ABRUPT AS ANGER, depression plunged through him. It was one hell of an assignment.
“You’ll find some angle,” John Minify said.
“It’ll need an angle all right.” He squinted his eyes and looked off past Minify’s shoulder as if he were taking the measure of some palpable thing there.
“Take your time on it.” Minify spoke without urgency. “I think you might turn out a great job.”
Philip Green nodded, not in agreement with the comfortable words, but in affirmation of his own estimate of the job ahead. It would be flabby, lifeless, unless he found some special approach to it. Instinct, experience, past failures as well as past successes, all helped him now in his quick appraisal.
“If you want,” Minify went on, “we’ll borrow the clips on it from some newspaper morgue. There’d be plenty of names of agencies and committees to start on.”
“Committees.” The certainty of future boredom, of wasted listening, laced his depression with resentment. Minify surely could have found a more manageable subject for his first job as a staff writer. “The clips would help,” he said. “Thanks.” He half closed his eyes, drew his lower lip in taut over his teeth as if he were shaving his chin, and sat thinking. “I’ll start researching it, anyway. There must be plenty of dope around.”
“I wouldn’t force this series on you,” Minify said. “Knock it around awhile and we’ll talk again.”
“O.K.” Phil stood up, without finality. He was in his middle thirties, tall, too thin, with an intelligent, decent face. Eyes and hair were dark; he had begun to go gray. There was a quiet about him, an absence of aggression, yet there was no diffidence in his voice or manner.
“You certainly didn’t hand me a pushover for a starter,” he said at last. It was matter-of-fact, bare of complaint or chiding. It would take more than a disappointing assignment to topple his admiration for Minify or lessen his confidence in him as an editor. “Would anybody read five articles about antisemitism?” He saw Minify nod. “Three million readers?”
Minify didn’t answer. He leaned forward toward his desk, propped his chin on the knuckles of his closed hand. Then he swiveled the hand about so that the thumb stood up vertically across the corner of his mouth. He seemed all at once absorbed in another idea. His thumb tapped lightly against his lips, in a one-two-three, one-two-three rhythm. Phil smiled. Minify was considering three million readers out there somewhere across all the towns and cities of the land.
“No,” Minify said at last. “You couldn’t print anything in God’s world all three million would read. But some of them will.”
“Sure. And will it do any good?”
Minify tipped his head back so he could look directly at Phil. “Did your Okie pieces or your mine pieces ‘do any good’?”
Phil smiled. “That’s nailing me. Fathead question.”
“It didn’t take that Roper survey to tell me it’s getting worse. You feel it. It gets you either mad or uneasy. I mean me.”
“Or baffled.”
“So you can bet it’s hitting plenty of people that same way. If you find some strong way to write it, it’ll get read.”
“If.”
Minify offered his half-empty pack of cigarettes as if he counted on a refusal, the way you used to during the cigarette shortage. He lit one himself and then sat examining his lighter. He snapped the flame on and off several times, watching it flare up and snuff out. He gave it a last decisive click and stood up.
“Getting to know people here?”
“Not so many. I’m always slow about that. It’s fine, though. My kid likes it, and my mother. She always wanted to live in New York.”
“Have you any relatives here? Or are they all in California, too?”
Phil shook his head to both questions. Minify’s concern on this personal level pleased him. “One of my sisters is out there, and the other lives in Detroit. Grosse Pointe, rather.”
“I’ve been meaning to introduce you,” Minify began vaguely. Then his manner lost its air of improvising. “How about tonight at my place? We’re having some people over. Couple of girls and people.”
“Thanks. I’d like to.”
The editor told him where, and they shook hands with a touch of formality, as if each suddenly remembered he didn’t know the other well. With an inexplicable embarrassment, Phil took up his coat and hat and left quickly. He went down the long corridor, past open-doored offices in which people were talking or laughing. The shyness of the outsider came over him. Though the line “By Schuyler Green” was known to every one of them, he himself was a stranger. Working at home was the setup he’d asked for, but it would be wise, now that he was on the staff, to come in every day until he got to know some of these editors and writers. At once the idea disturbed him. On an assignment, he was never shy about meeting and interviewing people, but to make new social contacts was another thing. His mind ran from this self-recognition, with a hurried promise to do something about the office soon.
