“Bills, bills, bills,” Viola said. “Not a day goes by without another bill. Sometimes I wish the mailman would never come.”
Anne smiled and ripped open the flap of the envelope.
“Today is my rent day,” Viola said. “Are you going to the office?”
“No,” Anne said, reaching into the envelope. “I’ve got some shopping to do.”
“Nothing heavy,” Viola said suspiciously.
“No, just a few things for tonight.”
“All right,” Viola said. “You get that husband of yours to do the heavy shopping.”
“He does,” Anne said, holding the folded contents of the envelope in her hand now, wondering who had written them a letter.
“Well, I’m going. I’ll see you later, Anne.”
“All right, Viola.”
Viola waddled out of the building, bundling her coat around her. Anne walked to the windows near the radiator, and unfolded the letter. It was a plain white sheet of paper. There was no date on it and no salutation. In the exact center of the page, neatly typed, were the words:
The note was unsigned.
9
“Oh, Mr. Dadier!” Lois Hammond called, poking her head out of the doorway and waving to him in the corridor. She’d addressed him formally because there were students in the corridor, rushing to their sixth-period classes, and teachers never used first names before the students.
Rick smiled and waved back, and then started for the stairwell. He’d planned on going down to the auditorium and grading his seventh-term test papers, a time-saving device which would afford him a free evening when he got home.
“Would you come in a moment, Mr. Dadier?” Lois said. “I want to show you something.”
Rick hesitated, and then swerved away from the moving stream of students and headed for the open doorway. A lettered sign hung on the door, and the sign boldly stated that the room beyond the door was the office of The Trades Trumpet, if office it could be called. Rick had been inside the room only once before, when he’d used the mimeograph machine to run off some material for his classes. The room was small and square, and it possessed a desk, two windows that looked out on the courtyard enclosed by the school’s L shape, a bulletin board, three chairs, a metal bookcase, and the mimeograph machine. It now also possessed Lois Hammond, and she held the door wide and said, “Come on in.”
He entered the room, and she closed the door behind him.
“It’s not the New York Times,” she said, “but it’ll have to do.”
“The Trades Trumpet, huh?” he asked. “Whose brainstorm was that?”
“Mine,” she said proudly. “Do you like it?”
“It’s alliterative, at any rate.”
“Do you know what they used to call the paper?” Lois asked.
“No. What?”
“The North Manual Trades High School Monthly.” She smiled and lowered her lashes. “Sounds like a woman’s complaint, doesn’t it?”
Rick chuckled a little and said, “Yes, I suppose so.”
“The Trades Trumpet,” Lois said, “I like that. The Trades Trumpet. Don’t you like it?”
“How about The North Nickelodeon?” Rick asked.
“Oh, Rick,” Lois said, delighted.
“Or The Manual Mandolin?” He paused and laughed. “There’s a good one.”
“You’re joking, but don’t you really like the name?”
“It’s a dandy,” Rick said. “What’d you want to show me?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, excitedly reminding herself. “Lock the door, will you, Rick?”
Rick raised his eyebrows, and Lois, seeing his surprise, quickly said, “Oh that has nothing to do with what I’ve got to show you. I feel like a smoke, and I’m also hot as hell, and I don’t want any of our students popping in.”
“I thought you had some French postcards,” Rick said jokingly.
“You would,” Lois replied, and Rick wondered just what she’d meant by that, and he didn’t know whether or not he enjoyed the implication. He locked the door, and Lois fished a package of Chesterfields out of her purse, promptly tucking one between her lips and waiting for Rick to light it. Rick, who was the kind of smoker who had to smoke whenever anyone else smoked, took a single cigarette from the package in his jacket pocket, and then struck a match, holding it first to Lois’s cigarette and then his own.
Lois exhaled a deep cloud of smoke and then said, “This is the stuffiest room in the building. Do you mind?”
He didn’t know what she meant at first, and then she began unbuttoning her suit jacket, and he remembered what she’d said about being hot as hell. The jacket was a long gray one with a tight waist and it flared out over her hips with a straight black skirt sheathing her thighs and legs. She unbuttoned the jacket quickly and then slipped out of it, throwing it over a chair.
“After my first-day escapade,” she said, “you won’t find me anywhere in this school without my armor on. Unless there are no students present.”
She had turned to face him now, and the blouse she wore was sheer and frothy, a nothing-thing of transparent silk, a blouse similar to the one she’d worn to the Friday Organizational Meeting so very long ago. But there was something different about this blouse, and Rick stared at her for a few moments before he realized what it was, and then he self-consciously averted his eyes lest she realize that he had realized what it was.
For whereas the blouse worn to the Organizational Meeting had been worn with only a skirt and no jacket, this blouse had been put on beneath a jacket, and by Lois Hammond’s own testimony, she would not be found anywhere in the school without her armor on, and the armor she referred to was her jacket. Indeed, when she had been inside the jacket and the jacket around her, there was no telling she wore a blouse under it. With the jacket off, and it was off now, and Rick knew it was off, and he wanted to leave the office of The Trades Trumpet and get the hell down to the auditorium and grade his seventh-term papers, there was no doubt that Lois Hammond wore a blouse beneath the jacket.
And because the blouse was of the sheerest stuff, there was also no doubting that Lois Hammond was not wearing a slip, or if she was, it was a half-slip that began at her waist and did nothing to conceal the firm, abundant cones of her breasts caught tight in a white cotton bra. As he had noticed about her so many times before, she did not even seem aware of the fact that rounded white shoulders and a firm white solar plexus were showing above and beneath the thrust of her brassiere.
“There,” she said, “that’s better,” and Rick did not entirely agree with her, because this was not better but worse. He was aware of her again as a woman, and he did not want this awareness which sneaked up on him like a cutthroat and slashed his stomach to ribbons. He did not want the awareness, and because it was unbidden, it produced the guilty feeling again, and he wet his lips nervously.
“What did you want to show me?” he asked, anxious to get this over with, wanting to get out of this office and away from her. His palms were wet, and his eyes strayed back to the front of the blouse, and he again visualized the exposed white breast on that day of the attempted rape. The brassiere now cupped her breasts firmly, and there was a deep shadow of warmth between the breasts, and he longed to touch that softly pocketed valley, longed for just an instant, and then turned his eyes away and felt the guilt spread into his face.