Текст книги "Rich Man, Poor Man"

Автор книги: Irwin Shaw

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Chapter 2

The office clock stood at five to twelve. Gretchen kept typing. Since it was Saturday, the other girls had already stopped working and were making up, ready to depart. Two of them, Luella Devlin and Pat Hauser, had invited her to go out and have a pizza with them, but she was in no mood for their brainless gabble this afternoon. When she was in high school she had had three good friends, Bertha Sorel, Sue Jackson, Felicity Turner. They were the brightest girls in the school and they had made a small, superior, isolated clique. She wished all three of them or any one of them were in town today. But they all came from well-off families and had gone to college and she had found no one else to take their place in her life.

Gretchen wished that there were enough work to give her an excuse to remain at her desk the whole afternoon, but she was typing out the final items of the last bill of lading Mr. Hutchens had put on her desk and there was no way of dragging it out.

She hadn’t gone to the hospital the last two nights. She had phoned in and said she was sick and had gone home directly after work and stayed there. She had been too restless to read and had fussed over her entire wardrobe, washing blouses that were already spotlessly clean, pressing dresses that didn’t have a crease in them, washing her hair and setting it, manicuring her nails, insisting on giving Rudy a manicure, although she had given him one just the week before.

Late on Friday night, unable to sleep, she had gone down into the cellar where her father was working. He looked up at her in surprise as she came down the steps, but didn’t say anything, even when she sat down on a chair and said, “Here, pussy, pussy,” to the cat. The cat backed away. The human race, the cat knew, was the enemy.

“Pa,” she said, “I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

Jordache didn’t say anything.

“I’m not getting anywhere in this job I have,” Gretchen said. “There’s no chance of more money and no place to go. And once the war is over, they’ll be cutting down and I’ll be lucky if I can hang on.”

“The war’s not over yet,” Jordache said. “There’s still a lot of idiots waiting that have to be killed.”

“I thought I ought to go down to New York and look for a real job there. I’m a good secretary now and I see ads for all sorts of jobs with twice the pay I’m getting now.”

“You talk to your mother about this?” Jordache began to shape the dough into rolls, with quick little flips of his hand, like a magician.

“No,” Gretchen said. “She’s not feeling so well and I didn’t want to disturb her.”

“Everyone’s so damn thoughtful in this family,” Jordache said. “Warms the cockles.”

“Pa,” Gretchen said, “be serious.”

“No,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Because I said so. Be careful, you’re going to get flour all over that fancy gown.”

“Pa, I’ll be able to send back a lot more money …”

“No,” Jordache said. “When you’re twenty-one, you can fly off anyplace you want. But you’re not twenty-one. You’re nineteen. You have to bear up under the hospitality of the ancestral home for two years. Grin and bear it.” He took the cork out of the bottle and took a long swig of whiskey. With deliberate coarseness, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving a smudge of flour across his face.

“I’ve got to get out of this town,” Gretchen said.

“There are worse towns,” Jordache said. “I’ll see you in two years.”

Five minutes past twelve, the clock read. She put the neatly typed papers in the drawer of her desk. All the other clerks were gone. She put the cover on her typewriter and went into the washroom and stared at herself in the mirror. She looked feverish. She dabbed some cold water on her forehead, then took out a vial of perfume from her bag and put a little on under each ear.

She went out of the building and through the main gate, under the big sign, “Boylan’s Brick and Tile Works.” The plant and the sign, with its ornate lettering that looked as though it advertised something splendid and amusing, had been there since 1890.

She looked around to see if Rudy was by any chance waiting for her. Sometimes he came by the Works and walked her home. He was the only one in the family she could talk to. If Rudy had been there, they could have had lunch in a restaurant and then perhaps splurged on a movie. But then she remembered that Rudy had gone with the high-school track team to a neighboring town for a meet.

She found herself walking toward the bus terminal. She walked slowly, stopping often to look into shop windows. Of course, she told herself, she was not going to take the bus. It was daytime now and the fantasies of night were safely behind her. Although it would be refreshing to drive along the river and get out somewhere and breathe a little country air. The weather had changed and spring was announcing itself. The air was warm and there were little white clouds high in the blue sky.

