The Sinful Ones

Chapter Three Shadow of Ecstasy

As Carr was about to kiss her, Marcia moved back from him smoothly, hands on his shoulders, inspecting his face.

“You’re looking well,” she said. “Mix us some drinks while I slip into a dress.”

She coolly departed and shut the bedroom door behind him.

Carr located a bottle of rye in the kitchen. Before doing anything else he had a straight shot. The little experience had certainly shaken him up. It was like, but worse than, those moments in childhood when everything seems strangely vivid and at the same time unreal. Chalk on a blackboard. Being outside and through a window watching adults reading newspapers in a living room at night.

He put a tray of ice in the sink to melt, hunted up ginger ale for himself. Marcia of course would take water, not too much.

He’d mention his experience to her, jokingly. On second thought, he wouldn’t. At least not right off. Sometimes Marcia wasn’t interested in the subjective. More practical. People, money, the latest news—things like that. Jobs.

He frowned unhappily, remembering her phone call.

He took a long time making the drinks, but the bedroom door was still shut when he brought them out. He sat down, holding them, not touching his. It was a bit like waiting in an office.

When Marcia came in he jumped up, smiling. “Say, are we going to the Pendletons’ party Friday? Should be interesting.”

She nodded. “You’re meeting Keaton Fisher there.”

He tried not to hear that.

Marcia sampled her drink. She had put on a black slip, but no bra. She sat down on the couch.

“Is it all right?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. “Carr, this idea of Keaton’s—”

“Say, Marcia,” he began moving over so that he stood in front of her, “the queerest thing happened to me this afternoon.”

“—is a remarkable one,” she concluded.

He gave up. “Well, what is it exactly?” he asked, starting to sit down close beside her. But she swung around toward him, so that he had to take the other end of the couch, leaving a business-like distance between them.

“In the first place, this is confidential,” she began. “Keaton asked me not to tell anyone. You’ll have to pretend you’re getting it from him first hand, Friday night.” She paused. “It’s an editorial counseling service.”

“What’s that?”

“You’ll take ailing magazines of all sorts, newspapers, trade journals, etcetera, analyze them and their difficulties, conduct surveys of readers and advertisers, reshape their policies and modernize their methods, pump them full of new ideas—in short, sell them the advice that will put them on their feet.”

Carr tried to look thoughtful. Marcia swept on, “Keaton has his plans all laid. He’s gone into it very carefully. He’s spotted some likely first clients—badly edited publications he knows it’ll be easy to improve. That way you’ll get a reputation right from the start. Once the circulation of those first publications begins to climb, watch the others flock to you! Even if you have to lose money to turn the trick, it will be worth it.”

Carr frowned. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Magazine and newspaper guys have their own ideas. They don’t put much trust in the judgment of outsiders.”

Marcia smiled with the faintest touch of pity. “Most publishers know that they can’t have editorial staffs that are the equal of Life or the Post, simply because they can’t pay the money. But they can have an editorial counseling service that’s that good, because dozens of other publishers will help to bear the expense.

Carr shrugged. “If we were as good as Life or the Post, why wouldn’t we start a magazine of our own?”

This time Marcia did not smile, although the suggestion of pity was if anything more marked. “Objections, again. Always objections. Next you’ll be telling me your interests don’t lie in that direction. The time isn’t right for new ventures.”

“Well,” he said, “I can see how all this applies to Keaton Fisher. He’s had experience on big magazines. But where do I shine in?”

“It’s obvious. Keaton’s no good at handling people. You’re an expert! This service won’t be purely an editorial matter. You’ll also be reshaping the office routine and personnel of publications.”

“I see,” he said slowly. “Well, I’ll think it over? I won’t be seeing him until Friday, you say.”

“What’s wrong?” She sat up straight. “Merely that there’s no question of thinking it over at all. You surely don’t compare your present job to Keaton’s proposition.”

He looked at her quickly, then looked away. “Well, Marcia, I don’t exactly like the idea of this counseling service.”

She smiled, almost encouragingly. “No?”

