Nothing That Meets the Eye by Patricia Highsmith Read Free Book Online Page B

hotels, eternally ­waiting.
    I am not lonely so much as terribly alone, he thought. For though he could honestly say he had many friends, old friends and new friends, to a man and to a woman they bored him and served only to impress upon him that the rut he was in, lest he think it only the sinecure of a job so comfortable he would never leave it, included the whole of what composed his life.
    â€œAnother brandy, sir?”
    â€œIf you please.”
    He wished the bartender were not so attentive, but what else had the miserable fellow to do? Hildebrandt watched chips of bright yellow lemon peel drop from his knife into an old-fashioned glass, looked around the burnished oak curve of the counter and saw other such glasses, and wondered when all the martinis would be drunk and by whom.
    Cluck!
    Hildebrandt started, though he knew the bartender had merely vanished behind the small brass-latched door and would reappear in a moment bearing a box of sugar cubes or an armful of limes.
    â€œA pretty girl—is like a melody—” the music droned, oversweet with strings.
    What pretty girl? thought Hildebrandt. Did he want a pretty girl? Really the thought sickened him. He pulled his cuffs out just beyond the garnet links and turned again to the galleon’s stern.
    A plump woman in a large black hat came in, scanned the room for her party, fluttered a hand and plowed across the sea of Persian rug toward a distant table.
    Cluck!
    And the bartender appeared, struggling with an armful of limes. Hildebrandt turned his eyes away.
    This was his last brandy. In another quarter hour or so, he should have watched the entry of two or three superannuated inmates come to take a late dinner, perhaps but not likely a pair of middle-aged men, well dressed but of that incredible colorlessness that only the Hotel Hyperion seemed to attract, come and stand a polite distance away from him at the bar and order bourbon old-fashioneds. In a quarter of an hour, he should have paid his check and walked leisurely back through the galleon’s stern, not abandoning hope for some unimaginable and unimaginably exciting stranger, until he found himself suddenly on the sidewalk beneath the hotel’s marquee. There a gust of desolation should divest him suddenly of poetry, tranquillity and will, and he would debate whether to take a taxi or the subway to his apartment or to walk to the nearest movie or to call up his friend Bracken, who lived just around the corner on Sixth Avenue. As yet he had never called up Bracken, but the possibility offered a modicum of comfort, so the thought always crossed his mind.
    Actually, though, he was alone.
    In the lobby beyond the galleon a man stopped, looked into the restaurant and walked on. The casements and the chandeliers sparkled like coruscating fireworks. The galleon floated in a blur of golden light. And abashedly realizing that tears had caused the distortion, Hildebrandt threw the brandy into his mouth. It flamed into his nose, and he saw the galleon through deeper tears.
    A black line appeared in the center of the goldenness. It was the figure of a woman with hair of the same golden beige as the doors. Suddenly Hildebrandt felt a thrill of happiness beyond that which the magic casements had ever caused, a throb of recognition. It was the way he had expected to feel when the destined one arrived, but now he smiled to himself, afraid to believe. The tremulous, inexpressible promise which for two weeks had emanated from the galleon’s stern seemed to have lifted from them and fixed itself on this woman whom the casements presented as its materialization.
    He turned back to the bar, unable even to look for her in the mirror. Her presence behind him filled the room. Before he looked at her again he must know how he intended to approach her. And yet it was, somehow, foreordained and accomplished.
    He paid his check, turned and walked, with the same leisured grace he would have walked toward the