She swept her hand out, brushed aside what he hadn’t said, but what she’d thought he might. “Oh I know. There are thousands of them like us come here every year. They shoot right up to the top. They’re in every walk of life.
“Why don’t you go back?” he said again. “Why don’t you?”
“Because I’m not strong enough any more to break the grip it has on me. I thought I just got through telling you that. I proved it to myself that early-morning when I sat waiting in the bus terminal, I saw what it was then. The lighter it got outside, the stronger the pull back got. It sneaked up on me calling itself ‘common sense’; it sabotaged me. When the sun started to creep down from the tops of the buildings, and the people started to thicken along the sidewalks on 34th Street, it kidded me by trying to look familiar, something I was used to, something that wouldn’t hurt me, I didn’t need to be afraid of. It whispered, ‘You can always go tomorrow instead. Why not give it one more night? Why not try it one more week? Why not give it one more tumble?’ And by the time the bus-starter said ‘All aboard,’ I was walking like a sleepwalker, with my bag in my hand, going the other way; slow and licked. No kidding, when I came outside I could hear the trombones and the saxes razzing me, way up high around the building-tops somewhere. ‘We’ve gotcha! We knew you couldn’t make it! Hotcha! We’ve gotcha!’ ”
She planted her head against her hand, stared thoughtfully down at nothing. “Maybe the reason I wasn’t able to break the headlock it has on me is because I was all alone. I wasn’t strong enough alone. Maybe if I’d had someone going back home with me, someone to grab me by the arm when I tried to back out, I wouldn’t have weakened, I would have made it.”
His face tightened up. She saw that. She saw the imaginary boundary line he stroked across the table with the edge of his hand. As if setting off something from something else; the past, perhaps, from the present. “I wish I’d met you yesterday,” she heard him say, more to himself than to her. “I wish I’d met you last night instead of tonight.”
She knew what he meant. He’d done something he shouldn’t, since yesterday, and now he couldn’t go back. He wasn’t telling her anything; she’d known all along he had something on his mind.
“Well, I guess I better clear out,” he mumbled. “Guess I better go.”
He went over toward where his hat was. She saw him lift up the edge of the pillow a little. She saw the half-start his other hand made, toward his inside coat-pocket, as if to take something out without letting her see him.
“Put it back,” she said metallically. “None of that.” Then her voice mellowed a trifle. “I’ve got the fare, anyway. I’ve had it put aside for over eight months, down to the last nickel for a hamburger at the stop-over. Like a nest-egg. A nest-egg that’s so old it’s curdled already.”
He came back to her, his hat on his head now. He didn’t linger at the table any more. He went on toward the door, not fast, not purposefully, at a sort of aimless trudge, and let his hand trail over her shoulder as he passed her, in a parting accolade that expressed mutely but perfectly what it was intended to convey: mutual distress, sympathy without the power of helping one another, two people who were in the same boat.
She let him get as far as the door, with his hand out to the knob. “They’re after you for something, aren’t they?” she said quietly.
He turned and looked back at her, but without any undue surprise or questioning of her insight. “They will be, by about eight or nine this morning at the latest,” he said matter-of-factly.
He took his hand off the knob, came back to her again. He didn’t say anything. He turned back his coat, fumbled with the lining down toward the hem. He unpinned a slit that looked as though it had been made intentionally with a knife or razor blade. He worked something free through it, with agilely probing fingers. Suddenly a deck of rubber-banded currency was resting on the table between them. The topmost bill was a fifty. He shifted to the other side of the coat, opened up a matching suture there. A second tablet of banknotes joined the first. This time the topmost denomination was a hundred.
