.

“What about tonight?”

“All right. But I won’t stay. It’s only three. I’ll give you a ring around six.” Carol dropped her lighter in her handbag. It was not the handbag Therese had given her. “I feel like looking at furniture this afternoon.”

“Furniture? In stores?”

“In stores or at the Parke-Bernet. Furniture does me good.” Carol reached for her coat on the armchair, and again Therese noticed the long line from her shoulder to the wide leather belt, continued in her leg. It was beautiful, like a chord of music or a whole ballet. She was beautiful, and why should her days be so empty now, Therese wondered, when she was made to live with people who loved her, to walk in a beautiful house, in beautiful cities, along blue seacoasts with a long horizon and a blue sky to background her.

“Bye-bye,” Carol said, and in the same movement with which she put on her coat, she put her arm around Therese’s waist. It was only an instant, too disconcerting with Carol’s arm suddenly about her, to be relief or end or beginning, before the doorbell rang in their ears like the tearing of a brass wall. Carol smiled. “Who is it?” she asked.

Therese felt the sting of Carol’s thumbnail in her wrist as she released her. “Richard probably.” It could only be Richard, because she knew his long ring.

“Good. I’d like to meet him.”

Therese pressed the bell, then heard Richard’s firm, hopping steps on the stairs. She opened the door.

“Hello,” Richard said. “I decided—”

“Richard, this is Mrs. Aird,” Therese said. “Richard Semco.”

“How do you do?” Carol said.

Richard nodded, with almost a bow. “How do you do,” he said, his blue eyes stretched wide.

They stared at each other, Richard with a square box in his hands as if he were about to present it to her, and Carol standing with a new cigarette in her hand, neither staying nor leaving. Richard put the box on an end table.

“I was so near, I thought I’d come up,” he said, and under its note of explanation, Therese heard the unconscious assertion of a right, just as she had seen behind his inquisitive stare a spontaneous mistrust of Carol. “I had to take a present to a friend of Mamma’s. This is _lebkuchen_.” He nodded at the box and smiled, disarmingly. “Anybody want some now?”

Carol and Therese declined. Carol was watching Richard as he opened the box with his pocketknife. She liked his smile, Therese thought. She likes him, the gangling young man with unruly blond hair, the broad lean shoulders, and the big funny feet in moccasins.

“Please sit down,” Therese said to Carol.

“No, I’m going,” she answered.

“I’ll give you half, Terry, then I’ll be going too,” he said.

Therese looked at Carol, and Carol smiled at her nervousness and sat down on a corner of the couch.

“Anyway, don’t let me rush you off,” Richard said, lifting the paper with the cake in it to a kitchen shelf.

“You’re not. You’re a painter, aren’t you, Richard?”

“Yes.” He popped some loose icing into his mouth, and looked at Carol, poised because he was incapable of being unpoised, Therese thought, his eyes frank because he had nothing to hide. “Are you a painter, too?”

“No,” Carol said with another smile. “I’m nothing.”

“The hardest thing to be.”

“Is it? Are you a good painter?”

“I will be. I can be,” said Richard, unperturbed. “Have you got any beer, Terry? I’ve got an awful thirst.”

Therese went to the refrigerator and got out the two bottles that were there. Richard asked Carol if she would like some, but Carol refused. Then Richard strolled past the couch, looking at the suitcase and the wrappings, and Therese thought he was going to say something about it, but he didn’t.

“I thought we might go to a movie tonight, Terry. I’d like to see that thing at the Victoria. Do you want to?”

“I can’t tonight. I’ve got a date with Mrs. Aird.”

“Oh.” Richard looked at Carol.

Carol put out her cigarette and stood up. “I must be going.” She smiled at Therese. “Call you back around six. If you change your mind, it’s not important. Good-by, Richard.”

“Good-by,” Richard said.

Carol gave her a wink as she went down the stairs. “Be a good girl,” Carol said.

“Where’d the suitcase come from?” Richard asked when she came back in the room.

