Ladies' Night (5 page)

She did.

The room was gone.

The running, the strangers, the deep water, the friends who were no longer friends — all of them were still there.

Relax
, she thought.
Relax and sleep. Because this is all right if you're asleep. But if you're awake you're crazy. Breathe deep
. She closed her eyes.

The images engulfed her, a film running just behind her eyelids.

She submitted.

~ * ~

Eventually, after some time, her sense of desperation faded. The ache remained, and so did the fear and the anger but they were easier to bear now, less at odds with one another, part of a whole. She could open her eyes and the room was as it should have been, back to normal — though she thought that she had never seen shadows so deeply formed and textured. But she preferred to keep them shut now. A man was running from her through the city streets. That, at least, made a kind of sense to her.

So that when it came at last and enveloped her completely, she only thought,
this is not exactly sleep
, and sank slowly into a silent warren of dim nightmares and they did not unduly disturb her.

Outside the wind was rising. She felt it cool her cheeks.

It was her last real sensation.

She — Susan — wife to Tom and mother to Andy, protagonist for thirty-eight years to her own life story, began to disappear.

~ * ~

Elizabeth lay naked on her bed and felt the breeze from the big screened window drift gently over her body, damp with sweat against the fresh sheets. As always after exercising, her body felt tight and strong. The temperature tonight was perfect, cooling, soothing. She stretched; her muscles expanding and then relaxing, tendrils of summer wind reaching beneath her to the small of her back arched against the bed sheets.

She heard laughter outside the window. She got up and looked.

Tom Braun and Dan, the doorman.

As far as she was concerned, the two most attractive guys in the building.

That she was attracted to Dan vaguely pleased her. She'd never been turned on by a black man before and it was nice to know that it was possible. A kind of skewed racism, she supposed, but there you had it.

That she was attracted to Tom didn't please her one damn bit. She was younger than Tom and Susan by nearly twenty years but they were more than neighbors — she considered them friends. She considered Andy a friend too and here she was, more than a little interested in his father.

Not that she would ever do anything about it.

Not while he and Susan were together.

She watched him turn and walk away, headed east toward Broadway. Dan stood at the door, his smile gradually fading, looking out at the street, unaware of her naked in the window a floor above.

In L.A. during the shoot of a low-budget thriller called
Hide and Seek
, her apartment had faced nothing more interesting than the generator. She had missed this one. She had missed watching the cabs pull up through the circular driveway to the three glass doors, the big black limos, watching people come and go, catching snatches of conversation and the sounds of traffic, the rain in the garden, the birch tree brushing against her window.

A second-floor front apartment in New York City. You had only to open a window to let the world inside.

On a still afternoon she could hear singing lessons being given somewhere above her, voices and a firm piano. Across the way a cellist practiced daily.

Sometimes she thought she heard gunfire — though they were probably just backfires. Even this she enjoyed since they held no threat to her directly. Along with the police sirens and fire engines wailing through the streets this was New York to her, its urgency, its drama.

It was good to be home.

Tom was the only problem. A problem she couldn't let
become
a problem.

There had been noises — shouting — coming from their kitchen earlier. She'd gone into her own kitchen for a cup of coffee and she could hear them faintly through the wall. That she could hear them at all meant they were pretty loud. Which meant they'd been lighting again.

She felt awful for Andy.

It wasn't fair. Half the men she met were absolute total fuck-ups and the other half were either gay or married. Same old song.

Tom was a nice man basically. She'd sensed that right away. Maybe not right now, maybe not to himself or Susan or even to Andy sometimes, but she sensed that once he got out of this particular job and into another that would change. A job you hated could turn everything sour.

A man like Tom was temptation.

Because . . . maybe . . . you only had to wait.

Go unpack
, she thought.
Get out of the window. Before somebody sees you up here stark naked and decides to climb a tree
.

Instead of unpacking she sighed and rolled back onto the bed. She ran her hands slowly over the good firm flesh of her stomach. Her skin was dry by now and warm. She remembered that Susan and some of the others had been talking at the party about smelling lollipops or something this afternoon — some kind of candy — asking if she'd smelled it too. But she was still in the air over Kennedy. She smiled mischievously.

If she had a lollipop now, she'd suck it.

Cut it out
, she thought.

It was still early but it had been a long day. She was exhausted.

She closed her eyes and thoughts of Tom came unbidden while she listened to the sounds of the street and the city night. She moved a hand to her breast and felt it pulse with her heartbeat.

You can unpack tomorrow
, she thought.

To hell with it
.

A short time later she fell asleep.

At the corner of 69th Street, Tom waited while a black stretch limo went by, and then he crossed the street. The entrance to the Burnside — a high-rise much like his own — was busy at the moment, not just the usual tenants coming and going but couples lounging against the big red-brick planters and a steady flow of well-dressed yuppies moving through the revolving doors. Somebody was throwing a party.

He passed a furniture store and a lighting store, long-necked chromium lamps peering out through the windows like spacecraft from
War of the Worlds
. Across the street the vegetable market and butcher shop were still open and doing good business. The beauty parlor and Japanese restaurant next to them would probably fold with the next rent-hike.

On the center strip of fenced-in scraggly grass and trees that divided Broadway a drunk was doing a tap dance for the amusement of the passers-by.

