symptoms. But he looked, for a man who claimed to be interested in childhood diseases, bilious and vulpine. His color was bad. He scowled and rubbed his forehead as if he suffered from a headache. He repeatedly wet his lips and crossed and recrossed his legs. Presently, his uneasiness seemed to cross the table. During the rest of the time they sat there, the conversation was about commonplace subjects, but an emotion for which they seemed to have no words colored the talk and darkened and enlarged its shapes. She did not finish her dessert. She let her coffee get cold. For a while, neither of them spoke. A stranger, noticing them in the restaurant, might have thought that they were a pair of old friends who had met to discuss a misfortune. His face was gray. Her hands were trembling. Leaning toward her, he said, finally, “The reason I asked you to come here is because the firm I work for has an apartment upstairs.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”
For lovers, touch is metamorphosis. All the parts of their bodies seem to change, and they seem to become something different and better. That part of their experience that is distinct and separate, the totality of the years before they met, is changed, is redirected toward this moment. They feel they have reached an identical point of intensity, an ecstasy of rightness that they command in every part, and any recollection that occurs to them takes on this final clarity, whether it be a sweep hand on an airport clock, a snow owl, a Chicago railroad station on Christmas Eve, or anchoring a yawl in a strange harbor while all along the stormy coast strangers are blowing their horns for the yacht-club tender, or running a ski trail at that hour when, although the sun is still in the sky, the north face of every mountain lies in the dark.
“DO YOU WANT to go downstairs alone? The elevator men in these buildings?” Stephen Bruce said when they had dressed.
“I don’t care about the elevator men in these buildings,” she said lightly.
She took his arm, and they went down in the elevator together. When they left the building, they were unwilling to part, and they decided on the Metropolitan Museum as a place where they were not likely to be seen by anyone they knew. The nearly empty rotunda looked, at that hour of the afternoon, like a railroad station past train time. It smelled of burning coal. They looked at stone horses and pieces of cloth. In a dark passage, they found a prodigal representation of the Feast of Love. The god?disguised now as a woodcutter, now as a cowherd, a sailor, a prince?came through every open door. Three spirits waited by a holly grove to lift the armor from his shoulders and undo his buckler. A large company encouraged his paramour. The whole creation was in accord?the civet and the bear, the lion and the unicorn, fire and water.
Coming back through the rotunda, Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan met a friend of Lois’s mother. It was impossible to avoid her and they said How-do-you-do and I’m-happy-to-meet-you, and Stephen promised to remember the friend to his mother-in-law. Mr. Bruce and Mrs. Sheridan walked over to Lexington and said goodbye. He returned to his office and went home at six. Mrs. Bruce had not come in, the maid told him. Katherine was at a party, and he was supposed to bring her home. The maid gave him the address and he went out again without taking off his coat. It was raining. The doorman, in a white raincoat, went out into the storm, and returned riding on the running board of a taxi. The taxi had orange seats, and as it drove uptown, he heard the car radio playing a tango. Another doorman let him out and he went into a lobby that, like the one in the building where he lived, was meant to resemble the hall of a manor house. Upstairs, there were peanut shells on the rug, balloons on the ceiling; friends and relatives were drinking cocktails in the living room, and at the end of the room, the marionette stage was again being dismantled. He drank a Martini and talked with a friend while he waited for Katherine to put her coat on. “Oh yes, yes!” he heard Mrs. Sheridan say, and then he saw her come into the room with her daughters.
Katherine came between them before they spoke, and he went, with his daughter, over to the hostess. Katherine dropped her curtsy and said brightly, “It was very nice of you to ask me to your party, Mrs. Bremont, and thank you very much.” As Mr. Bruce started for the elevator, the younger Sheridan girl dropped her curtsy and said, “It was a very nice party, Mrs. Bremont…”
He waited downstairs, with Katherine, for Mrs. Sheridan, but something or someone delayed her, and when the elevator had come down twice without bringing her, he left.
MR. BRUCE AND MRS. SHERIDAN met at the apartment a few days later. Then he saw her in a crowd at the Rockefeller Center skating rink, waiting for her children. He saw her again in the lobby of the Chardin Club, among the other parents, nursemaids, and chauffeurs who were waiting for the dancing class to end. He didn’t speak to her, but he heard her at his back, saying to someone, “Yes, Mother’s very well, thank you. Yes, I will give her your love.” Then he heard her speaking to someone farther away from him and then her voice fell below the music. That night, he left the city on business and did not return until Sunday, and he went Sunday afternoon to a football game with a friend. The game was slow and the last quarter was played under lights. When he got home, Lois met him at the door of the apartment. The fire in the living room was lighted. She fixed their drinks and then sat across the room from him in a chair near the fire. “I forgot to tell you that Aunt Helen called on Wednesday. She’s moving from Gray’s Hill to a house nearer the shore.”
He tried to find something to say to this item of news and couldn’t. After five years of marriage he seemed to have been left with nothing to say. It was like being embarrassed by a shortage of money. He looked desperately back to the football game and the trip to Chicago for something that might please her, and couldn’t find a word. Lois felt his struggle and his failure. She stopped talking herself. I haven’t had anyone to talk to since Wednesday, she thought, and now he has nothing to say. “While you were away, I strained my back again, reaching for a hatbox,” she said. “The pain is excruciating, and Dr. Parminter doesn’t seem able to help me, so I’m going to another doctor, named Walsh.”
“I’m terribly sorry your back is bothering you,” he said. “I hope Dr. Walsh will be able to help.”
The lack of genuine concern in his voice hurt her feelings. “Oh, and I forgot to tell you?there’s been some trouble,” she said crossly. “Katherine spent the afternoon with Helen Woodruff and some other children. There were some boys. When the maid went into the playroom to call them for supper, she found them all undressed. Mrs. Woodruff was very upset and I told her you’d call.”
