Читать книгу Deadline at Dawn - Cornell George Hopley-Woolrich - Страница 3

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He was just a pink dance-ticket to her. A used-up one at that, torn in half. Two-and-a-half cents’ worth of commission on the dime. A pair of feet that kept crowding hers before them all over the map, all over the floor, all over the night. A blank, a cipher, that could steer her any which way he wanted until his five minutes were up. Five minutes of hailing, pelting two-quarter-time notes, like a stiff sandstorm hitting an accumulation of empty tin buckets, up there on the bandsmen’s box. And then suddenly silence, as at the cut of a switch, and a sort of tonal deafness for a moment or two after. A couple of free breaths without your ribs being corseted by some stranger’s arm. And then the whole thing over again; another blast of sand, another pink ticket, another pair of feet chasing yours around, another cipher steering you any which way he liked.

That was all any of them were to her. She loved her job so. She loved dancing so. Especially for hire. Sometimes she wished she’d been born with a limp, so she couldn’t manage her two feet alike. Or deaf, so that she’d never have to hear another slide-trombone fingering its nose at the ceiling. That would have kept her out of this. Then she would have probably been bathing somebody’s soiled shirts in a basement-laundry, or scouring somebody’s soiled dishes in a lunchroom scullery. What was the good of wishing, anyway? You didn’t get anything. Well, what was the harm? You didn’t lose anything.

She had only one friend in all this town. It stayed still, it didn’t dance, that was one thing in its favor. And it was always on hand, night after night, seeming to say: “Buck up, kid, you’ve only got another hour to go. You can do it, you’ve done it before.” And then in a little while: “Hang on tight, kid; another thirty minutes now, that’s all. I’m working for you.” And then finally: “Just once more around the floor, kid. Time’s up now. Just one more complete turn, and your sentence has been commuted for tonight. Just once more around, you can last that long, don’t cave in now; look, my minute-hand’s muscling in on my hour-hand. I’ve done it again for you, I’ve gotten you off. By the time you get back this way it’ll be one o’clock.”

It seemed to say those things to her every night. It never let her down. It was the only thing in the whole town that gave her a break. It was the only thing in all New York that was on her side, even if only passively. It was the only thing in all the endless world of her nights that had a heart.

She could only see it from the two end windows on the left, the ones overlooking the side-street, every time she made the circuit down around that way. The ones in front, overlooking the main drag, didn’t show it to her. There was a long row of them on the left, but the last two were the only ones that were any good, the rest were blocked off by buildings in the way. They were always left slanting open, to get in ventilation and to publicize the din up here to the sidewalks below; it might pull strays off the pavement. It was through the end two that she got it. Peering benignly in at her from way up high there, with sometimes a handful of stars scattered around it further back. The stars didn’t help her any, but it did. What good were stars? What good was anything? What good was being born a girl? At least men didn’t have to peddle their feet. They could be low in their own particular ways, but they didn’t have to be low in this way.

It was pretty far-off, but her eyes were good. Glowing softly against the taffeta backdrop of the night. A luminous circle, like a hoop. With twelve luminous notches around the inside of it. And a pair of luminous hands to tell them off, that never jammed, never stopped dead and played a dirty trick on her, always kept plugging for her, kept inching ahead, to get her off and out of here. It was the clock on the tower of the Paramount, all the way across the town from here at Seventh Avenue and Forty-third. Diagonally across, and still visible in here where she was, through some curious canalization of building-tops and angle of perspective. It was like a face—all clocks are. It was like the face of a friend. A funny friend for a slim, red-haired girl of twenty-two to have, but it spelled the difference between endurance and despair.

And another funny thing about it was, she could still see it further over where she roomed, from the windows of her rooming house if she got up on tiptoe and stretched her neck, although it was at an even greater distance there and all the way around in a different direction. But over there, on sleepless nights, it was just a detached onlooker, neither for her nor against her. It was here in the mill, from eight to one, that it really helped her out.

