In Love by Alfred Hayes

Author:Alfred Hayes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-07-01T04:00:00+00:00

6

THE DOOR opened cautiously on its length of chain, and one eye, the eye of my favorite Cyclops, regarded me.

Are you drunk? she said. You smell drunk, not knowing whether she should open the door or risk my making a disturbance there in the hall. She thought she knew me well enough to suppose that if she did not open the door I would make a disturbance. The possibility of my making one was enough, for I had acquired somehow the reputation of being occasionally violent, and she did not want that sort of a scandal, with me knocking at the bolted door, and all the neighbors out in the hallway, and somebody perhaps going for the police. I looked to her, I suppose, through the narrow aperture, bleak enough at that moment to seem capable of assaulting her door knob; but I wouldn’t have. Had she closed the door firmly, had she threatened to telephone the police, stiff with a ridiculous contempt for her I’d have turned and descended the dirty stairs again. For I was not the lover who strangled her; I was not the demented pounder on doors. She knew me badly, really. She overestimated the violence in me. She took the chain off, and opened the door.

I looked quickly over the living room; the bed was not disturbed. She wore a skirt and a high turtle-neck black sweater. She had evidently just come into the house. I had intended to be cold, but somewhere a pulse was beating away uncontrollably.

Why didn’t you wait until tomorrow to tell me? I said.

What difference would one day have made? she answered.

And what difference would it? I knew, too, in that common knowledge we shared, that we had come to the end of it; that nothing, the delay of a day, kisses or going to bed again, would have changed it; nevertheless, it seemed to me that I would have had some mysterious satisfaction and would have accepted it more easily if we had, this one final night, gone to bed together. It seemed to me that this was all I wanted, and that it was not too much to have asked or expected. My bitterness seemed all based on the fact that I had been deprived of that very final night. Her face, the room itself, its details, the bed covered and against the wall, pressed on me with an intolerable weight. The pulse continued to pound; I was aware of my hands, how hot they were, and dry.

Now she was searching my face anxiously to see how agitated I was, and what it was I intended to do. She did not believe that I would hurt her, and yet she was afraid that I might hurt her. But she was in no danger. She would have been struck by nothing heavier than a laborious adjective. She was quite safe, and needed only to have permitted me to exhaust the not very effective phrases with which I clumsily tried

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