He didn’t do her justice. He wasn’t adroit with words at any time, and now less so than ever. He’d flung at her the first ones he could lay his mind on in his sincerity, but they fell short of what was required.
She was no more than twenty. She was beautiful, but not in a cloying, simpering way of pouting lips and wheel-spoke lashes. The beauty in her face was expressed in its proportions, in the width of her brow, in the wide spacing of her eyes, in their limpid candor, in the honesty and character already fully expressed in her chin. In all the things that would never leave her, she was beautiful. She was still pale, the shock had not yet left her. There was no paint or other markings on her face, to make it seem anything than what it was. Her hair, which was of the shade where dark blonde meets light brown, fell in soft disorder, no less attractive now than it could have been at the height of full-dressed artifice. She had on a dress of dark cloth, without a single ornament, without so much as a button to distinguish it, yet somehow in the way it fell revealing the fact that it had been made to her order.
He asked it again, overawed at the values he dimly perceived in her. Even he, with his untutored eyes. “What did you want to do a thing like that for? You, a girl like you?”
And again he got that same answer. “Make them stop shining. Make them.” Her eyes were fierce with intensity.
He didn’t know how to cope with it. “But they’re not there to hurt you. They’re—they’re just there. They always are, they’ll always be.”
“Then I don’t want to be.”
He tried to get in past whatever it was, get in to the other side of it, where it was soft. “Look, I’m here with you now. I’m not going to hurt you, am I? You don’t think I am, do you?”
She touched him on the arm. Suddenly her touch became a convulsive grip. “No, you won’t. People don’t. Men don’t. People have hearts. You can reach them. You can say to them, ‘Let me alone’—”
“Well, I’m right here with you. Then it’s all right. Hold me like that, if you want to. Go ahead, grab me tight. Both hands, that’s it, go ahead.”
She shuddered. “You’ll leave me in a little while, and then I’ll be alone with them again.”
He put his arm around her again. This time at the shoulder. He managed to make something impersonal out of it, protectively impersonal; a man clasping a child who tells him she is lost. They walked, in this new posture, a few paces. Into the gloom past the first revelatory light; then into a new light radius, then into new gloom beyond that.
He wondered what to do with her. He couldn’t just tip his hat, now that he had her off the bridge, and walk away. Go home with her, deposit her there? Home wouldn’t do her very much good; she must have come from there, not long before she’d tried—it. Call an ambulance, have her taken to an observation ward? That would only frighten her, and she was frightened enough already.
They’d come to where the bag was, and the litter of belongings, by unnoticeable stages; making little walks, and stops.
She made no move to reclaim it. He was the one who had to stand there and conscientiously put back, one by one, all the things that had come out of it. He stopped when he’d come to the shivered perfume vial, said to her questioningly, “Not this, of course?” and pushed it over the parapet.
She didn’t answer. She didn’t seem to know what it was. Or if she did, to care.
He remembered the errant bills he’d accumulated along the pavement as he approached the first time, took them out of his pocket, added them to the rest.
The shattered wrist watch, because it was apart, he handed to her direct.
She looked at it with a sort of dull satisfaction. “At least I made this stop,” she breathed. Then her lashes dropped, meaning, inversely, she must have checked an impulse to look upward at the sky. “But they keep right on.”
She handed it back to him, dispassionately as though it belonged to someone else and she had been asked just to look at it. He let it fall out of the hollow of his hand into the bag, and it spilled with a little liquid flash of diamonds.
He had everything in now. He closed the bag, offered it to her.
She didn’t take it for a minute. Her original impulse toward disencumbrance must have been still alive within her, even this long after.
“You want it back, don’t you?” he had to urge.
“No,” she answered with gentle simplicity. “But you want me to, so I’ll have to have it, I guess.”
She tucked it under her arm the way he’d seen many carry such things.
He asked her a question, and immediately after he had, regretted it, wished he hadn’t. It sounded like the devil. It was even more anticlimactic, more fatuous, than his first question back there on the bridge. “Got everything, now?” It sounded as though he were helping her aboard a bus or train or something. Well, maybe that was what life was; and he was putting her back on, after she’d got off at the wrong station.
“Yes,” she said, “everything. My watch, my purse, my life, my hell.”
He felt the sting of that, but he didn’t answer it. She couldn’t make it seem that the right thing for him to have done would have been to let her jump in, no matter what she said.
“Shall we go over this way?” he said.
He led her out toward the traffic lanes, to cut across them and get back to where the city lay, on the other side. He had her hand in the crook of his arm, holding it lightly in place with his other hand. Not tightly, as a prisoner is gripped, but in a sort of sustaining guidance that scarcely made itself felt.
She didn’t balk, but presently, at the lip of the first curb, she asked, “Where are you taking me?”
“Just somewhere to sit and talk it over for a while, maybe.”
She read his mind accurately. “Away from the river.”
“Well,” he said defensively, “there are cheerier places.”
She didn’t answer. He read hers: But it brings you peace.
