Acquainted with the Night (27 page)

Every evening the man—she always called him “the man” in her thoughts—stood at the wrought-iron gate in front of the house directly opposite hers and Fred’s. She never saw him come, never saw him go. But he was always there, evenings, when she looked out the front window, or if she passed by alone or with Fred. Mostly she passed by alone. He was a thin man, not young, not old, and dressed in an old-fashioned way, in a light-brown hat, a tan belted raincoat, and dark pants. The top buttons of the raincoat were usually open and she could see his white shirt, also unbuttoned, with no tie. His long bony face appeared vague: lit by the street lamp it was waxen and expressionless. The jutting chin, hollow cheeks, and tan raincoat reminded her of a puny gangster she had once seen in an old movie on the Late Show. She couldn’t remember the actor’s name, but he too had kept his hat brim down low and his hands deep in his raincoat pockets. The man at the gate was sinister yet pitiful in just that way.

He had done nothing to frighten her except stand, evenings the year round: still, she was afraid. Coming home from work (she worked at a women’s magazine, where she assembled household hints and amusing fillers for her boss’s monthly column), Charlotte was careful to walk on the other side of the street. Fred once suggested ironically that she should greet him, stop to chat. But then Fred was full of outlandish ideas. From across the street she would steal looks at the man before lifting the latch of her own gate. Once inside she would peer out the window.

It was a peaceful green neighborhood of three-story houses in a sleepy section of Philadelphia. The houses, old and narrow, with kindly, worn facades, were set well back from the street. Nearly all of them had wrought-iron gates and small flagstone walks dividing the meager front lawns. Charlotte and Fred rented a top floor. In the yard of the house opposite, where the man stood, grew a magnificent dogwood tree that flowered lusciously pink in late April. For two years Charlotte had watched it bloom and quickly fade; this would be the third. It lasted so short a time, she thought sadly every spring: eight, maybe ten days. It waited all year for its brief blaze of pink, and then sank back into dullness to wait again. At night the street lamp gave the dogwood a lurid plastic sheen that made it hideous. But she loved to see it in the mornings. She would linger at the window sometimes before leaving for work, to take in the sight of the glowing pink tree. It helped prepare her for the day, while Fred lay sleeping, snoring and cumbersome. With his head barely showing out of the brown blanket, he was like the great leatherback turtle she had once seen washed up on the beach, staining the sand around with dark blood.

She climbed the stairs slowly. “He’s still there,” she told Fred.

Fred didn’t answer right away. He was sitting on the couch in his T-shirt and undershorts, tinkering with an old broken alarm clock which he said could be fixed. He had taken it apart; bits of shiny metal were scattered on the coffee table. Charlotte didn’t care about the clock: she didn’t need an alarm clock to wake up on time, and Fred didn’t have to get up at any special time, but it was his latest obsession. He looked as though he had recently gotten out of bed. Charlotte didn’t know why she was so sure of this. Perhaps it was his puffy, dazed expression or the dryness around his lips.

“Of course, what did you expect? He’s always there.”

She sighed, and set down her bag of groceries on the coffee table. She must remember to tell him about the Harrises, but not right now. “Did you look today?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Nothing.”

Fred had been job-hunting for two years. He had quit his old job soon after he moved in with her, just three months after they met. He had been working for an airline, doing something called “dealing with the public,” but he was unhappy there. His bosses were fussy and gave him a hard time. Charlotte never knew which airline, or where his office was. It had seemed quite unimportant then, in the early days. There were other things to talk about. Now she found herself wishing she had known.

The airline was only a stopgap, though. His real work, he told her, was acting. He came from Chicago, where he had performed with several small theater groups and even had bit parts in two films, but they were obscure gangster films Charlotte had never heard of. She asked him, the first week they met, why he wasn’t acting any longer. He cocked his head in that appealing way he had and smiled his rueful, paternal smile. “Ah, well.” Things had gotten messed up, he explained. After his parents’ death, money problems—probate court, his investments screwed up by a crooked broker, now in jail. It was all too much. He had needed a job quick, any job, when he fled East. Luckily the airline job came along, but it was not the sort of thing he wanted to stay with.

