Woman in the Window (4 page)

She told him about the man with the gun, told him all the details that she knew he’d enjoy. When she finished he was silent. “Well? Well?” she prompted.

“I’m making notes,” he said. “It’s a little weird, Nat. There’s one big hole—”

“Like what?”

“Like how can you be sure it was a gun?”

“Because it looked like a gun.”

“Sure, and it was dark, it was raining, you’d had your share of champagne, and you were three floors up. Across the street.”

“It was a gun—”

“Not until somebody finds it.”

“So why did the guy come into my building and stand outside the door laughing?” He was making her angry but she was fighting it. He was doing his devil’s-advocate thing and she couldn’t really blame him.

“You don’t know who was outside the door,” he said, as if to prove her right. “Could have been a delivery boy, a messenger, a clean-up guy, laughing at the frightened lady locking the door just as he gets there—I mean, it could have been.” His patience always seemed so condescending.

“I say it was a gun and I say he came to the door. And I say you’re full of it!”

He laughed. “Well, the fact is, you’re probably right—”

“You admit you’re full of it?”

“No, I admit it probably was a gun and he probably did come to the door. But it’s also probably over. You went home and he’s hoping to God that’s all there is to it.” He paused. “It makes sort of a nice beginning for a plot—”

“The author at work! It really happened … but yes, I guess it does. It’s so New Yorky, isn’t it?”

“That’s what I mean. It’s real, it’s full of hints, and you can make up your own story to go with it. I mean, it’s my kind of pulpy crap, not like the stuff you handle.” He laughed quietly, forcing it. “You know what I mean.”

“Don’t start on that, Tony. It’s a tired story—”

“Well, aren’t all my stories tired?”

“Drop it,” she said.

“I hear your picture in
PW
is very sexy. I hear it goes on to say that you are hot—”

“Tony, I really don’t want to have this part of the discussion.”

“Ah.”

She closed her eyes, didn’t respond. There was nothing to say, it was all too old, too complicated, too insoluble, too ratty and dog-eared.

“Nat, are you there?”

“Barely. Look, I just wanted to thank you for the roses. I have, so now you can go back to work—”

“Hey, wait a minute. Are you all right? You’re not upset? I mean, really upset?”

“If you mean am I having an anxiety attack, no, I don’t think so. If I do I’ll give my keeper a buzz.”

“Come on, Nat, don’t get snotty. Are you okay?”

She heard the sudden change, the real urgency and concern.

“Just tired all of a sudden. The champagne. Look, how’s the work going out there? All you hoped it would be?”

“Nothing’s ever all you hope it’ll be, Nat.” There wasn’t much more to say, the conversation dwindled away. He was right, of course: nothing ever was quite the way you hoped it would be. Maybe that was the last great secret.

They had married when Tony Rader was thirty-three, a newspaperman, and she was twenty-seven, just beginning to make her way at the Danmeier Agency. Now he was forty-two, a novelist who made his living grinding out paperback originals, action-series stuff and the odd porno here and there. He’d been working on a novel—the quintessential
big novel
—since college days and it remained ever in revision, always unsold. Determined not to live off the earnings of his bright, fast-rising wife, he’d let his own view of what he called his “grotty little failures” grow higher and higher, a wall between them.

Natalie had pressed him endlessly, once they could afford it, to stop writing the pulp novels that he could turn out at the rate of one per month and instead devote all his time to what they called his A-material. But he insisted on paying his own way: if there was time left over, he’d attend to that big novel.

The result, of course, was that he did the junk work at the expense of the good stuff. Nothing ever turned out to be all you’d hoped.

The breaking point had come three years ago, when she went too far, tried to help. Without Tony’s knowledge she had taken the most recent revision—the first half of that big novel—along with his carefully worked-out outline of the remainder, and tried to connect it. Perhaps she knew the marriage was doomed on its present course, perhaps she knew there was nothing to lose. Maybe she thought she had a chance with the manuscript. She liked it, she found it a satisfying read, full of strong characterizations, just plain good writing. Maybe she’d been kidding herself. … She hadn’t been able to sell it. Tony had found out she’d tried.

And that had been the end.