She looked at it longingly over this anonymous shoulder now, and it said to her: “Ten-to. The worst is about over, kid. Just grit your teeth, and before you know it—”

“Plenty crowded here tonight.”

For a minute she couldn’t even tell where it had come from, she was in such a vacuum of non-awareness. Then she centered it in the disembodied cipher steering her about with him at the moment.

Oh, so he was going to talk, was he? Well, she could take care of that. He was slower in reaching that point than most of them, at that. This was the third or fourth consecutive number he’d claimed her for. And before the last intermission, she seemed to recall a similar suit-coloring before her blurred eyes a great many times, although she couldn’t be sure, for she didn’t bother trying to differentiate one from another—ever. The tongue-tied or the bashful type, perhaps, that was the reason for the delay.

“Yuh.” She couldn’t have made the monosyllable any shorter without swallowing it altogether.

He tried again. “Is it always as crowded as it is tonight?”

“No, after it closes it’s empty.”

All right, let him look at her like that. She didn’t have to be agreeable to him, all she had to do was dance with him. His ten cents just covered footwork, not vocal exercise.

They’d darkened the place for this last number. They usually did, toward the end of the session like this. Direct lights out, and the figures on the floor moving about like rustling ghosts. That was supposed to make the customers mellow, that was supposed to send them out into the street feeling as though they’d had a private tête-à-tête with someone up here. All for ten cents and a paper-cupful of vegetable-coloring orangeade.

She could feel him poising his head back a little, looking at her closely, as if trying to figure out what made her that way. She centered her own eyes blankly on the flashing, silvery spirochete that went swirling endlessly across the walls and ceiling, cast off by the spinning mirrored top overhead.

Why look into her face to find out what had made her this way? He wouldn’t find the answer there. Why not look into the casting-offices all over town, where her ghost still lingered, poised on the chair nearest the door? Or should have, she’d haunted them so. Why not look into the dressing-room of that tawdry Jamaica roadhouse, the one job she’d actually gotten, that she’d had to flee from before rehearsals for its floor-show even got under way, because she’d been foolish enough to loiter behind the others at the proprietor’s suggestion? Why not look into the slot at the Automat on 47th?—the one that had swallowed up the last nickel she had in the world one never-to-be-forgotten day, and given her back two puffy, swollen rolls; and from then on wouldn’t open again for her, no matter how often she stood longingly before it, for she had no further nickels to put in. Above all, why not look inside the battered dog-eared valise under her bed back at the room at this moment? It didn’t weigh much, but it was full. Full of stale dreams, that were no good now any more.

The answer was in all those places, but not in her face. So what was the sense of his looking for it in her face? Faces are masks, anyway.

He tried his luck again. “This is the first time I was ever up here.”

She didn’t bring her eyes back from the pelting silver gleams streaking down the walls. “We’ve missed you.”

“I guess you get tired of dancing. I guess by the end of the evening, like this, it starts in to get you.” He was trying to find an excuse for her surliness, so that his self-esteem could tell itself it wasn’t on account of him, was for some other reason. She knew; she knew how they were.

This time she brought her eyes back to him, witheringly. “Oh no. I never get tired of it. I don’t get half enough. Why when I go back to my room after I leave here at nights I practise splits and high kicks.”

He dropped his own eyes momentarily, as the barb made itself felt, then raised them to hers again. “You’re kind of sore about something, aren’t you.” He didn’t ask it as a question but stated it as a discovery.

“Yeah. Me.”

He wouldn’t give up. Couldn’t he take a hint, even when it was driven home with a sledge-hammer? “Don’t like it here?”

That was the crowning irritant of the whole series of inept remarks he’d been awkwardly tendering her as conversational fodder. She could feel her chest beginning to constrict with infuriation. An explosive denunciation would have surely followed. Fortunately, the necessity of answering was removed. The spattering and jangling of tin buckets that had been going on ended on a badly-fractured note, the mirror-gleams faded off the walls, and the center lights went up. A trumpet executed a Bronx cheer of dismissal.

Their enforced intimacy was at an end. His ten cents had spent its course.

