“Please sir, please-” said the man on the running board.
“I think he doesn’t want to drive any more,” said Quinn.
Quinn drove the truck into the warehouse. It is, he thought to himself, only poetic justice that I should do this. What with the jumping and the rattling, all of which was transmitted directly into his skull, it took him all of the fifteen yards which he had to cover before he had formulated the whole thought.
When he got out of the cab he could see the driver walking slowly away from the warehouse, slow like a farewell walk, but straight and steady, as if he would never come back. Then Whitfield came around a stack of bales and brought two Arabs. They immediately began to unload the canisters and wheeled them out to the pier on little wagons.
“Tell me,” said Quinn. “Where’s Bea this time of day?”
“Hotel most likely. It’s just before her siesta.”
Quinn smiled and left the warehouse. Two days, he thought, with hardly anything to do.
Chapter 14
She was drinking something orange and oily and when she saw him coming to her table she was not sure whether she liked seeing him or not. Of course he was new. But it seemed to her there had been something else before, something she missed.
“You looked,” she said to him, “as if you were heading straight for my table.”
“I was. May I sit down?”
She nodded and watched him sit.
“You look positively like you’d had a good day at the office.”
“I did,” he said.
They did not talk while the waiter took his order, and when the waiter was gone they still had nothing to say. Bea sipped and then licked her lips, which were sticky and sweet. She concentrated on that, trying to forget the platitude she had used on him, and that he had answered it in kind. Quinn lit a cigarette.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” she said.
“Now that I’m in civilization I’m taking up all kinds of civilized habits.”
She put her glass down and looked at him. “You say that without a smile and it sounds nasty. You say that with a smile and it sounds cagey.”
“Which did I do?”
“Don’t you know? You did both.”
Quinn waited till the waiter had put down the drink and left the table. He made out to himself that this was the only reason he didn’t say anything right away. Then he folded his arms on the table.
“You know what you sound like, Bea?”
“As if I disliked you.” She gave a small laugh and said, “Strange, isn’t it? I don’t know why.”
Quinn did not know what to do with that answer and looked into his glass. He drank and thought, how did I used to do it? I don’t remember ever sitting like this, not knowing what next.
“And then again,” she was saying, “if you were to ask me right now, now I don’t dislike you at all.”
This did not help him at all. He lost all touch with her and felt only suspicion.
“Look,” he said. “Naturally you don’t like me. First of all, you don’t know me from Adam. Second of all, what you do know you got from somebody else.”
“What was that?”
“You’re thick with the mayor, aren’t you? So naturally, listening to him-”
He knew he had missed as soon as he heard himself say the sentence. Bea sat up and looked at him as from a distance.
“You know something, Quinn?” She flicked one nail against her glass and made it go ping. “I just caught why I don’t like you. When I don’t like you.”
“I’m interested as all hell,” he said. The anger he felt seemed to swell his face. She went ping on the glass again and that was the worst thing about her, he thought idiotically.
“Here you sit talking to me, but not with me. Oh, no. It’s not even about me. It’s about the mayor. You have some thing with the mayor and nothing else matters, and when you get around to going to bed with me, that will probably be from spite too.”
Quinn sat hunched with his arms on the table. Then he pushed away and picked up his glass. He kept looking at her when he tipped up the glass and let the ice cubes slide down so that they hit his teeth.
“You don’t have to look at me like that,” she said.
He put the glass down and lit a cigarette. I’ll give her this silence, he thought, so she’ll be as confused as I am.
“And now I’ll tell you why I like you when I do like you,” she said, but he could not let her finish. He did not want to hear what she had to say about liking.
He exhaled and said, “Are you drunk?”
“No.” She frowned, and he thought it could have been anger. “I’m not drunk,” she said, “but I think I’m going to be.”
“You’re sweet,” he said. “Oh, are you ever a sweet female.”
“Reserve judgment, Quinn. Wait till I’m drunk.”
He now found that everything went very much easier. It was now easy to show her his anger, though he had no idea what he was angry about. He made out it was she who caused the anger and that game was fine with her. It was fine with her because now she felt animated. She was not bored. She ordered another drink for him and for herself and tried to insult him by paying for them. He let her pay for them and so insulted her back.
“For a pushover,” he said, “you sure do all the most repulsive things.” The liquor was starting to scramble his thinking and he sat wondering what he had meant by the remark.
“But I’m no pushover,” she said. “For that you’d have to ask me to go to bed and then I’d have to say yes, just because you asked. None of that has happened, you know.”
“And it won’t either.”
“You are very drunk, Quinn, very drunk,” and she looked slightly past his left ear. Then she got up. “I’m going home,” she said.
“And you’re not going to ask me if I want to come?”
“No. You’re no pushover, Quinn. You’re a hard man of principles.” Then she laughed and walked away from the table.
He watched her walk away and how her hips moved under the dress. The dress made a fold over one hip and then over the other. Quinn suddenly felt he had never seen anything more exciting in all his life.
He sat and wondered if it was the liquor making him dull and stupid, letting her walk out this way, letting her hit him in the head with her lousy insults, swapping insults back and forth like two idiots. He sat a short while longer and enjoyed disliking her. Then he left.
When the servant showed him into the room she did not even look up. She sat on a very red couch in the sunlight, because she had opened the shutters. The sunlight made a glow in her hair, it caused round shadows under her chin and her breasts, and the brown liquor in her glass looked almost like gold. When the door closed behind Quinn he felt the heat in the room. She did nothing about it. This heat was just there.
“God,” he said, “you look sullen.”
“I’m getting drunk.”
He swore again, feeling stupid. A bottle of bourbon sat on the window sill and when he picked that up she nodded her head in the direction where he could find a glass. He poured straight liquor which felt warm. Then he walked around in the room.
“More small talk?” she said. “You working up to more small talk?”
“No,” he said. “It’s simple. I don’t want to be with you and not have you talk.” He took a gulp from his glass and felt the liquor make a hot pathway inside him.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Get nasty. I invite it. Always do.”