Before leaving the house in the morning, she had told her mother she was going to work in the hospital that afternoon to make up for the time she had lost. She didn’t know why she had suddenly invented the story. She rarely lied to her parents. There was no need. But by saying she had to be on duty at the hospital, she avoided being asked to come and work in the store to help her mother handle the Saturday afternoon rush. It had been a sunny morning and the idea of long hours in the stuffy store had been distasteful to her.

A block from the terminal she saw her brother Thomas. He was pitching pennies in front of a drugstore with a gang of rowdyish-looking boys. A girl who worked in the office had been at the Casino Wednesday night and had seen the fight and told Gretchen about it. “Your brother,” the girl said. “He’s scary. A little kid like that. He’s like a snake. I sure wouldn’t like to have a kid like that in my family.”

Gretchen told Tom that she knew about the fight. She had heard similar stories before. “You’re a hideous boy,” she said to Tom. He had just grinned, enjoying himself.

If Tom had seen her she would have turned back. She wouldn’t have dared to go into the bus terminal with him watching. But he didn’t see her. He was too busy pitching a penny at a crack in the sidewalk.

She drifted into the terminal. She looked at the clock. Twelve thirty-five. The bus upriver must have left five minutes ago and of course she wouldn’t hang around there for twenty-five more minutes waiting for the next one. But the bus was late and was still standing there. She went up to the ticket window. “One for King’s Landing,” she said.

She got into the bus and sat up front near the driver. There were a lot of soldiers on the bus, but it was still early in the day and they hadn’t had time to get drunk yet and they didn’t whistle at her.

The bus pulled out. The motion of the bus lulled her and she drowsed with her eyes open. Trees flashed by, newly budded; houses, stretches of river; there were glimpses of faces in a town. Everything seemed washed and beautiful and unreal. Behind her the soldiers sang, young men’s voices blending together, in “Body and Soul.” There was a Virginia voice among the others, a slow Southern tone, sweetening the song’s lament. Nothing could happen to her. Nobody knew where she was. She was between event and event, choiceless, unchoosing, floating among soldiers’ yearning voices.

The bus drew to a halt. “King’s Landing, miss,” the driver said.

“Thank you,” she said and stepped down neatly onto the side of the road. The bus pulled away. Soldiers blew kisses at her through the windows. She kissed her fingers to the young men in return, smiling. She would never see them again. They knew her not, nor she them, and they could not guess her errand. Singing, their voices waning, they disappeared north.

She stood on the side of the empty road in the hushed Saturday afternoon sunlight. There was a gas station and a general store. She went into the store and bought herself a Coke from a white-haired old man in a clean, faded, blue shirt. The color pleased her eye. She would buy herself a dress that color, fine, clean, pale cotton, to wear on a summer evening.

She went out of the store and sat down on a bench in front of it to drink her Coke. The Coke was icy and sweet and stung the back of her mouth in little tart explosions. She drank slowly. She was in no hurry. She saw the graveled road leading away from the highway to the river. The shadow of a little cloud raced down it, like an animal running. It was silent from one coast to the other. The wood of the bench under her was warm. No cars passed. She finished her Coke and put the bottle down under the bench. She heard the ticking of the watch on her wrist. She leaned back, to catch the weight of the sun on her forehead.

Of course she wasn’t going to go to the house on the river. Let the food go cold, let the wine go unpoured, let the suitors languish by the side of the river. Unknown to them, their lady is near, playing her single, teasing game. She wanted to laugh, but would not break the wilderness silence.

It would be delicious to push the game further. To go halfway down the gravel road between the stands of second-growth birch, white pencils in the woodshade. Go halfway and then return, in inner mirth. Or better still, weave through the forest, in and out of the shadows, Iroquois maiden, silent on her stockinged feet over last year’s leaves, down to the river, and there, from the protection of the trees, spy out, Intelligence agent in the service of all virgins, and watch the two men, their lusty plans prepared, sitting waiting on the porch. And then steal back, her crisp dress flecked with bark and sticky buds, safe, safe, after the edge of danger, but feeling her power.

She stood up and crossed the highway toward the leafy entrance of the gravel-top road. She heard a car coming fast, from the south. She turned and stood there, as though she were waiting for a bus to take her in the direction of Port Philip. It wouldn’t do to be seen plunging into the woods. Secrecy was all.

The car swept toward her, on the far side of the road. It slowed, came to a halt opposite her. She did not look at it, but kept searching for the bus she knew wouldn’t appear for another hour.

