Last night, he had thought he should call his mother back home in Carey and tell her the good news, but then it seemed to him the happiness he was feeling was a very private sort of thing that shouldn't be shared with anybody, even if it was someone as close as his own mother, that was the trouble with Carey. That small house in Carey, and his mother's bedroom right next door, and Buddy sleeping in the same room with him, all sort of cramped together, there was hardly any time to be alone, to feel something special of your own, something private. And the room in Mrs. Dougherty's house, it was pretty much the same as being home, having to go down the hall for the toilet, and always meeting somebody or other in the hall, the room itself so small and full of noises from the street and noises from all the pipes. What Carey missed, and what the room here in the city missed, was a secret place where a person could be happy by himself, or cry by himself, or just be by himself.
He left the room feeling pretty good, this must have been about seven-thirty, maybe eight o'clock, but not looking for any company, instead really trying to get out of that small room and into the streets, into the larger city, so that the happiness he was feeling could have a little space to expand in, a little space to grow. He wasn't looking for a girl. He just came out of the room and down the steps and into the street - it was very cold last night, colder than today - and he pulled up his coat collar and stuck his hands in his pockets and just started walking south, not knowing where he was going, but just breathing the air into his lungs, cold and sharp and even hurting a little bit, it was that cold.
He must have gone six or seven blocks, maybe it was more, when he really began to feel the cold. It hit his feet all at once, and he felt his toes were going to fall right off if he didn't get inside someplace quick. He was not a drinking man, he didn't usually drink more than a beer or two, and he didn't much like bars, but he saw a bar up ahead and he knew if he didn't get inside someplace real quick he was going to have frostbite, well, he didn't know if he was really going to have frostbite, but it sure felt like it.
He couldn't remember the name of the bar, he supposed they would want to know its name and exactly what street it was on.
He must have come six or seven blocks,^ was all, walking straight south on Twelfth Street, from the rooming house. But he didn't know what avenue that would have been. He thought the bar had a green neon sign in the window. Anyway, he went in, and took a table near the radiator because his feet were so cold. That was how he happened to meet Molly. He wasn't really No, he thought.
No, it doesn't sound right, that's the difficult part about telling it.
He could visualize it all in his head, just the way it had happened, but he knew that going into that police station and telling it to a detective it would come out all wrong, he just knew it. Sitting face to face with somebody he didn't know and telling him about how the girl had come to the table after he'd been sitting there a couple of minutes, no, he knew it wouldn't come out right, even though he could see it plain as day inside his head, just the way it had happened, her coming to the table and stopping there and looking down at him with a very peculiar annoyed look on her face, her hands on her hips.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"You've got a lot of nerve, mister," she said. "You know that, don't you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You see that pocketbook there in the corner, what do you think that pocketbook is doing there?"
"What pocket - Oh."
"Yeah, oh."
"I'm sorry. I didn't see it when I sat down."
"Yeah, well now you see it."
"And there wasn't a glass or anything on the table, so I-"
"That's 'cause I didn't order yet. I was in the powder room."
"Oh," Roger said.
She had red hair, and the red hair was the only attractive thing about her, and he suspected even that was fake. She was wearing fake eyelashes, and she had penciled fake eyebrows onto her forehead and had made her mouth more generous by running a fake line of lipstick up beyond its natural boundaries. She was wearing a white blouse and a black skirt, but her breasts under the silk blouse were very high and pointed, with that same fake look the eyelashes and the lipstick and the eyebrows had. Her hair was a bright red, almost an orange, straight from a bottle, he supposed. She was altogether a pretty sad specimen. Even her legs weren't too hot; he supposed there was nothing she could do to fake them up a little.
"Well, I'm sorry," he said, "I'll just take my beer and move to another booth."
"Thanks," she said, "I'd appreciate it."