He sucked his lip. “Oh, it seems too much a part of the old con game. The old business of tailoring wordage, retailoring it, patching it up, cleaning and pressing it, putting it through the mangle over and over again. Too derivative. We wouldn’t even be editing the stuff. We’d be editing the editors. Selling them their own product.” He hurried on. “No, if I were to break away from General Employment, I’d want it to be for the sake of something more legitimate, more creative.”

She leaned back. Carr couldn’t recall her ever looking more the cool mistress of herself. Yet he knew she was displaying herself, tempting him deliberately. “Good,” she said. “Why don’t you?”

“What?”

“Do something creative. You were quite an actor in college, you’ve told me. Of course it may be a little late for that, though you never can tell. But there’s always writing, painting—all sorts of ways of blazoning your personality before the world.”

“Oh, Marcia!” For a moment he almost lost control of himself. Then with an effort he put down the hot hunger within him. “Look Marcia, the important thing is that we like each other and have good times together. That’s all that really matters, isn’t it?” He moved closer to her, watched the rise and fall of her bosom as she breathed.

She didn’t respond.

“Well, isn’t it?” he asked after a moment. “Look, Marcia, I enjoy the time we have together better than anything else. The parties, the shows, the yacht club, all that. Your friends are wonderful. The Pendletons and the Mandevilles are grand people. Last Sunday on the lake was marvelous. There was a kind of glamour in every moment, as there always is when you’re around.” He slid his hand along the top of the couch, behind her shoulders. “It’s fun, don’t you see? The best fun in the world?”

“You can’t join in the pleasures of people like the Pendletons and the Mandevilles without joining in their enterprises too. In the long run you can’t command the sweets of life without commanding people and events.”

“Why not?” he asked with simulated lightness. “After all, I pay my own way.”

“As an extra man, yes,” she admitted without rancor. He was close enough to smell her hair. “But that isn’t the same thing at all. Don’t you see that you’ve got to get into the really big money? Why, with all your ability—”

“No, I don’t see,” he said. “All I can see is you. And I love you very much.” Smiling, he quickly put his arms around her and pulled her toward him.

She didn’t resist. She only thinned her lips and looked straight into his eyes. “No,” she said, “No.”

“Please, baby!”

He seized her. With avid roughness he caressed the pink flesh. His kisses fell hot on her throat, her shoulders. He felt the smooth silkiness of her skin, the pliant sweet curves of her filling his palms.

But she jerked back and stood up in one movement. A little of her drink spilled onto the couch and pooled there.

“So that’s it,” he said. “You tempt me. You entice me. You think I desire you, you’ll control me—I’ll do anything you say.”

“And if I have to do that to put some steel into your backbone,” she replied, “why shouldn’t I?”

Carr thought that Marcia had never looked so queenly or desirable. At the same time, he saw in a flash how the whole evening would go from here on. First he would beg her pardon. Then, to please her, he would pretend to become very interested in Keaton Fisher’s editorial counseling service. As the evening wore along, what with drinks and the hypnotic glitter of restaurant and nightclub, he actually would begin to get interested. And she would become coolly amorous when he took her home, and let him in, and give him his little reward for dancing to her tune.

Like some puppet. Like some damned puppet dangling on her strings.

Well, for once he wouldn’t. For once he’d break the pattern, no matter what it cost him. There were other places he could go tonight. She wasn’t his whole life, not quite.

He had backed a couple steps away from her.

She finished her drink. “I’m ready now,” she said smiling. “I’ll get my bag.”

As she moved toward the bedroom, he watched her. He swallowed hard. Yes, there were other places. He had to prove that.

When she was out of sight, he turned quickly and—the door was still ajar—walked rapidly and silently out of the room and down the hall.

Yes, he kept telling himself, other places.

Short of the elevator, he opened the door to the stairs. He hurried down the gray, squared spiral. Faster. Faster.

