NINE
“OUT ON THE CATWALK ITS PRETTY NARROW, and if it’s windy up there, like today, it sways. Not a lot, but if you’re off balance, or a little funny about heights … Janine, are you there? Hey, Janine?”
The young man whose name was Michael Mancuso frowned across the table at the girl. She gazed back at him with a look of puzzlement, as if possibly she didn’t recognize him.
“Hey, Janine, am I interrupting anything?” The young man sat at the dinner table in a shirt of blue denim, open at the collar. He was thin and fair and radiated the sort of bouyant vitality that comes not merely from a soundness of the body but of the spirit as well. Though his manner was rough, there was a crude nobility to it.
“Are you still with me, or does my dinner conversation put you to sleep?”
“I’m here. I’m here.”
“Good. I hate to interrupt anything.”
“I’m here, I said.”
He cast a long, skeptical look her way. “Then what did I say?”
“Oh, Jesus. Are we gonna have a quiz now?”
“No quiz. Just tell me what I was just talking about.”
“Go to hell.”
“See?” He gave a triumphant laugh.
“You were saying something about the job up on Seventy-third Street.”
“Yeah. What about it?”
The girl grew flustered and angry. She tossed her napkin into her plate and started to rise.
“Hey, forget it,” he said, waving her back to her seat. “I don’t have to be cross-examined.”
“Who’s cross-examining you?”
“Not by you. Not by anybody.”
“Forget it,” he said, his voice lower and his manner placative. “I was just kidding. Tell me what you did today.”
“Nothing special,” she snapped. “I did nothing special. And you were just saying something about how you were working high up on the site today. And how the wind was blowing and how there was nothing under you.”
His face glowed and he held up his hands as if in defeat. “Okay, okay, I was wrong. So forget about it now. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t ever try that again, Mickey,” she said.
“Try what?”
“Checking up on me like that. Cross-examining me. ‘Cause if it’s gonna be like that, we can just forget the whole thing.”
He stared back at her a moment, still chewing a bit of meat, then finally swallowing it. He put his knife and fork back on his plate with a stiff, rather formal deliberation. When at last he spoke, his voice was almost a whisper. “Forget what?”
Instantly, she caught the wary edge, the sudden darkening of his brow, and saw the unmistakable signs of the squall line moving rapidly toward them.
“Forget what, Janine?”
“Nothing. Forget it, I said. Forget Christmas. Forget the whole thing.”
He sat there, elbows on table, hands clasped before him, his tongue playing with a fragment of food lodged between his teeth. “Hey, listen — I’m confused. Could someone tell me, please, what we’re fighting about?”
“Who’s fighting? I’m not fighting. You’re the one doing all the fighting.”
He threw up his hands in despair. “I just thought you’d be interested in this experience I had sixty floors above the street. It was sort of spirituallike. I thought you’d be interested.”
“I was listening. I told you what you said, didn’t I?”
“Sure,” he said, puzzled and looking hurt. “Sure you did.” He rose and crossed around the table to where she sat, then knelt in front of her with his big laborer’s hands placed lightly on the sides of her thighs. “Hey, listen, I’m sorry. You haven’t touched your supper. Something’s wrong.”
“Nothing’s wrong.”
His hand rose to her cheek. She swatted it aside like a fly.
“You wanna cry?” He could see the tears damming up behind her eyes. “Cry. Go ahead and cry.”
That was enough to unbind her. The dam broke. Deep, racking sobs shook the wispy, girlish frame.
He lifted her from the chair like some small, badly damaged thing and led her, docile as a child, across the room to the canvas couch, the only sitting area in the sparsely furnished room. She sat stiff and robotlike, permitting herself to be guided down onto the couch. When at last he’d settled her there, he sat beside her and took her into his big, comforting arms. “Is it me?” he asked. “Is it something I done?”
Still sobbing, her face crushed against his chest, she shook her head back and forth.
