She touched her hand lightly to his lapel as a signal; they stopped on the half turn.
“Some more people are leaving. I’ll have to see them off. Be right back, darling. Miss me while I’m gone.”
He watched her go, standing there like a flagpole on which the flag has suddenly been run down. When the light blue gown had whisked from sight at one end of the room, he turned and went out the other way, onto the terrace for a breath of air. He felt a little sticky under the collar; dancing always made him warm, anyway.
The lights of the city streaked off below him like the luminous spokes of a warped wheel. An indistinctly outlined, pearly moon seemed to drip down the sky like a clot of incandescent tapioca thrown up against the night by a cosmic comic. He lit the after-the-dance, whiie-waiting-for-her-to-come-back cigarette. He felt good, looking down at the town that had nearly had him licked once. “I’m all set now,” he thought. “I’m young. I’ve got love, I’ve got a clear track. The rest is a cinch.”
The terrace ran along the entire front of the apartment. At one end it made a turn around to the side of the penthouse superstructure, and the moon couldn’t follow it. It was dark there. There were no floor-length windows, either, just an infrequently used side door whose solid composition blacked out light.
He drifted around the turn, because there was another couple on the other way and he didn’t want to crowd them. He stood in the exact right angle formed by the two directions of the ledge, and now he had two views instead of one.
And then suddenly — she must have slipped unnoticed out through the side door and come along from that direction toward him — that ubiquitous girl in black was standing there a foot or two away from him, looking out into the distance, the same way he was. She was weirdly like a white marble bust floating in the air without any pedestal, for the black of her dress was swallowed up in the blackness of the trough they both stood in.
“Swell, isn’t it?” he suggested. After all, they were at the same party together.
She didn’t seem to want to talk about that, so maybe it wasn’t so swell to her.
At that instant Corey came along, conquest bound. He’d evidently had his eye on her for some time past, but the wheel of opportunity had only now spun his way. Bliss’ presence didn’t deter him in the least. “You go inside,” he ordered arbitrarily. “Don’t be a hog, you’re engaged.”
The girl said in quick interruption: “Do you want to be a dear?”
“Sure I want to be a dear.”
“Then get me a big tinkly highball.”
He thumbed Bliss. “He does that better than I do.”
“It would taste better coming from you.” It was primitive, but it worked.
Corey came back with it. She accepted it from him, held it out above the coping, slowly tilted it until the glass was bottom up and empty. Then she gravely handed it back. “Now go in and get me another.”
Corey got the point. It would have been hard to miss it. The suave man-about-town glaze shattered momentarily and one of those aforementioned glimpses of jungle showed through the rent. Not travelogue jungle, either. A flash of white coursed over his face, lingering longest around his mouth in a sort of bloodless pucker. He stepped in and went for her neck with both hands, in businesslike silence.
“Whoa — easy,” Bliss moved quickly, blocked them off before they could get to her, deflected them up into the air. By the time they came down again, Corey already had them under control. He bunched them in his pockets, perhaps to make sure of keeping them that way. Vocal resentment came belatedly, after the physical had already been reined in.
“Any twist that thinks she can make a monkey outta me...!” He turned around and strode back from where he’d come.
Bliss turned to follow. After all, what was she to him?
Her hand flashed out, pinned him at her side. “Don’t go. I want to talk to you.” It dropped away again as soon as she saw that she had gained her point.
He waited, listening.
“You don’t know me, do you?”
“I’ve been trying to find out who you are all evening.” He hadn’t; he’d paid her less attention than any man there. It was the gallant thing to say, that was all.
“You saw me once before, but you don’t remember. But I do. You were in a car with four others—”
“I’ve been in a car with four others lots of times, so many times I really can’t—”
“Its license number was D3827.”
“I’ve got a rotten head for figures.”
“It was kept in a garage up on Exterior Avenue in the Bronx. And it was never called for afterward. Isn’t that strange? It must still be there, rusted away—”
“I don’t remember any of that,” he said, baffled. “But say, who are you, anyway? There’s something electrifying about you—”
“Too much can cause a short circuit.” She moved a step or two away as though she had lost interest in him as unaccountably as she had developed it. She lifted the jet-spangled scarf from her head, held it spun out in a straight line before, her hands far apart, let the breeze flutter it forward.
Suddenly she gave a little exclamation. It was gone. Her hands still measured off its length. An aerial wire, invisible against the night, came down diagonally right there where she was, riveted to the facade below the ledge by a little porcelain insulation knob. She flashed him a look of half-comic surprise, then bent over, peering down.
“There it is, right there! It’s caught on that little round white thing—” She plunged one arm down, probing into space. A moment later she had straightened again with a frustrated smile. “It’s just an inch away from my fingers. Maybe you’d have better luck; you probably have a longer reach.”
He got up on the coping, squatting on both heels. He cupped one hand to its inner edge, as a brake to keep from going over too far. His head turned away from her, searching for it.
She stepped forward behind him, palms out-turned as if in sanctimonious negation, then recoiled again as quickly. The slight impact forced a hissing breath from her, a sound that was explanation, malediction and expiation all in one.
“Mrs. Nick Killeen!”
He must have heard it. It must have been a spark in his darkening mind for a moment that went out as he went out.
The ledge was empty. She and the night had it to themselves. Through the terrace windows, around the turn, the radio was pulsing to a rumba and voices were laughing. One, louder than the others, exclaimed, “Keep it up, you’ve got it now!”
Marjorie accosted her on her way in a moment later. “I’m looking for my fiancé—” She used the word with proud possessiveness, touching her ring with unconscious ostentation as she did so. “Is he out there, do you know?”
The girl in black smiled courteously. “He was, the last time I saw him.” She moved on down the long room, briskly yet not too hurriedly, drawing more than one pair of admiring masculine eyes after her as she went.
The maid and butler were no longer on duty in the cloakroom adjoining the front door, came back only as they were summoned. Just as the front door was closing unobtrusively, without their having been disturbed, the house telephone connected with the downstairs entrance began to ring. It went on unanswered for a few moments.
Marjorie came inside again from the terrace, remarking to those nearest her, “That’s strange. He doesn’t seem to be out there.”
Her mother, who had finally been compelled to attend to the neglected telephone in person, screamed harrowingly from somewhere out near the entrance, just once. The party had come to an end.