Atop his mood of painful desperation, he was aware of a sudden sense of freedom, even excitement. For it had just occurred to him what the other place was. He had just realized the meaning of a phrase he had read uncomprehendingly an hour before: “…the lion’s tail near the five sisters…”

Few people walk on the east side of Michigan Boulevard after dark. At such times the Art Institute looks very dead, with the automobile headlights and the colored glows from the busy side of the boulevard playing on its dark stone like archeologists’ flashlights. The two majestic bronze lions might well be guarding the portals of some monument of Roman antiquity. One wonders, though, whether the sculptor Keneys foresaw that the tail of the southernmost lion, conveniently horizontal, would always be kept polished bright by the casual elbows of art students and idlers, and now, the frightened girl.

She watched Carr mount the steps, without any active sign of recognition. He might be part of some dream she was having. A forbidding cold wind was whipping in from the lake and she had buttoned up her cardigan. She didn’t seem so frightened now, but very alone, as if she had nowhere in the world to go and was waiting for someone who would never come. Carr stopped a half dozen paces away.

She smiled and said, “Hello.”

Carr walked over to her. His first words surprised him. “I met your small dark man with glasses. He ran away.”

“Oh?” she remarked. “I’m sorry. He really is your friend—potentially. But he’s rather high strung. Indefinite. He was supposed to meet me here…” She glanced toward some distant electric numerals which told the time in order to attract attention to a gigantic bottle of beer.

“Is he afraid of me?” Carr asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. Headlights swept across her gray eyes. At the moment they seemed as enigmatic as those of a sphinx. “I had some vague idea of introducing the two of you,” she said. “But now I’m not so sure. About any of us.” Her voice dropped. The wind blew some strands of her shoulder-length brown hair against her cheek. “I never really thought you’d come, you know. Leaving notes like that is just a stupid way I have of tempting fate. You weren’t supposed to guess. How did you know it was the south lion? I don’t think you even looked at the north one.”

Carr laughed. “Taft’s Great Lakes Fountain is an obsession of mine. I always try to figure out, from the way the bowls the five sisters are holding pour into each other, which sister is which lake. And of course the fountain is nearest the southern lion.”

“Did you walk down here tonight?” she asked.

“Yes. And now I have questions for you. Who are those people you warned me against? That big, blonde, for instance. Why did you let her strike you without doing anything? What sort of hold do they have on you?”

“I don’t want to talk about them.” Her voice was flat. “It’s something obscene and horrible and I don’t want to think about it at all.”

“Are they after the small dark man with glasses too?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it. It’s not something you can do anything about. If you insist on talking about it, I don’t want to be with you.”

Carr waited. A chillier gust was blowing across the steps and the girl hugged herself.

“All right,” he said. “How about us getting a drink somewhere?”

“If you’ll let me pick the place.”

The last word made him think of Marcia. He quickly linked his arm through the girl’s and said, “Lead the way.”

At the bottom of the steps he asked, “What’s your name?”

“Jane.”

“Jane what?”

She shook her head.

“Mine’s Carr. Two r’s.”

They were half a block from the Art Institute when Carr asked, “What about your friend?”

“I don’t think there’s much chance of his coming now.”

They continued north. The wind and the gloom and the wide empty sidewalk seemed strange and lonely so close to the boulevard with its humming cars and its fringe of people and lights on the other side.

Jane’s arm tightened a little on Carr’s. “This is fun,” she said. “I mean—having a date.”

“I shouldn’t think you’d have any trouble,” he told her.

They were opposite the public library. She led them across the boulevard. It seemed to Carr that the loneliness had followed them, for as they walked past the massive dark façade of the library, they met only two people—a galloping, bleak-faced boy and a shiffling old man in a checked cap and shabby overcoat.

They squinted against blown grit. A sheet of newspaper flapped into their faces. Carr ripped it away and it swooped up into the air. They looked at each other and laughed. Carr took her hand and started across the next street, under the Elevated.

He felt a sharp tug, heard Jane cry, “Look out!” He jumped back out of the path of a dark automobile gliding along without lights.

“You should be more careful,” she said. “They can’t see us, you know.

“Yes,” Carr agreed. “The street’s awfully dark here.”

