She walked with one arm holding the flat brown purse to her side. I glanced down and saw how each stride she took molded the flaring skirt to the long line of her thigh.
She was remarkably difficult to talk to. Yet she gave no hint of shyness. Rather, she was almost too self-possessed.
“Do you like Thrace?”
“I haven’t thought of it, Mr. Cameron.”
“I suppose you came here because you knew someone, or someone spoke of it to you?”
She gave me an oblique look. “I looked in an atlas, Mr. Cameron. This was the only city of this size that I had never heard of, never heard mentioned.”
“That seems like an odd thing to do.”
“Doesn’t it?”
Walking with her, through the after-five rush, I was extremely conscious of her, of her effect on others. Men followed her with their eyes, with a sudden look of speculation and hunger. It was difficult to understand why. She was not beautiful. She was not pretty. She dressed very soberly, very quietly: It was like Sam had saidas though she carried a sign.
“Here we are,” I said, in a forced way. I held open the street door. Inside was a narrow white-tiled vestibule with mailboxes and buttons for the apartment bells. Three steps led up to the second door. I unlocked it and held it open for her.
“No elevators,” I said. “I’m on the second floor, though. The people on the fourth floor get their exercise.”
She went up the stairs in a peculiar stride, and I suspected that she could have carried books on her head with no difficulty. I unlocked my door and pushed it open. She went in and stood in the middle of the single room. She turned slowly, and I knew that she saw everything there was to see.
“Look around,” I said heartily. She looked into the kitchenette, into the tiny bath with its shower stall. I said, “It’s sort of gloomy. No view. Of course, I suppose you pay for a view.”
“And lose a sense of privacy, Mr. Cameron.”
“Then you like it?”
“Well enough.” She stood staring at me without expression. My move.
“Won’t you sit down?”
“Thank you.” She walked to the straightest chair in the room and sat down. She opened her purse and took out a pack of cigarettes. I held a light for her.
“Would you like a cocktail? A Martini?”
“Very dry, please.”
My hands and feet felt too big as I went to the battered record player, switched it on. When it warmed up, I started the turntable and the first record dropped from the spindle. Yma Sumac, of the incredible voice. I turned the volume low.
My hands shook as I broke the ice out of the tray into the shaker, measured out the cocktails. I swirled them, poured them out into the two new glasses, carried them in. She took hers gravely. “Thank you.”
I moved a little table closer to her chair, so that she would have a place to set it down.
We seemed to have absolutely nothing to say to each other. She loked mildly, casually expectant, as though waiting for me to entertain her.
“I’ll be giving this apartment up when I get married,” I said.
She raised her glass a bit. “To a lucky marriage.”
“Lucky?”
“Isn’t that the essential ingredient?”
“I’ve never thought of it that way.”
“It means a great deal. Luck. I’ve just been through an unlucky one, Mr. Cameron.”
“Aren’t you Miss Rudolph?”
“Of course. That’s one of the advantages of an annulment over a divorce. The disadvantage, of course, is the lack of any settlement or alimony.”
The glasses were empty. I brought in the shaker, filled them both. Sumac turned softly to Debussy. The drink gave me Dutch courage. “So you came to Thrace to get away from the past?”
She studied her glass. “Not exactly. I can live with the past. I came here to find my luck. I used to have it. I lost it, somehow.”
“How do you lose luck, Emily? I may call you Emily?”
“Yes, Kyle. Have you played dice? Yes? Suppose you are in a big dice game. You have the dice. You win and you let your winnings ride. Then you have a big sum on the table. You feel as though your luck is still with you. You sense it, yet you decide to be practical. You take all your winnings off the table, except for a small amount. And again you win. That is when your luck leaves you. It leaves you because you have not had the sense to take advantage of it.”
“Then, to you, luck is a sort of opportunistic thing.”
“Exactly. You take the chances you see. All of them. You take the risks when you can, whenever you can.”
“Sounds like a pretty exciting way to live, Emily.”
She finished her drink. “It is.”
