Lydia

by Howard Fast

  “Don’t be stupid,” Lydia said to him. “This is Harvey Krim. He’s an insurance investigator. We just had dinner next door.”

  “At the Italian restaurant, of course,” yellow-hair added, as if it were par for the course for all the dinner guests to climb the fence, and then the large, overfed boy remembered that he had seen Lydia on a college weekend.

  Lydia just stared at him and informed him that she was a housemaid. “Now what in hell would I be doing on a college weekend?” she demanded of him, talking very tough.

  Yellow-hair was dancing with me; at least she was pressed up against me, clinging to me, moving to the rhythm from inside and staring into my eyes.

  “Well, look at my clothes,” Lydia said to the passmaker, and he wanted to know what was wrong with her clothes.

  Others were drifting out into the garden now.

  “He disgusts me,” yellow-hair said. “He is fat and soft and stupid. You are not fat and soft and stupid, are you? Also, you are not one of those stinking intellectual slobs! You sell insurance. That adds up in my book. I had an uncle Harry who sold insurance, and he tried to rape me when I was thirteen years old. I swear to God. He took me out to the movies—yes, he was ace-high with my mother. He was my father’s brother and the bum had walked out, just like that—”

  “Uncle Harry?”

  “No, my father—so it was great, he took me to the movies, with hands like those active crabs you see in the fish-store windows. I didn’t mind, only I laughed too much. He couldn’t stand how much I laughed. He had a flask of sweet wine with him, and he kept giving me a swiggle to stone me, which maybe he did, and all I could think of were those hands of his, so I got hysterical with laughter. I mean, I wasn’t frightened. Not at all. He got me in the car, and he said to me, for crissakes, honey, I can’t do nothing unless you stop laughing, don’t you understand?”

  Someone took my arm and said to yellow-hair, “Excuse me, darling, but he must be charming and be introduced to the others.”

  “Just excuse me for living.”

  “Of course, darling,” said this round, motherly type, dragging me off. “I’m the life jacket,” she explained. “Who the devil are you? Do you want back to that tramp?”

  Lydia joined us and told me that I disgusted her. “Of course, you’re so restrained. You were practically having intercourse with her, but you kept your clothes on, and I suppose that’s a sign of real breeding.”

  “Darling, she pulls that on everyone,” the motherly type said. “Darling, this is nothing to be upset about. Take him inside and feed him something.”

  “We just ate. The Italian restaurant,” I explained, nodding at the wall, and she nodded understanding.

  “Of course.”

  “Of course,” Lydia said, “of course. Who doesn’t come over the wall?” She dragged me inside. “I don’t care about you,” she said to me as we pushed our way through crowds of people, “but I want to get out of here. Do you understand? I want to get out of here.”

  “You brought up that Camus business, I mean—”

  “I don’t care what you mean!”

  A young lady with bright, excited eyes grabbed my arm and said to another couple, a young man and a young lady, both of them with bright, excited eyes, “This is a television director. I told you that if there was one here, I would pick him out. There. We have one. Darling, do tell them you’re a television director,”

  “He’s an insurance salesman,” Lydia said. “Why don’t you leave him alone? He’s married to me and we’re both pregnant.”

  Outside on the street, I said to her, “What was all that about us being pregnant?”

  “I was confused.”

  “You were damn confused.”

  “Don’t you have any feelings, Harvey? Don’t you have any sensitivity? I was just panic-stricken in there.”

  “After all you’ve been through, you were panic-stricken in there.” We were walking west on Seventieth Street now. “You live a sort of happy idiot existence for months with a couple of animals who would wrap you up and put you into a trunk without so much as by your leave, and now a stupid party throws you into a panic?”

  She shrugged and shook her head.

  “Well, what is it?” I demanded.

  “You fool,” she cried, turning on me suddenly, “what do you think it is? Everything I own in the world is here in this bag—” holding out her cheap handbag toward me. “Can I go back there? Then where do I go? What do I do? I haven’t a friend in the world.”

