by Fritz Leiber
“Don’t you believe me even now?” she pressed. “You can get away with things. I’ll prove it to you again.”
A vague suspicion Carr had entertained when he’d first seen Jane, that she was some sort of shoplifter or petty criminal, flickered again in his mind, only to die immediately.
“You’re a funny girl,” he said. “What’s made you this way? Who’s—” He checked himself when she frowned. “Well, here’s a question maybe I can ask,” he went on. “What startled you so when you sat down at my desk this afternoon? You seemed to sense something in me that terrified you. What was it?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know.” But again her eyes were sphinxlike. “Maybe,” she said, “it was just that I realize you were alive.”
“That’s queer,” he said gravely, “because you know, twice today I’ve had an—an illusion of—”
“Don’t,” she said, touching his hand. She looked at her glass for a moment, rubbed the beads of moisture, curved her hand around it wonderingly. “It’s good to be alive,” she said intensely. “Good. Of course the really marvelous thing would be to be back in the safe old pattern and still alive. But that’s impossible.”
“And the safe old pattern is…?” he prompted.
She shook her head and looked away. He dropped the question.
More people began to drift in. Carr and Jane finished their drinks, talking about the old advertisements and prints—how they had such a nostalgic feel because, unlike genuine artistic creations, they died with their decade, became dried funeral wreaths and faded love-letters. More people came in. Soon all the other booths were filled and there weren’t many empty spaces at the bar. Jane was becoming uneasy.
“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said abruptly, standing up.
Carr started to say something, but she had slipped around a couple approaching their booth and was striding to the door. A fear took hold of him that she would get away like this afternoon and he would never see her again. He jerked a dollar bill from his pocketbook and dropped it on the table. With nettling rudeness the newcomers shoved past him and sat down. But there was no time to be sarcastic. Jane was already mounting the stairs. Carr ran after her.
She was waiting outside. He took her arm.
“Do people get on your nerves?” he asked.
She did not answer. It was too dark to see her face. The pavement under their feet was uneven and slippery. He put his arm around her waist.
The alley came to an end. They emerged into a street where the air had that intoxicating glow it displays in the centers of big cities at nigh. As if the street laps puffed out clouds of luminous dust which rose three or four stories. Above that, dark walls going up toward a few dull stars.
They passed a music store. Jane’s walk slowed to an indecisive drift. Through the open door Carr glimpsed a mahogany expanse crossed by serried walks of ivory and ebony. There were uprights, spinets, baby grands. Jane walked in. The sound of their footsteps died as they stepped onto the thick carpet.
Whoever else was in the store was out of sight somewhere in the back, where a soft glow glamorized shelves of record albums and a row of cubicles. Jane sat down at one of the pianos. Her thin fingers moved for a while over the keys, nervously questing. The taut, talon-suggestive cords in the back of her hands underlined the expression in her face. Then her back stiffened, her head lifted, and there came the frantically rippling, opening arpeggios of the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.
She didn’t play it any too well. She struck false notes and the general rendering was somewhat raucous. The impression was that of a student pianist who by a passionate determination has succeeded in grappling passably with a piece beyond her real technical proficiency.
For she did manage to extract from it a feeling of wild, desperate wonder.
Carr stopped speculating as to why a clerk didn’t emerge and at least give them a sizing-up glance.
Surely if the composer had ever meant this to be moonlight, it was moonlight illuminating a white-pinnacled ocean storm, through rifts in ragged clouds.
Jane’s lips were tightly bitten together. Her eyes seemed to be frantically searching out the next notes in an invisible score. Her body shook as her arms pounds from the shoulders.
Suddenly it was over. In the echoing quiet Carr asked casually, “Is that more like it? The rhythm of life, I mean?”
She made a little grimace as she got up.
“Still too nice,” she said. “But there’s a hint.”
They started out, Carr looking back over his shoulder.
“Do you realize we haven’t exchanged a word with anyone tonight?” he said.
She smiled wryly. “I think of pretty dull things to do, don’t I?” she said, and when he started to protest, “Yes, I’m afraid you would have had a lot more fun with Marcia…or with Midge’s girl-friend.”
“Say, you do have a memory,” he said in surprise. “I wouldn’t have dreamed you’d—”
He stopped. She had ducked her head. He couldn’t make out whether she was crying or laughing.
“…Midge’s girl-friend…” he heard her repeat chokingly.
“Don’t you know Tom Elvested?” he pressed suddenly.
She disregarded the question and looked up at him with an uneven smile. “But since you haven’t got a date with anyone but me,” she said, “you’ll just have to make the best of my antisocial habits. Let’s see, this time of night I’m apt to wander off to Rush Street or to South State, to feel the hour and watch the dead faces. I could take you there, or—”
“That’d be fine,” said Carr.
“Or—”
They walked close to the curb, skirting the crowd. They were passing the painfully bright lobby of a movie house, luridly placarded with yellow and purple swirls which seemed to have caught up in their whirlwind folds an unending rout of golden blondes, grim-eyed heroes, money bags, and detached grasping hands. Jane stopped.
