Chicago Noir

by Joe Meno

  Therese laughed.

  “And where Lewis and Clark once camped,” Carol added. “I think I’ll wear my slacks today. Want to see if they’re in that suitcase? If not, I’ll have to get into the car. Not the light ones, the navy-blue gaberdines.”

  Therese went to Carol’s big suitcase at the foot of the bed. It was full of sweaters and underwear and shoes, but no slacks. She saw a nickel-plated tube sticking out of a folded sweater. She lifted the sweater out. It was heavy. She unwrapped it, and started so she almost dropped it. It was a gun with a white handle.

  “No?” Carol asked.

  “No.” Therese wrapped the gun up again and put it back as she had found it.

  “Darling, I forgot my towel. I think it’s on a chair.”

  Therese got it and took it to her, and in her nervousness as she put the towel into Carol’s outstretched hand her eyes dropped from Carol’s face to her bare breasts and down, and she saw the quick surprise in Carol’s glance as she turned around. Therese closed her eyes tight and walked slowly toward the bed, seeing before her closed lids the image of Carol’s naked body.

  Therese took a shower, and when she came out, Carol was standing at the mirror, almost dressed.

  “What’s the matter?” Carol asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Carol turned to her, combing her hair that was darkened a little by the wet of the shower. Her lips were bright with fresh lipstick, a cigarette between them. “Do you realize how many times a day you make me ask you that?” she said. “Don’t you think it’s a little inconsiderate?”

  During breakfast, Therese said, “Why did you bring that gun along, Carol?”

  “Oh. So that’s what’s bothering you. It’s Harge’s gun, something else he forgot.” Carol’s voice was casual. “I thought it’d be better to take it than to leave it.”

  “Is it loaded?”

  “Yes, it’s loaded. Harge got a permit, because we had a burglar at the house once.”

  “Can you use it?”

  Carol smiled at her. “I’m no Annie Oakley. I can use it. I think it worries you, doesn’t it? I don’t expect to use it.”

  Therese said nothing more about it. But it disturbed her whenever she thought of it. She thought of it the next night, when a bellhop set the suitcase down heavily on the sidewalk. She wondered if a gun could ever go off from a jolt like that.

  They had taken some snapshots in Ohio, and because they could get them developed early the next morning, they spent a long evening and the night in a town called Defiance. All evening they walked around the streets, looking in store windows, walking through silent residential streets where lights showed in front parlors, and homes looked as comfortable and safe as birds’ nests. Therese had been afraid Carol would be bored by aimless walks, but Carol was the one who suggested going one block further, walking all the way up the hill to see what was on the other side. Carol talked about herself and Harge. Therese tried to sum up in one word what had separated Carol and Harge, but she rejected the words almost at once—boredom, resentment, indifference. Carol told her of one time that Harge had taken Rindy away on a fishing trip and not communicated for days. That was a retaliation for Carol’s refusing to spend Harge’s vacation with him at his family’s summer house in Massachusetts. It was a mutual thing. And the incidents were not the start.

  Carol put two of the snapshots in her billfold, one of Rindy in jodhpurs and a derby that had been on the first part of the roll, and one of Therese, with a cigarette in her mouth and her hair blowing back in the wind. There was one unflattering picture of Carol standing huddled in her coat that Carol said she was going to send to Abby because it was so bad.

  They got to Chicago late one afternoon, crept into its gray, sprawling disorder behind a great truck of a meat-distributing company. Therese sat up close to the windshield. She couldn’t remember anything about the city from the trip with her father. Carol seemed to know Chicago as well as she knew Manhattan. Carol showed her the famous Loop, and they stopped for a while to watch the trains and the homeward rush of five thirty in the afternoon. It couldn’t compare to the madhouse of New York at five thirty.

  At the main post office, Therese found a postcard from Dannie, nothing from Phil, and a letter from Richard. Therese glanced at the letter and saw it began and ended affectionately. She had expected just that, Richard’s getting the general delivery address from Phil and writing her an affectionate letter. She put the letter in her pocket before she went back to Carol.