“How about the school of thought, Emily, that says there is no such thing as luck? That you get where you want to get by hard work, by applying yourself.”
“The modern American myth, Kyle. Horatio Alger started it, I believe. And see what has happened? A hundred thousand Kyle Camerons all applying themselves like crazy, using all the copybook maxims and ending up under a little tin sign that says perpetual care.”
Even in her soft mild voice the words had enough sting to make me flush. And they were too close to what I had felt on Wednesday, the day when I had first heard her voice.
“That’s a pretty cynical philosophy, Emily.”
“Not cynical. Cynicism is for college sophomores and art critics. It’s a practical thing. You learn it by watching people. I learned it by watching my husband. He is a highly respected man. I made a … mistake. I underestimated his ruthlessness when I made my mistake.” She shrugged. “So I had to accept an annulment or he would have had me killed.”
My jaw must have dropped. “What!”
“Oh, Kyle! I know what you’re going to say. Melodrama. Nonsense. The woman is dramatizing herself. The world isn’t like that. But it is. It actually is. One of his people would have done it for him quite neatly.”
“Look, Emily. If you were married to that sort of person, how could you ever be approved by the bonding company so you could get a job in the bank?”
“I told you he is very respectable. And my own record is good. He found me in the accounting department of a Chicago firm. The company makes vending machines. He owns the company. I had just turned twenty. If I hadn’t believed in my luck, I might have agreed to some sort of arrangement with him. Each proposition was more attractive, and the last one was marriage. It was all very nice. Clothes and cars and two homes. A long way to come in twenty years, Kyle. A very long way. When I married him, I still had a lot of rough edges. Emmy Rudolph from Carbondale, Pennsylvania. I made him send me to night school. He used to laugh and laugh.”
“Another drink?”
“I’m talking too much, Kyle. It isn’t the drinks, though. It’s you.”
“Me?”
“You’re a listener, Kyle. You’ve got a nice, stubborn, honest face and good eyes. And I can tell about people. You won’t repeat what I tell you. I don’t even have to ask you to keep it to yourself.”
I made more Martinis. I filled our glasses again. My lips felt faintly numb. I wasn’t used to drinking. Drinking is expensive. You can’t drink and build up a bank balance.
“Tell me about your girl, Kyle.”
“I’ve known her all my life, Emily. She’s little and blonde. She works in an insurance office. Her father works for the railroad. We’ve been saving money for a long time. We’ve got over five thousand dollars now.”
“You’ll be a good husband, Kyle.”
“Sometimes I wonder. I mean, I don’t want to be disloyal to Jo Anne or anything.” I knew I was talking with the slightly pompous air of the medium tight. “But you take a guy. It’s like a gate shutting behind you. Like locking him in, sort of. Maybe all guys feel that way when the marriage date gets closer. I don’t know. I think about standing behind those bars in my little cage and listening to my feet get flat. Sometimes you wonder what you’re
living for. Movies are bad, and magazines are bad. All those people on beaches, without alarm clocks and diapers and the guy coming around to collect on the furniture. Hell, I’m not making much sense, am I?”
Her tone was very low. “You might be making a great deal of sense, Kyle.”
I switched the record stack, and wavered a little. I grinned at her. “Emily, I’m drunk.”
“You don’t look it or act it, Kyle.”
“I feel it. And you know something else? I maybe can’t say this right either. Meeting you. Talking to you. It’s all like in the movies when everybody is acting normal, and all of a sudden the music in the background starts to sound funny and you know something is going to happen and you get up on the edge of the seat. Remember, up by that water fountain? The way you looked at me. That was when the background music started to change. Did you feel it?”
“No, Kyle.”
“What did you feel?”
“That a man with a pleasant face liked the way I looked. And that pleased me, of course.”
“But nothing else?”
“Not then.”
“When?”
“A little while ago, when you were talking about standing behind those bars for the rest of your life. Then it was like a little drum starting. When you talked like that, it didn’t seem to me as though I could take deep enough breaths. And I felt cold, all over.”
