“Your eye! What happened to your eye, Peggy?”
“It’s nothing. What do you want, Jim? I was in bed,” she said impatiently.
“What happened to your eye?” he asked, raising his voice as he pushed his way in and closed the door. She was in her bare feet, which were so surprisingly small that he couldn’t take his eyes off them. “You’re in your bare feet,” he said. “The floor’s cold. Where are your slippers?”
“Here.” She went to the bed and put them on. “You don’t have to worry about my eye,” she said, watching him take off his coat.
“Somebody should. What happened?”
“I was having a drink with Henry. And I had a little disagreement with him, and he got pretty sore. Well, he punched me.” Her eyes were bright, vindictive, and hard. “It was something I said to him,” she added tentatively, waiting for him to ask what she had said.
But he didn’t ask. Instead he put his hands gently on her head and turned her face to the light. “It’ll be all blue tomorrow,” he said. “It’s closing now. What did you do for it? I think I’d better put some cold compresses on it.”
He got a face cloth from her dresser and marched resolutely along the hall to the bathroom to soak the cloth in cold water. Against the bathroom window lay the shadow of an icicle. Opening the window he knocked it off and broke it into lumps which he wrapped up in the face cloth, and then he returned to the room where she waited, sitting cross-legged on the bed, smiling to herself.
“All right, put your head back on the pillow,” he said. And when she lay back he tried to tell her all the secrets of his heart in the way his fingers touched her cheeks, touching her with a gentle reverence that made her smile. He caressed her head and stroked her hair. All his motions were full of tender concern. And gradually the bruised and swollen eye emerged in a fantastic contrast with her other eye and her dainty fair head and tranquil body. The bruise was a mark of wildness on her; it was a glimpse of a strange mixture of peace and wildness, and his heart began to swell and he stared at the shadow under her chin and the shadow between her breasts. Then he trembled and looked again at the bruise and he put his hands on her head and he held her and kissed her. His right hand slid down boldly under her nightgown, and cupped her breast, and when she squirmed they were both lost in a pulling, tearing ecstasy, trying to hold each other in some embrace that eluded them.
He whispered, and she answered him in a savage whisper, neither hearing what the other said. Then her soft little body was convulsed. He couldn’t hold on to it, and she slid away from him and off the bed where she stood facing him, trembling.
“No! I say, no! Don’t, Jim. Don’t,” she said doggedly. She backed over against the dresser. On the wall behind her was the drawing he had done of her – “Peggy the Crimper.”
There were two red spots on her cheeks, his finger marks on her shoulder, and a flush mounted from her neck while she held her kimono tight across her breasts. He took a slow step toward her, his eyes on the clenched fist holding the kimono, waiting for the fingers to open, the arm to drop, the sudden agitated yielding. And his hand went out, thinking she needed only to feel the compulsion of his own desire in order to believe she had been persuaded against her will and so could do what she wanted to do.
“I love you, Peggy,” he whispered. “I’ve loved you all the time. I have to be with you, darling. Don’t fight against me. Let it be easy, darling.”
“Oh, stop it!” she cried, wheeling away in anger from his outstretched hand, and he thought she was going to hit him. “If I wanted to let you touch me I would. What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see I don’t want it?”
“Oh!” he said, feeling stupid. “I thought—” he began, stammering awkwardly.
“I don’t care what you thought.”
“I got it wrong. I can see I got it wrong,” he said. His humiliation blinded him to the meaning of her anger. He did not realize that his kindness and love had broken through the passive indifference she had shown that day when he had tried to kiss her, and that now she had to resist and struggle not only against him, but against herself. He knew he had hurt her, but he did not see that he had done it by arousing her own desire. He did not see that, if she yielded, she yielded also to him her view of her life and of herself. He was also too bewildered to realize that she was now afraid of his gentle concern and his passion, and that it tormented her more now than any pressure all the others could bring to bear against her.
“I apologize,” he said, feeling miserable.
“Oh, all right, all right,” she said grudgingly. “I like you. Like being with you. You’re sort of there to rely on. I do rely on you. You’re clumsy, but gentle. Only it doesn’t mean that…”
“I know,” he said. The little motions he made, fumbling with his tie, adjusting his coat, reminded him of his unattractive love making and he blushed. If only she weren’t watching him fumbling with his coat! Then there flashed into his mind a picture of Henry Jackson and the faces of Wolgast’s grinning clients; he heard their jeering laughter: “You see, you’re not dark meat.” And the cords in his throat tightened and his head began to sweat, but in his heart came one pathetic cry. Why couldn’t she be a virgin? Virginity would be so becoming to her.
“I talked to Henry Jackson,” he said, trying to smile.
“Oh!”
“He talked as if you were his girl.”
