Robert had hoped for a letter Saturday from Nickie or from her lawyer, but nothing at all came Saturday. He took his shirts and sheets to the laundry, picked up a suit at the cleaner's, sat in the antiquated Langley library reading for an hour or so, and walked back to his apartment with a novel of John O'Hara's and a biography of Franz Schubert, whom for some odd reason he had been thinking about that morning. From two until after four, he drew Collembola, members of the springtail family. One of Professor Gumbolowski's sketches of Collembola protura was quite entertaining, no doubt unintentionally. The two front legs of the insect were drawn up in the manner of a dancing bullfighter about to plunge his banderillas into a bull. Robert amused himself by making a separate drawing on a postcard of the protura with bullfighting knee pants on its stocky legs, a triangular cap, and gaily tasseled darts in its hands. He sent it off to Edna and Peter Campbell with a note: "Making fine progress! Love to you both, Bob."
What he wanted to do was drive by the girl's house again. He had not been to her house in six days now, and Wednesday last, or maybe it was Tuesday, when he had resisted an impulse to go, he had sworn he wouldn't go again. It was a perilous thing to do. God, if Nickie ever found out! How she'd laugh and shriek and jeer! He felt he should thank his luck he hadn't been discovered so far, and that he should quit it. Yet it affected him exactly in the way liquor did alcoholics, he thought, people who swore off and went back to the bottle. Maybe it was because nothing else filled his life, there was nothing attractive around him now except the girl called Thierolf. That was what people said about alcoholics, that they had nothing more interesting to fill their lives with, so they drank. What he felt, slowly walking his room at six-ten of a Saturday evening, was temptation. It wasn't impossible for him to resist it, he assured himself. Go to a rotten movie, if necessary. Or be stronger, have some dinner somewhere, then come back and read this evening. Write the Campbells a letter and ask them to come down some weekend. He couldn't put them up, but the Putnam Inn wasn't a bad little hotel. Get the girl out of your mind. Crazy things like spying on a girl in her house couldn't be considered conducive to an orderly life. Or to mental health. Robert laughed a little. It was going against doctor's orders.
Now it was dark. Six-eighteen. He turned on his radio for some news.
He sat on his couch half listening to the abbreviated news items and debating whether to go again tonight or not. For the last time. Maybe she wouldn't be there, since it was Saturday evening. Robert was aware that part of his brain was arguing like a suddenly eloquent orator who had jumped to his feet after being silent a long while: "What's the matter with going one more time? You haven't been caught up to now. What's so serious if she does see you? You don't look like a psychopath." (Second voice: "Do psychopaths necessarily look like psychopaths? Certainly not.") "Anyway, you don't care if you're caught or seen. What've you got to lose? Isn't that what you're always saying?" The orator sat down. No, that wasn't what he was always saying, and he would care if he were seen by the girl. And yet to stay home that evening seemed like death, a slow and quiet death, and to see the girl again was life. And which side are you on, Robert Forester? And why was it so hard to live?
Off a main road out of Langley, he took a two-lane, badly paved road which was a shortcut to Humbert Corners. There was not a single street light along the road, and since the few private houses he passed were set far back, it seemed that he drove himself through a world of solid night. He went at a speed below thirty-five miles per hour, as he had constantly to avoid potholes. At Humbert Corners, he made a jog, turning right at the bank building with its red-and-blue mailbox on the corner, continuing on up a hill so steep he had to shift to second gear. At last came the dark house with white shutters on the left, which meant that the lane where he always left his car was three-tenths of a mile farther. He slowed and dimmed his lights, until he was driving by parking lights alone. He pulled some thirty feet into the lane, stopped and got out, then reached in the door pocket of his car for his flashlight. He used the flashlight at intervals on the road, mainly to see where to step out of the way of a passing car, though few cars had ever passed when he had been here.