“I have a car over there,” she said after a moment, as though she’d only just then recalled that.
“Oh, why didn’t you tell me sooner?” he said briskly. He stopped at once, and turned aside with her, and they went in the new direction. It was up the other way, above the bridge approach. “We’ll go over and get in, shall we?”
It was blotted out under the trees, almost invisible from where he’d first been, when he’d looked around immediately before sighting her herself. Then as they came nearer it became a silhouette against the drizzle of light farther down the roadway. Silhouette of a low-slung, custom-built roadster, licorice-glossy. A coin or two of arc light, no more, fell through the layers of leaves that bowered it and made sequinlike disks upon it, one over the hood, one over the rear guard, one over the bulge of the rumble.
He gave a short whistle. “This yours?” He tried to rally her, in a clumsy well-meaning way. “And you were going to leave this? How could you have the heart?”
She didn’t answer, he noticed; as though she couldn’t understand what was of value about it.
He got in under the wheel. “Got the keys?”
“I left them sticking in it, I guess.”
He found them fallen down by his feet. “Funny, isn’t it?” he philosophized. “If you’d wanted it again, and done that, it probably would have been gone by the time you got back. But because you didn’t want it again, it’s still here.”
He touched something, and a fuming torrent of platinum shot up the roadway ahead of them, making noon under the trees. Then he tempered it to a more moderate glow.
“What a job!” he said, running his hand across the top of the slanted windshield.
“Father had it made up for me when we were on the other side, gave it to me for my eighteenth birthday.”
He might as well find out something else while he was about it. “How long have you had it?” he asked, fiddling with the ignition.
“A little over two years now.”
Twenty was right, then.
She’d remai
ned there standing by the door, as though now that his arm had been taken away she no longer had any volition toward motion of her own. He wanted her to get in and sit beside him. He made her the offer he’d originally intended to make on the bridge, as a means of drawing her nearer, drawing her in next to him. Offered her his cigarettes, without extending his hand very far toward her. “Would you care for one of these now?”
She entered the car and sank down beside him. She didn’t know she was doing it, he could tell. He held a match for her with one hand and with the other, reaching across her, slapped the door safely shut.
Then he watched her for a while, turned toward her, elbow to seat-back.
“We’re going to talk about it now. Do you mind?”
He saw her head give a slight shake. He couldn’t tell if that meant she didn’t mind, or that there was no good talking about it.
She looked so licked, he thought, so baffled. It made you want to tighten your arm around her and— He took hold of his own wrist, made a bracelet around it, a handcuff, with his opposite hand, and held it there fast, slanting down the seat-back.
She kept looking down, into the little boxed floor of the car at their feet. He knew why. To keep from looking up; she was afraid of them, they were still bothering her.
“Who is he?”
She smiled. “I’ve never been in love.”
He thought of the handbag, the bills fluttering along the sidewalk. “It isn’t money.”
The smile became a laugh. A rueful one, not gay. She answered it with a single word in kind. “Money.” The way you speak of dust. Or something that’s always there, that you can’t help having underfoot a lot, but that you don’t dignify by discussing as a rule.
He answered his own question. “I figured it wasn’t.”
He traced the outline of the wheel rim with one hand, speculatively. “Not love, not money. Is it something the doctors have told you? Something like that? Sometimes they’re wrong, they don’t always know.”
“I haven’t been to a doctor since I was twelve. There’s never been anything the matter. There isn’t now. I’ve never had an ill day in my life.”
He couldn’t think of anything else. He ducked his chin to the wheel. “I’m only trying to help.”
“You’re so young, and they’re so old. You’re just one—and there are so many of them.”
She had them on the brain bad, he thought. A thing like that will take weeks to get it out of her. It’ll take one of these special kinds of doctors—what do you call them? He couldn’t think of the word.
She was starting to shiver, he noticed. And the night was warm. It was stifling under the trees. Maybe the aftereffects of the emotional somersault she’d experienced on the bridge. You couldn’t key yourself up taut to a thing like that without having all your cords jangle loosely for a while afterwards.
“Excuse me,” he said, and reached out and touched the back of her hand. It was like ice.
He started the engine. “Shall we get out of here?”
“Take me in some place where I can’t see them. In away from the open sky. Glaring—a thousand eyes—”
They glided into motion. He drove down the riverside lane for a while, he had to, until there was an opening he could take to turn off. She rode with her head bowed, looking down at her hands. Turning them over from time to time, to refresh the monotony of staring at themfixedly like that. All to avoid looking up.
It was hideous to go through life like that. Half the world, at all times, was sky. Half of the time, that half was dark and lit with stars. One quarter of the world around you, one quarter of your entire life, barred from you, a forbidden zone, a danger zone, something not to be looked at. He still would not have undone what he’d done; but he wondered now, for the first time, which of them had been the wiser on that bridge, he or she? Maybe she’d known what she was doing.