“Is it that you don’t wanna get married anymore?” He probed gently. “Or maybe, you just wanna think it over a little more? Put it off awhile? That’s no big deal. We can still cancel the hall.”
Again the head shook no.
“Well, what is it, for Chrissake? Something’s wrong. This isn’t you.”
She lay there sprawled against him, the clean, comforting smell of wood and plaster rising from his clothing and enveloping her.
“It’s nothing you did,” she said after a while, swiping at her eyes and trying to catch her breath. “Nothing you did.”
He regarded her skeptically. “Something’s wrong, Janine. Something’s up. I can see that. You been jumping down my throat all week. It’s like, whatever I say is wrong.”
“It’s not your fault, I said. It’s …”
“It’s what? What is it? You gotta tell me. If we’re gonna be a team, we can’t have any secrets. Now tell me, is it …” He paused, making an expression of profound distaste. “It’s not some other guy, is it?”
She looked at him with the most desolate expression. “It’s nothing like that.”
His face brightened. Once again his manner was buoyant and cocky. “Well, then, what the hell is it?”
Her wet eyes strayed off, across the room and out the window. Her lips pursed hard, and a fierce, tiny throbbing pumped at her throat. “I can’t, Mickey. I can’t tell you.”
He made a clicking sound with his tongue and started to rise.
“No, wait.” She tugged at his sleeve, pulling him back down. “I want to tell you something. But it’s … hard.” Tears spilled down her cheek. “This all happened a long time ago. And when you hear it, I’m sure it’ll all sound pretty strange to you.” As she spoke, it had very much the sound of the start of a children’s fairy tale. There’d be witches and ogres, good fairies and bad. “I’ve already told you a lot about how it was when I was growing up. I mean, it was no bed of roses. But at least I’ve been honest about it. I never tried to make it any prettier or no better than it was. But …” Her voice trailed off a moment. “There were some parts I left out.”
She watched him as she spoke, noting on his features the shift of expression as the intent of her words registered. “Before, when you asked me if it was another guy …”
“Oh, jeez. Here it comes.” He put up his hands before him as if to ward off a blow.
“Well, it was,” she blurted, then hastened to add, “But not the way you think.” She pushed the hair out of her eyes. “I’m going to tell you this now and I want you to remember that it was long ago, and I was very young. And stupid. I wanna tell it all to you. Everything. When I’m finished,” she swallowed hard, “then you tell me if you still wanna do Christmas.”
He started to protest, but she silenced him with two fingers pressed firmly to his lips. “Now just shut up and listen and try to understand.”
TEN
CLAIRE PELL TURNED IN HER BED. IN THAT gray, shadowy place between sleep and waking she was vaguely aware of a noise. It seemed to her that it had started to rain and that it was the sharp, sudden impact of an incipient downpour pelting the skylight that had roused her.
It had been unnaturally warm, even for that time of year. An hour or so before, she’d been up to open the glass sliders that led off her bedroom and out onto the deck, so that now a soft, briny wind came soughing in off the gently lapping surf not far beyond, fluttering the sheets about her.
Beside her, her husband lay in profound slumber, his deep, rumbling snores conforming to the quiet rise and fall of the sea outside. Something — she couldn’t be sure what — made her dimly aware of a presence. It may have been a movement or, possibly, even a slight upward variation in heat emanating from a source nearby. Not a presence exactly, for even in that drowsy, halfconscious state, her mind discounted such a possibility. What she felt was more a kind of shift of physical conditions within her immediate vicinity. It produced in her a quickening of the senses, akin to the pricking of an animal’s ears in the presence of a predator.
She lay on her side, fully still, eyes shut, convinced she’d only imagined something close by. Beside her she could feel the long, withdrawing sighs of her husband, somehow far away. Along with that came the disquieting sense of feeling suddenly very much alone.