“Or I could take you in here,” she said.
He obediently veered toward the box-office, but she kept hold of his arm and walked him past it into the outer lobby.
“I will prove it to you,” she told him, half gaily, half desperately, he thought. “I showed you at the bar and the music shop, but—”
Carr shrugged and held his breath for the inevitable.
They walked straight past the ticket-taker and through the center-aisle door.
Carr puffed out the breath and grinned. He thought, maybe she knows someone here.
Or else—who knows?—maybe you could get away with almost anything if you did it with enough assurance and picked the right moments.
The theatre was only half full, there were several empty rows at the back. They sidled away into one of these, through the blinking darkness, and sat down. Soon the gyrations of the gray shadows on the screen took on a little sense.
There were a man and a woman getting married, or else remarried after a divorce, it was hard to tell which. Then she left him because she thought he was interested only in business. Then she came back, but he left her because he thought she was interested only in social life. Then he came back, but then they both left each other again, simultaneously.
From all around came the soft breathing and somnolent gum chewing of drugged humanity.
Then the man and woman both raced to the bedside of their dying little boy, who had been tucked away in a military academy all this time. But the boy recovered, and then the woman left both of them, for their own good, and a little while afterwards the man did the same thing. Then the boy left them.
“Do you play chess?” Jane asked suddenly.
Carr nodded.
“Come on,” she said. “I know a place.”
They hurried out of the theatre district into a region of silent gray office buildings.
Carr remarked, “I suppose it must be because they don’t have an audience while the picture is being made, that movie actors sometimes seem so unmoved. Ha
ving a real audience puts an actor on the spot.”
“Yes,” she agreed, her voice fast and low, “watching you every minute, waiting for you to make one false move…” Her hand tightened on his arm and she looked up at him. “I hope you don’t ever have to learn to act that way. I mean when it isn’t a matter of appearing convincing to an audience that, after all, can’t really hurt you, but where the slightest slip...” She stopped.
“You mean, for instance,” said Carr, “as if a person had been confined, perhaps falsely, in an insane asylum, and then escaped?”
“No,” she said shortly, “I don’t mean that.”
She turned in at a dusky black cave-mouth, flanked by unlighted windows dimly displaying, to the left, knives and other menacing hardware, to the right, behind slim bars, ornate engagement rings. Pushing through a side door next to the locked revolving one, they came into a dingy lobby floored with tiny marble tiles and surrounded by the iron grille-work walls of ancient elevators. A jerkily revolving hand showed that one was still in operation, but Jane headed for the shadow-stifled stair.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s thirteen stories, but I can’t stand elevators.”
Carr grinned resignedly.
They emerged into a hall where the one frosted door that wasn’t dark read: CAISSA CHESS CLUB.
Behind the door was a long room. A drab and careless austerity, untidy rows of small tables, and grimy floor littered with trodden cigarettes, all proclaimed the place to be the headquarters of a somber monamania.
Some oldsters were playing near the door, utterly absorbed in the game. One, with a dirty white beard, was silently kibitzing, occasionally shaking his head, or pointing out, with palsied finger, the move that would have won.
Carr and Jane walked quietly to the far end near the windows, found a box of men as battered by long use as the half-obliterated board, and started to play.
Soon the maddening, years-forgotten excitement had Carr gripped tight. He was back in that relentless little universe where the significance of things is narrowed down to the stratagems whereby turreted rooks establish intangible walls of force, bishops slip craftily past bristling barricades, and knights spring out in sudden sidewise attacks, as if from crooked medieval passageways.
They played three slow, merciless games. She won the first two. Carr was too intent to feel much chagrin. He had never seen a woman play with such sexless concentration. She sat leaning forward in a way that emphasized her slightness—feet on the chair’s rung, knees together, head poised like a bird’s. One hand held an elbow. From between two fingers of the other, cigarette smoke curled. Her face was at once taut and serene—Carr thought of the portrait bust of Nefertiti, the millennia-dead Egyptian princess—as if Jane had lost herself in a quietness near eternity or the grave.
He finally drew the third game, his king just managing to nip off her last runaway pawn. It felt very late, getting on toward morning, when they finished.
She leaned back, massaging her face.
“Nothing like chess,” she mumbled, “to take your mind off things.” Then she dropped her hands.
They walked down the stairs. An old woman was wearily scrubbing across the lobby, on her knees, her head bent, as if forever.
In the street they paused uncertainly. It had grown quite cold.
“I’ll see you home,” said Carr.
Her lips formed the word “No,” but she didn’t say it. Instead she looked around at him and, after a moment: “All right. But it’s a long walk.”
The Loop was deserted except for the chilly darkness and the hungry wind. They walked rapidly. They didn’t say much. His arm was linked tightly around hers.
They crossed the river over the Michigan Bridge, where the wind had an open channel. Moored, perhaps a block up the river, was a large black hulk that looked to Carr like the motor-barge he had seen earlier in the evening. Now it seemed a funeral boat, coffin-shaped, built to carry coffins—a symbol of endings.