“It’s a present.”

“What’s the matter, Terry?”

“Nothing’s the matter.”

“Did I interrupt anything important? Who is she?”

Therese picked up Carol’s empty glass. There was a little lipstick at the rim. “She’s a woman I met at the store.”

“Did she give you that suitcase?”

“Yes.”

“It’s quite a present. Is she that rich?”

Therese glanced at him. Richard’s aversion to the wealthy, to the bourgeois, was automatic. “Rich? You mean the mink coat? I don’t know. I did her a favor. I found something she lost in the store.”

“Oh?” he said. “What? You didn’t say anything about it.”

She washed and dried Carol’s glass and set it back on the shelf. “She left her billfold on the counter and I took it to her, that’s all.”

“Oh. Damned nice reward.” He frowned. “Terry, what is it? You’re not still sore about that silly kite, are you?”

“No, of course not,” she said impatiently. She wished he would go. She put her hands in her robe pockets and walked across the room, stood where Carol had stood, looking at the box of plants. “Phil brought the play over this morning. I started reading it.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?”

“What makes you think I’m worried?” She turned around.

“You’re in another of those miles-away moods again.”

“I’m not worried and I’m not miles away.” She took a deep breath. “It’s funny—you’re so conscious of some moods and so unconscious of others.”

Richard looked at her. “All right, Terry,” he said with a shrug, as if he conceded it. He sat down in the straight chair and poured the rest of the beer into his glass. “What’s this date you have with that woman tonight?”

Therese’s lips widened in a smile as she ran the end of her lipstick over them. For a moment, she stared at the eyebrow tweezers that lay on the little shelf fixed to the inside of the closet door. Then she put the lipstick down on the shelf. “It’s sort of a cocktail party, I think. Sort of a Christmas benefit thing. In some restaurant, she said.”

“Hmm. Do you want to go?”

“I said I would.”

Richard drank his beer, frowning a little over his glass. “What about afterward? Maybe I could hang around here and read the play while you’re gone, and then we could grab a bite and go to the movie.”

“Afterward, I thought I’d better finish the play. I’m supposed to start on Saturday, and I ought to have some ideas in my head.”

Richard stood up. “Yep,” he said casually, with a sigh.

Therese watched him idle over to the couch and stand there, looking down at the manuscript. Then he bent over, studying the title page, and the cast pages. He looked at his wrist watch, and then at her.

“Why don’t I read it now?” he asked.

“Go ahead,” she answered with a brusqueness that Richard either didn’t hear or ignored, because he simply lay back on the couch with the manuscript in his hands and began to read. She picked up a book of matches from the shelf. No, he only recognized the “miles away” moods, she thought, when he felt himself deprived of her by distance. And she thought suddenly of the times she had gone to bed with him, of her distance then compared to the closeness that was supposed to be, that everyone talked about. It hadn’t mattered to Richard then, she supposed, because of the physical fact they were in bed together. And it crossed her mind now, seeing Richard’s complete absorption in his reading, seeing the plump, stiff fingers catch a front lock of his hair between them and pull it straight down toward his nose, as she had seen him do a thousand times before, it occurred to her Richard’s attitude was that his place in her life was unassailable, her tie with him permanent and beyond question, because he was the first man she had ever slept with. Therese threw the match cover at the shelf, and a bottle of something fell over.

Richard sat up, smiling a little, surprisedly. “’S matter, Terry?”

“Richard, I feel like being alone—the rest of the afternoon. Would you mind?”

He got up. The surprise did not leave his face. “No. Of course not.” He dropped the manuscript on the couch again. “All right, Terry. It’s probably better. Maybe you ought to read this now—read it alone,” he said argumentatively, as if he persuaded himself. He looked at his watch again. “Maybe I’ll go down and try to see Sam and Joan for a while.”

