have been established by spoken words over the telephone itself.
Jacqueline liked ivory. The color, that is. Pale, cold ivory. She surrounded herself with it in the restricted places of her private life, and added a touch here and there, wherever it was possible, in the public areas. For instance, except for the slightest relief of more vivid colors, which only served to emphasize the preponderance, the bedroom of her apartment was entirely in the pale tone—woodwork and walls and rug and drapes and furniture. Entering it was like walking into a kind of sanctuary, a strange temple in which the decor was possessed of esoteric significance for the instinctively initiate.
Kathy stirred and lit another cigarette, waiting for the occupant of the booth to complete his conversation. She watched him through a narrow glass panel in the door. He sat bending forward from the little swinging seat beneath the instrument, his soft felt hat pushed back on his head, smoke from a cigarette that was pasted with dry saliva to his lower lip swirling around his face and clogging the booth with a thin, blue haze. When he talked, the cigarette bobbled so sharply that it seemed about to shake loose. His voice undulated, rising now and then to the level of intelligibility, a word here and there standing out nakedly. He was apparently trying to persuade someone to meet him at a certain place at a certain time, and it seemed to be very important.
Kathy moved away a few steps to eliminate the sound of his voice. She was all at once unreasonably angry with him for delaying her own call, for being a stupid man with a dull problem that was probably no problem at all.
Trying to eject him from her mind, she began again to think of Jacqueline, following her in imagination through the routine of the day thus far. In the beginning she arose from ivory sheets and stood beside the bed on ivory broadloom, and she was herself ivory, black-and-ivory, tall and superbly proportioned by the standards of classic beauty, as if she had been carved by an ancient Greek artist from a giant tusk. Propelled by Kathy’s mind, she moved in a remembered order. First to the kitchen, where coffee was started in the automatic silver percolator. Next to the bathroom for a shower and then back into the bedroom for the swift and simple rites before the mirror of the dressing table. These rites, however simply and quickly done, seemed almost superfluous, because there was about her an appearance of fastidiousness that survived even the usual ravages of a night in bed. Her hair, black and sleek and pulled back to a knot from a center part, looked undisturbed. Her eyes were as bright as if they had been chemically flushed, and the muscles of her face did not sag in tired need of an astringent. Whatever there was in her of deterioration and slow decay existed in secrecy beneath unaffected flesh. This physical impression was supported, was perhaps in some degree established, by a more subtle quality, a kind of emotional purity impervious to violation, and even in passion and the act of passion she seemed to burn with a pure white cauterizing flame.
At the closet, she selected one of the severely tailored suits she invariably wore to work. Which one this morning? The navy pin-stripe? The gray chalk-stripe? The hard brown gabardine? It really didn’t matter, because whichever one it was, it was precisely the right one. It was the very one for this particular day, and no other one could possibly have been quite so appropriate for what the day would bring or for the places the day would take her. Fully dressed, a black string tie at the collar of a tailored blouse, she returned to the kitchen where the coffee was brewed and hot in the silver percolator.
She drank the coffee black and unsweetened, and then she left the apartment, locking the door behind her and going down in the elevator to the lobby and through the lobby to the street, and now she was behind the blond desk with the ivory telephone that would be ringing in desperate supplication just as soon as this man, this Goddamn vindictive, deliberately perverse man, got through with his stupid conversation in the drug store booth.
And he was through. He had finished and gone while Kathy wasn’t looking. The jointed door was folded back, and the thin smoke of his cigarette drifted out. Acting quickly, before she had time to reconsider in fear of Jacqueline’s reaction, she slipped into the booth and closed the door and dialed the remembered number. She got a central switch board, of course, and had to wait for a connection. After a bit, she got it, and Jacqueline’s voice, a cool, measured modulation, was saying, “Miss Wieland speaking.”
Kathy answered with a rush. “Jacqueline? This is Kathy, Jacqueline.”
There was a pause in which something grew, and Jacqueline’s voice, when it came back on, had subtle undertones, like the voice of a woman speaking casually to her lover when her husband was present. “Oh, hello, Kathy. How are you this morning?”
“I want to see you. I went to your place last night, but you weren’t home.”
“I had an engagement, I’m afraid. Sorry you made the trip for nothing.”
“I must see you, Jacqueline.”
“Well, I have a rather full schedule today. I’m not even having lunch out.”
“Please, Jacqueline.”
The pause again, a slight alteration in the undertone. A kind of soft wariness. “You sound urgent, Kathy. Is something wrong?”
“Yes. I can’t tell you about it now. Not over the telephone.”
“Very well. I’ll leave here about five o’clock. Meet me in the Bronze Lounge, and you can tell me over a cocktail. I’m sure it can’t be too serious.”
The line went dead, and Kathy sagged against the side of the booth, fighting again the dark compulsion to hysterical laughter. Not serious, Jacqueline had said. Not too serious. Just the bad end of a good idea.
Outside the booth, she looked again at her watch and was astonished to see how few degrees the minute hand had progressed. Five o’clock seemed remote in time, an improbable prospect in her own life. It was not yet ten. Over seven hours before five. She wondered how she could ever get through them to the Bronze Lounge and Jacqueline, and the appointment, now that it had been made, had assumed in her mind the character of a goal to be reached at any cost, a kind of terminal point of danger, beyond which she would be once more quite secure. She understood, actually, that there was no good reason for this, no reason at all to think that anything would be better after she had seen Jacqueline, but that there was, on the other hand, a good possibility that everything would be worse, depending upon Jacqueline’s response. But though she understood this very well, it would have been ruinous to acknowledge it, and so she continued to think of the hour of five as an established haven toward which the hands of her watch crept with unnatural slowness. It was only necessary to survive, somehow, the intervening time.
If only she could sleep. If she could sleep away the time, waking just soon enough to keep the appointment, all her trouble would be resolved. But she would never be able to sleep. If she tried, she would lie staring with hot, dry eyes into a past that offered no consolation and a future that offered no hope, and this was something to be avoided beyond all else. But there were inducements to sleep. What about a sedative? A barbiturate of some kind. Perhaps it would be possible to take just enough of something to let her sleep five or six hours, but not enough to prevent her keeping the appointment with Jacqueline. It would be a risky business, and she would have to be very cautious in the amount she took, rather too little than too much, for it would be the culminating disaster if she failed to be in the Bronze Lounge at the stipulated time. She held desperately to the blind, irrational conviction that Jacqueline would somehow have the solution to her problem, that her ills could be cured over a cocktail.
Turning with a jerk, she walked over to the prescription counter and stood drumming with her fingers until a bald man in a tan linen jacket came up from the rear and asked her what she wanted.
“I’d like some sleeping medicine,” she said, and added redundantly because her nerves