They walked on a short way. Jane suddenly turned down a cobbled alley chocked with fire escapes. A few steps more and Carr was startled to see the entrance to a little tavern. Steps led down to the sunken door.

The place was dimly lit and almost empty. None of the booths were occupied. At the bar two men were contemplating half-empty glasses of beer. In the shadows were smoky old advertisements and pictures. Carr recognized one—a large print of Custer’s Last Stand.

“What’ll you have?” he asked, heading for the bar.

“Let’s wait a minute,” she said, steering him instead to the last booth, crowded in like an afterthought beside the swinging door to the kitchen, which was evidently not in use, since the little round window was dark. Neither the two drinkers nor the bartender looked up as they went past. The latter was a solemn and fat man, thoughtfully shaving the foam off a small glass of beer.

Jane looked at Carr across the splotched table. Color had come into her cheeks and she was smiling, as if what they were doing was very wonderful. He found himself thinking of his college days, when there had been hip-flasks and roadsters, and checks from home, and classes to cut.

“It’s funny,” he said, “I’ve gone past this alley a hundred times and never noticed this place.”

“Cities are like that,” she said. “You think you know them, when all you know are routes through them. You think that Joe’s Hamburgers and the Cleanspot Laundry and Reagan’s Mortuary and the woman who’s always dusting on the second floor, where the electric wires dip close to the window, are the whole show. One day you turn a corner the wrong way, and after a dozen steps find something you’ve never seen before.”

We’re even beginning to talk about life, thought Carr.

One of the beer-drinkers put two nickels in the jukebox. Low, anticipatory strains eddied out.

Carr looked toward the bar. “I wonder if there’s a waiter,” he said. “Maybe they don’t server at the tables now.”

“Who cares?” she said. “Let’s dance.”

“I don’t imagine it’s allowed,” he said. “They’d have to have another license.”

“Come on,” she said. He shrugged and followed her.

There wasn’t much space, but enough. With what struck Carr as a grave and laudable politeness, the beer-drinkers paid no attention to them, though one softly beat time with the bottom of his glass against his palm.

Jane danced badly, but after a while she got better. Somewhat solemnly they revolved in a modest circle. She was thin. He could feel ribs through the sweater. She said nothing until almost the end of the first number. Then, in a choked voice—

“It’s been so long since I’ve danced with anyone.”

“Not with your man with glasses?” he asked quickly.

She shook her head. “He’s too nervous, serious all the time. He can’t relax—not even pretend.”

The second record started. After a while her expression cleared. She rested her cheek against his shoulder. “I’ve got a theory about life,” she said dreamily.

Yes, thought Carr, it’s exactly like the old days. He put out of his head the momentary suspicion that she was playing with him—very tenderly, but still playing with him. Like a solemn and wide-eyed child telling a story to an adult.

“I think life has a rhythm,” she began, pausing now and then with the music, her phrases drifting. “It keeps changing with the time of day and year, but it’s always really the same. People feel it without knowing it, and it governs their lives.”

Another couple came in, took one of the front booths. The bartender wiped his hands on his apron, pushed up the wicket in the bar and walked over to them.

“I like your theory, Jane,” Carr said. “I like to drift and take things as they come. There’s someone who doesn’t want me to, who’d like to see me fight the current, build a boat—a heavy cruiser with depth charges. But I’d rather follow the rhythm.”

“Oh, but we’re not following the rhythm,” Jane said. “We’ve broken away from it.”

“Have we?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Is that what you mean this afternoon when you wondered if I was ‘awakened’?”

“Maybe.”

The music stopped. Carr dug in his pocket for more nickels to put in the jukebox, but she shook her head. They slid back into their booth.

A telephone rang. The fat bartender carefully put down the tray of drinks he had mixed for the other couple, and went up front to answer it.

“Sure you don’t want to dance some more?” Carr asked.

“No, let’s just let things happen to us as they come.”

“A good idea,” Carr agreed, “provided you don’t push it too far. For instance, we did come here to get a drink.”

“Yes, we did,” Jane said. A rather impish expression came into her eyes. She glanced at the two drinks standing on the bar. “Those look good,” she said.

