Weep for Me (7 page)

“How about coming down and having a drink with me and then we’ll go out for dinner, Emily?”

“No, thanks, Kyle. I have my dinner here.”

“Don’t you want to be neighborly? How about the drink, at least?”

She shifted the groceries to the other arm. “No, thank you, Kyle.”

“Look, I won’t be a problem. Honestly. I mean it. I just want to … talk to you and look at you.” I blocked her way to the stairs.

“If you keep this up, Kyle, I’ll have to move out.”

“Keep what up? What’s it going to do to you to have a drink with me?”

She sighed. “I told myself I wasn’t going to leave my apartment tonight, and I’m not. Give me a half hour and then bring your shaker up. I have glasses. I’ll have two drinks with you, and then you’re leaving. Is that quite clear?”

“Perfectly clear. Half an hour, Emily.”

She went lightly up the stairs. I closed my door and listened. I heard her walk to the kitchen. I heard the chunk of the refrigerator door as she put food away. I walked softly, listening. When twenty minutes were up, I made a shaker of drinks. I nearly filled the shaker. I had wasted too much time in listening to her. I pulled off the neat banker suit, put on pale tan slacks, a soft cocoa-brown corduroy shirt. I looked down at the edge of the left pocket and saw the neat mend Jo Anne had done the time I tore it.

I went up the stairs with the shaker cold in my hand. I knocked at her door.

She opened it quickly. She had changed to severely tailored burgundy slacks and a white nylon shirt, cut like a man’s except for the very full sleeves, the tightness of the cuffs.

“I was a little stuffy, I guess,” she said. “Now I’m looking forward to the drink.”

She had changed the apartment completely. It took a few moments to see just how simple the changes were, yet how effective. The shades and curtains had been replaced by deep aqua draperies. They were drawn, shutting out all daylight. She had replaced the lamp bulbs with ones of higher power, replaced the shades with metal ones, completely opaque, so that most of the light was directed toward the floor, a small bit toward the ceiling. A coffee table formed of two cinder blocks and an oblong of plate glass stood in front of the studio couch.

“Like it?” she asked.

“Don’t let Harrison see it. He’ll raise your rent.”

“I hope you don’t mind the draperies being drawn. When the working day is over I expect it to be night. I’m not a daylight type, I guess.”

Two glasses and a saucer with twists of lemon peel were on the coffee table. I filled the two glasses and we sat, side by side, a careful thirty inches apart.

“To confusion,” she said, raising her glass.

We drank. “Enjoying your work?” I asked.

“There’s a certain amount of enjoyment in doing
anything you can do well, even if you don’t particularly like it.”

“Are the girls being more friendly?”

“No. They won’t change. I don’t expect them to. I don’t think I’d want them to. I don’t even feel like a member of the same species.”

Conversation died right there. The silence was taut and uncomfortable for me. With that old self-sufficiency of hers, she didn’t seem to notice it.

“Your friend Mr. Grinter,” she said, “stopped me on the way out tonight. He wanted me to have dinner with him.”

“Don’t have anything to do with him!”

She leaned back, raised one burgundy knee, laced her fingers around it. “That’s an order, I suppose.” Her eyes were mocking me again. They glinted dark in the reflected lamplight.

“Sam has the wrong ideas about you.”

“What are the right ideas?”

“Not Sam’s.”

“Yours, maybe?” she asked very softly.

“All right. I made a mistake. I wasn’t very smart. But don’t go out with Sam.”

“Why should I? There’s no luck there, Kyle. None at all.”

“No more than with me, I suppose.”

“Not a bit more.”

I refilled the glasses. She looked at the shaker. “You made considerably more than two rounds. Are we going through the same thing again, Kyle?”

I felt recklessly angry. “Sure. I came up to tell you that I’m only pretending to be a bank teller. Don’t tell anybody. Actually I’ve got forty million dollars. I’m just learning how the other half lives. Now you can throw yourself into my arms and we’ll ride off into the sunset, complete with mood music.”

“Poor Kyle,” she said. “Poor hungry, ambitious Kyle. And so desperately trapped.”

“You’re not trapped, I suppose.”

“Look at me and tell me I’m trapped, Kyle.”

I looked at her. “You’ll find a way out of it, won’t you?”

“Somehow.”

