I Come as a Theif Read online

  Je t’en ai dit assez pour te tirer d’erreur.

  Eh, bien, connais donc Phèdre et toute sa fureur.

  J’aime.”

  It was astonishing to see what dignity, what depth were conveyed to the bland old wrinkled face by Mrs. Lane’s art. The dumpy figure seemed to elongate, to throw off its frills and badges, to suggest that behind the frame, perhaps behind the frame of every woman, lurked the ravaged soul of Theseus’ queen. Tony recalled a novel, read in college, where the heroine, a rising young actress, scornfully rejects the proposal of a rising young diplomat conditioned on her giving up the stage. For how could she compare being an admirable ambassadress to being an admirable Phèdre? Surely, Mrs. Lane had made the wrong choice, for she had become nothing, produced nothing. Except Joan. Except Joan—precisely. Maybe Joan was the justification of her sacrifice. For Joan would be a great ambassadress.

  “You should still go on the stage, Mrs. Lane!” he cried when she had finished. “Think what you have to teach us!” He turned to Joan. “Do you think anyone in our generation could love that way?”

  “No, thank God!”

  Another extraordinary thing about Mrs. Lane was that she appeared entirely to comprehend Tony’s relationship with Joan. One evening, when he came early and found Joan still out, Mrs. Lane sent her husband downstairs to buy a cigar and proceeded to talk frankly to Tony about Norris Conway.

  “I’d really rather she married you.”

  “Just because I like Phèdre?”

  “Well, that’s a kind of reason, isn’t it? Norris Conway has never heard of Phèdre.”

  “But why do you assume, Mrs. Lane, that I want to marry Joan?”

  “Well, don’t you?”

  “No. We’re not suited at all. Joan’s got to be grand. It’s her style. It’s her trade. She’d be wasted on me, and I on her. Now with you it’s different. I feel that you and I understand each other. If anything were to happen to Mr. Lane, which God forbid…”

  Mrs. Lane gave a little shriek of laughter. “Oh, Tony, promise that if Joan does marry Norris, you’ll still come in and see us old folks once in a while.”

  “Oh, I don’t have to promise that. How could I stay away?”

  The day after this conversation Tony called Norris Conway and asked him to lunch. They talked of fishing and politics and mutual friends, but afterward, as they paused at the entrance of Norris’ office building, Tony asked him casually:

  “Tell me, Norry, are you off Joan Lane?”

  Norris immediately stiffened. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I’d like to know if the way’s clear, that’s all. I don’t want to waste my time if you’ve got her sewed up. Are you engaged, or anything like that?”

  “I guess that’s something you’ll have to find out for yourself,” Norris said heavily. He was clearly upset.

  “Good. I will.”

  “Well, don’t go telling her I insinuated we were engaged.” Then he added gruffly: “Anyway, we’re not.”

  Tony now let a month go by without calling Joan. When he finally did so she asked him up for cocktails. Her voice was very cold, and the invitation sounded like an order. He arrived and found her alone. Her parents were south on an “annual sponge,” as she put it, with a rich, but distant cousin in Palm Beach.

  “I want you to tell me what you did to Norry Conway,” she said, when he had mixed his drink. She already had her own, as if she had prepared herself for a scene.

  “What makes you think I did anything?”

  “Something he said.”

  “Has he been attentive?”

  “Very.”

  “How gratifying.”

  “Do you really find it so?”

  “I want what you want.”

  “I see.” Joan was very definite now. “Then you did speak to him. You did it to make him jealous.”

  “And I evidently succeeded.”

  “Oh, yes. It worked like a charm. Except for one thing. You should have gone on taking me out.”

  “Why?”

  “Because your failure to do so, after Norris told you we were not engaged, made it look as if you and I were in cahoots.”

  “So!” Tony exclaimed in surprise. “I never thought of that. Because, of course, we weren’t. But it’s easily remedied. All I have to do is tell him that he scared me off.”

  “You needn’t. I’ve already told him.”

