Oh What a Paradise It Seems Read Free

immortal soul as one’s own immortal soul is shown. Our lovers are always as tall as or taller than we. He stepped out of line, tapped her lightly on the shoulder and said: “I wonder ifyou can tell me what the music is that they’re playing. You look to me as if you understood music.”
    “You don’t understand the first thing about women,” she said. She laughed sweetly and dropped some papers she carried. Most of these he saw, when he picked them up, were real-estate advertisements, and when he passed them back to her he asked if she was in the real-estate business. She said yes and he said he was looking for an apartment. She gave him a card with the name Renée Herndon and they returned to their places in line.
    Sears was quite content with his apartment on East 78th Street. He was not a dishonest man and when he telephoned Renée Herndon a few days later he fully intended to reward her generously for any time she spent with him. He said he was looking for a one- or two-room apartment, and that he was prepared to pay a substantial rent and sign at least a two-year lease. She agreed to show him what was available the next afternoon.
    The offices where she worked struck him as being characterized by a kind of netherness. They were on the nether floor of a nether building in a nether neighborhood, and when he entered the place he saw nothing that was not distinguished by its portability. The reception room decorated with a vast urn, filled with artificial grasses and weeds, the receptionist’s desk, the receptionist herself all seemed highly mobile as if they could be moved, at short notice, to another building, another state or even another country. Renée Herndon, when she joined him, seemedquite permanent. Her hold on his attention, his senses and his intelligence was quite the most he knew of permanence, at that point in his life.
    She was, he guessed, thirty-five or perhaps forty and would have been married once or maybe twice. Her past was, at this point, none of his business. She was the sunny side of the street. The uniformity with which women of her age then dressed—widowed or divorced, showing real estate or working in china shops—seemed nearly ordained. She wore a suit, a little good perfume and no hat. He would have liked to kiss her, as she well knew, and when they got to the street and he offered her his arm she took it warmly and smiled or laughed with pleasure. She said they could either walk or take a cab and he said that he would be delighted to walk.
    They had walked for no more than half a block when she was attracted—magnetized was the word—to a display of embroidered scarves in a window. Still holding his arm she admired these. He offered to buy her one of the scarves and she politely refused, but her refusal was, he thought from his experience, genuine. He had known many women whose refusals were transparent. He felt that her distinct refusal to let a stranger buy her a present displayed a glimpse at the proportions of her self-respect. He thought this intimate and lovely. He was also delighted to see that in the three blocks they had to walk from her office to the apartment she was to show him she stopped to look at the display in absolutely every window with the exception of a window that displayed surgical appliances. They looked at shoes and hats and dresses and pottery animals and jewelryand china, and her interest in everything there was for sale charmed him and seemed to promise that she shared with him an undisciplined enthusiasm for men and women and circumstances and changes in the weather. The apartment she showed him was very different.
    At about this time the high incidence of criminal rapes and robberies made it difficult to get into apartments in some neighborhoods, and though she had keys and credentials they had great difficulties with a doorman, whose uniform was unbuttoned and who cleaned his teeth, while he talked to them, with an old-fashioned kitchen match. When