“Thanks,” she said from a husky throat, and followed him into the living room, grasping the box with the candlesticks in it so closely that the white tissue paper pulled apart under one of her thumbs. She looked about the room with quick scared eyes, her whole being prickling with the possibility of Laura’s presence.
“Sit down,” Jack said. He watched her with a mixture of amusement and curiosity that was friendly enough. Beth obeyed him, lowering herself halfway into her chair and suddenly remembering her gift.
“Oh, here,” she blurted, rising abruptly and thrusting it toward him “I—I brought you a little something. I remember Laura used to like crystal and cut glass, things like that.”
“Thanks,” he said, accepting it “Yes, she still does. Shall I keep it till she gets home? She ought to be the one to open it.”
“Isn’t she here?” Beth stared at him, still half out of her seat.
“If you froze that way,” he said with a grin, “you’d be a pretty unhappy girl.”
And she sat down suddenly, embarrassed.
“Yes, she’s out,” he went on. “I mean, no, she’s not at home.” He put the gift on the table in front of him and sat down opposite her in a leather chair, asking if she’d like a drink, how long she would be in New York, a dozen urbane civilities that they batted back and forth with a show of casualness. And all the while they studied each other surreptitiously, Jack with the bemused air of a man trying to place a face, and Beth with the intense interest of a rival.
“So you and Laura went to school together,” he said.
“Yes. Just for a year.” She thought she liked him, which was something she hadn’t planned on. He was ugly, in the nice sort of way that women like. There was a friendly intelligence in his face. And he was short. Beth guessed that he and Laura might be near the same height. Beth was taller than he, quite a bit taller in her high-heeled shoes. But he was quick and graceful and very much at ease, and it made her easier within herself, for which she was grateful. He went to a small built-in bar in a corner of the living room and fixed her a drink. It gave Beth a chance to look around. It was a spacious room, an unusually roomy apartment for midtown Manhattan.
He must be doing well to keep Laura like this, she thought.
“When do you think she’ll be in?” she asked in a voice loaded with careful disinterest.
“I don’t know. She’s out with a friend. They were going to a concert, so it could be rather late. If you’d told us you were coming…” He smiled and shrugged, handing her the scotch and water.
“Thanks. I guess it was silly not to. I wanted to surprise her.”
“Well, it sure as hell will surprise her if she hasn’t seen you in nine years. If you’d gotten here ten minutes earlier you would have caught her.”
“Probably just as well I didn’t. I might have ruined her evening.” She was thinking of the “friend” Laura went to the concert with, and Jack, though his eyes opened wider at this, pretended not to have heard.
“Where’s your daughter?” Beth asked suddenly. “I thought you had a daughter.”
“Really? What gave you that idea?” he asked with a little frown of curiosity visible between his eyes.
Beth cursed her own clumsiness silently. “I should have told you right away,” she stumbled. “I ran into a friend of Laura’s—oh, just by accident—or I never would have found you. She told me about—Betsy.”
“Oh. That explains it. I was about to ask how you found us.” He said it slowly and she knew he was amused but somehow she didn’t mind. She had the feeling he was being amiable because he liked her, not because it was his obligation to a guest. “Who was the friend?” he asked.
She didn’t want to throw it at him as if she had been down in the Village sleuthing and run into Beebo as a likely well of information—as if she and Beebo were in cahoots. But his smile broadened at her delay and she finally said, with a little sigh that meant she was surrendering all her subterfuges, “Beebo. Beebo Brinker. You know her pretty well, I guess.”
“Pretty well,” he said with the emphasis of understatement, and laughed outright. “Good old Beebo. How the hell did you find her? Well, I guess it’s not so hard at that,” he answered himself. “Anywhere south of Fourteenth Street you can’t miss her. Was she wearing her boots?”
“Her boots?”
“Yes. She wears them when she’s mad at the world. Makes her feel manly.” He said it without ill-will but full of old familiar affection.
“No boots,” Beth smiled. “But lots of advice. Lots of stories.”
“She must have been bowled over when she found out you knew Laura,” Jack said. “She’s still in love with her.”
A queer little flash of disappointment, almost alarm, went through Beth. “She recognized me,” she said. “I guess Laura told her quite a bit about me. Showed her some old snapshots, or something.”
“Then you must be Beth,” he said. “I thought so but I didn’t want to embarrass you…. Beth the Incorruptible.”
“What?” she exclaimed.
“That’s what I used to call you,” he said. “In the days when I couldn’t stand you. Purely sarcastic, you can be sure. But that was before I met you. Laura used to make you seem that way when she talked about you.”
Beth began to grin. Suddenly, strangely, she felt at ease. “You know, it’s the damnedest thing,” she told him. “I met her father in Chicago a couple of weeks ago, and he knew me right away. I met Beebo in a bar last night and she said, ‘My God, you’re Beth!’ And now you’ve got it figured out too. I feel like a celebrity.”
“Around here you were a celebrity, for quite a while,” he said. “We all had to learn to live with