In the reception room, he stopped to put on his overcoat. The receptionist gave him a neat, exact smile, a precise replica of the one she had bestowed each of the other three times he had come in or gone out through the double glass doors that announced Smith’s Weekly Magazine. The scene was a replica of the other times, too; in the dark-red armchairs the usual assortment of people waited the signal to go in to their appointments. Could any of these unknowns be some writer whose name and work were perfectly familiar? The notion made him look around once more. With the exception of best-selling authors and syndicated columnists, whose faces looked out of endless book advertisements, reviews, and columns, there was an anonymity about most writers. Perhaps some of these waiting people in the reception room knew his name and work and would yet look blankly at his stranger’s face. In his anonymity, he smiled comfortably, and went out to the elevators.
In the street, he turned toward Fifth Avenue. In the two weeks since he’d become a resident of New York, he had passed the stage where he had to watch two successive street signs to see whether he was headed uptown or down. At the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth, he turned south and began to walk rapidly in the thin December sunlight. Soon he was striding along as if he were hurrying to a specific place at a specific time. Actually he was walking only so that he could think more rapidly about the new assignment. Already the search for the “angle” completely occupied him. He might take one Jewish family in some particularly antisemitic section and trace its life in the past few years. No, a long string of articles on that would bore readers to death. His mind pushed the notion aside, darted in new directions, hunting possibilities, exploring, rejecting. Again he was depressed. For days he’d be in for the old familiar sequence—hope as an idea flared bright, then unease and self-mistrust as closer examination snuffed it out. Like Minify’s lighter.
It was the rhythm of all living, apparently, and for most people. Happiness, and then pain. Perhaps then happiness again, but now, with it, the awareness of its own mortality. He had made an honest enough search for happiness—in the last year or two, at any rate. All he had found was transience.
The sting of cold air in his throat told him he had sighed deeply. “Cut the philosophy,” he told himself testily. He walked on now, thinking of nothing, merely watching, seeing, noting. At Thirty-fifth Street, he turned left, to the remodeled brownstone house just east of Park where he lived. In the vestibule he took out his keys, tapped the bell, and let himself in without waiting. Above, a door opened. His mother’s voice said, “That you, Tom?” and he said, “No, it’s me.” He went up the carpeted steps slowly, suddenly thinking about his mother. Her voice sounded older than her sixty-eight years; all the chivying details of transcontinental moving had been hard on her.
“How was it, Phil?” she greeted him.
“O.K. I’ve got the hell of a stiff assignment.”
She sat down, waiting. He wandered about the wide, tall-ceilinged room in which their own furniture and books looked so different from the way they had in the house in California. When the extra bookshelves were built in and the rest of his books taken out of the stacked cartons, it would be a pleasant room; he would like working in it. This and his mother’s room in the rear of the whole-floor apartment were the only good things about it; the kitchen and bathroom had air-suction outlets instead of windows, and the two “hall bedrooms” which were for him and Tom were smaller than their bathroom out in California.
Yet when Minify had told him that he could sublease the apartment from an editor who had been newly assigned to the London office, Minify had said, “Better grab it, whatever it is. The Coast isn’t the only place with a desperate housing shortage.” He had grabbed it and considered himself lucky.
Actually, the very oddness of living in a rectangular shelf of space rather than in a house set to the earth among bushes and trees had so far stimulated rather than dampened his spirits. He had sought basic change in the patterns of his life. This apartment was physical proof that he had found it, or, at any rate, one facet of it.
He remembered that his mother was waiting for him to go on. “Minify wants me to write a series,” he said, “five, six articles, on antisemitism in America.”
“That’s good.” She underlined the “good” with approval.
“If I could find some way to make it good.”
“I mean, most big magazines—it’s nice Mr. Minify wants to do it. You can do such a fine thing on it.”
“Minify’s a strange guy. I liked him even better today than the first time.” He lit a cigarette. “He’s all hopped up about the job I could do, just like you.”
“And you’re not?”
He frowned. “It’s a toughie.”
“You’ll do a wonderful series, dear.” She sounded placid. He remembered Minify’s comfortable words and was all at once irritated with both of them. It was so easy to say, “This is a great theme and you’ll write a great series.”
“Christ, I will if I can get some idea.” His voice flung exasperation at her. “But not just if I spin out the same old drool of statistics and protest.” He walked over to the window, looked down on the street. Without turning around, he added a moment later, “Sorry.”
“That’s all right. How about some coffee?” She started toward the small kitchen.