“Emily, I read a book about that … what you call it … extrasensory perception. Duke University. Maybe what gives us that funny expectant feeling is that we know our lives are going to be tangled up together.”
She stood up and picked up her purse. She had gone back into herself. She was once again the girl who had met me at the side entrance of the bank. “I’m sorry, Kyle. That can’t be. I won’t permit that.”
“Maybe you can’t stop it.”
The measured smile. “I can stop it. I came here to find my luck. And there’s no luck in you, Kyle. There’s nothing in your life for any woman except a hundred thousand dirty dishes, two tired rosebushes, and a used car. That’s not luck. That’s not for me. That’s where I came in … back in Carbondale.”
She walked to the door. I got in front of her and put my shoulders against the door. “Wait a minute. You said you had the same feeling I did.”
“It’s nothing I can’t forget, if I have to.”
I put my hands on her waist. I felt that if I tried, I could encircle it so that my thumbs and middle fingers would touch. There was heat to her body and it came though the green fabric and it blistered my palms. She neither resisted nor responded. She looked at me with her head a bit to one side. I could have been one of those ads in a bus that she was looking at, while on a long ride.
I pulled her toward me. She had to take a slow step. Smooth flat muscles in her wrist moved under my hands.
“That’s why you asked me here, of course,” she said, without anger.
“What do you mean?”
“Man feeling marriage closing in on him. Campaign to get the new girl in the bank up here for fun and games. A last fling, sort of.”
I let go of her. “No.”
“Now, don’t try to kid yourself, or me.”
“It started that way. You’re right. It started that way. I didn’t know I was being that obvious.”
“Only slightly obvious. You haven’t been a bit clumsy about it, Kyle. But I’ve lived with myself a long time. I know the effect I have on men. A lot of them have tried to explain it to me. It’s sort of an aura of sex. Maybe it has something to do with hormones. Maybe it could be explained in a nasty, glandular way. But you see, so many attempts have been made that I’ve become an expert on appraising them. I knew it, and sensed it, the moment I walked in here. And I knew I wouldn’t play. And … I wished that I could. Your attempt was better than most.”
“And less successful than most, I suppose.”
She permitted herself the millimeter of smile again. “Don’t try to hurt my feelings, Kyle, because I’ve hurt yours. No matter how much I might be attracted to you, I won’t go to bed with you. Call it prostitution, if you want to. But the next man I go to bed with is going to be the man who takes me out of that bank without putting me into a kitchen. He’s going to give me back all the things I lost. But I am … attracted to you, Kyle. There. Feel better?”
“Not much. But a little.”
“We’ll be friends.”
“Oh, sure.”
“Don’t you think we can be?”
“I can’t get you out of my head. And it isn’t friendship. I’ve even … dreamed about you.” I felt my cheeks go hot.
“Poor Kyle.”
“I dont want pity, damn it.”
“I can’t keep you from thinking about me, Kyle. What should I do? Go away to give you a chance to get over it?”
“Don’t go away!”
“Now let me go, please. You’re blocking the doorway. And thanks for the drink.”
I stepped aside. She walked out and went down the stairs. She didn’t look back. When at last her head was below the floor level, I went back in, remembering that we’d come to no understanding about the apartment. The spiced scent of her was still in the air. Cigarette butts with her dark lipstick in the tray. My hands held the memory of the feel of her waist, the body heat against the green cloth. I wanted her to ask me to jump out a window, fall in front of a bus. I wanted to prove to her that I would do anything she asked of me.
I finished the gin and fell asleep, thoroughly drunk and fully dressed.
Chapter Four
A few minutes before the doors were opened Monday morning, Sam Grinter said, “I just saw Tootsie go upstairs. She looks fresh like a daisy. And you, my friend, look like hell. What do they mean, the woman always pays?”
“Lay off, Sam.”
He winked. “Bet she’s got a lot of mink blood, boy. Bet she’d kill a guy in ten easy lessons, eh?”