She dropped her hand from the turn of his arm, inertly, as though it were something that had died long ago; and in doing so managed unobtrusively but definitely to push his own arm off her waist.

A sigh of unutterable relief escaped from her, that she made no effort to quell. “Good night,” she murmured tonelessly, “we’re closing up now.” She turned to leave him and walk away.

Before she had quite time to complete the act, the look of surprise she saw on his face held her there a moment longer, her back half to him. More than that even, it was the way he was fumbling in his various pockets, bringing out coils and spirals of linked tickets from each, until he had a massed overflowing double-handful.

He looked down at them. “Gee, I guess I didn’t need to buy all these,” he murmured ruefully, but more to himself than to her.

“What did you expect to do, camp in here all week? How many did you get, anyway?”

“I don’t remember. I think about ten dollars’ worth.” He looked up at her. “I just wanted to get in here, and I didn’t stop to—” he began. Then he stopped again.

She’d caught that, however. “You just wanted to get in here?” she said on a rising inflection. “That’s a hundred dances! We never play that many in a night.” She glanced over toward the foyer. “And I don’t know what you can do about it, either. The cashier’s gone home for the night and you won’t be able to get a refund now any more.”

He was still holding them, but helplessly rather than with any air of acute loss. “I don’t want a refund.”

“Then you’ll have to come back again tomorrow night and keep coming till you’ve used them all up. They’ll be just as good then.”

“I don’t think I’ll—be able to,” he said quietly. Suddenly he’d edged them slightly toward her. “Here. Want them? You can have them. You get a cut on the ones you turn back, don’t you?”

For a moment her hands strayed uncontrollably toward the mass; then she quickly checked them, drew them in again, looked up at him. “No,” she said defiantly. “I don’t get it, but no thanks.”

“But they’re not any good to me. I’ll never be back here again. You may as well take them.”

It was a lot of commission. A lot of easy commission, too. But she’d made a rule for herself long ago, out of bitter experience. Never give in anywhere, about anything, even if you couldn’t see what they were driving at. If you gave in about one thing, no matter what it was, you’d find yourself giving in about the next, somewhere else along the line, that much easier.

“No,” she said firmly. “Maybe I’m a chump, but I don’t want any commissions I haven’t danced for. Not from you or anybody else.” And this time she completed the act of leaving him, turned on her heel and walked across the barren floor, upon which they were almost the last two to have remained standing.

She glanced back toward where she’d left him just once, from the dressing-room door on the other side of the ballroom. It was more of a posture-reflex that went with the act of widening the door to enter, than an intentional deliberate look back to him.

She could see his hands going in a sort of compressing motion, kneading the mass of tickets more compactly together. Then right while she looked, he flung the lumpy ball indifferently away from him, offside toward the edge of the parquet, and turned and went strolling forward toward the foyer entryway.

He’d danced about six times with her, all told. He’d just thrown away well over nine dollars’ worth of tickets. And it was no pose or act to impress her; she could tell he hadn’t been aware of her scrutiny at the moment it occurred.

Pretty easy with his money, as though he didn’t know what to do with it, couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. Meaning—if anything-that he wasn’t used to having it. Because, she was shrewd enough to have learned by now, those who have had money for any length of time are never at a loss as to what to do with it.

She gave a shrug with one shoulder, went in and closed the door behind her.

She called this next step, the departure from the premises, running the gauntlet, but it no longer held any real terrors for her. It was like stepping over a puddle of dirty water that lies in your path; inconvenient, but in a moment you’re on the other side of it and it’s done with.

The lights had gone down again, this time for good, when she came out. Just one in back, so the scrubwomen could see to work by. She said to someone, invisible behind her as she reclosed the dressing-room door, “Well, then don’t ask me to go out on double dates with you any more, and you won’t get turned down!” She made her way down one side of the gloomy, barren, cavernous place, her footfalls muffled by the strip of carpeting that ran along it, except in one place where she cut a corner and they echoed out in hollow woodenness for a moment.

