The Eleventh Virgin by Dorothy Day (important books to read .TXT) 📕

was sorry for some fault she was unconscious of committing. She wanted to trample on her pride and yet she sat there, paralyzed in her chair. Then he was gone. Despair was raising in her throat to choke her. She hastily swallowed the glass of whiskey and water that was on the table before her and although it was but her second felt that she would stagger if she ventured to get up.

“Billy,” she said. “I feel awfully woozy. Can I come over to your place to stay tonight?”

“Sure, old thing. I’ll bring home a bottle of sherry and we’ll have one of those early morning sprees that I just dote on.”

People seemed ugly suddenly. There were remarks from the man on her right⁠—a sympathetic question⁠—she could not hear what he said. She repulsed him rudely. He turned and went on talking to his friends. What did she care for Sorolla or whoever it was they were talking about?

Billy moved to the vacant seat by her side and squeezed her limp hand. She felt limp all over. It was as though life had gone out of her. Wait! Dick had used that phrase. When was it? That night she went to him and he told her he hated her because she was taking his life from him.

“They’re brutes, all of them,” Billy whispered and then went on chirping to the others at the table. She could afford to be sympathetic. She was in love with one of them and basked in his presence whenever he would sit at the table with her. Why was it that women idolized men that scorned them? His name was Bryant and he was a thin, black-haired fellow who limped. He painted feverishly most of the time and only stopped now and then to drink.

June had known him when she had worked on the Flame. She had always liked him. There had been nights when they had talked for hours over a glass of wine. She had liked to hear him talk even when she didn’t know what he was talking about. It flattered her that he should take it for granted that she understood the difference between a Corot and a Manet.

Yes, there was a time when she liked to sit with people, evening after evening. She liked them. She liked their enthusiasm. She didn’t anymore. People were dull and stupid.

The other man at the table had a face like Puck. His mouth stretched from ear to ear when he smiled and his ears were pointed. He grinned as though life were obscene. He grinned at June now.

“I laugh that I may not weep,” he said. Then, “Rotten to be in love.”

There were three doors June could watch from where she sat. Each time she heard one open her heart gave a jump and each time she saw that the newcomer was not Dick, her heart sank lower. The café was “L” shaped and at either end of the “L” there were doors that kept opening and closing. Just around the corner from where she sat there was another door going out into the bar. He had passed through that. Although she had not listened, she had heard the swing door pushed aside as he had gone, and then swing back and forth. Was he in the bar now?

She forgot her pride and asked the Puck-faced man to see if he was in the bar. He grinned sympathetically and returned to report that he was not there.

“Why don’t you go home after him?” he asked her helpfully.

“If I’d run after him when he left it would have been all right. Damn my pride! I love him and nothing else matters. But now⁠—I don’t know whether he did go right home or uptown. I haven’t any key. We’ve only got one between us. We’ve lost the duplicate.” (That “we” hurt her as she said it. Maybe it would not be “we” anymore. The dear intimacy of the word!)

“I could go home and sit on the door step, but if he’s already there that would be useless. It’s a back apartment so I couldn’t make him hear me by tapping on a window. And the bell only communicates with the landlady. (It’s an old house made over into apartments, you know.)”

June’s mind kept running around and around in circles. She began to weep softly. “Don’t pay any attention,” she whispered. “It’s probably only the whiskey.”

“Take another. That’ll help. The thing to do is to get pie-eyed.”

June didn’t think emotion and whiskey would mix very well. “I feel sickish now. But I’m not angry now. Before I had everything in the world, and now⁠—now I don’t see any use in living.”

The three doors went on opening and shutting but Dick did not return. Every now and then the telephone bell rang and sent its jangle through her heart, but neither of the two waiters who knew her came to say, “Miss Henreddy, somebody wants you on the phone.”

Soon it was closing time and Billy was ready to go home.

“Come on, June. I’ve got the sherry and I’ll tuck you in bed and give you enough to make you forget there ever was a lover in the world.”

Billy had a telephone and June decided she would stay awake listening for it to ring. But she didn’t. The combination of emotion and highballs made her fall asleep as soon as she lay down and she awoke brightly to find the sun streaming across the dusty studio. Billy on the other side of the room, lifted a face still expressionless with sleep surrounded by matted short hair, and called, “Moral support!”

“What’ll it be? Sherry or coffee this morning?” June asked. With the recognition of her surroundings came the return of the emotions of the night before.

“Coffee o’ course. Every time I get lit, I decide when I go to bed that I’ll begin again immediately in the morning to keep up the glorious feeling. And then the next morning