She stood there not moving, not even thinking of anything except of the few seconds of time to pass until he would be gone, while he brushed his hand once, a little clingy with its moisture, over her hair, and bent to kiss her. Then quite suddenly she remembered the Degas book she had bought days ago, the book of reproductions that Richard wanted and hadn’t been able to find anywhere. She got it from the bottom drawer of the bureau. “I found this. The Degas book.”

“Oh, swell. Thanks.” He took it in both hands. It was still wrapped. “Where’d you find it?”

“Frankenberg’s. Of all places.”

“Frankenberg’s.” Richard smiled. “It’s six bucks, isn’t it?”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

Richard had his wallet out. “But I asked you to get it for me.”

“Never mind, really.”

Richard protested, but she didn’t take the money. And a minute later, he was gone, with a promise to call her tomorrow at five. They might do something tomorrow night, he said.

Carol called at ten past six. Did she feel like going to Chinatown, Carol asked. Therese said, of course.

“I’m having cocktails with someone in the St. Regis,” Carol said. “Why don’t you pick me up here? It’s the little room, not the big one. And listen, we’re going on to some theater thing you’ve asked me to. Get it?”

“Some sort of Christmas benefit cocktail party?”

Carol laughed. “Hurry up.”

Therese flew.

Carol’s friend was a man called Stanley McVeigh, a tall and very attractive man of about forty with a mustache and a boxer dog on a leash. Carol was ready to go when she arrived. Stanley walked out with them, put them into a taxi and gave the driver some money through the window.

“Who’s he?” Therese asked.

“An old friend. Seeing more of me now that Harge and I are separating.”

Therese looked at her. Carol had a wonderful little smile in her eyes tonight. “Do you like him?”

“Soso,” Carol said. “Driver, will you make that Chinatown instead of the other?”

It began to rain while they were having dinner. Carol said it always rained in Chinatown, every time she had been here. But it didn’t matter much, because they ducked from one shop to another, looking at things and buying things. Therese saw some sandals with platform heels that she thought were beautiful, rather more Persian looking than Chinese, and she wanted to buy them for Carol, but Carol said Rindy wouldn’t approve. Rindy was a conservative, and didn’t like her even to go without stockings in summer, and Carol conformed to her. The same store had Chinese suits of a black shiny material, with plain trousers and a high-collared jacket, and Carol bought one for Rindy. Therese bought the sandals for Carol anyway, while Carol was arranging for Rindy’s suit to be sent. She knew the right size just by looking at the sandals, and it pleased Carol after all that she bought them. Then they spent a weird hour in a Chinese theater where people in the audience were sleeping through all the clangor. And finally they went uptown for a late supper in a restaurant where a harp played. It was a glorious evening, a really magnificent evening.

chapter ten

On Tuesday, the fifth day of work, Therese sat in a little bare room with no ceiling at the back of the Black Cat Theatre, waiting for Mr. Donohue, the new director, to come and look at her cardboard model. Yesterday morning, Donohue had replaced Cortes as director, had thrown out her first model, and also thrown out Phil McElroy as the second brother in the play. Phil had walked out yesterday in a huff. It was lucky she hadn’t been thrown out along with her model, Therese thought, so she had followed Mr. Donohue’s instructions to the letter. The new model hadn’t the movable section she had put into the first, which would have permitted the living room scene to be converted into the terrace scene for the last act. Mr. Donohue seemed to be adamant against anything unusual or even simple. By setting the whole play in the living room, a lot of the dialogue had to be changed in the last act, and some of the cleverest lines had been lost. Her new model indicated a fireplace, broad French windows giving onto a terrace, two doors, a sofa, and a couple of armchairs and a bookcase. It would look, when finished, like a room in a model house at Sloan’s, lifelike down to the last ash tray.

Therese stood up, stretched herself, and reached for the corduroy jacket that was hanging on a nail in the door. The place was cold as a barn. Mr. Donohue probably wouldn’t come in until afternoon, or not even today if she didn’t remind him again. There was no hurry about the scenery. It might have been the least important matter in the whole production, but she had sat up until late last night, enthusiastically working on the model.

