Single White Female

by John Lutz

  After toweling dry, she put on black slacks and a baggy white T-shirt with SIMON AND GARFUNKEL CENTRAL PARK CONCERT lettered across the front; she d bought it the day after she’d attended the concert several years ago, and the letters were faded. Simon, who was still hard at it, probably had a song about that. He was doing fine without Garfunkel; she could make it without Sam.

  She stepped into the comfortable soft leather moccasins she wore on weekends and wandered as if lost through the apartment, pausing here and there and running her fingertips over the furniture, as if to reassure herself it was real.

  Jesus, she thought, how maudlin. She walked over to the office-alcove, ripped the fan-fold paper from the computer printer, and read the classified ad she’d composed before dawn. It was simple and to the point. Effective. She’d been thinking clearly enough when she considered advertising for a roommate to share expenses.

  It occurred to Allie that she might have a problem, telling potential roommates they’d have to live surreptitiously in the apartment, be coconspirators in an arrangement that fooled neighbors and management company. On the other hand, apartments in Manhattan were so expensive and difficult to obtain that most renters would find the required discretion only a minor inconvenience. It might even appeal to the more adventuresome. Beating the system was a New York way of life, a point of pride as well as a means of survival in the cruelest of cities.

  She got her purse from the bedroom, folded the computer printout in quarters, and poked it in behind her wallet. Then she thought for a moment, pulled the wallet out, and counted her money. Twenty-six dollars. She thought about how much she had in the bank. Depressing. Even with the Fortune Fashions retainer, within a month she’d really be feeling the pinch. Something had to be done, and soon; if the wolf wasn’t at the door, it was prowling the corridors.

  Allie had slept through breakfast; she realized she was starving. Considering the scarcity of edible food in the refrigerator, she could treat herself to eating lunch out despite having to watch the flow of pennies.

  She locked the apartment behind her carefully. Woman alone now. Then she disdained the elevator and took the stairs down to the lobby too fast, as if to assert her physical capability and spirit.

  Breathing hard, she trudged outside and walked until she found a newsstand, where she bought three likely papers in which to place her classified ad. An obese man beside her bought a magazine with a cover illustration of a nude woman seated on a yellow bulldozer. He followed Allie half a block before falling behind her rapid pace and giving up. She glanced back and saw him standing near a wire trash basket, leafing through his magazine. Possibly he meant no harm, but New York had more weirdos per square yard than any other city.

  She tucked the newspapers more firmly beneath her arm and returned to West 74th. It was a little past one when she entered Goya’s.

  The restaurant did a good lunch business of neighborhood regulars and tourists. She had to wait for a table, and then was ushered to a tiny booth wedged in a corner. On the table were a napkin holder, salt and pepper shakers, a Bakelite ashtray, a half-full Heinz catsup bottle, and a two-dollar tip from the last diner. Allie found herself staring at the creased bills, thinking that theft, on a larger scale than this, was a way out of her financial difficulties.

  She shook that thought from her mind when the waiter arrived and stood by the booth. Stealing was stealing, a risk and a moral compromise she was unwilling to explore.

  The waiter said, “Something to drink?”

  She looked up. It was the same guy who’d taken her order when she was here the day before, the one with the intense, familiar face, the black hair and satellite-dish ears. Homely in the way of Abe Lincoln, or dogs you wanted to take home and feed. There was something clumsy and rough-hewn about him; a long way from Sam’s smoothness and grace. He laid a closed menu before her with ceremony. Like a good book he was recommending.

  “I’ll order now, drink and all,” she said, and looked at the grease-spotted menu. It was a computer printout, she noticed. The microchip was everywhere.

  The waiter said, “You’re Allison Jones.”

  She looked away from the menu, up into the homely face. Dark, earnest eyes gazed back at her, amiable despite their intensity, not devious or threatening.

