The Cry of the Owl (12 page)

“The idea of snooping to find where my car is. He told me he snooped to find out where you lived. Asked the post office.”

“Well—people snoop.” Robert took a cigarette from the box on the coffee table.

“But is it any of
their
business?”

He looked at her. “I suppose he told Nickie you spent a few nights here, too?”

“Oh, sure,” Jenny said.

She was looking at him in a surprised way, and he knew it was because his thoughts showed on his face.

“No, it’s none of their business,” he said. “It’s certainly not Nickie’s.”

She got up and took a cigarette. Robert let her light it. She was frowning, looking down at the floor. She was like a child threatened with the deprivation of some pleasure she considered quite innocent and harmless. Friday evening, when they had had their second dinner here together, she had said, “Robert, can I spend the weekend with you? I’ll cook—and I won’t bother you, if you want to work.” If he had refused, he felt the weekend would have been just a dreary stretch of time to her. He hadn’t been able to think of a really good reason to say no. He was a free man, and if he invited a girl for the weekend, wasn’t that his right? Greg’s threats, which he hadn’t told Jenny about, had annoyed him, and he had felt that if he told her
she couldn’t stay the weekend, it would have been partially because he was knuckling down to Greg. But during the weekend Robert had wished once or twice that he could have a couple of hours alone, not that she bothered him when he was working, but he foresaw that she was going to focus more and more on him, that she was the sort of girl who lived for the man she was in love with, and he regretted having agreed to her staying the weekend. He regretted having let her come over again tonight for dinner, just because she took it for granted that she would come. He thought of Saturday evening after dinner, when she had been lying on the red couch and he sitting in the armchair, with the fire dying low in the fireplace and the lights out as Jenny had wanted them. She had said, lying on her back and looking up at the ceiling, “I’m so happy now, I wouldn’t mind dying.”

“Do you think you could ever love me, Robert?” she asked.

I do now, he thought. But it was not the way people usually loved. It was not the way he had loved and been in love with Nickie, for instance. “Jenny, I don’t know. Maybe I could. I don’t care to make any promises.”

They were silent for several seconds.

“You’re afraid of promises? Words?” she asked.

“Yes. They don’t change any feelings about—I’m afraid of promises that get broken. If people love each other, words aren’t going to make them love each other more—or change anything.” He was thinking of Nickie, of everything collapsing, in spite of the words and the promises. “If I loved you now, I wouldn’t say it. I’m not going to promise that I will. But if I ever do and I don’t say it, that’s not going to change the facts at all. Things either happen or not.”

She didn’t move. “I love you, Robert, and I don’t care about anything else. I just would like to know how you feel about me.”

“Well—I like to be with you. You’re very easy to be with, even when I’m working. You make me happier.” He couldn’t say any more.

“And what else?”

“But it can’t go on like this, Jenny—you staying nights—because people talk. If it isn’t Greg, it’ll be the Kolbes next door pretty soon. They know I’m not married. They’ll see your car here, they’ll find out you’re a very good-looking girl of twenty-three. And there’re your friends the Tessers, et cetera. Once they start commenting … We shouldn’t see each other every evening, Jenny. You didn’t see Greg every evening, did you?”

“I wasn’t in love with Greg,” she said flatly. The ash of her cigarette fell to the floor, and noticing it, she bent over the coffee table to put the cigarette out.

Robert looked at her long-waisted figure in the black suit with the short jacket. Even in the flat shoes she wore because she thought herself too tall, she was graceful, even beautiful. Friday she had worn the black suit, which she said was ancient—four years old—but Robert had said he liked it, so she had worn it again.

“All right, I don’t have to see you every night,” she said sadly, “and I won’t see you any night you want to be by yourself, but it’s not going to be because of Greg that I won’t be seeing you. It’ll be because both of us agreed to it. For instance, tomorrow night I won’t see you if you prefer it. I’ll see you Wednesday.”

Robert smiled. “O.K.”

She didn’t return his smile.

“Want to go out somewhere tonight for dinner?” he asked.

“I made the soup. Remember?” She went to the bag on the straight chair.