  “Anything?” Carol said.

  “Just a postcard. From Dannie. He’s finished his exams.”

  Carol drove to the Drake Hotel. It had a black-and-white checked floor, a fountain in the lobby, and Therese thought it magnificent. In their room, Carol took off her coat and flung herself down on one of the twin beds.

  “I know a few people here,” she said sleepily. “Shall we look somebody up?”

  But Carol fell asleep before they quite decided.

  Therese looked out the window at the light-bordered lake and at the irregular, unfamiliar line of tall buildings against the still grayish sky. It looked fuzzy and monotonous, like a Pissarro painting. A comparison Carol wouldn’t appreciate, she thought. She leaned on the sill, staring at the city, watching a distant car’s lights chopped into dots and dashes as it passed behind trees. She was happy.

  “Why don’t you ring for some cocktails?” Carol’s voice said behind her.

  “What kind would you like?”

  “What kind would you?”

  “Martinis.”

  Carol whistled. “Double Gibsons,” Carol interrupted her as she was telephoning. “And a plate of canapés. Might as well get four martinis.”

  Therese read Richard’s letter while Carol was in the shower. The whole letter was affectionate. You are not like any of the other girls, he wrote. He had waited and he would keep on waiting, because he was absolutely confident that they could be happy together. He wanted her to write to him every day, send at least a postcard. He told her how he had sat one evening rereading the three letters she had sent him when he had been in Kingston, New York, last summer. There was a sentimentality in the letter that was not like Richard at all, and Therese’s first thought was that he was pretending. Perhaps in order to strike at her later. Her second reaction was aversion. She came back to the old decision, that not to write him, not to say anything more, was the shortest way to end it.

  The cocktails arrived, and Therese paid for them instead of signing. She could never pay a bill except behind Carol’s back.

  “Will you wear your black suit?” Therese asked when Carol came in.

  Carol gave her a look. “Go all the way to the bottom of that suitcase?” she said, going to the suitcase. “Drag it out, brush it off, steam the wrinkles out of it for half an hour?”

  “We’ll be a half hour drinking these.”

  “Your powers of persuasion are irresistible.” Carol took the suit into the bathroom and turned the water on in the tub.

  It was the suit she had worn the day they had had the first lunch together.

  “Do you realize this is the only drink I’ve had since we left New York?” Carol said. “Of course you don’t. Do you know why? I’m happy.”

  “You’re beautiful,” Therese said.

  And Carol gave her the derogatory smile that Therese loved, and walked to the dressing table. She flung a yellow silk scarf around her neck and tied it loosely, and began to comb her hair. The lamp’s light framed her figure like a picture, and Therese had a feeling all this had happened before. She remembered suddenly: the woman in the window brushing up her long hair, remembered the very bricks in the wall, the texture of the misty rain that morning.

  “How about some perfume?” Carol asked, moving toward her with the bottle. She touched Therese’s forehead with her fingers, at the hairline where she had kissed her that day.

  “You remind me of the woman I once saw,” Therese said, “somewhere off Lexington. Not you but
the light. She was combing her hair up.” Therese stopped, but Carol waited for her to go on. Carol always waited, and she could never say exactly what she wanted to say. “Early one morning when I was on the way to work, and I remember it was starting to rain,” she floundered on, “I saw her in a window.” She really could not go on, about standing there for perhaps three or four minutes, wishing with an intensity that drained her strength that she knew the woman, that she might be welcome if she went to the house and knocked on the door, wishing she could do that instead of going on to her job at the Pelican Press.

  “My little orphan,” Carol said.

  Therese smiled. There was nothing dismal, no sting in the word when Carol said it.

  “What does your mother look like?”

  “She had black hair,” Therese said quickly. “She didn’t look anything like me.” Therese always found herself talking about her mother in the past tense, though she was alive this minute, somewhere in Connecticut.