Charlotte imagined he must have been a good actor, even though he wouldn’t do any of his parts for her when she begged him to—not in the mood, he said. He was big and handsome in a rugged beefy way, though just a tiny bit fat around the middle when she first knew him. That would never do for an actor, she said, and she recommended a diet. And just a tiny bit gone to seed, she thought, feeling disloyal as she admitted it. That was from hard luck, but it could be fixed. Amazing what a little confidence, a little success and good luck, would do for him, when it came. Her father had looked that way once, she remembered, when he was out of work, and then he had perked up when he found a job.

He told her he was thirty-five. He appeared older to Charlotte, but if it made him happy, poor fellow, to say thirty-five, then let him. It was hard to tell a man’s age anyway. His voice sounded like an actor’s voice, deep and resonant, and he spoke well, probably because of his training. It was that voice and speech that first attracted her. No one had ever spoken to her in those low, deep tones. Compared to Fred, the others she had known were boys.

And he was funny, too. He had an offhand, bizarre wit. At least he made her laugh, and God knows she had needed to laugh. She was twenty-four then and living with her widowed mother, who scarcely let a day go by without reminding her that such a big girl would have trouble finding a suitable man. Charlotte didn’t mind being so tall; she accepted it as she accepted most things in life, only her mother harped on it so. She was five foot ten and solidly built, never overweight. Statuesque was what people called her when they wanted to flatter her. Well, she had found a big man, and she displayed him proudly to her mother like a trophy. Charlotte reached just to Fred’s lips. Big enough? she wanted to ask her mother. And you said it couldn’t be done. Only it was too bad that when Fred met her mother he had been so quiet. Not funny at all. That was the first time she experienced one of his silences, and it was chilling, but she chalked it up to nervousness. Afterwards her mother said, “A hulk, but what else? Can he talk?” That was the end of that. Charlotte moved out and took an apartment, and soon Fred joined her.

She had great plans for him when he quit the airline. He would go back to the theater. He might not be a star, but he would work steadily, and cultivated people would recognize his name. She would help him. Charlotte was energetic; her healthy exuberant face shone with life and motion. Before her father died, when she was twenty-one, she had had many friends and was full of ideas for adventure. She was never lonesome, never neglected. She had been on the point of moving into her own apartment with two friends, but she took pity on her mother, left alone, and remained. She became quieter, would spend long hours at home doing nothing. Like a young child, she longed for a sister or brother to keep her company. At last she met Fred and summoned the energy to leave her mother. It was a relief to talk again, to live with someone she could talk to. Soon she felt like her old self. She was lively, her spirits expanded, she made plans for trips they would take and pleasures they would share, and Fred listened good-humoredly, not saying much, but that was his way. She bought theater newspapers and magazines for him, and on the bus going to work she would read them and underline anything that looked promising. For a few months he took her advice and went to auditions. He would tell her about them in the evenings, how he had done his prepared bit, a monologue from
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,
how the director had looked him over in an appraising, offensive way, how silly the other auditioners had been. Fred made those stories very amusing. Sometimes his sarcasm bothered Charlotte, though. The others couldn’t all have been that bad, she thought. But then she knew nothing about the theater, really. It was a terribly cutthroat and competitive field, and it was no wonder Fred sounded bitter.

He was down on his luck, that was for sure. As he described it, there always seemed to be something against him. One day he had almost gotten a part, but the man who auditioned next turned out to be the son of a long-lost friend of the director. Another time they had needed an Italian accent, and Fred’s wasn’t good enough. Some actors have a ready flair for accents, but he wasn’t one of them. With a little time to prepare, of course, he could have done it well enough, but according to Fred they didn’t judge by innate talent, only by superficial things. He started going to auditions at night. Sometimes when he came home he smelled as if he had been drinking, or he looked rumpled. Charlotte always waited up for him with coffee. Often she would be waiting in Fred’s bathrobe; it made her feel less lonely. He would say he had gone out for a drink with some other actors; once he said he had been in a fight, “Why don’t you bring your friends home? You can all have a drink here, and I can meet them.” But he never did. The phone never rang for him. All she knew of these friends were their names: Phil, Jeff, Mike. They could be anybody.