  He smiled and said, “I live in the apartment above yours over at the Cody Arms. I’ve seen you around. Got your name from the mailbox.” He extended a hand and she shook it without thinking. “I’m Graham Knox.”

  The guy seemed friendly enough, not putting moves on her. “Glad to meet you, Graham.”

  He said, “The double burger and the house salad are good.”

  “I’ll have them, then, with fries and a large Diet Pepsi. I’m hungry today.”

  He scribbled her order in his notepad and scooped up the tip from the table in the almost unnoticeable manner of waiters everywhere. He smiled his lopsided smile and said, “Back soon.”

  And he was. Goya’s kitchen must have cooks falling all over themselves.

  He placed her food on the table and straightened up, dangling the empty tray in his right hand. “We’re neighbors, Allie, so anything you need, you let me know.”

  Oh-oh, where was this going? She gave him her passionless, appraising stare. The same one she’d given the obese man with the sex magazine when their gazes met. Turn it off, buddy, whatever you’re thinking.

  “Not that kind of anything,” he assured her, smiling. He had long, skinny fingers that played nervously with the edge of the round tray. His nails were gnawed to the quick. “Don’t get me wrong.”

  Okay, so he wasn’t interested in her that way. Now she wondered, was he gay? She mentally jabbed herself for being so egotistical and unfair. Any man who wasn’t interested in going to bed with her on first meeting wasn’t necessarily gay. And there was something about this man she instinctively liked, but in the same platonic fashion in which he seemed to see her. “Okay, Graham, thanks for the offer. And if you ever need a thumbtack, knock on my door.”

  “Not many people at the Cody would say that. Most of us don’t even know each other and don’t want to meet.”

  “New York,” Allie said, dousing her French fries with catsup. New York, like a disease.

  “Most big cities, I’m afraid.”

  “Maybe, but it’s special here.”

  “Could be it is. Well, I better get moving—orders are piling up. Come in sometime when we’re not busy and we’ll talk.”

  She nodded, holding the catsup bottle still, and watched him smile and back away, moving among the tables toward the serving counter.

  Did he want something? Or was he simply as he’d presented himself? Was she being cynical? Everyone didn’t have an act, an ulterior motive and an angle, even in New York. She had her choice now: she could stop coming into Goya’s, or she could become a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Graham Knox.

  She sampled the salad with the house dressing, and bit into the double burger. Graham was right, they were both delicious. And among the cheaper items on the menu. She decided what the hell, she could use a casual friend who didn’t clutter up her life with complications. Allie sensed that was all Graham wanted to be to her, someone she could talk to, and someone who’d listen if he felt compelled to talk. She almost laughed out loud at herself, thinking she could trust her instincts about people. She and Lisa.

  Allie wolfed down the rest of the salad and hamburger, then ate what was left of her fries more slowly.

  Afterward she ordered another Diet Pepsi and sat sipping it through a straw while most of the lunchtime crowd drifted outside. A vintage Beatles tune, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” came over the sound system. Softly. People came here to eat, not listen to music. It was one of Allie’s favorite Beatles numbers, so she leaned back, closed her eyes, and let it play over her mind. And she was thinking of Sam, trying not to cry.

  When Stevie Wonder took over, she opened her tear-clouded eyes and saw that Graham was staring curiousl
y at her from the other side of the restaurant, like a confused terrier.

  Allie nodded to him and he looked away. Not ill at ease, but as if he didn’t want to cause her embarrassment.

  She slid her cool glass to the side and examined the classified columns of the newspapers she’d bought, laying each one flat on the table, not caring about the spreading damp spots from puddles left by her glass.

  She decided to call her ad into the Times. The other ads in their “Apartments to Share” column seemed respectable enough—not placed by creeps or swingers trying to make contact. Abbreviations abounded in the small print: Single white female was, in the lexicon of the classified columns, “SWF.” Also being sought to share “Apt W Pvt Rm” were “Yng Prof’l Fem,” “GWM,” “SBF,” and “SBM prof nSmkr.” Allie took these to mean “Young professional female; gay white male; single black female; and single black male professional, nonsmoker.”