There was a light at the front side window, the living-room window, and one at the back, in the kitchen. Robert walked slowly, thinking even now that he could turn back, and knowing he would go on. Faintly, he heard classical music from the house-not Schubert, which had first come to his mind. He thought it was a symphony of Schumann's. He went quickly past the glow of the living-room window, went round the basketball goal, then toward the small trees behind the house. He had hardly reached the trees when the kitchen door opened and steps sounded on the wooden porch. The girl's steps, he was sure of that. She turned in the direction of the basketball board. She was carrying a big basket. A white muffler blew out behind her in the wind. She set the basket down, and he realized she was going to burn trash in the wire basket that was slightly behind and to the left of the driveway. In the wind, it took her a minute or so to make the paper catch. Then the flame was going, lighting up her face. She was facing him, staring down at the fire. Perhaps thirty feet separated them. She took the basket and emptied the rest of it onto the fire, and the flame went so high she had to step back. Still, she stared at the fire with the absent fascination he had seen on her face many times when she paused in something she was doing in the kitchen.
Then suddenly she lifted her eyes and she was looking directly at him. Her lips parted and she dropped the basket. She stood rigid.
In an involuntary gesture of surrender and apology, Robert opened his arms. "Good evening," he said.
The girl gasped and seemed on the brink of running, though she did not move.
Robert took one step toward her. "My name is Robert Forester," he said automatically and clearly.
"What're you doing here?"
Robert was silent, motionless also, one foot advanced for a step he did not dare to take.
"Are you a neighbor?"
"Not exactly. I live in Langley." Robert felt he had to throw himself at her mercy, and if he found none, then that was that. "I didn't mean to frighten you," Robert said, still holding his arms a little out from his sides. "Would you like to go into your house?"
But the girl didn't move. She seemed to be trying to fix his face in her memory, but the fire had died down now. The darkness was thickening between them. And Robert no longer stood in the light of the kitchen window.
"Just stand there," she said.
"All right."
She walked slowly, leaving her basket, watching him all the while. And Robert, so that she could keep him in view, moved forward so that he passed the corner of the house. The girl stood on the little porch with her hand on the knob of her door.
"Your name is what?"
"Robert Forester. I suppose you're going to call the police."
She bit her underlip, then said, "You've been here before, haven't you?"
"Yes."
The doorknob squeaked in her hand, but she did not open the door.
"I suppose you want to call the police. Go ahead and call them. I'll wait." He moved so that he was in the faint light that came from the kitchen's side window, and he looked calmly at the girl. It was all fitting, he thought-letting himself be seen on a night when he had sworn not to come, standing in a fire's glow when he might easily have stepped back in the dark at the other side of the house, then promising the girl he'd wait for the police.
"I don't want to call the police," she said softly and earnestly, in a way he had seen her but never heard her talk, "but I don't want a prowler around my house. If I could be sure you'd never bother me again-"
Robert smiled a little. "You can be sure." He was glad to be able to promise her something. "I'm very sorry that I've frightened you before. Very sorry. I-" His unplanned words came to a halt.
The girl shivered in the cold. She did not take her eyes from his face, but now her eyes did not look frightened, only intense and puzzled. "What were you going to say?"
"I would like to apologize. I liked-I liked to watch you in the kitchen. Cooking. Hanging curtains. I'm not trying to explain. I can't. But I don't want you to be afraid. I'm not a criminal. I was lonely and depressed and I watched a girl in a kitchen. Do you see?" In her silence, he felt she didn't see, couldn't. And who could? His teeth chattered. His body felt cool from sweat. "I don't expect you to understand that. I don't expect you to excuse it. I simply want to try to explain and I can't. I'm sure I can't, because I don't know the real reason myself. Not the real reason." He moistened his cold lips. The girl would scorn him now. He could never think of her again without also thinking of the fact she knew him and despised him. "Perhaps you should go in. It's so cold."
"It's snowing," said the girl in a surprised tone.
Robert turned his head quickly toward the driveway, saw that little flakes were coming down, then a smile pulled at his mouth. The snow seemed absurd, and to mention it now, more absurd. "Good night, Miss Thierolf. Goodbye."
"Wait."
He turned around.
She was standing facing him, her hand no longer on the doorknob. "If you're depressed-I don't think you should be more depressed because of-because I-"
He understood. "Thank you."
"Depressions can be awful. They're like a disease. They can make people go out of their minds."
He didn't know what to say to that.
"I hope you don't get too depressed," she added.
