Into The Night (9 page)

"Was that what I called your song? Yeah, I guess it was."

"And if I came up with something decent, you'd get first crack at it. Since you'd be helping me with it, you could even be coauthor, in case the song turned out to be a big hit and other singers covered it."

Dell shook her head. "I thought I was good at building castles in the air," she said. "You not only build them, you turn around and start renting out rooms. Here you haven't even written the song yet and you've got it on the Top Forty and the two of us splitting the royalties. What is it you want, exactly? I hope you're not looking to move in here because I don't want roommates."

"Just a key to the apartment," Madeline said. "I'd call first, to make sure you weren't home."

"I should hope so. The last thing I need is somebody walking in at the wrong moment."

"I'd be very careful," Madeline said dutifully.

"All right, it's a deal," Dell said. "You can have my duplicate key. On one condition. Anything missing it's understood you take direct personal responsibility for and make good on it."

"I agree," Madeline said.

"Here's the key, then." Dell went over to her dressing table, opened a drawer, took the key out, and tossed it into Madeline's lap.

"I'm not Sandy Claus," she let her know. "I might get a good workable song out of this yet, at that. For peanuts."

After a good thorough wall-to-wall casing on the occasion of her first two visits in Dell's absence, which revealed very little or nothing that she didn't already know, she didn't bother going there with any great regularity anymore. Paradoxically, and against all expectation, she found she stood to learn a great deal more when Dell was present, sousing and chattering away, than from her muted--and carefully sterilized--surroundings when she was absent. They had nothing to tell, no voice in which to tell it. What could they show her? A double strip of purple stamps in a desk drawer. A bottle of amber Chanel on a dressing-table top. A jigger of aspirin on a medicine cabinet shelf. A quart of the ubiquitous Canadian Club in the refrigerator, along with a sixpack of Heineken for those who were tapering off. Even her little blue booklet for telephone numbers, hanging by a loop beside the instrument itself, was chastely discreet. A liquor store. A music publisher. An all-night delicatessen, for those four-in-themorning snacks--with whom? The place where she bought her shoes. Not a personal name in it.

Smart; she must have kept them all in her head.

People didn't seem to write to Dell to any very great extent. Not because they were afraid to, probably, as much as because the world in which she and they moved was too swift to wait for letters to catch up. A phone call said everything that needed to be said. Yesterday's keenness for a get-together, by the following day might already have cooled to disinterest, or somebody else might have come along in the meantime.

There were no photographs of the two principals in her present life, nor of her former husband either, the man who had later married Starr, but then this last wasn't to be wondered at. She'd probably torn them all up at the time of the debacle.

There was a whole row of medical bills, all from the same doctor. The first just had the amount. The second had "Please" added to it in handscript. The third bore an imploring "Third notice." The final one had the sum x-ed off, and the notation "How about tonight?" in its place.

"So that's how she took care of that," Madeline caught on with a sudden flash of wry insight.

She left little notes on the piano a couple of times after having been there. "Was here. Had workout. Mad." And one time, just to make it sound plausible, "Is 'The Blues I Get from You' a good title?"

The next day there was a curt answering note from Dell, left in the same place. "Can it. I don't do blues, remember? If you're going to work at my piano, do material I can use, at least!"

Madeline thumbed her nose at it.

Madeline knew a time would come when she'd start talking about her former husband, and that time came. If a woman loves a man, she is bound to talk about him sooner or later to her confidante. If a woman hates a man, she is equally bound to talk about him sooner or later. She wouldn't be a woman if she didn't. She wouldn't have loved, she wouldn't have hated, if she didn't.

Madeline bided her time, threw out no leads, dropped no hints, planted no verbal traps. It would be freer, fuller, if it came by itself. It came by itself.

She was browsing through sheets of music one day, looking for something new to break into her repertoire. She came to one and she started to hum her way through it. Then she broke off and put it down so sharply it almost amounted to slapping it against the piano top. Madeline looked up at the sound. She could make out the title on the cover, upside down, from where she was. "That Old Feeling."