There was another movement, barely perceptible, but one in which the cool, uncarpeted floor made a soft, furtive sound, as if a sandal or a slippered foot had whispered across it. When her eyes opened, they didn’t open at once. Slowly, the thick, wet gray of predawn crept across her eye and, through the moist cage of her lashes, she was at once aware of a gray shape partially blocking the light between her bed and the deck beyond.
It was the displacement of light, a darkness where she was unaccustomed to seeing one, that made her eyes open fully despite her strong disinclination to do so.
She was not alarmed when she saw the face. It was not remarkable in any way, and even the incongruity of its presence there at that moment did not immediately strike her.
It was a dark, rather Mediterranean face, framed in an aureole of dark, curly hair. The impression it gave was something akin to that of a youthful fisherman one might see on a wharf in Naples. It was only when he saw her staring up at him that he smiled. At that moment, something crooked, off kilter, and vaguely brutal drifted across his features. Still smiling, he stooped over and lay a finger gently on her lips in a silencing gesture. The touch of that finger made her bowel turn.
She lay there mute, unmoving, docile as a child, staring up at him. Eyes now fully open, she could feel the pressure of the finger on her lips slowly increase until at last it started to hurt; until that single finger bearing down hard had the effect of pinning her head to the pillow, while all the time he continued to smile down at her.
Mr. Pell still slept. The long, sighing exhalations of his breathing conveyed a message of profound peace. The figure spoke to her now. That is, the lips moved and formed words, but no sound came.
Lifting his finger from her lips, the person suddenly rose from his slight crouch above her. For a moment he stood there, smiling down at her. Then, still smiling, he turned, and, holding her transfixed with his eyes, he circled around the bed. She could still feel the imprint of his finger on her lips and the cold numbness there after he went. Where it had been, a puffy, bruised welt had appeared, along with a thin crescent of blood where his fingernail had pierced the flesh. She could still smell the finger, too, a strangely feral smell, like a dog wet from the rain.
She lay there on her side, still watching him out of the corner of her eye. With the absence of any variation in its expression, the smile had a fixed, unreal look, a smile painted on the face of a child’s doll. His gait as he went had a light, jaunty bounce to it.
Hearing the slow, rattling snores of Mr. Pell behind her, she knew precisely where the stranger was headed. She might have easily cried out at that point, yet so great was her terror, nothing in the world could have compelled her to do so.
In a moment he’d passed beyond her field of vision, leaving in his place the view of a spider tracking sideways up the opposite wall. As it grew lighter, she kept watching the spider with an awful fixity, as though by sheer power of concentration she could nullify the existence of all else taking place about her.
The sudden sag of the mattress at her back coincided with a startled shudder, terminating in a quick, strangled yawp. There was the sense of some brief, feeble flutter behind her, followed by the squeal of compressed bedsprings being released. Then it was quiet.
All of that occurred while she kept her eye fixed on the spider, intent on its sideward peregrinations, first upward, then elaborately reversing itself in a half-turn and starting back down.
She knew that something had happened behind her and that something of a large order was about to happen to her. But she could neither move nor cry out, nor get her mind to bear for long on anything but the movements of the spider on the far wall.
Lying there, listening to the awful absence of any new sound behind her, her body grew rigid as a board while she waited in sickening anticipation for something to happen. Soundlessly as the figure had drifted out of her field of vision, just as soundlessly did it reenter there. It came, neither slow nor fast, but with that jaunty, rather bouncing gait. Like a shadow boxer, the figure appeared to float, swinging its arms loosely as though pummeling the air before it.
She felt him there above her before she actually saw him. It came to her in the form of a terrific heat, an animal heat, radiating out of the figure through its clothing. And then once more the smell — the wet dog smell. And he was there again smiling down at her, that curious, fixed smile in which the whole face smiled except the eyes, which were doing something quite different. And then, too, that crooked, off-kilter cast to the features, which she thought was due to crossed eyes.