  “That he scared me off?”

  “No. That he didn’t. I’ve told him that I have been out with you. Twice in the last month.”

  Tony whistled. “You are a cool one. And it worked?”

  “Oh, it worked divinely. He’s on the point of proposing.”

  He raised his glass. “Congratulations, Mrs. Conway!”

  Joan looked at him with a countenance from which she had carefully obliterated the least expression. “Is that all you have to say?”

  “All I have to say! What about you? Aren’t you going to thank me?”

  “Stop joking, Tony. Just for once.” She closed her eyes for a moment.

  “I don’t propose to be grim about this, you know.”

  “What do you propose?”

  “That we be frank. You resent my helping you to marry another man. No matter what we both think is best for you, you have a fixed female resentment against any man who doesn’t cast himself at your feet. But you’re wrong. I am casting myself at your feet. I do cast myself at your feet.”

  Joan’s eyes were wide with astonishment. “You mean you want to marry me?”

  “I mean that I want to be your lover.”

  She gasped. “And Norry?”

  “What Norry doesn’t know isn’t going to hurt him. You won’t be the first woman to make love to another man during her engagement.”

  Joan rose and walked to the window so as to be turned away from him. “And how long would you propose that this bizarre arrangement should last?”

  “As long as we both want it to. I doubt very much that you will want to continue it after you marry.”

  She stamped her foot. “Have you no heart at all?”

  “Enough. We would be taking a gamble with our emotions, I admit. But I think we can handle it. I know I want to try.”

  She turned now and stared hard at him. Was it gratitude that he made out in that penetrating, dark look? “Very much?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But not enough to marry me?”

  “It wouldn’t be right. The way for you to live is to be what you are. To accept yourself. Then your worldliness will be big and handsome. Not sordid and small.”

  “And Norry? Would it be fair to him?”

  “Oh, honey, you’ll make Norry a tremendous wife!”

  She walked over to him now slowly and then suddenly put her hands on his shoulders. “Will you teach me how?” She was utterly serious. “I know I look experienced, but I’m not. Not a bit!”

  “You don’t look as experienced as you think,” he said with a chuckle. “But we can have the first lesson right now.”

  “Oh, darling, don’t joke about it!”

  “It’s the only way, Joan. Believe me.”

  She hugged him desperately and put her head against his chest. “I don’t know what I think. I guess I’d better not think at all. I guess I’d better just leave it to you.”

  ***

  During the first month of Tony’s affair with Joan he met Lee Bogardus. As he saw Joan only on the nights that he visited the apartment of the Lanes, who were still in Florida, he seemed perfectly unattached in the eyes of his acquaintance. And in truth he was. There was little sentiment in his feeling for Joan. On her side there might have been more, but she was a woman of unusual will power, and she stuck to her implied bargain. Besides, the plan was working. The confidence that she drew from sex made her easier and more relaxed with Norris, who was already thoroughly ashamed of his suspicion of her mercenary motives. He had even
gone so far as to propose, and Joan now had her revenge by keeping him dangling.

  Tony had been immediately drawn to Lee. Her impassioned account of the rejected short story in the little garden behind their host’s brownstone had intrigued him. She had seemed hardly aware of him as a man as she told it, but as soon as his sympathy came through to her, she forgot all about her problems as a writer. Afterward, when he took her out, he was amused by the conflict between her rather quaint, old-fashioned reserve and her obvious need for a much warmer relationship. It was as if she might have been taught by her mother that “nice” girls had to prove hard to get and yet was speculating that if she didn’t move a bit faster, she might lose this new beau altogether. And this was something that she very clearly did not want to let happen.

  One night he insisted on coming up to the apartment, rather than waiting for her in the lobby, so that he might meet her parents. Tony loved to meet parents. Mr. and Mrs. Bogardus, a wonderfully handsome couple, he very gray and tall and distinguished, she, brilliant if falsely blonde, treated him with a formal but intense politeness. He felt immediately that he was being considered as a serious suitor and that he had already passed the first round.

