Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  But she didn’t come to the door. I rang until I was blue in the face, and the ball of my thumb went white with the long-sustained pressure I exerted on it. Still she didn’t come to the door. I moved back a pace or two, dug my hands into my pockets, and gazed at the door reproachfully as though it were doing this of its own accord. Then I remembered that I still had her key in my pocket. I had made it the excuse, once, for coming back to see her, but when I had gone away that day I had taken it with me again.

  So I fished it out and dug it into the lock, and turned it, and tried the knob, and the door remained more firmly shut than ever. Then I turned it back the other way again, and that opened it. So I saw that it had been open all along, and I had simply locked it myself just now. I could have gone in long ago, instead of standing out there like a fool, but what was she doing, anyway, not to have heard me ringing away?

  None of the lights were on in the living room, but the dial of the merrymaking radio over in the corner blinked across the dim room at me like a little gold star. And the lights were on in her bedroom and the door had been left ajar. “Bernice,” I called in to her, “hurry it up, will you! It isn’t early any more!” And I followed this admonition in there personally, pushed the bedroom door out of my way — and stopped. There was no one in there. She wasn’t in there.

  I crossed the room and looked into the closet — not to see if she was there, but to see how much of her packing she had accomplished. Evidently she had carried it through to completion. Most of the rods were empty, and the few dresses and shoes remaining were lying haphazardly on the floor. Even my untrained eye could tell by that that they had been consigned to the discard. I prodded them idly with my foot and then turned back to the room itself again.

  Our glasses were still standing around, the tray she had eaten her lunch from was still there, the striped-brocade chaise longue still flaunted the stain she had made on it when she spilled her drink that time, the very violet satin kimono she had been wearing all afternoon was still lying where I remembered seeing it fall when she threw it off — half over the side of the bed and half on the floor. She was leaving it behind because it had got stained too, I suppose. Only because I had been in the room as often as I had could I tell beyond the shadow of a doubt that everything was completely set for her getaway. Otherwise, it was even less disorderly than I had seen it looking many times before now — on awakening in the mornings for instance. But the fullest perfume bottle of the three was gone from the dressing table, and that photograph she used to have under the mirror looking like a cross between a prizefighter and a Mexican movie star had been torn once across and once up-and-down, and the four resulting pieces neatly piled one on top of the other and dropped into an empty drawer sticking out of its frame like a set of buckteeth. A couple of little touches like this were enough to tell me she was all in readiness to vacate. But then where the hell was she herself?

  I knew by now that she was not in the apartment at all, but just to give myself something to do for a second or two, I stuck my head in the two remaining places — serving pantry and bathroom. In one, the gin and vermouth bottles were still side by side on the edge of the vanishing breadboard where I had balanced them when I poured out those last two; in the other, there were just a lot of tiles and dazzling light that was hard on the eyes.

  Now it was beginning to trouble me a little; a moment ago it had been just perplexing. I would have phoned down to the doorman and asked him if he had seen her go out, only I knew that he hadn’t; he must have thought she was still up here or he wouldn’t have been so ready to announce me a while ago. But then he had only come on duty a few minutes before I had got here; the other man would have been the one to ask, and he had gone home now — or wherever doormen went when they were through dooring. But then, anyway, he was the very one had telephoned her message to me.

  I went back to the bedroom again, lit a cigarette, sat myself worriedly down on the chaise longue, and told myself aloud that I would be a — well, something not very creditable to my mother. A disquieting suspicion settled on me, and then on top of that another that was more than disquieting, that was terrifying, paralyzing. One was that she had gone ahead to the station the way we had originally planned it and was waiting for me there — in which case, with me here and she at that end, the train would be gone by the time we located each other. But how was I supposed to know that? Hadn’t she told me herself to stop by here and call for her! And the worse thought was that she might have gone on to the station and might not be waiting there for me — in other words, might have taken an earlier train herself and given me the slip. “But she wouldn’t do a thing like that to me!” I wailed to myself. I knew, just the same, that if she wanted to badly enough, she could and would. And maybe had. She had had a persecution complex of one sort or another all along, I reminded myself, didn’t trust me any more than she did any one else; she had told me so to my face not once but several times. The very words rang in my ears: “I met you on the street; how do I know who sent you my way?” What more likely than that she had got leery of me too at the last minute and had made up her mind to play safe and go by herself?

  Or else had become conscience-stricken at the eleventh hour at the thought of what she would be doing to Maxine, and decided to leave me behind to her. Or else had just been having a little indoor sport all these weeks, and in the end had gone off with somebody else entirely, letting me hold the bag. This last pleasurable theory was the worst of the lot. It produced a feeling something like taking a red-hot bath with a sunburned back — and scrubbing with a currycomb. But, I told myself, writhing there, what definite proof have you that such couldn’t be the case? What do you really know about her private life, after all? She’s kept you in the dark from beginning to end — told you never to ask for her on the wire if a man’s voice answered, pulled you down emergency staircases with her to keep you from seeing who called on her, cried about something like a child with the colic the night you brought her away from Jerry’s party, gone into convulsions of fear because you told another girl that she was corresponding with someone in Detroit. The whole thing smells fishy from beginning to end. Maybe that Marion person had reason to get jealous, at that; maybe there was more truth in it than you know; maybe there was something between her and this Sonny Boy individual, and maybe that’s where she’s gone right now — to Detroit to be with him!

