Woman in the Window

by Thomas Gifford

  But she still saw the curious look her father had. She’d seen it in other men, admiring her. She didn’t need to share their enthusiasm to use it, to get her way. When she’d mentioned such reflections once, Julie hadn’t known what she was talking about. But then Julie didn’t reflect much.

  Now, Natalie smiled at the Jets’ offensive lineman worrying about Julie’s sportfucking. It was precisely the same charge that she had leveled at poor Julie a few months before, and as usual Julie had taken it in her stride, faced it, dealt with it, and said the hell with it—I am what I am. Which she was.

  But Natalie cared for her and consequently worried about whatever fate might lie in wait for her at George Martin or Elaine’s or Maxwell’s or Xenon or … wherever. The Jets’ lineman sounded fine; the prognosis was not therefore terribly promising in Natalie’s view. Julie tended to attract her own kind, or at least those who matched the facade she had constructed. Not enough guys like Don the Jet.

  She believed that Julie had seriously misread the message of the liberation of women, which was not an uncommon fate to befall women of their generation, caught more or less in the middle. The novels, hopeful and angry and bitter and bemused and frequently very funny, crossed her desk with the regularity of White House claims that the economy was turning around. Novels written by bright, literate women trying to decipher the code of the New Woman—and too often there was an unsettling undercurrent of hatred. … Was it too strong a word? Perhaps it was a hatred that the authors might commit to paper but would never act on in the course of life. She certainly hoped so.

  A hatred of men. A stifling, destructive, soul-destroying hatred of half the human race, sometimes written out of justifiable personal experience, sometimes academically ingested prejudice, sometimes merely trendy. But the hatred was there and she couldn’t bring herself to represent the books. One had gone on to rise as high as seven on the Times best-seller list, but she hadn’t regretted turning down its representation. There was something so desperately wrong about it. Something so terribly pornographic, in the truest sense of that trashed word. Jay had wanted to handle the book, had sensed its commercial potential, and they had fought the issue to the wall. Natalie, not one to make theatrical gestures, had made one that day: we take on the book and I leave. In the aftermath she felt foolish, ignorant, stupid, not even sure she wouldn’t have buckled—but Jay had broken first, and the book had gone elsewhere. Where it had made a mint, he never hesitated to remind her.

  Julie …

  She ran some more hot water into the tub, turning the taps with her big toe, soaking up the steam.

  Dammit, it was a dangerous world out there for all the Julies. Rapists, coked-out jerks with too much money, values all backward and running amok … herpes, God forbid! Julie was coming off two divorces and looked upon men as something less than people—though she mustn’t always have been that way. Now, Natalie was sure, Julie was consumed with a deep, boiling hatred of men, their egos, their toughness, their use of women, and was responding by turning herself into a mirror image of them. …

  It was so sad.

  Chapter Four

  SHE MUST HAVE DRIFTED off, came awake slowly. She got out of the tub, ignored her reflection in the mirror, weighed herself—112 pounds, soaking wet—and wrapped herself in a huge towel like a winding sheet. She popped out her contacts, creamed her face, wiped it off, and went to bed.

  The streetlamps shining, a siren going by, the rain still gently falling, soaking the city as the temperature slowly dropped … everything normal. She put on her reading glasses and tried sorting through the stack of books on her bedside table. She couldn’t face the work she’d brought home, nor any of the hot new novels: by and large she slogged through the hot and new as part of her job. The worst part. She took instead Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith, which, like Lucky Jim, always made her laugh.

  But she couldn’t forget the man with the gun, the way he had seemed almost to pose as he threw the gun over the fence … the slow chuckle on the other side of the office door. She shivered at the thought. She didn’t often feel the need to share things: she seemed to end up listening to other people’s lives rather than they to hers, but this was different, she wanted to tell someone. But it had to be the right person. Not Julie, who might use it to push her karate lessons; not Jay, who’d think she was dramatizing everything; none of her other friends … not even Lew, to whom she’d been running with her problems since college. No, there was only one person she could call. She dialed the Staten Island number and hoped. He answered on the fourth ring.