“Fine. Damn assignment’s got me in a sweat already.”
A hundred times he vowed never to talk to her in that quick sharpness, yet a moment would come when it sprang out as if he had no power to halt it in his throat. Once he had apologized, too earnestly, and she had said, “It’s all right. It’s because you’re not happy enough.” At his silence, she had added, “Being lonely makes people snap. Tension, I suppose.”
Now he waited a moment and then followed her to the kitchen. “Where’s Tom?” he asked conversationally. “It’s nearly four.”
“Across the street at Jimmy Kelly’s.” She looked at him and smiled. “He makes new friends so easily, Phil.”
“Yeah.” Suddenly he felt obscure pride in himself. Tommy, at eight, without a mother since infancy, was relaxed, outgiving, never “the problem child.” Somehow, then, he, Phil, had done a sound job of concealing the unevenness of his own moods all these seven years.
“I told him not to be too long,” Mrs. Green added. “Belle’s in town.”
“Again?” His sister had flown in from Detroit to help them get settled the day they’d arrived in the East.
“Just for today—Christmas shopping.”
“Aren’t Detroit stores good enough for her? That Belle. She’s the golden sheep in this family for fair.”
“Now, Phil.”
“O.K.” Suddenly he grinned. “She is a little hard to take at times, and you know it.”
“So are you, dear, but it’s worth it.”
“Sure, sure. I’d hate to think I’d stodgied up as much as she has in the last few years, though.” Mrs. Green made no comment. When the coffee was ready, Phil took his cup, said, “Think I’ll start jotting down some notes,” and went back to the living room. “I’ll quit when she gets here,” he added.
But when the downstairs bell rang half an hour later, he left his desk and went to his room. It was too small to serve as a study, taking only a tall chest, one big reading chair, and a narrow bed. He puttered about, dissatisfied, with what he did not know. He drew out a bureau drawer, closed it, and drew out another, as if he were searching for something. At his desk, he had ordered himself to think about the assignment, but like a fractious child, his mind had refused to comply. This was another sign, he thought dismally, that his flash appraisal in Minify’s office had been correct. There was in him no itch to get at it, the way there was when instinct told him he had a “natural” by the tail. As he had said, it was going to be the hell of an assignment and the bitch of a job to bring the stuff alive.
There was a knock at the door. “Hi, Belle,” he called, and she opened the door.
“Mamma says you’re working.” She made it a gentle accusation. “Come out a minute and tell me about the new job.”
When he told her, she said, “I should think he’d have assigned it to a Jewish writer.”
“Why? I’m not blind, am I?”
Belle went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “Anyway, I just wonder. You can’t scold people into changing.”
“Who said anything about scolding?” Phil asked, and Mrs. Green said, “Now, Belle, you don’t mean that. It’s not like you.”
Belle began to elaborate her point, but Phil scarcely listened. There was a flat certainty about her statements which irritated him. He had noticed it on her other trip and decided she had changed a good deal during the war years. The difficulties of travel had kept her away from the Coast; for five years they had not seen her. Apparently she regarded New York as a neighboring town of Grosse Pointe.
He sat, dispirited and silent, looking at her and wondering how he could get off by himself again. Belle was handsome, slender, expensively dressed. He looked at her attentively, as if she were someone he would have to describe accurately on paper. There were two horizontal lines grooved in her neck, like necklaces tight to the skin; he had never noticed detail of that sort before. She talked with loud animation as one does in a large room with many voices to combat; her hands moved restlessly in gesture. Now she was describing the large new house she and Dick wanted to buy.
“Did you close the sale on the old place?” Mrs. Green asked.
“Not yet. That cheap Pat Curran keeps trying to Jew us down.” She shook her head despairingly, and Phil thought her distress vulgar and ridiculous when millions of people couldn’t find a two-room flat. He saw his mother frown at her. He glanced at his watch, offered excuses about a pressing appointment, and left them.