"I hope you're never depressed," he said as if he were making a wish. An unnecessary wish, he thought.
"Oh, I have been. Three years ago. But not lately, thank goodness."
The slow, emphatic way she said the last words made him feel less tense. She had said them in a tone she might have used to someone she had known a long while. He did not want to leave her.
"Would you like to come in?" she asked. She opened the door, went in, and held the door for him.
He went toward her, too stunned for the moment to do anything else. He walked into the kitchen.
She took off her coat and the white muffler and hung them in a small closet by the door, glancing at him over her shoulder as if she were still a bit afraid.
He was standing in the middle of the floor.
"I just thought it was silly, if we were talking, to stand out in the cold," she said.
He nodded. "Thank you."
"Do you want to take off your coat? Would you like some coffee? I just made this."
He took off his overcoat, folded it inside out, and laid it across the back of a straight chair by the door. "Thank you very much, but I've stopped drinking coffee. It's apt to keep me awake." He stared at her in an unbelieving way, at her soft hair so close to him now, only six feet away, at her gray eyes-they had flecks of blue in them. Here, so near he could touch them, were the white curtains he had seen her put up, the oven door he had seen her so often bend to open. And something else struck him: his pleasure or satisfaction in seeing her more closely now was no greater than when he had looked at her through the window, and he foresaw that getting to know her even slightly would be to diminish her and what she stood for to him-happiness and calmness and the absence of any kind of strain.
She was heating the glass percolator of coffee. As she watched it, she turned her head to look at him two or three times. "I suppose you think I'm insane, asking you to come in," she said, "but after a couple of minutes, I wasn't afraid of you at all. Are you from around here?"
"I'm from New York."
"Really? I'm from Scranton. I've only been up here four months." She poured a cup of coffee.
And what brought you, he started to say. But he didn't even care to know. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes. "May I?"
"Oh, of cour-rse." She shook her head at his offer of a cigarette. "Do you have a job in Langley?"
"Yes. I work at Langley Aeronautics. For the last three months. I live at the Camelot Apartments."
"Why'd you leave New York? I should think-"
"I wanted a change. A change of scene."
"That's my only reason, too. I was earning more in Scranton. Everyone thought I was crazy leaving my job, but I was living at home and I thought I was getting pretty o-old for that," she said with a shy smile.
He was surprised, surprised to silence by her na?veté. When she drawled certain words, it was not for effect, but rather the way a child might drawl words, by accident or from habit. She must be in her early twenties, he thought, but she was like a girl much younger, an adolescent.
She carried her coffee to the gate-leg table and set it on a dark-blue place mat. "Here's an ashtray," she said, pushing one on the table a couple of inches toward him. "Don't you want to sit down?"
"Thank you." He sat down in the straight chair opposite her. Immediately, he wanted to get up again, to leave. He was ashamed, and he did not want the girl to see his shame. As soon as he finished the cigarette, he thought, he would go. He looked at her long, relaxed hand gently stirring her coffee with a teaspoon.
"Do you believe in strange encounters?"
He looked at her face. "What do you mean?"
"I mean-accidents, I guess. Like my meeting you tonight. They're in all great books. Well, not all, I suppose, but a lot of them. People who meet by accident are destined to meet. It's so much more important than being introduced to someone, because that's just a matter of someone else knowing them already and introducing you to them. I met Greg-he's my fiancé-through Rita, at the bank where I work, but some of my closest friends I've met by accident." She spoke slowly and steadily.
"You mean-you believe in fate."
"Of course. And people represent things." Her eyes looked distant and sad.
"Yes," he agreed vaguely, thinking that she had certainly represented something to him before he ever spoke to her. But now? She did not seem to have the wisdom, the common sense, perhaps, that he had attributed to her when he watched her through the window. "And what do I represent to you?"
"I don't know yet. But something. I'll know soon. Maybe tomorrow or the next day." She lifted her coffee cup at last and sipped. "The time I was depressed, there was a stranger in the house, a friend of my father's staying with us a few days. I didn't like him, and I felt he represented death. Then a week after he left, my little brother came down with spinal meningitis and then he died."