  “Tony,” she said, “it’s Nat. I wanted to thank you for the roses. Really, they meant a lot to me—”

  “And made Jay jealous,” he said. She couldn’t tell if he was smiling, what mood he might be in. “Two birds with one stone.” There was that edge of bitterness: he could never quite get it out of his mind that she was probably sleeping with Danmeier.

  “Well, thanks. They were beautiful.”

  As they talked he softened up, dropping his everlasting guard, stopped assuming the worst of her. He became himself again, at least the self she liked to remember, the self she once had loved. He was writing, working on a novel. She could hear a tape of Tosca playing in the background. She pictured him in the study of the old house, a fire going, wearing chinos and a sweatshirt, smoking a cigar, looking like an overage college senior.

  She told him about the man with the gun, told him all the details that she knew he’d enjoy. When she finished he was silent. “Well? Well?” she prompted.

  “I’m making notes,” he said. “It’s a little weird, Nat. There’s one big hole—”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how can you be sure it was a gun?”

  “Because it looked like a gun.”

  “Sure, and it was dark, it was raining, you’d had your share of champagne, and you were three floors up. Across the street.”

  “It was a gun—”

  “Not until somebody finds it.”

  “So why did the guy come into my building and stand outside the door laughing?” He was making her angry but she was fighting it. He was doing his devil’s-advocate thing and she couldn’t really blame him.

  “You don’t know who was outside the door,” he said, as if to prove her right. “Could have been a delivery boy, a messenger, a clean-up guy, laughing at the frightened lady locking the door just as he gets there—I mean, it could have been.” His patience always seemed so condescending.

  “I say it was a gun and I say he came to the door. And I say you’re full of it!”

  He laughed. “Well, the fact is, you’re probably right—”

  “You admit you’re full of it?”

  “No, I admit it probably was a gun and he probably did come to the door. But it’s also probably over. You went home and he’s hoping to God that’s all there is to it.” He paused. “It makes sort of a nice beginning for a plot—”

  “The author at work! It really happened … but yes, I guess it does. It’s so New Yorky, isn’t it?”

  “That’s what I mean. It’s real, it’s full of hints, and you can make up your own story to go with it. I mean, it’s my kind of pulpy crap, not like the stuff you handle.” He laughed quietly, forcing it. “You know what I mean.”

  “Don’t start on that, Tony. It’s a tired story—”

  “Well, aren’t all my stories tired?”

  “Drop it,” she said.

  “I hear your picture in PW is very sexy. I hear it goes on to say that you are hot—”

  “Tony, I really don’t want to have this part of the discussion.”

  “Ah.”

  She closed her eyes, didn’t respond. There was nothing to say, it was all too old, too complicated, too insoluble, too ratty and dog-eared.

  “Nat, are you there?”

  “Barely. Look, I just wanted to thank you for the roses. I have, so now you can go back to work—”

  “Hey, wait a minute. Are you all r
ight? You’re not upset? I mean, really upset?”

  “If you mean am I having an anxiety attack, no, I don’t think so. If I do I’ll give my keeper a buzz.”

  “Come on, Nat, don’t get snotty. Are you okay?”

  She heard the sudden change, the real urgency and concern.

  “Just tired all of a sudden. The champagne. Look, how’s the work going out there? All you hoped it would be?”

  “Nothing’s ever all you hope it’ll be, Nat.” There wasn’t much more to say, the conversation dwindled away. He was right, of course: nothing ever was quite the way you hoped it would be. Maybe that was the last great secret.

  They had married when Tony Rader was thirty-three, a newspaperman, and she was twenty-seven, just beginning to make her way at the Danmeier Agency. Now he was forty-two, a novelist who made his living grinding out paperback originals, action-series stuff and the odd porno here and there. He’d been working on a novel—the quintessential big novel—since college days and it remained ever in revision, always unsold. Determined not to live off the earnings of his bright, fast-rising wife, he’d let his own view of what he called his “grotty little failures” grow higher and higher, a wall between them.

