Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [43]
He took her in his arms. Oh, I love you so much. I always will. I always have and I always will. Don t do this. She held up her chin while he kissed her neck and rubbed his mouth and nose against her breast, but when he cupped his left hand over her right breast she said, No. No. I don t want you to do that. Let me go, please.
Have you got the curse?
Please don t talk that way, say things like that. You know perfectly well I haven t.
That s right. I do. I thought you might have got it suddenly.
You think that s the only possible explanation for the way I feel?
At least there is some explanation, or there ought to be. You won’t tell me what it is?
It d take too long. And now I am going. It isn’t like you to keep me waiting out here with the temperature near zero.
Mm. Giving me a break. Okay. Let s go. He got out of the car and made one last effort to take her in his arms by carrying her to the verandah, but she was on the steps without even seeming to spurn his gesture. She went inside and immediately went up the stairs to the ladies quarters. He knew she did not expect him to be waiting when she came down, so he went out and joined the stag line. He saw Mill Ammermann and he was waiting for her to dance or be danced close enough to the stag line and he was going to cut in on her, when suddenly something happened that was like migraine: he did not see anyone in the room nor anything, yet the people and the lights and the things hurt his eyes. And the reason for it was that in one and the same instant he remembered that he had not asked Caroline to say yes or no about the date at intermission and he realized that he did not need to ask her.
He recovered a sense which may not have been sight, but whatever it was it enabled him to find his way back to the locker-room, where there was enough liquor for anyone in the world to get drunk.
CHAPTER 5
WHEN Caroline Walker fell in love with Julian English she was a little tired of him. That was in the summer of 1926, one of the most unimportant years in the history of the United States, and the year in which Caroline Walker was sure her life had reached a pinnacle of uselessness. She was four years out of college then, and she was twenty-seven years old, which is as old as anyone ever gets, or at least she thought so at the time. She found herself thinking more and more and less and less of men. That is the way she put it, and she knew it to be sure and right, but she did not bother to expand the -ism. I think of them oftener, and I think of them less often. She had attained varying degrees of love, requited and unrequited but seldom the latter. Men, and damn good men, fell in love with her with comforting regularity, and she had enough trouble with them, in one way or another, to make it impossible for her to tell herself honestly that she was unattractive. She was sorry she was not beautiful until a nice old gentleman, a Philadelphian who painted society women s portraits, told her that he never had seen a beautiful woman. That summer she thought of her life after college in three ways: she thought of it as unicellular, but a life that reversed the amoeba s performance. The days got together and formed one life, losing their separate identities. Again, she thought of those four years as calendar years, broken formally by the Assembly (New Year s Eve), the July 3 Assembly, Easter, Halloween, Labor Day. Put together they made four years, the length of time she had passed at Bryn Mawr, and like the years of college in that they seemed so long a time and so short a time, but also not at all like the college years, because she felt she had got something out of college. These four years had not had the compactness of college, and they seemed wasted. They were wasted. She took her turn teaching the Italian and Negro children at the Gibbsville Mission, which is what passes for the Junior League in Gibbsville. But she didn’t like it. She had no poise or assurance with those children, or any group of children, and she knew she was not a teacher. She almost loved