"No good?" she asked.

"Too good," Dell said. "It's more than a song, it's an actual experience. I know, because I've been through it. I saw you last night, and I got that old feeling." She turned to Madeline. "What the hell," she said. "You don't want to hear this."

"Yes, I do."

"Why? Just because I pick up some sheet music and get in a mood? That doesn't mean I have to tell you a sad story and bring us both down."

"Sometimes it helps to tell it to another person, whatever it is," Madeline said. "To get it off your own chest."

"And onto yours instead? What's the point?"

"That's what friends are for."

"Don't give me that," Dell snapped. "I don't know what friends are for, but it's not to listen to all the garbage people got locked up in their hearts. Maybe it's what psychiatrists are for, but not friends. So why should you listen? What's in it for you?"

Madeline shrugged. "Maybe I'll get a song out of it."

"A song?"

"Or an idea for a song."

"I told you," Dell said. "You don't get the good ideas by looking inside other people. You get 'em by looking inside yourself."

"Maybe looking inside other people, or listening to what's inside other people, is a way I can find out what's inside myself."

Dell thought about that. "Yeah," she said after a moment. "That makes sense. Well, I can stand it if you can. But I'm warning you, you might want to pick up a violin and accompany me. It's that kind of a story."

"Sad, huh?"

"It's the story of a marriage," Dell said. "There are two kinds of marriages. Bad ones and imaginary ones, because the real ones aren't good and the good ones aren't real." She shook her head. "I don't know where to start."

"How did the two of you meet?"

"We first met at the mail desk of the Eastland Hotel in Portland, Maine. We were both up there on our time off. All I wanted was my key. Instead, the clerk handed me a message. Before I even looked at it I said, 'This can't be for me, I don't know anyone in this town!' I was right. It was for some Swede named Miss Nilson and they'd put it in the wrong box. The 'i' was looped, looked like an 'e.'

"He smiled at me, and I let him. He began to talk, and I let him. I liked him almost from the minute he first began to talk. Before we separated he said, 'Now you can't say you don't know anyone in this town anymore.'

"The next night he came over to me in the lobby, and took me into one of the lounges, and bought me a drink. The night after, he bought me dinner. When time was up, we came back to the city separately, but we had arranged to meet again after we returned, and we did. By that time, I was in love with him already. He wasn't in love with me, I see that now. I was the one way out in front all through the whole thing. But we both made the same mistake: we both mistook my love for him, for a return love on his part. When he kissed me, he was only answering my kisses, not giving me originals. When he held me in his arms, he was only completing the half circle of my own embrace. On the strength of this illusion, we got married; he said the words, I put them into his mind.

"It was a bad risk from the start. I was safe only as long as he still hadn't come up with a love of his own. When he did, and it hit him, I was all screwed up.

"It hit him about two and a quarter years after we were married. Twenty-seven months; that would be about right. We got along very well, those first twenty-seven months. He didn't even know he didn't love me. For that matter, I even forgot about it myself, I was so taken up in loving him.

"I can't pinpoint exactly when she came along, I'm not that good. She didn't break one of these electronic beams that open or close a door, her arrival wasn't that precisely registered. But somewhere between the twenty-sixth and the twenty-eighth month she came along.

"The one thing I can't explain now is -how- I knew. There was some subtle change in him. I knew what it was then, and looking back now I know that I knew then, but I still can't say how I knew, any more than I could at the time.

"She was young, I knew that about her too. I saw him glance at a girl of eighteen or nineteen when I was with him on the street one day. He wasn't interested in her per se, it was a speculative look, so I knew that he must have been comparing her to this other one, and I knew by that that this other one must be around the same age, eighteen or nineteen. Even in a love affair, detective work can be brought into play.

"Pretty soon I knew everything about her, everything but her actual face and her actual name. I knew almost as soon as it happened when they had begun loving up together.

"I used to sit by the hour, thinking, Maybe there's still some way I could win him back. Maybe it's not too late even yet. It's happened before. It's happened to others. Why not to me?

