“A lady to see you.”
“A lady? What lady?”
“If you’ll open, you will see.” She kept threat out of her voice, to try to cajole the final obstacle out of her way.
The knob pivoted undecidedly, she saw it go around, but the door didn’t open. “It isn’t you, Ruth, is it?”
“Just let me speak to you. It will only take a minute.”
Trust this once, and you’re undone forever; trust this once, and you’ll never trust again.
A latch-tongue shot back, the door broke casing.
She was about twenty-eight. Well, it was hard to say; twenty-six, then. She was blonde, and her hair was short and curly. It was a natural blonde, though it may have been given some slight abetment. Her sandy eyebrows and almost white lashes told that. Her face was hard, and yet it wasn’t. It wasn’t the hardness that comes from within, it was rather a protective coating, a crust, it wore. Beneath, still lurking in the eyes and along the seams that caught tautly at the corners of its mouth, was a child-like trustfulness, that was afraid to come out too far, it had been rebuffed so often. It had learned its lesson not once but many times; it tried to hide itself away from the world now.
Her cheeks were thin, there was a hollowed spot in each. She had too much rouge on them, and over too great an expanse, and it gave them a fevered look. She had on a cheap cotton dress in a design of thin pencil-stripes. They ran diagonal; on one side of an invisible center line, they ran down one way, on the other, they ran down the opposite way.
She was a little frightened by this intrusion, but she was hoping to be reassured.
All this in an instantaneous snapshot taken by the eyes, to be assembled later as the minutes went by.
“I want to see you.”
That forepointed foot was in the way now; the door couldn’t close any more. She hadn’t looked down, so she wasn’t aware of this yet.
“Who are you?”
“You’d better let me talk to you about this inside, for your own sake as well as mine. Don’t keep me standing out here.”
She pushed by her and was in. One of them closed the door, neither one of them was sure at the moment which of the two had done it.
It was a small living-dining room in a cramped furnished flat. Neat enough, but shoddy-cheap in every aspect. A window cast its foreshortened square of light upon a gray wall an arm’s span out from it. A skimpy length of cranberry velour drapery hung down on either side of it. A card table had been erected, and dishes and the things she had brought from the delicatessen stood upon it, waiting to be partaken of. A newspaper was even on it, a pale green tabloid, furled and held flat between two of the dishes, waiting to be taken up and read. A package of cigarettes, still unopened, lay waiting there too — she must have brought them in with her just now — and a furbished ashtray to go with them, and even a folder of matches. A paper napkin was spread over the sandwiches to keep the dust off them until she was ready.
A doorless opening beyond, with light coming through, must have led into a bedroom.
She saw all this, but it didn’t matter. Even death has a homelife, it doesn’t strike out suddenly out of nowhere.
“What’re you up to, anyway? I don’t let strangers in on me at this time of night. I don’t like the way you’re acting.”
She gave it to her without any embroidery. “You got in a taxi at the corner of Seventieth and Madison, around one. You’d been paying a call on someone around the corner from there. Right?”
The woman’s face answered for her. It was starting to get white.
“The man you were calling on is dead now. Right?”
The woman’s eyes curdled. The outside of her face died a little. It wasn’t pretty to watch.
“You killed him. Right?”
“Oh my God.” She said it soft and low. Her eyes rolled; the pupils were carried upward under their lids, out of sight. She was all white eyeball for a minute or two.
The corner of the bridge-table kept her upright, she found it with her hands, sight unseen.
She started to cry; it came up only as far as her eyes, then she changed her mind. Not enough tears formed to push their way out. They stayed in, giving the eyes a glassy coating.
“What are you, a policewoman?”
“Never mind what I am. We’re talking about you. You’re a killer. You’ve killed someone tonight.”
The woman’s hand went to the base of her throat for a minute, trying to ease it. A sob that was more like a cough sounded in it. “Let me get a drink of water a minute, I’m all— It’s all right, there’s no other way out of here.”
“And get your things while you’re in there,” Bricky said mercilessly.
She went in through the lighted opening. She had to hold onto one side of it to steer herself through it.
Bricky stood there looking down. She was listening, not thinking. A glass tinked. Her ears didn’t tell her. Some wire-fine instinct, jangling to an unseen current, told her. She took a quick step forward, went in there after her.
“Don’t drink that!” Bricky swung backhand at her face. The glass was knocked away from her parted lips. It didn’t break, it was cheap and thick. It just thudded to the floor, rolled over, spewing a thin watery trail after it.
It was only after she’d completed the act that her eyes roamed around and saw the bottle standing uncapped on a shelf above the sink. Brown glass, “Lysol” on the label.
The woman was gripping the edge of the sink with both hands, as though it were unsteady and liable to get away from her.
“So you’ve as good as told me, haven’t you?”
The woman was silent. Her hands, on the sink were shaking a little, that was all.
“You didn’t have to. I knew it anyway.”
The woman was silent.
“You’re coming back there with me now. You’re coming up there — where it happened.”
The woman exploded into a strangled bleat. “No. You can’t make me. I don’t know who you are, but you can’t make me. I’ll kill you first. I don’t have to die twice. Once was enough.”
Her hand shot out into some sort of a rubber rack hanging to one side of the sink. Something flashed in the light, and a short, sharp-bladed kitchen-knife reared back over her shoulder, about to slash forward at Bricky.
There was no time to get out of the way, the place was too cramped. She flung herself forward upon her instead. Her hand caught the death-dealing arm at the wrist, tried to hold it off. Their other two arms threshed and clawed at one another, and finally riveted themselves together and stalemated one another.
The woman had the strength of desperation, of suicide. Bricky had the strength of self-preservation. An equipoise was established, that had to break sooner or later. They swayed slightly, moving very little, scarcely leaving the rim of the sink at all. Once they both bent over it together; again, they both bent outward the other way. Their hair came down. They didn’t scream, didn’t shrill. This wasn’t a cat-fight over some fancied slight; this was a fight to the death between two human beings. And death abolishes sex.
They rotated a little, then they went back again the other way. In the silence you couldn’t hear anything but their strident breaths. They had frozen into a tableau of exhaustion, Bricky too spent to ward off the knife, the other too spent to drive it home altogether.
A key fumbled at the door, on the outside of the other room.
Suddenly, with crazy irrelevancy, their roles had reversed.
The other woman was desperately trying to fling the knife away, rid herself of it, discard it. Bricky, still not understanding, held her wrist in a vise, choked off its power of motion. The fingers opened and the knife fell to the floor. The woman’s foot darted out, kicked it out of sight under the sink. There was nothing to strive over any more. They released one another uncertainly.