Lilith Read Online Free Page A

repeated.
    “Well, the door is open. Bring them in and set them on the kitchen table.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    I opened the door toward me and, holding it with my shoulders, carried the box up the steps and across the back porch into the kitchen. I put it on the large porcelain-topped table in the center of the floor, pushing aside several unwashed dinner plates on which a coating of orange-colored sauce had hardened and a slim-stemmed glass, still beaded with sweat and cool to my hand. From the hall which entered into the kitchen I heard the muted cascade of a water closet, a sound which suddenly increased in volume as a door was opened into the hallway and a middle-aged woman appeared, buttoning the front of a light summer dress. She held crumpled under her arm a garment of some type—another dress, apparently—of pale-blue silk, which she made a perfunctory attempt to conceal against her body.
    “Here are your groceries, ma’am,” I said with some embarrassment.
    She came into the kitchen, her hands lingering upon, and then abandoning, the upper button of her dress, looking at me longer and more reflectively, I felt, than was required by the casualness of the circumstance. She was perhaps fifty, with graying hair and a round, soft, still pretty face, oddly combining a middle-aged, maternal benevolence with something avid, a look of candid, unquenched sensuality in her very pale-blue eyes. Her heavy-breasted, still vigorous-looking body was voluptuous in a plump, matronly way, and obviously uncorseted under her light cotton dress.
    “Oh, thank you, young man,” she said. “I’m just all at odds and ends this morning because that damn maid didn’t show up.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
    “You just cannot depend on these nigras. She claimed to have a toothache, but you know how they are.”
    She smiled at me and lifted one hand to brush back with a movement of artificial, somehow unpleasant delicacy a strand of loose pale hair that had fallen across her forehead.
    I murmured, “Yes, ma’am,” again and stood for a moment looking into her eyes, held in some kind of a profound, spontaneous communication with her. It seems almost absurd in transcribing the event, but I felt that quick, impulsive, strangely zealous contact of my look flower suddenly, not beautifully or rarely, perhaps (but there are common flowers), into a relationship. My gaze was a moment too long. There was an instant when I knew I should have turned away toward the door, and, having done so, would have successfully dismissed another of those experiences from which the profound convention of modesty protects us; but I did not, and, having delayed that instant, I felt myself compromised, drawn with her into a covenant of confidence, both primitive and very subtle, from which I could not now, without dishonesty, renege. When I did break our gaze and make my belated movement toward the door I was not surprised, therefore, to hear her say, “I think perhaps you had better wait just a minute, young man. I just want to check this order and make sure everything has been sent.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I said, turning again toward her.
    She dropped the crumpled dress she had been carrying onto a chair and began to rummage with assumed concern among the groceries.
    “Isn’t there an order sheet in here? There ought to be.”
    “Yes, ma’am, it’s there somewhere,” I said.
    “I’m just entirely at a loss this morning. I was so upset about that maid that I had to have a cocktail to quiet my nerves. Can you imagine that! A cocktail for breakfast!”
    She lifted her head toward me with an expression of spurious, gay vitality that made her pleasant maternal face almost ugly with imposture. “I wonder if you could help me find it?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” I murmured. “I know it’s there, because I put it in myself.”
    I moved toward the table and bent above the carton to search with her. From her body there came a warm, strong smell of flesh,