Different Seasons - Stephen King [233]
And it was. But it was also true. I could scoff all I liked; none of the scoffing changed that essential certainty.
I walked slowly to the door of my building and went inside.
Ellen was sixty per cent asleep when I sat down on the bed to take off my shoes. She rolled over and made a fuzzy interrogative sound deep in her throat. I told her to go back to sleep.
She made the fuzzy sound again. This time approximated English: 'Howwuzzit?'
For a moment I hesitated, my shirt half-unbuttoned. And I thought with one moment's utter clarity: If I tell her, I will never see the other side of that door again.
'It was all right,' I said. 'Old men telling war stories.'
'I told you so.'
'But it wasn't bad. I might go back again. It might do me some good with the
firm.'
'"The firm",' she mocked lightly. 'What an old buzzard you are, my love.'
'It takes one to know one,' I said, but she had already fallen asleep again. I undressed, showered, towelled, put on my pyjamas and then, instead of going to bed as I should have done (it was edging past one by that time), I put on my robe and had another bottle of Beck's. I sat at the kitchen table, drinking it slowly, looking out the window and up the cold canyon of Madison Avenue, thinking. My head was a trifle buzzy from my evening's intake of alcohol-for me an unexpectedly large intake. But the feeling was not at all unpleasant, and I had no sense of an impending hangover.
The thought which had come to me when Ellen asked me about my evening was as ridiculous as the one I'd entertained about George Waterhouse as the cab drew away from me -what in God's name could be wrong with telling my wife about a perfectly harmless evening at my boss's stuffy men's club and even if something were wrong with telling her, who would know that I had? No, it was every bit as ridiculous and paranoid as those earlier musings and, my heart told me, every bit as true.
I met George Waterhouse the next day in the hallway between Accounts and the Reading Library. Met him Passed him would be more accurate. He nodded my way and went on without speaking as he had done for years.
My stomach muscles ached all day long. That was the only thing that completely convinced me the evening had been real.
Three weeks passed. Four five. No second invitation came from Waterhouse.
Somehow I just hadn't been right; hadn't fitted. Or so I told myself. It was a depressing, disappointing thought. I supposed it would begin to fade and lose its sting, as all disappointments eventually do. But I thought of that evening at the oddest moments-the isolated pools of library lamplight, so still and tranquil and somehow civilized; Waterhouse's absurd and hilarious tale of the schoolteacher stuck in the privy; the rich smell of leather in the narrow stacks. Most of all I thought of standing by that narrow window and watching the frost crystals change from green to amber to red. I thought of that sense of peace I had felt.
During that same five-week period I went to the library and checked out four volumes of Archibald MacLeish's poetry (I had three others myself, and had already checked through them); one of these volumes purported to be The Complete Poems of. I reacquainted myself with some old favourites, including my favourite MacLeish poem, 'Epistle to Be Left in Earth.' But I found no poem called 'The Toll' in any of the volumes.
On that same trip to the New York Public Library, I checked the card catalogue for works of fiction by a man named Edward Gray Seville. A mystery novel by a woman named Ruth Seville was the closest I came.
Come again, if you like; don't wait for an invitation
I was waiting for an invitation anyway, of course; my mother taught me donkey's years ago not to automatically believe people who tell you glibly to 'drop by anytime' or that 'the door is always open'. I didn't feel I needed an engraved card delivered to my apartment door by a footman in livery bearing a gilt plate, I don't mean that, but I did want something, even if it was only a casual remark: 'Coming by some night, David?