A Saucer of Loneliness (22 page)

“The way things happen,” said a voice. “Crazy.”

“What?” Killilea demanded, startled. He turned to look at the man next to him. He was a small man with pugnacious eyebrows and mild eyes, which became troubled and shy at Killilea’s barking tone. He thumbed over his shoulder and said placatingly, “Them.”

“Yeah,” said Killilea. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

The mild eyes looked comforted. The man said, “Crazy.”

The door opened. Someone came in. It wasn’t Prue. Killilea turned back to the bar.

“Waitin’ for somebody?” said his neighbor.

“Yes,” said Killilea.

“I’ll beat it if your company gets here,” said the man with the mild eyes. He breathed deeply, as if about to perform something brave. “Okay if I talk to you in the meantime?”

“Oh hell yes,” said Killilea.

“Man needs somebody to talk to,” said his neighbor. There was a taut silence as they both strove to find something to talk about, now that the amenities had been satisfied. Suddenly the man said, “Hartog.”

“What?” said Killilea. “Oh. Killilea.” They shook hands gravely. Killilea grunted, looked down at his hand. It was bleeding from a small cut in the palm. “Now how the hell did I do that?”

“Let me see,” said the man called Hartog. “Oh, I say … I don’t know what to … I think it was my fault.” He showed his right hand, on the middle finger of which was a huge, gaudily designed ring with the gold plate wearing off the corners of the mounting. The stone was gone, and one of the mounting claws pointed up, sharp and gleaming. “I lost the stone yesterday,” said Hartog. “I shouldn’t have worn it. Turned it around inside my hand like always when I come to a place like this. But what can I do?” He looked as if he were about to cry. He worried at the ring until he could get it off, and dropped it into his pocket. “I just don’t know what to say!”

“Hey, you didn’t cut my arm off, you know,” Killilea said good-naturedly. “Don’t say anything. Not to me.” Killilea pointed at the bartender. “Tell him what you’re drinking.”

They sipped companionably while the couple behind them laughed and murmured, while the jukebox unwound identical sentiments in assorted keys. “I fix refrigerators,” said Hartog.

“Chemist,” said Killilea.

“You don’t say. Mix prescriptions, and all?”

“That’s a pharmacist,” said Killilea. He was going to say more, but decided against it. He was going to say that he was a biological chemist specializing in partial synthesis, and that he’d developed one he wished he could forget about, and that it had been so fascinating that Prue had left him, and that that had made him leave chemistry to look for her. But it would have been tiring to go through it all, and he was not used to unburdening himself to people. Even so, as Hartog had said, a man needs someone to talk to. I need Prue to talk to, he thought. I need Prue, oh God, but I do. He said, abruptly, “You’re English.”

“I was once,” said Hartog. “How’d you know?”

“They call a drug store a chemist shop.”

“I forgot,” said Hartog; and this time, strangely, he seemed to be talking to himself, chidingly. Without understanding, Killilea said, “That’s all right.”

Hartog said, “I wonder if I spit on some girl she’ll pick me up.”

“It takes all kinds,” said Killilea.

“
All
kinds,” said Hartog, and nodded sagely. “All want the same thing. Each one wants to get it a different way. Hell of a thing to know what one wants, not know how she wants it.”

“Keeps it interesting,” said Killilea.

Hartog fumbled a cigarette out of a pack without removing the pack from his pocket. “One been hanging out at Roby’s, where I just was. You just
know
it about her, way she looks at everyone, way she watches.” Killilea gave him matches. Hartog used one, blew it out with smoke from his nostrils, and stared for a long time at the charred end. Funny little thing. Skinny. Everything wrong—bony here, flat there, and she got a big nose. Looks hungry. When you look at her you feel hungry too.” He looked at Killilea swiftly, as if Killilea might be laughing at him. Killilea was not. “You feel hungry, not for food, see what I mean?”

Killilea nodded.

Hartog said, “I couldn’t make it with her. Everything fine until you make
this
much—” he held a thumb and forefinger perhaps a sixteenth of an inch apart—“of a pass. Then she cares.”

“A come-on.”

