Nothing That Meets the Eye (6 page)

She shook her head. Then with her long pale hands she drew her cigarettes and her lighter toward her. “I don't know. Maybe I should be going.”

“No, please!”

“Thank you. I really can't stay. I'm glad you spoke to me, though—if you are.”

Hildebrandt was standing as soon as she. “But I may see you again? I mean, I must see you again!”

“I don't know,” she said vaguely, and moved toward the casements.

The music played “Over the Waves,” as though to point out his comic figure floundering beside her across the silent Persian sea. “Really,” he stammered, laughing, “this is no way. I must see you again!”

She stopped and turned to him. There was no one in all the wide room to see them. Hildebrandt could enjoy as though they had been alone the tilt of her head, the unexpected warmth as she said, “All right, I'll see you, then.”

“Tomorrow?”

“All right. Tomorrow.”

“Where shall I call for you?—May I see you home now?”

“I'll come here.”

“At the same time?”

“All right.”

He let her go, back to the casements' wings.

II

H
e had not wanted their second meeting to be in the Pandora Room, whose one charm, that of the casements, had gone when she had entered. But since it was to be, he waited for her at the bar, wishing to glimpse her once more as he had seen her first. And finally, toward ten o'clock, her image between the casements was the end of a vigil that had begun really when he had stood here the night before, watching her disappear, having nothing but the promise that she would return. He slipped off the stool and walked across the soft rug toward her.

She held her head higher than she had last evening. A green and brown dress brightened her, and made her less tall and thin, though she was almost as tall as he.

“I've a table over here,” he said, in his intensity forgetting to greet her.

He led her to the table he had elected during his wait at the bar, where two glasses of brandy, ordered long before as a kind of bet with himself that she would come, stood ready for them. As he seated her carefully, Hildebrandt felt that the miracle of this second meeting made the air quake and shimmer, as though a gloriole were painted about their table. He felt he would babble nonsense unless he was cautious. It might have been for this moment the Pandora Room had been created.

“I have so much to tell you,” he began in a burst, for though he had forgot in detail what she looked like, he felt their acquaintance had progressed and only conversation lagged. He had felt for the first time, since last night, that his life had a focus, which was she. He looked at her, his eyes misty with happiness, and suddenly, though she seemed ready to listen, he was afraid to tell her all he felt. He was afraid of exposing himself. It occurred to him she had encountered such men as him before, had evaluated and was already bored by their futile, hardly varying stories. She had suddenly seemed disturbingly intelligent, and though intelligence was what he had wanted, he could not speak.

“You might begin.”

“Oh, can't you tell me something about yourself first? You might at least tell me what your name is now. Where you live. Or even just what you are thinking about.” He felt more like himself now, and he slipped his cuffs out to the garnet links.

“I don't live here. My home's in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco!” Hildebrandt exclaimed, seizing the fact like a nail to fix her to some background, yet almost at the same time he realized he did not want to know about San Francisco. “How long are you staying here?”

“Just a short while. As short as possible.”

“Then what luck you happened to wander in here!”

“Is it?”

She was looking down at the tablecloth, running her thumbnail in it as though thinking of something else. It struck Hildebrandt that she regretted having met him here tonight, and the thought kept him silent as he watched her taste her brandy.

She turned to him and set down the half-empty glass. “I'm sorry. You like to linger over your brandies, don't you?”

“Oh, not at all!” Hildebrandt smiled.

“Like a gentleman—the gentleman-at-the-bar.”

Hildebrandt's drooping lids quivered a little. He had needed to tell her nothing. She knew. He saw himself perhaps a month from now, perhaps tomorrow evening, slumped on one of the high stools. No, not this bar, however. Some other, at least. But he lifted his head and smiled. “Shouldn't you like dinner?”

In a voice so gentle it hardly seemed an interruption, rather the quiet entrance of an idea, she asked, smiling, “Tell me, aren't you married?”

Hildebrandt leaned back with a feint of surprise. “What prompts you to ask that?”

“Don't you have a wife? Or didn't you?”

He put out his cigarette and slowly lighted another. “Yes, I was married once. Years ago. It's funny you should ask that out of the blue. I've been divorced—going on eleven years.”

“But it lingers. Doesn't it?”

“You seem to think so. Though my marriage didn't.” There began stirring in him the desire to tell the story of his life, a desire so strong it overruled his fear that she knew it already, that it would bore her and kill whatever affection might have grown in her for him. But also, he reasoned, he wanted her to know. He smiled, captured by memory. “You see, my idea of life was to travel up and down one romantic river after another in Europe, just the two of us and a servant or so, until we got ready to come home.” He was making it short, beginning near the end. “We were both very young. I was only twenty-four, with an income from my father, so I saw no reason to work. I hate work anyway, actually. Only—she fell in love with someone a bit richer before we'd even left the States.” He laughed a little, sadly and tolerantly, like a gentleman who related sordid facts reluctantly, though they showed him to advantage.

“But you went on to Europe.”

“Yes, I did. Went though all the advances I could get on my trust fund and finally went through the principal. Then I came home and sobered up and found a pleasant spot in my father's advertising firm. Which brings you practically up-to-date. Now I drift around, trying to put an edge on a hopelessly dull existence.”

She was looking off again, toward the casements now, and suddenly he realized she knew he had said the same thing in the same words many times before. It had never mattered before that he had, but it mattered now because she was different. He looked at her and bit the end of his tongue and cursed himself.

“Not by yourself all the time.”

“Oh, yes. Quite,” he replied, contritely. “It's not often I meet anyone like you.” He puffed nervously on his cigarette. “I mean, I never have. Do you know how it is sometimes,” he began again, trying to turn her eyes to him, “when you are lonely for something, you want something and you can't discover what it is? Not friends or lovers or any spot on earth. Something less graspable than any of those.” His hand closed with a grasping gesture on nothing. He had not said this to anyone before, and he was pleased with his articulateness and also with his honesty.