  “You really don’t think she’ll ever want to see you again?” Carol was standing at the mirror.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about your father’s family? Didn’t you say he had a brother?”

  “I never met him. He was a kind of geologist, working for an oil company. I don’t know where he is.” It was easier talking about the uncle she had never met.

  “What’s your mother’s name now?”

  “Esther—Mrs. Nicolas Strully.” The name meant as little to her as one she might see in a telephone book. She looked at Carol, suddenly sorry she had said the name. Carol might someday—a shock of loss, of helplessness, came over her. She knew so little about Carol after all.

  Carol glanced at her. “I’ll never mention it,” she said, “never mention it again. If that second drink’s going to make you blue, don’t drink it. I don’t want you to be blue tonight.”

  The restaurant where they dined overlooked the lake too. They had a banquet of a dinner with champagne and brandy afterward. It was the first time in her life that Therese had been a little drunk, in fact much drunker than she wanted Carol to see. Her impression of Lakeshore Drive was always to be of a broad avenue studded with mansions all resembling the White House in Washington. In the memory there would be Carol’s voice, telling her about a house here and there where she had been before, and the disquieting awareness that for a while this had been Carol’s world, as Rapallo, Paris, and other places Therese did not know had for a while been the frame of everything Carol did.

  That night, Carol sat on the edge of her bed, smoking a cigarette before they turned the light on. Therese lay in her own bed, sleepily watching her, trying to read the meaning of the restless, puzzled look in Carol’s eyes that would stare at something in the room for a moment and then move on. Was it of her she thought, or of Harge, or of Rindy? Carol had asked to be called at seven tomorrow, in order to telephone Rindy before she went to school. Therese remembered their telephone conversation in Defiance. Rindy had had a fight with some other little girl, and Carol had spent fifteen minutes going over it, and trying to persuade Rindy she should take the first step and apologize. Therese still felt the effects of what she had drunk, the tingling of the champagne that drew her painfully close to Carol. If she simply asked, she thought, Carol would let her sleep tonight in the same bed with her. She wanted more than that, to kiss her, to feel their bodies next to each other’s. Therese thought of the two girls she had seen in the Palermo bar. They did that, she knew, and more. And would Carol suddenly thrust her away in disgust, if she merely wanted to hold her in her arms? And would whatever affection Carol now had for her vanish in that instant? A vision of Carol’s cold rebuff swept her courage clean away. It crept back humbly in the question, couldn’t she ask simply to sleep in the same bed with her?

  “Carol, would you mind—”

  “Tomorrow we’ll go to the stockyards,” Carol said at the same time, and Therese burst out laughing. “What’s so damned funny about that?” Carol asked, putting out her cigarette, but she was smiling too.

  “It just is. It’s terribly funny,” Therese said, still laughing, laughing away all the longing and the intention of the night.

  “You’re giggly on champagne,” Carol said as she pulled the light out.

  * * *

  Late the next afternoon they left Chicago and drove in the direction of Rockford. Carol said she might have a letter from Abby there, but probably not, because Abby was a bad correspondent. Therese went to a shoe-repair shop to get a moccasin stitched, and when she came back, Carol was reading the letter in the car.

  “What road do we take out?” Carol’s face looked happier.

  “Twenty, going west.”

  Carol turned on the radio and worked the dial until she found some music. “What’s a good town for tonight on the way to Minneapolis?”

  “Dubuque,” Therese said, looking at the map. “Or Waterloo looks fairly big, but it’s about two hundred miles away.”

  “We might make it.”

  They took Highway 20 toward Freeport and Galena, which was starred on the map as the home of Ulysses S. Grant.

  “What did Abby say?”

  “Nothing much. Just a very nice letter.”

  Carol said little to her in the car, or even in the café where they stopped later for coffee. Carol went over and stood in front of a jukebox, dropping nickels slowly.

  “You wish Abby’d come along, don’t you?” Therese said.

  “No,” Carol said.

  “You’re so different since you got the letter from her.”