“Shut up, Sam!” I said.
“Listen to him! If I hadn’t been a pal, you might have missed it altogether. Is that any way to do?”
“Sam, I …”
“Watched her go up those stairs, with that cute little butt swinging like the pendulum on Granddaddy’s clock, and I said nothing is too good for my old pal …”
“Shut up!” I yelled. “For God’s sake, shut up!”
Sam’s jaw dropped and he turned dark red. My shout echoed through the big main room of the bank. Tatley, one of the more influential veeps, stood up at his desk and glared toward the cages. Nairn came hustling over.
“What is all this?” he demanded of me.
“Just horsing around,” I said meekly. “A little too loud, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“Watch that sort of thing, Cameron,” he said coldly.
That’s the hell of working in a bank. You can knock off six years of hard work in ten seconds. In 1960, they’d still be remembering the morning I raised my voice at Sam Grinter. And I could see, just as plain as day, that I would remain a teller until the day they retired me. It wouldn’t matter how many I.C.S. and night-school courses I took. Can’t have a man yelling in a bank. No respect. Better keep an eye on him. I hit the edge of my counter and then looked stupidly at the blood on my middle knuckle.
I knew why I looked like hell. It had been a miserable week end. The talk with Emily had shoved me a little farther along that tangential path that had started on Wednesday.
I had spent the better part of the week end quarreling with Jo Anne as we had never quarreled before. Three times I made her cry, and watched her cry, and took a stolid, sadistic satisfaction in it.
Sunday night, out of remorse, I had tried to patch it all up as best I could, but a lot of damage had been done. Our arguments were over meaningless things. Whether we’d get a new car or a good used car for the wedding trip. How many people we’d have at the reception.
And whenever I had thought of Emily Rudolph, the little drums had started beating in my blood again. She had admitted she was att
racted to me. But there wasn’t a thing I could do to give her what she wanted. Money was in the way. Money I didn’t have, and money somebody else would have.
When I kissed Jo Anne Sunday night and tasted salt on her lips, salt from the tears that had run down her face, tears that I had caused, I felt like smashing my fist against a stone wall.
When I had a chance I said, “Sorry, Sam.”
He didn’t look at me. “Skip it.” He was sore. You see, by yelling at him, I had hurt him with our bosses as well as myself.
“That was a damn fool thing to do,” I said. “Yelling like that.”
“Just drop the subject, Cameron. That’s all. Just drop the subject.”
I knew that bank. Five minutes after I yelled they’d know about it back in the safety-deposit vaults, know it up on the second floor. Ten minutes later the tellers two blocks away in the Chemical Trust and Exchange would know about it.
At eleven o’clock I picked a counterfeit twenty out of a deposit being made by a bar and grill. The depositor was highly indignant. He acted as though I were to blame for recognizing it. It didn’t matter to him that someone had passed it in his place. It was a crude job, and he had been a little too tense as I was counting his deposit. My nerves were so on edge that I nearly blew my top again, caught myself just in time, and turned him over to Tom Nairn.
After lunch I decided that the thing to do was pick up some flowers after work and make a pretty abject call on Jo Anne. Poor kid, she rated it. I’d given her the world’s most sour week end.
I checked out fast and stopped in a florist shop on the way back to the apartment. I picked out three white gardenias. The man quickly twisted them into a corsage and put them in a little transparent box. They looked nice with the little drops of water on the white petals.
While I showered and changed, I left the gardenias in the icebox to keep them fresh. I was going to get all the discontent and nervousness and thoughts of Emily Rudolph out of my head. I wanted, badly, to be the same guy I had been just one week before. And I was going to fight myself back to that state of mind.
It was quarter of six when I went down the stairs with the box in my hand. Just as I went out the street door, a cab pulled up in front and Emily Rudolph got out. My heart gave a wild bound as I thought at first that she had come to see me. But the cab driver pulled two big suitcases, two little ones, and a couple of hatboxes out of the cab.
Weep for Me Page 4