Carr nodded. “I wonder what you have to do to get them,” he remarked irritably.

“Walk up and take them?”

He looked at her. “Seriously?”

“Why not? We were here first. Serve them right.” Her eyes were still lively.

He grinned at her. “All right,” he said, getting up suddenly, “I will.”

She didn’t stop him, rather to his surprise. Much more so, there was no squawk when he boldly clutched the two glasses and returned with them to Jane.

She applauded soundlessly.

He bowed and set down the drinks with flourish. They sipped.

She smiled. “That’s another of my theories about life. You can get away with anything if you really want to. Other people can’t stop you, because of the rhythm. No matter what happens, they have to keep on dancing. They’re stuck. They can only interfere with you if interfering happens to fit the rhythm. Otherwise you’re safe.”

And rather true, thought Carr. Most people, himself included, went through life in fear and more or less controlled trembling, thinking that if they made the slightest move to assert themselves, they’d be jumped on. They fancied that everyone else was watching them, waiting for them to make a mistake. But actually the other people were as scared as you, or more so. And they rather liked you to make missteps and mistakes, because that eased their worried about themselves. There definitely was a sort of rhythm to life—or at least a counterpoint of opposed timidities. Take that bartender, who was busy with glasses and bottles again. He hadn’t even looked in their direction. He was probably embarrassed at having neglected to wait on them, and more relieved than annoyed at what Carr had done.

“Don’t you believe me even now?” she pressed. “You can get away with things. I’ll prove it to you again.”

A vague suspicion Carr had entertained when he’d first seen Jane, that she was some sort of shoplifter or petty criminal, flickered again in his mind, only to die immediately.

“You’re a funny girl,” he said. “What’s made you this way? Who’s—” He checked himself when she frowned. “Well, here’s a question maybe I can ask,” he went on. “What startled you so when you sat down at my desk this afternoon? You seemed to sense something in me that terrified you. What was it?”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.” But again her eyes were sphinxlike. “Maybe,” she said, “it was just that I realize you were alive.”

“That’s queer,” he said gravely, “because you know, twice today I’ve had an—an illusion of—”

“Don’t,” she said, touching his hand. She looked at her glass for a moment, rubbed the beads of moisture, curved her hand around it wonderingly. “It’s good to be alive,” she said intensely. “Good. Of course the really marvelous thing would be to be back in the safe old pattern and still alive. But that’s impossible.”

“And the safe old pattern is…?” he prompted.

She shook her head and looked away. He dropped the question.

More people began to drift in. Carr and Jane finished their drinks, talking about the old advertisements and prints—how they had such a nostalgic feel because, unlike genuine artistic creations, they died with their decade, became dried funeral wreaths and faded love-letters. More people came in. Soon all the other booths were filled and there weren’t many empty spaces at the bar. Jane was becoming uneasy.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said abruptly, standing up.

Carr started to say something, but she had slipped around a couple approaching their booth and was striding to the door. A fear took hold of him that she would get away like this afternoon and he would never see her again. He jerked a dollar bill from his pocketbook and dropped it on the table. With nettling rudeness the newcomers shoved past him and sat down. But there was no time to be sarcastic. Jane was already mounting the stairs. Carr ran after her.

She was waiting outside. He took her arm.

“Do people get on your nerves?” he asked.

She did not answer. It was too dark to see her face. The pavement under their feet was uneven and slippery. He put his arm around her waist.

The alley came to an end. They emerged into a street where the air had that intoxicating glow it displays in the centers of big cities at nigh. As if the street laps puffed out clouds of luminous dust which rose three or four stories. Above that, dark walls going up toward a few dull stars.

They passed a music store. Jane’s walk slowed to an indecisive drift. Through the open door Carr glimpsed a mahogany expanse crossed by serried walks of ivory and ebony. There were uprights, spinets, baby grands. Jane walked in. The sound of their footsteps died as they stepped onto the thick carpet.

