The light was just right so I could see the flash of green deep within
my hostess' eyes. It was the green of a long-festering wound.
Her husband was one of my casualties, too, but his clothing covered the
swelling of the injured spot. The girl he was talking to was pretty,
but she was one of the half-dead. Before the party was over, however,
she would come to life with the shock of pain. When I hit them, they
know it.
I glanced around at the party-goers, many of whom exhibited the
evidences of their wounds like the medieval beggars who hoped to win
sympathy and alms by thrusting their monstrous deformities under your
nose.
There was the financier whose face-twisting tic was supposed to spring
from worry over business. I alone knew that it wasn't business that
caused it, that he looked to his wife for healing, and she wouldn't
give it to him.
And there was the thin-lipped woman whose wound was the worst of all,
because she couldn't feel it and would not even admit it existed. But
I could see her hurt in the disapproving looks she gave to those who
drank, who laughed loudly, who spilled cigarette ashes on the rug, who
said anything not absolutely out of Mrs. Grundy. I could read it in the
tongue she used as a file across the nerves of her husband.
I wandered around a while, drinking champagne and listening to the
conversation of the wounded and the unwounded. It was the same as
it was in the beginning of my profession, a feverish interest in
themselves on the part of the unwounded and a feverish interest in
their healers on the part of the wounded.
After a while, just as I was about to open my violin case and go to
work, I saw the young woman enter--the one who had recognized me. She
still had the 3-D glasses. She carried them in her hand now, but she
put them on to glance around the room. It was just my luck for her
to be one of the invited. I tried to evade her search but she was
persistent.
She swept triumphantly towards me finally. She carried a large
cardboard box in her arms. She halted in front of me and set the box at
her feet. Certain she could identify me from now on, she then removed
her glasses.
She was very beautiful, healthy-looking, and with no outward signs of
her wounds.
If it hadn't been that her eyes were so bright I'd have thought she was
one of the half-dead. But there was no mistaking the phosphorescent
glow of the warm wound deep within her eyes.
I glanced at my watch and said coolly, "What's on your mind, Miss?"
"I'm in love with you!" She said it breathlessly.
I had trouble suppressing a groan. "Why?" I said, though I knew well
enough.
"You're the one who did it!" she replied. "Did you think that,
recognizing you, I would ever let you go?"
"What do you want me to do about it?"
"Marry me."
"That'd be no good for you," I said. "I would never be at home. I keep
all kinds of hours. Your life would be worse than that of the wife of
any traveling salesman. Besides," I added, "I don't love you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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