Gentleman's Agreement by Laura Z. Hobson Read Free Book Online Page B

corrected them without nervousness or embarrassment. She played pleasingly, with no attempts to dazzle by speed or crashing chords. He sat listening to her in a slow suffusion of Gemutlichkeit. Toward the end of the short sonata, he went over to stand by the piano, watching her hands. Looking down at her, he saw that her hair was not black as he had thought, but dark brown.
    She finished playing, stood up at once, and went back to her unfinished drink. He closed the book of music and set it atop the other volume, squaring the edges precisely with the one beneath. He heard her laugh.
    “Sort of old-maidish,” he said sheepishly.
    “Or bachelorism.”
    “I like the way you play.”
    “I’m glad.”
    Confidence, sureness, the freedom from his own ever-questioning-of-himself—she had that, and he envied her as he envied anybody else who was not forever involved with the weighing, the analyzing, the searching out he went through. She would not know the torment there could be in the fluctuating mood, the shifting decision, the wide swing between clarity and confusion, between cheerfulness and depression. Even though there were things about her that didn’t seem to square with other things, she seemed direct, free of complication or self-question.
    “Another drink?” she asked. “Or should we start? I’m starved.”
    When they were finishing dinner, she came back to the articles. This time he did not counter or dodge.
    “The thing’s got me licked so far, but that’s nothing new at the start. I’ve had a flock of ideas about how to angle it, but they’re all lousy.” Briefly he told her two of them. She liked them, but he brushed that aside. “They just don’t stand up. When you get the right one, a kind of click happens inside you. It hasn’t happened yet. Let’s skip it.”
    It was about ten when they left the restaurant. He hoped, expected even, that she would suggest going back to her place, but instead she said there was a movie she’d been watching the neighborhood playhouses for. A displeasure stabbed him, as if she’d said something to offend him, but he agreed that a movie was a fine notion. In the deep loge seats, he felt placated; watching the screen, he was conscious of her nearness, of whether her arm was on the seat rest or not, of her breathing. Each time she fished in her purse, he offered her a cigarette—leaning close to her to light it became a delicate and pleasing thing. The afternoon’s unspoken admonition not to hurry this sounded again in his mind. He kept his eyes on the picture, but every time she moved her head, recrossed her legs, shifted about in any way, he knew it.
    Was this to be like all the rest? His lips closed hard against each other as though to keep out the bitter taste of the question. He glanced toward her. Her whole attention was on the screen. In the dim light she seemed guileless and very young, and he believed at last in what she had told him about her divorce leaving no residue of bitterness or hatred. She had undoubtedly known pain—what human being could finish nearly three decades and be a stranger to it? But she seemed whole and unchipped in her personality, with none of the braced expectation of further pain.
    Across the veil of silence between them, Kathy was thinking, And maybe I’ve forgotten how simple and good it is to feel happy. She hadn’t been un happy, not even through the first adjustment after divorcing Bill. She hadn’t really suffered about anything since those long-ago days back home, in her teens. But it suddenly seemed a long time since she’d known the outrageous delight in life that she’d felt over going to college or getting married. For her, living alone was a stopgap. Three years was a great deal of stopgap indeed.
    There were good things about marriage that she’d begun to miss. Small things, apart from the big question of rightness and love. The comfortableness of always having somebody to go to a party with, the normal