but whose effect was intended to be the opposite: go ahead. A string of beads that clacked around her throat. A handkerchief with too much lace on it, saturated in a virulent concoction that made her own nose crinkle in distaste as she hastily stuffed it into her bag. She had made herself heavy lidded with some blue stuff she had never used before.
Scott Henderson had been watching her throughout the proceeding, from a frame to one side of the glass, and she was ashamed. “You wouldn’t know me, darling, would you?” she murmured contritely. “Don’t look at me, darling, don’t look at me.”
And now one final ghastly item, to complete the catalogue of sleazy accessibility. She put up her leg and slipped a garter of violently pink satin complete with a rosette up it, left it at a point just below visibility. At least when seated.
She turned away fast. His Girl shouldn’t look like that thing she had just seen in the glass, not His Girl. She went around putting lights out, outwardly calm, inwardly keyed up. Only someone that knew her well could have guessed it. He would have known it at a glance. He wasn’t here to see it.
When she came to the last one of all, the one by the door, she said the little prayer she always said, each time she started out. Looking over at him there, in the frame, across the room.
“Maybe tonight, darling,” she breathed softly, “maybe tonight.”
She put out the light and closed the door, and he stayed behind there in the dark, under glass.
The marquee lights were on when she got out of the cab, but the sidewalk under them was fairly empty yet. She wanted to get in good and early, so she’d have time to work on him before the house lights went down. She only half knew what was playing, and when it was over and she came out again she knew she wouldn’t know very much more than she had when she went in. Something called “Keep on Dancing.”
She stopped at the box office. “I have a reservation for
tonight. First row orchestra, on the aisle. Mimi Gordon.”
She’d had to wait days for it. Because this wasn’t a matter of seeing the show, this was a matter of being seen. She took out the money and paid for it. “Now you’re sure of what you told me over the phone? That’s the side of the house the trap drummer is on, and not the other?”
‘That’s right, I checked on it for you before I put it aside.” He gave her the leer she’d known he would. “You must think quite a lot of him. Lucky guy, I’d say.”
“You don’t understand; it’s not him personally. I don’t even know him from Adam. It’s—how’ll I explain? Everybody has some sort of a hobby. Well, mine happens to be the trap drums. Every time I go to a show I try to sit as close to them as I can get, I love to watch them being played, it does something to me. I’m an addict of the trap drums, they’ve fascinated me ever since I was a child. I know it sounds crazy but”—she spread her hands—“that’s how it is.”
“I didn’t mean to be inquisitive,” he apologized, crestfallen.
She went inside. The ticket taker at the door had just come on duty, the usher had just come up from the locker room downstairs, she was so early. Whatever the status of the balcony, where the unwritten rule of being fashionably late did not hold sway, she was definitely the first patron on the orchestra floor.
She sat there alone, a small gilt-headed figure lost in that vast sea of empty seats. Most of her gaudiness was carefully concealed, from three directions, by the coat she kept huddled about her. It was only from the front that she wanted it to have its full lethal effect.
Seats began to slap down behind her more and more frequently; there was that rustle and slight hum that always marks a theater slowly filling up. She had eyes for one thing and one thing only: that little half-submerged door down there under the rim of the stage. It was over on the opposite side from her. Light was peering through the seams of it now, and she could hear voices behind it. They were gathering there, ready to come out to work.
Suddenly it opened and they began filing up into the pit, each one’s head and shoulders bent acutely to permit his passage. She didn’t know which one was he, she wouldn’t know until she saw him seat himself, because she’d never seen him. One by one they dropped into the various chairs, disposing themselves in a thin crescent around the stage apron, heads below the footlights.
She was seemingly absorbed in the program on her lap, head lowered, but she kept peering watchfully up from under her sooty lashes. This one, coming now? No, he’d stopped one chair too short. The one behind him? What a villainous face. She was almost relieved when he’d dropped off at the second chair down from her. Clarinet, or something. Well, then this one, it must be he—no, he’d turned and gone the other way, bass viol.
They’d stopped emerging now. Suddenly she was uneasy. The last one out had even closed the door behind him. There weren’t any more of them coming through. They were all seated, they were all tuning up, settling themselves for work. Even the conductor was on hand. And the chair at the trap drums, the one directly before her, remained ominously vacant.
Maybe he’d been discharged. No, because then they’d get a substitute to take his place. Maybe he’d been taken ill, couldn’t play tonight. Oh, just tonight this had to happen! Probably every night this week, until now, he’d been here. She mightn’t be able to get this same particular seat again for weeks to come; the show was selling well and there was great demand. And she couldn’t afford to wait that long. Time was so precious, was running so short, there was too little of it left.
She could overhear them discussing it among themselves, in disparaging undertones. She was close enough to catch nearly everything they said, to get in under the tuning-up discords that covered them from the rest of the house.