“Hello, Miss Jordache.” She had been named, in a man’s voice. She could feel the blush rising furiously to her cheeks as she turned her head. She knew it was silly to blush. She had every right to be on the road. No one knew of the two black soldiers waiting with their food and liquor and their eight hundred dollars. For a moment she didn’t recognize the man who had spoken, sitting alone at the wheel of a 1939 Buick convertible, with the top down. He was smiling at her, one hand, in a driving glove, hanging over the door of the car on her side. Then she saw who it was. Mr. Boylan. She had only seen him once or twice in her life, around the plant which bore his family’s name. He was rarely there, a slender, blond, tanned, cleanly shaven man, with bristly blond eyebrows and highly polished shoes.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Boylan,” she said, not moving. She didn’t want to get close enough for him to be able to notice her blush.

“What in the world are you doing all the way up here?” Privilege his voice suggested. He sounded as though this unexpected discovery, the pretty girl alone in her high heels at the edge of the woods, amused him.

“It was such a lovely day.” She almost stammered. “I often go on little expeditions when I have an afternoon off.”

“All alone?” He sounded incredulous.

“I’m a nature lover,” she said lamely. What a clod he must think I am, she thought. She caught him smiling as he looked down at her high-heeled shoes. “I just took the bus on the spur of the moment,” she said, inventing without hope. “I’m waiting for the bus back to town.” She heard a rustle behind her and turned, panic-stricken, sure that it must be the two soldiers, growing impatient and come to see if she had arrived. But it was only a squirrel, racing across the gravel of the side road.

“What’s the matter?” Boylan asked, puzzled by her spasmodic movement.

“I thought I heard a snake.” Oh, good-bye, she thought.

“You’re pretty jittery,” Boylan said gravely, “for a nature lover.”

“Only snakes,” she said. It was the stupidest conversation she had ever had in her life.

Boylan looked at his watch. “You know, the bus won’t be along for quite some time,” he said.

“That’s all right,” she said, smiling widely, as though waiting for buses in the middle of nowhere was her favorite Saturday afternoon occupation. “It’s so nice and peaceful here.”

“Let me ask you a serious question,” he said.

Here it comes, she thought. He’s going to want to know whom I’m waiting for. She fumbled for a serviceable short list. Her brother, a girl friend, a nurse from the hospital. She was so busy thinking, she didn’t hear what he said, although she knew he had said something.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I missed that.”

“I said, have you had your lunch yet, Miss Jordache?”

“I’m not hungry, really. I …”

“Come.” He gestured to her with his gloved hand. “I’ll buy you lunch. I despise lunching alone.”

Obediently, feeling small and childish, under adult orders, she crossed the road behind the Buick and stepped into the car, as he leaned over from his side to open the door for her. The only other person she had ever heard use the word “despise” in normal conversation was her mother. Shades of Sister Catherine, Old Teacher. “It’s very kind of you, Mr. Boylan,” she said.

“I’m lucky on Saturdays,” he said as he started the car. She had no notion of what he meant by that. If he hadn’t been her boss, in a manner of speaking, and old besides, forty, forty-five at least, she would have somehow managed to refuse. She regretted the secret excursion through the woods that now would never take place, the obscene, tantalizing possibility that perhaps the two soldiers would have glimpsed her, pursued her … Limping braves on tribal hunting grounds. Eight hundred dollars worth of war paint.

“Do you know a place called The Farmer’s Inn?” Boylan asked as he started the car.

“I’ve heard of it,” she said. It was a small hotel on a bluff above the river about fifteen miles farther on and supposed to be very expensive.

“It’s not a bad little joint,” Boylan said. “You can get a decent bottle of wine.”

There was no more conversation because he drove very fast and the wind roared across the open car, making her squint against the pressure on her eyes and swirling her hair. The wartime speed limit was supposed to be only thirty-five miles an hour, to conserve gasoline, but of course a man like Mr. Boylan didn’t have to worry about things like gasoline.

From time to time, Boylan looked over at her and smiled a little. The smile was ironical, she felt, and had to do with the fact that she was sure he knew she had been lying about her reasons for being alone so far from town, waiting senselessly for a bus that wouldn’t arrive for another hour. He leaned over and opened the glove case and brought out a pair of dark Air Force glasses and handed it to her. “For your pretty blue eyes,” he shouted, over the wind. She put the glasses on and felt very dashing, like an actress in the movies.

