'And very interesting, too,' he said, his voice light. 'Maybe you should write a book, Lilly.'
'Maybe you should write one,' Lilly said. 'Carol Roberg would make a good chapter.'
Roy came stiffly to his feet. He nodded coldly, picked up his hat and started toward the door; then paused with a gesture of appeal. 'Lilly,' he said, 'just what are you driving at, anyway? What more can I do about Carol than I've already done?'
'You're asking me,' Lilly said bitterly. 'You've actually got the guts to stand there and ask me what you should do!'
'But-you're suggesting that I should marry her? Ask her to marry me? Oh, now, come off of it! What kind of break would that be for her?'
'Oh, God! God, God, God,' Lilly moaned.
Coloring, Roy slammed on his hat. 'I'm sorry I'm such a big disappointment to you. I'm going now.'
Lilly looked at him, as he still hesitated, and remarked that she hadn't noticed. 'That's the second time you've fooled me tonight,' she said. 'Now you see him and now you see him, and when he goes nobody knows.'
He left abruptly.
Striding down the corridor, his steps slowed and he paused; teetered on the point of turning back. At about the same instant, Lilly jumped up from her chair, started toward the door, and herself paused in teetering indecision.
They were so much alke, so much a part of one another. They were that close-for a moment.
The moment passed; a moment before murder. Then, flouting instinct, each made his decision. Each, as he always had, went his own way.
15
Roy had his delayed dinner in a downtown restaurant. He ate hungrily, telling himself, and doubtless meaning it, that it was good to be eating in a restaurant. It was what he was used to. The subtle sameness of the food, whatever the restaurant, had a reassuring quality about it, not unlike a mother's milk to a child. In its familiar and dependable nurture, it bolstered one's believe-or-perish credo that the more things changed the more they remained the same.
Similarly, it was good to be back in his own hotel bed. For here also would be his own bed wherever it was; standardized, always ready and waiting for him, simultaneously providing the pleasurable perquisites of permanence and impermanence. Perhaps, in his dreams, Carol briefly shared the bed with him, and he winced, almost crying out. But there were entirely amenable wraiths, also comfortably standardized, who came quickly to the rescue. They asked no more of him than he did of them, a sensual but immaculate penetration which achieved its end without mental or moral involvement. One bathed quickly or lingeringly, sans the danger of nearing the water.
So, all in all, Roy Dillon slept well that night.
Awakening early, he lay for a while in the presumable posture of all men awakening. Hands locked under his head, eyes gazing absently at the ceiling, letting his mind roam. Then, with a brisk abandonment of bed, he washed, dressed, and left the hotel.
He ate breakfast. He visited a barber shop, indulged himself in 'the works' and went back to his two-room suite. After bathing, he put on completely fresh clothes, hat and shoes included, and again left the hotel.
He got his car from its parking lot, and turned it out into the traffic.
At first he felt a little awkward, nervous, after his prolonged absence from driving. But that passed quickly. In a few blocks he was himself again, moving the car along with automatic ease, driving with the same unthinking skill that a stenographer applies to a typewriter. He was part of this river of cars, aiding its sluggish tide and in turn aided by it. Without losing his identity, free to turn out of the tide when he chose, he still belonged to something.
Like many business establishments that had once been a traditional integrand of the downtown's whole, the jobbing house of Sarber & Webb was now set down in a quasi-residential district; commodiously released, for a restless hiatus, from the sprawling giant which would inevitably surround it again. The firm was housed in a roomy sandstone-and-brick building, a lofty one-story high for perhaps threefourths of its area. At the rear it jutted up to a storyand-a-half, thus accommodating the company offices.
Roy put his car on the private lot at the side of the building. Whistling absently, his eyes approving as he surveyed the familiar scene around him, he took his briefcase from the car.
Someone else was looking them over too, he saw, but without his own casualness. A young man- well, perhaps he wasn't quite so young-in shirtsleeves but wearing a vest. A clerk in appearance, he stood well back on the wide sidewalk bordering the building, looking critically up and down and around, and occasionally jotting into a small notebook.
He turned and watched as Roy approached, his gaze uncompromising at first, incipiently disapproving. Then, as Roy came on, unflinching, and grinned and nodded, 'Hi,' the gaze registered a little warmth, and its proprietor nodded in return.
'Hi,' he said, almost as though the word embarrassed him.
Roy passed on, grinning, mentally shaking his head.
A long, broad service counter stretched along the interior front of the building, breached at one end by a wicket. Behind it, racks of stock-shelves ranged rearward, bulging neatly with the thousand-odd items which were wholesaled by Sarber & Webb, and forming a half- dozen parallel aisles.
It was early, and he was the only salesmancustomer in the place. Usually at this hour, most of the clerks were either having coffee across the street or propped up along the counter in clusters, smoking and talking until they could resign themselves to the day. But there was no such homey nonsense this morning.
Everyone was present, without a cigarette or coffee carton in sight. The aisles hummed with activity: the pulling of orders, inventorying, restocking, dusting, and rearranging. Everyone was busy, or-much harder-pretending to be busy.
Through the years, he had become friendly with all of them, and all came forward for a handshake and a word of congratulation on his recovery. But they wasted no time about it. Puzzled, Roy turned to the clerk who was opening a catalogue for him.
'What's hit this place?' he asked. 'I haven't seen anyone as busy since the joint caught fire.'
'Kaggs hit it, that's what!'
'Kaggs? Is that anything like the galloping crud?'
The clerk laughed grimly. 'You can say that again! Brother,' he brushed imaginary sweat from his brow. 'If that son-of-a-bitch stays around much longer-!'
Kaggs, he elaborated, was one of the home-office big shots, a seeming mixture of comptroller, troubleshooter, and efficiency expert. 'Came out here right after you went into the hospital-one of those college punks, he looks like. And he ain't had a kind word for anyone. Ain't no one knows anything but him, and everyone's either a dope-off or a bum. Now, you know that's not so, Roy. You won't find a harder- workin', more efficient group of boys anywhere than we got right here!'
'That's right,' Roy nodded agreeably, although it was very far from right. 'Maybe he'll run me off, d'you suppose?'
'I was going to tell you. He
As Roy had suspected, Kaggs was the criticallooking young man he had seen outside the building. A split second after the clerk had spoken, he was upon them, shooting out his hand like a weapon.
