The door slammed. Paul stuck his head around the curtain. "I can't find her!"
"For God's sakes, it's not that hot! She won't melt! Go get yourself some whisky. Or would you rather have coffee?"
"Christ. What do I care?" His brow was fissured. Sweat had soaked his unshaved face—which he had wiped with hands increasingly grimed by junketing about the city all night. He looked like a hung-over mechanic.
"You need a bath, yourself," I said, stepping out.
"You don't understand! I've got to find her! Before she does anything desperate."
"Look, Paul. If she's going to pull one, on the spur—it's pulled. If it's not done now—she won't hurry about it." I daubed myself with a towel; perspiration came immediately where the water had just been. It was muggier than Miami before a hurricane. "Don't get the idea that because it's your first, it's her primary emotional crisis, either! Marcia's been through a lot!" I opened the hot-water tap, let it run, and filled a tumbler. I went into the living room, took a jar of powdered coffee from the desk pigeonhole where I kept it, dumped in a couple of spoonfuls, went back, and stirred with my toothbrush handle. Then I took a couple of lumps of sugar from a horde I'd been accumulating at the Astolat's expense, plunked them in, and stirred more. I drank about half of the hot coffee and lit a cigarette.
Paul had followed every step of this gambit. I felt a little less like a roused-up mummy with the coffee inside me, so I said, "I'm sorry as all hell, cooky. Tell me about it."
"You did it!" His eyes despised me for a moment. Then tears came. "I guess I should have known enough not to bring her around to see you."
"What did I do?"
"Made her self-conscious. Made her think it wasn't ever going to work out for us. She said that when you looked at her it made her feel like a tart."