“I can make a perfect omelette,” she said. “So light you don’t know you are eating it. You only taste it.”
“Not very filling,” I thought.
“There may be something else, too,” she said.
There was. She rifled the pantry. The imponderable omelette, accompanied by bacon, was followed by cold chicken, ham, sausage, asparagus, salad, cheese of two kinds, jams in fluttering uncertainty, cake and coffee.
When she was convinced at last that I couldn’t encompass another bite and rested upon her achievement she began to giggle.
“What’s that for?”
“I’m thinking,” she said, “what my sister would say if she saw us now.”
As I walked home I could not help contrasting her with Vera, who never, even at Natalie’s age, would have thought of doing a thing like that. Why? Yes, why? Well, because she had not that way with a man. Natalie was born to get what she wanted through men. She fed them. She fed their stomachs with food and their egoes with adoration. She liked doing it for she liked men. She already knew more about their simplicities than Vera would ever learn. She knew it all instinctively. And how lovely she was in that apron!
iv
Late the next afternoon he appeared at my desk, sat down, fixed me with a stare and began to whistle Yankee Doodle out of tune.