Glancing at her, he saw that her face was a little flushed and her eyes brighter. She drank from the bottle again. “It is strong, isn’t it?” she said, after a moment, and then laughed. She stared at him thoughtfully for a few minutes. “You know, I’m scared being on my own like this,” she said abruptly.
Quentin could see she was getting a little tight. “You don’t have to be scared of me,” he said quietly.
“No, I know that.” She turned the bottle slowly in her hands. “You know when I said it was my fault that your friend was killed?”
“We don’t have to start that all over again.”
“But it’s true. It began with Lacey. You wouldn’t know about Lacey, but he and the moon began it.” She put the bottle to her lips and tilted her head. Quentin made a little move to stop her, then thought she might just as well get tight and talk.
She put the bottle down. “I was crazy. Have you ever been crazy? Have you ever felt that you’d give anything in the world for a really fine man to sweep you off your feet?” She looked at him, and shook her head. “No, I guess you’d never feel that way. I did. I wanted love. I wanted someone to sweep me off my feet. I was so sick of New York. I came to Havana because I heard it was the place of love. I wanted to believe it so badly that I kidded myself to death. I wanted it so badly that I let a down-at-heel ship’s Romeo seduce me. That is the type of double fool that I am. That was Lacey. Tall, beautiful and terribly, terribly cheap, and I thought he was the real thing. I couldn’t go back to the boat after that, could I? I mean, I couldn’t take that long trip back, scared that I might run into him at any moment. No, I couldn’t do that. So I decided to stay. Do you see now? If I hadn’t been such a bitch, you wouldn’t have annoyed the General, your friend wouldn’t have died… and I shouldn’t be here. You do see that, don’t you?”
All the time she had been talking, Quentin stared at his highly polished shoes. This sudden outburst rather shook him. She didn’t look the type to go off the rails. He said at last: “It’s damn queer how things happen, isn’t it? I mean, maybe, when you get out of this, and look back on it, you’ll be able to see why it had to happen.”
Myra screwed up her eyes as if to see him more clearly. “You think it had to happen?”
He nodded. “Sure, I think these sort of things are planned to happen to you. Sometimes you think that life is giving you a hell of a belting, but when you’ve had time to get away from it, and you look back, you see why it happened. Most times you realize that it was the best thing that could have happened.”
She frowned. “Can you see any redeeming feature in being shut up in a cellar with a good chance of losing one’s life?”