The Blunderer (10 page)

She sounded so pleasant, though, that Walter smiled. “Maybe I can help you,” he said. “Can I come over? I'm not far away.”

“Well—if you can stand a mess.”

“What's the address?”

“Brooklyn Street, one eighty-seven. The bell's under Mays. M-a-y-s.”

He rang the bell under Mays. When the release buzzer sounded he thrust the door open and climbed the stairs two at a time, clutching the champagne bottle under his arm like a football. In his other arm he carried a bag from the delicatessen.

Ellie stood in an open door on the second floor. “Hello,” she said. “Welcome.”

Walter came to a nervous stop in front of her. He held out the paper bag. “I brought a few sandwiches.”

“Thank you! Come on in—but I doubt if you'll find a place to sit down.”

He came in. It was a single large room with two windows on the street side, and in the back a hall that led to kitchen and bath. He glanced around at the clutter of suitcases and cardboard cartons. There were two violin cases, one battered and one new-looking. He followed her into the kitchen.

“And this,” he said, handing her the champagne bottle. “It isn't cold. The refrigerator just happened to be broken in the Benedict liquor store tonight.”

“Champagne? What's this in honor of?”

“The new apartment.”

She held the champagne bottle as if she appreciated champagne. There was nothing that would serve as an ice bucket. Ellie got a bath towel from one of the cartons in the living room and wrapped the bottle and two trays of ice cubes in the towel.

“Would you like a Scotch while we wait for this?” she asked.

“Fine.”

“And a sandwich? You've brought such nice things. Turkey sandwiches—and what's this?”

“Truffles.”

“Truffles,” she repeated.

“Do you like them?”

“I adore them.” She took some plates out of a newspaper wrapping. She was in moccasins and a blouse and skirt and she wore no make-up. “I'm very glad to have company. I don't like to pack or unpack unless I have a drink, and it depresses me to drink alone.”

“I'll help you drink and unpack, too. Want me to help you with any of this?”

“I want to forget it for a while.” She offered him a plate and he took a sandwich from it.

They took their drinks and the plates into the living-room, and, because there was no table, set the plates on the floor.

Ellie looked down at a stack of her music books. “Do you like Scarlatti?”

“Yes. On the piano. I have some—”

“That's fine, I play him on the violin.”

Walter smiled a little. He set the suitcases down on the floor and they sat down on the sofa. He had the feeling he had been here many times before, and that in a few minutes, after they finished their drinks, they would start to make love, as they had done many times before. Ellie was telling him about a woman in New York named Irma Gartner, who was going to miss her because, Ellie said, she depended on her to change her music books at the library every two weeks. Irma Gartner was a cripple, about sixty-five years old, and she played the violin.

“She still plays well,” Ellie said. “If she weren't a woman she'd certainly be able to get a job in some string orchestra playing in a restaurant or somewhere, but no one would hire a woman at her age. It's too bad, isn't it?”

Walter tried to imagine Clara caring enough about someone to visit him or her out of friendship or pity; it was impossible. Ellie's shoulders looked soft under the white blouse, and he longed to put his arms around her. What if he did? Either she would respond or she wouldn't. Either she would respond or she would be very cool and it would be the last time he would see her. Walter thought: if he couldn't put his arm around her, he didn't want to torture himself by seeing her again, anyway. He put his arm on the back of the sofa, then lowered it around her shoulders. She glanced up at him, then laid her head against him. His desire crept, vine-like, down his body. She turned her head as he did and they kissed. It was a long kiss, but suddenly she twisted away from him and stood up.

She turned and looked at him from the middle of the room, smiling a wide, embarrassed smile at him. “How much further is this going?”

He came towards her, but she looked a little frightened, or annoyed, and he stopped.

She walked slowly into the kitchen. Her body in the skirt and blouse looked very young to him, young in its pretence of indifference. She felt the champagne bottle.

