Manhattan Noir 2 (8 page)

Down below, on the sidewalk, the glowing green blob of a street light, swollen to pumpkin size by foreshortened perspective, thrusts upward toward my window. And along the little slot that the parted slats make, lights keep passing along, like strung-up, shining, red and white beads. All going just one way, right to left, because 37th Street is westbound, and all going by twos, always by twos, headlights and tails, heads and tails, in a welter of slowed-down traffic and a paroxysm of vituperative horns. And directly under me I hear a taxi driver and would-be fares having an argument, the voices clearly audible, the participants unseen.

“But it’s only to Fifty-ninth Street—”

“I don’t
ca-a-are
, lady. Look, I already tolje. I’m not goin’ up that way. Can’tje get it into your head?”

“Don’t let’s argue with him. Get inside. He can’t put you out.”

“No, but I can refuse to move. Lady, if your husband gets in here, he’s gonna sit still in one place, ’cause I ain’t budgin’.”

New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.

I take away the little tire jack my fingers have made, and the slats snap together again.

The first sign that the meal I phoned down for is approaching is the minor-key creak from a sharply swerved castor as the room-service waiter rounds a turn outside my door. I’m posted behind a high-backed wing chair, with my wrists crossed over the top of it and my hands dangling like loose claws, staring a little tensely at the door. Then there’s the waiter’s characteristically deferential knock. But I say “Who is it?” anyway, before I go over to open it.

He’s an elderly man. He’s been up here twice before, and by now I know the way he sounds.

“Room service,” comes through in that high-pitched voice his old age has given him.

I release the double lock, then I turn the knob and open the door.

He wheels the little white-clothed dinner cart forward into the room, and as the hall perspective clears behind him I get a blurred glimpse of a figure in motion, just passing from view, then gone, too quickly to be brought into focus.

I stand there a moment, holding the door to a narrow slit, watching the hall. But it’s empty now.

There’s an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous. The hall makes a right-angle turn opposite my door, and to get to the elevators, those whose rooms are back of this turn have to pass the little setback that leads to my door.

On the other hand, if someone wanted to pinpoint me, to verify which room I was in, by sighting my face as I opened the door for the waiter, he would do just that: stand there an instant, then quickly step aside out of my line of vision. The optical snapshot I’d had was not of a figure in continuous motion going past my point of view, but of a figure that had first been static and then had flitted from sight.

And if it’s that, now they know which room I’m in. Which room on which floor in which hotel.

“Did you notice anyone out there in the hall just now when you came along?” I ask. I try to sound casual, which only makes me not sound casual.

He answers with a question of his own. “
Was
there somebody out in the hall, sir?”

“That’s what I asked you, did you see anyone?”

He explains that years of experience in trundling these food-laden carts across the halls have taught him never to look up, never to take his eyes off them, because an unexpected bump on the floor under the carpet might splash ice water out of the glass and wet the tablecloth or spill consommé into its saucer.

It sounds plausible enough. And whether it is or not, I know it’s all I’m going to get.

I sign the check for the meal, add the tip, and tell him to put it on the bill. Then just as he turns to leave I remember something I want to do.

“Just a second; that reminds me.” I shoot one of my cuffs forward and twist something out of it. Then the other one. And I hold out my hand to him with the two star-sapphire cuff links he admired so much last night. (Innocently, I’m sure, with no venal intent.)

He says I’m not serious, I must be joking. He says he can’t take anything like that. He says all the things he’s expected to say, and I override them. Then, when he can’t come up with anything else, he comes up with, half-hopefully (hopeful for a yes answer): “You tired of them?”

“No,” I say quite simply, “no—they’re tired of me.”

He thanks me over and thanks me under and thanks me over again, and then he’s gone, and I’m glad he’s gone.

Poor old man, wasting his life bringing people their meals up to their rooms for thirty-five, forty-odd years. He’ll die in peace, though. Not in terror and in throes of resistance. I almost envy him.

I turn my head a little. The radio’s caroling “Tonight,” velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria’s song from
West Side Story
. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I
do
with her?

Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Then fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.

Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn’t be answered, the door rings that wouldn’t be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.

Now there aren’t two paths anymore; there’s only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.

Tonight, tonight—there will be no morning star
—Right, kid, there won’t. Not for me, anyway.

There’s a tap at the door, made with the tip of a key, not the tip of a finger. The voice doesn’t wait, but comes right through before the signal has a chance to freeze me stiff. A woman’s voice, soft-spoken, reassuring. “Night maid.”

I wait a second to let a little of the white drain from my face before she sees me, and then I go over and let her in.

Her name is Ginny. She told me last night. I asked her, that’s why she told me. I wanted to hear the sound of somebody’s name, that’s why I asked her. I was frightened and lonely, that’s why I wanted to hear the sound of somebody’s name.

On her face the beauty of two races blends, each contributing its individual hallmark. The golden-warm skin, the deep glowing eyes, the narrow-tipped nose, the economical underlip.

While she’s turning back the bedcovers in a neat triangle over one corner, I remark, “I notice you go around the outside of the room to get to the bed, instead of cutting across the middle, which would be much shorter. Why do you?”

