All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [152]
Then the lady suddenly overcame the paralysis which had frozen her tongue and the blood hit her cheeks. “Jack Burden!” she said, “if you don’t–”
“She knows your name,” Slade said.
I turned around to face the reality which was not something caught in the ice of the mind but was something now flushed, feline, lethal, and electric and about to blow a fuse. “Well, I declare,” I said, “if it isn’t my fiancée! Say, Slade, I want you to meet Anne Stanton. We’re going to get married.”
“Gee,” Slade said, his pan as dead as something in the sink next morning, “I’m glad ter–”
“We’re getting married in twenty-hundred-and-fifty,” I said. “It will be a June wedding, with–”
“It will be a March murder,” Anne said, “right now.” Then she smiled, and the blood subsided in her cheeks, and she put out her hand to Slade.
“Glad ter meetcha,” Slade said, and though the face which he exhibited might well have belonged to a wooden Indian, the eyes in it didn’t miss any of the details suggested by the coat suit. “How about a drink?” he asked.
“Thank you,” Anne said, and settled on a Martini
After the drink, she said, “Jack, we’ve got to go,” thanked Slade again, and led me away into the night full of neon lights, gasoline fumes, the odor of roasted coffee, and the honk of taxis.
“You have a wonderful sense of humor,” she said.
“Where are we going? I sidestepped her remark.
“You are such a smart aleck.”
“Where are we going?”
“Aren’t you ever going to grow up?”
“Where are we going?”
We were walking aimlessly down the side street past the swinging doors of the bars and oyster joints and past newsstands and old women selling flowers. I bought some gardenias, gave them to her, and said, “I reckon I am a smart aleck, bit it is just a way to pass the time.”
We walk on another half block, threading through the crowd that drifted and eddied in and out of the swinging doors.
“Where are we going?”
“I wouldn’t be going anywhere with you,” she said, “if I didn’t have to talk to you.”
We were passing another old woman selling flowers. So I took another bunch of gardenias, laid down my four bits, and shoved the blossoms at Anne Stanton. “If you can’t be civil,” I said, “I’m going to smother you in these damned things.”
“All right,” she said, and laughed, “all right, I’ll be good.” And she swung on to my arm and matched her step to mine, holding the flowers in her free hand, her bag tucked under the off elbow.
We kept step, not talking for a half block. I looked down, watching her feet flick out, one-two, one-two. She was wearing black suède shoes, very severe, very mannish, and she clicked the pavement with authority, but they were small and the fine ankles flickered, one-two, one-two, hypnotically.
Then I said, “Where are we going?”
“To walk,” she said, “just walk. I’m too restless to be still.”
We walked on, down toward the river.
“I had to talk to you,” she said.
“Well, talk then. Sing. Spill.”
“Not now,” she said soberly and looked up at me and I saw in the light of the street lamp that her face was very serious, even worried. The flesh seemed smoothed back, even painfully taut over the wonderful perfection of the bone structure of her face. There wasn’t any waste material in that face, and always there was a hint in it of a trained-down, keyed-up intensity, though an intensity kept under the smooth surface of calm, like a flame behind glass. But the intensity was keyed up more than usual, I could see. And I had the feeling that id you turned the wick up a fraction the glass might crack.
I didn’t reply, and we took a few more paces. Then she said, “Later. Now just walk.”
So we walked. We had left the streets where the bars and pool-rooms and restaurants were, and the blare or whimper of music from beyond the swinging doors. We passed down a grubby, dark street where a couple of boys scurried along by the walls of the houses, uttering short, lost-sounding, hollow calls, like marsh