“With ice in the glass, this should be all right,” she said. “Do you mind ice in the glass?”

“No.”

She looked at him with the shy, excited eyes again. “I'm not dressed for champagne. Can you wait ten minutes? Here're the glasses. I don't have anything but old-fashioned glasses.” She handed them to him, then went into the living-room and got something white out of the suitcases. Then she disappeared into the bathroom.

Walter heard the shower running. He put the ice into the glasses, and set them with the champagne bottle on a suitcase lid. The shower ran a long time, and he started to fix himself another Scotch and then didn't.

Ellie came out in a thick white bathrobe, barefoot. “I ought to put on my best suit,” she said, looking into a suitcase.

“Don't put on anything.” The bathrobe was of terry cloth, and Walter thought suddenly, Clara hates terry cloth. “I wish you'd take that off,” he said.

She ignored the remark completely, which for Walter was the most exciting reaction she could have had. “Open the bottle.” She sat down on the floor beside the suitcase and leaned against the sofa.

Walter worked the cork out and poured it. They tasted it in silence. He had turned off the main light, and there was only a light from the kitchen. She had lovely feet, smooth and narrow and brown as her legs. They did not look as if they went with her hands. He poured more champagne. “Not bad, is it?”

“Not bad,” she echoed. She leaned her head back against the sofa. “It's wonderful. There are times when I like disorder. Tonight's one of them.”

He got up and spread a green blanket on the floor. “Isn't the floor getting hard?” he asked.

She lay on her stomach on the blanket, with her cheek down on her arm, looking up at him. He sat beside her on the blanket. The champagne seemed to go on for ever, like the pitcher in the myth.

“Why don't you take your clothes off?” she asked.

He did, and then he untied the terry-cloth belt. She felt wonderfully soft, her breast against his hand as soft as milk. He was very slow and very careful not to hurt her on the floor that was still hard in spite of the blanket, but Ellie didn't seem to feel it, and then he forgot the floor. But he had a cool, rational moment when he wondered if anyone had ever made love to her as well as he. He felt they had been together many times before and that for them it would never diminish as long as they lived. And that Clara was a pale thing compared to this.

He wanted to say, I love you. He said nothing.

She opened her eyes and looked at him.

He poured the last of the champagne, then lighted a cigarette to share with her.

“Do you know the time?” she asked.

He hated the fact that he was still wearing his wrist watch. “It's only five to two.”

“Only!” She got up and went to the radio and turned it on, low. Then she came back and knelt down in front of him. She kissed his forehead.

He watched her put her robe on. Then he put on his own clothes quickly. He didn't want to stay the night, yet he felt that she wanted him to. “When will I see you?” he asked.

She looked up at him, and he knew from her eyes that she was disappointed because he wanted to leave. “I don't want to plan anything.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Errands. For the new apartment.”

Ellie laughed. She was leaning against the empty bookcase. He could see her brownish blue eyes in the dim light: they were smiling as if she adored him. “Maybe I'll never get it straight. I told you I liked disorder.”

He walked slowly towards her. “I'll call you.”

“Nice of you,” she said.

Smiling, he took her by the wrist and pulled her towards him. They kissed, and he could have started all over again, but he opened the door. “Good night,” he said, and went out. Going down the stairs, his body felt loose-jointed and young, as if every cell in it had somehow changed. He was smiling.

He woke Clara up as he went into the bedroom.

“Where've you been?” she asked sleepily.

“Drinking. With Bill Ireton.” He didn't care if she found out he hadn't been with Bill. He didn't care if she found out he had been with Ellie.

Clara evidently went back to sleep, because she did not say anything more.

Walter called Ellie on Monday morning and asked if she could have dinner with him. He was going to tell Clara that he had a date with Jon in New York. He was not going to go home after work. But Ellie said that she had to practice her violin all that evening, absolutely had to, because of a new group of music appreciation selections for her class. Walter thought she sounded very cool. He felt that she had decided to break it off, and perhaps would never agree to see him again at all.

