Rector’s attorney had given to her along with a sheaf of forms and a bundle of expense
money.
At El Paso she got out of the plane, managed to get her luggage back even though it
was checked through to Chicago. She didn’t know anybody in El Paso, and didn’t want
to. Nothing fascinated her about El Paso. But she had realized, while the big plane
was in the air, that she had no desire at all to return to Chicago. And flying was
dull, monotonous.
So here she was, in El Paso.
She stood up. Her purse was in the dresser’s top drawer. She found her cigarette case
in it, took out a cigarette, lit it and smoked. She caught a glimpse of herself in
the mirror on the closet door, stopped and regarded herself thoughtfully. She saw
the long black hair that had remained miraculously dry in the shower, saw the tall
body with the full curves and the trim waist and the full, flaring hips. Her arms
and legs and face were slightly tanned, but the rest of her body was a very pale white,
with the white breasts almost shocking with their crimson tips.
She looked at herself.
Nude Smoking a Cigarette
she titled the picture. She laughed again, an audible laugh, a mirthless laugh. She
ground out the cigarette in an ashtray and put clothes on.
Downstairs, in the lobby, she walked to the room clerk’s desk and coughed until the
little round-shouldered clerk scurried over to her.
“Where’s a decent restaurant?”
“Just around the corner,” he told her. “You go out that door—” he pointed “—and turn
right, and walk to the corner, that’s Carleton Boulevard and you turn right again.
Giardi’s Restaurant is just four doors from the corner.”
“Italian food?”
“Italian and American. It’s very good there.”
His brother probably owned it, she decided. But he didn’t look very Italian. Maybe
his brother-in-law owned it. Or maybe his brother had purchased it from Giardi, or—
The clerk was still waiting patiently. “Listen,” she said, “what the hell do you do
in this town?”
The clerk looked puzzled. He was wearing glasses, thick glasses, and they made his
eyes seem enormous.
He said, “Do?”
“For excitement. What goes on?”
The clerk took a short breath, thought, expelled the breath. “Why, there are movie
theaters,” he said. “And night clubs, of course. There’s a listing of entertainment
in the daily newspaper, the
El Paso Sun
. And then there is Juarez, of course.”
“Across the border?”
“Yes. It’s a…a border town. Not a very decent sort of place, I’m afraid, but quite
a few persons go there for…for amusement. But it depends what sort of excitement—”
She told him to forget it. She turned around, went out the door he had pointed to,
walked to Carleton Boulevard and found Giardi’s. The food was better than she had
expected. She asked for a breakfast menu, found out they had stopped serving breakfast
two hours ago, and stopped the waiter in mid-sentence when he started to offer to
get her an omelet, maybe, or some wheat cakes, or—
She had a plate of spaghetti with chicken livers and a bottle of red wine. She had
never cared much for breakfast food, hated eggs and couldn’t stomach cereal. But Borden
liked breakfast. Every day, for four years, Borden liked breakfast.
Four years of Borden. Four years of marriage, four years that added up to fourteen
or fifteen hundred days, and every day the same, except that each was a little more
horribly monotonous than the last. Four years of wearing a nightgown to bed because
Borden thought it was indecent to sleep in the raw. Four years of making love briefly,
and rarely; four years of on-again off-again, with Borden finished and ready to sleep
just as she started to get interested in the game.
A year, perhaps, of running to the bathroom and finishing the job herself. Then three
years of not bothering, because Borden had not even managed to arouse her. Three years