  “Well—” I said. “Well, that’s not really true, Lydia. I mean, I know it’s bad, but not that bad. You have me.”

  “You?”

  “All right.” I took her arm, and we turned south along Park Avenue. “Maybe I’m no great shakes. So I’m not a bargain. But I’m better than nothing. I mean—”

  “Oh, Harvey, why don’t you face it? All you want is that damn necklace and your fee for turning it up.”

  “Isn’t that all you want?”

  “No!” she snapped.

  “Didn’t you take the job to get your hands on it?”

  “You don’t know one damn thing, Harvey, so help me!”

  “Maybe not,” I agreed. “Maybe we don’t know one damned thing about each other. Maybe all I care about is the necklace. I don’t know. I don’t know very much about myself, and I certainly don’t know a hell of a lot about you. It may seem like a thousand years, but we only met this afternoon and it’s short of midnight now. So you have to give these things a chance. I know you’re in a rough spot. Well, I’ll help you—”

  “Harvey,” she said softly, “Harvey, I think we’re being followed.”

  “What?”

  “Well before, when I turned around, I thought that I saw those two men. I just glanced back—I think they’re there.”

  I glanced back, and there were two men about two thirds of a block behind us. No one else on the street. It was Park Avenue toward midnight, with Hunter College alongside of us, and as empty as a dead street in a dead city. And when I looked for a cab, there wasn’t one in sight.

  “Turn here,” I said, “and quick!”

  We turned the corner, and I took her hand and we fled down the street toward Lexington. Just short of the subway station we stopped and looked back. A moment, and then the two men came around the corner.

  I pulled Lydia toward the subway and into it, and when she protested that it was dead-end and a trap, I said, “No, not if we get a train. Then it’s the best way out.”

  “Harvey, trains don’t run often at night.”

  We were at the change booth, and the cavern of the station was filling up with sound, the soft, echoing, increasing sound of a train approaching. I smiled at Lydia and pushed a ten-dollar bill toward the attendant.

  “Sorry, Jack,” he said. “I don’t change tens. I’ll take a single.”

  “Goddamn it, make an exception for once!”

  The attendant looked at me sourly. “What is it, Jack? You want trouble?”

  I was turning my pockets out—not a coin, not a bill smaller than the ten. Lydia meanwhile was examining her purse and muttering that it was crazy and impossible, and then she found two dimes and a nickel and I turned up a nickel in a corner of the purse that she had missed, and the train was thundering into the station. The attendant, who disliked us, mistrusted us and labored under the burden of bruised feelings, was in no hurry to give us our tokens. He counted the money twice and examined one of the coins. I swallowed all the clever, hateful and malicious things I thought of calling him; it might delay him; and it was only after he passed me the tokens that I flung a single forlorn, four-letter word in his direction, withal softly. Then we raced for the turnstiles.

  Lydia got through first, and ran wildly for the closing doors of the train. She was an inch short, and as I joined her, the train was moving past us.

  “That’s it,” I said. “If you get a train.”

  “Harvey, I’m frightened.”

 
I didn’t see any point in informing her that I was equally frightened; our relationship was sufficiently complex and her opinion of me sufficiently confused. I asked her to come with me, as if I actually knew where I was going and why, but since I made it purposeful, she walked with me toward the end of the platform, while the train thundered away into the distance. But we were alone there on that empty night-echoing platform for only a matter of moments. She was saying to me that we ought to get out of there—“I mean, shouldn’t we, Harvey? We’re trapped here—” And then the two of them came onto the platform, and I swung her down onto the tracks, where there was at least a tunnel of retreat and darkness.

  “Harvey!” she screamed.

  I swung back. One was running toward us; the other stood with his legs apart, a gun in his hands, a long, lopsided gun that had a silencer on its muzzle.

