The Street by Ann Petry

Author:Ann Petry
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

10

AFTER MIN hung the cross over the bed, Jones took to sleeping in the living room. He could no longer see the cross, but he knew it was there and it made him restless, uneasy.

Finally it seemed to him that he met it at every turn. Wherever he looked, he saw a suggestion of its outline. His eyes added a horizontal line to the long cord that hung from the ceiling light and instantly the cross was dangling in front of him. He sought and found the shape of a cross in the window panes, in chairs, in the bars on the canary’s cage. When he looked at Min, he could see its outline as sharply as though it had been superimposed on her shapeless, flabby body.

He drew an imaginary line from her head to her feet and added another crosswise line, and thus, whenever he glanced in her direction, he saw the cross again. When she spoke to him, he no longer looked at her for fear he would see, not her, but the great golden cross she had hung over the bed.

He turned and twisted on the sofa thinking about it. Finally he sat up. Min was snoring in the bedroom. He could almost see her lower lip quiver with the blowing-out of her breath through her opened mouth. The room was filled with the sound. The dog’s heavy breathing formed an accompaniment.

It annoyed him that Min and the dog should be comfortably lost in their dreams while he was wide awake—painfully awake. He thought of Lutie’s apartment on the top floor. It was like a magnet whose pull reached down to him and drew him toward it steadily, irresistibly. He dressed quickly in the dark. He had to go up and see if she was home. Perhaps he could get another look at her.

He went steadily up the stairs, his thoughts running ahead of him. This time he would tell her that he had come to see her. She would invite him in and they would really get to know each other. The stairs creaked under his weight.

There was no light under the door of her apartment. He hesitated, not knowing what to do. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might not be home. He stared blankly at the door and then went past it, down the hall, and climbed the short flight of stairs to the roof. He stood looking down at the dark street, studying the silhouette of the buildings against the sky.

Gradually he began to discern the outline of a whole scries of crosses in the buildings. And he crept silently down the stairs and into his apartment. He didn’t undress. He took his shoes off and lay down listening to the sound of Min’s snoring, and the dog’s heavy breathing, and hating it.

He couldn’t go to sleep. His mind was filled with a vast and awful confusion in which images of Lutie warred with images of Min. His love and desire for Lutie mixed and mingled with his hatred and aversion for Min.

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