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Angels are the best liars, that’s what I think,” Nell said morosely. After a moment she asked, “Are you an angel, Anna?”
Anna was aware of the rattle of fall leaves over the pavement, the gardenia smell of Nell’s perfume. No one had ever asked her that question before. Everyone simply presumed that she was.
“No,” she said. “I’m not an angel.” Her eyes met Nell’s, and they understood each other.
cute friendship moment
“A picture. Maybe the drugstore.” The studied way she avoided his eyes told him boys would be present. Natalie was boy-crazy, and Tabby had grown prettier than Dexter would have liked. Not that he wished ugliness on his only daughter, but showy beauty was an invitation to dependence. He’d have liked her to have the hidden kind, visible only to those who looked closely. She’d made a lapel pin out of an aspirin box painted over with red nail varnish, and called it a Wish Box. Apparently, there was a secret wish inside, written on a slip of paper. The idea of Tabby maintaining a secret vexed him a little.
not wrong about the beauty thing [makes life too easy! you have to work hard to resist the invitation to laziness]
[...] while Dexter’s power derived from physical force, the old man’s had been distilled into abstraction. The Berringers were wearing top hats to the opera when Dexter’s people were still copulating behind hay bales in the old land. He liked the thought that his own power would one day be refined into translucence, with no memory of the blood and earth that had generated it.
“Ah. Your supervisor. Mr. . . . Voss.” He drew out the name as though its syllables were the last bits of meat he was sucking from a bone. Then he grinned. “I imagine he’s just as eager to please you as you are to please him.”
The mockery blindsided Anna, but the crude power of the insult expressed itself more slowly, like a burn. It made the lieutenant seem unhinged. She noticed an unnatural hush quivering around them in the small building, and wondered if he was performing for a hidden audience.
Coldly, she said, “Is there a test you give people to see if they can dive?”
He slapped the desk, apparently believing this to be the last word. But Anna couldn’t seem to move. She was so close. She had untied the knot! Time seemed to elongate, allowing her to consider every possible course and know its result. Anger would revolt him; tears would prompt sympathy but prove her weak; flirtation would put her back where she’d started.
Most nights, a girl with thin blond hair awaited Bascombe outside the Sands Street gate. Anna gleaned from his conversation with the other divers that she was his fiancée, Ruby, whom he’d met after arriving in Brooklyn last summer. For a Brooklyn girl, Ruby was bizarrely ill-equipped for winter, shivering in a thin coat, then lassoing Bascombe in a lariat of sinewy arms and hanging at his neck, her forehead pressed to his. Anna liked Bascombe, which was partly to say that she liked herself in his company. Their flat, unvalenced exchanges were the closest she had ever come to feeling like a man. Bascombe in the grip of those greedy arms would be another matter, but Anna felt no envy. She had the Bascombe she wanted.
Dexter cracked the car window and let the winter wind rake his face. An intelligent person sat beside him, a girl who was not silly, who would understand whatever he gave her to understand, who intrigued him through some combination of physical attributes and mental toughness, but really it was the latter, because physical attributes surrounded him daily and prompted little feeling. And yet there was a problem with the girl in his car—this smart, modern girl with correct values, joined to the war effort, a girl matured by hard times and familial tragedy—and that problem was that all he could think of doing, in a concrete way, was fucking her. The rest—vague notions that she might work for him, that her toughness could be of use, that she was likely a good shot (taut slender arms, visible in the dress she was wearing tonight); confusion about how they had originally met (had someone introduced them?)—flickered at a middle distance, well behind his need to have her. And even as that need made it hard to drive the goddamn car, he was also thinking: this was the problem of men and women, what made the professional harmony he envisaged so difficult to achieve. Men ran the world, and they wanted to fuck the women. Men said “Girls are weak” when in fact girls made them weak. At the same time, another line of thought was unspooling: Why this? Why now? Why her? Why take the risk when George Porter had just seen them? But those questions were theoretical, to be debated at some future point. For now, the explosive discontent that had been mounting in Dexter since his visit to Mr. Q. two weeks before had at last found an object. And another line of thinking: Where could they go? Somewhere private, somewhere indoors. Lust made an idiot of everyone it touched—Dexter felt stupidity shrouding his head like a hood in the shape of a dunce’s cap. Where? Where? Where?
lol
She waited by the door while he checked his pockets. Now that they were two people in coats and hats, she felt calmer. When he joined her at the door, she smiled up at him, relieved. He held her chin in his fingers and gave her a perfunctory kiss—a kiss goodbye—before unbolting the door. Then he kissed her again, more deeply, and Anna felt a window fall open inside her despite everything—a wish to start again, even with sunrise approaching. The hunger he’d wakened in her banished every scruple—she would think about them later. And reentering the dream made her shame of minutes ago melt away.