As she felt herself blacking out, in the moment before unconsciousness, the thought flickered and fled that there was something terribly familiar about his face.
It rained the next day. East 52nd Street was slick and shining with the oil rainbows. The rain washed the dog turds into the gutters and nudged them down and down to the catch-basin openings. People bent against the slanting rain, hidden beneath umbrellas, looking like enormous, scurrying black mushrooms. Beth went out to get the newspapers after the police had come and gone.
The news reports dwelled with loving emphasis on the twenty-six tenants of the building who had watched in cold interest as Leona Ciarelli, 37, of 455 Fort Washington Avenue, Manhattan, had been systematically stabbed to death by Burton H. Wells, 41, an unemployed electrician, who had been subsequently shot to death by two off-duty police officers when he burst into Michael’s Pub on 55th Street, covered with blood and brandishing a knife that authorities later identified as the murder weapon.
She had thrown up twice that day. Her stomach seemed incapable of retaining anything solid, and the taste of bile lay along the back of her tongue. She could not blot the scenes of the night before from her mind; she re-ran them again and again, every movement of that reaper arm playing over and over as though on a short loop of memory. The woman’s head thrown back for silent screams. The blood. Those eyes in the fog.
She was drawn again and again to the window, to stare down into the courtyard and the street. She tried to superimpose over the bleak Manhattan concrete the view from her window in Swann House at Bennington: the little yard and another white, frame dormitory; the fantastic apple trees; and from the other window the rolling hills and gorgeous Vermont countryside; her memory skittered through the change of seasons. But there was always concrete and the rain-slick streets; the rain on the pavement was black and shiny as blood.
She tried to work, rolling up the tambour closure of the old rolltop desk she had bought on Lexington Avenue and hunching over the graph sheets of choreographer’s charts. But Labanotation was merely a Jackson Pollock jumble of arcane hieroglyphics to her today, instead of the careful representation of eurhythmics she had studied four years to perfect. And before that, Farmington.
The phone rang. It was the secretary from the Taylor Dance Company, asking when she would be free. She had to beg off. She looked at her hand, lying on the graph sheets of figures Laban had devised, and she saw her fingers trembling. She had to beg off. Then she called Guzman at the Downtown Ballet Company, to tell him she would be late with the charts.
“My God, lady, I have ten dancers sitting around in a rehearsal hall getting their leotards sweaty! What do you expect me to do?”
She explained what had happened the night before. And as she told him, she realized the newspapers had been justified in holding that tone against the twenty-six witnesses to the death of Leona Ciarelli. Paschal Guzman listened, and when he spoke again, his voice was several octaves lower, and he spoke more slowly. He said he understood and she could take a little longer to prepare the charts. But there was a distance in his voice, and he hung up while she was thanking him.
She dressed in an argyle sweater vest in shades of dark purple, and a pair of fitted khaki gabardine trousers. She had to go out, to walk around. To do what? To think about other things. As she pulled on the Fred Braun chunky heels, she idly wondered if that heavy silver bracelet was still in the window of Georg Jensen’s. In the elevator, the young man from the window across the courtyard stared at her. Beth felt her body begin to tremble again. She went deep into the corner of the box when he entered behind her.
Between the fifth and fourth floors, he hit the off switch and the elevator jerked to a halt.
Beth stared at him and he smiled innocently.
“Hi. My name’s Gleeson, Ray Gleeson, I’m in 714.”
She wanted to demand he turn the elevator back on, by what right did he presume to do such a thing, what did he mean by this, turn it on at once or suffer the consequences. That was what she wanted to do. Instead, from the same place she had heard the gibbering laughter the night before, she heard her voice, much smaller and much less possessed than she had trained it to be, saying, “Beth O’Neill, I live in 701.”
The thing about it, was that the elevator was stopped. And she was frightened. But he leaned against the paneled wall, very well dressed, shoes polished, hair combed and probably blown dry with a hand dryer, and he talked to her as if they were across a table at L’ Argenteuil. “You just moved in, huh?”
“About two months ago.”
“Where did you go to school? Bennington or Sarah Lawrence?”
“Bennington. How did you know?”
He laughed, and it was a nice laugh. “I’m an editor at a religious book publisher; every year we get half a dozen Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Smith girls. They come hopping in like grasshoppers, ready to revolutionize the publishing industry.”
“What’s wrong with that? You sound like you don’t care for them.”
“Oh, I love them, they’re marvelous. They think they know how to write better than the authors we publish. Had one darlin’ little item who was given galleys of three books to proof, and she rewrote all three. I think she’s working as a table-swabber in a Horn & Hardart’s now.”
She didn’t reply to that. She would have pegged him as an anti-feminist, ordinarily, if it had been anyone else speaking. But the eyes. There was something terribly familiar about his face. She was enjoying the conversation; she rather liked him.
“What’s the nearest big city to Bennington?”
“Albany, New York. About sixty miles.”
“How long does it take to drive there?”
“From Bennington? About an hour and a half.”
“Must be a nice drive, that Vermont country, really pretty. They went coed, I understand. How’s that working out?”
“I don’t know, really.”
“You don’t know?”
“It happened around the time I was graduating. “
“What did you major in?”
“I was a dance major, specializing in Labanotation. That’s the way you write choreography.”
“It’s all electives, I gather. You don’t have to take anything required, like sciences, for example.” He didn’t change tone as he said, “That was a terrible thing last night. I saw you watching. I guess a lot of us were watching. It was a really terrible thing.”
She nodded dumbly. Fear came back.
“I understand the cops got him. Some nut, they don’t even know why he killed her, or why he went charging into that bar. It was really an awful thing. I’d very much like to have dinner with you one night soon, if you’re not attached.”
“That would be all right. “
“Maybe Wednesday. There’s an Argentinian place I know. You might like it. “
“That would be all right.”
“Why don’t you turn on the elevator, and we can go,” he said, and smiled again. She did it, wondering why she had stopped the elevator in the first place.
On her third date with him, they had their first fight. It was at a party thrown by a director of television commercials. He lived on the ninth floor of their building. He had just done a series of spots for Sesame Street (the letters “U” for Underpass, “T” for Tunnel, lowercase “b” for boats, “c” for cars; the numbers 1 to 6 and the numbers 1 to 20; the words light and dark) and was celebrating his move from the arena of commercial tawdriness (and its attendant $75,000 a year) to the sweet fields of educational programming (and its accompanying descent into low-pay respectability). There was a logic in his joy Beth could not quite understand, and when she talked with him about it, in a far corner of the kitchen, his arguments didn’t seem to parse. But he seemed happy, and his girlfriend, a long-legged ex-model from Philadelphia, continued to drift to him and away from him, like some exquisite undersea plant, touching his hair and kissing his neck, murmuring words of pride and barely submerged sexuality. Beth found it bewildering, though the celebrants were all bright and lively.