Woman in the Window (8 page)

“Really, just tired but … I’m not looking forward to your leaving me alone with my thoughts. Ever since all this started, things have been sort of piling up around me … oh, hell, Lew! No point in babbling to you—”

“On the contrary,” he said. “But for now I want you to get right to bed. And I’m going to call you tomorrow. I want to know just what it is that’s been piling up.”

“Oh, please don’t worry, Lewis!”

“What, me worry?” He grinned, boyish, like the old days.

She got up and followed him up the stairway to the front door.

He stood there looking at her.

She smiled up at him.

He punched her softly on the arm. “I’ll call you, Natalie. Tomorrow.”

Once he was gone, once she was standing at the sink brushing her teeth, she thought how lucky she was that he’d remembered where Sir liked to walk.
Way to go, Lew.
She took a sleeping pill to blot out the images that haunted her and went to sleep with the radio playing softly. And Sir curled against her legs. He began to snore just before she went under.

A
T THE OFFICE IN
the morning there was a handwritten letter from Rory Linehan, the novelist whose first book she had recently placed. He was delighted with the news of his advance. He and his wife hoped she could join them for dinner at their place the next evening to celebrate. She was hugely pleased, couldn’t stop beaming to herself. Her optimism about Linehan’s career was really limitless, if only he had the determination and stability to keep learning, working, disciplining his gifts. She called their number and spoke briefly to his wife, accepting the invitation.

She had lunch with Jay, a fortnightly ritual enabling them to speak of business away from the endless telephone discussions that kept them apart within the office. They had a drink in the tiny bar inside the front door at Lutece, then dined more elegantly than her appetite required in the airy, green and white barnlike dining room. Danmeier was in full cry, running the tab to well over a hundred dollars. Natalie just smiled at his discourse on the wine. He was more wrapped up in his toys than any other man she’d ever known. Still, why not? He seemed to have life so much his own way. Which was doubtless why his inability to forge a personal relationship—a
more
personal relationship, in any case—with Natalie seemed to bother him so. Any resistance seemed to throw him off his game, and Natalie wondered if just maybe she was testing him and his professed interest in her.

“By the way,” he said, enjoying what she took for a gooseberry tart with his coffee, “Clive Morrison’s over from London. We’re having dinner tomorrow night and he specifically asked me to have you join us. Good sign, Nat. He’s a distinguished publisher, and we’re doing an increasing amount of business with him, as you know if you’re paying attention to the contracts file, and he’s being touted for the queens next honors’ list. Should be ‘Sir Clive’ the next time he’s over here. Why in God’s name are you looking at me that way?”

“I can’t go, I’m afraid. I already have a dinner engagement, Jay—”

“For God’s sake, Natalie, if it’s not with Ernest Hemingway, break the date. Perhaps you missed it, but this is Clive Morrison! He asked for you, he knows about you—it’s business, my dear. Not just old Jay hanging around waiting to be turned down as usual.” The bitterness in his voice frustrated her: the last thing she needed …

“It’s just one of those things,” she said, knowing already that she was wrong and Jay was right, that she could quite easily beg off the Linehans and make another date for their dinner. She knew it but something was flaring inside her. She wasn’t going to change her plans. “If it makes you feel any better, my engagement is business, as well.”

“With whom, may I ask?” He sounded very cold. As if he were yet again bearing up under a personal insult.

“Linehan and his wife,” she said.

“Linehan.” He repeated the name with distaste. “I do wish you’d never heard of dear old Linehan. You can tell from his bloody overwrought book that he’s the kind of Irishman who enjoys blowing people to smithereens. I mean, have you read the book?”

“Of course.”

“One pussy and cock symbol after another—the man’s a raving degenerate. Can’t say what he means. D. H. Lawrence might just as well never have existed—”

“Jay, people are looking at you—”

“Good. I like to be looked at. Linehan.” He sighed with massive disgust. “I don’t suppose I can actually order you to come meet Morrison?”

“You can do whatever you like. But I shan’t come.”

He finished his gooseberry tart. “Natalie, we’ve got to have a good long talk. About the agency. About your role in it—you aren’t by any chance …” He shook his head. “No, I guess not.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Are you thinking of leaving? Raiding the client list and going off on your own?” His face was reddening. She realized the effort the question had cost him.

