Mitchell Smith (7 page)

Its sliding doors opened, its passengers filed out, and Ellie walked in with the others, reached up to grip one of the handholds, and stood swaying slightly, watching through a wide window as the gondola trembled and ran smoothly up into the air. The lights were on along the East River Drive, reflecting, shimmering at the edges of dark water. The East River ran flat black far beneath them as they reeled along.

On Roosevelt Island, Ellie took the small bus for its short route, got off, walked past the liquor store and a travel-agency office-the store still open, the office closed-past another apartment building, and into hers.

Through the lobby-the security man, just come on duty, nodded and smiled-and straight on down the groundfloor corridor to the last door on the left.

She heard Mayo calling, cursing her as she took out her key. When the door swung open, the small Siamese, not much larger than a kitten, ran swiftly out into the hallway, as though expecting someone else. This temperamental game, a result of too many hours of solitude, was liable to continue through several minutes of calling and coaxing, with the cat skittering along the corridor from door to door, sounding its hoarse complaint.

Ellie took a step, stooped, caught the Siamese as he started off, and held him against her for a moment, until he quieted, kneading at her breast with soft, strong paws, the claws only very slightly extended.

She carried him inside and shut the door-remembering, as it closed behind her, that she’d had shopping to do. Milk . . . bread.

Some pineapple sherbet. Something else she couldn’t remember. . . .

She put the cat down to turn on the hall light, and he began to march slowly around her, tail in the air (bent at the tip), talking to himself.

Ellie’d had two cats. The other-a fat half-Persian had died of a kidney ailment, and left Mayo, who’d hated her, bereft. Ellie’d thought of getting another, but consideration of odors, snagged upholstery, another pair of perfect, empty eyes to watch her from the back of the couch, had prevented it.

She put her purse down on the hall table, checked her answering machine-there were no messages-then turned right at the end of the short hallway, went into the bedroom, and put on the bedside lamp. She kicked off her shoes, hitched up her skirt, and tugged her panty hose down and off-then reached under her skirt again, and gently drew the lips of her vulva apart, feeling a cool, momentary kiss of air. She had read long ago that fresh air was necessary for those tissues, that it was bad to keep them compressed, closed, and heated hour after hour until infection began to cook. Either she’d read that, or come to the conclusion on her own. Both Klein and Spears, in their time, had caught her at it-the quick little motion of her fingers there when she undressed and made fun. Spears said she was spoiling the taste.

Ellie took off her summer suit and hung it in the closet-thinking she’d heat up the rice and one of the small cans of chili-bent forward slightly, arms winged back, delicate shoulder blades’in relief, unhooked her bra, and tossed it on the bed. She stood, absently caressing her small breasts, lifting them up with a gentle stroking motion as if to counteract in that way all the sullen weight of gravity upon them throughout the day. -She used wire-edged bras to support them, make them seem a little bigger, even though Clara said she shouldn’t, and these left red marks engraved. She went into the bathroom and turned on the light, leaving the door open on the empty apartment-sat on the john, and, after a moment’s relaxation, farted and began to pee. The fart was soft, high-pitched, and querulous, and Ellie smiled at its resemblance to Mayo’s cries. -There had been several months after Klein had left her, during which she had once or twice communed with farts she produced, answering soprano with soprano, gruff with gruff reply. She had also spent a lot of money getting her hair done, particularly shampooed, so as to enjoy the touch of another person’s hands. -That was, Ellie supposed, wiping herself, much the same use Sally Gaither’s men had made of her. A small, cool woman, murdered hot. Possibly some poor maniac, disappointed by Sally’s chill, had resolved to warm her under water.

Ellie reached back to flush, got up, put on her shower cap, and stepped into the tub to turn the shower on and balance its temperature. She made it cooler than usual.

