a
said her own things--"pieces"--would spoil the effect of the living
room. All Italian.

"No wonder the Italians sit outdoors all the time, on the steps and in
the street"--more of Ray's dull humour. He surveyed the heavy gloomy
pieces, so out of place in the tiny room. One of the chairs was black
velvet. It was the only really comfortable chair in the room but Ray
never sat in it. It reminded him, vaguely, of a coffin. The corridors of
the apartment house were long, narrow, and white-walled. You traversed
these like a convict, speaking to no one, and entered your own cubicle.
A toy dwelling for toy people. But Ray was a man-size man. When he was
working downtown his mind did not take temporary refuge in the thought
of the feverish little apartment to which he was to return at night. It
wasn't a place to come back to, except for sleep. A roost. Bedding for
the night. As permanent-seeming as a hay-mow.

Cora, too, gave him a strange feeling of impermanence. He realized one
day, with a shock, that he hardly ever saw her with her hat off. When he
came in at six or six-thirty Cora would be busy at the tiny sink, or the
toy stove, her hat on, a cigarette dangling limply from her mouth. Ray
did not object to women smoking. That is, he had no moral objection. But
he didn't think it became them. But Cora said a cigarette rested and
stimulated her. "Doctors say all nervous women should smoke," she said.
"Soothes them." But Cora, cooking in the little kitchen, squinting into
a kettle's depths through a film of cigarette smoke, outraged his sense
of fitness. It was incongruous, offensive. The time, and occupation, and
environment, together with the limply dangling cigarette, gave her an
incredibly rowdy look.

When they ate at home they had steak or chops, and, perhaps, a chocolate
eclair for dessert; and a salad. Raymond began to eat mental meals. He
would catch himself thinking of breaded veal chops, done slowly,
simmeringly, in butter, so that they came out a golden brown on a
parsley-decked platter. With this mashed potatoes with brown butter and
onions that have just escaped burning; creamed spinach with egg grated
over the top; a rice pudding, baked in the oven, and served with a tart
crown of grape jell. He sometimes would order these things in a
restaurant at noon, or on the frequent evenings when they dined out. But
they never tasted as he had thought they would.

They dined out more and more as spring drew on and th