“Oh, Jay,” she said. She tentatively brushed the sleeve of his immaculate blue pinstripe. His vulnerability, coming as it did out of the blue, touched her. “Jay, really … of course I’m not thinking of any such thing. I like what I do. I like where I do it. And I certainly don’t want the administrative headache of setting up my own shop—even if I could.”

He nodded, recovering. “But you know you could. You could take your share of clients. Very loyal to you. Well, I’ll give your apologies to Clive.”

They lingered briefly, hostilities ended, and she took his arm on the walk back to the office.

The patching-up process was not, however, wholly successful. Natalie was aware of the tension between her and Jay through the afternoon, though they never actually had occasion to speak. The looks—or lack of them—were enough. He was just going to have a pout and there wasn’t much she was inclined to do about it.

And then Tony called. “Your ex,” Lisa said, sticking her head around the corner, “on two. You here?”

Lisa was very protective, but yes, Natalie was there. Listening to Tony’s voice from the wilds of Staten Island, she was reminded of the fact that she’d not spoken to him since he’d blabbed to Garfein. She felt herself flushing at the memory: anger like a tiny explosion somewhere in her brain. He said he was just heading into town and wanted her to meet him at the Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle. He said it was important. She told him she’d try to be there by six. “I hate it when you sound so mysterious,” she said, but he only laughed. His voice was a little on the high-pitched side and she’d never been crazy about his laugh. He was better in person than on the telephone. The Clint Eastwood syndrome, high voice but sort of gaunt and sexy otherwise. God, poor screwed-up Tony, hammering away at his porn novels and his soldier-of-fortune novels and his treasury-agent novels. …

She left the office early and took a taxi home. The insurance man was waiting for her on the front steps. He was a shy young man who made a list, checked it twice, told her that she had been very wise to photograph her valuable possessions and file the photos with the insurance company. He told her he’d get back to her. She fed Sir several Bonz and went to pick up the mail.

A note had been dropped through the outside slot and lay atop the pile of bills and circulars.

Tried to deliver flowers at 4:30. Nobody home. Call 866-9851 for delivery.

Who could be sending flowers?

She looked at her watch and punched out the number while slipping out of the day’s clothes, flinging them across the bed.

“Dante’s Flowers,” the man said.

“You’ve got a delivery for me. Last name Rader, over on—”

“Yeah, yeah. I got it right here. You weren’t home.” His voice brimmed over with impatience, as if she’d set out to frustrate Dante’s Flowers’ daily schedule.

“I’m home now,” she said, “if you can step on it.”

“Wait a minute.” He yelled at someone on his end, “Can you deliver Rader, Harry? Hey, way to go, man. Okay, Miss Rader, how’s twenty minutes?”

“Fine,” she said, wriggled out of her pantyhose and ducked under a cold shower, clenched her teeth and waited for it to get hot and steamy.

She was half-dressed in something new and turquoise, drying her hair, when the buzzer sounded. She straightened the skirt and looked out the peephole at the man on the stoop. He was holding a box of flowers and smoking a cigar.

She spoke into the intercom: “Who is it?”

“The flowers, lady, the flowers you just called about.”

She buzzed him in and opened her door. It was a very cheap cigar that smelled like candy. He looked like a character in a movie, short, muscular, beetle-browed, holding the box of flowers like a bat against his shoulder.

“Hi, toots,” he said, without even looking at her. “It’s your lucky day. Here, just sign on the back of this sheet.” He wheezed on the smoke, blew a stream past her face.

She signed. “Is there a card?”

“Look, I only deliver ’em, y’know? Card should be in the box.”

She took the box. There was an ashtray full of change and a few bills on the table by the door. She handed him a dollar. He folded it, tucked it into his shirt pocket. “I’ll buy myself a decent smoke. Thanks, ma’am.” He touched the shiny black plastic visor of his hat. “Have a nice night, toots.” He was gone.

A dozen long-stemmed yellow roses.

She put them in a Lalique vase on the coffee table so she’d see them down in the living room the moment she opened the door. One problem. The card.

Congrats!

No name, no signature. Just a typewritten, single word.

She was running late, there was no time to try to figure it out now.