He had forgotten the soup. She had gone home to start it last night, because all the ingredients were at her house, and then come back to spend the night at his house, and tonight after work she had gone by her house to finish it. Now she was solemnly starting their dinner in the kitchen—leek and potato soup and a big green salad—as if they had been married for a year.

He picked up a postal card from his writing table. “Want to see the yellow-bellied thumbsucker?” He walked into the kitchen.

“The what?” The frown had left her face. She took the card, looked at it, and smiled a wide smile. “Where’d you find
this
bird?”

“Oh, he sits on my window sill all the time. Here’s another, the clothesline bird. He says, ‘Ah-
eee
! Ah-
eee
!’ just like a rusty pulley on a clothesline.”

Robert had drawn two birds working a clothesline full of small trousers and shirts.

“I know that bird. I’ve heard it,” Jenny said, “but I’ve never seen one.”

He laughed. Jenny was taking his birds as seriously as if they existed.

“Got any more?” she asked.

“No. But I’ll make more. Should that soup be boiling?”

“Ooooh, no.” She turned the burner off and pushed the pot back. “I guess we’re ready—as soon as I set the table.”

“I’ll set the table.”

Jenny had three helpings of her salad. Robert stayed his appetite on the soup and several slices of dark bread and butter. Then they
had coffee and brandy by the fire. Jenny leaned back in her chair, quiet and pensive, and Robert stared at her slender face surrounded by darkness, the dark of her suit and the shadows of the room. Was she happy, was she sad? Impulsively, Robert got up, touched her shoulder lightly, and kissed her cheek.

“Sorry I sounded gloomy tonight,” he said.

She looked up at him with sharp and serious eyes. “You’re not gloomy. Maybe I am.”

She hadn’t moved, her hands had not stirred from where they rested on the arms of the chair. And it was just as well, Robert thought, because he regretted kissing her, even though his kiss on her cheek might as well have been from her brother. But her eyes did not leave him. He threw his cigarette in the fire and started clearing the table. Then he filled the sink to wash their few dishes, and Jenny with a gesture and a smile shooed him aside and put an apron on and did them herself, very neatly, not wetting the cuffs of her suit. Robert dried them as she put them on the rack. He felt content, unworried about anything. Greg seemed unimportant and a bit silly. He was as important as Jenny made him, and Jenny simply wanted him out of her life and that was that. They both, in fact, were free, he and Jenny. He looked at her soft hair that hung beside her face, some of it slipped over the pin behind her ear, and he wanted to kiss her cheek again. She was wiping out the sink. Then she straightened and untied the apron, dropped it on the counter, and opened her arms to him. Their lips touched, pressed, and the tip of her tongue against his was like a warm electric shock. He held her tight—her strange, warm body, taller than Nickie and more slender, her perfume different. The first girl he had held in his arms since Nickie. Then he
broke away and walked into the living room. He felt her eyes on him from the kitchen. He stood looking into the fireplace for a minute, then made a lunge toward the phonograph and put a record on, the first record he picked up.

He did not want her to stay the night, but she was taking it for granted that she would, he knew, and it was impossible to say “Jenny, in view of what we were talking about tonight …” And what was worse, he might have slept with her, might have asked her to come up to his bedroom without any to-do about it tonight. It would all have been so easy, so natural, so expected by everyone. And possibly unfair. If it happened tonight, he might never want it to happen again. If it happened tonight, she might be disappointed—what fantasies went on in her head, what unrealizable ideals?—or she might expect it to happen “every night and every night,” the phrase she had used on Sunday in regard to seeing him in the evenings. Robert did not want to begin. Tomorrow she would not be here, and that would be the beginning of the tapering off of something that should never have begun.

He stood looking at her in bed on the red couch, his hands clenched in the pockets of his robe, as he had stood on the first night she had spent here. She had gotten into bed after her shower with the routine air of a docile child, but now her eyes looked up at him questioningly, alert.

“Good night, Jenny.”

She smiled slowly, as if she were amused by him. “No kiss on the forehead? No kiss on the cheek?”

He laughed and swung around in search of a cigarette. “No.” He found the cigarette, lit it, and started up the steps to the bedroom,
paused and turned to say a last “Good night,” but before he had spoken, she called his name.

“I want—” she began, and there was a long pause. Her arms were behind her head, her eyes closed, and she stirred as if she were in pain. Then she opened her eyes and said, “I’m so ha-appy, Robert. What can I do for you?”