About a year and a half ago was when they had first noticed the man. “There’s a man standing across the street,” Charlotte said from the chair near the window.

“So?” He was watching
Kojak
and didn’t like being interrupted. He kept the TV on all the time. This bothered her at the beginning, but gradually she got used to having lively voices in the background. She even got to like it herself. Fred didn’t always watch it, he simply liked to have it on. Sometimes after a detective story he would grunt and say he could have done the main part better.

“I mean, he’s just standing there against the gate, staring straight ahead. He’s been standing there for fifteen minutes.”

“And have you been watching him all that time?”

She fell silent. It made her feel so foolish. But after a week or so Fred caught a little of her interest. When dinner was over they would check to see if he was still at the gate. Once Charlotte determined to wait up and see how long the man stood there. But she fell asleep in her chair at twelve-thirty; when she woke at a quarter after two he was gone. The weather grew cold; it was dreary November, and still he came.

One evening Fred went out to the corner store to bring back a pint of strawberry ice cream, and when he returned he told her, “I spoke to your friend out there.”

“No! What did you say?”

“Nothing much. ‘How’s it going, pal?’”

“Oh, no! I don’t believe you.”

“Suit yourself,” he teased. “I told him to look up at our window if he wanted to see a sexy item.”

“You didn’t.” But she drew the curtains anyway.

To pass the time they sometimes sat on the couch and made up stories about who the man might be and why he stood there. Charlotte’s were not pure fantasy; they were what she half believed.

“He’s planning to rob our apartment and he’s developing a very careful log of our comings and goings. Except you’re at home so much that he’s been frustrated so far.”

“I see. And what valuable article in this apartment does he want?”

“I don’t know. The TV. Me.” She laughed awkwardly.

Fred gave her an odd look. “No, he’s a Russian spy,” he said. “He’s looking past our building to the big apartment house on Walnut Street. There on the top floor is another spy who sends him signals with a flashlight through the curtains. And these signals spell out the details of our next space flight, which is why the Russians are always a step ahead of us.”

“Oh.” She put her arms around him. “You have so much more imagination than I do.”

Fred grinned. “Try again.”

“All right. He’s an ex-con, just out of jail after ten years for embezzling. But he was innocent. It was a frame-up. The guilty party who framed him lives down the block. The man is waiting for him to pass by on a dark night—no, wait, that would only land him in jail again, and he doesn’t really have a criminal temperament. He’s haunting him, so that the guilty one will eventually be driven mad by his own conscience.”

“Interesting,” said Fred. He poured some more beer into his glass and thoughtfully watched the foam rise. “He’s a dealer in heroin. The heroin is in tiny plastic bags, hidden in the branches of the dogwood tree. Maybe tied with little strings. Or, better, in the leaves of the honeysuckle. The connection comes by in the daytime. The man is there to guard it from a rival gang.”

“Maybe,” said Charlotte, “he’s unemployed and hoping someone will come along and give him a job. ... Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. It just came out. But really, don’t you think we should call the police?”

“What for?”

“He’s a suspicious character.”

“What could you charge him with? He hardly moves a muscle; he’s not drunk and disorderly.”

The nights Fred was out Charlotte double-locked the door and drew the curtains tight. Once she woke at three in the morning. Fred was not back yet. It was bitter cold. She hugged her arms, shivering, then put on his heavy robe and walked barefoot to the front windows. The man was gone. And she felt the strangest sensation of being abandoned and unsafe.

Fred stayed out at night more often. And he slept during the day, she was sure of it. He had stopped looking for acting jobs over a year ago. It was a rotten time for theater, he said. It seemed to Charlotte that the papers were full of notices of small theater groups springing up everywhere. It seemed odd too that Fred never suggested going to see the new plays these groups were putting on. But, she thought, he must know what he’s talking about. What could she presume to know about the theater? Perhaps it all depended on the right connections.