The pattern of the darkness had reversed itself. It was lighter now outside the open windows than in here in the interior of the dance-hall. She passed the two at the end, and her friend, her ally and accomplice, was up there limned against the sky. Her head turned slightly toward it as she moved rapidly by, until the casement cut them off from one another again with her passage. If any message or look of gratitude passed fleetingly between them at the moment, that was between her and it.

She parted the swing doors and stepped out into the still-lighted foyer running to the head of the stairs, with its alcoves for the ticket-seller and cloakroom-attendant and its two decrepit rattan settees.

There were two of them out there. There was always somebody. They always hung around. If you waited until daybreak to emerge, there would still have been one or two of them hanging around. One, a leg draped from the edge of the settee, must have been waiting for someone who was still in there; he gave her only nominal attention. The other, standing out at the very head of the steps themselves, was, she saw as she passed him, the very one who had just been with her for the past half-dozen dances or so.

He was, however, looking intently down the stairs toward the street rather than expectantly inward toward the doors she had just come through. As though delayed more by inability to decide where to go than by intent to meet anyone. In fact, she could tell by the surprised look of recognition he turned on her as she passed, that he hadn’t seen her approach at all until then.

She would have gone by without a word, but his hand went to his hat—he had one on now—and he said: “Going home now?”

If she’d been astringent inside, she was vitriolic out here in the vestibule. This was strictly enemy territory. There was no bouncer out here to protect you, you were on your own. “No, I’m just checking in. I come up the stairs backward like this so they won’t see my face, know who I am.”

She went down the rubber-matted, steel-tipped steps and out into the open. He stayed behind up there, as though still at a loss what to do. And he wasn’t waiting for anyone, because there was just one girl left behind in there and she was already preëmpted. Again she gave that slight shrug of one shoulder, but this time mentally and not in actuality. What was it to her? What was any of it to her, anyone to her?

The open air felt good. Anything would have, after that place up there. She always gave a deep exhalation on first emerging, that was part relief, part exhaustion. She gave it now.

This was the real danger zone, down on the street. There were a couple of indistinct figures loitering about, well-offside to the doorway, cigarettes dangling from mouths, whom she refrained from glancing at too closely as she came out, turned, and went up the street. There always were; she had never seen it to fail yet. Like tomcats watching a mousehole. The ones who loitered about up above, they were waiting for some one particular girl as a rule; the ones down here, they were waiting for just anyone at all.

She knew this hazard by heart. She could have written a book. She wouldn’t have smirched the good white paper to do it, that was all. There was always a time-lag, when there was to be the challenge direct. It never came at point of closest propinquity, at the doorway itself; it was always withheld until she was some distance away. Sometimes she thought this had to do with courage. Rather than tackle the mouse face-to-face, the valiant toms waited until its back was turned. Sometimes she thought it was merely that their stunted developments needed that much longer to come to a decision about their choice of prey. Sometimes she just thought, “Oh, the hell.” And often, very often, she didn’t think about it at all; it was just a puddle of dirty water to be overstepped along her homeward way.

The challenge came in the form of a whistle tonight. It often took that form. It wasn’t an honest, open shrill whistle, at that. It was bated, surreptitious. She knew it was for her. And then a verbal postscript. “What’s your hurry?” She didn’t bother quickening her pace; that would have been giving it more respect than was due it. When they thought you were afraid, that emboldened them all the—

A hand hooked detainingly around the curve of her arm. She didn’t try to pull away from it. She stopped short, looked down at it rather than up into his face.

“Take that off me,” she said with lethal coldness.

“What’s the matter, don’t you know me? Memory’s kind of short, ain’t it?”

Her eyes were taut slits of white against the street-darkness. “Look, I’m on my own time now. It’s bad enough I’ve got to talk to guys like you—”

“I was good enough for you when I was upstairs two nights ago, though, wasn’t I?” He’d followed his own hand around forward, was blocking her way now.

She wouldn’t give ground, nor even pay him the homage of trying to step around him at the side. “Heavy spender,” she said evenly. “Shot sixty cents to pieces in one night, and now you’re trying to collect a bonus on it down here on the sidewalk.”