Robert stared at her, shocked to silence. Death was the last thing he'd expected her to talk of. And her words reminded him of his own dream, his damned recurrent dream.
"What do I represent to you?" she asked.
He cleared his throat, embarrassed. "A girl with a home, a job-a fiancé. A girl who's happy and content."
She laughed, a slow, soft laugh. "I've never thought of myself as content."
"People never do, I suppose. It's just the way you looked to me. I was feeling low and you looked happy to me. That's why I liked to look at you." He did not feel he had to apologize or be ashamed of that any more. She wasn't the kind of girl who'd assume he had been watching her undress. She seemed too innocent for that.
"What were you depressed about?" she asked.
"Oh, nothing that I can talk about." He frowned. "None of this makes any sense unless I say that life is meaningless unless you're living it for some other person. I was living for you since September-even though I didn't know you." He scowled at the table, feeling he had just delivered a minor Gettysburg Address. The girl was going to laugh, ignore it, or just say, "Um-hm."
She sighed. "I know what you mean. I really do."
He looked up from the table, solemn-faced. "You work at Humbert Corners?"
"Yes, in the bank there. I'm a teller and I also help out with the bookkeeping, because I was trained for it in college. I majored in sociology, but I never finished college. I suppose I'll be one of those people who raise a family and then go back to school and finish."
She was probably a bit lazy, he thought, very easygoing and lazy. "You're going to be married soon?"
"Um-hm, in the spring. Greg wants it sooner, but after all, we've hardly known each other four months. His name is Greg Wyncoop. He sells pharmaceuticals."
Robert felt suddenly uncomfortable. "You're going to see him tonight?"
"No, he's on the road tonight. He's coming back tomorrow." She accepted absently the cigarette he offered, took his light as if she were unused to smoking.
"You're very much in love with him?" He wanted her to be.
"I think so," she answered earnestly. "No wild excitement like-Well, there was a fellow in Scranton I liked better, two years ago, but he married someone else. Greg's a marvelous fellow. He's awfully nice. And our families like each other; that's a help. My family didn't approve of the fellow I liked in Scranton. Not that I'd have let that bother me, but it makes things harder."
It sounded very dull to Robert, and regrettable. She didn't love Greg enough, from the way she spoke. But she might be just the sort of girl to make a success of a marriage to a man she wasn't passionate about, yet really liked. Look what had happened to him and Nickie after their enthusiastic start. He was about to push his chair back and get up when she said, "I think I'm afraid of marriage." She was staring at the ashtray, her cheek propped on her hand with its long fingers turned under.
"I've heard of girls saying that before they're married. Men, too."
"Have you ever been married?"
"No."
"I can't imagine anyone easier to marry than Greg, so I suppose if I ever do it, it's got to be him."
"I hope you'll be very happy." He stood up. "I must go. Thanks-thanks for-"
"Do you like cookies?"
He watched her open the oven door, then pull some wax paper from a roll and tear it off. Each cookie had a raisin in its center. She put half a dozen or so on the wax paper.
"I know," she said shyly, "you think I'm crackers or something. Maybe it's the Christmas spirit. But there's nothing wrong with giving somebody cookies, is there?"
"I think it's very nice," he replied, and they both laughed. He put the cookies gently into the pocket of his overcoat. "Thank you very much." He went to the door.
"If you'd ever like to talk again-well, call me up and come over. I'd like you to meet Greg. We don't have to tell him-that we met the way we did. He wouldn't understand, probably. I'll tell him-oh, for instance, you're a friend Rita introduced me to."
Robert shook his head. "Thanks, Miss Thierolf. I certainly don't think Greg would understand. It's probably just as well I don't meet him." He saw at once that she took it as a rejection of her, too. Well, so be it, he thought.
"I hope you call sometime," she said simply as she went to the door. "Don't you have a car?"
"Down the road a bit." His shame was back, in full force. "Goodbye."
"Goodbye." She put on the porch light for him.
The light let him see a few yards on the driveway, and then he used his flashlight. Once on the road, he began to whistle a tune, out of nervousness, shame, madness-or all three.
Half an hour later, he was home. He lit a cigarette, and then the telephone rang. It was Nickie calling from New York.