  “Harvey, he’s shooting at you!”

  He was a poor shot. Chips of the wall tile cut my skin as I dropped down next to Lydia. “He’s a rotten shot,” I tried to explain to her as I pulled her along toward the darkness. The second one stopped running and clawed a gun out of his pocket. He fired two shots without a silencer, and they boomed hollowly. But we were already in the darkness then. I saw him lowering himself onto the tracks, balancing on his belly, his feet hanging. The other one joined him. I didn’t look again. Hand in hand, Lydia and I fled down the tracks into the darkness, and then I pulled her over to the left against the wall.

  Both of us panting, I whispered to her:

  “Watch the third rail. That’s the important thing.”

  “What rail?”

  I heard them shouting at each other—back behind us. They moved slowly into the darkness.

  “Don’t you have a gun?” Lydia demanded.

  “Never mind guns. I want to go down the tracks again. But I want you to mind the third rail.”

  “Suppose a train comes?”

  “Then you step in here—in the middle. Didn’t you ever ride in the subway before?”

  “So I rode in the subway before. That doesn’t mean I have to be an engineer.”

  “Walk, don’t run,” I told her softly. “It’s too dark now. You could fall and be badly hurt, or fall up against the third rail.” I held her hand and led her down the tracks. “You know they’re electric trains, don’t you? That’s what the third rail is—their supply of electricity. So if you touched it—”

  “Harvey, they’re right near us!” This in a hoarse whisper, with her face up against my ear. Her breath was sweet. “Harvey, don’t you have a gun?”

  “No.”

  From the other direction—which meant the other track—the noise of a train approaching. At least, I thought it was another track, guessed that it was. I guided Lydia between the tracks, and then placed a steel supporting girder behind my back, Lydia in front of me, but both of us concealed at least to some degree by the girder.

  “Quiet, baby, please,” I whispered.

  The whole world filled with a reverberating thunder of sound.

  “I can’t hear you!” Lydia shouted, turning to face me, close up against me. There was a fitful, increasing gleam of light, just a glow on her face, but I leaned toward her and kissed her. I don’t know why I did it then.

  And then, right then, he came around the girder and was there with us, surprised—so surprised that he leaped back away from us, stumbled, fell, screamed, fired his gun wildly—and, screaming, fell toward the train that came thundering through the tunnel.

  It was very sudden, suddenly the man who had been following us—which one, we never knew, for it was all too quick, too sudden—and then the train, the jungle of sound, the glaring lights, and the man falling, not in front of the train but against it, so that he was flung back and away from it, his body bounced and smashed against the girder behind us, and the shrill memory of his scream filling our ears against the crash and thunder of metal wheels and iron cars.

  But already I was guiding her away. We crossed to the other tracks, and the screaming, crashing sounds and lights battered the walls of the place less hotly, and presently disappeared. The train had come into the station. I looked back and I could see it standing there, uphill, it seemed. I am sure it was not that way, but that was how it seemed, as if the tunnel curved up, and somewhere in that tunnel was the flung and broken body of one man—and somewhere else the other man.

  We walked on into the darkness, on and on. I know that it is no more than a quarter of a mile from the end of one platform to the beginning of another, and in light it would have been nothing; but in the darkness it was a great deal indeed, a slow, foot-feeling walk which we had to interrupt once to let a train go by—a downtown train that stopped far ahead of us. We could see it standing there, tail lights twinkling.

  I put my arm around Lydia. Not a word had she said since Sarbine’s man had been killed, nor did she try to speak again while we were underground.

  The downtown train pulled out and we walked in. There was one young couple on the platform when we got there, and they gaped in astonishment as I boosted Lydia onto the platform and then wriggled up and on myself.

  The young couple continued to stare, but in the very New York habit of New Yorkers, they made no move toward us or away from us, to help us or reject us or summon authority. They simply stared. Lydia stuck her tongue out at them as we walked past, through the turnstiles and upstairs to the street.

