Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [91]
When Tinker presented the ring, she wouldn’t even touch it. He had to close it in her palm and insist she think it over. But she didn’t need to. She slept like a baby. Then she got up at dawn, stuffed an overnight bag, and slipped out the back door while Tinker was sound asleep.
Ambitious, determined, no-nonsense, whatever you wanted to call her, Eve never ceased to surprise. I thought of Eve six months earlier dressed in white, draped across the couch in Tinker’s apartment dissolving barbiturates in tepid gin. From that lotus-eating repose, she had roused herself to run the city ragged as the rest of us watched with varying degrees of admiration, envy, and contempt, convinced she was angling for a proposal. And all the time, she was laying in wait for everyone’s smug assessments like a cat in the barnyard grass.
—I wish you’d been there, she said with a nostalgic smile. You would’ve peed in your pants. I mean, he takes a week to engineer this song and dance and as soon as I tell him no, he sails his buddy’s yacht right into the ground. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He must have gone in and out of that cabin a hundred times looking for a flare gun. He trimmed the sails. Climbed the mast. He even got out and pushed.
—What were you doing?
—I just lay there on the deck with the rest of the champagne. I was listening to the whistle of the breeze, the flap of the sails, the lap of the waves.
Eve buttered a piece of toast as she recalled it, her expression almost dreamy.
—It was the first three hours of peace I’d had in half a year, she said. Then she stuck the knife in the butter like it was a banderilla in the back of a bull.
—The irony, of course, is that we don’t even like each other.
—Come on.
—You know what I mean. We’ve had some fun. But mostly, it’s he says po-tay-to and I say po-tah-to.
—You think that’s the way he saw it?
—Only more so.
—Then why’d he propose?
She took a sip of her coffee and scowled at the cup.
—What do you say we liven these up?
—Suit yourself. But I’ve got work in thirty minutes.
She found a fifth of whiskey in a cabinet and Irished her cup. When she sat back down, she tried to change the subject.
—Where the hell did all the books come from?
—Not so fast, Sis. I’m serious. If the two of you were so po-tay-to po-tah-to, why did he propose?
She shrugged and put her coffee down.
—It was my mistake. I got pregnant and I told him so when we got to England. I should have kept my trap shut. If he was a pain in the neck when I came out of the hospital, you can just imagine what he was like after that.
Eve lit a cigarette. She tilted her head back and shot the smoke toward the ceiling. Then she shook her head.
—Watch out for boys who think they owe you something. They’ll drive you the craziest.
—So what are you going to do?
—With my life?
—No. With the baby.
—Oh. I took care of that in Paris. I just hadn’t got around to telling him. I was going to find some way to cushion it. But in the end, I had to let him have it.
We were quiet for a moment. I stood to clear the plates.
—I had no choice, Eve explained. He’d cornered me. We were a mile at sea.
I turned on the tap.
—Katey. If you start washing those dishes like my mother, I’m going to throw myself out the window.
I came back to my seat. She reached across the table and squeezed my hand.
—Don’t look so disappointed in me. I can’t bear it—not from you.
—You’re just catching me off guard.
—I can see that. But you’ve got to understand. I was brought up to raise children, pigs & corn and to thank the Good Lord for the privilege. But I’ve learned a thing or two since the accident. And I like it just fine on this side of the windshield.
It was like she’d said all along: She was willing to be under anything, as long as it wasn’t somebody’s thumb.
She