“I got up late,” she went on. “Everything’s gone wrong today.” She finished her cocktail just as the waiter came with the two bottles of wine. He drew the corks and filled their glasses. “I feel like getting tight tonight,” she went on.
George was still not satisfied. “Are you sure there isn’t something else?”
“Of course not!” she said, the waspish note hack in her voice. “It’s just that it’s been a hell of a day, and I’m tired.”
“Well, never mind,” George said, certain now that there was something on her mind. “The wine will make you feel better.”
And he began to talk to her about the only subject he was really competent to talk about—crime in America. He didn’t want to talk to her about that. He would much rather have talked of his love for her, and even to confide in her that all his stories of violence and adventure were figments of his imagination, and that he was only a simple type of fellow, but very much in love with her. But she was so unsympathetic and hard and nervous that he knew it would be inviting disaster to be sentimental. So he told her more fictitious stories of his adventures in America. He had been reading a lot lately, and was well primed with material. She seemed to welcome these stories, probably because she didn’t wish to talk herself. While he talked, she smoked incessantly. The ashtray was piled high with cigarette butts, smeared with lipstick. She had scarcely touched her meal, but she had drunk a good deal of the sour red wine. When George asked her if she felt all right, as she had made such a poor dinner, she said abruptly that it was too hot to eat. Remembering that the first words she had greeted him with were, “Come on, I’m hungry", George shrugged hopelessly. Her moods defeated him.
But she listened to his tales of crime, sitting still, with her chin in her cupped hands, her eyes expressionless.
George soon became engrossed in his own stories, and when the lights in the restaurant began to go out, he realized with a start of surprise that it was half past eleven and he was a little drunk. The restaurant was empty now, except for the blond man at the table opposite, the Hebrew barman, the fat woman at the desk and the waiter who had looked after them.
“We’d better be going, I suppose,” he said regretfully. “I’m afraid I’ve been doing all the talking again. I hope I —haven’t bored you.”
Cora shook her head. Her face was flushed by the wine, and when she spoke, the sickly smell of the wine was on her breath. “I wanted you to talk,” she said. Then she looked again at the blond man at the table across the room. George suddenly realized that all the time he had been talking to her she had been casting glances in this man’s direction.
He couldn’t resist saying, “Do you know that man?”