The Farmer’s Inn had been a relay house in the post-colonial days when travel between New York and upstate had been by stagecoach. It was painted red with white trim and there was a large wagon wheel propped up on the lawn. It proclaimed the owner’s belief that Americans liked to dine in their past. It could have been a hundred miles or a hundred years away from Port Philip.

Gretchen combed her hair into some sort of order, using the rear-view mirror. She was uncomfortable and conscious of Boylan watching her. “One of the nicest things a man can see in this life,” he said, “is a pretty girl with her arms up, combing her hair. I suppose that’s why so many painters have painted it.”

She was not used to talk like that from any of the boys who had gone through high school with her or who hung around her desk at the office and she didn’t know whether she liked it or not. It seemed to invade her privacy, talk like that. She hoped she wasn’t going to blush any more that afternoon. She started to put on some lipstick, but he reached out and stopped her. “Don’t do that,” he said authoritatively. “You’ve got enough on. More than enough. Come.” He leaped out of the car, with surprising agility, she thought, for a man that age, and came around and opened the door for her.

Manners, she noted automatically. She followed him from the parking lot, where there were five or six other cars ranged under the trees, toward the entrance to the hotel. His brown shoes, well they weren’t really shoes (jodhpur boots, she was later to discover they were called), were highly shined, as usual. He was wearing a hounds-tooth tweed jacket, and gray flannel slacks, and a scarf at the throat of his soft wool shirt, instead of a tie. He’s not real, she thought, he’s out of a magazine. What am I doing with him?

Beside him, she felt dowdy and clumsy in the short-sleeved navy-blue dress that she had taken so much care to choose that morning. She was sure he was already sorry he had stopped for her. But he held the door open for her and touched her elbow helpfully as she passed in front of him into the bar.

There were two other couples in the bar, which was decorated like an eighteenth-century tap room, all dark oak and pewter mugs and plates. The two women were youngish and wore suede skirts with tight, flat jerseys and spoke in piercing, confident voices. Looking at them, Gretchen was conscious of the gaudiness of her own bosom and hunched over to minimize it. The couples were seated at a low table at the other end of the room and Boylan guided Gretchen to the bar and helped her sit on one of the heavy, high, wooden stools. “This end,” he said in a low voice. “Get away from those ladies. They make a music I can do without.”

A Negro in a starched white jacket came to take their order. “Afternoon, Mr. Boylan,” the Negro said soberly. “What is your pleasure, sir?”

“Ah, Bernard,” Boylan said, “you ask the question that has stumped philosophers since the beginning of time.”

Phoney, Gretchen thought. She was a little shocked that she could think it about a man like Mr. Boylan.

The Negro smiled dutifully. He was as neat and spotless as if he were ready to conduct an operation. Gretchen looked at him sideways. I know two friends of yours not far from here, she thought, who aren’t giving anybody any pleasure this afternoon.

“My dear,” Boylan turned to her, “what do you drink?”

“Anything. Whatever you say.” The traps were multiplying. How did she know what she drank? She never drank anything stronger than Coke. She dreaded the arrival of the menu. Almost certainly in French. She had taken Spanish and Latin in school. Latin!

“By the way,” Boylan said, “you are over eighteen.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. She blushed. What a silly time to blush. Luckily it was dark in the bar.

“I wouldn’t want to be dragged into court for leading minors into corruption,” he said, smiling. He had nice, well-cared-for dentist’s teeth. It was hard to understand why a man who looked like that, with teeth like that and such elegant clothes, and all that money, would ever have to have lunch alone.

“Bernard, let’s try something sweet. For the young lady. A nice Daiquiri, in your inimitable manner.”

“Thank you, sir,” Bernard said.

Inimitable, she thought. Who uses words like that? Her sense of being the wrong age, wrongly dressed, wrongly made-up, made her hostile.

Gretchen watched Bernard squeeze the limes and toss in the ice and shake the drink, with expert, manicured black-and-pink hands. Adam and Eve in the Garden. If Mr. Boylan had had an inkling … There wouldn’t be any of that condescending talk about corruption.

The frothy drink was delicious and she drank it like lemonade. Boylan watched her, one eye raised, a little theatrically, as the drink disappeared.

“Once again, please, Bernard,” he said.

