address. My secretary got the telephone number. Have another little drink.”
“You know, you’ve never come to a place of mine before?never,” he said. “Why did you come now?”
“Why did I come, darling?” she asked. “What a question! I’ve known you for thirty years. You’re the oldest friend I have in New York. Remember that night in the Village when it snowed and we stayed up until morning and drank whiskey sours for breakfast? That doesn’t seem like twelve years ago. And that night?”
“I don’t like to have you see me in a place like this,” he said earnestly. He touched his face and felt his beard.
“And all the people who used to imitate Roosevelt,” she said, as if she had not heard him, as if she were deaf. “And that place on Staten Island where we all used to go for dinner when Henry had a car. Poor Henry. He bought a place in Connecticut and went out there by himself one weekend. He fell asleep with a lighted cigarette and the house, the barn, everything burned. Ethel took the children out to California.” She poured more Scotch into his glass and handed it to him. She lighted a cigarette and put it between his lips. The intimacy of this gesture, which made it seem not only as if he were deathly ill but as if he were her lover, troubled him.
“As soon as I’m better,” he said, “I’ll take a room at a good hotel. I’ll call you then. It was nice of you to come.”
“Oh, don’t be ashamed of this room, Jack,” she said. “Rooms never bother me. It doesn’t seem to matter to me where I am. Stanley had a filthy room in Chelsea. At least, other people told me it was filthy. I never noticed it. Rats used to eat the food I brought him. He used to have to hang the food from the ceiling, from the light chain.”
“I’ll call you as soon as I’m better,” Jack said. “I think I can sleep now if I’m left alone. I seem to need a lot of sleep.”
“You really are sick, darling,” she said. “You must have a fever.” She sat on the edge of his bed and put a hand on his forehead.
“How is that Englishman, Joan?” he asked. “Do you still see him?”
“What Englishman?” she said.
“You know. I met him at your house. He kept a handkerchief up his sleeve. He coughed all the time. You know the one I mean.”
“You must be thinking of someone else,” she said. “I haven’t had an Englishman at my place since the war. Of course, I can’t remember everyone.” She turned and, taking one of his hands, linked her fingers in his.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” Jack said. “That Englishman’s dead.” He pushed her off the bed, and got up himself. “Get out,” he said.
“You’re sick, darling,” she said. “I can’t leave you alone here.”
“Get out,” he said again, and when she didn’t move, he shouted, “What kind of an obscenity are you that you can smell sickness and death the way you do?”
“You poor darling.”
“Does it make you feel young to watch the dying?” he shouted. “Is that the lewdness that keeps you young? Is that why you dress like a crow? Oh, I know there’s nothing I can say that will hurt you. I know there’s nothing filthy or corrupt or depraved or brutish or base that the others haven’t tried, but this time you’re wrong. I’m not ready. My life isn’t ending. My life’s beginning. There are wonderful years ahead of me. There are, there are wonderful, wonderful, wonderful years ahead of me, and when they’re over, when it’s time, then I’ll call you. Then, as an old friend, I’ll call you and give you whatever dirty pleasure you take in watching the dying, but until then, you and your ugly and misshapen forms will leave me alone.”
She finished her drink and looked at her watch. “I guess I’d better show up at the office,” she said. “I’ll see you later. I’ll come back tonight. You’ll feel better then, you poor darling.” She closed the door after her, and he heard her light step on the stairs.
Jack emptied the whiskey bottle into the sink. He began to dress. He stuffed his dirty clothes into a bag. He was trembling and crying with sickness and fear. He could see the blue sky from his window, and in his fear it seemed miraculous that the sky should be blue, that the white clouds should remind him of snow, that from the sidewalk he could hear the shrill voices of children shrieking, “I’m the king of the mountain, I’m the king of the mountain, I’m the king of the mountain.” He emptied the ashtray containing his nail parings and cigarette butts into the toilet, and swept the floor with a shirt, so that there would be no trace of his life, of his body, when that lewd and searching shape of death came there to find him in the evening. THE POT OF GOLD
You could not say fairly of Ralph and Laura Whittemore that they had the failings and the characteristics of incorrigible treasure hunters, but you could say truthfully of them that the shimmer and the smell, the peculiar force of money, the promise of it, had an untoward influence on their lives. They were always at the threshold of fortune; they always seemed to have something on the fire. Ralph was a fair young man with a tireless commercial imagination and an evangelical credence in the romance and sorcery of business success, and although
