“Well, now,” said the woman, “Everybody’s a stranger when you look at it that way. But everybody got a chance to find a little love. That’s the most important thing. When you got a little love, the rest don’t seem so strange or sad no more. There now, honey, there now.”
Laura suddenly shied away from her. “Don’t call me honey!” she said, her face twisted with misery.
The Negro woman let her go, shaking her head. “You pretty sick, girl,” she said. “You need a doctor, and that’s the truth.”
Laura turned and walked out of the rest room on shaking legs. Outside she looked warily up and down the waiting platform. Only a handful of people were there. A train had gone through just after she entered the rest room and had taken most of the crowd with it. She waited in silence for the next train.
The woman came out of the rest room after Laura. She stood some distance from her, staring at her with a mixture of distrust and pity, until the train arrived and the crowd separated them.
Laura came home too exhausted to talk about it, to be embarrassed with Marcie about the fight with Burr. She was so full of her experience, so absorbed in her father, that nobody else seemed real. She almost fell into her bed, with hardly a word to Marcie, and lay there wrapped up in herself, crying quietly for a long time.
Things were no better in the morning. Somehow the enormity of Burr’s accusation hung between them like a curtain. They could look at each other only furtively; they couldn’t speak. They were embarrassed, a little afraid of each other, and it made them overly polite. All they said was, “Excuse me,” “Pass the cream, please,” “I’m sorry.” Laura had the additional burden of her terrible flight from her father to keep her both silent and preoccupied.
She was unable to figure it out. She knew she didn’t want to talk to him, to show him any forgiveness at all, to satisfy his curiosity about her—if he had any. She only wanted a glimpse of him; she wanted to reassure herself that he was still in New York, even though she knew he was. And she knew he might see her if she hung around his hotel. And she was ashamed that he should see her and know how important he was to her, even after his cruel denial of her. All these things were plain to Laura and yet when she looked back on the night before it seemed incredible. Especially her own terror.
They parted for work without more than a perfunctory good-bye. Laura knew it was going to be a rough day. She had had almost no sleep. And for the first time since she took the job she didn’t even give a damn what happened. She was too engrossed in herself and the urgent unnamable feelings that plagued her. Not even the head start she had given herself the night before encouraged her. It only reminded her of Burr and the ugly quarrel they had had. The thought of her father, which usually spurred her on, even on the darkest days, now filled her with a shaky apprehension and so engaged her mind that it was hard for her to think about anything else.
Bombshells fell around her all day. Marcie called in tears at ten to say she couldn’t stand it any longer and wouldn’t Laura forgive her. And Laura was forced to take time out, while Dr. Hagstrom was in the room, to reassure her. Marcie wouldn’t be put off; there was no help for it.
Sarah reminded her that they were all going out for dinner that night. They had arranged to meet Jack and Carl Jensen at a small bar a couple of blocks away for cocktails and to go on from there. It wasn’t until Sarah mentioned it that Laura even remembered it, and then she was dismayed.
Just before lunch, Jack called.
“Laura,” he said firmly, “what the hell are you trying to do to me?”
“Nothing. What’s the matter, Jack, can’t you make it tonight?”
“Tonight be damned. I’m liable to get skinned alive. Right now.”
“Did something go wrong with Terry?” Laura was startled into attention.
He paused a minute before answering, taken aback to hear his lover mentioned right out on the phone. “No,” he said. “I spoil him rotten, but that’s nothing new. Guess again.”
“Well, Jack, I don’t have time for guessing games, we’re—”
“I know, you’re behind. Burr told me you stayed late last night to catch up.”
“Burr told you? Oh!” Suddenly she remembered. “What’s the matter with me?”
“You tell me. I’d like to know. Burr was real sweet. He told me I was a lousy bastard and no friend of his, and I could take my psychoanalysis and cram it. Oh, he told me some very interesting things. He told me you’re queer and you’re perverting Marcie, and you two are lovers, and Marcie sicked the cops on him last night, and God knows what else. Would you care to explain to me what the hell is going on? Just so I won’t put my foot in my mouth? You know how it is.” There was no forgiveness in his bitter humor and it made her miserable.
“Jack, I’m so terribly sorry,” she said. “I blurted out something about the way you felt about Burr and Marcie. I was trying to calm him down. I should have known better. He was out of his mind.”
“Since when are you and Marcie lovers?”
“We’re not! I would have told you, you know that.” She glanced surreptitiously across the office at Sarah, but Sarah had her eyes on her work. “Burr got it into his head we were because Marcie talked about me so much. Because she stayed home and wouldn’t go out with him. When he accused her, it made her so mad she just told him,