Whoever else was in the store was out of sight somewhere in the back, where a soft glow glamorized shelves of record albums and a row of cubicles. Jane sat down at one of the pianos. Her thin fingers moved for a while over the keys, nervously questing. The taut, talon-suggestive cords in the back of her hands underlined the expression in her face. Then her back stiffened, her head lifted, and there came the frantically rippling, opening arpeggios of the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

She didn’t play it any too well. She struck false notes and the general rendering was somewhat raucous. The impression was that of a student pianist who by a passionate determination has succeeded in grappling passably with a piece beyond her real technical proficiency.

For she did manage to extract from it a feeling of wild, desperate wonder.

Carr stopped speculating as to why a clerk didn’t emerge and at least give them a sizing-up glance.

Surely if the composer had ever meant this to be moonlight, it was moonlight illuminating a white-pinnacled ocean storm, through rifts in ragged clouds.

Jane’s lips were tightly bitten together. Her eyes seemed to be frantically searching out the next notes in an invisible score. Her body shook as her arms pounds from the shoulders.

Suddenly it was over. In the echoing quiet Carr asked casually, “Is that more like it? The rhythm of life, I mean?”

She made a little grimace as she got up.

“Still too nice,” she said. “But there’s a hint.”

They started out, Carr looking back over his shoulder.

“Do you realize we haven’t exchanged a word with anyone tonight?” he said.

She smiled wryly. “I think of pretty dull things to do, don’t I?” she said, and when he started to protest, “Yes, I’m afraid you would have had a lot more fun with Marcia…or with Midge’s girl-friend.”

“Say, you do have a memory,” he said in surprise. “I wouldn’t have dreamed you’d—”

He stopped. She had ducked her head. He couldn’t make out whether she was crying or laughing.

“…Midge’s girl-friend…” he heard her repeat chokingly.

“Don’t you know Tom Elvested?” he pressed suddenly.

She disregarded the question and looked up at him with an uneven smile. “But since you haven’t got a date with anyone but me,” she said, “you’ll just have to make the best of my antisocial habits. Let’s see, this time of night I’m apt to wander off to Rush Street or to South State, to feel the hour and watch the dead faces. I could take you there, or—”

“That’d be fine,” said Carr.

“Or—”

They walked close to the curb, skirting the crowd. They were passing the painfully bright lobby of a movie house, luridly placarded with yellow and purple swirls which seemed to have caught up in their whirlwind folds an unending rout of golden blondes, grim-eyed heroes, money bags, and detached grasping hands. Jane stopped.

“Or I could take you in here,” she said.

He obediently veered toward the box-office, but she kept hold of his arm and walked him past it into the outer lobby.

“I will prove it to you,” she told him, half gaily, half desperately, he thought. “I showed you at the bar and the music shop, but—”

Carr shrugged and held his breath for the inevitable.

They walked straight past the ticket-taker and through the center-aisle door.

Carr puffed out the breath and grinned. He thought, maybe she knows someone here.

Or else—who knows?—maybe you could get away with almost anything if you did it with enough assurance and picked the right moments.

The theatre was only half full, there were several empty rows at the back. They sidled away into one of these, through the blinking darkness, and sat down. Soon the gyrations of the gray shadows on the screen took on a little sense.

There were a man and a woman getting married, or else remarried after a divorce, it was hard to tell which. Then she left him because she thought he was interested only in business. Then she came back, but he left her because he thought she was interested only in social life. Then he came back, but then they both left each other again, simultaneously.

From all around came the soft breathing and somnolent gum chewing of drugged humanity.

Then the man and woman both raced to the bedside of their dying little boy, who had been tucked away in a military academy all this time. But the boy recovered, and then the woman left both of them, for their own good, and a little while afterwards the man did the same thing. Then the boy left them.

“Do you play chess?” Jane asked suddenly.

Carr nodded.

“Come on,” she said. “I know a place.”

They hurried out of the theatre district into a region of silent gray office buildings.

Carr remarked, “I suppose it must be because they don’t have an audience while the picture is being made, that movie actors sometimes seem so unmoved. Having a real audience puts an actor on the spot.”

