No one came out of any buildings to see what was going on. No police showed up. Everything was nice and private.
I watched, and Chloe finally went shuffling away, still singing and doing her drunk act. Trask or Slade stood in the street and glared after her till she’d rounded the far corner, and then he turned and looked up at me — that is, at the window behind which I was cowering — and then he got back into his car. I watched, and a few seconds later a match flared in the car as he lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.
Six hundred seconds went by, one at a time. I stood at the window and watched the street.
A young guy in work clothes — dungarees and a black jacket and cap on his head — came walking down the street from the direction in which I had come. A cigarette dangled from his mouth, and his hands were in his jacket pockets. A rolled-up newspaper jutted out of a hip pocket of his dungarees.
He came down the street and stopped in front of this building and flipped his cigarette in the street and I saw it was Chloe. I also saw the pale face of Trask or Slade across the way, looking at her and satisfying himself she wasn’t me. Then she trotted up the steps and out of my line of vision.
I waited at the hall door for her. She came to the second floor, grinning, taking the newspaper from her pocket and the cap off her head. All of her hair had been stuffed into the cap one way or the other, and it now fell all asnarl around her face. She brushed it away, came into the dark living room, and said, “Well? How’d I do?”
“Great,” I told her, “but the Hayes office made us cut the scene.”
“Come on in the bedroom,” she said. “We can turn the light on in there.”
“Right.”
I had grown somewhat used to the darkness by now, so I led the way, taking Chloe by the hand. We went through the doorway into the bedroom, I shut the door, and she switched on the light.
Artie didn’t believe in cleaning up. The bed was unmade, the whole room was still the disreputable mess it had been when last I’d seen it. But it was a relatively safe place, and it contained a bed, and its only window faced on an airshaft, so I didn’t object too much.
Chloe, taking off the jacket, said, “Well. He’ll remember me awhile.”
“Where’d you get the hat?” I asked her.
“Off a drunk sleeping on Charles Street,” she said. She looked at it in disgust and threw it in a corner. “I hope I don’t get bugs from it.” She ruffled her already-ruffled hair. “Well,” she said, “you slept on the floor last night, so you can have the bed tonight. I’ll sleep out on the sofa.”
“I thought you said I was Errol Flynn,” I reminded her. “This is more the Cary Grant bit, isn’t it? He was always the one spending the night in the same room with a woman and they’re not going to do it.”
“That’s right,” she said offhandedly, “we’re not going to do it.” She’d been looking around the room. “No note in here,” she said. “Maybe there’s one in the living room, we’ll look when it gets light.”
I didn’t say anything. Sex had just hit me in the stomach and I was having trouble inhaling.
I couldn’t tell you the last time that had happened to me, and after all this time with Chloe that it was happening now was as surprising as it was inconvenient.
It was the damnedest thing. This morning I’d seen her take her dungarees off, and nothing. Tonight I’d seen her take her sweater off, and nothing. In between, I’d ridden all over the Greater New York area in the Packard with her, and nothing. Just a minute ago I’d taken her hand to lead her through the dark living room, and still nothing.
I think it was ruffling the hair that did it. She stood there in that messy bedroom, a rumpled sexy elf looking warm and distracted and tired, and she raised her right arm and ruffled her hair, and there it was. What they call in books a heightened awareness came over me.
A heightened awareness. Yeah, I’ll say. I was suddenly so aware of Chloe as a female body, a collection of feminine parts, that I was paralyzed. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t move, I could hardly breathe.
Flashback: The summer that I was fourteen, I worked as a messenger boy for a deli in midtown Manhattan, carrying coffees and sandwiches into the office buildings along Fifth and Madison avenues. One afternoon, having left an order in an office in the Longines-Wittnauer Building, I boarded a crowded down elevator, and the next floor down three very sexy busty hippy blondes got on board. I guess there was a talent agency on that floor or something. Anyway, we were all crammed together in that elevator, and I had one of those girls pressed against my front, and another one pressed against each side. By the time we reached street level I was so shaken I went over to a White Rose on Sixth Avenue and lied about my age and had my very first shot of bar whiskey. I hated it.
Until tonight, with Chloe, I had never had the old heightened awareness that much ever again. And now the intervening ten years, all the dates with girls, the rare — I’m ashamed to say how rare — scores, all were washed away as completely as though a dam had burst. I was fourteen again, crowded into the elevator again, afraid again to tremble.
Chloe raised her arms over her head and stretched. “Well,” she said, while I died. “Anything you want to talk about, or shall we just go to bed?”
“Bed,” I said.
“Good. I’m too tired to think, anyway. I’ll have to turn this light out before I open the door.”
I nodded.
One hand on the doorknob, the other on the light switch, she looked over at me and smiled and said, “You’re a real nut, Charlie.”
I roused myself, flashed her a nervous smile of my own, and managed to say, “You’re something of a goober yourself.”
“Huh.” She switched off the light, opened the door, and went out to the living room. “Good night,” she said, in the dark, and shut the door again.
“Good night,” I mumbled, though she couldn’t hear me.
I didn’t get as much sleep as I needed.
Chapter 20
I smelled eggs. Frying, scrambling, omeleting, perhaps even poaching. At any rate, eggs.
Naturally, I opened my eyes. Naturally, that woke me up.
I was lying on my back on Artie’s bed, dressed only in shorts. I’d gone to sleep covered by a sheet, but sometime in the night I must have kicked it off; I could remember having had several strenuous dreams, the details of all of which had happily been lost.
Ersatz daylight grayed the airshaft window, revealing but not enriching the bedroom. I sat up and looked around the gray lumpy mess everything was in, just like my own bedroom over the bar in Canarsie — so far and far away! — and I found myself feeling as maudlinly homesick as a Third Avenue Irishman. I was beginning my third day as a fugitive.
A clatter of crockery from the other room reminded me of the egg aroma that had awakened me, and all at once my stomach started growling in a determined and irritable manner, and what with one thing and another the day had begun.
I left Artie’s bed reluctantly, and shuffled over to the bathroom, where I abluted, after which I borrowed some too-small underwear from Artie’s dresser, put on my shoes and trousers, and went out in my undershirt to the living room.
History repeats. The same sloe-eyed raven-tressed dungaree-clad barefoot beauty stood at the same stove scrambling eggs. A cigarette dangled from her lips, to complete an impression of jaded wanton evil. In a silent movie, the first shot of Chloe would inevitably have been followed by a slide reading:
The Other Woman said, “How do you like your scrambled eggs, wet or dry?”
Until that moment I’d thought I was hungry, even starving. My stomach, in fact, was continuing unabated to growl. But being faced first thing in the morning with a decision between wet scrambled eggs (ugh) and dry scrambled eggs (gah) was too much for me. Therefore, “Coffee,” I said.