Soaped and rinsed, she soaped her legs again, took a throwaway razor from the corner of the tub, and taking care around the bones of her ankles, began to shave her legs. She heard Mayo, and through the translucent shower curtain, water-stippled, dripping, saw his small silhouette pacing back and forth on the bathroom carpet. Ellie flicked at the curtain with her finger, but he paid no attention. She heard his muttering over the drumming water. -Ellie enjoyed shaving her legs, the length and general smoothness of them-though she also enjoyed the fine felt of blond down that grew along her shins, when, on vacations at the beach in summer, she didn’t shave. She was fond of the memory of her legs’ smoothness and perfection when she was younger. -Now, and for years, she had watched with interest the fine traceries of tiny veins clustering beneath the sheer skin behind her knees. The faintest touch of the same turquoise could be seen on her left calf, in proper light, when she wore no hose. Ellie found, though, she didn’t mind these slowly gathering imperfections. They interested her, as if her legs belonged to another woman, had been very beautiful, and were now slowly being spoiled.

She turned off the water, shoved the shower curtain back, selected the less used of two canary-yellow towels but used enough to have a faint bite to its odor when she held it to her face-and dried herself. The phone rang as she finished.

Ellie went into the bedroom, wrapping the towel around her, Mayo snaking through her feet. She picked up the phone and sat on the edge of the bed. Her father’s picture, in an oval tortoise-shell frame, stood on the bureau top facing her. The photograph, her father smiling into the camera, had been taken almost a year before he died. Ellie had never sketched him.

“El?”

“Hi, Clara.”

“Listen, can you come over tonight?” It was a quiet, round, full, humming voice, as if its owner were about to chuckle.

“Oh, I can’t, Clara. I’m exhausted-I had an unbelievable day. Worse than usual.” Her father smiled at her, squinting a little in the sunlight. Ellie had taken the picture herself, in the backyard of the house in Queens; a section of the brickwork showed in the photograph, just above her father’s left shoulder.

The voice hummed softly in her ear. Clara almost always spoke softly,

“A lawyer’s trick,” she’d said, “-it makes them listen up.”

“No . . .” Ellie said. She reached down, picked up the Siamese, and put him in her lap. “-I’m going to have some leftover rice and chili, and I’m going to sleep.

No. -No way . . .” She listened a few moments more.

“Yes, I will,” she said, and hung up. She stood, the cat leaping softly down, and tugged the towel from her hips as she went to the closet for her dark green robe, put it on, and walked out to the kitchen, Mayo stalking behind.

Ellie took a can of Nine Lives from the cupboard over the counter, opened it, scooped the stuff into a saucer with a spoon, and slid the saucer just under the small kitchen table, where Mayo, safe in this shadow den, ran to it and began to eat. Ellie bent for a moment and stroked him, feeling the fragile configurations of his bones beneath her fingertips.

Then she opened the refrigerator, took out the plastic container of cooked rice, and began to search the cabinets for a can of chili. She found one behind the can of cherry pie filling-opened it, mixed the rice and chili together in a small saucepan, added some warm water, butter, Tabasco sauce and a dollop of ketchup, and had just set it on the burner on low when the phone rang, She answered it out in the hall.

“You cunt,” Clara said. “-Do you have somebody there?”

“No,” Ellie said, and hung up the phone.

When she finished her supper, she went to the hall, got her purse, and took it into the bedroom. She sat on the bed, took the .38 out, and put it on the bedside table.

Then she took out the Bloomingdale’s package, unwrapped it, and unfolded the scarf. She sat for a while, looking at it, smoothing the blue silk and holding the material up to the light so the small white animals stood out in bold relief. Ellie stood up so she could see herself in the bureau mirror, and draped her scarf around her neck. It clashed with the bathrobe’s green, and she took it off, folded it, went to the bureau, and put it in the top right-hand drawer. Then she took off her robe, draped it over the foot of the bed, turned off the bedside lamp, tugged the covers down, and got into bed.

Ellie lay still for some time, enjoying the darkness, then turned on her left side, stroked the soft edge of the pillowcase for a moment, and fell asleep.

She slept, quite still, for hours-kept company by the small electric clock’s slow sweeping hands, its constant faint hum-almost below the range of hearing, and, silent now in darkness, Mayo, pacing the apartment wide awake, slipping under chairs, ranging the couch, sliding through the gloomy hall-hunting for creatures never found, of which he had no clear notion as to sight or size or scent, his superb slit pupils stretched to perfet ponds of black.