  Natalie had pressed him endlessly, once they could afford it, to stop writing the pulp novels that he could turn out at the rate of one per month and instead devote all his time to what they called his A-material. But he insisted on paying his own way: if there was time left over, he’d attend to that big novel.

  The result, of course, was that he did the junk work at the expense of the good stuff. Nothing ever turned out to be all you’d hoped.

  The breaking point had come three years ago, when she went too far, tried to help. Without Tony’s knowledge she had taken the most recent revision—the first half of that big novel—along with his carefully worked-out outline of the remainder, and tried to connect it. Perhaps she knew the marriage was doomed on its present course, perhaps she knew there was nothing to lose. Maybe she thought she had a chance with the manuscript. She liked it, she found it a satisfying read, full of strong characterizations, just plain good writing. Maybe she’d been kidding herself. … She hadn’t been able to sell it. Tony had found out she’d tried.

  And that had been the end.

  With their lives and ambitions so hopelessly intertwined, there had been no way to smooth it out. Tony went on and on about being robbed of his manhood, his personal worth, his responsibility for his own life. And Natalie hadn’t been able to figure out what he was talking about. Two people loved each other, they tried to help each other out: it seemed so simple to her, so wildly complex to him. He was threatened by her success, her power over his life: boring, tedious arguments, human. And she felt that if she wasn’t allowed to make a contribution to their life together, what was the point? And he would soar off into flights of self-deprecation, rattling on about his inferiority to her other clients. …

  The old story. No survivors.

  She remembered, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, one of their last evenings together. They had gone to see Harold Pinter’s play Betrayal. Tony had known the music that underscored the play’s most haunting moment: Stan Getz’s recording of “Her.” Once they were no longer together, she had gone in search of the album and found it at King Karol on Forty-second Street. She had bought the album, Focus, and had nearly worn it out in the years since, playing it again and again.

  She lay quietly in bed, chewing her thumb, her face wet with tears. She really had no idea what she was crying about.

  Nothing ever quite being all it was supposed to be?

  Maybe.

  Sir snuggled up in the curve of her leg, tail wagging slowly.

  Finally they slept.

  Chapter Five

  A COUPLE OF DAYS later, the man with the gun already fading in her memory, overtaken by the rush of events at the office, Natalie was slouched behind her desk, her feet cocked up on a lower drawer, shoes off, reading a letter from an angry, disappointed author. It was almost two o’clock, still well within the limits of publishers’ lunches and the only stretch of the day when she wasn’t on the telephone. In a recent attempt to reclaim time for thought, and to read a bit more, she had ruthlessly curtailed her lunch and cocktail calendar: in the past there had been a business lunch every day, drinks or dinner on business four nights a week. Jay said he didn’t believe she could cut it back, said that it would dramatically lessen her effectiveness. She suspected he might be right, but she’d been working too hard, she had to give it a try. And so far, so good. Today she was lunching at her desk. And tonight’s dinner with Lotte was only partially business, she hoped.

  She was trying to deal with an immensely sticky doughnut and a cup of now-cold coffee, trying to dream up a soothing response for the unhappy writer, when the door to her office opened and Jay loomed, filling the space. She looked up in surprise at his failure to knock and saw that he was waving a folded copy of the New York Post at her. As Wodehouse once said, though he may not have looked exactly disgruntled, he was surely far from gruntled. The normal tightness of his expression tended to sag into jowls when he wasn’t happy: she recognized the sag of concern.

  “You look like you’re posing for a statue, Jay,” she said lightly. “Would you like to come in? Or do you just want to wave the day’s news at me?”

  “Very funny,” he growled, entering and laying the paper on her desk. He was just back from the Four Seasons and she couldn’t bear to tell him there was a little spot of something on his blue-and-white-striped shirt. “Your fame spreads, Nat. But if I may offer an opinion, it sounds a little scary to me. …”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Look at Teddy Garfein’s column, my dear.” He stood over her, frowning, staring down at her, making her slightly crazy. There was that fine patina of criticism in his voice and it pissed her off, frankly.

