Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You

arms and trying to talk to me. I tried to keep control and ask him—well, normalizing , questions, but I was getting very nervous. I believed now it was a setup between them. I really was very nervous. He began sort of crawling over me there on the couch so I had to get up, and then he just dropped all pretense and cornered me against the wall and took out a knife—”
    “Ahhh,” cried Viola. “How could you go to such a country?”
    “And he held it under my throat and demanded—well, by this time he was getting very graphic about the whole thing, but I just said no, no , and refused to look at any thing.”
    “But the knife was at your throat,” said Blair King, almost as if this was a joke.
    “Well I somehow did think he was bluffing. I somehow could tell. It was all like a play. And then the blue-eyed one came back. He really had gone to buy food; he had some cheese and so on, and he got very annoyed or seemed to when he saw what was going on. The other one put the knife away of course. The blue-eyed one apologized with great eloquence and we all sat down and ate. It seems incredible. Then the blue-eyed one said he would show me the way back. And he did. He was very courteous. On the way back he asked me to marry him.”
    When she said this Jeanette’s voice dipped with embarrassment, as it had not done during any other part of the story.
    “He was hoping I would get him out of the country or something. Or maybe it’s a kind of extreme Arab courtesy. He came to the hotel every day until I left and repeated his proposal. He said he loved me, naturally.”
    What is there here that is not being told? thought Dorothy. She had had a great deal of experience listening to the voices of children who were leaving things out. Maybe she slept with the blue-eyed Arab when she got him back to the hotel. Maybe she slept with both of them in the Arab house. Something more than that. Maybe she loved him. Maybe the whole story is made-up.
    “I think,” said Jeanette apologetically, “I think I was a little in love with him. Very odd things happen to your feelings in those countries. And being alone.”
    “Odd things happen,” Blair King agreed.
    “Of course the impossible thing is to tell what they feel about you. Impossible.”
    She and Blair King had drunk almost the entire bottle of gin between them.

    Dorothy got ready for bed. She felt restless and not at all tired, though it was far past her usual bedtime. If this is what a drink is going to do to me, she thought, then I had better not get in the habit. She heard Viola go to the bathroom and go back to her room and shut the door. She heard Viola’s light click out. She put out her own light. Jeanette was sleeping downstairs. No sound in the house.
    Dorothy sat on the bed in her long nightgown, with her hair, which was worn coiled up in the daytime, lying like a stiff gray broom, still fairly thick, around her shoulders. She could after a while make out her old face in the glass. There was a moon. She looked like a character to scare children, like an old Norse witch. The sight was enough to make her decide to go downstairs to get a glass of milk or a cup of tea, to bring herself back to normal.
    She went down in her bare feet, with her old maroon dressing gown tied over her nightdress. She did not turn on any lights. She could see by the moon in the back rooms of the house and by the street light in the front. She unlocked the front door and went down the steps.
    She stood on the sidewalk in her dressing gown, her pale nightdress trailing underneath, and thought, What if anybody should see? She walked around the house on the grass. The grass was heavily damp. August dew. She walked past the spirea bushes and stood by the flower border from which all the delphiniums had been cut. There was no fence or hedge between this yard and the Kings’. On the other side of the border the Kings’ ragged grass began.
    The Kings had a glassed-in porch at the back of their house. The light was on in it. The porch had been renovated a few years ago and the windows now came right down to the floor.
    Dorothy walked across the flower border, trying not to step on plants. She stood on the Kings’ grass. In the lighted porch she could see two figures, and when she walked closer she could see they were Jeanette and Blair King. Jeanette seemed to be kneeling on some sort of low stool or hassock. She was pulling her embroidered blouse over her head. Then she was bare. Blair