She answers plausibly, “People are often watching their television sets at this time, when I come in, and I don’t want to block them off.”

I point out, “But mine isn’t on, Ginny.”

I see how the pupils of her eyes try to flee, to get as far away from looking at me as possible, all the way over into their outside corners. And that gives it away. She’s afraid of me. The rumors have already reached her. A hotel is like a beehive when it comes to gossip.
He never leaves his room, has all his meals sent up to him, and keeps his door locked all the time
.

“I want to give you something,” I say to her. “For that little girl of yours you were telling me about.”

I take a hundred-dollar bill out of the wallet on my hip. I fold the bill a few times so that the corner numerals disappear, then thrust it between two of her fingers.

She sees the “1” first as the bill slowly uncoils. Her face is politely appreciative.

She sees the first zero next—that makes it a ten. Her face is delighted, more than grateful.

She sees the last zero. Suddenly her face is fearful, stunned into stone; in her eyes I can see steel filings of mistrust glittering. Her wrist flexes to shove the bill back to me, but I ward it off with my hand upended.

I catch the swift side glance she darts at the fifth of rye on the side table.

“No, it didn’t come out of that. It’s just an impulse—came out of my heart, I suppose you could say. Either take it or don’t take it, but don’t spoil it.”

“But why? What for?”

“Does there have to be a reason for everything? Sometimes there isn’t.”

“I’ll buy her a new coat,” she says huskily. “A new pink coat like little girls all seem to want. With a little baby muff of lamb’s wool to go with it. And I’ll say a prayer for you when I take her to church with me next Sunday.”

It won’t work, but—“Make it a good one.”

The last part is all she hears.

Something occurs to me. “You won’t have to do any explaining to her father, will you?”

“She has no father,” she says quite simply. “She’s never had. There’s only me and her, sir.”

Somehow I can tell by the quick chip-chop of her feet away from my door that it’s not lost time she’s trying to make up; it’s the tears starting in her eyes that she wants to hide.

I slosh a little rye into a glass—a fresh glass, not the one before; they get rancid from your downbreaths that cling like a stale mist around the inner rim. But it’s no help; I know that by now, and I’ve been dousing myself in it for three days. It just doesn’t take hold. I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It’s good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn’t do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you’re out of sand, then you must burn up.

I have it out now, paying it off between my fingers like a rosary of murder. Those same fingers that did it to her. For three days now I’ve taken it out at intervals, looked at it, then hidden it away again. Each time wondering if it really happened, hoping that it didn’t, dreading that it did.

It’s a woman’s scarf; that much I know about it. And that’s about all. But whose? Hers? And how did I come by it? How did it get into the side pocket of my jacket, dangling on the outside, when I came in here early Wednesday morning in some sort of traumatic daze, looking for room walls to hide inside of as if they were a folding screen. (I didn’t even know I had it there; the bellboy who was checking me in spotted it on the way up in the elevator, grinned, and said something about a “heavy date.”)

It’s flimsy stuff, but it has a great tensile strength when pulled against its grain. The strength of the garotte. It’s tinted in pastel colors that blend, graduate, into one another, all except one. It goes from a flamingo pink to a peach tone and then to a still paler flesh tint—and then suddenly an angry, jagged splash of blood color comes in, not even like the others. Not smooth, not artificed by some loom or by some dye vat. Like a star, like the scattered petals of a flower. Speaking of—I don’t know how to say it—speaking of violence, of struggle, of life spilled out.

The blood isn’t red anymore. It’s rusty brown now. But it’s still blood, all the same. Ten years from now, twenty, it’ll still be blood; faded out, vanished, the pollen of, the dust of, blood. What was once warm and moving. And made blushes and rushed with anger and paled with fear. Like that night—I can still see her eyes. They still come before me, wide and white and glistening with fright, out of the amnesiac darkness of our sudden, unpremeditated meeting.

They were like two pools of fear. She saw something that I couldn’t see. And fear kindled in them. I feared and I mistrusted but I couldn’t bear to see my fear reflected in her eyes. From her I wanted reassurance, consolation; only wanted to draw her close to me and hold her to me, to lean my head against her and rest and draw new belief in myself. Instead she met my fear with her fear. Eyes that should have been tender were glowing with unscreaming fear.

It wasn’t an attack. We’d been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers.

She turned and tried to run. I caught the scarf from behind. Only in supplication, in pleading; trying to hold on to the only one who could save me. And the closer I tried to draw her to me, the less she was alive. Until finally I got her all the way back to me, where I wanted her to be, and she was dead.

I hadn’t wanted that. It was only love, turned inside out. It was only loneliness, outgoing.

And now I’m alone, without any love.

And the radio, almost as if it were taking my pulse count, electrographing my heartbeats, echoes them back to me:
For, like caressing an empty glove, Is night without some love, The night was made for
—

The hotel room ashtrays are thick glass cubes, built to withstand cracking under heat of almost any degree. I touch my lighter to it, to the scarf compressed inside the cube. The flame points upward like a sawtoothed orange knife. There goes love. After a while it stops burning. It looks like a black cabbage, each leaf tipped by thin red lines that waver and creep back and forth like tiny red worms. Then one by one they go out.