both ends of a bargain. Maybe that’s my trouble.” She raised her eyes slowly. “Let me alone, Jason.”
“Do you think I’m the bold trader, the big gambler? My God, Lois, I live with anxiety. I know the shape and the feel of it. I hedge all my bets, and my hand shakes. I want so badly for things to have meaning that somehow I don’t let them have meaning. You know, I
envy
Jenny. I get so busy worrying about what I’m doing with my life, I don’t do enough with it. My history is a big long list of the things I should have done. My God, I’d trade it for a list of remorses.”
“Just let me alone. Just please let me alone. Please.”
She unlocked her door and went in and closed it softly. He stood there for a little while, shutting his jaw so hard his teeth ached. And then he went down the stairs instead of ringing for the elevator, walked back to his hotel in the cold night with his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets.
As he dressed he thought of the odd talk. He wondered if it could be considered a quarrel. He wondered how he should act toward her when he saw her next. He wondered if she was wondering the same thing. Perhaps they would both wait, looking for a clue. That was, he thought, the difference between them and a person like Jenny Bowman. Jenny reacted immediately, instinctively, setting the tone.
(They had waited at Jenny’s hotel while Keppler viewed the last day’s rushes to decide whether any final takes were necessary. And then he phoned. Jenny answered. She thanked him and hung up. And then she ran to him and hugged him with forlorn strength and put her lips against his throat and said in a small fierce voice, “Just take me a long way the hell and gone a long way away from here, justus alone and a long way, and the first plane leaving no matter where just so long as it’s a warm place in the sun alone.”)
He breakfasted early. There was a misty sun. He walked as far as St. James Park and sat and smoked a pipe and watched the early scurry of the civil servants heading for the complex of government buildings. He looked at the fresh young English girls and had complex fantasies born of loneliness and lust. ‘See here, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. I may be a bit long in the tooth for you, but you look tidy and healthy and I have a four-year-old daughter who needs brothers and sisters. And you would live in California, if that sounds attractive to you. I am quiet and reasonably neat. I would be sober and faithful, and try to bring you back to England once a year to see your people. You see, my dear, people who do know each other make such a ghastly botch of it that it might be interesting to begin as total strangers.’ And the young eyes would bulge and she would give him a truly frightful wallop across the chops and scream for a bobbie. He grinned. And if by any chance he did strike upon one desperate enough, heartsick enough, lonely enough to chance it, she would turn out to be slatternly and dismal, yearning for the damps of her native climate, the pubs and telly, the fish and chips, the comforting pageant of royalty. But it alarmed him to realize how vulnerable he was, that he should even entertain such a fantasy. Somehow, coming here had opened chinks in familiar armor. And a cold wind blew in.
He arrived at the Park Lane at a little after nine. When there was no answer when he phoned Lois’s room, he looked in the dining room and saw her eating alone, opening mail as she ate, scribbling marginal notes on the letters. He hesitated, and when the captain of waiters started toward him, he waved him away and went to her table. He sat without invitation and as she gave him a startled look, he said, “The part of London they call The City comprises about three hundred and thirty acres. It is the part that was originally enclosed by a stone wall after the Claudian Invasion of 43 A.D. It became one of the largest and most prosperous of the Roman provincial
“Do you think I’m the bold trader, the big gambler? My God, Lois, I live with anxiety. I know the shape and the feel of it. I hedge all my bets, and my hand shakes. I want so badly for things to have meaning that somehow I don’t let them have meaning. You know, I
envy
Jenny. I get so busy worrying about what I’m doing with my life, I don’t do enough with it. My history is a big long list of the things I should have done. My God, I’d trade it for a list of remorses.”
“Just let me alone. Just please let me alone. Please.”
She unlocked her door and went in and closed it softly. He stood there for a little while, shutting his jaw so hard his teeth ached. And then he went down the stairs instead of ringing for the elevator, walked back to his hotel in the cold night with his shoulders hunched and his hands deep in his pockets.
As he dressed he thought of the odd talk. He wondered if it could be considered a quarrel. He wondered how he should act toward her when he saw her next. He wondered if she was wondering the same thing. Perhaps they would both wait, looking for a clue. That was, he thought, the difference between them and a person like Jenny Bowman. Jenny reacted immediately, instinctively, setting the tone.
(They had waited at Jenny’s hotel while Keppler viewed the last day’s rushes to decide whether any final takes were necessary. And then he phoned. Jenny answered. She thanked him and hung up. And then she ran to him and hugged him with forlorn strength and put her lips against his throat and said in a small fierce voice, “Just take me a long way the hell and gone a long way away from here, justus alone and a long way, and the first plane leaving no matter where just so long as it’s a warm place in the sun alone.”)
He breakfasted early. There was a misty sun. He walked as far as St. James Park and sat and smoked a pipe and watched the early scurry of the civil servants heading for the complex of government buildings. He looked at the fresh young English girls and had complex fantasies born of loneliness and lust. ‘See here, I don’t know you and you don’t know me. I may be a bit long in the tooth for you, but you look tidy and healthy and I have a four-year-old daughter who needs brothers and sisters. And you would live in California, if that sounds attractive to you. I am quiet and reasonably neat. I would be sober and faithful, and try to bring you back to England once a year to see your people. You see, my dear, people who do know each other make such a ghastly botch of it that it might be interesting to begin as total strangers.’ And the young eyes would bulge and she would give him a truly frightful wallop across the chops and scream for a bobbie. He grinned. And if by any chance he did strike upon one desperate enough, heartsick enough, lonely enough to chance it, she would turn out to be slatternly and dismal, yearning for the damps of her native climate, the pubs and telly, the fish and chips, the comforting pageant of royalty. But it alarmed him to realize how vulnerable he was, that he should even entertain such a fantasy. Somehow, coming here had opened chinks in familiar armor. And a cold wind blew in.
He arrived at the Park Lane at a little after nine. When there was no answer when he phoned Lois’s room, he looked in the dining room and saw her eating alone, opening mail as she ate, scribbling marginal notes on the letters. He hesitated, and when the captain of waiters started toward him, he waved him away and went to her table. He sat without invitation and as she gave him a startled look, he said, “The part of London they call The City comprises about three hundred and thirty acres. It is the part that was originally enclosed by a stone wall after the Claudian Invasion of 43 A.D. It became one of the largest and most prosperous of the Roman provincial
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