None of San Francisco’s flavor reached Celia at all. Except as it might affect her own goals, she was peculiarly insensitive to physical atmosphere; it was as though a very shallow vessel had been filled to the brim by one moment of total awareness on a long-ago Christmas Eve at the Vestrys’. She did notice the fogs, because they were a nuisance to her hair, but open water was no novelty to her, the Golden Gate bridge was only a long link between two points, and an overfamiliarity with the preparation of it had bored her with food. All this conveyed an effect of not being easily impressed, and Jules Wain was mildly intrigued by it.
He asked on the first evening when he took her to dinner alone, “Do you find that you miss New York at all?”
Without appearing to, Celia had been studying the restaurant—old, French, apparently famous—and registering in her tireless way that there was evidently a point at which blazing chandeliers and bare marble-topped tables became smarter than low lights and heavy damask. She said with a deliberating air, “Not really. Of course, under the circumstances . . .”
An expression of acute embarrassment quite alien to it appeared on Wain’s formidable brown face. “Good Lord, what a stupid question. You look so distracting that I’d forgotten.”
Celia gave him a tranquil, understanding smile. Realizing that she would have to produce some reason for arriving on the San Francisco scene, where no friends or relatives awaited her, she had let it be known that a very dear friend of hers, in fact a girl with whom for a time she had shared her New York apartment, had committed suicide, and she had simply wanted to get as far away as possible from painful associations. (Very sensible, said her perspicacious new friends. The best thing to do about such a dreadful experience was to make a clean cut.)
She knew that she was looking extremely well this evening, in polished, scoop-necked ivory satin and the topaz earrings which had become a kind of good-luck charm. The tutelage of Mrs. Pond and Blanca Devlin, plus her own observation, had brought home to her that either stark black or white turned her skin muddy and most blues made it sallow; she was at her best in varying creams or cinnamons or clear deep reds.
But she also knew that a flicker of interested sympathy could settle all too easily into a pall of boredom. She said, lifting her newly arrived daiquiri in answer to Wain’s gesture with his Scotch, “I’m afraid I find myself forgetting too. Is that awful of me, or is it just San Francisco?” and he assured her predictably that it did not do to live in the past.
The ordering of dinner, and the careful surveying of it when it arrived, was a protracted and fussy affair in which Celia, far from being amused or annoyed, bathed contentedly. This epitomized what she had striven for: the waiter answering the catechism about the pompano as though the fate of nations were at stake, the precise instructions about the salad dressing. The wine, surprisingly, was presented with smiling confidence and received in kind. Jules Wain was clearly a familiar and valued patron.
They had arrived at coffee when the voice of a woman at the next table struck as sharply at Celia’s consciousness as a phrase of English dropped suddenly into a jumble of foreign language. “. . . stepped on a skateboard, of all things, but of course being Alec he told everybody he broke it skiing.”
There was a little burst of derisive laughter. Celia stared down at her coffee, concentrating fiercely on something at once elusive and beckoning, like the fluttering tag end of a dream. A skateboard, narrowly avoided by her own foot . . . yes, in the narrow dark hall outside the apartment in Bridgeport, although it hadn’t been there when she arrived. So a child, or a child plus an older custodian, had come while she was telling that tale to wide-eyed Lena. With terrible faithfulness, Celia’s ear now recorded, instead of the restaurant hum, an odd and furtive sound and then Lena’s voice saying, “Don’t worry, it’s only a rat.”
Such an urgent warning to secrecy would automatically seem to be worth something in Grand Street, so that if someone (someone who had read the address on a Christmas card envelope) had paid an enquiring visit, the child or its companion, possibly hidden that day behind a crack in a peeling door, might very well pursue the visitor out to the street, say slyly, “Were you looking for a lady called Celia? With blonde hair?”
What else had that horribly freshening conversation contained, toward the end? Lena: “Where will you go?” Celia, not meaning it in the least, then, but wanting to put herself an imaginary continent’s length away: “California.”
It was frightening, even all this safe time later, to realize that she had in effect locked a door and left a window wide open. Celia moved her shoulders in a quick tense shudder, and Jules Wain said solicitously, “Chilly?” She shook her head, smiling, secure again, and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Someone has a friend who stepped on a skateboard. Doesn’t that sound painful?”
She went to bed that night with a pleasure that bordered cautiously on triumph. She congratulated herself on her intuitive feeling that Jules Wain was basically very conventional and had been reassured rather than otherwise when he was not asked in for a drink at close to midnight. He had held her one hand in both of his, lightly but possessively, as he said, “I’m leaving for New York Sunday night. I’ll be gone two weeks, so I’d like to call you before then if I may.”
“Please do,” said Celia with warmth but no alarming eagerness. She knew that the background of the foyer became her so well that it gave the impression of having been done in detail by her own hand, and that the faint appreciative tip of