  And then a glance at the long, wide vanity table — which was only a couple of feet away from where I was sitting — but a glance below it instead of above it as heretofore, sent all my suspicions and torments buzzing away from me like a cloud of mosquitoes when some one has lighted a punk-stick. Three pieces of her baggage were standing there side by side, all latched and strapped and ready to be carried downstairs — a big valise, a much smaller one, and a round, shiny, patent-leather thing, looking like a drum, that was probably a hat- or shoe-box.

  I could have jumped up in the air and yelled with surprised relief, felt like kissing the neat little “B.P.” marked on each one. I told myself how low I was to have even doubted her for a minute, much less credited her with all kinds of tortuous machinations the way I had. “You have everything going just the way you want it to.” I upbraided myself disgustedly, “and instead of being satisfied, you have to go out of your way and look for trouble!” She had probably only just stepped outside for a minute, to get something to eat most likely. Although — I had never known her not to have it sent up from the drugstore downstairs, and tonight in particular, when she claimed she was too busy even to come down and speak to me on the phone, you’d think she would have — oh, well, some other reason then; she would be back in a minute; she had even left the apartment door unlocked.

  I shifted to a more relaxed posture on the chaise longue, raised one knee to scratch my calf, put it down again, lighted another cigarette for lack of something better to do — my second since I had come in here. Thought I’d cut down on them once the two of us were settled out there; no sense in
lighting one every five minutes the way I did nowa — I had been there longer than that, though; had been there about ten or twelve minutes now, I guessed. I looked over at the clock and — that thing must be wrong! Was that ten past nine, or had it stopped at quarter to two that afternoon and stayed that way? I got up and took a closer look. More than ten past, twelve past — and I had been up there half an hour! If she didn’t get back inside of the next five minutes we were just going to make that train by the skin of our teeth — if at all! Until we got the bags downstairs, and by the time we got down to Forty-Second Street through all the traffic! I started pacing back and forth. Wished she’d hurry, what was she doing, wished she’d hurry! The radio in there was beginning to get on my nerves; it had played nothing but one dance tune after another ever since I had been up there. I liked quieter pieces — and I didn’t like music of any kind with my timetables, what was more.

  I strode in there to turn it off, put up the room light, which she had left off when she went out, and — there she was!

  Chapter Seven

  Gone from me, and just when I thought I had her closest. Turned from something beautiful into something unmentionable, filthy, fit only to be burned or hurriedly smothered with earth and hidden from sight. The mouth that had known how to smile so beautifully remained open now, where death had gone slinking in. The hands that had roamed in my hair were just white things now on the floor. The blue dress (the omen fulfilled!) that had encircled a living body’s perfection of form, remained now to cover a carcass.

  The icy coating of shock that had coagulated all over me held fast for a moment or two — I even had time to do an unnaturally natural thing: reach out and silence the obscene radio — before it shattered abruptly, and red-hot knives of pain began cutting in at me.

  I did things that the sane don’t do; got down on my knees, got down on my hands, lay there on my face and gnawed the down of the rug, writhing with the agony that has no seat, knows no physical cause, cannot be stemmed. Tears bubbled from my eyes as though they were percolaters, my nose ran, saliva dripped slowly from between my lips, a drop at a time. My heart pumped under me like a frantic, imprisoned bird caught between me and the floor. I died a hundred times where she had died just once.

  The phenomena of grief are banal, after all. Who, seeing some one he loves lie dead, hasn’t spoken aloud, hasn’t pleaded to her to come back? I did all those things. “Bernice, can’t you hear me? It’s Wade, your miserable Wade you’re doing this to. Open your eyes — just for a minute — then you can close them again. Just give me one more look, one more smile, before you go.” I drew nearer and nearer to her, like a human being turned alligator. I kissed her at last, and the kiss brought me only horror and recoil. I cried out sharply at the coldness, the goneness of her, and leaped to my feet and drew back quivering. I stared reproachfully over at the thing lying there that had just tricked me like that.

  I knew I hadn’t kissed her just now; that was never Bernice. But where was she, where had she gone? Oh, more almost than I wanted her back again, I wanted an explanation now, I wanted to be told. It was the finality of it that appalled me so, the utter, utter irretrievability. Oh, how much kinder it would have been, how much more consoling, to have belonged to one of those old, gone generations — and been able to kid myself that I would find her again the day I went myself. But knowing that the soil, the earth that trees take root in, never, never can take wings and rise and speak with a human voice — what was there left for me, what solace had I in the world?

  What heaven was there for me, what haven, what hope? Our heaven would have been in California, with the things we knew of — the Chevrolet, and she, and I. There would never be any other; we had had our chance, we had muffed it, and — the rest was oblivion.

