He stood there shaking his head.

Newman walked numbly out the door. After a few feet he stepped off the curb of the sidewalk and headed for home, keeping to the center of the macadam street where there was more light than under the trees.

Chapter Seventeen

BUT it all began to look differently the next morning. Something seemed to have happened to him during his sleep.

While he was dressing he knew once more his beloved feeling of independence and self-containment. Opening the front door for Gertrude he took note of the garbage pail standing undisturbed at the curb and walked up the street with his wife as though it could not have been otherwise, he having finally withdrawn from all contests.

And if when he passed the newsstand without taking a paper there arose in him a sense of embarrassment, it was more nearly the last drop from an empty gourd than the first of one that had now showed a crack. The only thing that needed settling, in his opinion, was Gertrude: she stood waiting for him to put the nickel in the turnstile and made everything clear by the raising of her eyebrow and repeated sighs.

The days passed that way, and when they spoke it was as though a little stone had lodged in their throats. He noticed the absence of small talk, knew she was waiting for him to acknowledge his mistake. But he had a house with a lock, and when she came to understand it she would brighten up and be happy with him there behind his door.

In a little while, however, the truth rode silently across his horizon like some hidden moon and hung there, squarely in front of his eyes. And he saw that he too was waiting, waiting to be attacked.

The garbage pail had not been turned any more violently the second time than it had the first, and yet he knew, he knew it was coming and he knew it would find him. Not because anything outside him had changed but because he had changed. In those solemn days between him and his wife, the city kept carving a new shape upon his soul. Like a current along a shore it scoured silently against the sides of his mind. It was not something that happened; tantalizingly it never took the shape of an event. He merely came to live in a state of waiting while his body carried him through his daily rounds. Work in the morning, lunch at noon, home at night. He had dinner with Gertrude in restaurants on many evenings and they went to the movies a little more often, and one Saturday afternoon, making a stab at joy, they rode along the river on a Fifth Avenue bus. But nothing drew the pressure away, for wherever he looked he saw new shapes and heard sounds that had never registered on his ears before. Often, while walking in a crowd, he caught a conversation behind him and slowed down to listen. For’ the sound ‘ew’ had come from back there and he must know to what it referred, and trying to follow the conversation he would find his heart turned a little, and it took a moment for it to slip back into place.