  She decided to make the wording of her ad more economical and change it to read “SWF seeks same.”

  Graham took the order of a middle-aged couple who’d just entered the restaurant, then walked over to Allie. For the first time she noticed that he had an oddly bouncy sort of walk, jaunty, with a lot of spring in his knees. A tall Groucho Marx. He used his sawed-off pencil as a pointer. “Refill on the Pepsi?”

  “No, thanks, I’m going in a minute.”

  He tucked the pencil behind his ear, then thumbed through the torn-off order slips stuck into the cover of his note pad. He laid Allie’s check on the table with practiced precision, as if dealing her a card faceup. “You can pay the cashier up by the door. See you next time, Allie.”

  “Right.” She watched him bustle away, the busy waiter, showing her he wasn’t the sort to get smarmy and make a pest of himself.

  Allie chewed on the crushed ice in her glass for a while, thinking about how life could change so drastically and unexpectedly. A phone call in the night, and the center of her universe had shifted. A simple phone call, and a relentless momentum had taken hold. Everyone’s fate was so precariously balanced, even if people didn’t seem to know it.

  She paid for her lunch and left a tip, nodding to Graham Knox as she pushed open the door to the street. In the bright sunlight outside the restaurant she stood still for a few minutes, as if trying to decide which direction to take.

  Then she walked back to her apartment and phoned in the ad.

  8

  Allie’s classified ad appeared in the Wednesday Times. Seated in bright sunlight at her kitchen table, steaming coffee cup before her, she read it to make sure it was worded correctly, then found herself scanning the news. The city’s murder rate was up (a bloodless statistic listed along with the birth and divorce rates and per capita income). A woman’s body had been found in her apartment, dismembered and decomposed. Yesterday a man’s body had been discovered hidden in the bushes in Central Park, only a few hundred feet from Fifth Avenue. Someone had struck him in the back of the head with a sharp rock, perhaps during sexual intercourse, and severed his hands. New York was a tumult of souls seeking fulfillment bright and dark, where sanity and madness converged often and sometimes violently. Allie grimaced. A nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to die there.

  The rest of that week her phone rang almost continuously. Most of the people who answered her ad were eliminated almost immediately by the amount of rent, or the apartment’s precise location, or the fact that Allie preferred a nonsmoker without a pet. Or for various personal reasons.

  After the initial winnowing process, five seemed promising enough to interview.

  Allie set up appointments and had each person who arrived fill out the rental application form she’d composed and printed out on her computer. It asked for present and previous addresses. Occupation, salary, reason for wanting to move, approximate work/sleep schedule. Whether friends would be entertained in the apartment and if so how often. Any hobbies or activities that might cause problems.

  Afterward, mulling over the interviews and rental applications, she reflected that no matter how much information you gleaned about someone, you were still taking a chance on any prospective roommate. It figured to be that way. Even people who’d known each other for years and then married sometimes found out when living together day in, day out that they hadn’t really known each other. She felt a cold weight in the pit of her stomach. She hadn’t really known Sam, and she’d lived with him for two months.

  Allie finally settled on Hedra Carlson, a twenty-nine-year-old temporary office worker with a hesitant smile and a shy manner. Hedra wasn’t the perfect applicant, but she certainly was the best bet out of those who’d responded. And Allie, smiling inwardly, realized the real reason she’d chosen Hedra was that the diffident and quiet woman was the least likely of any she’d seen to leave dirty socks on the floor and hair in the shower drain. So it came down to personality rather than employment records, pastimes, or schedules. To DNA, maybe. With Hedra as a roommate, Allie would be giving up as little of her independence as possible. Simple as that.

  As soon as she’d informed the ecstatically grateful Hedra by phone that she could move in immediately, Allie tore the other applications in half and dropped them in the wastebasket. They hadn’t proved very useful, since this business of choosing a roommate had reverted to emotion and a certain positive feeling about the applicant. But that was okay. Maybe in something like this, unknown territory, instinct was the most reliable compass; the floating needle in the heart.

