Laughing Man (13 page)

"Hello," she called again. "Is anyone there?"

"Is anyone there?" the voices of the house replied.

Then Hal said, "I don't think we're alone here," and shone his flashlight about frantically. Its yellow beam caught what looked like insects speeding through the cold air.

"Insects," Denise said.

Hal let the flashlight beam settle on a far wall—white plaster, orange wainscoting. A naked form—stomach, pubic hair, teeth, breasts, sky-blue eyes—stepped quickly and gracefully into the light, then was gone.

"Jesus Christ," Denise whispered.

Another naked form appeared in the light, and was gone. Then another, gone, And another. Gone. And then they were like insects moving through the light, and Denise whispered, "I'm sorry. God, I'm so sorry."

Because these, they knew, were the
others
in the house. They were on the stairs in front of them, and in the big room where the footprints had been. They were close enough to touch, and no more visible than shadows on a starlit night.

But they were
real
, and they moved with purpose, and grace, and terrible certainty.

E
rthmun thought that he should be asleep, but he couldn't sleep because he had a joke to tell, and no one to tell it to. It was a joke of his own devising and he thought it was very funny. It was his first joke, the only joke he had ever devised, and he was desperate to share it, but there was no one available to share it with. He had tried calling Patricia David, but had gotten only her answering machine. He'd tried calling the squad room, but there was no one there tonight whom he saw regularly on the day shift, and he felt very self-conscious at the idea of telling his first joke to a stranger. He'd even tried calling his sister, Lila, but she wasn't home either.

So he sat on the edge of his bed and he said to himself, "I have a wonderful joke but no one to share it with."
It was pathetic
, he thought.
He
was pathetic. For God's sake, everyone should have someone they could tell a joke to on a moment's notice.

And, for the second time in a week, he felt very lonely, and very alone.

The woman in the hall
, he thought
. The woman with the big cat
. Maybe she'd like to hear his joke. She had a kind of bond with him, after all. They'd had an encounter in the hall. She had stolen a glance at his erection beneath his blue robe, and he had fantasized bending her over the bed. Surely that was a bond of sorts.

He went to his door, opened it, stepped into the hallway, stopped.
Where did she live?
he wondered.
Which apartment?
He looked left, right. Hadn't her big gray cat been at the end of the hall to his left? Sure. Left.

But maybe right.

He looked to his right, tried to visualize the cat at the end of the hallway there. But he could visualize nothing. He looked to his left again, tried to visualize the cat there. Still nothing.

Shit.

He decided that he'd knock on doors. She lived on the same damned floor—he knew that much about her anyway.

He looked down at himself, thinking he might be naked. He saw that he wasn't. He was wearing blue jeans, a white shirt, red socks. He grinned. Why would he have to actually look at himself to find out if he was naked? That was foolish.

He went to a door in the hallway to his left and knocked. The door was number 4C, and no one answered his knock. He knocked again, said, "Hello?" but still no one answered. He decided that no one was home, went to Apartment 4D, knocked there.

A tall, thin man sporting a trendy handlebar mustache answered his knock almost at once. The man looked upset and Erthmun guessed that he was upset at being interrupted while doing something personal.

"I'm sorry," Erthmun said, "wrong apartment," because he was not about to tell his joke to someone who was clearly upset with him, and someone who was, besides, a complete stranger.

The man silently closed his door.

Erthmun went to Apartment 4E and knocked. The woman he had seen a week earlier answered his knock within moments. She was cradling her big gray cat in her arms and she was dressed in the same blue robe in which Erthmun had first seen her. She smiled ingratiatingly and said, "Mr. Erthmun, how pleasant to see you." She was stroking her cat, and as she spoke, her stroking action quickened, as if, Erthmun guessed, his appearance at her door actually
had
given her pleasure.

He beamed what he hoped was an ingratiating smile and asked, "Do you have time for a joke?"

"A joke?" She looked suddenly perplexed.

He nodded vigorously; her look of perplexity became a look of concern. "Yes," he said, "I made up a joke." He smiled ingratiatingly again. "What's your name? I think I should know your name."

"My name?" She had stopped stroking her big, gray cat.

Erthmun said, "My name's Jack."

She said, "Cindy," and put her hand on the open door, as if getting ready to close it.

He nodded, as if accepting the fact of her name, and hurried on. "May I come in to tell you my joke, Cindy?"

She shook her head. "No, I don't think so." It took a moment for her rejection to sink in. He backed away from the door, felt suddenly, and inexplicably, embarrassed, said, "Sorry. My mistake," and went quickly back to his apartment.

He sat quietly on the edge of his bed for a long while, then he called Patricia David's number again, but without success. He tried his sister Lila's number again, too, but without success. He tried his mother's number; it was busy.

He got off his bed, went to his window, put his hands flat on the windowsill, locked his arms, and said, into the myriad lights of Manhattan, "There was a man who was waiting for his wife to have quadruplets. The man knew that his wife was going to have quadruplets because the doctor had performed an ultrasound exam. While he waited for his wife to have quadruplets, the man tried to devise some names. Maxwell, Hiram, George, Terry, Bud. But he liked none of these names, and he thought that he had better wait for the moment that the quadruplets were born before trying to devise names. Then he was called into the delivery room, where he watched as his wife gave birth first to one son, then another, then another, and still another. He smiled and said to the doctors present, and pointing at the babies, 'That's Ted, that's Fred, that's Ed, and that's Ned.' Then he thought about this, realized what he had done and proclaimed, 'My, how rhyme flies when you're having sons.'" Erthmun smiled. It was a good joke.
My, how rhyme flies when you're having sons
. A pun. His first joke had been a play on words. Didn't that say much about him and about his . . . humanity? Didn't that
prove
something?

