The bride wore black (15 page)

sacking had gone up and he was standing there rooted to the spot.

Ferguson turned his head at the continuing silence. "Well, if it takes your breath away like that before it's even finished," he said hopefully, "imagine what it'll do after the fixative's gone on."

Corey shook his head vaguely. "No, I'm trying to think. There's something vaguely familiar about that girl's face."

"Oh, sure, I expected that," Ferguson said dryly. "Well, you don't get her phone number out of me, not till after this picture's finished, if that's what you're "

"No, I mean it. It hit me hke a flash when I first lifted the sacking. Now I've lost it again. Like when you have a word on the tip of your tongue and can't bring it out. Where the devil have 1 seen those ice-cold eyes before and that warm, kissable mouth? What's her name?"

"Christine Bell."

"I don't know her by name, at any rate. Have you ever used her before? Maybe I've seen her on some of your covers."

"No, she's brand-new. I'm just breaking her in, so you haven't."

"There's just enough familiarity about the eyes and mouth to tease my memory. There isn't enough about the whole head in general, the hair for instance, to help me place her definitely. Damn it, Ferg, I know I've seen that girl somewhere before!"

Ferguson dropped the protective sacking over the canvas once more, somewhat like a jealous hen guarding its chick. They both moved away.

But Corey came back to the subject again later, just before he left, as though it had lain uppermost in his mind all the while. "I won't get any sleep now until I get

Straightened out on that." He went out, casting troubled backward glances at the covered canvas to the very last, until the door had closed after him.

She winced delicately as Ferguson notched the arrow into the bowstring, fitted the integrated weapon into the formalized pose of her hands. "Wasn't that horrible, the way that snapped through my fingers yesterday? I almost hate to touch it, after that!"

He laughed good-naturedly. "It wasn't horrible, but it sure could have been if my neck had been two inches farther back, where it belonged and where it had been a minute before! What saved me was I happened to bend my head toward the canvas just then to concentrate on a detail I was working on. I felt this streak of air shoot past the nape of my neck and the next thing I knew the arrow was wobbling in the wooden frame between two of the skylight panes over there."

"But it could have killed you, couldn't it?" she lamented, wide-eyed.

"If it had happened to hit me in the right place the jugular vein or dead center to the heart I suppose so. But it didn't, so why worry about it?"

"But wouldn't it be better if I used one with a guard, a protective knob on the end of it?"

"No, no, I'm nothing if not realistic; I go flat when I fake things, even such a simple thing as an arrowhead. Don't be nervous now. It was just one of those hundred-to-one shots. Most likely you were unconsciously pulling it tighter and tighter as the tension of posing grew on you, and then without realizing it you let your muscles relax to try to ease them, and the damn thing sprang! Just remember not to pull it all the way back. Pull it only enough so that the bowstring isn't relaxed, forms a straight Une to the arrow cleft; that's all you've got to do."

When they had taken time out and the cigarette package had passed between them on the fly, as a hand cloth does between gymnasts, she remarked, "Strange that you should become a painter."

"Why?"

"You always think of them as sort of gentle people. At least, I always did until now."

"I am gentle. What makes you think I'm not?"

She murmured, so low he could barely hear her, "Maybe you are now. You weren't always so gentle."

TTien afterward, when she was back on the stand, bow stretched toward him in shooting position, she said, "Ferguson, you bring happiness to many people. Did you ever bring death to anyone?"

His brush halted in midair, but he didn't turn to look at her. He stared before him as though seeing something in the past. "Yes, I have," he said in a subdued voice. His head incHned a little. Then he straightened it, went ahead retouching. "Don't talk to me while I'm working," he reminded her evenly.

She didn't anymore, after that. There wasn't a sound in the studio, and scarcely a motion. Only two things moved: the long slender stem of the paintbrush between his deft fingers; the retreating steel-tipped head of the arrow as it slipped slowly back upon the shaft to the position of uttermost tension the cord was capable of. A third thing there was that moved: a shadow played back and forth across the hollow of her left arm, as the white flesh contracted, as the tendons below it strained. Only those three things were not still, in the vibrant, supercharged silence.

