SWF Seeks Same

by John Lutz

  They were on the still-made bed, both of them nude. Hedra was straddling Sam, her hands propped on her hips. Only Allie didn’t know at first that it was Hedra.

  It was the wig. Hedra was wearing the blond Allie wig.

  She and Sam were both perspiring and Hedra was grinning down at him with an intense expression though her eyes were half-closed. So preoccupied were they that they didn’t notice Allie at first.

  Then Hedra sensed something. She stopped grinning, stopped the rising and falling contortions of her glistening body, and turned toward her.

  A needle of fear penetrated Allie’s shock and rage. Hedra stared insolently at her as if Allie didn’t belong there. As if Allie were trespassing in her own apartment.

  Sam had seen Allie now and was staring at her dumbstruck with his mouth hanging open.

  Hedra glanced down at him, then back at Allie. She was grinning again. She said, “Oh, hi, Allie.”

  When they were both gone, Allie sat paralyzed on the sofa. The breeze crept in through the open window and rippled coolly around her bare feet like chilled water. Hedra and Sam. Sam and Hedra. Oh, Jesus! She knew she shouldn’t be surprised. Some far corner of her consciousness had known but hadn’t admitted the possibility that her lover and former roommate were deceiving her. If Hedra—sick, conspiring Hedra—envied everything else about Allie, why wouldn’t she want Sam? It was logical, insofar as logic could be applied to Hedra, but Allie simply hadn’t wanted to believe it.

  This … abomination, this unfairness, was sinking in, altering her world forever. The hum of traffic from outside grew louder and became a continuous roar, blotting out all rational thought. A beast devouring her mind.

  Hedra had everything she wanted from Allie now. The rape and destruction were complete.

  Oh, hi, Allie.

  Allie dug her fingertips into her temples, harder and harder, wishing she could penetrate her skull and her mind and rip from them like raw matter the pain of what had happened to her.

  The telephone rang.

  She sat listened to it for a long time, then lifted the receiver and touched the hard, cool plastic to her ear. She didn’t say anything.

  A man’s voice said, “Allie? Allie? Hey, Sweet Buns, it’s me. Remember? Hey, I know you’re there.”

  She lowered the receiver slowly, letting it clatter back into its cradle. She sat staring at the wall, wondering who she was, and what she had done.

  Chapter 24

  THAT night, Sam described Allie’s visit at the Atherton. It seemed the only way he could stop thinking about it; share it so it was halved. He knew that, with Allie, the final corner had been turned.

  All the while he was talking, Hedra lay beside him in his bed in the Atherton suite. They’d made love. The room was totally dark and still smelled from their coupling. Hedra was smoking a cigarette, invisible to Sam except for the glowing red ember that now and then brightened like a beacon aimed his way, a warning to ships on a dark sea.

  Hedra said, “Allie’s imagination must have been rolling in high gear. Actually, I did use her name, but it was no big deal. It came to mind when some guy was getting too friendly and I didn’t wanna give him my own name. He caught me off guard or I’d have given him the name of my third-grade teacher or somebody like that. The drug stuff is pure imagination. Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “I offered Allie some tranquilizers once. She was almost bonkers after losing her job. Maybe that put the idea of me and drugs in her mind.” Hedra drew on the cigarette, making its ember flare angry red in the darkness. “‘Nother thing. A couple of times I dissolved tranquilizers in her coffee or hot chocolate without her knowing it.”

  “You what?”

  “Nothing strong, Sam, just some old prescription medicine. Now, don’t get so excited. I did it for her own good. And tell you the truth, so I could live with the crazy bi—no, I shouldn’t say that. She’s under a strain. She’s got this hands-off thing about any kind of drug, and I just wanted to help her through the rough times, till she could feel better on her own.” Sam heard Hedra shift her body so she was lying on her side, facing him. He felt the mattress depress. She was still perspiring; he could feel the heat emanating from her. “I did it because I’m her friend, Sam.”

  A tangle of thoughts spun through his mind. He couldn’t help asking, “Is that why you’re here with me? Because of Allie?”

