SWF Seeks Same (9 page)

“I don’t suppose you would,” Sam said.

Allie locked the apartment door behind her while Sam stood in the hall, watching. There was the slightest hint of a smile on his face, as if he’d just heard a good joke and it lingered in his mind.

Hedra had already gone down in the elevator. Allie and Sam waited silently while it rose slowly back to the third floor. It seemed to take long enough to rise three hundred floors.

Allie heard the cables thrum as the elevator adusted to floor level. The doors slid open. Sam stood back like a gentleman to let her enter first. She felt like waiting until the doors were about to close, then stepping into the elevator so he wouldn’t have time to follow. The old rattletrap didn’t have the kinds of doors that opened automatically if someone stuck a hand between them. But she knew that was foolish and would accomplish nothing in the long run.

Alone with him in the elevator, she reached around him to press the button. Gave it a twist with her thumb.

Sam said, “I’m asking for your forgiveness, Allie.”

She was silent, trying not to let his nearness affect her in the cramped space. She could smell his familiar aftershave, feel the warmth of him. The doors slid closed and the elevator hummed into motion.

Neither she nor Sam said anything until the elevator doors opened. Allie started to step out, then realized they weren’t at lobby level. She looked at the floor indicator light, saw she’d pressed the wrong button on Three. The elevator was on the thirtieth floor. Sam was smiling faintly, as if he suspected she’d done it with subconscious purpose as some kind of Freudian slip. My God, might he be right?

She very deliberately stabbed a finger at the
Lobby
button, and the elevator began its descent. She felt a hollowness in her stomach, as if they were plunging straight down the shaft at dizzying speed. Down to the center of the earth.

He said, “Other women forgive other men for less.”

“We’re not other women and other men.”

He gave a humorless soft chuckle. “
Somebody
has to be. How else could Gallup and Harris take all those polls?”

“I never took part in a poll.”

“My life’s not good without you, Allie.”

“You don’t seem to have any trouble finding stand-ins.”

He clenched his fist and stared down at it, as if what had happened to his hand troubled him. Then he banged it into the elevator’s steel wall. “So I’m a fucking sinner! Who are you, Mother Teresa? Isn’t a human being allowed one mistake? For God’s sakes, are you shooting for the ministry? I
need
you, Allie!”

Allie’s heart was slamming. The abruptness of his outburst had startled her. The unexpected violence, and the heat of his words. Words that penetrated like darts because they recognized an imperfect world and made undeniable sense.

He was staring at her, his deep dark eyes angry and injured. She didn’t know quite how to react. She heard a voice something like hers say, “What now, Sam? You grab me and kiss me into submission like in the movies? Or give me a good shake until I see reason? Get what you want by force if it isn’t given willingly?”

“I don’t play the game that way and you know it.”

He was right, of course. She did know that about him. “Game, huh?”

The elevator stopped on
Ten
. The doors opened to an empty hall, then closed again. They continued their descent.

“Don’t twist what I say, Allie.”

“All right, I suppose that wasn’t fair. Mother Teresa apologizes.”

He wiped a hand down his face in slow motion, a gesture of remorse. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper.”

“No, but maybe I shouldn’t blame you.”

He bent down and kissed her gently on the forehead. “I’m sorry, Allie. So sorry.” She didn’t move. Felt him bend lower as he braced with one hand against the elevator wall. His lips were against hers. She was suddenly tired of resisting, and all this time she hadn’t realized she
was
resisting him. Perhaps that was the most exhausting kind of self-denial.

Allie parted her lips, felt the probing warmth of his tongue. She felt herself catch fire.

He shifted position and his arms were around her, pressing her to him.

The fire spread throughout her body. Jesus, she didn’t want this! Yet she wanted it fiercely! So fiercely! She was ashamed of herself but couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop needing Sam. This was the kind of crap that happened in romance novels, not in
her
life.

They were no longer plunging through the core of the building. They’d been at lobby level for some time while the elevator adjusted position. The doors hissed open on the empty lobby, to faint sounds of traffic and the outside world.

Allie pulled away from Sam. She stared at the world beyond the street doors, and suddenly she didn’t want to go any further. She was held by a force stronger than her pride. Sam pulled her close to him again, as if she were as weightless as she felt. She heard him say, “Can you phone wherever you were going and say you’ll be late?”