She went out to stand in the wings again. The cast was all on stage with scripts in hand. Mr. Donohue kept running the cast through the whole play, to get the flow of it, he said, but today it seemed to be only putting them to sleep. All the cast looked lazy except Tom Harding, a tall blond young man who had the male lead, and he was a little too energetic. Georgia Halloran was suffering from sinus headaches, and had to stop every hour to put drops in her nose and lie down for a few minutes. Geoffrey Andrews, a middle-aged man who played the heroine’s father, grumbled constantly between his lines because he didn’t like Donohue.

“No, no, no, no,” said Mr. Donohue for the tenth time that morning, stopping everything and causing everybody to lower his script and turn to him with a puzzled, irritated docility. “Let’s start again from page twenty-eight.”

Therese watched him waving his arms to indicate the speakers, putting up a hand to silence them, following the script with his head down as if he led an orchestra. Tom Harding winked at her, and pulled his hand down his nose. After a moment, Therese went back to the room behind the partition, where she worked, where she felt a little less useless. She knew the play almost by heart now. It had a rather Sheridanesque comedy of errors plot—two brothers who pretend to be valet and master in order to impress an heiress with whom one of the brothers is in love. The dialogue was gay and altogether not bad, but the dreary, matter-of-fact set that Donohue had ordered for it—Therese hoped something could be done with the color they would use.

Mr. Donohue did come in just after twelve o’clock. He looked at her model, lifted it up and looked at it from below and from both sides, without any change in his nervous, harassed expression. “Yes, this is fine. I like this very much. You see how much better this is than those empty walls you had before, don’t you?”

Therese took a deep breath of relief. “Yes,” she said.

“A set grows out of the needs of the actors. This isn’t a ballet set you’re designing, Miss Belivet.”

She nodded, looking at the model, too, and trying to see how it possibly was better, possibly more functional.

“The carpenter’s coming in this afternoon about four. We’ll get together and have a talk about this.” Mr. Donohue went out.

Therese stared at the cardboard model. At least she would see it used. At least she and the carpenters would make it something real. She went to the window and looked out at the gray but luminous winter sky, at the backs of some five-story houses garlanded with fire escapes. In the foreground was a small vacant lot with a runted leafless tree in it, all twisted up like a signpost gone wild. She wished she could call Carol and invite her for lunch. But Carol was an hour and a half away by car.

“Is your name Beliver?”

Therese turned to the girl in the doorway. “Belivet. Telephone?”

“The phone by the lights.”

“Thanks.” Therese hurried, hoping it was Carol, knowing more likely it was Richard. Carol hadn’t yet called her here.

“Hello, this is Abby.”

“Abby?” Therese smiled. “How’d you know I was here?”

“You told me, remember? I’d like to see you. I’m not far away. Have you had lunch yet?”

They agreed to meet at the Palermo, a restaurant a block or two from the Black Cat.

Therese whistled a song as she walked there, happy as if she were meeting Carol. The restaurant had sawdust on the floor, and a couple of black kittens played around under the rail of the bar. Abby was sitting at a table in the back.

“Hi,” Abby said as she came up. “You’re looking very chipper. I almost didn’t recognize you. Would you like a drink?”

Therese shook her head. “No, thanks.”

“You mean, you’re so happy without it?” Abby asked, and she chuckled with that secret amusement that in Abby was somehow not offensive.

Therese took the cigarette that Abby offered her. Abby knew, she thought. And perhaps she was in love with Carol, too. It put Therese on guard with her. It created a tacit rivalry that gave her a curious exhilaration, a sense of certain superiority over Abby—emotions that Therese had never known before, never dared to dream of, emotions consequently revolutionary in themselves. So their lunching together in the restaurant became nearly as important as the meeting with Carol.

“How is Carol?” Therese asked. She had not seen Carol in three days.

“She’s very fine,” Abby said, watching her.