This wasn’t just an incident in the course of an evening, he could see that now. A single act that had already concluded. He said to himself, I’ve got work ahead ofme, a job ahead ofme. This is going to take time, and it’s going to be a hard pull. I just saved her pretty little skin, back there. Now I’ve got to finish it, and save her.
They were coursing through a thoroughfare freckled with electric lights now, away from the river. It was a little better for her along here. The glow and pollenlike haze of the various signs and illuminated tubes, rising to a certain distance, combated and dimmed those other, more lasting sparks in the sky.
They passed a taproom or two, smoky, sullen with subdued light, but those weren’t the sort of places for him to take her, anyone like her. Even apart from tonight’s circumstances, any man could see that just by looking at her. She was in trouble, and it would only have heightened it to submit her to the stares of semidrunks and the clatter of cheap conviviality. Besides, this wasn’t a social occasion, this was a mild form of first aid. He eschewed several eating places they came upon as being unsuitable too. They were just counters, frequented by cab drivers and night truckmen and that sort.
He had a certain place in mind. It was an all-night restaurant, an anachronism in their day and age in that it offered no entertainment or distraction of any kind, simply food. It was very old and musty, and what kept it going he had never been able to determine, unless it was the lifelong habit of its owners, which they found themselves unable to break.
He drew up before its quiet entrance and they went in. It was practically empty. It always was, at any time he’d ever seen it. Two men were sitting at a table, lost in a conversation that had been going on for hours. A man and a girl were sitting at another, lost in a lovelorn silence that had been going on for hours. A single waiter, very tired, very uncomplaining, stood about doing nothing.
He led her first to a table in a forward corner, drew back a chair. “This all right?”
She sat down, then got up again with an odd little twist of aversion. “No, this is too near the window. They’re out there. If I turn my head, I can still see them. I’d keep—They’re sort of spying over my shoulder.”
He noticed an alcove or indentation at the rear. They went all the way back to it. “How about this?”
She sat down, this time, and remained seated.
When he saw that she intended to, he sat down in turn.
“Waiter, pull those drapes closed on the side window there. Block off the—view.”
“Pardon me, sir, but that way you can see all the—”
“I said closed.”
“Shut them out,” she said when he’d gone. “Cover me up. Pull a thousand curtains across. But their rays are still coming through. There isn’t any place in the world, or deep down under it, that their rays aren’t still coming through.”
“Whew!” Shawn said softly to himself.
He tried to smile at her. “How are you now? Let me feel your hand a minute.”
It was still cold.
“A little whisky, maybe?”
“What good will it do? I would have drowned myself in it by now—”
The waiter came back again. “Coffee for the lady. Black coffee. Good and hot.”
He lit another cigarette while they were waiting, more to give himself something to do than because he wanted it.
“Do you want to tell me your name?” he asked her solicitously. “You don’t have to, of course, if you—”
“Jean Reid,” she interrupted.
“Thank you, Miss Reid.”
“You can call me Jean, if you like.” He wondered what she was looking at. There wasn’t anything there on the table between them, where her eyes were fixed immovably.
He had to keep talking for the two of them. “Would you care to know who I am?”
She kept looking at that spot on the table, where there was nothing.
“You’re a man. You came along. You’ve made me keep on looking at them long after I would have stopped, if it hadn’t been for you. I don’t know if you say thanks for a thing like that or not.”
“Police. A detective.” She began to laugh.
He waited for her to get through.
She didn’t get through. It seemed to feed on itself. It wasn’t raucous or shrill, it didn’t even attract the attention of the other two pairs in the room outside. It was well-bred, like everything about her. But she couldn’t seem to stop it.
Weeping is nothing. There is nothing more terrible than having to sit and listen to a person laugh, endlessly, without joy, without mockery, without hope. He clenched his fist down under the table where she couldn’t see it, and pressed down hard with it on his knee.
He wondered how to stop her.
He’d heard that if you slapped them, that stopped them. He couldn’t have done that if he’d tried.
He’d heard that if you dashed a glass of water full in their faces, that stopped them. He couldn’t have done that either. That was just as bad. He wished it had been a man he’d saved on the bridge; then he could have hung one on his jaw without any compunction.
She perked a thumb backward across her shoulder. “Arrest those stars out there, officer. Put handcuffs on them. Hit them with a blackjack.”
He had a certain native dignity, this Shawn. He’d meant to help her. He got up, put his chair carefully back into place, started to walk away without a word.
The laughter had stopped, suddenly. He looked back, from across the room, and her head was down, her arm coiled tight around it. She was mute.
He stood there undecided. Then he turned and walked back toward her again, as slowly as he’d walked away. He drew out the same chair he’d just now left and sat down again without a word. When she looked up at last he was sitting there before her again, patiently waiting. He was trying to show her, in the only way he knew, that he wanted to help her.
The underlids of her eyes were heavy with hoarded moisture. She looked at him, and pushed her hair back a little.
“Now do you want to tell me?”
“I can’t.”
Night Has a Thousand Eyes Page 3
