All the Days and Nights

Read All the Days and Nights for Free Online

Book: Read All the Days and Nights for Free Online
Authors: William Maxwell
Tags: General Fiction
not enough. But it took some doing. There was a long tear in the woman’s coat and she was gasping for breath as she let herself go backward into space.
    T HE sun enters Aquarius January 20th and remains until February 18th.
“An extremely good friend can today put into motion some operation that will be most helpful to your best interest, or else introduce you to some influential person. Go out socially in the evening on a grand scale. Be charming.”
    T HE cocktail party was in a penthouse. The elevator opened directly into the foyer of the apartment. And the woman he was talking to — or rather, who was talking to him — was dressed all in shades of brown.
    “I tried to get you last summer,” she said, “but your wife said you were busy that day.”
    “Yes,” he said.
    “I’ll try you again.”
    “Please do,” somebody said for him, using his mouth and tongue and vocal cords — because it was the last thing in the world he wanted, to drive halfway across Long Island to a lunch party. “We hardly ever go anywhere,” he himself said, but too late, after the damage had been done.
    His mind wandered for an instant as he took in — not the room, for he was facing the wrong way, but a small corner of it. And in that instant he lost the thread of the story she was telling him. She had taken her shoe off in a movie theater and put her purse down beside it, and the next thing he knew they refused to do anything, even after she had explained what happened and that she must get in. Who “they” were, get in where, he patiently waited to find out, while politely sharing her indignation.
    “But imagine!” she exclaimed. “They said, ‘How valuable was the ring?’ ”
    He shook his head, commiserating with her.
    “I suppose if it hadn’t been worth a certain amount,” she went on, “they wouldn’t have done a thing about it.”
    The police, surely, he thought. Having thought at first it was the manager of the movie theater she was talking about.
    “And while they were jimmying the door open, people were walking by, and nobody showed the slightest concern. Or interest.”
    So it wasn’t the police. But who was it, then? He never found out, because they were joined by another woman, who smiled at him in such a way as to suggest that they knew each other. But though he searched his mind and her face — the plucked eyebrows, the reserved expression in the middle-aged eyes — and considered her tweed suit and her diamond pin and her square figure, he could not imagine who she was. Suppose somebody — suppose Iris came up and he had to introduce her?
    The purse was recovered, with the valuable ring still in it, and he found himself talking about something that had occupied his thoughts lately. And in his effort to say what he meant, he failed to notice what happened to the first woman. Suddenly she was not there. Somebody must have carried her off, right in front of his unseeing eyes.
    “… but it isn’t really distinguishable from what goes on in dreams,” he said to the woman who seemed to know him and to assume that he knew her. “People you have known for twenty or thirty years, you suddenly discover you didn’t really know how they felt about you, and in fact you don’t know how anybody feels about anything — only what they
say
they feel. And suppose that isn’t true at all? You decide that it is better to act as if it is true. And so does everybody else. But it is a kind of myth you are living in, wide awake, with your eyes open, in broad daylight.”
    He realized that the conversation had become not only personal but intimate. But it was too late to back out now.
    To his surprise she seemed to understand, to have felt what he had felt. “And one chooses,” she said, “between this myth and that.”
    “Exactly! If you live in the city and are bringing up children, you decide that this thing is not safe — and so you don’t let them do it — and that thing
is
safe. When, actually,

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