A cab had sidled up on the outside, drawn by some unobtrusive signal on his part that she had missed, its door dangling encouragingly open.

“All right, you’re hard to get; you’ve played your act. I believe you. Come on, I’ve got a taxi waiting.”

“I wouldn’t even get in a five-cent trolley-car with you, let alone a taxi.”

He tried to turn her aside toward it, partly by indirection, partly by main force.

She managed to slam the door closed behind her, and then it acted as a bulwark as he crowded her back against it.

A man had stopped opposite the two of them. That other one, who’d been in the upstairs foyer when she came out. She caught sight of him over this one’s shoulder. She didn’t appeal to him, ask him for help in any way. She’d never asked anyone for help yet in one of these passages. That way you were sure of never being disappointed. This wasn’t anything, anyway; it would be over in a minute.

He came in closer, said to her uncertainly: “Do you want me to do anything, miss?”

“Well, don’t just stand there. What do you think this is, an audition for the Good Will Hour? If you’re musclebound yourself, call a cop.”

“Oh, I don’t have to do that, miss,” he answered with a curious disclaiming sort of modesty, totally unsuitable to the circumstances.

He pulled the other man around toward him, and she heard the blow instead of seeing it. It made a taut impact against thinly-cushioned bone, so it must have been the side of his jaw. The recipient went floundering back against the rear fender of the cab, and overbalanced down the curve of that to the ground, half-prostrate and half-upright on one elbow.

None of the three moved for a minute.

Then the recumbent member of the small group scrambled to his feet with a curious recessive movement, pushing backward with his legs along the ground until he could be sure of rising at a safe distance from further blows. When he had risen, he turned, with neither threat nor sign of animosity, as one who is too practical to waste time on such heroics, and scuttled from their ken, dusting himself down the leg as he went.

The cab withdrew second, its driver deciding there was nothing further for him in this after a briefly questioning look to see whether she intended making use of it with her new partner.

Her thanks were scarcely overwhelming. “Do you always wait that long?”

“I didn’t know but what he was some special friend of yours,” he murmured deprecatingly.

“According to you, special friends have a right to hijack you on your way home. Is that what you do yourself?”

He smiled a little. “I don’t have any special friends.”

“You can double that,” she said crisply. “And you can stick in for me I don’t want any.” And she shot him a look that added personal point to the remark.

He saw that she was about to turn and continue on her way without further parley. “My name’s Quinn Williams,” he blurted out, as if seeking by that means automatically to detain her a moment longer.

“Pleased to meet you.” It didn’t sound as pleasant as the word-arrangement presupposed it to. It sounded like a lead quarter bouncing against a zinc counter.

She resumed her withdrawal, or rather continued it without having interrupted it at all.

He turned and looked behind him, in the direction in which her recent annoyer had disappeared. “Think maybe I should walk with you a block or two?” he suggested.

She neither acceded nor openly forbade him to. “He won’t come back again,” was all she said. He translated her indecisive answer into full consent, fell into step beside her, though at a formal distance of several feet.

They walked an entire block-length from the dance-hall entrance in mutual silence; she because she was determined not to make the effort to say anything, he—judging by several false starts he made that died stillborn—because he was unequal to it, was self-conscious, didn’t know what to say now that he had gained his point of accompanying her.

They crossed an intersection, and she saw him look back. She made no comment.

The second block passed in the same stony silence. She looked straight ahead, as though she were alone. She owed him nothing, she hadn’t asked him to come with her.

They reached the second and last intersection. “I go west here,” she said briefly, and turned aside, as if taking leave of him without further ado.

He didn’t take the hint. He belatedly turned after her and came abreast again, murmuring something indistinct about: “May as well go the rest of the way, now that I came this far.”

She’d seen him glance back again, though, a moment before he did so. “Don’t let him worry you,” she said caustically. “He’s gone for good.”

“Who?” he asked blankly. And then, as if remembering whom she meant, “Oh, I wasn’t thinking about him.”