She nodded, her cheek pressed against his white shirt and red tie. Trusting him. Wanting him. She nodded again, more vigorously, so he could feel the motion of her head against his chest even if he couldn’t see it.

She reached around him and pressed the
Up
button.

SAM played it light and easy, continuing to live at the Atherton Hotel over on West 44th Street. He told Allie he wished he could move back into the apartment with her so things could be the way they had been, but it wasn’t necessary; things could be even better this way. He took her out a couple of times a week, to restaurants, for walks in Central Park, for easy jogs along early-morning deserted West Side streets, nurturing what he’d coaxed back to life. He hung around the apartment some weekends, but not in any way that created tension. If he sensed he was interfering with even normal domestic activity, he left. Allie was sure he was going out of his way to demonstrate to Hedra that he posed no threat to her secret living arrangement with Allie.

The two of them—the three of them—became close friends, learned how to coexist with minimum friction. Allie and Sam were falling back into their old relationship, bodies slipping into familiar orbit. Hedra was dressing more stylishly, going out more often in the evenings. Allie never asked where she went, suspecting that sometimes her reason for leaving was to make the apartment available for her and Sam. And Hedra never pried into Allie’s affairs.

Allie received a few more obscene phone calls. Not only obscene, but puzzling, and with that eerie familiarity that made her stomach drop.

But all in all she was happy in her reconstructed world. The roommate arrangement was working out.

However, other things in Allie’s world were not. Hedra was a comfort when Allie needed her most. Sam was in Chicago, at something called a new-issue seminar, when Allie entered the apartment sobbing without inhibition, seeking shelter and thinking she’d be alone.

But there was Hedra, standing near the door and wearing Allie’s blue coat with the white collar; she was doing temporary office work nearby for an orthopedic surgeon, had come home for lunch, and was about to leave.

When she saw Allie’s agony, the pained look that came over Hedra’s face almost made Allie momentarily forget her own problem and feel sorry for Hedra. Then she realized it was pain reflected—
her
pain.

Hedra’s hand was on her arm, fingers gently kneading. “So what’s the matter? What’s going on, Allie?” Her voice was throaty, urgent, and weighted with concern.

Allie pulled away from her, from the surprising intensity of her compassion, and was immediately sorry. What the hell was she thinking, drawing back from a friend’s attempt to console her? She paced in front of the window, trying to organize her thoughts, then came back and sat down on the sofa. Listened to the refrigerator droning in the kitchen. Something was vibrating inside it; glass singing on a wire shelf. It was a subtly piercing sound, like an accepted and ignored scream.

“Allie…?”

Allie swiped at a tear on her cheek and said, “Goddamned Mike Mayfair!”

“Mayfair? What happened?”

Allie made an effort to even out her breathing, not look like such a crushed idiot. The universe was still in place, the earth revolving. Talk, she told herself. Talk about this latest kick in the gut and it might not seem so devastating. “He made it clear to me that if my services for Fortune Fashions were to continue, I’d have to supply certain services for him.”

“Huh? Oh, I get it …”

“And Mike Mayfair’s
not
going to get it. I made a pact with myself when I moved to this shit-hole city. My body, the essential me, wasn’t for sale. I wouldn’t let myself be devoured by what’s outside that window. And, dammit, I still feel that way!”

“Maybe you oughta tell Sam about Mayfair.”

“That’d only cause more trouble, and it wouldn’t really change anything.”

Hedra crossed her arms and studied Allie as if peering through flesh and bone and observing the wheels of her mind, coolly assessing this situation that had broken their lives’ tranquility. It gave Allie an odd feeling, glimpsing this unexpected, calculating side to Hedra. As if the family pet turned out to know how to balance a checkbook. “The company hired you and the job’s not finished,” Hedra said. “So don’t they still need you?”

“Not much. Not at this point. I did too good a job. The systems they need are on line and simple enough so that even Mayfair’s secretary can run and expand the programs. Even Mayfair himself. It’ll take some time, and there’ll be minor fuck-ups, but the truth is they can get along fine without me.”

Hedra bit her lower lip so hard Allie thought blood might appear. Hedra said, “Well, I think it’s …
just rotten
!”