With their lives and ambitions so hopelessly intertwined, there had been no way to smooth it out. Tony went on and on about being robbed of his manhood, his personal worth, his responsibility for his own life. And Natalie hadn’t been able to figure out what he was talking about. Two people loved each other, they tried to help each other out: it seemed so simple to her, so wildly complex to him. He was threatened by her success, her power over his life: boring, tedious arguments, human. And she felt that if she wasn’t allowed to make a contribution to their life together, what was the point? And he would soar off into flights of self-deprecation, rattling on about his inferiority to her other clients. …

The old story. No survivors.

She remembered, as she lay in bed unable to sleep, one of their last evenings together. They had gone to see Harold Pinter’s play
Betrayal.
Tony had known the music that underscored the play’s most haunting moment: Stan Getz’s recording of “Her.” Once they were no longer together, she had gone in search of the album and found it at King Karol on Forty-second Street. She had bought the album,
Focus,
and had nearly worn it out in the years since, playing it again and again.

She lay quietly in bed, chewing her thumb, her face wet with tears. She really had no idea what she was crying about.

Nothing ever quite being all it was supposed to be?

Maybe.

Sir snuggled up in the curve of her leg, tail wagging slowly.

Finally they slept.

A
COUPLE OF DAYS
later, the man with the gun already fading in her memory, overtaken by the rush of events at the office, Natalie was slouched behind her desk, her feet cocked up on a lower drawer, shoes off, reading a letter from an angry, disappointed author. It was almost two o’clock, still well within the limits of publishers’ lunches and the only stretch of the day when she wasn’t on the telephone. In a recent attempt to reclaim time for thought, and to read a bit more, she had ruthlessly curtailed her lunch and cocktail calendar: in the past there had been a business lunch every day, drinks or dinner on business four nights a week. Jay said he didn’t believe she could cut it back, said that it would dramatically lessen her effectiveness. She suspected he might be right, but she’d been working too hard, she had to give it a try. And so far, so good. Today she was lunching at her desk. And tonight’s dinner with Lotte was only partially business, she hoped.

She was trying to deal with an immensely sticky doughnut and a cup of now-cold coffee, trying to dream up a soothing response for the unhappy writer, when the door to her office opened and Jay loomed, filling the space. She looked up in surprise at his failure to knock and saw that he was waving a folded copy of the
New York Post
at her. As Wodehouse once said, though he may not have looked exactly disgruntled, he was surely far from gruntled. The normal tightness of his expression tended to sag into jowls when he wasn’t happy: she recognized the sag of concern.

“You look like you’re posing for a statue, Jay,” she said lightly. “Would you like to come in? Or do you just want to wave the day’s news at me?”

“Very funny,” he growled, entering and laying the paper on her desk. He was just back from the Four Seasons and she couldn’t bear to tell him there was a little spot of something on his blue-and-white-striped shirt. “Your fame spreads, Nat. But if I may offer an opinion, it sounds a little scary to me. …”

“What are you talking about?”

“Look at Teddy Garfein’s column, my dear.” He stood over her, frowning, staring down at her, making her slightly crazy. There was that fine patina of criticism in his voice and it pissed her off, frankly.

But that was forgotten when she saw Garfein’s tidbit.

This week’s hot, glamour-girl literary, deal-maven, Natalie Rader at the Danmeier Agency, had one of those spooky midtown glimpses of the underbelly of life that makes this truly a Wormy Big Apple. Sometimes, anyway. Working late—as deal-mavens always do—our Natalie witnessed what we can only assume is the postscript to a—dare we say it?—murder. Say, how’s that for a title, Nat? Would it play in Peoria? Anyhoo, she saw a gunsel de-gun himself on a Madison Ave. streetcorner, pitch his weaponry over a fence and into a building site! And naturally nobody noticed … but eagle-eyed Natalie. So what’s the upshot? Is there a pistol-packin’ construction foreman now on the loose? Who got blasted in the hours before the gunsel threw his gun away? And can Natalie find someone to turn her glimpse of murders aftermath into a hot property? Ira Levin, where are you when Nat needs you?

“I don’t believe it,” she said. “How in the name of God—”

“You mean it didn’t happen?”

“No, it happened. It was the night we had the party here.”

