The blonde woman behind the cigar case (it was as if she had not moved in the six months, not altered one strand of her hard bright brassridged hair or even her dress) watched him.
At the far end of the counter the group of men with their tilted hats and their cigarettes and their odor of barbershops, watched him.
The proprietor was among them.
He noticed, saw, the proprietor for the first time.
Like the other men, the proprietor wore a hat and was smoking.
He was not a big man, not much bigger than Joe himself, with a cigarette burning in one corner of his mouth as though to be out of the way of talking.
From that face squinted and still behind the curling smoke from the cigarette which was not touched once with hand until it burned down and was spat out and ground beneath a heel, Joe was to acquire one of his own mannerisms.
But not yet.
That was to come later, when life had begun to go so fast that accepting would take the place of knowing and believing.
Now he just looked at the man who leaned upon the counter from the inward side, in a dirty apron which he wore as a footpad might assume for the moment a false beard.
The accepting was to come later, along with the whole sum of entire outrage to credulity: these two people as husband and wife, the establishment as a business for eating, with the successive imported waitresses clumsy with the cheap dishes of simple food as business justified; and himself accepting, taking, during his brief and violent holiday like a young stallion in a state of unbelieving and ecstatic astonishment in a hidden pasture of tired and professional mares, himself in turn victim of nameless and unnumbered men.
But that was not yet.
He went to the counter, clutching the dime.
He believed that the men had all stopped talking to watch him, because he could hear nothing now save a vicious frying sound from beyond the kitchen door, thinking She’s back there.
That’s why I don’t see her. He slid onto a stool.
He believed that they were all watching him.
He believed that the blonde woman behind the cigar case was looking at him, and the proprietor too, across whose face now the smoke of the cigarette would have become quite still in its lazy vaporing.
Then the proprietor spoke a single word.
Joe knew that he had not moved nor touched the cigarette.
“Bobbie,” he said.
A man’s name.
It was not thinking.
It was too fast, too complete: She’s gone.
They have got a man in her place.
I have wasted the dime, like he said. He believed that he could not leave now; that if he tried to go out, the blonde woman would stop him.
He believed that the men at the back knew this and were laughing at him.
So he sat quite still on the stool, looking down, the dime clutched in his palm.
He did not see the waitress until the two overlarge hands appeared upon the counter opposite him and into sight.
He could see the figured pattern of her dress and the bib of an apron and the two bigknuckled hands lying on the edge of the counter as completely immobile as if they were something she had fetched in from the kitchen.
“Coffee and pie,” he said.
Her voice sounded downcast, quite empty.
“Lemon cocoanut chocolate.”
In proportion to the height from which her voice came, the hands could not be her hands at all.
“Yes,” Joe said.
The hands did not move.
The voice did not move.
“Lemon cocoanut chocolate.
Which kind.”
To the others they must have looked quite strange.
Facing one another across the dark, stained, greasecrusted and frictionsmooth counter, they must have looked a little like they were praying: the youth countryfaced, in clean and Spartan clothing, with an awkwardness which invested him with a quality unworldly and innocent; and the woman opposite him, downcast, still, waiting, who because of her smallness partook likewise of that quality of his, of something beyond flesh.
Her face was highboned, gaunt. The flesh was taut across her cheekbones, circled darkly about the eyes; beneath the lowered lids her eyes seemed to be without depth, as if they could not even reflect.
Her lower jaw seemed too narrow to contain two rows of teeth.
“Cocoanut,” Joe said.
His mouth said it, because immediately he wanted to unsay it.
He had only the dime.
He had been holding it too hard to have realised yet that it was only a dime.
His hand sweated about it, upon it. He believed that the men were watching him and laughing again.
He could not hear them and he did not look at them.
But he believed that they were.
The hands had gone away.