miles. His hat slanted above his delicate hooked profile. She nursed her jaw. The houses gave way to broad, dark subdivisions out of which realtors’ signs loomed abrupt and ghostly, with a quality of forlorn assurance. Between them low, far lights hung in the cool empty darkness blowing with fireflies. She began to cry quietly, feeling the cooling double drink of gin inside her. “You hurt my mouth,” she said in a voice small and faint with self-pity. She nursed her jaw with experimental fingers, pressing harder and harder until she found a twinge. “You’ll be sorry for this,” she said in a muffled voice. “When I tell Red. Dont you wish you were Red? Dont you? Dont you wish you could do what he can do? Dont you wish he was the one watching us instead of you?”
They turned into the Grotto, passing along a closely curtained wall from which a sultry burst of music came. She sprang out while he was locking the car and ran on up the steps. “I gave you your chance,” she said. “You brought me here. I didn’t ask you to come.”
She went to the washroom. In the mirror she examined her face. “Shucks,” she said, “it didn’t leave a mark, even;” drawing the flesh this way and that. “Little runt,” she said, peering at her reflection. She added a phrase, glibly obscene, with a detached parrotlike effect. She painted her mouth again. Another woman entered. They examined one another’s clothes with brief, covert, cold, embracing glances.
Popeye was standing at the door to the dance-hall, a cigarette in his fingers.
“I gave you your chance,” Temple said. “You didn’t have to come.”
“I dont take chances,” he said.
“You took one,” Temple said. “Are you sorry? Huh?”
“Go on,” he said, his hand on her back. She was in the act of stepping over the sill when she turned and looked at him, their eyes almost on a level; then her hand flicked toward his armpit. He caught her wrist; the other hand flicked toward him. He caught that one too in his soft, cold hand. They looked eye to eye, her mouth open and the rouge spots darkening slowly on her face.
“I gave you your chance back there in town,” he said. “You took it.”
Behind her the music beat, sultry, evocative; filled with movement of feet, the voluptuous hysteria of muscles warming the scent of flesh, of the blood. “Oh, God; oh, God,” she said, her lips scarce moving. “I’ll go. I’ll go back.”
“You took it,” he said. “Go on.”
In his grasp her hands made tentative plucking motions at his coat just out of reach of her finger-tips. Slowly he was turning her toward the door, her head reverted. “You just dare!” she cried. “You just—” His hand closed upon the back of her neck, his fingers like steel, yet cold and light as aluminum. She could hear the vertebrae grating faintly together, and his voice, cold and still.
“Will you?”
She nodded her head. Then they were dancing. She could still feel his hand at her neck. Across his shoulder she looked swiftly about the room, her gaze flicking from face to face among the dancers. Beyond a low arch, in another room, a group stood about the crap-table. She leaned this way and that, trying to see the faces of the group.
Then she saw the four men. They were sitting at a table near the door. One of them was chewing gum; the whole lower part of his face seemed to be cropped with teeth of an unbelievable whiteness and size. When she saw them she swung Popeye around with his back to them, working the two of them toward the door again. Once more her harried gaze flew from face to face in the crowd.
When she looked again two of the men had risen. They approached. She dragged Popeye into their path, still keeping his back turned to them. The men paused and essayed to go around her; again she backed Popeye into their path. She was trying to say something to him, but her mouth felt cold. It was like trying to pick up a pin with the fingers numb. Suddenly she felt herself lifted bodily aside, Popeye’s small arms light and rigid as aluminum. She stumbled back against the wall and watched the two men leave the room. “I’ll go back,” she said. “I’ll go back.” She began to laugh shrilly.
“Shut it,” Popeye said. “Are you going to shut it?”
“Get me a drink,” she said. She felt his hand; her legs felt cold too, like they were not hers. They were sitting at a table. Two tables away the man was still chewing, his elbows on the table. The fourth man sat on his spine, smoking, his coat buttoned across his chest.
She watched hands: a brown one in a white sleeve, a soiled white one beneath a dirty cuff, setting bottles on the table. She had a glass in her hand. She drank, gulping; with the glass in her hand she saw Red standing in the door, in a gray suit and a spotted bow tie. He looked like a college boy, and he looked about the room until he saw her. He looked at the back of Popeye’s head, then at her as she sat with the glass in her hand. The two men at the other table had not moved. She could see the faint, steady movement of the one’s ears as he chewed. The music started.
She held Popeye’s back toward Red. He was still watching her, almost a head taller than anybody else. “Come on,” she said in Popeye’s ear. “If you’re going to dance, dance.”
She had another drink. They danced again. Red had disappeared. When the music ceased she had another drink. It did no good. It merely lay hot and hard inside her. “Come on,” she said, “dont quit.” But he wouldn’t get up, and she stood over him, her muscles flinching and jerking with exhaustion and terror. She began to jeer at him. “Call yourself a man, a bold, bad man, and let a girl dance you off your feet.” Then her face drained, became small and haggard and sincere; she spoke like a child, with sober despair. “Popeye.” He sat with his hands on the table, finicking with a cigarette, the second glass with its melting ice before him. She put her hand on his shoulder. “Daddy,” she said. Moving to shield them from the room, her hand stole toward his arm pit, touching the butt of the flat pistol. It lay rigid in the light, dead vise of his arm and side. “Give it to me,” she whispered. “Daddy. Daddy.” She leaned her thigh against his shoulder, caressing his arm with her flank. “Give it to me, daddy,” she whispered. Suddenly her hand began to steal down his body in a swift, covert movement; then it snapped away in a movement of revulsion. “I forgot,” she whispered; “I didn’t mean.…I didn’t.……”
One of the men at the other table hissed once through his teeth. “Sit down,” Popeye said. She sat down. She filled her glass, watching her hands perform the action. Then she was watching the corner of the gray coat. He’s got a broken button, she thought stupidly. Popeye had not moved.
“Dance this?” Red said.
His head was bent but he was not looking at her. He was turned a little, facing the two men at the other table. Still Popeye did not move. He shredded delicately the end of the cigarette, pinching the tobacco off. Then he put it into his mouth.
