When her anger had passed she was able to think coldly and clearly. She would get a divorce. She would get a divorce as quickly and with as little trouble as possible. She would go to Las Vegas and when it was over, if he would still have her, she would marry Charley Long.
But a thought nagged at her. She tried to thrust the thought from her mind but it kept returning and she had to consider it, and considering it she could not think coldly and clearly. She grew to like it more and more. It appealed to her: Jack was depending on her to save him from V. He needed her as a shield, if she left him she would be failing him, and somehow, with this, her dignity and self-respect were safe.
Each morning she got up and went to work and came home again to the often empty house, not because she was waiting for Jack to speak, but because she was turning the matter over in her mind. Gone was the cold determination she had had at first, and the more she thought that Jack must need her desperately, the stronger she felt. She liked the role she would soon be playing. And Saturday when the phone call came she almost welcomed it, although she was frightened and demoralized by the voice that came over the wire.
The woman’s voice was smooth and self-assured, strange to her, and yet she had known that voice for a long time. It was as though she had lived with that voice as long as she had lived with Jack, and hated it as long as she had loved him.
“This is V,” the voice said.
Gene held the phone away from the sudden loudness of her breathing. Her fingers looked white and lifeless against the black instrument.
“Hello?” said the phone.
“Hello,” Gene said.
“Is this Gene?”
“Yes.”
“Could you meet me at three at the El Cortez? I think…”
“Yes,” Gene said. “Yes.”
And they arranged a meeting, as though they were two old friends who hadn’t seen one another for a long time. She was to meet V at the Sky Room of the El Cortez Hotel, where she had told Jack she would marry him.
She had never known fear as she knew it then. She tried, as she had already tried so many times, to imagine what V was like. Now she would know, and she told herself it was always easier to fight something you knew. But she was afraid, and then she tried not to think about V as she pressed her black suit and carefully dressed and fixed her face and combed her hair. She put on her black hat with the short veil, her black gloves and her Chesterfield, and then she called a taxi.
But in the ascending elevator, staring at the tightly tailored back of the elevator operator, she felt completely alone and shabby and inadequate, with too much and too many against her, and her courage was almost gone. The elevator stopped, the doors opened on sunlit glass and she walked dazedly across the room to a table in the farthest corner. She ordered a straight bourbon and looked at her watch. It was ten minutes to three, and she should have been late. In ten minutes V would come.
Then her courage was completely gone and in its place came utter panic. What was she doing here? What could she ever gain by seeing V, whom she hated too much and feared too much and who was so much stronger than she that she had made of her, Gene’s, marriage a hateful and rotten thing? What could she do but lose, and losing now lose altogether the dignity and self-respect she thought she could save? She couldn’t face it; as though it were a dark night and she could not turn to face the demon that followed her, as though if she did not turn the demon could not be there. She fumbled a dollar from her change purse, snatched up her bag and gloves and fled toward the elevator.
The burnished arrow circled the burnished arc and stopped. The elevator doors opened and she brushed against someone as she blindly thrust herself forward. A hand touched her arm, the voice said, “You’re Jack’s wife, aren’t you?”
A cry of terror almost pushed from her throat. She forced herself to look at the source of the voice, feeling the muscles pull tight at the corners of her mouth and in her throat. She could not separate the details of the face she saw from the whole, she saw no eyes, mouth, nose, hair, as such; she saw only a face that had known always what she was only now learning, learning now in this moment, and what she would learn in years to come, and knew too what she could never learn and would never want to learn. The face was beautiful and ruthless and was all to Gene that she herself was not and could never be, and then she saw the pity in it and her knees turned to liquid and she felt as though she must faint.
“No,” she whispered. “No, I have to go. Let me go, please.”
She almost cried out as she saw the elevator doors close, the arrow arch down. Her eyes, bright and hot with tears, searched for the call button; she found it, pushed; the arrow continued to arch away. She looked wildly for the stairs.
“Wait,” V said.
“No,” she whispered. “No. Let me go,” but paralyzed, she made no move. She saw Vs face turn hard and white. The gold choker around her neck sparkled dazzlingly in the sun and Gene’s eyes were caught and held by it.
“You’ve got to divorce him,” V whispered. “We can’t go on like this. None of us. You’ve got to…”
“He hates you,” Gene said. “He hates you. I can’t.”
There was no pity in V’s face now. “You must!”
“No,” Gene moaned. “Let me alone, you…” She saw the bronze arrow swinging up. It stopped and the doors slid open. People pushed out past her and she stumbled against V. She sobbed aloud as their arms touched.
“Wait, Gene,” V said, but sobbing, she covered her ears with her gloved hands and ran into the elevator. The operator stared at her with impersonal curiosity. “Down!” she cried at him. “Take me down!”
As the elevator doors slid together she raised her face. Through a hot, salt film she could see V shining in the closing rectangle, the sun bright on her blonde hair and gold choker, and in her brown eyes pain, and the horrible pity. Then the doors clanged softly shut and the floor dropped away beneath her feet, down and down, and she pressed her hands to her face and sobbed with humiliation.