Outside, the city was already dim with the early twilight and sharp with the clean smell of cold, but he still relished New York’s positive weather and walked into it as if into sanctuary. He wished it were his sister Mary in California instead of Belle who lived near enough for frequent visits. Belle was seven years older than he, and Mary only four; maybe that accounted for the greater closeness there’d always been between him and Mary. No, it was more than that. Mary lived in a sprawly house near the university and was lazy and easy about things; Belle had a terrific place, smart to the last ash tray. He’d been only sixteen when Belle had married Dick King. Nineteen years ago, Dick had been a college-boy draftsman, and for a long time the Kings had led an ordinary modest life like the rest of the family. Then Dick had designed the new wheel-transmission gadget that did the trick better than the one his company had been using; almost at once he’d become one of the high-priced big shots in the automotive world. That was ten years ago, and as if she’d been tensed and ready to spring, should the chance ever be offered her, Belle instantly changed into one of the “smart set” out there. “Perhaps a long transition period would have made her less of a jackass about being rich,” Phil had once remarked to Mary. Now he thought, Oh, well, and forgot her.
He’d been walking along Lexington Avenue. At Forty-second, he stopped and folded his head back on his neck as far as it would go, looking up at the Chrysler Tower. He wondered whether an atomic bomb could really vaporize it out of existence. He knew he looked like any tourist, but it did not disturb him. After two weeks he still was a tourist in his greed to examine all the great city he had only glimpsed in the brief stopovers of the past. But feeling again a tourist brought back the sense of strangeness in this new place; loneliness drifted through his mood. He began to walk again. Christmas decorations livened every shopwindow; though it was only the first day of December, the stores already bustled with shoppers for this first postwar Christmas. In December, seven years ago, Betty had died. Decembers would always be hard months for him.
Perhaps that’s why his mind was being so inelastic about the new work; perhaps that’s why he’d been so edgy over Belle.
Suddenly he remembered her despair. “That cheap Pat Curran keeps trying to Jew us down.”
His mind drew back sharply. All he’d thought then was two-room flats. The verb had glided right by him. His mother, he now realized, had been frowning about that as he was leaving. But he? He hadn’t even registered.
Maybe he was the wrong man for this series. Heart in the right place, but tone-deaf. Rot, he argued back at once. It’s just the old inertia at the start of a long pull.
At a newsstand he bought the evening papers. On the front page, dwarfed by the headlines about General Motors and the War Guilt Trial, was a story about some Brooklyn hoodlums attacking three Jewish boys. He ought to begin a file of his own clippings if he were going ahead with the series. Maggotlike, the “if” squirmed through his conscience.
Damn it, why couldn’t Minify give it to an old-timer and not load it on me for the first?
A few blocks later, he passed a newsreel theater, went by it, and then turned back to it. He read the signs about what was showing. Feeling a traitor, he fished a quarter out of his pocket and went through the turnstile. It moved oilily, without a click, and vaguely he felt cheated about everything.
He paid off his taxi and said to the doorman, “Minify, please.”
“Eighteenth, sir. To your right.”
He went into the small lobby, noted the gleam of the white border on the black linoleum floor, and turned right to a small elevator. Inside, he looked into the square of beveled, unframed mirror and straightened his tie. It was friendly of Minify to ask him, but this sort of setup was somehow jarring. Formality always dispirited him, not because he worried about being gauche, but because what he and Betty used to call “fingerbowl houses” implied alien values and importances. Something had been building between him and Minify since their first meeting two months before. He did not want it destroyed. A husky maid in black and white answered his ring, and he heard Minify calling out, “Never mind, Berta, I’ll answer it—oh, you’re already there.” He stuck out his hand and said, “Hello, Green. I might have thought of this before.”
Relief swept up in Phil. It was the same easy Minify. As he followed him into the living room, he felt a whole atmosphere of wealth, beautiful colors and fabrics. A thin middle-aged woman came toward them.
“Jessie, this is Schuyler Green I’ve been talking about. My wife.”
“I’ve read everything he ever wrote, don’t be silly, John. Good evening, Mr. Green. Kathy, this is Mr. Green. My niece, Miss Lacey.”
Simultaneously he shook hands with Jessie Minify and smiled at the girl sitting on the sofa just behind her. Mrs. Minify had small curls like gray bubbles all over her head; her voice seemed to bubble too, and he felt that the apartment was cut to her pattern and fitted nothing in Minify at all. He turned and took the hand held up to him by Miss Lacey and knew she was very pretty and that this was going to be a fine evening.