She was lucky to find a cab outside the front door and she was off to the Carlyle.

Tony was waiting for her. It had always been his favorite rendezvous with the wonderful Ludwig Bemelmans drawings on the wall! Natalie found it rather impersonal, tables too small, and too much open space. But then there had been a lot they didn’t agree on. He got up as she approached and kissed her cheek. There was a bucket of Perrier-Jouet champagne by the table and Tony was looking very pleased with himself.

He poured a glass for each of them. He was quite gray by his ears and he still wore his hair longish, though it was receding at the temples. His jaw was wide and firm, giving him a look of great resolve, which was, in practice, more often just bad temper. His gaze was level, his dark brown eyes as clear as ever. He had a long straight nose, shaggy eyebrows, and looked like he belonged on a horse, a cowboy in an advertisement. A Ralph Lauren man in a worn corduroy jacket and a cotton polo shirt that had been washed twelve thousand times: Tony Rader, her ex.

He lifted his glass, clinked the rim of hers.

“Happy birthday, Nat,” he said. His eyes twinkled.

She knew her face looked blank, her lips parted as if a question was forming.

“I knew it,” he said, sipping his champagne. “I knew you’d forget. It was bound to happen, you used to come close, but this year you just forgot! Glad I lived to see it!” He seemed high on something, the way he’d get when his nerves were strung too tight.

“My God, Tony … you’re right. What am I? Thirty-seven? I must be—how could I actually have forgotten?” She took a healthy swallow of champagne and felt it go straight to her head.” Passing her nose it made her sneeze, and she heard him laugh.

“You forgot because you’ve got the worst case of tunnel vision in the world. You never think about anything but work, you don’t worry about birthdays, yours or anyone else’s. So you forgot. So I remembered for you. Sitting out there on the Island in the fog, seeing the shape of Manhattan kind of blurred, I got to feeling funny. About you, I mean. Lonely for you. Lonely for your face and your self-centered approach to life—”

“Watch it, buster.”

“You don’t scare me anymore, Nat. Don’t even try.”

She laughed. “Dummy. And thanks for the flowers.”

“Flowers? I didn’t send you flowers. I bought you a Tiffany bauble. But no flowers.” She could see his face clouding over: only she could notice it, probably, but she’d had lots of experience. She could see the old possessiveness, the jealousy burning in the irises of his eyes. The flowers pissed him off.

“If it wasn’t you, it had to be Lisa. My secretary. Or Julie. They both know my birth date.” She wondered if the lie sounded anything like the truth. The light in his eyes dimmed a bit. “Anyway, what were you saying about Tiffany’s?”

“Don’t look so surprised,” he said. Clint Eastwood never sounded petty but he was already beginning to pout. “Even writing my kind of garbage I occasionally get paid—”

“Come on, Tony. Remember, this is supposed to be fun.” She forced herself to smile brightly. “I want my present!” She was mildly disgusted with herself for doing her excited-little-girl number, but anything was justifiable to avoid one of Tony’s moods.

“And you shall have it.” He handed her the baby-blue box.

“You really shouldn’t have—well, I’m pleased that you did, anyway.” Her fingers were fumbling with the ribbon, finally slipped it off the edge. There was a baby-blue flannel pouch inside and she lifted it out by the drawstring. She looked up hesitantly, asking herself: Why? What was the point? But also remembering all the years when there had been a point, when why was a question you never had to ask. She pulled it open and slid her fingers in, touched something warm and smooth. She emptied it into her palm; it was silver, caught the light from every direction: a diamond-shaped egg of silver with a silver chain. She was trying very hard to keep her lower lip from quivering, fighting back even a single tear. What was the point? But it was such a beautiful thing. … It was warm in her palm and she closed her fingers around it, looked up at Tony and his handsome, silly, weak face.

He swallowed hard, smiling at her. “I just saw it, you know, and your birthday was coming up … like they say, it was you, Tiger. It’s a replica of the Tiffany diamond in silver.” He shrugged. “Wish it had been the diamond itself … Happy birthday, anyway.” He cleared his throat. “Don’t ask me why, I just miss you sometimes. You’re just so damned busy, you filled the air with the beating of your wings—I miss all the little flurries sometimes, that’s all.”