He got out, and the top of the door frame knocked his hat askew. He straightened it, fumbled for change, dropped a dime to the sidewalk. He wasn’t helplessly drunk; he never got that way. He knew everything that was said to him and everything he was saying, and he felt just right. Not too little, not too much. And then there was always the thought of Marge — it looked like he was getting someplace there. You didn’t want to drown out a thought like that in liquor.
Charlie, on night door duty, came out behind him while he was paying the driver. Charlie was just a little behind time with his reception ritual, because he’d stayed behind on his bench in the foyer to finish the last paragraph of a sports write-up in a tabloid before coming out. But it was two-thirty in the morning, after all, and no one’s perfect.
Bliss turned and said, “ ’Lo, Charlie.”
Charlie answered, “Morning, Mr. Bliss.” He held the entrance door open for him, and Bliss went inside. Charlie followed, his duties more or less satisfactorily performed. He yawned, and then Bliss caught it from him, without having seen him do it, and yawned, too — a fact that would have interested a metaphysician.
There was a mirror panel on one side of the lobby, and Bliss stepped up, took one of his usual going-in looks at himself. There were two kinds. The “boy-I-feel-swell, I-wonder-what’s-up-tonight” look. That was the going-out look. Then there was the “God-I-feel-terrible, be-glad-to-get-to-bed” look. That was the coming-back look.
Bliss saw a man of twenty-seven with close-cropped sandy hair, looking back at him. So close-cropped it looked silvery at the sides. Brown eyes, spare figure, good height without being too tall about it. A man who knew all about him — Bliss. Not handsome, but then who wanted to be handsome? Even Marge Elliott didn’t care if he was handsome or not. “As long,” as she had put it, “as you’re just Ken.”
He sighed, snapped his thumbnail at the bedraggled white flower that still clung to his lapel button-hole, and it flew to pieces.
Bliss took out a crumpled package of cigarettes, helped himself to one, scanned the neat hole in the upper right-hand corner. He saw that there was one left, offered it to Charlie. “Greater love hath no man,” he remarked.
Charlie took it, perhaps figuring there wasn’t likely to be anyone else coming in after this.
Charlie was big and roundish at the middle. He wasn’t so good at polishing all the way down toward the bottom of the brass stanchions that supported the door canopy, but the middle and upper parts always shone like jewels, and he could handle twice his weight in disorderly drunks. He’d been night doorman in the building ever since Bliss had first moved into it. Bliss liked him. Charlie liked Bliss, too. Bliss gave him two bucks on Christmas and spread another two throughout the year in four-bit pieces. But that wasn’t the reason; Charlie just liked him.
Bliss lit the two of them up. Then he turned and started up the two shallow steps to the self-service elevator. Charlie said, “Oh, I nearly forgot, Mr. Bliss. There was a young lady around to see you tonight.”
“Yeah? What name’d she leave?” Bliss answered indifferently. It hadn’t been Marge, so it really didn’t matter much — any more. He stopped and turned his face only a quarter of the way toward the answer.
“None,” said Charlie. “I couldn’t get her to leave any. I asked her two or three times, but—” He shrugged. “She didn’t seem to want to.”
“All right,” said Bliss. And it was all right.
“She seemed to want to go upstairs and wait for you in the apartment,” Charlie added.
“Oh, no, don’t ever do that,” Bliss said briskly. “Those days are over.”
“I know. No, I wouldn’t, Mr. Bliss, don’t ever worry—” Charlie said with impressive sincerity. Then he added with a somewhat reticent shake of his head, “She sure wanted to bad, though.”
Something about the way he said it aroused Bliss’ curiosity. “Whaddye mean?” He dropped one foot down a step to the lower level again, turned head and shoulders more fully toward Charlie.
“Well, she was standing here with me, a little to one side, over there by the mirror, after I’d already rung your announcer without getting any answer, and she said, ‘Well, could I go up and wait?’
“I said, ‘Well, I dunno. Miss. I’m not supposed to...’ You know, trying to let her down easy. And then she opened this bag, this evening pockybook she was holding on to, and sort of hunted around down in it like she was looking for a lipstick. And right there on top of all her things there was this hundred-dollar bill staring me in the face. Now y’may not want to believe me, Mr. Bliss, but I saw it with my own eyes—”
Bliss chuckled with good-natured derision. “And you think she was trying to offer you that to let her up, is that it? Gawan, Charlie.” He kicked up one elbow scoffingly.
Nothing could lessen Charlie’s pained, round-eyed earnestness. “I know she was for a fact, Mr. Bliss, y’couldn’t miss it, the way she done it. She left the top of the bag wide open and went around under it with her fingers, so’s to be sure not to disturb it. It was spread out flat, see, on top of everything else. Then she looked from it to me, looked me square in the eye — even holding the bag a little ways out from her. Not right at me, y’understand, but just a little ways out, so I’d catch on what she meant. Listen, I been in this business long enough. I know all the signs. I could tell.”
Bliss scratched the corner of his mouth reflectively with the cutting edge of one thumbnail, as if feeling to see if it was still there. “Are you sure it wasn’t just a ten spot, Charlie?”
Charlie’s voice became almost falsetto in its aggrieved insistence. “Mr. Bliss, I seen the two ‘O’s’ in both upper comers of it!”
Bliss worried his lip between the edge of his teeth, pinching it in. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned full body toward Charlie at last, as though intending to talk until this thing had been thrashed out to his satisfaction.
Charlie seemed to understand the need for further colloquy between the two of them. He said, “Be right with you, Mr. Bliss,” as the sound of another cab arriving outside reached them. He went out, did his devoir with the doors, returned in the wake of a man and woman in evening garb who must have been very spruce at eight-thirty. All the starch was out of them now.
They nodded slightly to Bliss in passing, and he nodded slightly back to them, with all the awful frigidity of metropolitan neighbors. They stepped into the car and went up.
As soon as the glass porthole in the elevator panel had blacked out, Charlie and he resumed where they had left off. “Well, what’d she look like? Was she anyone you ever saw before? You know most of the crowd I used to have around to see me pretty well.”
“Yes, I do,” Charlie admitted. “And I can’t place her. I’m sure I never seen her before, Mr. Bliss, all I can tell you is she was some looker. Was she some looker!”
“All right, she was some looker,” agreed Bliss, “but like what?”
“Well, she was blond.” Charlie brought his hands into play as the artist in him came to the fore. He outlined — presumably — masses of luxuriant hair. “But this real blond, y’know this real yella-blonde? Not this phony, washed-out, silvery kind they make it. This real blond.”
“This real blond,” Bliss confirmed patiently.
“And... and blue eyes; y’know, the kind that are always laughing, even when they’re not? And about this high — her chin came up to this second chevron here, on me sleeve, see? And... er... not too fat, but y’wouldn’t call her skinny, either; just a right armful—”