  But that was forgotten when she saw Garfein’s tidbit.

  This week’s hot, glamour-girl literary, deal-maven, Natalie Rader at the Danmeier Agency, had one of those spooky midtown glimpses of the underbelly of life that makes this truly a Wormy Big Apple. Sometimes, anyway. Working late—as deal-mavens always do—our Natalie witnessed what we can only assume is the postscript to a—dare we say it?—murder. Say, how’s that for a title, Nat? Would it play in Peoria? Anyhoo, she saw a gunsel de-gun himself on a Madison Ave. streetcorner, pitch his weaponry over a fence and into a building site! And naturally nobody noticed … but eagle-eyed Natalie. So what’s the upshot? Is there a pistol-packin’ construction foreman now on the loose? Who got blasted in the hours before the gunsel threw his gun away? And can Natalie find someone to turn her glimpse of murders aftermath into a hot property? Ira Levin, where are you when Nat needs you?

  “I don’t believe it,” she said. “How in the name of God—”

  “You mean it didn’t happen?”

  “No, it happened. It was the night we had the party here.”

  “And you didn’t tell me? Christ, Natalie, sometimes I just can’t cope with you—”

  “Why in the world should I tell you about something I saw out the window? I don’t get it—is everybody crazy? What’s this doing in Garfein’s stupid column?” She was breathing too rapidly. She waved a hand as if to eradicate Garfein and knocked over the cold coffee, desperately began dabbing at it with Kleenex. It soaked into the Post. She felt Jay’s eyes boring into her.

  “Well, you told somebody, Nat.”

  “Jay,” she said, trying to hold her voice steady, “why do you come in here looking like the wrath of God and start picking on me? Who do you think you are? And what the hell do you think I’ve done? What’s my crime? I didn’t throw away the gun and I didn’t call the Post—”

  “Somebody did.”

  “So what? It’s my problem, not yours. So why the dark looks, that see-me-in-the-principal’s-office tone? Really …”

  He looked at her and she saw his eyes soften. Her fists were clenche
d in her lap and she knew she’d stuck out her lower lip like a little girl about to cry. She sat there looking up at him, aware of his softening, wondering if she was doing it all on purpose. All her life, the pose had worked. But it wasn’t a pose: it was just her, just the way she looked. Oh, who could figure it out?

  “I’m sorry, Nat,” he said quietly, closing the door behind him. “I didn’t mean to play the heavy.”

  “Well, you should watch it. And you’ve got food on your shirt. Messy eater.” She smiled, felt better.

  “I don’t know, it just worried me, seeing your name in the paper that way.” He stood looking out the window. “Over there, is that where you saw it happen?”

  She nodded, got up, pointed out the spot.

  “The thing is,” he said, “whoever threw the gun away—assuming it was a gun, your eyes must be better than mine—may be wondering right now if you saw him, if you could recognize him—and Garfein put your name in the paper. It’s not funny. Too many freaks out there, and now this particular freak has your name—”

  “So there’s not much I can do about it, is there?”

  He shrugged his massive shoulders. “If you didn’t tell Garfein, who did? Who have, you told?”

  “Only one person, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh, no, not Tony!”

  She nodded. “I had to tell somebody.”

  She saw him almost flinch, the question unspoken: Why not me, Nat, why didn’t you tell me?

  He looked at his watch. “I’ve got an appointment. Look, we’ve got to think of something—some means of keeping an eye on you for a few days. I could call a security firm. Or a detective agency. I don’t want you just wandering around, a sitting duck.” He looked out the window again. “I’ve had some experience with being scared, really scared. It’s not nice.”

  She took his sleeve. “Don’t worry, Jay.” If she had told him the rest of the story, the laughter on the other side of the door, he’d have put her in his pocket and not let her go. “Really, I’m not scared. Maybe it wasn’t a gun—”