"Well, where've you been?"
Robert sat down and slumped in the chair in order to sound pleasant and relaxed. "Out for a while. Sorry. You've been trying to get me?"
"For hours. I bring you good tidings of great joy. You're going to be a free man in a month. And I'm marrying Ralph as soon as I possibly can."
"That's very nice. I'm glad things are moving. I hadn't heard anything from the lawyer."
"Why should you? I give him orders what to do." Now she sounded a little high.
"Well, thanks very much for telling me."
"The bill will be sent you in due time. Fifty-fifty, O.K.?"
"O.K., certainly."
"How's your mind these days? Lose it yet?"
"I don't think so." How he regretted ever saying anything about his "sanity" to Nickie. He'd said it carelessly once during one of their conversations about his depressions, said that depressions were such a torture they could make a person lose his sanity, or something like that, and Nickie had been sympathetic, had said he ought to go to a psychotherapist, so he had gone to one. And then, in a matter of days, she had begun to throw up his words to him, saying he admitted being insane, so naturally he was, and she was afraid to be in the same house with him, and how could anybody love or trust someone insane?
"Still burying your head in that little hole down there?" she went on, and he heard the click of her cigarette lighter as she closed it.
"It's not a bad town at all. Not that I expect to live here the rest of my life."
"I'm not interested in your plans."
"O.K., Nickie."
"Meet any interesting girls?"
"Veronica, how about sticking to Ralph and your painting and letting me alone?"
"I'll let you alone. You can be sure of that. You're a creep and I'm sick of creeps. And as for my painting, I did two and a half canvases today. How's that? Ralph inspires me, you see? He's not like you, moping around-"
"Yes, I know. I understand."
She gave a contemptuous laugh. In the seconds she took to think of something else to say, he said:
"Thanks again, Nickie, for calling me up to tell me."
"Good bye!" She slammed the telephone down.
Robert took off his tie, went into the bathroom, and washed his face. Why was she always so angry, he wondered, so flippant, so eager to hurt? He was sick of asking himself that, yet it was a perfectly natural thing to ask, he thought. Even Peter Campbell-or had it been Vic McBain?-had asked him the same thing when Robert had told him about one of his quarrels with Nickie. It had been a funny quarrel over the misunderstanding of a sofa-cover color, which was why he had told it. But the end of it had not been so funny, because Nickie had hung onto the incident all day and the night and the next day, a whole weekend, Robert remembered. He had told it to Peter, and now he remembered Peter's smile fading and Peter asking, "But why was she so angry about it?" Robert could come up with some answers for himself, such as, Nickie didn't like him because he was often depressed, rather inarticulately melancholic, and he couldn't blame her for that. Or Nickie was very ambitious about her painting, and a man in her life represented a threat, against her time or whatever, a threat of being dominated, perhaps (witness her choice of Ralph Jurgen to marry, a pretty weak character, Robert thought, someone Nickie could easily dominate). Or, Nickie's ego was so weak or so sensitive, she couldn't bear the least criticism, and toward the last she'd begun to accuse him of saying things he had not said, and when he denied them, she had told him he was losing his mind. Robert could go over these things, but they still did not explain her furious anger against him, didn't explain it to his satisfaction. There was a missing link somewhere, and he doubted if he would ever find it, if it would ever pop into his head so that he could say, "Ah, now I understand, now it all makes sense."
He stood looking out his window at the two-story white house across the street, with its window on the top floor full of plants. Sometimes an elderly man sat reading a newspaper in the armchair just beyond the plants, but tonight the chair was empty. He could see a child's tricycle in the shadows on the porch. At the corner to the left, there was a drugstore-luncheonette that smelled of chocolate syrup, where Robert had bought toothpaste and razor blades a couple of times. Down at the other corner, out of sight from him, was a rather gloomy Y.M.C.A. Two or three blocks away, straight ahead, was the railroad station, where he'd picked up the box Nickie had sent him of items he had forgotten. Not that he'd forgotten most of them, since most of them had been things he'd bought for the house-an expensive clothes brush, a vase, a big glass ashtray, a ten-inch-high Mayan statue he had found in a shop in the Village. But sending them to him was another way of Nickie's saying, "We're finished, and take every damned thing you brought here!" Yes, she had finished with him abruptly, as abruptly as she finished with a name she had chosen to paint under. She was on her fourth or fifth name now-Amat. Or perhaps Ralph had inspired her to choose another. And when would Ralph start getting the treatment, Robert wondered. The on-again-off-again treatment, the manufactured quarrels, the rages followed by apologies. When would Ralph start to get fed up with the drunks asleep in the bathtub, on the living-room sofa, maybe in his own bed?