During his lunch hour on Monday Walter went into the Public Library and looked up the Kimmel story in the Newark newspaper for August. There was a picture of the body on the scene. The woman looked stocky and dark, but the face was averted and he could see very little except a bloodstained light dress, half covered with a blanket. He was most curious as to Kimmel's alibi. He found only one statement, repeated in various ways: “Melchior Kimmel stated that he was in Newark on the night of the crime, and had attended a movie from 8 to 10 p.m.” Walter assumed that he had a witness to substantiate it and that it had never been challenged.

But neither had the murderer ever been found. Walter looked over the Newark papers for several days following the murder. There were no further clues. Walter left the library feeling frustrated and rather angry.

11

“I'
ve got to see you,” Walter said. “Even if it's just a few minutes.”

Ellie finally agreed.

Walter hurried to Lennert. It was only seven o'clock. Clara was out for dinner with the Philpotts, Claudia had told him. He hoped Ellie was free the whole evening. He heard her violin from the sidewalk below the house. He waited until she had played a phrase over three times, rang the bell, and heard her strike a loud chord. The release bell buzzed.

She was standing in the doorway of her apartment again.

He started to kiss her, but she said: “Do you mind if we go out?”

“Of course not.”

The apartment had completely changed: there was a rose-colored rug on the floor, some pictures were up, and the books were in the bookshelf. Only the stack of music books, still topped by Scarlatti, remained to remind him of the other evening. She came back from the closet with her coat.

He decided to take her to the Old Millhouse Inn, near Huntington, because he was not likely to see anyone he knew there. In the car she talked about her school. Walter felt she was worlds away from him, that she had not missed him at all.

They ordered martinis at their table. Walter would have preferred to drink in the more secluded bar, but the bar was taken over by a noisy group of men, either a club meeting or a stag party, carousing so loudly they could hear them from where they sat. Ellie had stopped talking. She seemed shy with him.

“I love you, Ellie,” he said.

“No, you don't. I love you.”

It hit him right in the heart, a sweet pain like an adolescent's. “Why do you say I don't?”

“Because I know. I'll never do again what I did the other night until you do love me. Maybe I only did it the other night to prove how strong I am.”

“Oh, Ellie!” He frowned. “That's all very complicated. And very Russian.”

“Well, I am half Russian.” She smiled. “Shall I be very straightforward? You don't love me, but you're attracted to me because I'm different from your wife. You have troubles with your wife, so you come to me—don't you?” She spoke so softly that he had to strain to hear her. “But I'm not so unwise as to have an affair with a married man—even if I am in love with him.”

“Ellie, I could love you more than any woman on earth. I do love you!”

“But what are you going to do about it, I wonder? I don't think anything.” There was no resentment in her tone. She said it like a simple statement of fact.

“How do you know?”

“Well, I don't. Perhaps I'm wrong.”

It was her seriousness that stymied him, he realized. He realized that he didn't match it with any plans, any solution of his own, and perhaps not with any emotion, either. He suddenly saw himself objectively, as she must see him, and he felt ashamed.

“I don't know you and yet I think I know you—enough to love you,” Ellie said. “I think you're basically decent. I think you're strong. And I think I fell in love with you the first time I saw you.”

Walter wondered if he could say the same thing. That night of the party—

“I haven't had a very merry life,” she went on. “My father drank. He died when I was sixteen. I had to support my mother, because my brother is about as useless as my father was. My mother named me Elspeth because she thought it was a pretty name. It's the only thing I can think of that she ever got her way about—with my father. The only sure thing I ever found was music. I had two loves before—little ones, not like you.” She smiled and she looked very young, younger than her voice. “I like sure things. I want a home. I want children.”

“So do I,” Walter said.

“And with a man I can look up to. I want something definite. It's just my luck I had to fall for you, isn't it?”