“I haven’t read everything,” Miss Lacey said, “but what I did read was—” She tipped thumb and forefinger together to form a circle and flicked the circle toward him, braking the gesture in mid-air so suddenly that her hand shook on her wrist. It was the effusive gesture for “done to a turn, monsieur,” and it struck him now as absurd and artificial. He smiled and said, “Thanks,” but the first flush of approval chilled in him. Her voice had a hint of Jessie Minify’s too-well-bred tone. He felt vaguely resentful to it, as he did to the gesture.
Through the next quick sequence of Minify’s “Scotch or rye?” and of Mrs. Minify’s “Sit over there, Mr. Green, it’s the biggest,” and of his own “Thanks, I like big chairs,” and “Scotch, please, a light one,” he kept on being aware of an uneasy disappointment. From a bar closet at the side of the room, Minify called out, “What do people call a guy whose first name is Schuyler?”
“Phil,” he answered, and everybody laughed.
“Thank God, I don’t have to say Green all the time,” Minify answered. “So hearty, last names.”
“It’s my mother’s name, my middle one. I started signing my stuff ‘Schuyler Green’ on the college paper at Stanford. Sounded ritzier to me, I guess, than Philip—like Somerset Maugham instead of William, or Sinclair Lewis instead of Harry. My literary heroes then.”
“Somerset, Sinclair, Schuyler,” Miss Lacey said. “All S’s. Maybe that means something.”
He wondered if she were laughing at him and felt stiffly young and too explanatory. In that moment also he realized that the maid Berta had held out her arms in a gesture which meant he was to give her his coat and hat and that he had not handed them over but had put them down on a chair himself. Miss Lacey was saying something about noms de plume, but he missed it, feeling embarrassed about Berta and exasperated that he should. Though he hadn’t remembered it all day he now recalled his unaccountable awkwardness that morning about shaking hands with Minify. A resigned dismay darted through him, as at the second pang of a toothache. He was in for a tight, watchful evening, after all.
“… from California?” Only the end of Miss Lacey’s question came clearly to him, but like an aftermemory on his eardrums the first part still registered. The voice was again overbright, but the words were simple and interested. He turned toward her just as Minify came back with his drink, saying, “Here, Phil, light one.” She looked natural and friendly, and he suddenly felt he had been too quick to disapprove of her. How furious he would be if somebody made judgments on him because of a gesture or tone in the first clumsiness of meeting! For the second time in a few minutes, apprehension fell back. He admonished himself to stop vacillating between tension and ease and enjoy himself. “Not my first trip,” he said to Miss Lacey. “But the first time I’ve ever come here without a steamship ticket for tomorrow or something.” She nodded, and he went on more easily with the prefaces of getting acquainted as she or Jessie Minify prodded him. All the while he kept taking an inventory of her, in quick installments, so that it should not be apparent. She was small, with lovely legs, and about twenty-eight or -nine. (“No, I wasn’t born there. But when I was seven, we moved out from Minnesota, so we all feel like Californians.”) There was a sureness about her manner and clothes which you found in New York or Hollywood or London girls, a self-confidence it was, somehow provocative. (“There was this small private hospital in Santa Barbara, my father was a doctor. I was going to study medicine, too.”) She undoubtedly wished she weighed ten pounds less, but no man would. His heart hammered once against his ribs and went back to its ordinary business. (“You did read those? I was mad, so I suppose it showed up in the writing. That’s when Mr. Minify wrote me to come East about a job.”) There was something a little wrong with her looks, but you’d call her beautiful, anyway. She had blue eyes, her hair was dark and smooth, her whole look was somehow very clean and precise and neatly tended. He turned to Mrs. Minify’s question about him and the war, but John Minify was answering it for him, and he glanced again at Katherine Lacey. She was looking up at Minify, and he saw the stretch of her throat from chin down to the dark close dress. Suddenly he knew what was wrong. By itself, in a close-up, say, her face was beautiful, but it was scaled to go with a taller girl and was top-heavy for her. A click of satisfaction accompanied this recognition. She now seemed vulnerable and human, not so perfect that he felt lumpish and nervous.
“So after eleven months of training and a month of transport, he had one vicious week of action with the Marines at Guadalcanal and then out. Isn’t that it, Phil?”
He nodded. “Except for the hospital.”
“Do you still hate to talk about it?” Mrs. Minify sounded cautious but caught in irrepressible curiosity.
“I never hated to. I wanted to tell about my operation the way everybody else always does. Only that wore off, especially after V-J Day. Now it seems a million years back.”