Robert went into his kitchenette and fixed himself a Scotch and water. It had taken him nearly six months, the whole last six months, to learn that Nickie was playing a game, playing it so well she could produce real, wet tears out of her eyes when she apologized, when she told him she loved him and that she still believed they could make a go of it together. And hope had sprung up in Robert every time, and he had said, "Of course we can. For God's sake, we love each other!" And at Nickie's request, he would move out of the hotel that at her request he had moved into, and then the game would repeat itself, with a manufactured quarrel: "Go back to your filthy hole of a hotel! I don't want you in the house tonight! Go back and pick up some whore, I don't care!" And slowly but surely Ralph Jurgen had come on the scene, and as Nickie became more sure of Ralph, her interest in the game with Robert had diminished.
He and Nickie had started out so differently, very much in love with each other, and Nickie had said many times, "I'll love you the rest of my life. You're the only man in the world for me," and he had every reason to think that she meant it. Their friends told him she had said the same thing to them about him. It was Nickie's second marriage, but those who had known her first husband-very few people, actually, only two or three, because Nickie had evidently dropped all the people she had known with Orrin Desch-said that she had never cared as much for Orrin. Robert and Nickie had planned a trip around the world in two years-now one, Robert realized. He remembered her going all the way to Brooklyn once to find a certain drawing pen that he had wanted. And maybe for a while, maybe for about a year, Nickie had loved him. Then the incidents had begun to come, minuscule incidents that Nickie could blow up into a storm. What were the letters from Marion doing at the back of the drawer in his desk at home? Marion was a girl he had been in love with four years before. Robert had forgotten he had the letters. Nickie had found them and read them all. She suspected Robert of seeing Marion-who had since married-now and then in New York, maybe for lunch, maybe when he said he was working overtime at the office. Robert had finally taken the letters into the hall of the building and thrown them down the incinerator-and later regretted it. What right had Nickie to look in his desk, anyway? Robert thought her unsureness of herself-it seemed to be that-might come from her dissatisfaction with herself as a painter. Robert had met her at the time she was beginning to realize she could not get into the uptown galleries merely by giving lavish parties for reviewers and gallery owners. Nickie had a small income from her family and with that, plus Robert's salary, she could afford rather fancy parties. But every gallery manager, it seemed, had told her to try showing on Tenth Street and then work up, and at last Nickie had accepted the fact that she had to do this. And it was difficult enough even to show on Tenth Street. During the two years and six or seven months they had been married, Nickie had had perhaps three shows and they had been in Tenth Street group shows. Reviews were few.
Robert went to his closet and felt for the wax paper of cookies in his overcoat pocket. There they were, tangible, even edible. He smiled. There were nice people in the world after all, kind people, friendly people, maybe even married people who didn't quarrel like mortal enemies when they quarreled. Robert blamed himself for taking his and Nickie's breakup overly hard just because it had been theirs, his pain too hard just because it was his. One had to see things in proportion. That was what made the difference between a sane person and an unbalanced one. Remember that, he told himself.
He nibbled a cookie and thought of Christmas. Jack Nielson had invited him to spend Christmas with him and Betty, and Robert thought he would accept. He would buy a lot of toys for their little girl. It seemed better than going all the way to Chicago to see his mother and her husband, Phil, and if he went, he'd certainly have to tell them something about the breakup with Nickie, even though his mother wasn't the kind to ask a lot of questions. Robert's stepfather had two daughters by his first marriage, and they had children, so the house would be full on Christmas, anyway. The Nielsons' invitation was also more attractive than the two or three he had received from friends in New York, because the people in New York were friends of Nickie's, too.
