Serenade - James M. Cain [67]
"Yes, yes. Make me feel very nostálgica."
Then came the real Hawes touch. He picked it up, staggered with it over to the fireplace, and put it down. "For my hearth!"
She got up to go, and I did. "Well, children, you know now where I live, and I want to be seeing a lot of you."
"Yes, gracias."
"And oh! As soon as I'm moved in, I'm giving a little house-warming, and you're surely coming to it--"
"Well, I don't know, Winston, I'm pretty busy--"
"Too busy for my housewarming? Jack, Jack, Jack!"
"Gracias, Seńor Hawes. Perhaps we come."
"Perhaps? Certainly you'll come!"
I was plenty shaky when we got to our own apartment. "Listen, Juana, we're getting out of this dump, and we're getting out quick. I don't know what the hell his game is, but this is no coincidence. He's moved in on us, and we're going to beat it."
"We beat it, he come too."
"Then we'll beat it again. I don't want to see him."
"Why you run away?"
"I don't know. It--makes me nervous. I want to be somewhere where I don't have to see him, don't have to think of him, don't have to feel that he's around."
"I think we stay."
We saw him twice more that day. Once, around six o'clock, he rang the buzzer and asked us to dinner, but I was singing and said we would have to eat later. Then, some time after midnight, when we had got home, he dropped in with a kid named Pudinsky, a Russian pianist that was to play at his next concert. He said they were going to run over some stuff, and for us to come on down. We said we were tired. He didn't argue. He put his arm around Pudinsky, and they left. While we were undressing we could hear the piano going. The kid could play all right.
"I see his game now."
"Yes. Very fonny game."
"That boy. I'm supposed to get jealous."
"Are you jealous?"
"No. Jealous--what the hell are you talking about? What difference does it make to me what he does, once I'm out of it? But it makes me nervous. I--I wish he was somewhere else. I wish we were all somewhere else."
She lay there for a long time, up on one elbow, looking down at me. Then she kissed me and went over to her own bed. It was daylight before I got to sleep.
Next day he was in and out half a dozen times, and the day after that, and that day after that. I began missing cues, the first sign you get that you're not right. The voice was in shape, and I was getting across, but the prompter began throwing the finger at me. It was the first time in my life that that had ever happened.
In about a week came the invitation to the housewarming. I tried to beg out of it, said I had to sing that night, but she smiled and said gracias, we would go, and he put his arm around her and you would have thought they were pals, but I knew them both like a book, and could tell there was something back of it, on both sides. After he left I got peevish and wanted to know why the hell she was shoving me into it all the time. "Hoaney, with this man, it do you no good to run away. He see you no care, then maybe he estop. He know you have afraid, he never estop. We go. We laugh, have fine time, no care...You care?"
"For God's sake, no."
"I think yes, little bit. I think we have--how you say--the goat."
"He's got my goat all right, but not for that reason. I just don't want any more to do with him."
"Then you care. Maybe not so, how he want. But you have afraid. When you no care at all, he estop. Now--we no run away. We go, you sing, be fine fallow, no give a damn. And you watch, will be all right."
"If I have to, I have to, but Christ, I hate it."
So we went. I was singing Faust, and I was so lousy I almost did get stuck in the duel scene. But I was washed up by ten thirty, and we came home and dressed. It wasn't any white dress with flowers on it this time. She put on a bottle-green evening dress, and over that the bullfighter's cape, and that embroidered crimson and yellow silk, sliding over the green taffeta,