jealous.
“Sure, sure,” said the latter, following them into the vestibule. “I’d gladly unload my better half on anybody who’d take her.”
“Watch your step,” said his wife, appearing from the same room as he. “Someday you might be sorry!”
“Well, you’re welcome anytime,” said the widow. “I’m always home, and you might be interested in the lamp or the pipe collection—they are all fine things, and it makes me a little sad to part with them, but that’s life.”
“What next?” he wondered on the way home. Up to that point he had played it by ear, practically without forethought, following blind intuition, like a chess player penetrating and applying pressure wherever there is a hint of shakiness or constriction in his opponent’s position. But what now? Day after tomorrow they are taking my darling away—that rules out any direct benefit from my acquaintance with her mother…. She’ll be back, though, and may even stay here for good, and by that time I’ll be a welcome guest…. But if the woman has less than a year to live (according to the hints I was given), then everything goes down the drain…. I must say she doesn’t look too decrepit to me, but if she does take to her bed and die, then the setting and the circumstances for a potentially jovial relationship will crumble, then it will all be over—how would I find her, under what pretext?… Nevertheless, he felt instinctively that this was the way to proceed: don’t think too much, keep the pressure on the weak corner of the board.
Therefore, next day he set out for the park with an attractive box of marrons glaces and sugar violets as a going-away present for the girl. Reason told him that it was a silly cliche, that this was a particularly dangerous moment to single her out for overt attention, even from an uninhibited eccentric, especially since so far he had— quite rightly—paid hardly any attention to her (he was a past master at dissimulating lightning bolts)—not like one of your putrid oldsters who always carry some candy to lure the lasses—and still he minced along with his present, in response to a secret impulse that was more accurate than reason.
He spent a whole hour on the bench, but they did not come. Must have left a day early. And, although one more encounter with her could in no way have alleviated the very special burden that had accumulated during the past week, he experienced the burning chagrin of a betrayed lover.
Continuing to ignore the voice of reason that told him he was again doing the wrong thing, he rushed over to the widow’s and bought the lamp. Noticing his odd shortness of breath, she invited him to sit down and offered him a cigarette. In his search for a lighter he came upon the oblong box and said, like a character in a book:
“It may seem odd to you, since we’ve known each other for such a short time, but still allow me to present you with this trifle—a little candy, not bad candy, I think—if you accept, it will give me great pleasure.”
She smiled for the first time—apparently she was more flattered than surprised—and explained that all the sweets of life were forbidden to her, and that she would give it to her daughter.
“Oh—I thought they had already—”
“No, tomorrow morning,” the widow resumed, fingering the gold ribbon not without regret. “Today, my friend, who spoils her dreadfully, took her to a needlework exhibit.” She sighed, and gingerly, as if it were something fragile, set the gift on a nearby side table, while her exceedingly charming guest inquired what she was and was not allowed, and listened to the epic of her malady, referring to the variants and interpreting with great acuity the most recent distortions of the text.
BY THE THIRD VISIT (he had dropped by to inform her that the mover could come no earlier than Friday) he had tea with her and, in his turn, told her about himself and about his limpid, elegant profession. They turned out to have a common acquaintance, the brother of an attorney who had died the same year as her husband. Objectively and without insincere regrets she discussed the husband, about whom he already knew certain things: he had been a bon vivant and an expert on notarial matters; he had gotten on well with his wife, but had tried to spend as little time as possible at home.
On Thursday he bought the couch and two chairs, and on Saturday he called for her as agreed to take her for a quiet stroll in the park. However, she was feeling rotten, was in bed with a hot-water bottle, and spoke to him in a singsong through the door. He asked the gloomy crone who periodically appeared to cook and nurse to let him know at such-and-such a number how the patient had spent the night.
In this fashion a few more busy weeks elapsed, weeks of murmuring, exploration, persuasion, intensive remolding of another’s pliable solitude. Now he was moving toward a definite goal, for, even back when he had proffered the candy, he had suddenly recognized the outlying destination silently indicated to him by what looked like a strange, nailless finger (scrawled on a fence), and the true hiding-place of genuine, blinding opportunity. The path was unenticing but neither was it difficult, and the sight of a weekly letter to Mother, in a still unsteady, coltishly sprawling hand, left lying about with inexplicable heedlessness, sufficed to put an end to any sort of doubt.
He had learned from other sources that the mother had checked on him, with results that could only have pleased her, not the least of which was a well-kept bank account. From the way she showed him, with devoutly lowered voice, old, rigid snapshots depicting, in various more or less flattering poses, a young girl in high shoes with a round, pleasant face, a nice full bosom, and hair combed back from her forehead (there were also the wedding photos, which invariably included the bridegroom, who had a happily surprised expression and an oddly familiar slant to his eyes), he gathered that she was surreptitiously addressing the faded mirror of the past in search of something that might even now entitle her to masculine attention, and must have decided that the keen eye of an appraiser of facets and reflections could still discern the traces of her past comeliness (which, incidentally, she exaggerated), traces that would become even more apparent after this retrospective bride-show.
To the cup of tea she poured him she imparted a dainty touch of intimacy; into the highly detailed accounts of her diverse indispositions she managed to infuse so much romanticism that he could barely resist asking some coarse question; and at times she would pause, seemingly lost in thought, and then catch up, with a belated query, to his cautiously tiptoeing words.
He felt both sorry and repelled but, realizing that the material, apart from its one specific function, had no potential whatever, he kept doggedly at his chore, which in itself demanded such concentration that the physical aspect of this woman dissolved and vanished (if he had run into her on the street in a different part of town he would not have recognized her) and its place was haphazardly filled by the formal features of the abstract bride in the snapshots, grown so familiar that they had lost all meaning (thus, after all, her pathetic calculations had been successful).
The task proceeded swimmingly and when, one rainy, late-fall evening, she heard out—impassively, without a single bit of feminine advice—his vague complaints about the yearnings of a bachelor who looks with envy at the tailcoat and misty aura of another’s wedding and thinks involuntarily of the lonely grave at the end of his lonely road, he concluded the time had come to call the packers. Meanwhile, though, he sighed and changed the subject, and, a day later, how she was amazed when their silent tea-drinking (he had gone to the window a couple of times, as if meditating about something) was interrupted by the furniture mover’s powerful ring. Home came two chairs, the couch, the lamp, and the chest: thus, when solving a mathematical problem, one first sets aside a certain number so as to work more freely, and then returns it to the womb of the solution.
“You don’t understand. All it means is that a married couple’s belongings are owned jointly. In other words, I offer you both the contents of the cuff and the live ace of hearts.”
Meanwhile, two workmen who had brought in the furniture were bustling nearby, and she chastely retreated to the next room.
“You know something?” she said. “Go home and have a good sleep.”
He tried, with a chuckle, to take her hand in his, but she drew it behind her back, repeating resolutely that this was all a lot of nonsense.
“All right,” he replied, producing a handful of change and preparing the tip in his palm. “All right, I’ll leave, but, if you decide to accept, kindly let me know, otherwise don’t bother—I’ll rid you of my presence forever.”
“Wait a bit. Let them leave first. You pick strange times for this kind of talk.”
“Now let’s sit down and discuss things rationally,” she said a moment later, having descended heavily and meekly onto the newly returned sofa (while he sat next to her in profile with one leg tucked under him, holding onto the lace of the protruding shoe). “First of all, my friend, as you know, I am a sick, a seriously sick, woman. For a couple of years now my life has been one of constant medical care. The operation I had on April twenty-fifth was in
