I began to like Leicester City, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Again at eight o’clock, when the dark lanes of Roosevelt avenue were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart, Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
For a while I lost sight of Mandy, and then in midsummer I found him again. At first I was
“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”
“Duh well other people are,” she said lightly.
Mandy instinctively avoided clever shrewd men and now I saw that this was because she felt safer on a plane where any divergence from the code would be thought impossible. She was incurably dishonest. She wasn’t able to endure being a disadvantage, and given this unwillingness I suppose she had begun dealing in subterfuges when she was very young in order to keep that cool insolent smile turned to the world and yet satisfy the demands of her hard jaunty body. It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply- I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat.
“What’s that got to do with it?”
flattered to go places with her because she was a golf ch
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