“Can’t think of anything. Thanks.”

“Nothing? Not even knit a sweater for you?”

He shook his head. “Well, there is one thing. If you’ve got a doctor here and you can get some sleeping pills for me—I prefer Seconals.”

“Oh, sure I can. E-easily.”

“I’ve been too lazy to look up a doctor. Thanks, Jenny. Good night, now.”

“Good night.”

He climbed the stairs, got into bed, and turned his light off at once. Jenny’s light stayed on for another half hour. Robert had taken two of the mild sedatives he had bought in a drugstore without prescription, but they might as well have been placebos. It was one of the nights he needed something strong.

Robert spent Tuesday evening working on his drawings of the cylinder-shaped part—as yet nameless—that he was trying to get into producible form for Langley Aeronautics. The plant had the mold for a similar piece, one of the standard transmission parts that went into every helicopter. Since molds were expensive, Mr. Jaffe and Mr. Gerard, Robert’s boss and the company president, respectively, wanted him to design this piece so that it could be produced by the mold they already had, even though the functions of the two cylindrical parts were entirely different. Robert’s idea, if it could be put to use, would eliminate two parts and combine three parts into one, thus eventually saving the expense of two molds, but Gerard had not seemed much impressed by this fact. They were not going to lay out the money for a new mold to try it out. Or perhaps they were testing his ingenuity, just seeing if he could do it. Their attitude was a bit irksome. But the task had the challenge of a game or a puzzle that he felt could be solved, if he kept at it. Again and again Robert compared
his drawings with those of the transmission mold, coming again to the same impasse at the anterior end. And what did it all matter? Did he really care about improving L.A.’s helicopters? Or about getting himself a raise in pay for it? No. It was just something that had occurred to him while looking at a certain section of a helicopter the other day.
You have no ambition
, Nickie’s voice said in his ears. She was no doubt right. He had simply fallen into industrial designing in the last year of college. He had studied engineering, and his specialty might have been any number of things besides industrial engineering. He hadn’t been passionately drawn to anything. Robert supposed that was a fault, a deficiency. Perhaps someday he would be passionately drawn to something he might have to study years more to master. It had happened to other men that they found their lifework only at thirty or so, or at least their particular specialization.

He lifted his head when the telephone rang, blinked his eyes, looked at his watch. Ten-thirty-five. Jenny calling to say good night, he thought. He had not talked to her all evening.

“Hello?” he said.

“Elusive with that telephone number, aren’t you, darling?” said Nickie’s voice.

“Mm-m. How’d you get it?”

“Oh, I got it from Greg. And he said he got it by telling the operator he had an urgent message about your sick mother.” Nickie laughed. “What’s the use trying to hide your number if you can’t? Who do you think you are, a V.I.P. or something?”

“Nickie, I’m working. What’re you calling about?”

“I’m calling to give you a word of advice,” she said, dragging out the last word in a hiss. “Mr. Wyncoop is annoyed with you, and
who could blame him? Stealing his girl friend, his fiancée. I hear she’s young enough to be your daughter, anyway.”

“Oh, Nickie, knock it off.”

“I’m telling you this for your own good,” she said righteously now and in a tone of anger. “Mr. Wyncoop is a man who means business. The best thing for you to do is drop the girl—before it’s too late. I understand you’ve been sleeping with her. Good God!” Nickie said with disgust.

“Listen, Nickie, we’re divorced now, remember? What I do is my own business and nothing—”

“I’m giving you some advice. I suggest you drop the girl before it’s too late.”

“And what do you mean by too late?”

She laughed. “I mean, when you find out, it’ll probably be too late. Get it? I mean, watch your health down there.”

Now Robert laughed. “Interesting.”

“Oh, you ass. You moron.”

“Good night, Nickie.” He waited an instant, she was silent, and he hung up.

He went back to his writing table and sat down, but the image of his drawing didn’t focus. Damned if he’d let it bother him, he thought. If it weren’t Jenny, it’d be some other girl, any other girl he happened to be interested in. Nickie would find out somehow, she’d find the time and the energy to hang herself on the telephone and heckle him about it. He flung his pencil down and stood up.