  She was silent for a moment. He saw her cigarette flare. Heard her exhale and smelled the smoke. “I don’t think so. What about you? Is it Allie you’re really sleeping with?”

  He was silent. He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he knew she was wearing the wig. God! What kind of twisted creature have I become?

  “Never mind,” she said. “Some things it’s better not to think about, and we don’t have to think about them, do we?”

  “No,” he said, “we don’t. But it’s eerie, what’s happened. Sometimes the way you talk even when we’re not in bed, the way you dress, or motion with your hand or tilt your head, it’s … well, so damned strange.”

  “Face it, the real thing turned out not to be the real thing. You regret this, Sam? Me and you?”

  “Not at all.” Was that a lie? he wondered. Maybe so, but what was the point of regretting what you couldn’t change or resist? What was the use of hating a weakness in yourself if you knew you couldn’t overcome it?

  “Listen, I don’t have to be here if you don’t want me.”

  He thought about her not being with him and didn’t like the idea. When he and Hedra were in the same room, it was as if each of them had swallowed half of a powerful magnet. He had to be near her, to touch her. Once he’d allowed their affair to start, he was caught up in a force ponderous and irresistible. Whatever he still felt for Allie was dwarfed and crushed before it.

  The real thing turned out not to be the real thing.

  “Believe it,” he said, “I want you here.”

  He felt her hand glide down to his pubic hair and caress his penis. She did something quick and rhythmic with her fingers and immediately, almost against his will, he had an erection. He was struck again by the contrast between the Hedra he’d first met and this woman. In the dark, she was somebody else. Somebody else …

  He heard a fizzing, sputtering sound, as with her other hand she dropped her cigarette in her glass with melted ice in it by the bed.

  In an amused voice she said, “Another dead soldier,” and climbed on top of him.

  Allie almost lacked the willpower to climb out of bed in the morning. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to “take to her bed and die” like the heart-stricken Victorian women in romantic novels. Self-pity, something she’d always despised in others, had attached to her like a parasite and wouldn’t be dislodged by reason.

  She had dreamed of Sam and Hedra, of them making love in her bed, where she and Sam had lain together. She heard their groans, the rocking and banging of the headboard. The keening of the bedsprings mingled with their own subdued moans. In the dream she tried to block it from her hearing, drifting to the window and staring out at the universe beyond the glass. She pretended what was going on in the bedroom wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be happening. But the relentless rhythm of their lovemaking was persistent, and she couldn’t deny the extent to which Hedra had taken over her life, as the sounds coming from the bedroom crashed into her tortured mind. My bed! Bed! Bed! Bed!

  When she awoke she thought she heard Sam singing in the shower, as he often did. Water gushed through the plumbing in the old walls, nearly drowning out his voice. “I’m takin’ the A-Train,” he was singing, giving it an exaggerated jazzy glide. For an instant there was nothing wrong in Allie’s life and her dream had been a cruel fluke that had nothing to do with reality.

  For an instant. Before she was entirely awake.

  Then her depression wrapped itself around her. She had to use all her will to struggle out of bed, even though she had to relieve herself so badly she couldn
’t lie still. She commanded each leg to move as she plodded into the bathroom.

  She didn’t bother eating breakfast, opting instead for a cup of instant coffee, and it was an effort to spoon the dark granules into a cup of water heated in the microwave.

  As she settled into the sofa to hold her cup with both hands and sip at the hot coffee, she was surprised to hear a knock at the door.

  Even more surprised when she’d trudged to the door, opened it, and found the hall empty.

  Then she glanced down and saw on the mat a long-stemmed flower on a folded sheet of white tissue paper. She stooped and picked it up. It was a dark orchid with petals the consistency of flesh. A small white card was Scotch-taped to the paper. In black felt-tip pen it read, “Thanks, Sweet Buns. Until next time.”

  Allie touched the thick, fleshlike petals and revulsion welled up in her. She flung the orchid on the hall floor. Then she backed into the apartment and slammed and locked the door.

