“Emmy, you’ve got it all backwards, you—” She broke off. “Let’s not talk about it. Let’s please not talk about it.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“Please, Emmy.” She restrained an impulse to grasp her shoulders and shake her into silence. She stood up abruptly, suddenly at the end of her endurance, and said, “I’m going up to the Union. I’ll see you later, Emmy.”
Emmy looked up, surprised and a little hurt. “I’ll come with you, Beth,” she offered.
“No, no. You—you stay here and finish your coffee.”
Emily watched Beth stumble out of the lounge and made up her mind that she would interfere. Laura’s crush would just have to give way to Beth’s love. There were no two ways about it.
Thirteen
Mitch was curious. He pestered Charlie for the facts, and Charlie’s evasions gave him the satisfaction of supposing the evening with Beth was a failure.
“How far did you get?” he asked.
Charlie sighed and looked up from his book. His temper was bad but he tried to hold it back. “I got nowhere, boy. 1 wasn’t trying to get anywhere.”
“Going to see her again?”
“Of course.”
“When?”
“I don’t know,” he said with martyred patience. And then to illustrate his irritation he added, “God damn it! Now will you shut up?”
Mitch complied, grinning comfortably. To see Charlie make a mistake with a woman was to see Romeo take a pratfall under the balcony.
“What are you grinning at?” said Charlie.
Mitch chuckled. “I didn’t know I was.”
“You were.”
“Oh, I’m just glad to know you’re fallible.”
Charlie plunged back into his book. He had been trying to reach Beth all day with no success. She wasn’t at home or she couldn’t be disturbed. They couldn’t say where she was or when she’d be back. Sorry. Call again. And he did, again and again, with always the same results and the same obvious reason for them: she didn’t want to talk to him.
It was incomprehensible. For a long while he imagined that he had done something wrong. But the harder he pursued the idea the less substance it had and finally he gave it up. Something else was bothering her. Maybe they had gone too fast. Maybe they both had wanted too much too soon. He hadn’t pushed it, he hadn’t insisted on anything. She’d wanted it as much as he did; it had happened naturally. He couldn’t accuse himself of anything there. The whole evening had seemed so right, so fair and lovely, and he wanted her again so much that it was impossible for him to admit that she didn’t want him just as much. He didn’t think she was a girl with a conventional conscience, but he was willing to admit that he might have been wrong there; she had certainly suffered enough over her past transgressions. What else could it be? He didn’t think she was seeing anyone else; she came with him voluntarily and never made an objection to him. The more he thought of it the more puzzled he was.
Charlie didn’t know he had an ally. Emily kept her peace as long as she could, but by the middle of exam week she couldn’t hold out any longer. She knew Charlie had been trying to see Beth on campus, at the Union, everywhere; that he had been calling every day and getting nowhere; that he was upset and getting mad. She got half of this from Bud, who saw Charlie almost every day, and the rest from watching and listening to Beth, and pretty soon her Samaritan instincts got the better of her. She called Charlie. Mitch took a message for her.
When Charlie got home he found the note under the corner of the phone. “Call Emily at 7-4006. She says you’ll understand. What’s the mystery?”
Charlie chucked his books on the sofa and picked up the phone, pulling off his jacket while it rang.
“Good afternoon, Alpha Beta,” said a bright young voice.
“Hello, is Emily there?”
“Just a moment, please.”
Charlie lighted a cigarette and waited, fidgeting.
Minutes later, Emmy said, “Hello?”
“Emmy?” he said eagerly.
“Oh, Charlie! I’m so glad you called. Listen, I’m going to be perfectly frank with you. I know you’ve been trying to reach Beth.” She hesitated.
“Yeah?” he said, urging her with his voice.
“Well, she wants to see you, Charlie. I know it. She won’t talk to you on account of Laura.”
“Laura? What the hell does Laura have to do with it?”
“Beth’s got it into her head that Laura’s still got a crush on you.”
Charlie was floored. “Emmy—my God—she never did! Our fathers were old buddies in college. I never would have met the girl if it hadn’t been for that. She doesn’t have a crush on me. She never did. What the hell!”
Emily was suddenly concerned. The words she phrased in such good faith seemed always to change character the moment they left her mouth. Not until she heard herself speak them did she understand them as other people did. She paused, trying to grasp the implications of the conversation. “Well,” she said, uncertainly, “Beth doesn’t know that, apparently. Anyway, Charlie, that’s not the point. The point is she wants to see you. She’s told me so. She’s miserable, and if you could just talk to her—”
“How? My God, I’ve been trying—”
“I know, but she won’t talk to you if she knows it’s you. Call her on her private phone. We have one in the room. She doesn’t know you have the number, so she’ll answer it. Once she hears your voice, Charlie, it’ll make all the difference, I know it.”
“When can I call?”
“Call her tonight about seven. She’ll be alone in the room then. Laura’s got a final at Greg Hall and I’ll just fade away.”
“Emmy, you’re a good girl.”
“Oh, she’d do it for me. I just hate to see you two in a mess because of a silly
