He sat by the window, watching the landscape. Somewhere south of Boston the train passed a suburban tract of houses. They were new, and although the architects and the gardeners had rung a few changes here and there, the effect was monotonous. What interested him was that rising in the center of the development was a large, ugly, loaf-shaped and colorless escarpment of granite. The roads must circumvent it expensively. Its sides were too steep to hold the foundations of a house. It seemed, in its uselessness, triumphantly obdurate and perverse. It was the only form on the landscape that had not succumbed to change. It could not be dynamited. It could not be quarried and carried away piecemeal. It was useless, and it was invincible. Some boys his age were climbing the steep face, and he guessed this was their last refuge.
It was late and it was getting cold, and he could remember the sense of the season and the hour when it was time to leave off playing and go home to study. Near where he lived there was a similar rock, and he had climbed it on winter afternoons, to smoke cigarettes and talk with his friends about the future. He could remember grasping for handholds on the steep face, and how the rough stone pulled at his best school clothes, but what he remembered most clearly was how once his feet were on the ground, he had a sense of awakening to a whole new life, the arrival at a new state of consciousness, as clearly unlike his past as sleep is unlike waking. Standing at the foot of the cliff at that hour and season—about to go home and study but not yet on the path—he would stare at the yards and the trees and the lighted houses with a galvanic sense of discovery. How forceful and interesting the world had seemed in the early winter light! How new it all seemed! He must have been familiar with every window, roof, tree and landmark in the place, but he felt as if he were seeing it all for the first time.
How old he had grown since then.
They met ten days or two weeks later, in a New York hotel. She was there first and ordered some whisky and roast-beef sandwiches. When he came in, she poured herself a drink and made one for him, and he ate both the sandwiches she had ordered. She was wearing a bracelet, made of silver bells, that she had bought long ago in Casablanca. She had been given a Mediterranean cruise as a Christmas present by a rich elderly cousin, and in her travels she had never been able to escape a genuine and oppressive sense of gratitude to the old lady. When she saw Lisbon she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Lisbon! When she saw Rhodes she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see Rhodes! Standing in the Casbah at dusk she thought, Oh, Cousin Martha, I wish you could see how purple the skies are above Africa! Remembering this she gave the silver bells a shake.
“Do you have to wear that bracelet?” he asked.
“Of course not,” she said.
“I hate that kind of junky stuff,” he said. “You’ve got lots of nice jewelry—those sapphires. I don’t see why you want to wear junk. Those bells are driving me crazy. Every time you move they jingle. They get on my nerves.”
“I’m sorry, darling,” she said. She took off the bracelet. He seemed ashamed or confused by his harshness; he had never before been harsh or callous with her.
“Sometimes I wonder why it happened to me like this,” he said. “I mean, I couldn’t have had anything better, I know. You’re beautiful and you’re fascinating—you’re the most fascinating woman I ever saw—but sometimes I wonder—wondered—why it should happen to me this way. I mean, some fellows, right away they get a pretty young girl, she lives next door, their folks are friendly, they go to the same schools, the same dances, they go dancing together, they fall in love and get married. But I guess that’s not for poor people. No pretty girls live next door to me. There aren’t any pretty girls on my street. Oh, I’m glad it happened to me the way it did, but I can’t stop wondering what it would have been like some other way. I mean like in Nantucket that weekend. That was the big football weekend, and I was thinking, there we were, all alone in that gloomy old house—that was a real gloomy place, rainy and everything—while some fellows were driving in convertibles to the football game.”
“I must seem terribly old.”
“Oh, no. No, you don’t. It isn’t that. . . . Only once. That was in Nantucket, too. It was raining in the night. It began to rain and you got up to shut the window.”
“And I seemed terribly old?”
“Just for a minute. . . . Not really. But you see, you’re used to comfort, you’re different. Two cars, plenty of clothes. I’m just a poor kid.”
“Does it matter?”