  Chapter 25

  ALLIE didn’t leave the apartment for days. She ignored her temporary job at the camera store. The Iranian brothers must have called, she was sure, but she didn’t bother answering her phone. By now they’d probably replaced her and not thought much about it. People did strange things in New York. People came and went for their own reasons, and life continued its raucous, zigzagging slide toward eternity.

  She didn’t call Sergeant Kennedy about the orchid and note she’d found by her door; the thought of more contact with the police repelled her. She wanted only to escape from unpleasant reality.

  It scared her finally, the possibility that she was withdrawing completely from everything human, so she began to go out and take long walks, for the exercise, she told herself. But she knew it was really for the tenuous contact with people. In one way the press of Manhattan’s humanity made her feel less alien, but in another it made her feel more lonely. Often she had the sensation she was invisible. Locked inside herself and invisible.

  During one afternoon walk, on impulse, she stopped in at Goya’s for lunch. It would help to talk to Graham; he at least thought she was real. She sat at her usual table. The restaurant was crowded with a mixture of neighborhood people, office workers on their lunch hours, and a few tourists who’d stopped to eat after wandering around the Upper West Side. The mingled, spicy scent of a kitchen going full tilt added to appetites. A grayish haze from the smoking section hovered close to the high ceiling, swirling ever so gently with the lazy rhythm of the two large and slowly rotating paddle fans. Goya’s employees in black slacks and red shirts glided swiftly and efficiently among the tables, holding trays level above their heads and out of harm’s way; the nonchalant balancing act of waiters and waitresses everywhere.

  Allie expected Graham to appear any second, dodging tables and diners with his lanky sideways shuffle, wearing his lopsided grin and exchanging comments with regular customers. Her glance kept darting reflexively to the kitchen’s swinging doors, like a reformed smoker’s hand edging toward an empty pocket.

  But a tall girl with wet-look red lipstick and dark hair in a frazzled French braid took Allie’s order. The plastic tag pinned crookedly to her blouse said her name was Lucy. She was tentative and seemed new to the job.

  “Is Graham Knox working today?” Allie asked.

  “I don’t think so,” the girl said. “I mean, I just started and don’t know everybody yet, but the guy I think is Graham isn’t in today.”

  Allie thanked her and watched her walk away.

  Since Goya’s was crowded, about twenty minutes passed before Allie’s food arrived. Lucy smiled with only her glossy lips and said she was real sorry about the delay. As she placed the white plate on the table, Allie noticed her fingernails were long and painted to match her lipstick. About half the bright red nail polish had been chipped or chewed away.

  Allie fell into a somber mood as she sat munching her pastramion-rye and sipping Diet Pepsi. A different waitress, this one middle-aged with hair going to gray, asked if she wanted her glass refilled, but Allie declined. She left immediately after finishing her sandwich.

  For a long time she walked the crowded, noisy streets of the city, until her feet were sore and the spring was gone from her legs. Around her, steam rose from the sidewalk grates; the monster breathing. She sat for a while on a bench in Riverside Park before smelling rain in the air and starting for home.

  The phone was ringing when she let herself into the apartment. She hadn’t been using her answering machine because she dreaded having to deal with the kind of messages that might be left, so the phone kept ringing. She ignored it.

  The ringing continued as she slipped off her blue blazer and draped it over the sofa arm. She sat down in the wing chair and stared at the ringing phone. She didn’t move.

  Finally it stopped ringing.

  Allie walked into the kitchen and got a glass of water, then sat again in the wing chair and stared at the dusk closing in outside the window. The noise of the city was beginning to lessen with the advent of night and the threat of rain.

  The phone began ringing again. Shrill and insistent.

  It rang twenty-one times before it stopped. Someone wanted very much to talk to Allie.

  Whoever it was, they kept calling back. Finally, on the third ring of the fifth call, she lifted the receiver and held it to her ear.

  Hedra’s voice said, “I know you’re there, Allie.”

  “Yes, I’m here,” Allie said. She wasn’t even curious about why Hedra had called. Nothing about Hedra could surprise her now.