"Yes, but how? I'd say to myself each time. How? I was never able to get past that 'how?'

"Then one night something happened that gave me an idea, and I thought I saw the way. I was sitting there alone, watching TV and yet not paying any attention to it, both at the same time, when the phone rang. It was a man, and he had the wrong number. He asked if Miss Somebody-or-other was there. I said, 'Nobody by that name lives here.' It turned out our two numbers were identical but for the two last digits, and even those were the same but in opposite order. He'd gotten them transposed, and gotten me by mistake. He excused himself and got off, and that's all there was to it.

"But I started to think about it, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt it might be the very thing I'd been looking for. Jealousy. Try jealousy. Patience hadn't worked, lack of opposition hadn't worked. If I raised hell and stormed at him, I'd only lose him all the quicker. But maybe jealousy would do the trick. Maybe if he felt that somebody else wanted me, even though he no longer did, I would look good to him again. Men were funny that way: what the other guy didn't want, they didn't want either; there must be something the matter with it. What the other guy wanted, they wanted too; there must be something good about it. They were like sheep. Or I suppose I should say, wolves.

"It took me almost a week to get up enough courage to try it. I thought about it all the time, but I still didn't do anything about it. I used to try to visualize his face on the night he would come home and find out I'd been carrying on behind his back. Stunned, first. Then angry. Maybe he'd even slap me. Maybe he'd swear me out, call me all those low-down names they call their women when they catch them cheating. I hoped so, how I hoped so. Anything, anything would be better than this indifference.

"On the day of the night that he would next be seeing her (and I told you, I was as sure of them as I was of my own birthdays) I went out and bought a few necessary props, I guess you might call them. Things I didn't habitually buy.

"I went into a cigar store and I asked the clerk for the name of a good, expensive brand of cigar.

"Garcia y Vega,' he said. 'Twelve-fifty a box.'

"'I don't want a whole box,' I said. 'Just let me have two.'

"He put them into a small bag for me and remarked, 'Your husband's going to like these.'

"My husband, I said to myself, is -not- going to like these, is what I hope.

"From there I went into a package store and bought a half pint of bourbon, which was the smallest amount I could get. Since it wasn't intended for drinking, there was no use spending too much money on it.

"I tried to think of what else might conjure up a fictitious masculine presence, but nothing further would come readily to mind. I was determined to make this as realistic as possible, no holds barred.

"There was a little elderly man, well, I should say about sixty, on the late-afternoon to late-evening elevator shift in our building. All the others were youngsters. I went outside to the hall and rang for him, after he'd come on, and handed him the two cigars with one of the strangest requests I bet he'd ever had yet from a woman tenant.

"Smoke these,' I said, 'but be sure you bring me back the butts. I want -both- butts back. And not too--er--soggy, if you can help it.'

"He did a very good job of covering up whatever surprise he must have felt. 'Will tomorrow be all right?' he asked. 'I'll smoke one when I get my coffee break at six, and I'll save the other for tonight when I get home--'

"No, no, no!' I said quickly. 'I've got to have them -both- back, and no later than five-thirty. You'll have to work it out the best you can.'

"It's kind of heavy smoking,' he said dubiously.

"I went inside and got the rest of the stage setting ready. I got out two highball glasses and poured about an inch of the whiskey in each one. Then I stood them side by side, very close together, on our knee-high refreshment table in the front room. Then I filled a big bowl with ice cubes, and ran hot water over them from the faucet, so they looked like they'd been slowly melting away for hours. Then I got hold of all the cushions in the room and scattered them all around that one particular place on the sofa Opposite where the drinks were, throwing some on the floor, to make it look like there'd been quite a hot thing going on there.

"I went into the bedroom and I took particular pains with the bed. I pulled it all apart first, so that it looked like an earthquake had hit it. Then I telescoped the two pillows one on top of the other, and kept punching my hand into them until I had a big hollow in their centers. Then I got out a pair of my pink nylon underpants and shoved them down underneath between the sheets, but letting them show just enough. I mean, even beds that had had it happen didn't look that realistic.