The waiter came, and Abby asked him if he could recommend the mussels and the scaloppine.

“Excellent, madame!” He beamed at her as if she were a special customer.

It was Abby’s manner, the glow in her face as if today, or every day, were a special holiday for her. Therese liked that. She looked admiringly at Abby’s suit of red and blue weave, her cuff links that were scrolly G’s, like filigree buttons in silver. Abby asked her about her job at the Black Cat. It was tedious to Therese, but Abby seemed impressed. Abby was impressed, Therese thought, because she did nothing herself.

“I know some people in the producing end of the theater,” Abby said. “I’ll be glad to put in a word for you any time.”

“Thanks.” Therese played with the lid of the grated cheese bowl in front of her. “Do you know anyone called Andronich? I think he’s from Philadelphia.”

“No,” Abby said.

Mr. Donohue had told her to go and see Andronich next week in New York. He was producing a show that would open this spring in Philadelphia, and then on Broadway.

“Try the mussels.” Abby was eating hers with gusto. “Carol likes these, too.”

“Have you known Carol a long time?”

“Um-hm,” Abby nodded, looking at her with the bright eyes that revealed nothing.

“And you know her husband, too, of course.”

Abby nodded again, silently.

Therese smiled a little. Abby was out to question her, she felt, but not to disclose anything about herself or about Carol.

“How about some wine? Do you like Chianti?” Abby summoned a waiter with a snap of her fingers. “Bring us a bottle of Chianti. A good one. Builds up the blood,” she added to Therese.

Then the main course arrived, and two waiters fussed around the table, uncorking the Chianti, pouring more water and bringing fresh butter. The radio in the corner played a tango—a little cheesebox of a radio with a broken front, but the music might have come from a string orchestra behind them, at Abby’s request. No wonder Carol likes her, Therese thought. She complemented Carol’s solemnity, she could remind Carol to laugh.

“Did you always live by yourself?” Abby asked.

“Yes. Since I got out of school.” Therese sipped her wine. “Do you? Or do you live with your family?”

“With my family. But I’ve got my own half of the house.”

“And do you work?” Therese ventured.

“I’ve had jobs. Two or three of them. Didn’t Carol tell you we had a furniture shop once? We had a shop just outside of Elizabeth on the highway. We bought up antiques or plain second-hand stuff and fixed it up. I never worked so hard in my life.” Abby smiled at her gaily, as if every word might be untrue. “Then my other job. I’m an entomologist. Not a very good one, but good enough to pull bugs out of Italian lemon crates and things like that. Bahama lilies are full of bugs.”

“So I’ve heard.” Therese smiled.

“I don’t think you believe me.”

“Yes, I do. Do you still work at that?”

“I’m on reserve. Just in time of emergency, I work. Like Easter.”

Therese watched Abby’s fork cutting the scaloppine into small bites before she picked any up. “Do you take trips a lot with Carol?”

“A lot? No, why?” Abby asked.

“I should think you’d be good for her. Because Carol’s so serious.” Therese wished she could lead the conversation to the heart of things, but just what the heart of things was, she didn’t know. The wine ran slow and warm in her veins, down to her finger tips.

“Not all the time,” Abby corrected, with the laughter under the surface of her voice, as it had been in the first word Therese had heard her say.

The wine in her head promised music or poetry or truth, but she was stranded on the brink. Therese could not think of a single question that would be proper to ask, because all her questions were so enormous.

“How’d you meet Carol?” Abby asked.

“Didn’t Carol tell you?”

“She just said she met you at Frankenberg’s when you had a job there.”

“Well, that’s how,” Therese said, feeling a resentment in her against Abby building up, incontrollably.

“You just started talking?” Abby asked with a smile, lighting a cigarette.

“I waited on her,” Therese said, and stopped.

And Abby waited, for a precise description of that meeting, Therese knew, but she wouldn’t give it to Abby or to anyone else. It belonged to her. Surely Carol hadn’t told Abby, she thought, told her the silly story of the Christmas card. It wouldn’t be important enough to Carol for Carol to have told her.

