On her face was the smile of a beggar whose tinselled metaphors have been pummeled and disheveled by surface realities. The plump curves of her face seemed to fit less snugly beneath the flat deceit of rouge.
“I am a fool,” he said. “Your eyes told me something, but I spat upon it. I think that you had better leave me.”
“I have no intention of leaving you,” she said.
They sat and stared at each other.
“Do you give yourself to different men every night?” he asked, as though his sophistication, in an instant curve, had retreated to an anxious child long concealed within him.
“I give them what they are able to take, and that is little. They want to clutch me for a time, but I don’t feel them unless they stop my breathing. A man walks into a house, wipes his feet on the mat, spits into one of the cuspidors, and leaves with a vacant smile on his face.”
“Why do you want them to come in?”
“They give me money for whiskey and leisure time in which I can read. I’ve never been able to find a simpler way of getting these things.”
The explanation was clear and delicate to him.
“Of course, the whiskey makes you sneer like a queen, and the books bring you affairs with better men,” he said.