An hour more, and Ellie woke, turned to feel a cool, smooth surface of sheet beneath her hip, and went to sleep again. She dreamed her father had called to her, and she walked and drifted from the side of the house where she’d been watching flowers, and saw him in the backyard, measuring a window frame for glass. Sheets of glass stood behind him, glittering, flashing in the sunlight.

Ellie thought she asked him why he wasn’t working in the garage, but if she had, he didn’t hear her. He measured, then let the rule-tape retract with a flicker of white.

“Eleanor,” he said, looking down into a sheet of glass.

“Eleanor . . .” He turned and looked at her, smiling.

She’d forgotten how nice-looking he was, even with his blue workshirt sweated through, a light frost of beard stubble on his face. His eyes were as gray as she remembered. His fingernails were bruised blue from his work.

“Sugar-bear,” her father said, `-you visiting? Or going’ to stay awhile?”

Ellie moved in some wrong way, and was in the kitchen, though she wanted to stay and talk with him. It was empty; her mother had left it clean and dark. She looked out a strange window, and saw her father talking to a man with bare feet. Her father pointed to the window, and the man turned and looked across the yard-and was able to see her, even though she stepped back into shadows. Then he began to dance, barefoot, a slow dance while he looked at her, raising his knees high, changing to a swift little sideways shuffle. She’d never seen his face before.

Outside the apartment building, down past the western edge of the island, out across the deep, slow estuary tide, a bright knotted cord of light snaked in from the north, moving, twinkling as the East River Drive began to murmur in darkness, to hum, to tremble, to vibrate with the weight of traffic. There, more and more machines were rolling, speeding, thumping past potholes, booming over steel slab and black pavement, rushing, rushing into the shaking city.

Far from this disturbance, the earth spun slowly to morning along the shifting sea, and the Colonel and his men flew into Kennedy out of the sun.

“By the short hairs,” said the First Deputy Commissioner. Francis Connell was a very large man with eyes the color of pencil lead.

“So-if they got us, we got them.” John Cherusco, an Assistant Chief and Commander of Intelligence.

“We have shorter hairs,” said Chief of the Department Delgado.

These three men, three lords of the New York City Police Department-Connell and Delgado rough equals, Cherusco not-sat almost at ease in the First Deputy’s large corner office, where glass walls gave the city to them on two sides, its buildings, its morning light reflecting in little in the gtass-fronted desk photographs of the First Deputy’s wife and two daughters, in the glass covering his citations and honors along the office walls-his diploma from Fordham, his honoraries from NYU and Binghamton, the group portraits with men and women of Democratic Party politics throughout the city and state.

With all this, still he sat in service of a greater.

“What does the P.C. say?” Cherusco-slight, fierce, dark-eyed, big-nosed, shifty-headed as a hungry bird.

Though a respected man, he did not ordinarily spend much time in the First Deputy’s office. His two stars, enough to frighten twenty thousand lesser ranks in the Department, counted for little on this floor of Headquarters, for less in-this corner office.

“The Commissioner,” the First Deputy spoke of his boyhood friend, his lifelong friend, only as the Commissioner, “-the Commissioner put a stop to this operation two years ago, right after he was appointed.” A comfort, as well as some slight discomfort always in speaking of his friend, who had, when both were thirteen years old and masturbating together in Mr. Kramer’s basement, said, “Oh … Frank,” and, his narrow hand at his own part traced slimly with silver, laid his handsome head for a moment into the angle of the future First Deputy’s throat and shoulder. -A memory that, now and then, still drifted though Francis Connell like a breeze, sometimes chill, sometimes warmer.

“Stopped it four months after he was appointed.”

Cherusco’s dark, hectoring voice had all the Bronx ground up in it.

“The Commissioner put a complete stop to that operation as soon as he was apprised of it!” For the record, if not quite true.

“Almost,” said Chief of the Department Delgado. The Chief, uniformed as the other two were not, his stout bulk crowded into fine dark blue, his buttons gold-plated for eternal polish, sat in the dimmest portion of the room-the corner where some architecture high above cast a long shadow through the left-side wall of glass-his familiar practice even in these airy new spaces, where most morning shadows amounted to little.