Then suddenly there was a rain of jovial blows against the studio door, and a bevy of voices called, "Come on, Ferg, let us in. Union hours, you know!"

The arrowhead edged unnoticeably forward again, past the staff", as the strain was let out of the cord, degree

by degree. She exhaled in such a peculiar, exhausted way that he turned to ask, "Matter, can't you take it?"

She shrugged, threw him a glazed smile, "Sure, but too bad we couldn't have finished it, while we were at it."

She had never dressed under such difficulties before. The dressing-room door had no lock, and after the first inadvertent discovery that she was in there, they kept purposely trying to break in on her every few minutes, to tease her. Even Ferguson added his voice to the good-natured clamor. "Come on out, Diana, don't be modest you're among friends."

Once the critical moment of transition from the leopard kilt to nothing to her own underthings was safely past, the worst was over. She effected this by wedging herself against the door it opened inward and blocking it with her body while she struggled into her things. Every moment or two it flounced against her, forcing her forward a little; then she would flatten it behind her again and go ahead with her dressing. She had never put on stockings that way before; it was an acrobatic feat.

Judging from the sounds going on in the studio proper, the party was no temporary intrusion. It was going to be an all-night affair, one of those snowball things that kept rolling up more people as it went along. Twice already the outer door had stormed open and new voices had come screaming in. "So this is where you are! I went looking for you at Mario's and when you weren't there "

Once she heard Ferguson at the phone bawling his lungs out above the bedlam: "Hello, Tony? Send over some one-gallon jugs of Spanish red. That monthly hurricane has just hit here again. Yeah, you know the one."

There were shrieks of protest. "What that man makes on commercials alone, and the best he can off'er us is Spanish red!"

"Champagne! Champagne! Champagne, or we'll all go home!"

"All right, go home!"

"Just for that we won't! Ble-e-eh."

Dressed, she stroked the side of her own face uncertainly, looked around. There was no other way out of here than through the studio. She turned, opened the door narrowly and peered out. They were already thick as bees out there or seemed to be, the restless way they kept moiling around. Somebody had brought in some sort of stringed instrument as bohemians, they evidently wanted no part of mechanical music and was plucking vigorously if not too expertly at it. A girl was dancing on the model's platform.

She watched her chance, and when the line of escape from dressing room to studio door was least populous, she slipped out, threaded her way diagonally across that comer of the vast room and tried to make her exit unobserved or at least unquestioned.

It was an attempt that was foredoomed to failure. Somebody shouted, "Look, Diana!" There was a concerted rush over toward her, and she was swept into their midst as if by a maelstrom. They were unhampered by conventional formality.

"How beautiful! Oh, just look, how beautiful!"

"And trembling like a frightened gazelle. Ah, Sonya, why don't you tremble for me like that anymore?"

"I do, darling, I still do; but with laughter now, every time I look at you."

When the first effusion of appraisal and praise was over, she managed to draw Ferguson aside. "I have to go-"

"But why?"

"I don't want all these people to to see me I'm not used to it "

He misunderstood. "On account of the picture, you mean? Because it's a semi-nude?" He found this so charming, he promptly repeated it to the whole assemblage at the top of his voice.

They found it charming, too; it was that thing they were always looking for, the unusual. This brought on another group formation around her. The girl named Sonya seized her hand, clasped it protectively between her two, blew upon it as if to cherish some impalpable virtue it possessed. "Ah, she's still so innocent!" she condoled, no sarcasm intended. "Never mind, dear. Just spend ten minutes in my Gil's company and you'll get over it."

"Did you?'' somebody asked her.

"No," she shrugged. "He spent five minutes in my company and he got it."

They meant well. Ferguson backed the canvas to the wall. "Nobody look at that picture. Nobody so much as think about it!"

"She ends below the shoulders!" somebody else proclaimed.

"She is a bust," Sonya added fervently. Then with a quick clutch at her arm, "Not in the slang sense, dear."