He passed a drugstore, a Baskin-Robbins and a McDonald's. On the northwest corner of 71st Street in front of a bar, two young cops were trying to pull a middle-aged woman into their cruiser. They couldn't seem to get hold of her. She kept flapping her arms like some huge gawky flightless bird. A crowd was gathering, smiling, laughing. Tom stopped for the light and watched them.

The woman's blue summer suit was expensive and so were the high-heel shoes. A Bloomingdales bag sat beside her on the curb. At the moment she was using the shoes against the cops, trying to kick them where it would do the most good. So far they were managing to avoid her. Then she dropped the purse off her shoulder, swung it and hit the cop on her left full in the face.

Thwack.

Good leather.

"Shit!" said the cop and grabbed himself a fistful of summer suit, pulling her backward by the shoulder and forearm while his partner went for her thighs, lifting her off the ground. A homeless guy opened the back door of the prowl car for them with a flourish and they shoved her inside.

Summer in the City.

The woman was calling them every name in the book, banging on the windows, mad as hell. The cop she'd hit in the face climbed into the driver's seat while the other cop retrieved her
Bloomie's
bag and slid into the passenger side. They drove away.

He crossed 71st Street, passed a rollerblade shop, a jewelry store, a restaurant, a
Photomat
, a natural food store, and a vegetable market. At a kiosk at 72nd Street he bought himself a
Post
, in case there was nothing doing at the bar, and a pack of
Winstons
. The girl who ran the kiosk was very pretty, with long brown silky hair. He'd seen her there before and wondered how a woman that good-looking wound up in a street-peddler's job. He glanced at the headline of the
Post
.

He turned left on 72nd Street, wondering what the hell
that
was all about.

There were still a few cigar-chomping old men in front of the OTB discussing the day's action. The TV sets were still on in the window of 72nd Street Electronics, Murphy Brown hauling her new baby into the office on a dozen screens. Across the street the mannequins in
Areil
posed
lubriciously
in silk camisoles, negligees and lace bodysuits — bringing Elizabeth, similarly attired, right to mind.

Hands off
, he thought.
Both physically and mentally.

Enough. You've got enough problems as it is.

You bought into her
, he thought.
Into Susan. The problem is not Susan but that you're too damn young to have a family. You didn't buy into them and supporting them in a job you hated
. Much as he loved Andy.

It felt too damn much like the end of things.

A light was still on in the mystery bookstore between the butcher shop and the travel agency. He'd worked in a bookstore once as a teenager one summer and knew the light on this late meant they were probably taking inventory inside.

Beside the bookstore was a fish market and beside the market was
MacInery's
.

Class
, he thought.

His favorite bar was next to a fish store.

He peered through the plate glass window. It looked pretty lively. Bailey was behind the bar and he recognized a few of the regulars. He saw that the women were out in pretty good number.
MacInery's
was a neighborhood place and women tended to feel comfortable there. So instead of the usual New York quota of, say, four guys to every woman,
MacInery's
ratio was more like two to one, and sometimes it was dead even. He folded his
Post
, tucked it under his arm and pushed open the door.

The jukebox blared. Bailey glanced up from behind the bar and smiled.

The crowd opened up for him like a mouth always hungry for more and he moved on inside.

For a weekend summer night the streets were quiet.

At the World Cafe and the Aegean on Columbus and at the trendier China Club uptown at the Beacon Hotel on Broadway the crowds were still thin and would remain so until about midnight.

Further uptown, at Pearlie's on 84th Street, a young, early drunk stumbled on his way out the door — but here the long narrow
barspace
was already so crowded with people drinking, shouting over the music, hustling one another, that there was nowhere for him to go. The drunk stayed upright, blinking, spilling the beer of the guy in the cowboy shirt in front of him.

Over on Amsterdam, the well-dressed, polite young crowd at Sweetwater were waiting for the show to start — Thelma Houston —and listening to a Marvin Gaye song on the juke in the meantime.

On the streets the traffic was light, pedestrians few.

~ * ~

The wino on the center-strip divider of Broadway at 69th had quit tap dancing. Now he was sitting on a bench, waiting for the right woman to pass by, a suitable target for attack. His attack was always the same. "
When
ya
gonna wake up and smell the coffee?
" he'd growl. The words seem to yap inside him like hostile puppies. Without a woman around they could not get out. He needed to be free of them but without the appropriate woman he could not. He pulled on the dark brown bottle and watched and waited.

Inside McDonald's, Jim "
Jumma
" Jackson entered and looked around and sauntered to the counter. The girls behind the counter smiled at him.
Jumma
was a handsome man. He ordered three Big Macs and a chocolate shake, large order of fries.

He carried the plastic tray to his table and sat down, arranging his coat so that the gun lay flat in his raincoat pocket against his leg and would not dislodge itself accidentally. He was not at all nervous. The nervousness would come later, when he went back to the counter and pulled the gun. For now he just looked around.

An old woman sat muttering to herself a few tables back. Homeless, all her shit stuffed into shopping bags at her feet. He watched her pick at the ulcerous sores on her legs, scratch her dirty face.

No trouble there.

No trouble anywhere he could see.