Laura slumped to the floor, her arms over her head, and sobbed helplessly.
Marcie knelt beside her, profoundly afraid and ashamed. “Laura,” she said, “Do whatever you want with me. I’ve hurt you so terribly. Hurt me back if it’ll help. Do something. Do anything. I can’t stand to see you like this. Oh, Laura, Laura. Please don’t cry like that. Please.”
Chapter Fourteen
In the morning—the bleak morning that came in spite of everything and had to be faced—she could hardly look at Marcie. And Marcie, brimming with shame and pity, avoided her, breaking softly into tears from time to time.
At breakfast Marcie said, “Laur, if you think you can bear to live with me I don’t want you to move out. Nothing was your fault, nothing.”
“I couldn’t stand it, Marcie,” Laura said hoarsely without looking at her. “Neither could you.” She got up abruptly and left the table without having eaten a thing.
Marcie got up and followed her. “I wish we could still be friends, Laur.”
“We never were.”
“Oh, but we were. I like you so much, Laura.”
“Marcie, this is unbearable. Don’t talk to me. Please don’t.”
“But I can’t just leave things like this, it’s too awful.”
“I can’t help it.”
“Laura, I’ll never get over this. I’ll never forgive myself. I hurt you so.”
“Marcie, stop it!” She almost screamed at her. “I was a fool, a blind fool. I wouldn’t listen.” She was thinking of all the warnings from Jack and Beebo that she willfully ignored. But she caught herself and spared Jack another betrayal. That, at least, was something Marcie didn’t know and never would. “Never mind,” she finished. “Just drop it.” She turned away and busied herself, but Marcie wouldn’t let her go.
“You will come back tonight, won’t you, Laura? You’ll stay here until you find another place? I’ll be sick if you don’t. This is your apartment as much as it is mine. I’ll move out if you’d rather. You know that, don’t you, Laur?” She was so anxious, so eager for conciliation, so disgusted with what she had done, that Laura felt a momentary relenting and looked shyly at her. “Please come back tonight,” Marcie whispered. “I’ll worry myself sick if you don’t. Please. Promise?”
Laura shut her eyes for a moment and tried to control her voice. She hadn’t the courage to argue. She just said, “Yes,” and grabbed her purse and rushed out.
Laura knew, even before she reached the subway, that she wasn’t going to work that day. She knew it would be impossible for her to read, to type, to look up words, to answer the doctors, to joke with Sarah. It would be a nightmare of hypocrisy, utterly beyond her strength.
She felt shattered, ready to scream if anyone touched her, like someone with an open wound. But she held herself tightly in check. She rode aimlessly on the subway for an hour or two. She stood in bookshops with a volume in her hands and stared at the pages until the clerks, in turn, stared at her. She sat on benches in Central Park. She stopped now and then to get a cup of coffee, and late in the day, a sandwich. It enabled her to keep walking. She walked, looking at nothing but the pavement ahead of her, for a couple of hours. She paid no attention to where she was going or why. She walked to exhaust herself, to reach that country of fatigue where even the mind cannot operate and the emotions are dead.
Abruptly she found herself standing outside the McAlton in the last hour of daylight. She was not strong enough to feel surprise. On the contrary, it was as if she had been working toward it, all through that empty endless day, knowing she would end up here. And knowing, she had not needed to think of it, to make a decision. It was unavoidable.
She stood outside the main door to the lobby, looking at the people hurrying past and hoping somebody would come up to her, talk to her, even make advances to her. Anything to postpone what she knew was coming. She looked at the door and away again, and then back to it, as if it were a great sinister magnet. Sooner or later she knew she would walk through it.
She stood leaning against the gray stone of the McAlton, her fine face pale and vacant, her body apparently relaxed. She looked like a tired young career girl, waiting at the appointed place for a date. She knew it and took advantage of it. The hotel doorman strolled to her and said, “Lovely evening, isn’t it?” And later, “Looks like he’s a bit late, Miss.” With a little smile.
Laura returned the smile faintly. She tried to engage him in conversation, but he was called away frequently, and finally, with the evening crowd converging on him, got too busy to talk to her at all. The night was violet now, turning fast to black. It was eight o’clock.
Laura turned to the door and walked through it almost automatically. Once inside she was suddenly profoundly afraid. Flashes of fear went through her; long sweeps of tremors and gooseflesh. She didn’t bother with the desk this time. She knew what floor he was on. She got the elevator and said, “Fourteenth floor, please.” She wondered if her voice sounded as shaky as it felt in her throat. She thought of simply getting off the elevator on the fourteenth floor and taking another elevator right back down. And when she was let off, she stood there in the deep carpeted hall with her heart crying “No-no, no-no, no-no,” at every beat.
“He’s my father,” she told herself. “He won’t kill me, after all. He might beat me, but he’s done that before and I’ve lived through it. I’ll be twenty-one in three weeks, so he can’t say I’m a minor. All he