“And you didn’t tell me? Christ, Natalie, sometimes I just can’t cope with you—”

“Why in the world should I tell you about something I saw out the window? I don’t get it—is everybody crazy? What’s this doing in Garfein’s stupid column?” She was breathing too rapidly. She waved a hand as if to eradicate Garfein and knocked over the cold coffee, desperately began dabbing at it with Kleenex. It soaked into the
Post.
She felt Jay’s eyes boring into her.

“Well, you told somebody, Nat.”

“Jay,” she said, trying to hold her voice steady, “why do you come in here looking like the wrath of God and start picking on me? Who do you think you are? And what the hell do you think I’ve done? What’s my crime? I didn’t throw away the gun and I didn’t call the
Post
—”

“Somebody did.”

“So what? It’s my problem, not yours. So why the dark looks, that see-me-in-the-principal’s-office tone? Really …”

He looked at her and she saw his eyes soften. Her fists were clenched in her lap and she knew she’d stuck out her lower lip like a little girl about to cry. She sat there looking up at him, aware of his softening, wondering if she was doing it all on purpose. All her life, the pose had worked. But it wasn’t a pose: it was just her, just the way she looked. Oh, who could figure it out?

“I’m sorry, Nat,” he said quietly, closing the door behind him. “I didn’t mean to play the heavy.”

“Well, you should watch it. And you’ve got food on your shirt. Messy eater.” She smiled, felt better.

“I don’t know, it just worried me, seeing your name in the paper that way.” He stood looking out the window. “Over there, is that where you saw it happen?”

She nodded, got up, pointed out the spot.

“The thing is,” he said, “whoever threw the gun away—assuming it was a gun, your eyes must be better than mine—may be wondering right now if you saw him, if you could recognize him—and Garfein put your name in the paper. It’s not funny. Too many freaks out there, and now this particular freak has your name—”

“So there’s not much I can do about it, is there?”

He shrugged his massive shoulders. “If you didn’t tell Garfein, who did? Who have, you told?”

“Only one person, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, no, not Tony!”

She nodded. “I had to tell somebody.”

She saw him almost flinch, the question unspoken: Why not me, Nat, why didn’t you tell me?

He looked at his watch. “I’ve got an appointment. Look, we’ve got to think of something—some means of keeping an eye on you for a few days. I could call a security firm. Or a detective agency. I don’t want you just wandering around, a sitting duck.” He looked out the window again. “I’ve had some experience with being scared, really scared. It’s not nice.”

She took his sleeve. “Don’t worry, Jay.” If she had told him the rest of the story, the laughter on the other side of the door, he’d have put her in his pocket and not let her go. “Really, I’m not scared. Maybe it wasn’t a gun—”

“Don’t bullshit me, Nat.” He stopped with the door open. “Be careful. I’ll think of something.” He grimaced, shook his head, and left her alone.

What had he meant? she wondered:
I’ve had some experience with being scared, really scared. …
It was hard to imagine what might scare him. Then she smiled to herself: the fact was, he was a little bit scared of her.

At seven-thirty she met her friend, Lotte Marker, who was a senior editor specializing in mysteries and thrillers at a house with whom Natalie had done a good deal of business over the years. They had been friends since their first meeting and made a point of dining together three or four times a year, which always meant there was a good deal of personal catching up to do. When they settled into one of the corners in the back at Le Petit Robert in the West Village, Natalie was surprised at Lotte’s immediate reference to something other than books and business. The Garfein column. No warming up with shoptalk tonight.

“Well, everybody’s talking about it, my dear,” Lotte said, fixing Natalie with a quizzical gaze over the tops of her half-glasses. She was holding the menu to one side as if this Garfein thing couldn’t wait. “Let’s face it, it’s so bizarre!”

“Come on, things like that happen in New York all the time.”

“Debatable, in my view, but it’s not just that you saw the man with the gun. What makes it so precious, so priceless, is that it shows up in the
Post
! That, whatever else you may tell yourself, definitely does not happen every day. That sets it well apart from all the other daily scary numbers, don’t you agree?” She sipped a kir and smiled knowingly. “It’s rather like having several million people look through your purse … or your medicine cabinet. Suddenly everybody knows more about you than you know about them, you’re so exposed, so vulnerable—
”