  Carol looked at her across the table. “Darling, it’s just a silly letter. You can even read it if you want to.” Carol reached for her handbag, but she did not get the letter out.

  Sometime that evening, Therese fell asleep in the car and woke up with the lights of a city on her face. Carol was resting both arms tiredly on the top of the wheel. They had stopped for a red light.

  “Here’s where we stay the night,” Carol said.

  Therese’s sleep still clung to her as she walked across the hotel lobby. She rode up in an elevator and she was acutely conscious of Carol beside her, as if she dreamed a dream in which Carol was the subject and the only figure. In the room, she lifted her suitcase from the floor to a chair, unlatched it and left it, and stood by the writing table, watching Carol. As if her emotions had been in abeyance all the past hours, or days, they flooded her now as she watched Carol opening her suitcase, taking out, as she always did first, the leather kit that contained her toilet articles, dropping it onto the bed. She looked at Carol’s hands, at the lock of hair that fell over the scarf tied around her head, at the scratch she had gotten days ago across the toe of her moccasin.

  “What’re you standing there for?” Carol asked. “Get to bed, sleepyhead.”

  “Carol, I love you.”

  Carol straightened up. Therese stared at her with intense, sleepy eyes. Then Carol finished taking her pajamas from the suitcase and pulled the lid down. She came to Therese and put her hands on her shoulders. She squeezed her shoulders hard, as if she were exacting a promise from her, or perhaps searching her to see if what she had said were real. Then she kissed Therese on the lips, as if they had kissed a thousand times before.

  “Don’t you know I love you?” Carol said.

  Carol took her pajamas into the bathroom, and stood for a moment, looking down at the basin.

  “I’m going out,” Carol said. “But I’ll be back right away.”

  Therese waited by the table while Carol was gone, while time passed indefinitely or maybe not at all, until the door opened and Carol came in again. She set a paper bag on the table, and Therese knew she had only gone to get a container of milk, as Carol or she herself did very often at night.

  “Can I sleep with you?” Therese asked.

  “Did you see the bed?”

  It was a double bed. They sat up in their pajamas, drinking milk and sharing an orange that Carol was too sleepy to fini
sh. Then Therese set the container of milk on the floor and looked at Carol who was sleeping already, on her stomach, with one arm flung up as she always went to sleep. Therese pulled out the light. Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched, fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven? she wondered.

  “Go to sleep,” Carol said.

  Therese hoped she would not. But when she felt Carol’s hand move on her shoulder, she knew she had been asleep. It was dawn now. Carol’s fingers tightened in her hair, Carol kissed her on the lips, and pleasure leaped in Therese again as if it were only a continuation of the moment when Carol had slipped her arm under her neck last night. I love you, Therese wanted to say again, and then the words were erased by the tingling and terrifying pleasure that spread in waves from Carol’s lips over her neck, her shoulders, that rushed suddenly the length of her body. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else, of Carol’s hand that slid along her ribs, Carol’s hair that brushed her bare breasts, and then her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped farther and farther, beyond where thought could follow. While a thousand memories and moments, words, the first darling, the second time Carol had met her at the store, a thousand memories of Carol’s face, her voice, moments of anger and laughter flashed like the tail of a comet across her brain. And now it was pale blue distance and space, an expanding space in which she took flight suddenly like a long arrow. The arrow seemed to cross an impossibly wide abyss with ease, seemed to arc on and on in space, and not quite to stop. Then she realized that she still clung to Carol, that she trembled violently, and the arrow was herself. She saw Carol’s pale hair across her eyes, and now Carol’s head was close against hers. And she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect. She held Carol tighter against her, and felt Carol’s mouth on her own smiling mouth. Therese lay still, looking at her, at Carol’s face only inches away from her, the gray eyes calm as she had never seen them, as if they retained some of the space she had just emerged from. And it seemed strange that it was still Carol’s face, with the freckles, the bending blond eyebrow that she knew, the mouth now as calm as her eyes, as Therese had seen it many times before.