T
he woman was blue-eyed and auburn-haired, and she had been told more than once that this was a stunning combination. She had also been asked more than once where it came from—some topsy-turvy intermingling of genes, a Swedish father and a Mediterranean mother? She had grown tired of such questions, and now, when they were asked, she became surly and uncommunicative. She didn't know why. She was not normally surly and uncommunicative. She was normally vivacious and outgoing. In the past month, she had even bought green contact lenses to ward off the questions, but they felt harsh on her eyes, so she did not often wear them.

Her name was Greta, and she was twenty-seven years old. She was a copywriter for an advertising firm on 42nd Street, and she lived in a studio apartment near Central Park. The apartment's only window looked out on the park, in fact, and Greta had spent many nights and days staring out that window at the park, because the view called up her formative years on her parent's farm in northern Pennsylvania, when her second-story window looked out on a very similar landscape.

On several of the nights that she'd looked out at the park she had seen Helen. It did not occur to her that she was seeing anything unusual; she supposed that she was seeing some odd movement of air and leaves and snow, something that only for the briefest moment became a naked human form and then instantly coalesced into air again, roadway, tree trunk, street lamp, dust, heat; and so, Greta supposed that she was seeing nothing, not even a brief fantasy.

This night, she saw no dust, and there was no heat. Snow covered the park, except for the roadways, which were used often during the day, and they were dark and narrow. The snow tangled in tree limbs, dipped like a garland over the tops of bridges, held fast and fat to the tops of benches.

Greta could see all of this and much more from her studio apartment. She paid well for the view; she had even given up one meal a day for it, and this was a great sacrifice because eating, and eating well, was one of the great pleasures of her life.

She thought that she liked her view of the park most at night because she could easily work her childhood landscape into it. There were no blue-suited joggers at night, and few yellow taxis, or people sledding or skiing. Occasionally, a horse-drawn hansom cab crossed her field of view, and she especially enjoyed this because she had owned a horse on her parents' farm in Pennsylvania.

It had never occurred to her to go into the park at night. She thought of herself as a sensible woman and she knew that, even in winter, the park was not a safe place, especially at night.

But she supposed that, this night, it would be all right simply to go to the edges of the park and peer in. What could be wrong with that? There were people walking on Central Park West. She would be one of them, and she would peer into the park, and what she would see there, up close, would feed the nostalgic fantasy she had indulged in so often at her window.

She thought that she would have to be impulsive about this because if she wasn't impulsive, then she would decide not to do it, and so would probably never do it. She thought that she had to cultivate her impulsiveness, that the city was squashing it, somehow, that, as a child, her every act had seemed impulsive, capricious, and whimsical. She had not come here to have the child inside her squashed by this big and impersonal place.

She got into her green leather coat, which covered her to mid calf, put on her brown leather gloves, and her slip-on boots, studied herself in the full-length mirror near the door, decided she looked good, but needed her hat, got it out of the closet, put it on—it was a stylish red beret—and left her apartment.

She was on the street within a minute and trying to decide whether to cross at the light, a block away, or wait for traffic to clear and then jaywalk. She'd been ticketed for jaywalking, and it had been an unpleasant experience in a city that was, she thought, no stranger to unpleasant experiences.

Shit, she thought, who was going to see her jaywalk here, at night? She waited for the traffic to clear, crossed Central Park West to the sidewalk, hesitated a few feet from a tall wrought iron fence, then crossed to the fence itself. She put her hands on the bars and felt the cold of the black iron through her leather gloves.

She put her face between the bars and peered into the park, but saw little. There were tall, snow-covered bushes in front of her, and she could see a triangle of snow-covered grass between them. She let go of the fence, stepped back. This was all very disappointing. She'd have to find some other place where she could peer into the park.

She went back to the sidewalk, saw a young couple walking toward her, felt suddenly foolish and self-conscious, and began walking quickly away from them.
Why was she doing this?
she asked herself as she walked. She had no answer. She was acting under an impulse that was unknown to her.

She walked faster.

After a minute, she looked behind her and saw that the young couple was gone and that the sidewalk was empty. Five blocks south, she could see that traffic was moving slowly on Columbus Circle. She found it astonishing that she had walked so far in so short a time.

She looked toward the park. There was no wroughtiron fence here, only a waist-high stone fence. She thought she could easily climb it, which was an idea that appealed to her because it involved another impulsive act whose origin was shrouded in the mysteries of her subconscious.

But she did not act at once. She ruminated upon the idea for several moments. She tossed the pros and cons about in her head. She asked herself,
What if there is someone just beyond that stone fence, and he's waiting for a fool like me to venture into the Park?
And she answered herself,
What fool, indeed, would be waiting there at night, in the frigid cold?
It was a good question.

At last, she crossed the little strip of snow-covered grass to the fence, hesitated only a moment, put a leg up on the fence, and climbed over it, into the park.

She smiled. This, she thought, was much better, though the deep snow here was very cold on her bare calves, and was already beginning to make its way down her slip-on boots.

She saw much. Paths winding like a tangled Mobius strip through the park, snow tumbling through the dark sky, birds shivering in their pitiful spaces, the wretched homeless making the most of their cardboard shelters in the park's secluded areas, ice on the lake cracking under the weight of cold and atmosphere.