The bride wore black Read Free Page B

roomer.
    She went back to the valise with it, cut a little oblong around the initials on the Hd, peeled off the top layer of the papier-mache, thus removing them bodily. Then she prodded through the contents of the receptacle, gashing at the stitching of an undergarment, a night robe, a blouse; removing those same two letters that had once stood for her wherever they were to be found.
    Her predecessor obliterated, she threw the razor blade into the wastebasket, fastidiously wiped the tips of her fingers.
    She found the picture of a man in the flap under the lid of the valise. She took it out and held it before her eyes, gazing at it for a long time. Just a young man, nothing wonderful about him: Not so strikingly handsome; just eyes and mouth and nose as anyone has. She looked at it a long time.
    Then she found a folder of matches in her handbag and took the picture over to the washbasin. She touched a lighted match to one comer of it and held it until there was nothing to hold anymore.
    "Goodbye," she breathed low.
    She ran a spurt of water down through the basin and went back to the valise. All that was left now, in the flap under the lid, was a scrap of paper with a penciled name on it. It had taken a long time to get it. The woman looked further, took out four similar scraps.
    She brought them all out. She didn't bum them right away. She played around with them first, as if in idle disinterest. She put them all down on the dresser top, blank sides up. Then she milled them around under her rotating fingertips. Then she picked one up, glanced briefly at the underside of it. Then she gathered them all together once more, bumed all five of them alike over the washbowl.

    Then she moved over toward the window, stood there looking out, a hand poised at each extremity of the slablike sill, gripping it. She seemed to lean toward the city visible outside, like something imminent, about to happen to it.

    BLISS
    T,
    HE CAB DREW UP short at the entrance of Bliss's apartment house and threw him forward a little on the seat. The liquor in his stomach sloshed around with the jolt. Not because there was so much in him but because it was so recently absorbed.
    He got out, and the top of the door frame knocked his hat askew. He straightened it, fumbled for change, dropped a dime to the sidewalk. He wasn't helplessly drunk; he never got that way. He knew everything that was said to him and everything he was saying, and he felt just right. Not too little, not too much. And then there was always the thought of Marge it looked like he was getting someplace there. You didn't want to drown out a thought like that in liquor.
    Charlie, on night door duty, came out behind him while he was paying the driver. Charlie was just a little behind time with his reception ritual, because he'd stayed behind on his bench in the foyer to finish the last paragraph of a sports writeup in a tabloid before coming out. But it was two-thirty in the morning, after all, and no one's perfect.
    Bliss turned and said, "'Lo, Charlie."
    Charlie answered, "Morning, Mr. Bliss." He held the entrance door open for him, and Bliss went inside. Charlie followed, his duties more or less satisfactorily per-

    formed. He yawned, and then Bliss caught it from him, without having seen him do it, and yawned, too a fact that would have interested a metaphysician.
    There was a mirror panel on one side of the lobby, and Bliss stepped up, took one of his usual going-in looks at himself. There were two kinds. The "boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what's-up-tonight" look. That was the going-out look. Then there was the "God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed" look. That was the coming-back look.
    Bliss saw a man of twenty-seven with close-cropped sandy hair, looking back at him. So close-cropped it looked silvery at the sides. Brown eyes, spare figure, good height without being too tall about it. A man who knew all about him Bliss. Not handsome, but then who wanted to be handsome? Even Marge