“Nup,” said Hartog. He closed his eyes to look at something behind them, and shook his head positively. “I mean scared—
real
scared. Show her a snake, shoot off a gun, she wouldn’t scare like that.” He shrugged. He picked up his glass, saw it was empty, and put it down again. Killilea was aware that it was Hartog’s turn to buy. Then he noticed how carefully Hartog was keeping his eyes off Killilea’s glass, which was also empty, and he remembered the way the single cigarette had come out. He beckoned the bartender, and Hartog thanked him. “Get up a parade,” said Hartog. “Guys with ways to get a woman. Send ’em in one at a time to this funny little thing I’m telling you about. One brings sweet talk. One brings beads ’n’ bracelets. One brings troubles to get sympathy. One brings sympathy for her troubles. One brings a fishtail Cadillac an’ a four-carat blinker. One brings a hairy chest. All they going to do, all the specialists, they going to scare her, they won’t get next to her a-
tall
.”

“She doesn’t want it then.”

“You wouldn’t say that, you see her,” said Hartog, shaking his head. “Must be some way, some one way. I got a theory, there’s a way to get to anything, you can only think of it.”

Killilea swirled his drink. Bars are full of philosophers. But just now he wasn’t collecting philosophers. “You selling something?” he asked nastily.

“I’m in the refrigerator repair business,” said Hartog, apparently unaware of the insult. His ash dropped on his coat, whereupon he tapped his cigarette uselessly on the rim of an ashtray. “And why I keep talking about her, I don’t know. Skinny, like I said. Her nose is big.”

“All right, you’re not selling,” said Killilea contritely.

“Got only one ear lobe,” said Hartog. “Saw when she pushed her hair back to scratch her neck. What’s the matter, Mr. Killdeer?”

“Killilea,” said Killilea hoarsely. “Which ear?”

Hartog closed his eyes. “Right one.”

“The right one has a lobe, or the right one hasn’t?”

“Taken in parts,” said Hartog, “that’s a real homely woman. Taken altogether, I don’t know why she makes a man feel like that, but damn if she—”

Should I explain to this disyllabic solon, thought Killilea, that the day I met Prue in the men’s room she charged out and went face-first through the frosted-glass door and lost an earlobe? And that therefore I would like very much to know if this … what had the idiot said? He’d just come from … Roark’s …? Rory’s?
Roby’s!

Killilea turned and bucketed out.

The bartender blinked as the door crashed open, and then his cold professional gaze swung to Hartog. He advanced. Hartog sipped, licked his lips, sipped again, and put the empty glass down. He met the bartender’s eye.

“Your friend forget something?”

Hartog pulled a roll of bills from a jacket pocket, separated a twenty, and dropped it on the bar. “Not a thing. Take it out of this. Build me another. Have one yourself and keep the change.” He leaned forward suddenly, and for the first time spoke in a broad Oxford
accent. “You know, old chap, I’m extraordinarily pleased with myself.”

She didn’t see him when he came into Roby’s, which wasn’t surprising. He remembered how she used to lean close to see his expression when they held hands. The only reason she had been in the men’s room the day they met—what was it, four years ago? Five?—was that LADIES is a longer word than MEN, but the sign on this particular one said GENTLEMEN, and since it seemed to have more letters, she headed for it. She had glasses, good ones, but she wouldn’t wear them, not without drawing the blinds first.

He moved to a table fifteen feet from hers and sat down. She was facing him almost directly, wearing the old, impenetrable, inturning expression he used to call her fogbound look. He had seen that face that way in happiness and in fright, in calm rumination and in moments of confusion; it was an expression to be read only in context. So he looked at the hands he knew so well, and saw that the left was flat on the table and the right palm upon it, pressing it from wrist to knuckles, over and over in a forceful sliding motion that would leave the back of the right hand hot and red and tender.

That’s all I need to know, he said to himself, and rose and went to her. He put his big hand gently down on hers and said “It’s going to be all right, Prue.”

He pulled a chair close to her and silently patted her shoulder while she cried. When a waiter came near he waved the man away. In due time, he said, “Come home, Prue.”

Her strange face whipped up, close to his. It was flogged, flayed, scored with the cicatrices of sheer terror. He had her hands and gripped them tightly as she started to rise. She sank down limply, and again she had the fogbound face. “Oh no, Killy; no. Never. Hear me, Killy? Never.”

There was only one thing to say “—why?”—and since he knew that if he said nothing, she must answer the question, he was quiet, waiting.