If her unease had stemmed from the cause they ascribed it to, she could not have helped but overcome it; they all tried so heartily to make her feel at home. Since it didn't, it persisted. She finally acquiesced to the extent of sitting on the floor against the far wall, a cup of untasted red wine on one side of her, an intense young man reciting some of his own blank verse on the other. She sat there passively, but her eyes kept calculatingly measuring the distance between herself and the studio door. Her hands suddenly clenched spasmodically on the floor, slowly opened out again.

"Ah!" the blank-verse poet exulted. "That last line

Struck home. Its beauty pierced your heart. I could tell by the change that came over your face."

He was wrong.

Corey had just turned up across the room from her, was standing there over by the entrance drawn as unerringly by a party, any party, even one going on all the way across town from him, as a bloodhound is by the scent he has been set to track down.

Seconds hung like moments in the air, moments hung like quarter hours. Her eyes, which had sought refuge on the floor, slowly, unwillingly traveled the ascending arc of the figure that had come to halt directly before her.

"Wait, let him finish first," she had said in a smothered voice. The intense young man's blank verse had never been as highly appreciated before as at this moment, would never be again.

Thick soles with welt edges. Heavy brown brogues with punctured scrollwork on their toes. Ten-dollar shoes. Then long legs, in trousers of a fuzzy tweed mixture. The hands they'd tell, wouldn't they? Still un-flexed. One hooked onto a side coat pocket by its thumb, the other negligently holding a cigarette just a little above hip level. Signet ring on its little finger. Golden glint of hair on its back, visible only by indirection. Two-button jacket, top one left open. The face was coming, the face was coming, couldn't be dodged any longer. The tie, the collar, the chin. The face at last. The two looks, fusing just as the last line of blank verse died into silence.

Then Ferguson's jovial voice, somewhere close beside them: "Now call his bluff, Diana!"

She got up slowly, at bay against the wall, working her back against it a little to aid her legs. "I can't," she said to where the voice had come from, without looking that

THE BRIDE WORE BLACK

way, "until you tell me what it is and until you introduce me."

"There you are, there's your answer!" Ferguson jeered at him.

Corey wouldn't take his eyes off her. She couldn't take hers off him, as though afraid to trust him out of their sight a single instant. He said, "All kidding aside, haven't I met you before?"

Even if she'd given an answer, even if she'd wanted to, it would have been drowned in the howl of friendly derision that went up.

"Look, there are moths flying around from that one!"

"You should oil up that technique."

"Is that the best the Great Lover can get off?"

Sonya squalled informatively to someone, with that dead-earnest mannerism of hers, "Yes, didn't you know? That's how they make girls in the upper-middle classes. A friend of mine who went uptown once told me, She had it said to her three times in one night."

Corey was laughing with them at his own expense, shoulders shaking, facial muscles working, everything humorously attuned except those coldly speculative eyes that wouldn't leave hers.

The girl they held pressed to the wall with their stabbing stare shook her head slightly, smiled a little in regretful negation. She stood there a moment, then maneuvered her way out of the comer pocket he had her backed into, sauntered across the room, conscious his head had turned to look after her, conscious his eyes were following her every aimless step of the way.

She found refuge on the other side of the studio for a while, took shelter with almost the entire personnel of the party between them for a buffer. In fifteen minutes he had marked her down again, came bringing a cup of red wine over, for an excuse.

She seemed to grow rigid when she saw what he was bringing her, swallowed hard, as though there lay some danger in the imminent courtesy itself, apart from the fact of his approach.

He reached her finally, held it out to her, and the pupils of her eyes dilated. She seemed afraid to accept it and equally afraid to refuse it, afraid to drink it and equally afraid to set it aside untasted as though anything she did with it bore a penalty of flashing recollection. She took it finally, touched it toward her lips, then held it behind her with one hand, safely out of sight.

He said, blinking troubledly, "I nearly had it for a minute when I handed you that just then, and then I lost it again. "

"You're torturing the hell out of me, quit it!" she flared with unexpected savagery. She turned away from him and went into the dressing room.