The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror(33)

She kissed him again. “What an ugly way to look at it.”

“Has she even given you a wedding present?”

“You sound,” Alison said, “alarmingly like a person who is asking for money.”

“I don’t mean that you should have asked her for it,” he said. “I only meant that she’s been in a position to do you some good, and I want to know why she hasn’t—and why that doesn’t seem to bother you.”

“But the point is that Tess hasn’t given me money, whether you think she ought to have or not,” she said. “And she isn’t stupid, which means that at some point, she’s noticed that she has money and I haven’t, which means that at some point she’s thought about giving me some, and decided against it. So I could ask her for some, if I felt like embarrassing myself, and she’d arrive at the same decision, and then we’d be no differently situated than we were before, except I’d have been living with a woman I was ashamed to show my face to. My poor, grubby, impoverished face.” And at this she pulled such a long and self-pitying expression that David could not help but smile at her.

“I think,” he said, “if she really cared about you as much as she claims—”

“Perhaps you should go sit under Tess’s window,” she said, “and take your hat with you, and hold it out in front of you, stretched open wide, and carry a sign with the exact amount that you believe I am owed for performing the act of friendship, and see if she is interested in dispensing largesse. Or settling her bill. You started out the day so well too, David. I wonder if your hangover is operating in reverse, and I should put you to bed until you get properly drunk and fit for human society again.”

“Why do I always feel as if I’ve insulted your mother when I try to talk money with you?”

“I’m sure I have no idea. You could always try to stop talking money with me, if you don’t like the effect it produces. Stop pawing at me; you’ll wrinkle my suit.”

David dropped his hands reflexively, but she was smiling again, and he knew that the danger had passed. “And tomorrow you’ll marry me,” he said, not quite believing it still. “Tomorrow you’ll marry me, and then you’ll be married to me, and I’ll take you out of the tower Tess has you locked up in, and it won’t matter if she tries to buy you the moon, because I’ll—”

“Tess would never try to give me the moon,” she said, frowning. “Tess would never give me something I couldn’t use.”

“If you don’t like the ring I bought you,” he said, “I’ll buy you another one. Whatever kind you like. We’ll throw this one away.” There was a very sharp sense of imminence in his chest, somewhere between his lungs and a little lower down. There was no other word for it; something, something was going to happen, or already had.

“I like this ring,” Alison said, and turned her hand to look at it with the same cool, studied air of forgiveness she always did. He would like to strike her, David thought suddenly. He would like to strike her and get up and leave, or fall at her feet and lay his head on her knees and beg until something happened. What that something might be, he could not quite imagine. “But you won’t get any complaints from me if you feel inclined to buy me more jewelry.”

“Darling,” he said, and he kissed her.

*

The door did not open again, but Alison had seen something in the window, and snapped her handbag shut as she drew herself up from her chair. “That’s Tess, just outside,” she said, “and you look like you’ve just been having an argument, which is your own fault. I’ll go out and talk to her. You stay here, and see if you can’t convince that ancient mariner of a waitress to come back in and turn the lights on so Tess doesn’t have to sit in the dark.”

He’d kissed her hand then and tried to press it lightly to his cheek. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry, and I do like Tess, and I was a beast to ask about— Anyhow, I know it was never like that, with you, and I’ll do anything you like, as long as you marry me; you can leave me here in the dark with the wind outside and I won’t say a word until you come back, only if you’ll marry me.”

“I have your ring,” Alison said, and she did not try to keep the impatience out of her voice. “You have a train ticket in your jacket pocket with my name on it, and there is a very unfriendly clerk at the marriage bureau who is counting on being unpleasant to the both of us at exactly ten o’clock tomorrow morning. I can’t think of anything else I can do to convince you, but I hope at the least to find you sensible when I come back.” She stepped lightly outside, closing the door behind her.

The waitress did not come back, and David had not felt right moving any farther away from the table than the entrance to the kitchen. The kitchen was full of shadows and flung his own voice back at him when he tried to halloo for attention. He did not have permission to go farther, so he went back and sat down.

There was no reason for him to open the door, because Alison was standing just outside, with Tess beside her, and she would open it and come back inside any minute. It was bad luck for a groom to see a bride on her wedding day; David thought, a trifle hysterically, that perhaps it was bad luck too for a groom to open any doors a bride kept closed the night before. David could just hear the low, warm tones of voices babbling on the other side of the door, and one belonged unmistakably to Alison. One of the voices paused to laugh, and the other swept darkly underneath it. The voices rose and fell together, bowing and nodding graciously to each other in turn, as if they were being continuously introduced. David closed his eyes and pictured Alison’s long hands trailing after her words as she spoke.