  Exhausted, prostrated — though antipathy to what lay on the floor kept me erect on my feet somehow — drained of almost every feeling but one that hadn’t been tapped yet, I stood cowering limply against a wall as though the collar of my coat had caught on a nail and I were suspended there. The knives grew blunted at last, as though the continual driving of them into the same gashes had robbed them of their edge; they gave only a dull ache now. I had no more tears, I had nothing to feed them any more.

  In the wake of my ebbing grief came something else — the blind, unreasoning will to preserve myself. I was in a room with that inert mound under the blue dress. The laws of the land said death for that. I must get out into the open. I felt as if the walls were likely to close around me and hold me there in a living trap if I stayed a minute longer. The lights shining so brightly in every corner, in every room of this empty silent place seemed much more horrible to me than darkness could possibly have been. I couldn’t look at her any more, she seemed to move each time I did. She seemed to cause a spell, a stagnation in the air. Breathe it as deeply as I would, I couldn’t get enough of it into my lungs — they seemed to be closing up. It was as though a spark of malevolence had remained behind when all else had fled, and was trying to draw me down, suck me down, into her condition.

  I turned and beat my way along the wall out into the foyer to the door and flung it open, and the winds of life rushed in again. Fear instantaneously changed its form, and became a fear of the living and not of the dead. I must get away from here, away from here, and I mustn’t let any one see me!

  I closed the door behind me and locked it with my key, fingers shaking like ribbons in a breeze. I put the key in my pocket, listened, then crossed the corridor and got the door open that led to the emergency staircase we had used that night. I went down it and down it and down it, not stopping a floor below but all the way to the bottom. On the inside of each heavy door giving out upon a corridor the number of the floor was painted in red. When I had come to the one below “2” I stopped, though the stairs still went further down, and opened it a little and peered out. The soft pinkish lights of the lobby met my eyes, and I heard some people getting out of the elevator to one side of me, without being able to see them because of an angle in the wall.

  The ponderous metal slide closed again; evidently the car had just received another call from above. I heard the doorman I had disliked so remark, “Good evening,” and mention some one’s name. Then a woman’s voice said, “Will you get hold of a taxi for us, Leroy?” and I heard the glass doors in front swinging around.

  I pushed the staircase door wide and stepped out; there was no one in the lobby. I walked quickly across it to the front door, still spinning idly around, and passed through it into the street. The doorman was standing out in the middle of the road blowing a little whistle repeatedly and staring fixedly up toward the corner. An elderly lady and a younger one were standing together on the edge of the sidewalk, waiting and looking in the same direction. They had evening wraps on. Neither they nor the doorman turned to look at me as I came out; as a matter of fact he had that very moment turned about to stare in the other direction, toward Fifth, so that his back was now to me altogether.

  Though I tried to walk straight, it seemed to me I reeled at every step I took, that those I met would be bound to notice there was something wrong with me. But what more commonplace than an unsteady man making his way along a New York street? I crossed to the other side of Sixth and then turned down it, looking back, always looking crazily back, as though unable to control my neck muscles. An empty cab came along, and thinking I was looking for a taxi, the driver flung the door open for me without even coming to a halt. I took a little run toward it and jumped on, and he cracked the door shut after me, and asked friendlily, “Where to, buddy?”

  “Grand Central Station,” I shuddered, biting my nails.

  I clapped my hand to my breast pocket to make sure I still had the tickets; I could feel the slight stiffness of the pasteboard even through the cloth of my suit — they were there all right. The lights of New York went spinning and hurtling by like shoals of comets, and each time he turned the cab in a new direction, they flattened and elongated themselves against the
windows and left tracks and smears of fire across the glass until they had had time to come into focus again. Tall buildings reeled and threatened to topple over on me, or else leaned far back as though we were about to climb up the faces of them, machine and all.

  I must get out of this town — the train had left long ago, but there were others — only, I must get out of this town. Where didn’t matter; anywhere would do! Montreal. Quebec, some place across the line. And then I thought, shivering, “But they bring you back from those places. Just as quick, even quicker. They expect you to go there, they look for you there.” And then I remembered my grip, standing at that very moment in the lobby back there. “Oh, I’m gone!” I groaned aloud, and hid my face behind my sleeves.

  I lifted my head again a moment later and looked thoughtfully at the driver’s back through foggy, unseeing eyes. What good would going back for it do, even if I did manage to get it into the cab with me and drive off again without being stopped? They knew who I was; the very doorman up there knew me by name, had seen me time and again. The grip wouldn’t tell them anything they didn’t know already—

  And what good for that matter, I began to tell myself, would going off like this do? Even if I did get out of New York, get to Quebec, get to Montreal? What was the most I could expect? To drag out an existence ten times worse than the one Bernice had foreseen for herself if she had quit New York — robbed of the right to use my own name any longer, cowering at every shadow that crossed my path, fleeing abruptly and silently from one place to the next as though pursued by ghosts or possessed of devils. Ah, no! To face such a future, to plunge into it, was not cowardice — was the utmost bravery, required more courage than I had. I hadn’t the guts, the lust for life anymore that that took. After all, what was there so sweet about life any longer to make it worth fighting for at such a price? What happiness was there left for me in this world even if I stood acquitted of all suspicion at that very moment? Gray days and endless nights without her. Month after month of them, year after year of them.