Prue, Prue … in his mind he paraphrased the odd fantasy of Hartog, the barfly he had met this evening: Get up a parade. Ask the specialists, one by one, what do you think of a girl like Prue? (Correction: what do you think of Prue? There were no girls
like
Prue.)
Send in a permanent secretary of the Ladies Auxiliary:
Sniff!
Send in a social worker:
Tsk!
A Broadwayite:
Mmm
 … A roué: Ah …! The definition for Prue, like beauty, could be found only in the eye of the beholder. Killilea had one, a good one. For Killilea—perhaps because he was a steroid chemist and familiar with complex and subtle matters—saw things from altitudes and in directions which were not usual. Prue lived in ways which, in aggregate, are called sophistication; but Killilea had learned that the only true sophistication lies in exemplary and orthodox behavior. It takes a wise, careful and deeply schooled gait to pace out the complicated and shifting patterns of civilized behavior. It takes a nimble and fleet hypocrisy to step from conflict to paradox among the rules of decency. A moral code is an obstinate anagram indeed. So Prue, thought Killilea, is an innocent.

And never to be with him again? Never?
Why?

“It would kill you,” she explained finally.

He laughed suddenly. “We understand each other better than that, Prue. What awful thing has happened to me, then? Or what wonderful thing has happened to you?”

Then she told him about Karl. She told him all about it. “The men’s floor of that silly hotel,” she finished. “It seemed a sort of—different thing to do. We conspired … and it was funny.”

“Getting out of there wasn’t funny,” he conjectured.

“No,” she said.

“Poor Prue. I read about it in the papers.”

“What? The papers?”

“About Karl’s death, Miss Misty. Not about you!… He was quite an important man, you know.”

“Was he?”

Killilea had long since ceased to be amazed at Prue’s utter inability to be impressed by the things that impress everyone else. “He was a sort of columnist. More like an essayist. Most people read him for his political commentaries. Some people thought he was a poet. He shouldn’t have died. We need people like him.”

“He liked
The Little Prince
and mango chutney and he would rather look at penguins than baby rabbits,” said Prue, stating her
qualifications. “I killed him, don’t you understand?”

“Prue, that’s ridiculous. They had an autopsy and everything. It was heart failure.”

She put her left hand flat on the table and with the right pressed and slid cruelly. “Prue,” he said. She stopped.

“I did, Killy. I know I did.”

“How do you know you did?”

That terror flitted across her face again.

“You can tell me, Prue.”

“Because.” She looked up into his face, leaning forward in that swift, endearing, myopic way. She so seldom really wanted to look at anything, he thought. The things she knows … the way she thinks … she doesn’t
need
to see. “Killy, I couldn’t bear it if you died. And you’d die.”

He snorted. Gently, then, he asked her, “That isn’t why you went away, is it?”

“No,” she said without hesitation. “But it’s why I stayed away.”

He paused to digest that. “Why did you go away?”

“You weren’t you any more.”

“Who was I?”

“Someone who didn’t look at the snow before it had footprints, someone who read very important papers all the way through the crepe Suzettes, someone who didn’t feed the goldfish,” she said thoughtfully, and added, “Someone who didn’t need me.”

“Prue,” he began, and cast about for words. He wished devoutly that he could talk to her in terms of ketoprogesterone and the eleventh oxygen in a four-ring synthesis. “Prue, I stumbled on something terribly important. Something that … you know those old horror stories, all built on the thesis that there are certain mysteries that man should not know? I always sneered at them. I don’t any more. I was interested, and then fascinated, and then I was frightened, Prue.”

“I know, Killy,” she said. There was deep understanding in her voice. She seemed to be trying as hard as he was to find words. “It was important.” The way she used the term included “serious” and “works of the world” and even “pompous.”

“Don’t you see, Killy,” she said earnestly, “that you can have
something important, or you can have me? But you can’t have both.”

There was a gallant protest to be made at this point, and he knew better than to make it. If he told her how very important she was, she would look at him in astonishment—not because she could not realize her importance to him, but because he would have so badly misused the term. He understood her completely. There was room in his life for Prue and his work when he built on his steroid nuclei as Bach built on a theme, surely and with joy. But when the work became “important,” it excluded Prue and crepe Suzettes and a lovingly bitten toe: music straight from a sunset rather than a sunset taken through music; the special sting across the sight from tears of happiness; and all the other brittle riches that give way when that which is “important” grows greater to a man than that which is vital. And she was perfectly right in saying that he had not needed her then.