  “Where do your parents live, Mr. Lowder?” Lee’s mother asked, after her father had shown himself perfectly satisfied with Tony’s law credentials.

  “They live on the West Side, Mummie,” Lee interrupted rudely. “You may as well know right away that they don’t have a fashionable address.”

  “Lee, dear child,” Mrs. Bogardus breathed, in the manner of a parent quite accustomed to such ferocities, “there’s nothing wrong with the West Side. I lived there myself as a child.”

  “Yes, but below Fifty-ninth Street. That was quite all right. I know your little rules. But Tony’s family are on Central Park West.”

  “You don’t have to defend my family’s address, Lee,” Tony interposed with a laugh. “We’ve never had any claim to being fashionable. Quite the reverse. On Daddy’s side we were Jewish at the wrong time, and on Mother’s Catholic. We’re always out of step.”

  “You mean you’re not Catholic now?” Mrs. Bogardus asked, with what her daughter undoubtedly construed as relief.

  “No, we’re nothing. We’re Episcopalians.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Bogardus exchanged undecipherable glances. He, smiling, now resumed the questioning. “Didn’t your mother’s family object to such apostasy?”

  “Not really. To the Irish religion is essentially politics. So long as we remain loyal to the tribe…” Tony shrugged. “Well, nobody much cared.”

  Lee was obviously a bit shocked, but Tony had the feeling that her parents were not. There was a bleak little communion between him and the Bogarduses. It was only Lee who cared for things past.

  She was certainly ready for marriage. Ready and more than ready. It must have been bad enough for her to know this herself, without having it made quite so obvious that her parents knew it too. Tony could sense in the Bogarduses’ wlecome of him their willingness to waive all requirements of residence and genealogy in the interest of getting off their hands into those of any decently respectable male a daughter who was probably moody and violent behind the scenes. Let us do something, their worried eyes seemed to plead, before she goes off with the elevator boy!

  Of course, they were unjust to her. He quite saw that. They knew nothing about girls. Far from being about to go off with the elevator boy, poor Lee did not dare even show him the inclination that she obviously did feel. When he took her home after an evening she would almost scramble out of the taxi in her effort not to look as if she were waiting for a good night kiss. He let her go, but sometimes, later in the same night, when he made love to Joan, he would think of Lee.

  Lee seemed to suspect something. He could see that she was troubled by his slowness in making advances. Was he involved with another girl? Was he queer?

  “You listen so well,” she told him in a bar after a Saturday afternoon concert. “You listen to music the way you listen to people. You really hear.”

  “Is that rare?”

  “I think it is. It makes me feel I can ask you something without your taking it wrong. Without your thinking…” She paused, much embarrassed.

  “Thinking what?”

  “Well, that I’m throwing myself at you,” she said almost defiantly. “I couldn’t bear that.”

  “I promise not to think it, then. What did you want to ask me?”

  There was another rather breathless pause. “I wanted to ask you if you think it’s funny that a girl my age—twenty-three—has never, well never…”

  “Had an affair? Funny? You mean, do I think it’s unusual? No.”

  Lee was taken aback by his casualness. “How did you know I was going to ask that?”

  “Wasn’t it obvious?”

  “That I was so … pure?”

  “No, no. That it was on your mind.”

  “Well, I’ve heard that a man has to be experienced that way before he’s married or else he’ll be a terrible fumbler. Mightn’t it be true of a woman, too?”

  Tony laughed. “Those things aren’t difficult to learn. You’ll find it will come very easily.”

  Lee jumped up at this and hurried to the ladies’ room. When she came back, it was evident that she had been weeping.

  “You do think I’ve thrown myself at you. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life. Please take me home.”

  “May I tell you something first?”

  “No. Please. I’ll just start crying again.”

  “Let me say one thing.”

  “Tony, I want to go!”

