Gordon collapsed rather than sat down.
“Well?” His voice was plaintive.
“I had an extra job today. I had to go to Leafy Way and interview the Governor’s wife. I was late getting back.”
“I thought you’d given up reporting.”
“It was a special assignment.”
“You might have telephoned me.”
“I didn’t have much chance, really. I came here directly from Leafy Way. Only stopped a moment to drop Sam at the office.”
“Sam who?”
“Sam Bates, the photographer who went with me.”
Tash looked across the table and wondered for the hundredth time: How did I ever allow myself to drift into a relationship like this?
The most logical answer was the most humiliating: Gordon was the only game in town.
Tash was a realist. At twenty-five, she knew she had missed the young mating season. Most of the men she met now would be the proverbially very married or very promiscuous or very homosexual. Gordon was the only one she had met who had seemed to her truly uncommitted, as if he might be a male version of herself: lonely and a little shy about love-making.
Now it was beginning to dawn on her that, in addition to the married, the promiscuous, and the homosexual, there might be a fourth category: the neuter.
Ethologists had found individuals among birds and mammals in nature who abstained from courtship during the breeding season, though dissection did not reveal any anatomical difference between them and the others. Did something like that explain Gordon?
If love is “egoism for two,” her dalliance with Gordon was loneliness for two.
Suddenly, tonight, it seemed intolerable.
Why tonight?
Had it anything to do with that vision of two young men in tennis white, sauntering under trees, their heads dappled with sunlight?
How entirely different this evening would be if either Carlos de Miranda or Jeremy Playfair were sitting on the other side of the table.
Perhaps it was better to stay at home with a good book or a bad television show, than to go out in the evening with the Gordons of this world.
“I am hesitating between sweetbreads financière or duck à l’orange,” announced Gordon.
He was one of those people who can consume a vast amount of calories without gaining an ounce. She had scarcely noticed this before. Tonight, like everything else about him, it irritated her.
“I’ll have lamb chops and string beans, please.”
“Dieting again?”
“I have to, now I spend more time sitting a typewriter than riding or playing tennis.”
“I sit at a desk all day, but I do not have to diet.”
“Congratulations.”
“You are in a frightfully negative mood tonight.”
“Sorry.”
“What is the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
But she did know. She could have answered his question in one word: you.
Was it his job that made him what he was? Or had he sought the job because he was born that way? He was a civil servant hidden away in an arcane niche of the labyrinthine Department of Progress and Rehabilitation in nearby Washington. His job was his favorite subject of conversation.
“. . . and so I told him that eight copies are always made of every aide-mémoire in our section and one of those eight should always come to my desk as a matter of routine. He couldn’t answer that. He didn’t even try. So now I am biding my time. If I do not find a copy of the next aide-mémoire on my desk the day it is sent out, I shall take the law into my own hands and go over his head to the Deputy Assistant Secretary. It is a revolutionary thing to do, but what else can I do when a matter of principle is at stake? And—Tash! You’re not listening!”
“Oh, yes, I am. What happens to all these aides-mémoires in a year or so?”
“They are stored in a warehouse.”
“How long has your section been making eight copies of everything?”
“Since World War Two.”
“Must be a pretty big warehouse.”
She had hoped for a smile, but he answered seriously: “It is. Very big.”
Suddenly, she was thankful things had never gone further between them. He would be a sober, industrious lover. He would read all the sex manuals about “arousing” a woman and bring to love-making the same patience and calculation that he would bring to the coupling of two engines. It would not occur to him that to be joyous such things must be spontaneous and mutual as they are in nature.
Rain was falling when they reached the parking lot after dinner.
Tash looked across the open space to a shopping center where neon lights advertised a liquor store.
“I haven’t a drop of anything to drink. Let’s pick up something over there.”
“You needn’t bother for my sake,” said Gordon. “I’m just as happy without it.”
“Then I’ll bother for my sake,” said Tash. “I’m not just as happy without it.”
Gordon cast one longing look at his dry, warm car, then turned up his coat collar and plodded after her through the drizzle.
It was a self-service place, more like a supermarket than an old-fashioned wine merchant’s. Shelves along four aisles displayed row upon row of glittering bottles, each ticketed with its price.
Gordon stopped at the cashier’s desk to buy cigarettes, while Tash wandered down the first aisle looking for a bottle of Madeira, her favorite after-dinner drink.
“Please, ma’am, can y’all tell me if this here is the cheapest sherry wine?”
It was the soft speech of the rural, western counties.
She turned her head and saw at her right elbow a frail boy with hair like thistledown floating around a delicate face. Pale eyes, half-closed, blurred, blind-looking. An elfin smile. He might have been a fallen angel who could still remember Paradise.
“Aren’t you a little young to be buying wine?”
“I’m older than I look.”
“These California sherries are the cheapest. This one is sweet and this one dry. Less sweet.”
“Thank ya, ma’am.” He didn’t even bother to look at the sherry. He was edging away.
“These are from New York state, and—”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He was still edging away. Didn’t he want to buy? Was the price too steep?
She reached for a bottle of rainwater