“D’jever see a guy like that? I think he’s been on time once since the season started. Fining don’t do any good.”
The alto saxophone said, “He probably chased some blonde up an alley and forgot to come out again.”
The man behind him chimed in facetiously, “A good drummer is hard to get.”
“Not that hard.”
She was staring at the credits on her program, without their focusing into type. She was rigid with suppressed anxiety. Ironical, that every man in the orchestra should be on hand but the single one, the only one, that could do her any good.
She thought, “This is the same sort of luck poor Scott was in the night he —”
The lull before the overture had fallen. They were all set now, light rods turned on over their scores. Suddenly, when she was no longer even watching it any more, it seemed so hopeless, the door giving into the pit had flickered open, closed again, so quickly it was like the winking of an intermittent light, and a figure scuttled deftly along the outside of the chairs to the vacant one before her. bent over both to increase its speed and to attract the conductor’s attention as little as possible. Thus there was something rodentlike about him even at his first appearance within her ken, and he was to stay in character throughout.
The conductor gave him a sizzling look.
He wasn’t abashed. She heard him pant in a breathless undertone to his neighbor, “Boy, have I got a honey for the second tomorrow! A sure thing.”
“Sure, and the only sure thing about it is it won’t come in,” was the dry answer.
He hadn’t seen her yet. He was too busy fiddling with his rack, adjusting his instrument. Her hand dropped to her side and her skirt crept up her thigh an unnoticeable fraction of an inch more.
He got through arranging his set-up. “How’s the house tonight?” she heard him ask. He turned and looked out through the pit railing for the first time since he’d come in.
She was ready for him. She was looking at him. She’d hit him. There must have been an elbow nudge beyond her radius of downcast vision. She heard the other man’s slurred answer. “Yeah, I know, I seen it.”
She’d hit him hard. She could feel his eyes on her. She could have made a graph of the wavy line they traveled. She took her time. Not too fast now, no
t right away. She thought, “Funny how we know these things, all of us, even when we’ve never tried them before.” She concentrated on a line on her program as though she could never get enough of its mystic import. It was mostly dots, running from one side of the page over to the other. It helped to keep her eyes steady.
Victorine Dixie Lee
She counted the dots. Twenty-four of them, from character name over to performer name. There, that was about long enough. That had given it time to work. She let her lashes come up slowly and unveil her eyes.
They met his. They stayed with his. His had expected them to turn away, frost over. Instead, they accepted his glance, sustained it for as long as he cared to give it. They seemed to say, “Are you interested in me? All right, go ahead, I don’t mind.”
He was a shade surprised for a moment at this ready acceptance. He kept on looking for all he was worth. He even tried a tentative smile, that was ready to be rubbed out at a moment’s notice too.
She accepted that in turn. She even sent him one back, of about the same degree as his. His deepened. Hers did too.
The preliminaries were over, they were getting into— And then, damn it, the buzzer signaled from back curtain. The conductor tapped out attention, spread his arms holding them poised. Flounced them, and the overture was under way, he and she had to break it off.
That was all right, she consoled herself. So far so good.
The show couldn’t be straight music all the way through, no show was. There would be rest spells.
The curtain went up. She was aware of voices, lights, figures. She didn’t bother with what was going on onstage. She wasn’t here to see a show. She minded her own business strictly, and her business was making a musician.
He turned and spoke to her at the start of the intermission, when they were filing out for a rest and a smoke. He was the furthest over, so he was the last to go; that gave him the chance to do it undetected behind the others’ backs. The people next to her had gotten up and gone out, so he could tell she was alone, even if her conduct had left him any doubts on that point until now, which it certainly should not have.
“How do you like it so far?”
“It’s real good,” she purred.
“Doing anything afterwards?”
She pouted. “No, I only wish I was.”
He turned to go out after his fellow bandsmen. “You are,” he assured her smugly, “now.”
She gave her skirt a corrective downward hitch with considerable asperity as soon as he was gone. She felt as though she could have used a scalding shower and plenty of Lifebuoy.
Her face lines slipped back to where they belonged. Even the make-up couldn’t hide the alteration. She sat there, pensive, alone, at the end of the empty row of seats. Maybe tonight, darling, maybe tonight.
When the house lights went on again at the final curtain, she lingered behind, pretending to have dropped this, pretending to be adjusting that, while the rest of the audience siphoned slowly up through the aisles.
The band finished playing them out. He gave the cymbal atop his drum a final stroke, steadied it with his fingers, put down his drumsticks, snapped off the light over his rack. He was through for the night, he was on his own time now. He turned around to her slowly, as if already
feeling himself the dominant factor in the situation. “Wait for me around at the stage alley, lovely,” he said. “Be with you in five minutes.”