She stopped short, to deliver an ultimatum. “Look,” she said. “I didn’t ask you to walk all the way over with me. If you want to, that’s up to you. Just one thing. Keep your own thinking clear. Don’t get any ideas in your head.”

He accepted it in silence. He didn’t protest that she’d misjudged him. That was almost the first thing she’d liked about him, the first favorable comment she’d permitted herself to make upon him, since he’d first come within her orbit an hour or two ago. But she had a prejudiced mind against all who came her way as he had, a mind that had long ago learned: the less obnoxious you found them in the beginning, the greater care you had better take, for the more obnoxious they were likely to prove in the end, having partially disarmed you.

They went on again, still at their spaced width of several feet, still uncommunicative, being together only in the act of going forward simultaneously. It was the strangest escorting she had ever had, and if she must have any, she preferred them all to be like this.

Up a tunnel-dim side-street, that had once carried a lateral branch of the Elevated over to Ninth Avenue. It was now shorn of it but permanently stunted in its development by the sixty-year strait jacket it had endured. The slab-like sides of windowless warehouses, the curved back of a well-known skating-rink that looked like a cement tank, gaps torn in the building-ranks here and there by the Depression, particularly on corner-sites, and never rebuilt upon, used now for parking lots.

The street lampposts, few and far apart, would talcum them thinly white for a moment or two like something sifting downward from the punctures of a reversed container, then their figures would darken again, blend into the gloom.

He said something finally. She couldn’t remember precisely, but she thought it was the first remark he’d made since the fracas at the taxi. “You mean you come through here alone other nights?”

“Why not? It’s no worse than back there. Along here, if they’d make a grab at you, it would only be your purse they’d be after.” And then she felt like adding, “Why, are you afraid?” but forbore. Mainly because he hadn’t said or done anything deserving the slash, at least up to this point, and she was tired of having her claws out and ready all the time; it felt good to leave them in where they were for a change.

He looked back again. That was the second or third time he’d done that now. Even if there’d been something to see back there, in the gloom through which they’d just now passed, he wouldn’t have been able to see it.

This time she didn’t let it pass unnoticed. “What are you afraid of, he’ll come after you with a knife? He won’t, don’t let it worry you.”

“Oh, him,” he said, “you mean that guy,” and gave her a surprised look, as though again she had recalled him from a separate train of thought wide of her own. He smiled a little, sheepishly, and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck, as though the fault of the act lay therein and not in his volition. A moment later he’d put it into words, half to himself. “I didn’t know I was doing it, myself. Must be a sort of habit I’ve fallen into.”

There’s something on his mind, she told herself. People didn’t look behind them like that, every few steps of the way. And strangely enough she believed him, that it had nothing to do with the recent incident of the blow. The way he reacted each time she caught him at it bore that out. His wariness wasn’t of the immediate stretch of sidewalk behind them, of someone skulking up in back of him, it was more general, more widespread, it was of the entire night behind him. On two dimensions: both the hours of it, and the island-wide depths of it.

And now that she recalled it, that monstrous purchase of tickets he’d made, back at the mill, and then flung extravagantly away, as though they’d lost their value with tonight, there were never going to be any later time in which to use them, that was of a piece with it.

She remembered something else, and asked him a question.

“When I came out, and you were standing there in the foyer, up at the top of the stairs, you know—were you waiting for someone?”

“No,” he said. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Then why were you standing there after the place was already closed?” She’d known he hadn’t been, because he’d been looking down the steps and not over toward the inner doors.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I—didn’t know where to go, or what to do, after the place was once closed. I guess I—I guess I was trying to make up my mind where to go from there.”

Then why didn’t he stand outside, at the street entrance; that would have been the natural place for him to stand and do his thinking. She didn’t ask him that. The answer had come with it. Because you couldn’t be seen from upstairs in the stair-foyer, you were safe while you stayed there; you could be seen downstairs at the street entrance. If anyone were looking for you. Or you thought they were.

