Looking distressed as she intended to look distressed, she said, “Oh, Asher.”

Now I was jaunty. It is possible to say that at similar moments, having thus rescued, having thus alleviated the bothersome finances of a woman, having restored again her sense of being safe, I have been jaunty. My arm went about her. She leaned slightly to me. Her warmth penetrated to me. I am, as Michael might say, easily moved by such penetrations.

I said: “I just don’t want you to be unhappy, darling. I like the idea of your going to school. I like it that you want to become a lawyer. Pay your tuition and stop looking so woebegone.”

She tried not to look so woebegone.

“Better. Now smile.”

She produced a trembling smile.

“There. Now where would you like to have dinner?”

30

But I didn’t have dinner with Aurora that evening. She begged me to forgive her, she felt so exhausted, perhaps tomorrow night we could have dinner, on Lexington, perhaps, at one of the Balkan restaurants.

I had a certain hesitancy about asking her if she was going to see Michael. She insisted she wasn’t. She was going directly home and straight into a hot bath. Besides, she was very angry with Michael.

“Oh?”

She had, she said, an absolutely sick taste in her mouth about Michael at this moment.

“Oh?”

She was going straight home and get into a hot bath and just soak.

“Oh?”

I remember I kissed her at the hotel door, and she went off, down the silent hotel corridor, past the vacuum cleaners and the carts stacked with dishes, huddled in the muskrat, the purse with the check folded neatly in it tucked under her arm. I waited until I heard the elevator, and the door hiss closed, and then I went back and looked into the mirror and thought I ought to shave. It was almost six o’clock and I didn’t know what I was going to do with myself. Michael had filled my afternoons and the girl had filled my evenings. Now that I had quarreled with the boy, and she had gone home to soak in a tub, I felt lost again.

I had dinner and then I went to the theatre. I walked down Broadway in the cold past the haberdashery and the novelty shops and looked at some of the pictures of the hostesses at the dance parlors and at the late headlines in the early editions on the news-stands and then I decided to see if I could get a seat at one of the new plays. I hadn’t been to the theatre in years. One simply didn’t manage to go in California. Not that I missed it but I had gone when I lived in New York. I had no trouble getting a seat at the new play: it was only, apparently, the musicals that one had trouble getting a seat at. I checked my coat, and as I sat down in my seat I thought, again, that it was a bit odd that Aurora should have gone to the elaborate extent of telling me the thing about her mother having a tumor; I mean, if it was a lie, it was a rather cruel choice of lies. I could see that she might have wanted a more serious reason to borrow money, for it occurred to me, now, that she must have come to the hotel either hoping or planning to borrow the money, but I couldn’t quite see what had led her to invent and then reject the rather unpleasant thing about a tumor. I decided that she had simply been ashamed about the money, and that she’d said merely the first thing that had come to mind. Still, why should her mother’s having a tumor (something ugly and willful like that) have been the first thing to come to her mind? The play began.