The two couples went into the dining room and they had the bar to themselves, as Bernard prepared the second round. She felt more at ease now. The afternoon was opening up. She didn’t know why those were the words that occurred to her, but that’s the way it seemed—opening up. She was going to sit at many dark bars and many kindly older men in peculiar clothes were going to buy her delicious drinks.

Bernard put the drink in front of her.

“May I make a suggestion, pet?” Boylan said. “I’d drink this one more slowly, if I were you. There is rum in them, after all.”

“Of course,” she said, with dignity. “I guess I was thirsty, standing out there in the hot sun.”

“Of course, pet,” he said.

Pet. Nobody had ever called her anything like that. She liked the word, especially the way he said it, in that cool, unpushy voice. She took little ladylike sips of the cold drink. It was as good as the first one. Maybe even better. She was beginning to feel that she wasn’t going to blush anymore that afternoon.

Boylan called for the menu. They would order in the bar while they were finishing their drinks. The headwaiter came in with two large, stiff cards, and said, bowing a little, “Glad to see you again, Mr. Boylan.”

Everybody was glad to see Mr. Boylan, in his shiny shoes.

“Should I order?” Boylan asked her.

Gretchen knew, from the movies, that gentlemen often ordered for ladies in restaurants, but it was one thing to see it on the screen and another thing to have it happen right in front of you. “Please do,” she said. Right out of the book, she thought triumphantly. My, the drink was good.

There was a brief but serious discussion about the menu and the wine between Mr. Boylan and the headwaiter. The headwaiter disappeared, promising to call them when their table was ready. Mr. Boylan took out a gold cigarette case and offered her a cigarette. She shook her head.

“You don’t smoke?”

“No.” She felt that she was not living up to the level of the place and the rules of the situation by not smoking, but she had tried two or three times and it had made her cough and go red eyed and she had given up the experiment. Also, her mother smoked, day and night, and anything her mother did Gretchen didn’t want to do.

“Good,” Boylan said, lighting his cigarette with a gold lighter he took from his pocket and put down on the bar beside the monogrammed case. “I don’t like girls to smoke. It takes away the fragrance of youth.”

Fancy talk, she thought. But it didn’t offend her now. He was putting himself out to please her. She was suddenly conscious of the odor of the perfume that she had dabbed on herself in the washroom at the office. She worried that it might seem cheap to him. “I must say,” she said, “I was surprised you knew my name.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t think I’ve seen you more than once or twice at the Works. And you never come through the office.”

“I’ve seen you,” he said. “I wondered what a girl who looked like you was doing in a dreary place like Boylan’s Brick and Tile Works.”

“It isn’t as awful as all that,” she said defensively.

“No? I’m glad to hear that. I was under the impression that all my employees found it intolerable. I make it a point not to visit it more than fifteen minutes a month. I find it depresses me.”

The headwaiter appeared. “Ready now, sir.”

“Leave your drink, pet,” Boylan said, helping her off her stool. “Bernard’ll bring it in.”

They followed the headwaiter into the dining room. Eight or ten of the tables were occupied. A full colonel and a party of young officers. Other tweedy couples. There were flowers on the polished fake-colonial tables and rows of shining glasses. There is nobody here who makes less than ten thousand dollars a year, she thought.

The conversation in the room dropped as they followed the headwaiter to a small table at the window, overlooking the river far below. She felt the young officers regarding her. She touched her hair. She knew what was going on in their minds. She was sorry Mr. Boylan wasn’t younger.

The headwaiter held the chair for her and she sat down and put the large, creamy napkin demurely over her lap. Bernard came in with their unfinished Daiquiris on a tray and put them down on the table.

“Thank you, sir,” he said as he backed off.

The headwaiter appeared with a bottle of red wine from France and the table waiter came up with their first course. There was no manpower shortage at The Old Farmer’s Inn.

The headwaiter ceremoniously poured a little of the wine into a huge, deep glass. Boylan sniffed it, tasted it, looked up, squinting, at the ceiling, as he kept it for a moment in his mouth before swallowing. He nodded at the headwaiter. “Very good, Lawrence,” he said.

“Thank you, sir,” the headwaiter said. With all those thank you’s, Gretchen thought, the bill was going to be horrendous.

The headwaiter poured the wine into her glass, then into Boylan’s. Boylan raised his glass to her and they both sipped the wine. It had a strange dusty taste and was warm. Eventually, she was sure, she was going to learn to like that taste.