“I know.”

He nodded, believing she did know. He felt his eyes were stretched wide the way they were sometimes when he looked into bar mirrors and saw the ingenuous hope. But now he did not care. He wanted to go on, to tell her that at the times he wanted this mysterious thing, he sat in bars where he could heighten the sense of its absence and so possibly discover one day what it was he wanted. But remembering her phrase, the gentleman-at-the-bar, he dared not. He brought his face under control, leaned closer to her and said quietly, “I know it's to meet you that I've wanted.”

“I'm sorry,” she said, her slow words making it sound somehow final and irreparable, “that you're so lonely!”

“Lonely? I'm never lonely!”

She only smiled at him now, and he did not know what to make of the smile.

“No, I'm not lonely!” He laughed, feeling that such an admission would be a weakness, as though loneliness were a disease which even when cured left some unattractive trace.

She said nothing. Now the smile was gone and only the corner of her mouth was drawn up a little, with what expression Hildebrandt could not see, for her head was bent over the table.

“At any rate, have you had dinner?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“I wish I'd thought to ask you last night.”

“But I had an engagement.”

“You might have broken it.”

“No, a business engagement.”

“Business?”

“Legal business.”

“Oh?”

“Tell me what you do on Sundays.”

Hildebrandt smiled, wanting to embrace her. “But I'm very curious about you.”

She reached for a cigarette. “I'm here to settle some accounts—having just got a divorce.”

“Oh, I see,” he said subduedly, while within he fell into small quiet pieces. He realized he had thought of her as isolated from everyone but himself. If she had had a frame in his mind, it was that of the magic casements and the red and gold lobby beyond. Now all at once she was estranged, and to learn more of her was to risk thrusting her yet farther away.

“Do you have any children?”

“No.” She smiled at him. “I'm quite free. I suppose I can't believe it yet.”

Hildebrandt relaxed. In the moment of crisis the magic of the casements had all but left her. She had been the divorced wife of another man, the former mistress of a household in San Francisco. He might have ceased to love her, he thought, but instead, his love had metamorphosed to one that loved her as a creature of reality. He felt he had become real himself. He had risen suddenly far above the dreary gentleman-at-the-bar.

He sat upright, solicitous, beside her. “Could I ask you—if I've a right—to tell me about it?”

“No, don't ask me that!” she said with a laugh.

Hildebrandt watched her face return to its poised, somewhat preoccupied expression. He saw, despite his love for her, the distance that separated them now unless he could span it somehow. Yet this was not the time, either, to tell her he loved her. He wondered if her husband had been cruel to her. Or unfaithful. Or if he had given her the scar on her cheek! He wanted to hunt down the monster and kill him!

“Is there nothing I can do?” he asked searchingly. “I do wish you'd tell me even the least important things, if you will.”

“The least important things are the least important things—like my name. And the most important thing I think you know.”

“No, I don't.”

She was silent again, and Hildebrandt continued. “I just can't bear to see you unhappy.”

“But I am not so unhappy.”

He pondered her reply as though it had been a riddle.

III

S
he was more than an hour late. Hildebrandt, scanning the people who walked from right and left on the sidewalk, paced once more across the long cement step. He dared not leave to call the St. Regis, for it had now reached a time at which she, arriving and not finding him, might think he had grown tired of waiting and gone away.

“Of course she will come!” Hildebrandt said to himself. “She has never failed, has she?” He could look back on the one occasion, last evening, when she had kept their appointment in the Pandora Room. And because she had been later than he expected, he told himself she was probably late for all her engagements.

“You may think this is funny,” he could still hear her say. “I wanted to go to the Metropolitan while I was here.”

And he had assured her he could take the afternoon off and go with her. He had begged her, in fact, to let him see her today, because last night while they had had eggs and toast at midnight in the sandwich shop, she had said something— He could not quite remember it. Something like, “You mustn't think I've cured loneliness in you. Only someone who's never known it can cure it.” And while he had laughed at her theory, it had hurt him, because he had realized she might be saying in this way that she knew he was inadequate to cure her own loneliness, to give her what she needed, perhaps in the way that mattered to her was inferior to the man who had been her husband.

But these doubts had vanished before the promise of the afternoon at the Metropolitan, which last night had seemed a gay adventure. He would learn, later when they took tea in some quiet place, all the things it was absurd he did not know already, her name, when she would come back from San Francisco and why she had to go in the first place. He would tell her then that he loved her. He would begin all over again, somewhere besides the Pandora Room, as though he had never been lonely or inadequate.

The museum had been enchanted by her presence when he had run up the steps at three o'clock to search the lobby. Now the place was melancholy. He found himself staring at a man who walked down the steps with a small boy on either hand, and only when they reached the sidewalk did he remember he had seen them go in at three o'clock. He paced slowly back along the broad step.

Even in the outdoors, with the collar of his black overcoat thrown up carelessly, his tapered face below the gray homburg stiffened against the cold twilight, he was the gentleman-at-the-bar, the anxiety of waiting but externalized upon his face by the discomfort of chill. There was a finicalness in the rigidity of his arm, the gloved hand that held the other glove, and in the precise click of his heels. He might have been impatient at having been delayed in reaching his bar at his usual hour.

He could not endure the scene any longer. The gap between three and five on the face of his watch seemed enormous. He ran down the steps and began walking south on Fifth Avenue, still watching both sides of the street, still turning to inspect taxis that drew up.

He tried to outstrip the darkness, for it seemed if he should reach the hotel before dark, it would be still afternoon, still conceivable she had been only delayed. She might, as he walked into the lobby, be coming from an elevator to meet him.