Cristie looked at him. She didn’t say anything. Steven had always been a scrupulous person.
He went on, “Sara never loved me either. Whatever little feeling she had wore off after the first few months. She’s not happy with me. I can’t give her the things she wants, the only sort of life she really craves. She’s suggested herself, at least twice, that we call it a day. She was the one who mentioned the word ‘divorce’ first.”
A pulse in Cristie’s throat beat in and out. “Divorce!”
“Yes,” Steven said firmly, “divorce. She spoke of one a year ago. National Motors wanted me to take the Argentine laboratory then. It was the opportunity I was after. No engineer could ask for a better. The equipment’s tip-top. It would have given me a fine chance for experimental work. But Sara absolutely refused to go. She said she’d divorce me if I accepted the post, and now, well—don’t you see?”
This time Cristie did see. Her defenses began to crumble. If Sara didn’t love Steven, if she was willing to divorce him, wanted a divorce herself . . .
Steven leaned across the table. He was closer to her. His words came faster. “Don’t worry about Sara. Sara will agree. I know she will, like a shot, when I make my offer. She wouldn’t dream of leaving New York and her tight little world. She doesn’t care a snap of her fingers for me, doesn’t want anything from me except cold cash. It may be a little hard for us for a while, darling. Sara will demand everything. It will mean a commitment for big alimony. But it will be worth it. Think of it, Cristie. We can wipe out that miserable blunder we made three years ago. We can start over again.”
To start over again, with Steven, in South America. New horizons and a new existence—together. The thought of it shook Cristie almost unbearably. She lowered her lashes to hide the flame that had sprung up in her eyes, tried to drag herself back to sanity. There were a lot of obstacles to be surmounted. And yet . . . Steven’s voice was in her ears.
“Look at me, darling.”
Cristie raised her lashes slowly.
At the bar McKee turned. He glanced at the girl’s radiant face lifted to the man on the other side of the table. Strong emotion can be as tangible as a breeze, a shout. It was there in those two people. It hadn’t been there a moment before. He couldn’t hear what they were saying. He didn’t need to hear. We hold these truths to be self-evident.
Twenty feet away Steven Hazard was repeating softly, “So you see it’s going to be all right if—love me, Cristie?”
This time it was Cristie’s hands that found his. She touched the back of Steven’s with the tips of her fingers. “You know, don’t you?” she whispered.
There was no hesitation in her answer. But she was still not completely convinced. Could you ever go back and wipe out the past? Steven sensed her uncertainty, because he said with sudden iron in his voice, “You don’t know what my marriage is like. You don’t know it at all, Cristie. I’m not going to go into it. But we’re entitled to another chance, you and I. It isn’t as though I were welching on Sara. She doesn’t want me, doesn’t want any part of me. Our life together is over. If she gets money enough it will suit her down to the ground to let me go. That’s all I can tell you.”
His brooding gaze left Cristie for a moment, he was far away, enclosed in the shadows of a dark inward knowledge. He straightened his wide shoulders like a man shaking himself free of a physical weight. His eyes cleared. His muscles relaxed. He said forcefully, “I’m going straight home. I’m going to put it up to Sara, now, at once, today. And tonight at Margot St. Vrain’s party, when the decks are clear, we’ll be able to make our plans, definite plans.”
Happiness should have been singing through Cristie. The happiness was there but there were other things mixed up with it.
“Sara won’t be with you ?” she said. “Margot asked her.”
“No,” Steven replied, signaling to the waiter. He ordered cocktails. “‘Sara’s going to the opening of ‘The Star-spangled Manner’ with the Johnsons.”
The cocktails were brought. “To us,” Steven said, raising his glass.
Their eyes met and held. A wave of joy engulfed Cristie. She stopped fighting, let it take her. They kept on looking at each other.
Cristie had come to New York from Texas late in the spring, after her mother’s death. She was staying for the summer with Margot St. Vrain in Margot’s penthouse on East Sixty-fourth Street. Margot’s people had been friends of Cristie’s father. Margot and Margot’s cousin, Johnny St. Vrain, the radio announcer, had been in Texas when her mother died and they had both pressed her to come north. It was Margot who had fallen on Cristie’s pen-and-ink sketches with a scream of delight, Margot who had made her send them around. They had had an almost immediate, if modest, success.
Steven left Cristie at the door of Margot’s apartment. Her mood of exhilaration began to fade as he walked away. Entering the lobby, going up in the small private elevator that serviced the penthouse, the doubts and tremors and questions began to come back. Granting that Sara wanted a divorce herself, would she make some impossible conditions? Cristie tried to push her fears aside; they refused to go, completely.
When she went into the penthouse living room, Margot was there, with Euen Firth, the man Margot was engaged to, and so was Johnny. Cristie said hello to Margot, tall and competent and square in a superbly cut, brown shantung coat and skirt that intensified her height and leanness and brought out the lines of a magnificent pair of shoulders and arms. They were Margot’s one really good point and she made the most of them.
Johnny waved a cheerful greeting to Cristie as she pulled off her hat and settled down in a corner of the immense geranium-red sofa. Looking at Johnny’s shapely head, his compact body, his pleasant handsome face, listening to his voice, a voice that even in a room had the ring to it that had put him well at the top of America’s leading announcers, Cristie knew why she hadn’t married him when he had asked her in the spring. It was because he wasn’t Steven. Her refusal hadn’t made any difference in the camaraderie between herself and the St. Vrains. She had been afraid it would, but it hadn’t.
Margot’s engagement to Euen Firth had been announced in the morning papers. They were discussing plans and a date. Margot said firmly that she couldn’t leave New York until after Thanksgiving. Two or three pots were due to boil in late November and she had to be on deck to watch the proceedings.
Cristie looked at her wistfully. Margot was so sure of herself. At thirty-one she was the foremost band agent in the country, and she had started from scratch. Left with an illustrious name and nothing with which to back it up, she had gradually built a business that was the despair of her competitors. “You’ve got to see St. V. to swing” had become an axiom among the jive and jam folk. Winchell had called Margot the Queen of Swing in a Sunday night broadcast.
But Cristie knew that although Margot’s income was large, her expenses were high and the pace was terrific. She had engaged herself to Euen Firth with her eyes open, made no secret of it. She wasn’t and she didn’t pretend to be, madly in love with the gangling, not quite “ex-” playboy in his early thirties, with a prospective couple of millions in his jeans. Euen was the son of Charles Firth, one of the country’s leading drug manufacturers. Not that Margot wasn’t fond of Euen in her own way. She was, but she had explained to Cristie quite frankly that he could give her the things she wanted, the chance to stop and take a deep breath, to lie back and relax and laze a bit—for a while, anyhow.
Margot went on talking, but she gave Cristie a shrewd glance. Cristie averted her face. The gnawing little worm of fear in her breast stirred. Margot was terrifically keen, saw all there was to see. She didn’t know, specifically, about Steven. Cristie didn’t want her to know, didn’t