She was sound asleep, her mouth pressed against the side of the pillow and her lush white body curled like a cat about to spring. Sleep softened the hard lines around her mouth and eyes and made her far more gentle and feminine than she was when she was awake. She invariably slept nude, and because the night was so warm she had thrown back the covers and slept on top of the bed.
Ralph saw her with the eye of an artist. While any man would have been captivated and excited by Stella’s body, Ralph was able to study it in detail and to realize just how beautiful it was.
Stella was thirty, three years older than Ralph. With the sort of life she had been leading it was almost a miracle that no signs of wear or aging appeared to the eye. Her breasts were still perfectly firm, and breasts as large as Stella’s generally show the signs of age earlier than smaller ones. Her complexion was clear and perfect from head to toe.
She was so beautiful, Ralph mused. How could anyone so beautiful be so inexplicably bad? It was impossible to understand.
He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him. A fast shower made him feel alive once again, his skin fresh and clean and his mind able to concentrate. He toweled himself dry and stood at the open bathroom window, gulping huge breaths of the early morning air. The air was as fresh as air ever got in New York and it made him feel even more awake and more alive.
He almost felt good.
But not quite. Not quite, because he knew that no man in his position could ever feel good. No man with Stella hanging on his neck like a millstone.
A millstone? That wasn’t a particularly good image, and he closed his eyes to hunt for a better one. An albatross, perhaps. A sexy blonde albatross. He remembered the poem by Coleridge in which a sailor shot an albatross and the corpse of the bird hung around his neck for months bringing terrible luck to the ship.
That was Stella, all right. Hanging around his neck and lousing him up.
Returning to the bedroom, he dressed quickly and quietly. Stella slept on. He glanced at her again and the events of the previous night flashed through his mind briefly — the insults, the slapping, the humiliating way she had forced him to make love to her on the floor with her dress on, the terrible laughter that tore from her throat all the while until passion caught her up and the laughter changed in midstream to a gush of foul obscenities. For a moment a wild impulse gripped him and he longed to kill her, to press the pillow over her nose and mouth and hold it there until she choked to death.
But the impulse passed quickly. Ralph was not by nature a violent man. He could fight when pressed and he could lose his temper easily enough, but he had never yet gotten mad enough to commit murder.
But he had to admit the idea was an attractive one.
For a moment he considered frying himself a couple eggs in the apartment’s small kitchen. Then he decided against it. He didn’t want to be around when Stella woke up. Even if he didn’t get up the guts to leave her, he wanted to spend as little time around her and the apartment as possible.
He left the apartment and walked down the hallway to the door. The weather was nice out, with a hot yellow sun just coming into view and the sky clear-blue with hardly a cloud in it. He sat down for a moment on the stoop in front of the building and lit the first cigarette of the day, enjoying the lift it gave him as the strong smoke hit his lungs.
When the door opened behind him a second or two later he turned his head slightly to see who it was. That’s when he saw her for the first time.
She was wearing black toreador pants that were tight around her hips and legs and a light green sleeveless blouse that looked as cool as the grass in the mountains. She wore sandals on her feet and her hair was short and dark brown. Her body was trim and neat; in fact, there was an overwhelming impression of neatness and coolness and quiet self-possession about her which hit him at once.
He liked her instantly.
“Hello,” he said. He smiled.
She smiled back.
“I haven’t seen you around before,” he said. “Did you just move in recently?”
“Yesterday morning.”
“First time in New York?”
“No,” she said, and she smiled as if the question were very funny.
“Been in the Village before?”
She nodded. “For several years.”
Suddenly he said: “Sit down for a minute. It’s very nice here.”
She seemed to be hesitating.
“Come on,” he said, indicating that she could sit on the stoop beside him. “The sun’s nice and it’s still cool out. Later in the day you’ll want to spend your time sitting in front of a fan, but now it’s nice enough just sitting in the sun and enjoying it.”
“All right,” she said. “But only for a minute.” She sat down.
He wasn’t sure where to begin. He felt that he wanted to get to know this girl, wanted to talk to her, but it was hard to hit on a conversational opener. Still, she was obviously willing to talk with him. Otherwise she wouldn’t have sat down.
“My name’s Ralph,” he said. “Ralph Lambert.”
“I’m Susan Rivers.”
“Have you had breakfast, Susan?”
“Not yet. I just got up.”
“There’s a place down the street where they make a good mushroom omelet. Interested?”
She hesitated, and this time it wasn’t hard to see her hesitation. She seemed genuinely worried about something and he wondered idly what it might be.
“I’m not trying to make a pass,” he assured her. “I live on the first floor here and there’s a girl who lives with me, so I’m not a guy on the make. I just thought you might like to have breakfast with me.”
She relaxed visibly. “All right,” she said. “A mushroom omelet sounds like a good idea.”
They stood up simultaneously and began walking along Barrow Street toward the restaurant, a small quiet place around the corner on Bedford. He noticed things: the way the top of her head was just level with his shoulder, the clean freshly bathed smell of her that rose to his nostrils, the cool, calm air about her. As they walked they talked about nothing in particular and he hardly managed to follow the conversation even though he was a participant in it. His mind was wrapped up in an appraisal of the girl. He felt that he wanted to get to know her, wanted to find out for himself just what sort of a person she was and what made her tick.
They both ordered mushroom omelets at the restaurant, with orange juice and toast and coffee. They ate in relative silence — the food was good and they were both quite hungry.
Then, over coffee and cigarettes he said: “Do you work, Susan?”
She nodded.
“Where?”
“Do you know the ceramic and jewelry shop on Macdougal Street just below Eighth?”
“I think so.”
“That’s where I work. I design ceramics and do a little of the actual throwing myself, too.”
“That sounds pretty good.”
She shrugged. “It doesn’t pay much but I like it. I can work pretty much my own hours and knock off for a day or two whenever I feel like it. And it’s… well, creative, I guess.”
“That makes a difference.”
“It really does, Ralph. I’m not talking about the artistic angle of it or anything. I don’t pretend to be artistic, whatever that means exactly. I’m just making things — ashtrays and vases and bowls that people can use and enjoy. It’s more a craft than an art.
“But the thing is that I’m figuring out a way to make something and then making it, sort of with my own two hands.” She held up her hands to illustrate the point. He noted that her hands were quite small with slender and well-formed fingers. Her fingernails were clipped short and she didn’t wear any nail polish.