They sat a moment in silence, reflectively sipping their brandies.
"I'd like to have sex with you," he said suddenly.
She looked at him, expressionless.
"But I never would," he added hastily. "I mean, I'd never ask you. Zoe, you're a beautiful, exciting woman, but if we went to bed together, uh, you know, casually, it would make us just like those people we saw tonight."
"Animals," she said.
"Yes, that's right. I don't want a cheap thrill and I don't think you do either."
"I don't, dear; I really don't."
"It seems to me," he said, puzzling it out, "that when you get married, you're making a kind of statement. It's like a testi-monial. You're signing a legal document that really says it's not just a cheap thrill, that something more important is involved. You're pledging your love forever and ever. Isn't that what marriage means?"
"That's what it's supposed to mean," she said sadly. "It doesn't always work out that way."
She pushed her way along the couch. She sat close to him, put an arm about his neck. She pulled him close, kissed his cheek.
"You're an idealist," she whispered. "A sweet idealist."
"I guess I am," he said. "But is what I want so impossible?"
"What do you want?"
"Something that has meaning. I go to work every day, come home and fry a hamburger. I watch television. I'm not complain-ing; I have a good job and all. But there must be more than that. And I don't mean a one-night stand. Or an endless series of one-night stands. There's got to be more to life than that."
"You want to get married?" she asked in a low voice, remembering Maddie's instructions.
"I think so. I think I do. I've thought a lot about it, but the idea scares me. Because it's so final. That's the way I see it anyway, I mean, it's for always, isn't it? Or should be. But at the same time the idea frightens me, I can't see any substitute. I can't see anything else that would give me what I want. I like my job, but that's not enough."
"An emptiness," she said. "A void. That's what my life is like."
"Yes," he said eagerly, "you understand. We both want sorne-thing, don't we? Meaning. We want our lives to have meaning."
The uncovering that had started that afternoon in Central Park had progressed to this; they both felt it. It was an unfolding, a stripping, that neither wanted to end. It was a fearful thing they were doing, dangerous and painful.
Yet it had become easier. Intimacy acted on them like an addictive drug. Stronger doses were needed. And they hardly dared foresee what the end might be, or even if there was an end. Perhaps their course was limitless and they might never finish.
"There's something I want," she said. "Something. But don't ask me what it is because I don't know, I'm not sure. Except that I don't want to go on living the way I do. I really don't."
He leaned forward to kiss her lips. Twice. Tenderly.
"We're so alike," he breathed. "So alike. We believe in the same things. We want the same things."
"I don't know what I want," she said again.
"Sure you do," he said gently, taking her hand. "You want your life to have significance. Isn't that it?"
"I want…" she said. "I want… What do I want? Darling, I've never told this to anyone else, but I want to be a different person. Totally. I want to be born again, and start all over. I know the kind of woman I want to be, and it isn't me. It's all been a mistake, Ernie. My life, I mean. It's been all wrong. Some of it was done to me, and some of it I did myself. But it's my life, and so it's all my responsibility. Isn't that true? But when I try to understand what I did that I should not have done, or what I neglected to do, I get the horrible feeling that the whole thing was beyond my…"
But as she spoke, she saw his eyelids fluttering. His head came slowly down. She stopped talking, smiled, took the empty brandy glass from his nerveless fingers. She smoothed the fine hair, stroked his cheek.
"Beddy-bye," she said softly.
He murmured something.
She got him into the bedroom, half-supporting him as he stumbled, stockinged feet catching on the rug. She sat him down on the edge of the bed and kneeled to pull off his socks. Small, Pale feet. He stroked her head absently, weaving as he sat, eyes closed.
She tugged off his jacket, vest, tie, shirt. He grumbled sleepily as she pushed him back, unbelted and unzipped his trousers, peeled them away. He was wearing long white drawers, prac-tically Bermuda shorts, and an old-fashioned undershirt with shoulder straps.
She yanked and hauled and finally got him straightened out under the covers, his head on the pillow. He was instantly asleep, didn't even stir when she bent to kiss his cheek.
"Good night, darling," she said softly. "Sleep well."
She washed the coffee things and the brandy glasses. She swallowed down a salt tablet, assorted vitamins and minerals, drank a small bottle of club soda. After debating a moment, she took a Tuinal.
She went into the bathroom to shower, her third that day. The wound on her thigh was now just a red line, and she soaped it carefully. She lathered the rest of her body thickly, wanting to cleanse away-what?
She dried, powdered, used spray cologne on neck, bosom, armpits, the insides of her thighs. She pulled on a long nightgown of white batiste with modest inserts of lace at the neckline.
She crawled into bed cautiously, not wanting to disturb Ernie. But he was dead to the world, breathing deeply and steadily. She thought she saw a smile on his lips, but couldn't be sure.
Maddie had instructed her to determine Ernest's attitude toward marriage, and she had done it. She thought that if she were a more positive woman, more aggressive, she might easily lead him to a proposal. But at the moment that did not concern her.
What was a puzzlement was her automatic response to Maddie's advice. She had obeyed without question, although she was the one intimately involved, not Maddie. Yet she had let the other woman dictate her conduct.
It had always been like that-other people pushing her this way and that, imposing their wills. Her mother's conversation had been almost totally command, molding Zoe to an image of the woman she wanted her daughter to be.
Even her father, by his booming physical presence, had shoved her into emotions and prejudices she felt foreign to her true nature.
And her husband! Hadn't he sought, always, to remake her into something she could not be? He had never been satisfied with what she was. He had never accepted her.
Everyone, all her life, had tried to change her. Ernest Mittle, apparently, was content with Zoe Kohler. But could she be certain he would remain content? Or would the day come when he, too, would begin to push, pull, haul, and tug?
It came to her almost as a revelation that this was the reason she sought adventures. They were her only opportunity to try out and to display her will.
She knew that others-like the Son of Sam-had blamed their misdeeds on "voices," on hallucinatory commands that overrode their inclinations and volition.
But her adventures were the only time in Zoe Kohler's life when she listened to her own voice.
She turned onto her side, moved closer to Ernie. She smelled his sweet, innocent scent. She put one arm about him, pulled him to her. And that's how she fell asleep.
During the following week, she had cause to remember her reflections on how, all her life, she had been manipulated.
The newspapers continued their heavy coverage of the Hotel Ripper investigation. Almost every day the police revealed new discoveries and new leads being pursued.
Zoe Kohler began to think of the police as a single intelligence, a single person. She saw him as a tall, thin individual, sour and righteous. He resembled the old cartoon character "Prohibition," with top hat, rusty tailcoat, furled umbrella. He wore an expression of malicious discontent.
This man, this "police," was juiceless and without mercy. He was intelligent (frighteningly so) and implacable. By his deductive brilliance, he was pushing Zoe Kohler in ways she did not want to go. He was maneuvering her, just like everyone else, and she resented it-resented that anyone would tamper with her adventures, the only truly private thing in her life.