The talk veered off to general discussion about the new organizations for veterans. He relaxed further. The first phase of the evening was over. A benevolence went through him; he sipped his drink comfortably. Jessie Minify began some anecdote about a woman he didn’t know, and he scarcely listened. She was not the wife he would have imagined for John Minify, but she was amiable and perhaps just the right complement for his high-voltage mind. Some men preferred it that way.
Miss Lacey brought the talk back to him.
“Do you mind telling people what you’re writing, Mr. Green?”
“Not at all.” He hesitated and glanced at Minify. “Only right now I’m not writing anything—just starting a new thing.”
“I asked him to try a series on antisemitism,” Minify said. “A knockdown and drag-out at every part of it. Here, not Europe.”
Phil was watching her. She did an unexpected thing. She grinned.
“Do I get a credit line on it?”
“You, Kathy?” Minify was as astonished as he himself.
“Don’t you remember back in, oh, in the spring it was, about that Jewish girl resigning and I asked you—”
“Why, sure.” Minify looked pleased with her. “I knew somebody’d been at me but I forgot who. I’m always stealing ideas without knowing it.”
“Stealing? I gave it to you. I rammed it down your throat.” She turned to Phil. “I carried on about how the big magazines and papers and radio chains were helping spread it by staying off it except for bits here and there. And why didn’t somebody go after it the way they do taxes or strikes? Yell and scream and take sides and fight?”
Phil was watching her as if she were revealing something immensely important. The affectation in her voice was gone, or lost to his ear already. All he said was, “What I’m afraid of is just stringing those same bits—”
“I fixed it with Bill Johnson at the Times,” Minify said, reaching for Phil’s glass, “about borrowing their clips for a week or so. It’s against their rules. Another drink, Phil?”
“Thanks, this’ll do it, John.”
The first name slipped out on the rush of affection he felt for the honesty and simplicity of the man. He had long respected and admired Minify; it was surprising to like him so much. Minify was sixty, yet each time they had talked together, the quarter century between their ages ripped away and left them contemporaries. Minify looked his sixty. His roundish head was fringed with red hair, wiry and free of gray; it was a remarkable baldness since the scalp was not the glossy pink that usually tops florid complexions, but a dull walnut like tan suede, result of sporadic attempts to keep fit with a sun lamp. Below this oddly hued top, the parallel ellipses of dark eyebrows and the darker crescents of his eye sockets made his gray eyes noticeably light. Unless he stood or sat in determined erectness, his stomach bulged over his belt. But vitality rode every sentence he spoke and played large on every plan he outlined for the years ahead.
That, Phil had decided after their first long talk in October, was what made Minify seem so young. Whenever he talked of the future, he gave forth a confidence about having enough time. There was none of that anxious “I won’t be here then” which Phil nearly always found in men of sixty. Nor was there any tacit concession, as they had discussed politics, that there was any basic difference in the older point of view and the younger. In their first interview, Minify had excited in Phil a sharp desire to work with him more intimately than he had been doing as a free-lance special writer for Smith’s. Coming at a time when his life in California seemed especially flaccid, that one personal meeting with the famous editor had turned the trick.
So far he’d had no qualms or regrets, he thought now, looking from Minify to his wife to Kathy. The bell rang just then, and four other people arrived, exuberant or a little drunk. “Why, Katherine Pawling, where’ve you been keeping yourself?” one of the girls cried out as she came in. The room filled with voices and noise and movement, and at once the character of the evening changed. He talked around him vaguely for a bit and then moved to the sofa to sit by Kathy.
“What about you?” he started. “You have a pretty complete dossier on me. It’s your turn now.”
“What should I start on? I heard Aunt Jessie explaining I’d been divorced and was running a nursery school and was called Miss Lacey there.” She glanced up at him and then quickly away. The knowledgeable, experienced look that faintly irritated him deserted her for a moment. He was puzzled again; she was always offering some new facet that made it hard to stick to any estimate of what she was or whether he liked her as a person or only responded to her as a pretty girl. The things she said seemed real and good; the manner and clothes and air seemed too, in quotes, upper class. But he was drawn to her, whatever she was.
“Just anything,” he said. “And maybe you could finish at a bar or someplace when I take you home.”
“Are you?”
“May I?”
She waited a second and then nodded. Sitting side by side with her now, looking down at her, he saw the faintly raised, branching arcs just above the V neck of her dark dress. Again his heart hammered once against his ribs.