Life transacting thrilled her. Contact with people, especially in free, noisy crowds, produced in her a kind of intoxication. We walked a great deal in the pulsating streets, often till late at night, and that she enjoyed more than the play, the opera or any other form of entertainment. Her curiosity was insatiable. She was always for going a little further, for prying still deeper into the secrets of humanity’s gregarious business, afraid yet venturesome and insistent. She would pick out of the throng whimsical, weird and dreadful personalities and we would follow them for blocks.
Once at a corner we came suddenly upon a woman importuning a man. She was richly gowned and not in any way common. He was sinister, sated and cruel. She had lost her head, her pride, her sense of everything but wanting him. We were close enough to hear. He spoke in a low, admonishing tone, imploring her not to make a scene. She grew louder all the time, saying, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” and continued alternately to assail him with revealing reproaches and to entreat him caressingly, until they both seemed quite naked in the lighted street. The man was contemptible; the woman was tragic. I took Vera by the arm to move her away, but she was fixed between horror and attraction and stood there regarding them in the fascinated way one looks at deadly serpents through the glass at the Zoo. The man at last yielded with a bored gesture, called a cab, whisked the woman into it, and the scene vanished. Vera shuddered and we walked on.
We explored the East Side at night, visiting the Chinese and Jewish theatres, Hungarian coffee houses and dance halls. Nobody had ever done this kind of thing with her before. It was a new experience and she adored it. Of what she did with it in her mind I knew almost nothing. Emotions in the abstract she would discuss with the utmost simplicity. Her own she guarded jealously.
One evening late, with a particularly interesting nocturnal adventure behind us, we stood in the hallway saying good-night. We said it and lingered; said it again and still lingered. She was more excited than usual. Her lips were slightly parted. She almost never blushed, but on rare occasions, such as now, there was a feeling of pink beneath the deep brunette color of her skin.
Her beauty seemed of a sudden to expand, to become greatly exaggerated, not in quality but in dimensions, so that it excluded all else from the sense of space. The sight of it unpoised me. And she knew. I could feel that she knew. My impulse toward her grew stronger and stronger, tending to become irresistible. This she knew also. Yet she lingered. Then I seized and kissed her. At the first touch her whole weight fell in my arms. Her eyes closed, her head dropped backward, face upturned. She trembled violently and sighed as if every string of tension in her being snapped.
How little we can save of those enormous moments in which the old, old body mind remembers all that ever happened! What was it that one knew so vividly in that co-extensive, panoramic, timeless interval, and cannot now recall?
The first kiss goes a journey. The second stays on earth. The first one is a meeting in the void. Then this world again.
“Vera! Vera!” I whispered.
Her eyes opened.... The look they gave me was so unexpected, so unnatural in the circumstances, that I had a start of terror lest she had gone out of herself. Then I recognized it. This was she whom I had forgotten. These were those impervious, scornful carnelian eyes you could not see into. The old hot and cold feeling came over me again. And though she still lay in my arms, not having moved at all, it was now as if I were not touching her, as if I never had. I released her. Without a word she turned and walked slowly up the stairway out of sight.
The next whole day was one of utter, lonely wretchedness, supported only by a feeling of resentment. I found myself humming “Coming Through the Rye,” and wondering why, as it was a ditty I had not remembered for years. Then it came to me why,—“If a body kiss a body need a body cry?” What had I done that was so terrible after all?