I stood up. Some of the drink slopped over onto the back of my hand. I set the glass down and stood in front of her. “Why did you move in here, right above me?” My voice sounded hoarse and funny.

“It was the only apartment vacant.”

“I had half a chance to get you out of my mind. But not now, Emily. I hear you walking above me. I think of what you’re doing. I wonder how you sleep. How you look. I hear your shower. This morning, I listened. I stopped breathing, I listened so hard. I heard the little sound of you brushing your teeth. I didn’t know what it was at first. Then I knew.”

“You’d better go, Kyle.”

“What do you want me to do? What have I got to do to stop tearing myself apart?”

“Don’t talk like that!”

“There. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you raise your voice. And you know, you’re not kidding me. You feel this the same way I do. We’re drifting toward something. Both of us. Nothing is going to stop it.”

“You’re talking like a fool.”

“Am I. The light slants across your throat, Emily. I can see a pulse at the base of your throat. Does it always beat that fast? Does it?”

She brought her hand up to her throat. “Don’t,” she whispered.

“There’s something dark about you. Dark and strange. Me, I’m supposed to be just right for Jo Anne. I’m not supposed to want anything like you. What’s soft and feminine about you? You’re like that damn adding machine you beat on all day. Like a ledger card. Adding up this and adding up that. O.K., so in your book I don’t add up. What do I have to do to add up? What’s the price, Emily?”

She walked to the door and held it open. It wasn’t done with drama. Just with assurance, self-control. “Get out,” she said.

I walked over to her, stood inches in front of her, and looked down into her eyes. As I watched her, the heaviness of her upper lids seemed to increase.

Her mouth twisted. “Get out, Kyle. I’ve got no time for charity.”

I reached out slowly and put my right hand on her throat. She did not try to evade me. I squeezed gently, felt the muscles in my arm and shoulder knot. I wanted to clamp my fingers and thumb shut on her throat with all my strength. She still watched me, unmoving. I could feel the pulse beat against the base of my palm. I increased the pressure slowly and her breathing stopped. There was contempt in her eyes then. She did not move. The chalky face began to take on color and a tiny vein at her temple stood out.

It gave me the feeling that she would force herself to stand there, without resistance, until consciousness left her, just to prove that she was the stronger of the two.

I released her. She breathed deeply, rapidly, breasts lifting sharp and hard against white nylon. The color faded slowly, the vein receded.

“You wanted to kill me,” she said, her voice raspy from the pressure on her throat.

“Yes.”

She gave the door a little push. It swung slowly shut and the latch clicked loud in the silence. She looked at me with something lowering, feral, in her expression. Chalk face framed with black. Lips like a wound.

The nyloned arms flashed up and her fingers caught folds of the corduroy shirt above my belt on either side. She thrust her hips against me and leaned backward from the waist, as though she were trying to hold herself aloof and apart from the body, which had now taken over volition, had now begun its unthinking act. She ground herself against me, and as she did so, she whimpered softly.

“Emily, I …”

“Don’t talk,” she said, without unclenching her teeth. “Don’t spend time talking.”

She was the agressor, sweeping both of us up into an
incredible and brutal climax that was, for both of us, like being at last broken on a great wheel.

Her breathing took a long time to quiet, and then she left me. I watched her walk quickly by the lamp, her shoulders drooping, head lowered, body impossibly white, breasts sharply conical silhouetted against the lamplight, and I saw that in profile, the line from the nape of her neck to her ankle was one long flowing curve.

I dressed. I felt a long way away from myself. I picked her clothes from the floor, stood stupidly with them for a moment, put them carefully on a chair. Then I stretched out on the day bed, lit a cigarette.

She came out after a time, wearing a dark robe with wide lapels and heavily padded shoulders. She came to the couch and I moved my knees over to give her a place to sit. She took a cigarette from my pack. I saw her hand tremble as she lit it, but her face had regained its impassivity.

“That’s what they sense about me,” she said tonelessly. “Now you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t they write books about physical love? A nice dreamy floating. Tender stuff. Drifting on big woolly clouds. I wonder how that kind would be. You know what my kind is. Like a kind of dueling I read about. Where two men stand, each with the corner of the same handkerchief in their teeth, and a knife in each hand. Then they turn out the lights.”