“Do you mind telling me who started talking first?”

Therese laughed suddenly. She reached for a cigarette and lighted it, still smiling. No, Carol hadn’t told her about the Christmas card, and Abby’s question struck her as terribly funny. “I did,” Therese said.

“You like her a lot, don’t you?” Abby asked.

Therese explored it for hostility. It was not hostile, but jealous. “Yes.”

“Why do you?”

“Why do I? Why do you?”

Abby’s eyes still laughed. “I’ve known Carol since she was four years old.”

Therese said nothing.

“You’re awfully young, aren’t you? Are you twenty-one?”

“No. Not quite.”

“You know Carol’s got a lot of worries right now, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And she’s lonely now,” Abby added, her eyes watching.

“Do you mean that’s why she sees me?” Therese asked calmly. “Do you want to tell me I shouldn’t see her?”

Abby’s unblinking eyes blinked twice after all. “No, not a bit. But I don’t want you to get hurt. I don’t want you to hurt Carol either.”

“I’d never hurt Carol,” Therese said. “Do you think I would?”

Abby was still watching her alertly, had never taken her eyes from her. “No, I don’t think you would,” Abby replied as if she had just decided it. And she smiled now as if she were especially pleased about something.

But Therese did not like the smile or the question, and realizing her face showed her feelings, she looked down at the table. There was a glass of hot zabaglione standing on a plate in front of her.

“Would you like to come to a cocktail party this afternoon, Therese? It’s uptown at about six o’clock. I don’t know if there’ll be any stage designers there, but one of the girls who’s giving it is an actress.”

Therese put her cigarette out. “Is Carol going to be there?”

“No. She won’t be. But they’re all easy to get along with. It’s a small party.”

“Thanks. I don’t think I should go. I may have to work late today, too.”

“Oh. I was going to give you the address anyway, but if you won’t come—”

“No,” Therese said.

Abby wanted to walk around the block after they came out of the restaurant. Therese agreed, though she was tired of Abby now. Abby with her cocksureness, her blunt, careless questions made Therese feel she had gotten an advantage over her. And Abby had not let her pay the check.

Abby said, “Carol thinks a lot of you, you know. She says you have a lot of talent.”

“Does she?” Therese said, only half believing it. “She never told me.” She wanted to walk faster, but Abby held their pace back.

“You must know she thinks a lot of you, if she wants you to take a trip with her.”

Therese glanced and saw Abby smiling at her, guilelessly. “She didn’t say anything to me about that either,” Therese said quietly, though her heart had begun pumping.

“I’m sure she will. You’ll go with her, won’t you?”

Why should Abby know about it before she did, Therese wondered. She felt a flush of anger in her face. What was it all about? Did Abby hate her? If she did, why wasn’t she consistent about it? Then in the next instant, the rise of anger fell and left her weak, left her vulnerable and defenseless. She thought, if Abby pressed her against the wall at that moment and said: “Out with it. What do you want from Carol? How much of her do you want to take from me?” she would have babbled it all. She would have said: “I want to be with her. I love to be with her, and what has it got to do with you?”

“Isn’t that for Carol to talk about? Why do you ask me these things?” Therese made an effort to sound indifferent. It was hopeless.

Abby stopped walking. “I’m sorry,” she said, turning to her. “I think I understand better now.”

“Understand what?”

“Just—that you win.”

“Win what?”

“What,” Abby echoed with her head up, looking up at the corner of a building, at the sky, and Therese suddenly felt furiously impatient.

She wanted Abby to go so she could telephone Carol. Nothing mattered but the sound of Carol’s voice. Nothing mattered but Carol, and why did she let herself forget for a moment?

“No wonder Carol thinks such a lot of you,” Abby said, but if it was a kind remark, Therese did not accept it as such. “So long, Therese. I’ll see you again no doubt.” Abby held out her hand.