'Really, I'm not at all--'
'Take it, for Chrissake. I didn't poison it or anything.'
Ginnie accepted the sandwich half. 'Well, thank you very much,' she said.
'It's chicken,' he said, standing over her, watching her. 'Bought it last night in a goddam delicatessen.'
'It looks very good.'
'Well, eat it, then.'
Ginnie took a bite.
'Good, huh?'
Ginnie swallowed with difficulty. 'Very,' she said.
Selena's brother nodded. He looked absently around the room, scratching the pit of his chest. 'Well, I guess I better get dressed....
Jesus! There's the bell. Take it easy, now!' He was gone.
Left alone, Ginnie looked around, without getting up, for a good place to throw out or hide the sandwich. She heard someone coming through the foyer. She put the sandwich into her polo-coat pocket.
A young man in his early thirties, neither short nor tall, came into the room. His regular features, his short haircut, the cut of his suit, the pattern of his foulard necktie gave out no really final information.
He might have been on the staff, or trying to get on the staff, of a news magazine. He might have just been in a play that closed in Philadelphia. He might have been with a law firm.
'Hello,' he said, cordially, to Ginnie. 'Hello.'
'Seen Franklin?' he asked.
'He's shaving. He told me to tell you to wait for him. He'll be right out.'
'Shaving. Good heavens.' The young man looked at his wristwatch. He then sat down in a red damask chair, crossed his legs, and put his hands to his face. As if he were generally weary, or had just undergone some form of eyestrain, he rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his extended fingers. 'This has been the most horrible morning of my entire life,' he said, removing his hands from his face. He spoke exclusively from the larynx, as if he were altogether too tired to put any diaphragm breath into his words.
'What happened?' Ginnie asked, looking at him.
'Oh. . . . It's too long a story. I never bore people I haven't known for at least a thousand years.' He stared vaguely, discontentedly, in the direction of the windows. 'But I shall never again consider myself even the remotest judge of human nature. You may quote me wildly on that.'
'What happened?' Ginnie repeated.
'Oh, God. This person who's been sharing my apartment for months and months and months--I don't even want to talk about him.... This writer,' he added with satisfaction, probably remembering a favorite anathema from a Hemingway novel.
'What'd he do?'
'Frankly, I'd just as soon not go into details,' said the young man.
He took a cigarette from his own pack, ignoring a transparent humidor on the table, and lit it with his own lighter. His hands were large. They looked neither strong nor competent nor sensitive. Yet he used them as if they had some not easily controllable aesthetic drive of their own.
'I've made up my mind that I'm not even going to think about it. But I'm just so furious,' he said. 'I mean here's this awful little person from Altoona, Pennsylvania--or one of those places. Apparently starving to death. I'm kind and decent enough--I'm the original Good Samaritan--to take him into my apartment, this absolutely microscopic little apartment that I can hardly move around in myself. I introduce him to all my friends. Let him clutter up the whole apartment with his horrible manuscript papers, and cigarette butts, and radishes, and whatnot.
Introduce him to every theatrical producer in New York. Haul his filthy shirts back and forth from the laundry. And on top of it all--' The young man broke off. 'And the result of all my kindness and decency,' he went on, 'is that he walks out of the house at five or six in the morning--without so much as leaving a note behind--taking with him anything and everything he can lay his filthy, dirty hands on.' He paused to drag on his cigarette, and exhaled the smoke in a thin, sibilant stream from his mouth. 'I don't want to talk about it. I really don't.' He looked over at Ginnie. 'I love your coat,' he said, already out of his chair. He crossed over and took the lapel of Ginnie's polo coat between his fingers. 'It's lovely. It's the first really good camel's hair I've seen since the war. May I ask where you got it?'
'My mother brought it back from Nassau.'
The young man nodded thoughtfully and backed off toward his chair.
'It's one of the few places where you can get really good camel's hair.' He sat down. 'Was she there long?'
'What?' said Ginnie.
'Was your mother there long? The reason I ask is my mother was down in December. And part of January. Usually I go down with her, but this has been such a messy year I simply couldn't get away.'
'She was down in February,' Ginnie said.
'Grand. Where did she stay? Do you know?'
'With my aunt.'
He nodded. 'May I ask your name? You're a friend of Franklin's sister, I take it?'