There was ignominy attached even to the simple act of waiting for him outside, for some reason she couldn’t quite ascertain. Perhaps it was something about his personality that tinged everything that way. She felt crawly, walking up and down out there. And a little afraid. And the way all the other bandsmen, coming out ahead of him (he couldn’t even spare her that embarrassment, he had to be the last one out), looked at her as they passed added to her discomfort.
Then suddenly he’d swept her off with him by surprise. That is to say, before she’d even seen him coming, he had her arm possessively under his and was towing her along with him, without even breaking stride. That was probably characteristic of him, too, she thought.
“How’s my new little friend?” he began breezily.
“Fine, how’s mine?” she gave him back.
“We’ll go where the rest of the gang goes,” he said. “I’d catch cold without ‘em.” She got the idea. She was like a new boutonniere to him, he wanted to show her off.
This was at twelve.
By two o’clock she decided he’d been softened up enough by beer for her to begin to go to work on him. They were in the second of two identical places by then, the gang still in the offing. A peculiar sort of etiquette seemed to govern things of this sort. He and she had moved on when the rest of them moved, and yet once they were in the new place they continued their separateness, at a table by themselves. He would get up and join the others every once in a while, and then come back to her again, but the others never came over and joined him, she noticed. Probably because she was his, and they were supposed to stay away from her.
She’d been watching carefully for her opening for some time. She knew she’d better get going at it; after all, the night wouldn’t last forever, and she couldn’t face the thought of having to go through another one like it.
One offered itself finally, just what she wanted, in one of the rancid compliments he’d been shoveling at her all evening—whenever he thought of it. Somewhat like an absent-minded stoker keeping a fixe going.
“You say I’m the prettiest thing ever sat in that seat. But there must have been other times you turned around and saw someone you liked sitting there right behind you. Tell me about some of them.”
“Not in it with you, wouldn’t waste my breath.”
“Well, just for fun, I’m not jealous. Tell me: if you had your choice, out of all the attractive women you ever saw sitting behind you, in that same seat where I was tonight, since you’ve been playing in theaters, which was the one you would have rather taken out?”
“You, of course.”
“I knew you’d say that. But after me; which would your second choice be? I want to see just how far back you can remember. I bet you can’t remember their faces from one night to the next.”
“Can’t I? Well just to show you. I turn around one night and there’s a dame sitting there right on the other side of the rail from me—”
Under the table she was holding the soft inside curve of her arm with her own hand, squeezing it tightly as though it ached unendurably.
“This was at the other house, the Casino. I don’t know, something about her got me—”
A succession of attenuated shadows slipped across their table one by one; the last one of all stood still for a minute. “We’re going to pitch a jam-session downstairs in the basement. Coming?”
Her gripping hand relaxed its hold on her arm, fell away frustratedly down by the side of her chair. They’d all gotten up, were piling in through a basement entrance at the back.
“No, stay up here with me,” she urged, reaching out to hold him. “Finish what you—”
He’d already risen. “Come on, you don’t want to miss this, snooks.”
“Don’t you do enough playing all evening at the theater?”
“Yeah, but that’s for pay. This is for myself. You’re going to hear something now.”
He was going to leave her anyway, she saw, this had a stronger pull than she had, so she rose reluctantly to her feet and trailed after him down narrow brick-walled stairs to the restaurant basement. They were all in a large room down there, with instruments in it already that they must have used at previous times. Even an upright piano. There was a single large but smoky bulb hanging on a loose wire from the center of the ceiling, and to supplement this they had candles stuck in bottles. There was a battered wooden table in the middle, and they put bottles of gin on it, nearly one to a man. One of them spread a piece of brown wrapping paper out and dumped quantities of cigarettes on it, for anyone to help themselv
es at will. Not the kind the world upstairs smoked; black-filled things; reefers, she heard them call them.
They closed and bolted the door, as soon as she and Mil-burn had come in, to keep themselves free from interruption. She was the only girl among them.
There were packing cases and empty cartons and even a keg or two to sit on. A clarinet tootled mournfully, and mania had begun.
The next two hours were a sort of Dantesque Inferno. She knew as soon as it was over she wouldn’t believe it had actually been real at all. It wasn’t the music, the music was good. It was the phantasmagoria of their shadows, looming black, wavering ceiling high on the walls. It was the actuality of their faces, possessed, demonic, peering out here and there on sudden notes, then seeming to recede again. It was the gin and the marihuana cigarettes, filling the air with haze and flux. It was the wildness that got into them, that at times made her cower into a far corner or climb up on a packing case with both feet. Certain ones of them would come at her at times, individually, crowding her back, driving her before them shrinking against the wall, singling her out because she was a girl, blowing their wind instruments full into her face, deafening her, stirring her hair with them, bringing terror into her soul.
“Come on, get up on the barrel and dance!”
“I can’t! I don’t know how!”
“It don’t have to be your feet. Do it with what else you’ve got, that’s what it’s for. Never mind your dress, we’re all friends.”
Phantom lady Page 14
