Even then, at seven minutes of twelve, she might have missed him if it hadn’t been for a snarl in the sidewalk traffic caused by a lost and bewildered French poodle. In the small island of space made by veering pedestrians, Oliver appeared between the gilt-grilled doors of the gray marble lobby, halted briefly to cup his hands around a match and started up the block. Elizabeth watched him without feeling anything at all.
He was going to cross the street, he was hailing the cab at the comer. Elizabeth clasped her hands tightly together in her lap and made a decision she hadn’t consciously considered, perhaps because she hadn’t wanted to look closely at it. She leaned forward again to the driver. “Oh, we’ve missed each other. It’s that red and yellow cab up ahead. Driver. If you’ll follow that . . .”
“The one that fella just got in?” said the driver baldly.
“Yes.” She was stony with not caring. He had probably waited like this often, with women checking up on their husbands, men checking up on their wives. She hadn’t thought she could ever do that, but the odd part of it was that at the last minute everything whittled down to the simple necessity of knowing. What to do when you knew was something else again, and not even the most knowledgeable taxi driver could help you there. . . .
Oliver’s cab led them into a part of Boston Elizabeth didn’t know and wouldn’t have been able to find again. She had stared at the red and yellow fenders ahead so long that she had stopped seeing them, and she was startled when the driver said laconically, “There goes your friend,” and drew in to the curb.
She had had change ready; she dropped it into his outstretched palm and was out of the cab without ever having seen his face at all.
Nine
REVOLVING DOORS carried Oliver out of sight. With an instinctive caution she hadn’t known she possessed, Elizabeth waited until a balding mink-faced man in a trench coat had followed him before she walked up the three shallow steps and spun her way into the lobby of the Hotel Savoia.
She couldn’t have said exactly how the Savoia ticketed itself, but it did. It might have been the general amber gloom, lighted at cautious intervals by a pink silk lamp, or the lounging bellboy whose eyes roved over her with a kind of bored speculation; it might have been the blonde seated with improbable hauteur just beside the elevators or the slumbrous silence that pervaded the whole lobby. She had thought herself numb and too driven to care, but her instant and violent distaste was so strong that it was an effort to remember why she was here, and to find Oliver in the dimness.
To her right were a Western Union counter and a bookstall, directly opposite her, across an area of small couches and chairs with a few unwinking occupants, were the elevators and an alcove lined with public telephones. At the end of the lobby to her left, Oliver’s head and shoulders rose out of a giant rubber plant at the desk. Elizabeth advanced a little; he was talking to the room clerk, and then bending his head intently.
How had she ever thought this room was dim? It seemed suddenly floodlit, without shadow or shelter from the countless stares, sharp as drawn knives, that had found her face, slyly, without her knowing it. The woman in the bookstall, the clerk at the Western Union barrier, the lounging bellboy, the blonde beside the elevators, a spinsterish man on the nearest sofa—their eyes pinned her against a wall of light, dissecting, cataloguing. It was the old, old dream of suddenly discovering in the midst of the assembly hall that you had no clothes on, but it was not a dream. Briefly, Elizabeth hated Oliver for the mere fact of bringing her here.
In another instant she would have to bolt and run . . . shakily, she pushed back a glove and pretended an oblivious glance at her watch. She couldn’t read its face, but the small gesture shattered the spell. The male spinster began to tweak his nose nervously, the blonde readjusted her hemline, the woman in the bookstall turned her back—but in the interval Oliver had left the desk and was walking rapidly across the lobby toward the elevators.
She could still have escaped, she could have fled out into the winter sunlight, hoping to find a remnant of the pride she had had to shed at the door. But then she would have shed it for nothing. . . . No. Find out what there was to know, what there was to fight—or, indeed, if victory would be a little more intolerable than loss.
Elizabeth did what no power on earth could have forced her to do ten seconds ago: she walked briskly across the lobby, passing within two feet of Oliver and the group of people leaving the elevator, and stood in front of the telephone book on a chain in line with the elevators, so that his back was half turned to her. It crossed her mind wryly that it was helpful in situations like this to know your husband’s habits. Oliver would give his floor number as he entered the elevator . . . but would he, here?
“Six,” said Oliver, startlingly close by.
Six. No good at all, unless . . . The uniformed boy had stepped out of the elevator and was waiting for more passengers. A man and woman Elizabeth hadn’t seen before were crossing the lobby. The blonde stood up, gave her a curious glance and followed them into the elevator. The doors closed and they were gone.