“Maybe your way is better.”

“This wasn’t going to happen. I wasn’t going to let it happen.”

“What did I do that made it happen?”

She gave me a quick look. “I won’t tell you that.”

“Because I’ll use it again.”

“Yes.”

I reached down and caught her wrist. I twisted it slowly. I watched her face, saw her mouth begin to change. I released her.

“
Damn
you,” she said. “
Damn
you for learning how!”

“It was pretty obvious, wasn’t it?”

“You know what you’ve done. Now I’m going to have to leave. Leave the apartment, and the bank and the city.”

“Because I can’t buy cars and clothes and diamonds and all the rest of it.”

“And that’s what I want, Kyle.”

“A matter of money,” I said contemptuously.

She turned her head slowly and looked at me. She kept her eyes on mine for a long, long time. This was a new kind of tension.

When she whispered, I could barely hear her. “You handle money all day, Kyle.”

My mouth slowly turned dry. Lying there, I could hear the big drum that was my heart. “You don’t mean that.”

She turned away, “No, I guess I don’t mean it.”

What was left in the shaker was warm. She took it out and put ice cubes in it. She brought it back, swirling it, filled the glasses again. She didn’t speak.

I said, too loudly, “That’s for damn fools. They never stop hunting for you. How can you live? What good is that kind of money?”

“I didn’t mean it. It’s easier for me to go away, Kyle.”

“I won’t let you go. Not now. Not after this.”

“There’s no way to stop me from leaving, Kyle.”

I dug my fingers into her shoulder. “No way but one. Is that it? Is that the way you’re putting it up to me?”

She pulled away. “Why try to give me the responsibility?”

“I asked you your price. Now you’ve let me know what it is.”

“If that’s the way you want to say it.”

“And that’s the choice you’re giving me. Be a thief and be with you, if I’m lucky, for thirty days before they catch us.”

She moved up along the couch, put her hands on my shoulder, and forced me back. She looked intently down into my face. A long strand of the dark hair swung below her cheek. “Suppose it were a year, Kyle. A full year. Just for us. Would that be worth it?”

“Where do we hide for a year?”

“Would it be worth it? Answer me!”

I traced the line of her swollen mouth with my fingertips. “If it were just thirty days, it would be worth it. You know that.”

“We’ll be careful, Kyle. Terribly careful. I learned things from my husband. I remembered a name. I’ve remembered it for a long time. A man in Mexico City. Manuel Antonio Flores. He’s expensive. But he can sell Argentine citizenship, the kind where they can’t extradite you.”

“Very simple. I just pick up a couple hundred thousand and we got to Mexico City and become Argentinians.”

Her eyes glowed. “This is luck, Kyle! Can’t you see it? Can’t you taste it? Luck! The best thing in the world. Everything fits.”

I pushed her away and drained the drink and stood up. I began to pace back and forth. She sat and watched me. When I glanced at her, I knew where I’d seen that expression before. Mona Lisa. Now I knew why that old gal had smiled that way. A little victory smile. Suddenly I hated the black-headed tart on the day bed. Hated her for both her violence and her greed.

I stood heavily in front of her. “I’m a fool, Emily. But not a damn fool. I’ve never stolen a dime in my life.”

“Bully for you,” she said softly.

There was a certain kind of revenge I could take. I reached for her.

She said quietly, “If you touch me, I’ll scream as loud as I can. I’ll scream before I have a chance to … respond to being hurt.”

I knew she would. It was on her face, in her eyes. I picked up the shaker, went into the hall, pulled her door shut, and went down to my own place. I showered, changed, went out, and ate a steak that was more expensive than I could afford. When I first went down into my apartment, it shocked me to find that it was still daylight. It gave me that same subtle sense of disorientation as when you come out of an afternoon movie.

I went to bed, telling myself that I was cured of her.

F
riday, in the bank, I tried to keep my mind off it. But the bank money I handled had a new feel in my hands, a new texture.

I don’t think the bank teller ever lived who didn’t play the mental game of how to beat the system. It’s a dangerous game to play. You do it as a sort of mental exercise. You are led to do it because in the books, in the news, there are always stories about those who tried and failed. Being egocentric, you tell yourself that if you ever really
wanted
to jump the fence, you could do a smarter job than the slob who just got himself caught.