The dread­ful thing, which the girl had antic­i­pated no more than a col­li­sion of the earth with a comet, and which her faith­less lover had been half-consciously plan­ning for weeks, had just hap­pened. The taxi­cab was speed­ing through the deserted Sixty-sixth Street under­pass from the east to the west side of the park. Honey Beaton cringed in a cor­ner of the back seat as though she had been struck, her face tear-stained and bowed, her left hand tightly grip­ping a metal bracket, her whole body shrink­ing against the side of the car as though she feared noth­ing so much as that Andrew Reale might touch her. Indeed, this gal­lant had endeav­ored to quiet her grief with a caress, only to be repulsed with a vehe­mence that star­tled his very soul. Now he sat in con­fu­sion, gaz­ing at the appalling havoc he had wrought. There was lit­tle in the girl’s appear­ance to rec­om­mend her to the buy­ers of beauty now, as she wailed, clutched her tum­bled yel­low hair, gnashed her teeth and con­torted her face in the fury of a death-wounded heart. In vain did Andrew attempt to inter­ject words of com­fort or apol­ogy; she seized on every phrase as it came from his mouth, twisted it into a bit­ter denun­ci­a­tion and made it an occa­sion for a fresh parox­ysm of mis­ery. The taxi swung around cor­ners, stopped like a trained metal beast at the flash of red lights, and moved again with a grind­ing whine of old gears as the lights snapped green. The broad back, round head, and wide ears of the dri­ver might have been made of the dead sub­stance of the auto­mo­bile, for all the acknowl­edg­ment he made of the hor­rid scene behind him, and for all the atten­tion that the ago­nized lovers paid him.

The girl’s pas­sion, after rag­ing for twenty min­utes in mount­ing crescen­dos, began to spend itself her sobs sub­sided, her wild and inco­her­ent utter­ances ceased and she fell to quiet weep­ing, her face averted from Andrew. He, still stunned by the force and sur­prise of her out­burst, dared not speak. The sight of the bal­anced, placid Laura as a mad­dened female had been a dis­turb­ing one, and (as he thought), he felt immense ten­der­ness, sym­pa­thy, and regret for her, but he had no doubt of the wis­dom of his course, and no inten­tion of being diverted from it by the over­praised power of a woman’s tears. Not only had Honey Beaton’s lust been dimmed by her lapse into hys­ter­ics, but he even felt a strange, obscure glow of sat­is­fac­tion, of which the storm he had raised in this desir­able breast was some­how the cause. When the taxi­cab drew up before the girl’s apart­ment build­ing and she auto­mat­i­cally moved to get out, Andrew sud­denly felt that he did not want the exchange to end. He had to per­suade Honey that he had done well, for her as well as for him­self, and sensed a con­fi­dence in the rea­son­ings that quickly gath­ered to the por­tals of his tongue. Gen­tly he detained her in her seat, and began to talk. Dry­ing her eyes, Laura lis­tened with wan atten­tive­ness in an oth­er­wise immo­bile face.

The meter clicked on and the dri­ver sat with the patience of an old priest, his eyes look­ing straight ahead at the dark, lonely avenue splashed here and there with the elec­tric sign of a tav­ern or del­i­catessen, as the ambi­tious young man poured forth his apol­ogy. After all the dec­la­ra­tions, pro­pos­als, jilt­ings, seduc­tions, rup­ture, rec­on­cil­i­a­tions, and denoue­ments which the dri­ver had heard in the rude con­fes­sional of the front seat, screened by the per­fect anonymity of the back of his head, he was as wearily wise as Eccle­si­astes, and he scarcely had an ironic sigh left for the pat­tern of words which Andrew Reale was earnestly impro­vis­ing under the impres­sion that it was the first time in his­tory that a decamp­ing lover had ever been so con­sid­er­ate and lucid.

pg 161 — 163

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Tags: Aurora Dawn, breakups, Herman Wouk, romance, scenes