That made Allie feel better, almost made her smile. Hedra being Hedra again. But it didn’t tell her anything she hadn’t known. Rotten. That was Mayfair, all right.

Hedra stared at the floor and ground her high heel into it, as if trying to bore through wood and plaster to the apartment below. “You were counting on the money from this assignment, weren’t you?”

“Hell, yes. That’s the card Mayfair was trying to play. He was smooth and he made it all seem halfway respectable, but it came down to prostitution and we both knew it. What we were talking about was ass for cash.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“Christ, Hedra!”

“I’m sorry. I meant what’d you
say
to him?”

“Nothing at all. I simply left.”

“Best thing, maybe.”

“I passed up some solid accounts because the Fortune Fashions job was so lucrative, and now here I sit with empty pockets and empty time.”

“Empty pockets?”

“Well, they’ll be empty soon.”

Hedra gave a careless backhand wave, as if shooing away a mosquito instead of financial devastation. “I can carry us for a while. And Sam’ll help, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, I’m sure, too. If I ask him. But I don’t know if I want that.”

“That
isn’t
prostitution, Allie. Not with Sam.”

Allie worked her shoes off and let them drop to the floor. One landed on the soft throw rug, the other
thunked
on wood. “I guess it’s not,” she said. She began massaging her foot. In her anger after leaving Mayfair, she’d walked blocks along Seventh Avenue before hailing a cab; her legs were tired and her feet were sore and felt clumsy and heavy. Her soles tingled as if she’d been marching barefoot on sandpaper. She leaned back and closed her eyes. “God, I really feel shitty, Hedra.”

“Anybody would, after what happened.” There was a hitch in Hedra’s voice; she seemed about to cry. “I don’t like seeing you like this.”

“I know you don’t,” Allie said, her eyes still closed. “I don’t like it, either.”

Hedra spoke from the blackness. “If you want, I can get you something.”

Allie wasn’t sure what she meant. “No, I’ll be okay. But thanks.”

“You sure?”

“What do you mean by ‘something’?” Allie asked.

“You know. A pill.”

Allie opened her eyes and met Hedra’s guileless stare. “What kind of pill?”

“Just something to make you feel better, that’s all.”

“What kind of pill?” Allie repeated.

“I dunno, it’s something like Demerol. You heard of Demerol?”

“Sure. In hospitals.” Allie stared at Hedra, who was outlined against the bright haze of light streaming through the window. There was something unreal about her, as if she were someone’s strayed shadow rather than solid substance. Here was yet another side of Hedra. “It’s none of my business if you do drugs, Hedra; I’m not preaching. But it’s not for me and thanks anyway.”

The figure silhouetted against the light writhed with discomfort. “Wait a minute, Allie, it’s not like I’m a drug fiend. It’s just that I got used to taking certain drugs when I was in the hospital in St. Louis.”

“I didn’t say you were an addict.”

“No, I guess you didn’t. Guess you wonder what I mean, though, about being hospitalized and all.”

Allie sat quietly, waiting, knowing Hedra felt compelled to tell her about this. Allie had been wounded and brought down to earth. The weak could safely confide in the weak.

“I was just a kid,” Hedra said, “and a car hit me when I was on my bike. It tossed me twenty feet and injured my spine. The doctors couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong; injured backs can be like that. Anyway, I was in the hospital for a while, and they had me on this drug and that drug for pain. They were doing that to a lot of people in those days if they couldn’t diagnose what was wrong; I even saw a TV documentary on it once. Well, eventually the pain just went away by itself, but I was in the habit of taking drugs when I felt bad. I still do it, but it’s not as if I’m hooked or anything. There are millions of people like me, using drugs the way I do sometimes, to help them over the rough spots.”

“I suppose there are,” Allie said. “But it’s a habit I never fell into. Where was your family when all this was going on?”

Hedra stepped out of the light and Allie was shocked by the dismay and rage on her face. “My family situation was never good. I try not to think much about those people, after the way they let me down. Heck, the way the brain can block out bad stuff, I hardly even remember them. Except for my father’s hands, and the things he did with them. That’s the way I see him now, just a pair of big powerful hands with dirt under the nails. I can’t even picture my mother at all.”