“I hope you like hearts of palm,” Boylan said. “I developed the taste in Jamaica. That was before the war, of course.”

“It’s delicious.” It tasted like a flat nothing to her, but she liked the idea that a whole noble palm tree had been cut down just to serve her one small, delicate dish.

“When the war is over,” he said, picking at his plate, “I’m going to go down there and settle. Jamaica. Just lie on the white sand in the sun from year’s end to year’s end. When the boys come marching home this country’s going to be impossible. A world fit for heroes to live in,” he said mockingly, “is hardly fit for Theodore Boylan to live in. You must come and visit me.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’ll rhumba on down on my salary from the Boylan Brick and Tile Works.”

He laughed. “It is the proud boast of my family,” he said, “that we have underpaid our help since 1887.”

“Family?” she said. As far as she knew, he was the only Boylan extant. It was common knowledge that he lived alone in the mansion behind the stone walls of the great estate outside town. With servants, of course.

“Imperial,” he said. “We are spread in our glory from coast to coast, from pine-clad Maine to orange-scented California. Aside from the Boylan Cement plant and the Boylan Brick and Tile Works in Port Philip, there are Boylan shipyards, Boylan oil companies, Boylan heavy-duty machinery plants throughout the length and breadth of this great land, each with a Boylan brother or uncle or cousin at its head, supplying the sinews of war at cost-plus to our beloved country. There is even a Major General Boylan who strikes shrewd blows in his nation’s cause in the Service of Supply in Washington. Family? Let there be the sniff of a dollar in the air and there you will find a Boylan, first on the line.”

She was not used to people running down their own families; her loyalties were simple. Her face must have showed her disappointment.

“You’re shocked,” Boylan said. Again that crooked look of amusement.

“Not really,” she said. She thought of her own family. “Only people inside a family know how much love they deserve.”

“Oh, I’m not all bad,” Boylan said. “There’s one virtue which my family has in abundance and I admire it without reservation.”

“What’s that?”

“They’re rich. They’re verrry, verrry rich.” He laughed.

“Still,” she said, hoping that he wasn’t as bad as he sounded, that it was just a show-off lunchtime act that he was performing to impress an empty-headed girl, “still, you work. The Boylans’ve done a lot for this town …”

“They certainly have,” he said. “They have bled it white. Naturally, they feel a sentimental interest in it. Port Philip is the most insignificant of the imperial possessions, not worth the time of a true, one hundred percent, up-and-at-em male Boylan, but they do not abandon it. The last and the least of the line, your humble servant, is delegated to the lowly home province to lend the magic of the name and the authority of the living family presence at least once or twice a month to the relic. I perform my ritual duties with all due respect and look forward to Jamaica when the guns have fallen silent.”

He not only hates the family, she thought, he hates himself.

His quick, pale eyes noted the minute change in her expression. “You don’t like me,” he said.

“That isn’t true,” she said. “It’s just that you’re different from anyone I know.”

“Different better or different worse?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He nodded gravely. “I abide the question,” he said. “Drink up. Here comes another bottle of wine.”

Somehow, they had gone through the whole bottle of wine and they hadn’t reached the main course yet. The headwaiter gave them fresh glasses and there was the ceremony of tasting once more. The wine had flushed her face and throat. The conversation in the rest of the restaurant seemed to have receded and came to her ears now in a regular, reassuring rhythm, like the sound of distant surf. She suddenly felt at home in the polished old room and she laughed aloud.

“Why are you laughing?” Boylan asked suspiciously.

“Because I’m here,” she said, “and I could be so many other places instead.”

“You must drink more often,” he said. “Wine becomes you.” He reached over and patted her hand. His hand was dry and firm on her skin. “You’re beautiful, pet, beautiful, beautiful.”

“I think so, too,” she said.

It was his turn to laugh.

“Today,” she said.

By the time the waiter brought their coffee she was drunk. She had never been drunk before in her life so she didn’t know that she was drunk. All she knew was that all colors were clearer, that the river below her was cobalt, that the sun lowering in the sky over the faraway western bluffs was of a heartbreaking gold. All the tastes in her mouth were like summertime and the man opposite her was not a stranger and her employer, but her best and most intimate friend, his fine, tanned face kindly and marvelously attentive, the occasional touch of his hand on hers of a welcome calm dryness, his laugh an accolade to her wit. She could tell him anything, her secrets were his.