“Yes,” she agreed, her voice fast and low, “watching you every minute, waiting for you to make one false move…” Her hand tightened on his arm and she looked up at him. “I hope you don’t ever have to learn to act that way. I mean when it isn’t a matter of appearing convincing to an audience that, after all, can’t really hurt you, but where the slightest slip…” She stopped.

“You mean, for instance,” said Carr, “as if a person had been confined, perhaps falsely, in an insane asylum, and then escaped?”

“No,” she said shortly, “I don’t mean that.”

She turned in at a dusky black cave-mouth, flanked by unlighted windows dimly displaying, to the left, knives and other menacing hardware, to the right, behind slim bars, ornate engagement rings. Pushing through a side door next to the locked revolving one, they came into a dingy lobby floored with tiny marble tiles and surrounded by the iron grille-work walls of ancient elevators. A jerkily revolving hand showed that one was still in operation, but Jane headed for the shadow-stifled stair.

“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s thirteen stories, but I can’t stand elevators.”

Carr grinned resignedly.

They emerged into a hall where the one frosted door that wasn’t dark read: CAISSA CHESS CLUB.

Behind the door was a long room. A drab and careless austerity, untidy rows of small tables, and grimy floor littered with trodden cigarettes, all proclaimed the place to be the headquarters of a somber monamania.

Some oldsters were playing near the door, utterly absorbed in the game. One, with a dirty white beard, was silently kibitzing, occasionally shaking his head, or pointing out, with palsied finger, the move that would have won.

Carr and Jane walked quietly to the far end near the windows, found a box of men as battered by long use as the half-obliterated board, and started to play.

Soon the maddening, years-forgotten excitement had Carr gripped tight. He was back in that relentless little universe where the significance of things is narrowed down to the stratagems whereby turreted rooks establish intangible walls of force, bishops slip craftily past bristling barricades, and knights spring out in sudden sidewise attacks, as if from crooked medieval passageways.

They played three slow, merciless games. She won the first two. Carr was too intent to feel much chagrin. He had never seen a woman play with such sexless concentration. She sat leaning forward in a way that emphasized her slightness—feet on the chair’s rung, knees together, head poised like a bird’s. One hand held an elbow. From between two fingers of the other, cigarette smoke curled. Her face was at once taut and serene—Carr thought of the portrait bust of Nefertiti, the millennia-dead Egyptian princess—as if Jane had lost herself in a quietness near eternity or the grave.

He finally drew the third game, his king just managing to nip off her last runaway pawn. It felt very late, getting on toward morning, when they finished.

She leaned back, massaging her face.

“Nothing like chess,” she mumbled, “to take your mind off things.” Then she dropped her hands.

They walked down the stairs. An old woman was wearily scrubbing across the lobby, on her knees, her head bent, as if forever.

In the street they paused uncertainly. It had grown quite cold.

“I’ll see you home,” said Carr.

Her lips formed the word “No,” but she didn’t say it. Instead she looked around at him and, after a moment: “All right. But it’s a long walk.”

The Loop was deserted except for the chilly darkness and the hungry wind. They walked rapidly. They didn’t say much. His arm was linked tightly around hers.

They crossed the river over the Michigan Bridge, where the wind had an open channel. Moored, perhaps a block up the river, was a large black hulk that looked to Carr like the motor-barge he had seen earlier in the evening. Now it seemed a funeral boat, coffin-shaped, built to carry coffins—a symbol of endings.

Carr’s vague notion of making himself a friend of this girl, of solving the mystery of her existence, of helping her get a real hold on life, died in the cold ebb of night. No. Marcia was his girl—he’d patch things up with her somehow. This was just…a weird night.

As if sensing his thoughts, Jane shrank closer to his side.

They turned down a street where big houses hid behind black space and trees. They crossed another street, passing a stylishly archaic lamp with a pane splintered into odd spears. Then the trees closed in again and it grew darker than ever.

She stopped in front of a high iron gate that stood open a couple of feet.

