“It’s awful for you to be alone, though, Joy,” she said. “Auntie suggested that you come and stay with us—she’s deaf, you know, so she won’t mind your practicing, if you don’t mind living in the little room off the kitchen——I’d take you in with me, but there’s really no room, the way everything’s fixed.”
Having decided to accept this enthusiastic invitation before it had been issued, Joy surprised Félicie by being pleased with the offer of the little room near the kitchen. “Of course, I’d pay board,” she said, “and take my meals out.”
“Well, all right,” said Félicie, “only auntie will be annoyed if you don’t eat with her. She’s lonely, now that I go out so much of the time.”
They left the situation to be fought out with “auntie,” and Joy wrote Jerry of her decision to leave the apartment as soon as she could get her things together.
Jerry replied by bursting in upon Joy one morning in the first chill days of April, while Joy was poaching a dejected egg in the kitchenette. A new radiant Jerry, all softness and winsome, assured charm that is the gain of those who are exorbitantly loved in return for their own great love. She danced over the apartment in pretended high spirits at being back, and then packed her clothes in a rush of concentration that betrayed her haste.
“This is the first time I’ve been away from him—and I didn’t know I was going to feel like this!” she confessed.
“There’s just one thing, though. You have no use for the wine-closet, I take it?”
Joy had not taken a drink since the night she watched the effect of it from the sofa, with Wigs and Davy babbling in her ear.
“Then,” said Jerry briskly, “we might just as well do a little government-agent work.” At Joy’s look of astonishment: “Oh, I never drink now. There’s—too much else to think about. Phil and I smoke together—but that’s as far as we go. Seems funny when I think in idle moments how I’ve taken it down all my life and now have just dropped it off without—much—effort. But somehow, you don’t feel like the good old stuff when you’re in love. There’s something about it——”
They took the liquor case by case to the bathroom where they became carried away by an orgy of opening bottles and watching their contents gurgle into the tub.