Why am I so timid? I have personality as much as the next girl, she was thinking as warmed by the young man's smile she wandered about the fruit store trying to decide what to buy. At last she lit on some pears. While the Greek, a sallow man with a long nose and close-cropped hair, was putting them in a bag, she spied some Japanese persimmons in a box. "O, I must have some of those for the color."
"They are mighty good ... sweet as honey," said the Greek.
"At last!" she muttered, closing her eyes with a little sigh when, having paid off the taxi, she stood in the elevator of the Swansea. As she let the packages slide from her arms into the armchair in the living room, she felt a crushing sense of loneliness. She poured the orangered persimmons into a blue bowl on the teatable. How beautiful they are. If I only had someone to show them to. She threw herself into a bustle of preparations for supper. She lit two burners in the kitchenette. Toast and boiled eggs and then I'll go to bed with a book. The usualness of the smell of the gas-burners and boiling water and toast oppressed her. Was she going to spend all her life puttering about that miserable kitchenette? If I were at Aunt M.'s in the little room I had when I was a child it would be cosy to be made a fuss over and have breakfast brought up to me in bed by Mary Ann in the morning.
After supper she remembered she hadn't looked at the letters she had brought up from the mailbox. One from Salinski, what on earth?
Dear Miss Taylor:
It is with infinite regret that I must announce to you that on account of great and pressing business I shall be forced to omit your next three lessons, making our following engagement for January 26....
I know what that means. He's losing interest in me. He can't treat me like that. I'll phone him. He has no right not to explain what he means.
She went to the phone and jerked off the receiver. Then she put it back weakly and burst into tears. O, I'm all distraught this evening. How horribly silly. I'll go to bed and read.
Once in bed, in her white bedroom, with the reading light over her shoulder and the rest of the room in cosy shadow and the persimmons in their blue bowl on a chair within reach, she began to feel calmer. She lay a long while staring at the ceiling with Locke's Beloved Vagabond unopened in her hand. Is it just that I'm feeling low this evening, or is everything crumbling, breaking down to let in the floods of platitude the way the noise of pianolas seeps in through apartment-house walls?
The persimmons glowed like lacquer. Sweet as honey, the Greek had said they were. Vermilion, the color, was more than red or orange. Was it Wenny or Fanshaw used to talk about how the three of them were like people out of another age lost in a grey swamp of dullness in their vermilion barge? Another age. If she'd lived in another age. The grandeur that was Rome. Decline and fall. What careers women had then. Dread career of adultery and crime. Messalina. Was it on the Pincian her gardens had been? Somewhere in Baedeker. Carried in a litter through howling streets, swinging above the torches and the black dripping backs of slaves with an arm about the neck of a young curlyhaired lover, long ringed fingers clasped about the hard muscle of his shoulder, into the walled gardens winy with the smell of overripe fruits sweet as honey. Great gates closing on streets full of crowds that shrieked challenging, mocking, Messalina. In the hush of the garden on the Pincian she and Wenny in each other's arms, with their lips touching, sweet as honey. Nan felt hot shudders go through her, her cheeks were fire. She pressed her dry eyes against the white cool linen of the pillow and lay on her face rocking to and fro. Then she jumped out of bed and began to walk about her narrow bedroom. She must go out.
From the apartment below came the sound of a piano and a man's nasal voice singing: