“You’ve had enough,” Popeye said.
His hand took the glass from her lips.
She watched him empty it into the ice bowl.
The music started again.
She sat looking quietly about the room.
A voice began to buzz faintly at her hearing, then Popeye was gripping her wrist, shaking it, and she found that her mouth was open and that she must have been making a noise of some sort with it.
“Shut it, now,” he said.
“You can have one more.”
He poured the drink into the glass.
“I haven’t felt it at all,” she said.
He gave her the glass.
She drank.
When she set the glass down she realised that she was drunk.
She believed that she had been drunk for some time.
She thought that perhaps she had passed out and that it had already happened.
She could hear herself saying I hope it has.
I hope it has.
Then she believed it had and she was overcome by a sense of bereavement and of physical desire.
She thought, It will never be again, and she sat in a floating swoon of agonised sorrow and erotic longing, thinking of Red’s body, watching her hand holding the empty bottle over the glass.
“You’ve drunk it all,” Popeye said.
“Get up, now.
Dance it off.”
They danced again.
She moved stiffly and languidly, her eyes open but unseeing; her body following the music without hearing the tune for a time.
Then she became aware that the orchestra was playing the same tune as when Red was asking her to dance.
If that were so, then it couldn’t have happened yet.
She felt a wild surge of relief.
It was not too late: Red was still alive; she felt long shuddering waves of physical desire going over her, draining the color from her mouth, drawing her eyeballs back into her skull in a shuddering swoon.
They were at the crap table.
She could hear herself shouting to the dice.
She was rolling them, winning; the counters were piling up in front of her as Popeye drew them in, coaching her, correcting her in his soft, querulous voice.
He stood beside her, shorter than she.
He had the cup himself.
She stood beside him cunningly, feeling the desire going over her in wave after wave, involved with the music and with the smell of her own flesh.
She became quiet.
By infinitesimal inches she moved aside until someone slipped into her place.
Then she was walking swiftly and carefully across the floor toward the door, the dancers, the music swirling slowly about her in a bright myriad wave.
The table where the two men had sat was empty, but she did not even glance at it.
She entered the corridor.
A waiter met her.
“Room,” she said.
“Hurry.”
The room contained a table and four chairs.
The waiter turned on the light and stood in the door.
She jerked her hand at him; he went out.
She leaned against the table on her braced arms, watching the door, until Red entered.
He came toward her.
She did not move.
Her eyes began to grow darker and darker, lifting into her skull above a half moon of white, without focus, with the blank rigidity of a statue’s eyes.
She began to say Ah-ah-ah-ah in an expiring voice, her body arching slowly backward as though faced by an exquisite torture.