Carr’s vague notion of making himself a friend of this girl, of solving the mystery of her existence, of helping her get a real hold on life, died in the cold ebb of night. No. Marcia was his girl—he’d patch things up with her somehow. This was just…a weird night.
As if sensing his thoughts, Jane shrank closer to his side.
They turned down a street where big houses hid behind black space and trees. They crossed another street, passing a stylishly archaic lamp with a pane splintered into odd spears. Then the trees closed in again and it grew darker than ever.
She stopped in front of a high iron gate that stood open a couple of feet.
All at once he got the picture in his mind he had been fumbling for all night. It fitted Jane, her untidy expensive clothes, her arrogant manner. A rich man’s daughter, overprotected, neurotic, futilely rebellious, tyrannized by relatives or servants. Everything mixed up, futilely and irremediably, in the way only money can manage.
“It’s been so nice,” she said in a choked voice, not looking at him. “So nice to pretend.” Her small sobs (if they were that) trailed off. Still without looking at him, she squeezed his hand, standing close to him so that her side pressed his, as if gathering courage to leave him and go in. He turned fully toward her, embraced her, and as her face came up, kissed her full on the lips.
She yielded to the kiss and he became aware that he was reacting physically. The need which Marcia had aroused earlier in the evening returned with unexpected force. She made a slight effort to pull away from him. He quickly shifted his hand to the small of her back and pressed her to him, while his other hand dropped hers and caressed the back of her neck while the kiss kept on.
She did pull back then with a gasping chuckle and looked at him, almost comically, a startled question. He nodded ruefully, looked down, and gave a little shrug, as if to say, “I didn’t plan on it happening.”
“Oh Lord,” she said in consternation that was again more comic than not. “Look, Carr, it’s much too cold out here and I simply can’t ask you in, but I can’t leave you like that.” A mischievous look came into he eyes and something of her earlier merriment retuned as she grabbed his hand. “But first let’s get into a little shadow.”
And as she tugged him through the gate and toward one of its big pillars, she told him swiftly and eagerly, “When I was twelve years old there was an older boy cousing staying with us and we became great chums. He was going out on his first dates and as you can image, I became very interested in his erotic experience, you might say, his amatory progress. When he was on a date I’d stay awake and afterward sneak over to his room to hear how it had gone, whether he’d scored or not, and how. Now wait a minute—”
She had him backed against the side pillar, next to some shrubbery. She searched her small handbag, said, “Damn,” under her breath, looked up, he glimpsed something pale slip down into the shrubbery, her eyes widened, “Just the thing!” she said with a grin as she impudently snatched his handkerchief from his breast pocket and clipped its corner between his little and ring fingers, then went down with it.
She resumed, “Now when he hadn’t scored, which was quite often, and was suffering form it, was all ‘het up,’ he’d say, he taught me how to fix that up for him, give him a helping hand, as you might say.”
Carr chose that moment to begin unbuttoning the top buttons of her cardigan and of the blouse beneath. He felt his own zipper being loosened and the cold, cold tips of her first two fingers and her thumb creep to the root of his phallus and walk round it knowingly, sometimes caressing, sometimes probing deeply, sometimes feather-touching. Carr reversed the hand, palm for back, that had done unbuttoning, and thrust it gently down into the warm space between her small, small breasts, then worked out either way to the surprisingly large nipples. Time passed, with more activities. Their cold noses and warm mouths nuzzles each other’s face. He feather-touched and felt the aureoles life and roughen. Her still-cool fingertips moved to his glans and pushed his stretched fore
skin all the way back so they could trace the groove around its base. His fingertips darted from nipple to large nipple, patting and pressing each all the way around, while his other hand belatedly slipped down inside her skirt, across her indrawn belly and surprisingly close-shaven skin below, found her cleft, her clitoris, and caressed it. She drew his foreskin down, then pushed it back. Time raced, more things happened, the pain was exquisite. She gasped, he came and she embraced his coming through his handkerchief. She chuckled and he whinnied just a little.
Some moment passed and she drew back from him.
“Please don’t come in with me,” she whispered. “And please don’t stay and watch.”
Carr knew why. She didn’t want him to see the lights wink agitatedly on, perhaps hear the beginning of an accusing, rackingly solicitous tirade. It was her last crumb of freedom—to leave him with the illusion that she was free.
He whimsically kissed her helping hand, then took her lightly in his arms. He felt in the darkness the tears on her cold cheek wetting his.
Then she had broken away. There were footsteps running up a gravel drive. He turned and walked swiftly away.
In the sky, through the black trees, shined the first paleness of dawn.
Ecstasy, or the shadow of it, throbbed and undulated in the lightening night.
Chapter Four
The Big Blonde
THROUGH SLITTED, SLEEP-HEAVY eyes Carr saw the black hands of the clock stiffly invoking the wrath of heaving on all slugabeds. The room was drenched with sunshine.
But he did not hurl himself up, tear into his clothes, rush downtown, just because it was ten minutes past ten.
Nor did he start brooding about how he was going to make his peace with Marcia.
Instead he yawned and closed his eyes, savoring the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the freedom from anxiety, that pervaded him.