  “All right.” He signaled to the waiter. “But you’ll have to have dinner with me tomorrow night. I don’t for a minute think that you’re throwing yourself at me. It’s still possible, however, that I may want to throw myself at you. And I think you should give me the chance.”

  ***

  Later that night, as Joan and Tony were lying, smoking cigarettes, on her mother’s bed, which they used because it was larger than her own, and the room more comfortable than hers, he asked her about Norry.

  “When are you going to give him his answer?”

  “Soon, I suppose. I’ve wanted to prolong our ‘idyll.’ Oh, Tony, do you think we mustn’t meet afterward?”

  “Not for a time, anyway. You have to give him a chance. He’ll probably be a marvelous lover.”

  “But I’ll be thinking of you when he makes love to me.”

  “No, you won’t. Not after a time.”

  “And you’ll be after some other girl.”

  “Naturally.”

  “Someone you’ll want to marry?”

  “I hope so.”

  “Damn you, Tony!”

  “Now don’t get excited.”

  “You don’t know anything about women!”

  “We agreed this was an experiment. It wasn’t guaranteed to work.”

  “But you were a bastard to try such an experiment.”

  “Oh, that’s for sure.”

  “And that’s what helps me. Would I really want to be married to such a bastard?”

  “And would I want to be married to a girl who two-times her boy friend?”

  “Ah, there you are!” Joan laughed a bit wildly. “I guess you are a bit of a genius, lover. You’ve made me accept something no woman would accept. No decent woman, that is.”

  Just then the telephone rang sharply in Tony’s ear. Joan reached across him to pick it up, and he listened to her conversation with Norris, the cord stretched tight against his jugular vein. Norris, who had obviously been drinking, sounded loud and angry.

  “What are you doing?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing? I’ve gone to bed, that’s what I’m doing. What the hell are you doing, calling at this hour?”

  “It’s only eleven.”

  “Oh, is that all? Well, anyway, I was asleep, and it’s horrid to be wakened up when you’ve just gone to sleep. Particularly by rude dr
unks.”

  “I’m sorry, Joanie darling.” Norris’s voice dropped to a whine. “I’m not drunk. I had a few at the club because somebody told me you were going out with Tony again.”

  “I am going out with Tony again. Have I ever made a secret of it?”

  “Ah, honey, don’t you know what that does to me? It kills me, that’s all.”

  “There’s no reason it should kill you. Tony’s a very dear friend of mine. Any man I marry is going to have to get used to Tony. If you think, Norris Conway, that I’m the kind of woman you can lock up in a harem guarded by some eunuch, you have another think coming.”

  Norris’s voice became very excited at this. “Oh, honey, does that mean you might marry me? You could have everything the way you want it. Honest! I don’t mind you having friends—that is, if they are friends.”

  “If you’re going to insult me now…”

  “Please, honey, no! Tell me I have just a chance, and I’ll hang right up.”

  “You have just a chance.”

  “Oh, darling! Let me come up. Let me come up just for one minute and give you just one kiss, that’s all, and I swear on a million bibles 111 go straight home, the happiest man in the world!”

  “I tell you, I’m in bed, Norris!” Joan sounded scandalized.

  “Get up and put your wrapper on. You won’t have to do more than open the door. I’ll take one kiss and go.”

  “My parents are away!”

  “I tell you what then. I’ll make the elevator man wait. How’s that?”

  Joan hesitated. “Where are you?”

  “At the drugstore on the corner.”

  “All right, but remember. One kiss. And the elevator man waits.”

  Tony replaced the receiver th^t she silently handed to him. She switched on the light, hurried to the bureau and sat down to comb her hair in short, sharp strokes. Then she put on a nightgown and a silk wrapper, firmly tying the cord.

  “What do I do?” he demanded. “Get under the bed?”

  “You stay right where you are,” she snapped. “The door will be closed.”

  “Suppose he comes in to look?”

  “Then he’s not a man I care to marry.” She cast an almost contemptuous look at him. “Are you afraid?”

  Tony laughed. “Not unless he has a gun!”