“Well—”
“As if you had been in love with him.”
“Henry has to feel someone is in love with him.”
“I don’t like to think of – well, tell me on thing, will you?”
“What?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Oh!” She smiled faintly. “How about Catherine Carver?”
“She was married. Will you tell me? Are you?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s the way it should be, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“You certainly take a direct method of trying to find out, don’t you, Jim? Yet it’s interesting. Very interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
“I seem to remember a little conversation about whether I was corrupt – or was it whether I attracted brutality and corruption?”
“I – I remember.”
“I do seem to bring it out in you, judging by your performance just now,” she said dryly. “I think some of those Negroes you worry about would agree with me, don’t you?”
“I made a mistake. I make mistakes with you because I love you. I thought Jackson had been your lover. People think so, Peggy.”
“I told you I had been very fond of Henry.”
“I still don’t know what it was like between you. What made you take to him?”
“It’s hard to know sometimes,” she said, “but I think I know why Henry appealed to me. He has a chip on his shoulder. But I knew why, Jim. Henry has pure feelings, and he gets hurt so easily. He’s always angry but he doesn’t want to be.”
“And he’s lame.”
“Yes, he’s lame. And he’s always in flight.”
“Always on the run.”
“On the run. Yes, in a sense,” she said, looking surprised. But he believed he could see where Henry fitted in with the Johnson family and the St. Antoine people, and he was glad.
“Maybe I still seem a little like a stranger,” he said. “Maybe later on, when you get used to me, it could be easier for both of us.”
“You worry me,” she said. “Why the hell I keep having you around, I don’t know. In heaven’s name please don’t be so humble! I hate it.”
“I – well…” he began helplessly. Then the wind rattled a loose window pane and he turned. “The glass there is loose. Isn’t there always a draft on you?”
“It rattled all last night,” she said, going toward the window. “I had a piece of paper in there to tighten it.”
“Has it come out?”
“I think I can fix it,” she said, pressing the folded paper tighter between the frame and the glass. “There.”
“I’m sick of this zero weather. I’m sick of the snow,” he said.
“So am I. Aren’t we due for a January thaw?”
“It’ll come. It always comes.”
“I like the summer better. I like the hot summer in the city,” she said.
“That’s odd. I like the city in the summer, too. It doesn’t get too hot for me.”
“Me neither,” she said. “Well, I might as well make some coffee.”
She put on the kettle, and while it was boiling she went to the mirror to examine the bruise. Her face was close to the mirror, and standing beside her, he showed her that the bruise was really under the eye. “Maybe it won’t blacken at all,” he said. “What a break that would be!” she said hopefully. The kettle began to boil. She measured out the coffee. He poured in the water. Doing these things with her delighted him, and he knew that he only needed the right to share this part of life in the room to have her under the siege of his love. When they were drinking the coffee he grew cunning. It was difficult for him to do any work at the Ritz, he complained. Phones rang, maids walked in, he wandered down to the lobby. “I don’t see how you get anything done there,” she said. Nodding, he led her on.
What he needed was a little place he could use as an office, a place where no one would bother him. When she agreed he said, “Say, why couldn’t I come here in the afternoons, Peggy?”
“You mean use my room?”
“I wouldn’t be in your way. You wouldn’t be here.”
“What do you think I am? Why, you’d be moving in on me.”
“But only when you’re not here.”
“Do you think I live my life on the sidewalk?” she asked, exasperated. “Just because you’ve found the door open a few times, is this room supposed to be a hangout?”
“I’ve just said you wouldn’t know I was here.”
“Why, you’d be living in my pocket, Jim. I don’t know what impression you have of me, but the fact is I have a private life. This room, damn it, is my castle. Well,” she added, looking around the bare room, “at least it’s my cottage. It’s the only place where I can be alone.”
“I know,” he persisted. “I wouldn’t bother you. I’d get out before you came home.”
“And you’d wonder where I had been.”
“No. Honestly I wouldn’t. I’d never ask.”
“And you seem to have taken a fancy to that bed.”
“I swear I wouldn’t bother you, Peggy,” he said, eagerly. “I’d do my work. It’s quiet here. Nobody would know I was here. I’d go before you came back.”
“In a funny kind of way I think you feel I need you here. Isn’t that it?” she asked, and when he shook his head vigorously she added, “I don’t need anybody around here.” But what she had just said surprised her. Maybe she suddenly remembered Malone barging in with her. Maybe she had some sudden doubt of herself and a remembered awareness that she liked having him around and in touch with her. “Well, if it’s so important to you,” she said reluctantly, “if you wouldn’t bother me, if you’d get out when I came home—”
“Thanks, Peggy,” he said, quietly exultant. He had wormed his way into the room, he would worm his way into her life and into her heart and take her life into his.