They began. Audrey looked up at him. “I’ll say London hasn’t been cut off! Who taught you?”
“Her name,” he began throbbingly, “was Conchita. She was a little thing with blue-black hair and eyes like the flames in a burning coal mine. Emotions of a tigress in the body of a child—a sepia child. Lovely! Conchita taught me the rhumba. Eight bob per lesson. That’s about a dollar fifty.”
Audrey laughed.
He took her home, late, in a taxi. She asked him to. While they rode through the quiet streets they were silent. The night was growing warmer. Roofs dripped, the snow along the sides of the walks was slushy, and there were patches showing in lawns that looked black under the outreaching lavender murk of arc lights. When they stopped in front of her house—a bigger, more imposing house than his family’s—Audrey said, “Will you kiss me good night, Jimmie? It would sort of finish erasing the mess I made at the start.”
He bent and kissed her perfunctorily.
“Is that all?” she whispered.
He kissed her again—not perfunctorily. And then again, as if to reassure himself about his first impression.
“You’ll forgive me—for Ellen?”
He nodded. “Yes. That all happened summer before last.” Suddenly he grinned.
“You’re not being fair to your mother, Audrey!” He reached past her and opened the cab door.