  Allie had already shuffled the items that had been stored in the second bedroom, spreading some throughout the apartment, transferring most of them to her insecure though padlocked storage area in the basement. At a used-furniture store, she bought a four-section folding screen to isolate the alcove she used as her office. The screen was quite a find. It had a few stains on it, but it was gray silk and adorned with a delicate black Chinese willow design. She thought it added something to the décor while concealing her desk and computer.

  Hedra moved in by degrees over the next few days. She didn’t have that many possessions, and the one short trip by a moving company to bring in a bed, dresser, chair, and several boxes went smoothly. Allie was sure no one who mattered had seen which apartment the movers actually entered and left.

  The smoothness of the move seemed a good omen. The first night with Hedra in the apartment, Allie slept soundly, not once waking to lie restless and wondering about money and the near future. Something in her life was going right. Maybe there was balance in the world.

  Friday, in the sun-drenched kitchen that smelled of burnt toast, the roommates had their first breakfast together. After asking politely, Hedra had turned on the radio at low volume. WRNY was playing soft rock from the seventies—Jefferson Airplane, the Beach Boys. God, the Beach Boys! Harmonizing about innocence and surf and sand, nothing deeper than a dime. Allie was glad Hedra liked the Beach Boys.

  The agreement was that each roommate would have an assigned set of shelves in the refrigerator, and each would prepare her own meals. Allie, dressed for a meeting with Mayfair, sat before coffee and two slices of toast with grape jam. Hedra, still in her robe, was swigging Coca-Cola from a can and munching a cold slice of the sausage-mushroom pizza she’d had delivered last night. Pizza, especially with mushrooms, was something Allie didn’t like to look at so early in the morning, but she decided she could stand it, considering Hedra was paying half the rent and utilities.

  Gazing across the table at Hedra, Allie wondered for the first time if the woman’s appearance had a great deal to do with why she’d settled on her for a roommate. Hedra was average height and slim, but without much of a figure. Her face was oval with small, even features and pale green eyes too close together beneath eyebrows that could use shaping despite the current unplucked, natural fashion. Hers was the sort of face you’d expect to see when opening a Victorian locket. The set of her eyes lent her an apprehensive, searching expression, as if she were afraid one wrong move would lose the ent
ire game. She would have been somewhat attractive if she’d only done something with her medium-length brown hair. She wore it pulled back tightly with a center part, but hanging loose on the sides, like a Sixties folksinger. She wasn’t the type to duck into Bloomingdale’s and get made over. There was an inherent plainness about her, a subservience. Hedra, Allie knew, was no threat.

  Hedra used a finger to tuck a strand of cold cheese into her mouth. “I’m sure this is gonna work out, Allie.” Her voice was soft and carefully modulated. It suggested the same apprehension as her eyes. Had she ever in her life really been sure of anything?

  Allie the practical said, “You going to work today?”

  Hedra giggled, her hand covering her mouth, for a moment looking like sixteen-year-old concealing braces. Surprising Allie. “You sound like my mother.”

  Her mother! Jesus, loosen up, Allie told herself. Back away and breathe. She smiled. “Yeah, I guess I do. Sorry. I was just making conversation, not checking up on you. Hey, for all I care, you can stay out all night for the prom.”

  “I’m way past those years,” Hedra said. “Never was much of a dancer anyway. Do you dance?”

  “I used to,” Allie said, remembering nights out with Sam. “I love to dance.”

  “I never actually went to a prom. Did you?”

  “Twice. Back in Illinois. In a green world I barely remember.”

  “Musta been nice.”

  “No, not really. A little nerd named Pinky tried to rape me in the backseat of a sixty-five Chevy.”

  For a second Hedra seemed shocked. Then she said, “Well, those things happen.”