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 pre sume 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 drier, 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. It’s an all-girls’ school, they haven’t thought of making it co-ed? How many girls enrolled there?”
“Approximately.”
“Yes, approximately.”
“About four hundred.”
“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 really a 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 it was 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, lower-case “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 girl friend, 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.
In the living room, Ray was sitting on the arm of the sofa, hustling a stewardess named Luanne. Beth could tell he was hustling: he was trying to look casual. When he wasn’t hustling, he was always intense, about everything. She decided to ignore it, and wandered around the apartment, sipping at a Tanqueray and tonic.
There were framed prints of abstract shapes clipped from a calendar printed in Germany. They were in metal Crosse frames.
In the dining room a huge door from a demolished building somewhere in the city had been handsomely stripped, teaked and refinished. It was now the dinner table.
A Lightolier fixture attached to the wall over the bed swung out, levered up and down, tipped, and its burnished globe-head revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
She was standing in the bedroom, looking out the window, when she realized this had been one of the rooms in which light had gone on, gone off; one of the rooms that had contained a silent watcher at the death of Leona Ciarelli.
When she returned to the living room, she looked around more carefully. With only three or four exceptions — the stewardess, a young married couple from the second floor, a stockbroker from Hemphill, Noyes — everyone at the party had been a witness to the slaying.
“I’d like to go,” she told him.
“Why, aren’t you having a good time?” asked the stewardess, a mocking smile crossing her perfect little face.
“Like all Bennington ladies,” Ray said, answering for Beth, “she is enjoying herself most by not enjoying herself at all. It’s a trait of the anal retentive. Being here in someone else’s apartment, she can’t empty ashtrays or rewind the toilet paper roll so it doesn’t hang a tongue, and being tightassed, her nature demands we go.
“All right, Beth, let’s say our goodbyes and take off. The Phantom Rectum strikes again.”
She slapped him and the stewardess’s eyes widened. But the smile stayed frozen where it had appeared.
He grabbed her wrist before she could do it again. “Garbanzo beans, baby,” he said, holding her wrist tighter than necessary.
They went back to her apartment, and after sparring silently with kitchen cabinet doors slammed and the television being tuned too loud, they got to her bed, and he tried to perpetuate the metaphor by fucking her in the ass. He had her on elbows and knees before she realized what he was doing; she struggled to turn over and he rode her bucking and tossing without a sound. And when it was clear to him that she would never permit it, he grabbed her breast from underneath and squeezed so bard she howled in pain. He dumped her on her back, rubbed himself between her legs a dozen times, and came on her stomach.