  “It’s not very refined, sticking your tongue out at people,” I said, when finally we were on the street.

  “You should talk, you idiot. Why don’t you carry a gun if you’re a detective?”

  “I hate guns. I’m afraid of them.”

  “Yes. And what a place to kiss me! Indeed! I wouldn’t talk about being refined if I were you.”

  Then she burst into tears.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “I THINK,” said Lydia, still not recovered from her outburst and quite choked with emotion, “that you ought to go your way, Harvey, and let me go mine. It’s not that I have anything specific against you, but since I met you things have gone from bad to worse—and anyway, I don’t see that we have any real relationship to each other. You’re pretty old.”

  “Only thirty-five,” I said.

  “Yes, but I am twenty-three. That’s a big difference.”

  “You’re also presuming,” I said. “You’re presuming on what I feel about you and what you may or may not feel about me. The practical thing is where are you going to go if I do leave you?”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “Well, maybe we can manage together, so why don’t we have a cup of coffee and talk about it?”

  We were somewhat unkempt and dirty now, and we put ourselves together as best we could and then walked a few blocks down Lexington, turned west on Fifty-seventh Street and walked all the way across town to Sixth Avenue before I felt secure and sufficiently secluded to go into a restaurant with Lydia and order doughnuts and coffee. At first we had nothing to say, just as we had had nothing to say on our way across town, and no appetite to eat, and neither of us touched the food but only sat and looked at each other. Then Lydia admitted that I was nice in some ways, and I shrugged as much as to admit that perhaps I was, and she wondered whether I had saved her life. I didn’t think so, and I told her that I didn’t think so. If I had gotten her out of anything, it was only because I had gotten her into it.

  “Well, I don’t know, Harvey,” she said ruefully. “Just look at the way I have gone about this from the very beginning—every step of the way is crazy.”

  I nodded. I couldn’t argue with that.

  “My father was the last person I had in the world—that’s all, Harvey, just my father. You know about him, don’t you?”

  I nodded again.

  “Well, then you ought to be able to understand how I hated Sarbine.”

  “I guess I don’t understand about hate any more than I do about love,” I admitted. “I guess that’s what’s wrong with me. I guess that’s my
own particular sickness.”

  Then Lydia began to shiver, and I begged her to drink the coffee. She shook her head. “I need a drink, Harvey.”

  “All right, so do I.”

  “I keep thinking about that man in the subway. What are you going to do, Harvey? Don’t you have to call the police and tell them? Or report this?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” I said.

  “And that couple of kids that saw us come out on the subway platform. They’ll tell the police. They’ll identify us—or won’t they be able to?”

  “They will—as soon as Rothschild hears about it.”

  “Should you call him, Harvey?”

  I promised that I would call him later, but that was one more thing that we forgot. Bit by bit, we were becoming involved in each other, and bit by bit, more interested in our involvement than in anything else.

  I mean that the interest was in each other. I don’t know whether we were falling in love or whether either of us was capable of such a thing as being in love. We had both been living for a long time in intense if aimless self-interest; suddenly each of us was aware of another human being, and in that sense the cavern of the subway was terribly important. We had emerged from something; we had been born out of something, and there was newness and some preparation for something in the way we walked down the street together. We were only walking four blocks down Sixth Avenue to the Hotel Skelton bar, but there was no precise beginning to our walking together. I felt that, and I know that Lydia felt it, because she asked me how long we had been in the subway.

  “I don’t know—ten minutes, fifteen minutes at the most.”

  “No, more than that,” Lydia insisted.

  “I don’t know—”

  She took my hand then, or rather she put her small hand inside of mine, curling her finger around my hand. Her hand was small and hard and capable, and I felt that all of her would be like that, her limbs tight and round but small, a small wisp of a contained and foolishly courageous girl.

  “Harvey,” she asked me, “are you alone?”

  “What do you mean?”