But chiefly she didn’t ask him because of another reason, and not the self-evident explanation that had occurred to her. She didn’t ask him because her own mind had just dropped shut at this point, like a portcullis catching itself open; rolling down with a harsh grating injunction, that had no mercy, no admission in it for anyone: What do you care? What is it to you? What do you want to know about it for? Let him keep it to himself. What are you, a settlement nurse? Did anyone else ever worry about you?

And in bitter silence she upbraided herself, “You still haven’t learned, have you? They beat you black and blue, and you still hold out your open hand to the next one that comes along. What does it take to get it into your head, a pounding with a lead pipe?”

He looked back again, and she let him.

They’d come to Ninth, wide and dismal in its grubby shadowiness, and not all the red and white beads whisking along it could make it anything but that.

They stood for a moment, toes overlapping the curb. The streaming beads slackened, dammed into sleazy diadems, reared facing one another, two to each intersection, all down the long billowy vista, that would crumble again and be strewn along as before in another moment.

She had already stepped down. There was an instant’s recoil on his part. A false start, nothing more. A small thing. “Come on, the light’s all right,” she said. He went over after her immediately, but that unaccountable hitch had been self-revelatory. Effect had been shown, so cause had to be somewhere around, it only remained to identify it. Then she saw that it wasn’t the light that had checked him, it was that lone figure all the way over on the other side, and going steadily away from them, that patrolman pacing his beat.

She saw that by the way his eyes came back from following him along, and then and only then went upward to the light, attracted to it by her remark.

The portcullis remained stubbornly closed.

They climbed the opposite curb, and went on into the maw of the ensuing westward block. Three anemic light-pools widely spaced down its seemingly endless length did nothing to dilute the gloom; they only pointed it up by giving it contrast. As if saying: See, this is what light is like—when there is any.

There was a clamminess to the air now, a sense of nearby water, that had been lacking further over. A tug-siren groaned dismally somewhere in the night ahead of them. And then another one answered it, way over near the Jersey side.

“Pretty soon now,” she said.

“I’ve never been this far over before,” he admitted.

“You can’t get very much further in off the river than this for five dollars a week.” And then, though she realized full well he hadn’t offered any objection, she couldn’t resist adding: “You can drop off anytime it gets you down.”

“It hasn’t got me down,” he murmured diplomatically.

She opened her bag and felt for her key ahead of time; a preparatory reflex, to make sure it was there.

She halted as they reached the midway pool of light, and its downward-fuming motes powdered them back into visibility to one another. “Well, this is it here,” she said.

He just looked at her. She thought it was almost stupid, the way he looked at her. Sort of bovine. As though he were trying to grasp the fact that they were separating and he would be by himself once more. Something like that. At least there wasn’t any of that other stuff in it; no amorous ambitions.

There was a doorway opposite them, or very nearly so. Left open to the street, but with the perils of ingress ameliorated to some slight extent by a faltering lemon-pale backwash that came from deep within it and failed to reach all the way to its mouth, leaving an intervening twilight zone. Still it was better than nothing. They’d formerly left it dark, and she’d dreaded having to enter it late at nights. Until someone had been knifed on the stairs one night, and since then they’d left a light there at their foot. Now, she reflected wryly, you could see who knifed you, if you were to have it happen.

She cut their parting short; carrying it into effect while holding him where he was under a delaying barrage of a few last words. That was simply to gain distance, get beyond arm’s reach. She’d learned by experience to do it that way, and not to stand still listening to remonstrances and purring objections. She’d had to.

“Take it easy,” she said. And suddenly she was already over in the doorway and he was standing alone on the sidewalk. “I’ll see you around,” she said from there. Meaning just the reverse: she never would see him again, he never would see her, this ended it.

But even before she’d quite gone inside, she’d already seen him turn his head away again and look back into the obscurity through which they’d just come. Fear was uppermost over dalliance in his mind.

What was he to her? He was just a pink dance-check, torn in half. Two-and-a-half cents’ worth of commission on the dime. A pair of feet, a blank, a cipher.