  “Sam’s going to be mine forever,” Hedra said. “I’ve seen to that.” Her voice sounded odd, flatter than usual yet with an undercurrent of excitement.

  Allie almost laughed. “Don’t try to tell me the relationship has only just been consummated.”

  “I wouldn’t tell you that,” Hedra said. “Anyway, I never liked that word ‘consummated’ when it was used to describe people. It sounds too much like soup, don’t you think?”

  Allie held her silence.

  Hedra said, “Okay, crabby appleton, I know you’re still on the line.” A little girl’s voice. Taunting. But still flat. “Listen, I didn’t mean to hurt you, Allie.”

  “Then why did you?”

  Instead of answering, Hedra said, “Are you lonely, Allie?”

  “Yes,” Allie said, “I’m lonely.”

  Hedra said, “I’m not.”

  “You have Sam,” Allie said. “You deserve each other. You’re both contemptible.”

  “He’s contemptible. Otherwise he wouldn’t have put his hands on both of us. He wouldn’t have done what he did to us.”

  “He didn’t do it alone, Hedra.”

  “He didn’t have to do it at all, did he? What if I promised he’d never do it again?”

  “I don’t want your promises,” Allie said. “I don’t care anymore about either of you. Can’t you understand that? There’s no reason for us to have anything to do with each other.”

  “I hope you’re right, Allie.”

  “Don’t call me again, Hedra.”

  “I won’t.”

  The connection broke with a click, and the empty line sighed in Allie’s ear until the dial tone buzzed.

  She hung up the phone and sat for a while thinking about the call, watching a large bluebottle fly, later along in life than it thought, drone and bounce off the window, trying to escape into the drab, cool evening. The sky was darkening quickly now; it was getting dark noticeably earlier each day. Seasons changing.

  What was Hedra trying to do? Why had she virtually taken over Allie’s life, sapped Allie of herself and somehow become another Allie? She’d lived in Allie’s apartment. Wore duplicate clothes, jewelry, and perfume. Sometimes wore Allie’s clothes and jewelry. Used Allie’s identity. Even some of her gestures and speech habits. Slept with Sam.

  Envied Allie.

  Had no identity of her own.

  “She’s ill,” Allie said to the bluebottle fly. Hedra
had mentioned being hospitalized as a young girl. Possibly she’d been kept in a mental institution, and she was still very, very sick. So gradually had the situation made itself evident that the seriousness of Hedra’s problem had never registered on the unsuspecting Allie. Allie had misjudged the intensity of Hedra’s inner fire and envy. It was clear now why she’d wanted Sam so desperately, and why she flaunted the affair in front of Allie. It was as if she were letting Allie know that now she, Hedra, had finally supplanted Allie, and Allie no longer was quite real. Allie had become the inhabitant of an empty life, the shadowy subleasing roommate in her own existence.

  The terrible part was that Allie felt that way. She’d bought it. She’d been so involved with other problems in her life that she hadn’t noticed danger creeping up from an unexpected quarter. And then it was too late.

  It was Hedra, Allie realized, who must have stolen her credit cards and driver’s license, so she could be Hedra outside the apartment as well as inside. Hedra, the thief who stole so much more than property.

  Why had Hedra called tonight? What had she meant about making Sam hers forever? And why the strange tone of her voice? There’d been an odd, deranged quality to the way she’d sounded. On the other hand, why shouldn’t there be? She’d certainly been behaving that way.

  Allie remembered the blueberry cobbler recipe she’d found in the shoe box in Hedra’s closet, and the murder news item on its reverse side. There had been other newspaper clippings in the box, but she hadn’t looked at them, assuming they were other recipes or cooking columns. But maybe the grisly homicide story on the back of the recipe didn’t simply happen to be there. Maybe it was the recipe that happened to be on the back of the news item. Maybe the other clippings were about murders.

  No, Allie told herself, don’t let your imagination make a fool of you again.

  But the longer she sat there, the more a kind of pressure built in her. Things Hedra had said and done over the months seemed to click into a pattern and became meaningful. Ominous. Imagination? Maybe.