“It wasn’t anything like they said, not as exciting as that,” Chase told her.
“How do you know? You haven’t read it.”
“They always exaggerate. Reporters.”
“Oh, you’re just too modest,” Mrs. Fielding said.
She was wearing a blue and yellow housedress with the two top buttons undone. Chase could see the pallid bulge of her breasts and the edge of a lacy yellow brassiere.
Though he was much stronger and much younger than Mrs. Fielding, she frightened him. Perhaps because he could not figure out what she wanted from him.
She seemed to want something more than the rent. More than some companionship. There was a desperation in her – maybe because she herself didn’t know what she wanted.
She said, “I bet this brings twice the job offers that the last article brought!”
Mrs. Fielding was much more interested in Chase’s eventual employment than was Chase himself. At first he’d thought that she was afraid he would fall in arrears on the rent, but he’d eventually decided that her concern went deeper than that.
She said, “As I’ve often told you, you’re young and strong, and you have a lifetime ahead of you. The thing for a fellow like you is work, hard work, a chance to make something of yourself. Not that you haven’t done all right so far. Don’t misunderstand me. But this lounging around, not working – it hasn’t been good for you. You must have lost fifteen pounds since you first moved in.”
Chase did not respond.
Mrs. Fielding moved closer to him and took the morning paper out of his hands. She stared at the picture in the center of the front page and sighed.
“I have to be going,” Chase said.
She looked up from the paper. “I saw your car.”
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
“It’s a car.”
“It tells about the car in the paper.”
“I suppose it does.”
“Wasn’t that nice of them?”
“Yes. Very nice.”
“They hardly ever do anything for the boys who serve and don’t make a big protest of it. You read all about the bad ones, but no one ever lifts a hand for good boys like you. It’s about time, and I hope you enjoy the car.”
“Thank you,” he said, opening the front door and stepping outside, trying not to look as though he were fleeing.
He drove to Woolworth’s for breakfast.
The novelty of the car had worn off. He would have preferred to walk. There were too many decisions to make while driving a car. Walking was simpler. Walking, it was easier to shut the mind off and just drift along.
Ordinarily, the lunch counter at Woolworth’s was a guarantee of privacy, even when every stool was taken. Businessmen reading the financial pages, secretaries drinking coffee and doing crossword puzzles, laborers hunched over plates of eggs and bacon – all wanted a moment of solitude before the daily hubbub began. Strangely, the elbow-to-elbow proximity fostered a respect for privacy. That Tuesday morning, however, halfway through his meal, Chase discovered that most of the other customers were watching him with only poorly disguised interest.
The ubiquitous newspaper with the front-page photograph had betrayed him.
He stopped eating, left a tip, paid his check, and got out of there. His hands were shaking, and the backs of his knees quivered as if his legs would fail him.
He didn’t like being watched. He didn’t even like being smiled at by a waitress or a clerk. His preference was to go through life as one of those nondescript men whom people looked through.
When he went to the newsstand around the corner from Woolworth’s to purchase a paperback, he was confronted with so many images of his face in the newspaper racks that he turned away at the door without going in.
At the nearby liquor store, for the first time in months, the clerk commented on the size of the whiskey purchase. Clearly, he felt that a man like Chase shouldn’t be buying so much booze. Unless, of course, the whiskey was for a party.
“Giving a party?” the clerk asked.
“Yeah.”
Anxious for the barren confines of his little attic room, Chase walked two blocks toward home before he remembered that he now owned a car. He walked back to it, embarrassed that someone might have seen his confusion.