All at once he got the picture in his mind he had been fumbling for all night. It fitted Jane, her untidy expensive clothes, her arrogant manner. A rich man’s daughter, overprotected, neurotic, futilely rebellious, tyrannized by relatives or servants. Everything mixed up, futilely and irremediably, in the way only money can manage.

“It’s been so nice,” she said in a choked voice, not looking at him. “So nice to pretend.” Her small sobs (if they were that) trailed off. Still without looking at him, she squeezed his hand, standing close to him so that her side pressed his, as if gathering courage to leave him and go in. He turned fully toward her, embraced her, and as her face came up, kissed her full on the lips.

She yielded to the kiss and he became aware that he was reacting physically. The need which Marcia had aroused earlier in the evening returned with unexpected force. She made a slight effort to pull away from him. He quickly shifted his hand to the small of her back and pressed her to him, while his other hand dropped hers and caressed the back of her neck while the kiss kept on.

She did pull back then with a gasping chuckle and looked at him, almost comically, a startled question. He nodded ruefully, looked down, and gave a little shrug, as if to say, “I didn’t plan on it happening.”

“Oh Lord,” she said in consternation that was again more comic than not. “Look, Carr, it’s much too cold out here and I simply can’t ask you in, but I can’t leave you like that.” A mischievous look came into he eyes and something of her earlier merriment retuned as she grabbed his hand. “But first let’s get into a little shadow.”

And as she tugged him through the gate and toward one of its big pillars, she told him swiftly and eagerly, “When I was twelve years old there was an older boy cousing staying with us and we became great chums. He was going out on his first dates and as you can image, I became very interested in his erotic experience, you might say, his amatory progress. When he was on a date I’d stay awake and afterward sneak over to his room to hear how it had gone, whether he’d scored or not, and how. Now wait a minute—”

She had him backed against the side pillar, next to some shrubbery. She searched her small handbag, said, “Damn,” under her breath, looked up, he glimpsed something pale slip down into the shrubbery, her eyes widened, “Just the thing!” she said with a grin as she impudently snatched his handkerchief from his breast pocket and clipped its corner between his little and ring fingers, then went down with it.

She resumed, “Now when he hadn’t scored, which was quite often, and was suffering form it, was all ‘het up,’ he’d say, he taught me how to fix that up for him, give him a helping hand, as you might say.”

Carr chose that moment to begin unbuttoning the top buttons of her cardigan and of the blouse beneath. He felt his own zipper being loosened and the cold, cold tips of her first two fingers and her thumb creep to the root of his phallus and walk round it knowingly, sometimes caressing, sometimes probing deeply, sometimes feather-touching. Carr reversed the hand, palm for back, that had done unbuttoning, and thrust it gently down into the warm space between her small, small breasts, then worked out either way to the surprisingly large nipples. Time passed, with more activities. Their cold noses and warm mouths nuzzles each other’s face. He feather-touched and felt the aureoles life and roughen. Her still-cool fingertips moved to his glans and pushed his stretched foreskin all the way back so they could trace the groove around its base. His fingertips darted from nipple to large nipple, patting and pressing each all the way around, while his other hand belatedly slipped down inside her skirt, across her indrawn belly and surprisingly close-shaven skin below, found her cleft, her clitoris, and caressed it. She drew his foreskin down, then pushed it back. Time raced, more things happened, the pain was exquisite. She gasped, he came and she embraced his coming through his handkerchief. She chuckled and he whinnied just a little.

Some moment passed and she drew back from him.

“Please don’t come in with me,” she whispered. “And please don’t stay and watch.”

Carr knew why. She didn’t want him to see the lights wink agitatedly on, perhaps hear the beginning of an accusing, rackingly solicitous tirade. It was her last crumb of freedom—to leave him with the illusion that she was free.

He whimsically kissed her helping hand, then took her lightly in his arms. He felt in the darkness the tears on her cold cheek wetting his.

Then she had broken away. There were footsteps running up a gravel drive. He turned and walked swiftly away.

In the sky, through the black trees, shined the first paleness of dawn.

Ecstasy, or the shadow of it, throbbed and undulated in the lightening night.