He was holding a knife, the blade of which she could see was spattered a vivid red. He laid it down with the most exquisite tenderness beside her head on the pillow, so close that she could feel the heat of its hasp near her cheek. The slightly ferrous odor of blood rose from its blade. The next moment he was unbuckling his belt, smiling down on her that fixed, unsmiling smile. He never spoke once but, stooping slightly, inserted both hands with an odd fastidiousness into her mouth, prying the jaws open.
She didn’t actually faint, although the effect of what she did do was comparable to that. She remained fully conscious throughout, but some natural inner safety mechanism, like a fuse cutting off an overload, mercifully withdrew her from the place. Out of the corner of her eye, she became aware of a dark, scything motion, then of an uncomfortable pressure of weight on her chest, and of noises at her ear, fierce guttural grunts, whisperings of half-spoken words — oaths, obscenities, and then numbers, long unbroken series of them, incantatory, like a chant. It seemed to her that she smelled rubber, too. The smell of rubber was inside her mouth, inside her head, but what was happening to her at that moment, mercifully, she had no idea.
Suddenly the oppressive weight on her chest was gone. The figure stood above her again, adjusting his clothing, all the while holding her in his smiling gaze. The knife he’d placed on the pillow beside her head was again back in his hand. The hand holding it had started to move in long, languid, sweeping arcs toward her.
Her scream coincided with the doorbell ringing. More accurately, she had no idea which had triggered which, or if indeed they were simultaneous. She came to believe that it was the doorbell, a loud, brash rattle of a bell, preceding her scream by a millisecond, that had shaken her loose from her terrified trance. The sound tore from her — not actually a scream but something else; something guttural and gagging. It rose from somewhere deep inside her, hurting her throat.
In the end, it saved her life. That cry, and the harsh, rude rattle of the bell clattering through the bird-twittering calm of a Sabbath morning, deflected the intruder.
At last she did faint. It came with a slow diminishment of light, like the iris of a camera closing. Just as the light went out entirely, she saw a dark figure fleeing like some large bird through the open glass sliders, and heard until she could hear no more the frantic, unrelenting racket of the doorbell dying in her head.
“Up to your old games again, eh, sonny? Radio’s full of your escapades.”
The old lady came padding around the big old nineteen-thirties electric range that sat like a derelict car wreck square in the
middle of a space that might have been a kitchen, but could just as well have been anything else. There was about the room more the look of a shabby, somewhat disreputable curio shop than a place in which meals were prepared and served. A big square area crammed with junk and refuse, the room was pervaded with a sour haze of decomposing food and cat smells. Innumerable cat bowls with dry, hardened food littered the linoleum floors. Plates containing the remains of meals consumed weeks ago still littered the sinktop, already mantled over with a lacy green mold.
All about were windows, tall and stately, grimed with the dust of decades. Gazing out on the world through them gave the impression of peering through gauze. The shape of objects beyond the panes was a mottled, formless blur.
Short and stout, compact as a coal stove, with a face beet red, Suki Klink lumbered about the room, weaving her way through the intricate clutter with an agility that belied her sixty-some-odd years.
In truth, you couldn’t really tell her age. Her skin had a pink, scrubbed, infant quality, although she seldom washed it. On first glance she gave the impression of something put together out of large quantities of undifferentiated rubbish — jackets, sweaters, long, voluminous skirts layered one atop the other, from beneath which a pair of brand-new boxy, blue-white Nike sneakers showed below the numerous hems.
On her head she wore a toque hat set at a dizzy angle, a prize she’d plucked from a trash bin outside a theatrical costumer’s shop on the Upper West Side. Accessorizing the entire ensemble was a pair of Walkman headphones wired to her ears, from which she rarely disconnected herself even when she was sleeping. Yet she seemed oblivious to the incessant din of music blaring in her ears as she went about putting together some semblance of a meal, all the while keeping up a steady stream of reasonably coherent gab. When she spoke, it was through a choking haze of smoke wafting upward from the stubby little cigarillo inevitably screwed more or less dead-center into her mouth.
Shadow Dancers Page 8
