Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara [79]
was no purist who would discourage the progress of a fair tenor. No, a good tenor, as locker-room tenors go. He thought of these things. Harry must have changed since then, become obnoxious or something. Julian reasoned that he could not have asked the Harry he now knew to invest so much money in the business. Well, maybe the winter had something to do with it. You went to the Gibbsville Club for lunch; Harry was there. You went to the country club to play squash on Whit Hofman s private court, and Harry was around. You went to the Saturday night drinking parties, and there was Harry; inescapable, everywhere. Carter Davis was there, too, and so was Whit; so was Froggy Ogden. But they were different. The bad news never had worn off Harry Reilly. And the late fall and winter seemed now to have been spoiled by room after room with Harry Reilly. You could walk outside in the summer, but even though you can walk outside in winter, winter isn’t that way. You have to go back to the room soon, and there is no life in the winter outside of rooms. Not in Gibbsville, which was a pretty small room itself. Well, what was the use of trying to build up Harry now as having been a swell guy last summer. Last summer Julian had needed money, and Harry Reilly had money, so he had asked Harry. And Harry had said: Jesus, I ain t got that much cash at this present minute. Do you need it right away? Julian had said he needed it pretty soon. Well, I don t see how I can get it for you before tomorrow. & Oh, hell, sure I can. Julian had almost laughed in his face: in one minute the little worry that Harry wanted to have a month to think it over and raise the cash had come and gone. Julian had had a lot more trouble in college, trying to borrow forty-four cents to go to the movies. & Harry had been no different then from the Harry he knew today. Might as well face that. As for the Caroline angle, Julian believed in a thought process that if you think against a thing in advance, if you anticipate it whether it s the fear that you’re going to cut yourself when you shave, or lose your wife to another man you ve licked it. It can t happen, because things like that are known only by God. Any future thing is known only to God; and if you have a super-premonition about a thing, it ll be wrong, because God is God, and is not giving away one of His major powers to Julian McHenry English. So Julian thought and thought about Caroline and Harry, and thought against them, against their being drawn to each other sexually, which was the big thing that mattered. By God, no one else will have her in bed, he said, to the empty office. And immediately began the worst fear he had ever known that this day, this week, this minute, next year, sometime she would open herself to another man and close herself around him. Oh, if she did that it would be forever. Julian reached in the second drawer of the desk and took out a Colt s .25 automatic and got up and went to the washroom. He was breathless with excitement and he felt his eyes get the way they got when he was being thrilled, big but sharp. He sat down on the toilet, and he knew he was not going to do it that way. But be wanted to sit down and look at the pistol. He looked at it for he knew not how long, and then snapped himself to without changing his position in the slightest degree. He put the barrel in his mouth and some oil touched the inside of his lower lip. He made a Guck sound, and took a long breath, and then he put the pistol in his pocket and got up and washed his mouth with cold water and then he took off his upper garments, except his undershirt, and washed himself all over the head and face and arms to the elbow. He used four towels, drying himself. Then he put on his clothes again, wiped stray drops of water off his shoes, and went back to the office and lit a cigarette. He remembered a bottle of whiskey he had in the desk, and he had a long-lasting drink of one whiskey glass of it. Oh, I couldn t, he said, and he put his arms on the desk and his head on his arms, and he wept. You poor guy, he said. I