“Who is it?” the woman said from inside the apartment.
“It’s me,” he answered. “Sam.”
“Just a second,” she said.
He waited. His heart had begun beating frantically inside his chest. She won’t know me, he thought. Oh Jesus, she won’t know me. It was not important now that he find out who he was; this did not seem important at all. It was only important that she should know who he was, that she should open the door and say, “Sam, oh Sam baby, where you been, honey? Come in,” that she should open her arms and pull him close to her breasts and smother him with warmth and perfume, that she should know him. He waited while she fussed inside the apartment — what was she doing in there? — waited interminably, and then knocked again on the door, and she yelled, “Yes, yes, I’m coming,” and still he waited; what was taking her so damn — the door opened.
Gloria Osborne was a big blond woman wearing curlers in her hair, and a quilted robe around her shoulders. She opened the door wide and peered into the hallway, and her face expressed the same shock that must have been on his the moment the door opened, because Gloria Osborne was perhaps fifty-three years old with pale blue eyes and a wide nose and a mouth that had vanished the moment she had removed her lipstick. He stood staring at her in disappointment and in anger, feeling she had tricked him with her breathless, sleep-edged voice, recognizing that what he had first accepted as breathlessness was really the sound of advancing middle age, hating her for having tricked him, and then seeing that she was staring at him in surprise and waiting for him to speak. Neither said a word. He thought of turning and running for the elevator, and then a horrifying idea rushed into his mind. My mother, he thought. This woman standing here with the machinery of hell in her hair, this woman with watery blue eyes and no mouth, is my goddamn mother!
“Miss... Miss Osborne?” he asked.
“Yes?” The voice was cautious, suspicious.
“Gloria Osborne?”
“Yes?”
“I...” He sighed heavily. “I’m Sam,” he said.
“Yeah?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“You’re not any Sam I know,” she said.
“I just spoke to you on the phone a little while ago,” he answered.
“Yeah,” she said. She was still watching him suspiciously, as though trying to figure out what his game was.
“Your number was in my book.”
“Yeah,” she said.
He could see that she didn’t believe him, so he instantly reached into his jacket pocket and took out the little black book and opened it to the first page and showed the page to her.
“Twice,” she said, and she smiled.
“What?”
“It’s in your book twice.”
“Oh. Yes, I... I wrote it twice.”
“Because you forget things, isn’t that right?” The smile was still on her face, a curious smile he could not read. He was suddenly aware of the heavy scent clinging to her and realized that Gloria Osborne, his breathy-voiced telephone inamorata, had doused herself with perfume upon arising, but had not bothered to put on any lipstick. The implications of such an oversight were frightening.
“Well,” Gloria said, “why don’t you come in?”
“I don’t think I should,” he answered. “You see, I thought you might know me, but apparently you don’t, so I’ll just apologize for waking you up, and—”
“Don’t be silly,” Gloria said. “You’re here, so come on in. I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”
“Well...”
“Come on.”
“But... I’m not Sam,” he said.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know you’re not Sam?”
“Am I?”
“How do I know?”
“I mean, do you know me?”
“I’ve never seen you before in my life.”
“Then I can’t be Sam, can I?”
“You can be whoever you like, baby. Napoleon, if you like. Only make up your mind. We’re going to wake up the whole damn building.” She paused, watching him. “Yes or no? In or out?”
He shrugged. “I guess I can use a cup of coffee,” he said.
Gloria smiled, and said, “Then come on in.”
He followed her into the apartment. The quilted robe was blue, and it spread over a very wide backside which she managed to jiggle ponderously as she walked, rather like a truck horse pulling a brewery wagon. He noticed that she was wearing tiny blue satin slippers with blue pom-pom puffs at each toe. There was a small mirror on the wall just inside the entrance, and she paused to glance at herself, and then turned her head daintily over one shoulder, and said, “Come on,” in a trippingly light voice, slightly teasing, invitational. He would have left her in that moment, were it not for the fact that her number was, after all, in his little black book. He found, as he followed her into the small apartment, that a curious tug of war was going on in his mind, the antagonists in which stood at either end of a memory rope, one trying to pull him deeper into forgetfulness, the other trying to pull him up into complete recognition. He sensed that if he succumbed to either one or the other, he would be completely lost. The key to survival, he reasoned, was to maintain a balance between these two forces tugging at either end of his unconscious. So whereas he wanted to run from this blowzy broad in her blue quilted robe with her blue pom-pom slippers, his instincts told him to stay and hear her out. How had her number come to be in his book in his handwriting in his jacket pocket? He had to know, and yet he did not want to know, and the rope tightened in his mind from the strain at its opposite ends.
He followed her into a small living room furnished in a three-piece suite, one chair done in maroon, a second in gold, and the couch in a deep blue, all with heavily carved mahogany legs, all with antimacassars on the arms and the backs. A framed print of gondolas in Venice was on the wall over the couch, and a framed print of a Spanish lady with a mantilla over her head, strumming a guitar and singing, was on the wall over the maroon chair, which he now sat in. Gloria sat opposite him on the couch, tucking her legs up under her and pulling the flaps of the quilted robe down over her knees. She smiled maternally, and said, “The coffee’s up. It should be ready in a few minutes.”
“Thank you,” he said.
“What’s your name?” she asked. She asked it so casually, so offhandedly, that it seemed not at all like a trap. It seemed for a moment as though he were simply some stranger who had come to the door, whom she had accepted, and whose name she now wanted to know. The conversation on the telephone seemed never to have taken place.
“I don’t know my name,” he said.
“Then why’d you say you were Sam?”
“You said I was Sam.”
“I never said no such thing.”