RENDEZVOUS IN BLACK (12 page)

"Everybody goes in there looking like us. What're we supposed to do, change clothes? There's a war on."

On the way he said, "Where's your friend tonight?"

She said, "Oh, her." Then she said, "Oh, you noticed her, hunh?"

He quickly said, "Only because she was with you."

"You can't get her to go out," she said. "She's one of these war widows. just sticks around the room all night. Y'ought to see her. She even changes to skirts when she gets back home."

They went into Harry's dine and dance joint, and they fought their way to a table. They had to share it with another couple, but though their elbows grazed and their smoke drifted into one another's faces, the two parties were as isolated from one another, as exclusively self-contained, as though they were a thousand miles apart. Neither one existed in the other's awareness.

They had a warm-up drink. They gave each other their names. His, he told her, was Joe Morris.

"Have another," he said, when that stage was past.

"Do you want me drunk, or do you want me to know what I'm doing? It don't have to make any difference, because I can be just as easy to get along with when I know what I'm doing."

They had another. Then she said, "Let's limber up. It'll help make the drinks go down."

They got up and went out where the dance floor was. You could see flashes of it at times under people's feet, but only very briefly.

The eighteenth century had the minuet. The nineteenth had the waltz. The nineteen forties had arrived at a state of delirium tremens, which could be turned on and off, however, without the intervention of strait jackets and attendants.

He spread his legs and shot her through to the other side, like a mail sack going down a chute; then braked her and jerked her back again, and she--miraculously--found her feet once more and stood upright before him. Then he bent down and rolled her across his back, from the left side to the right, and dropped her down to the floor.

Nobody collided with anybody else. Or if they did, it was just like another dance step anyway, you couldn't tell which was the mistake and which the intent. Except that the accidents looked a little better, maybe.

They got through and they complimented one another.

"You're good," she said.

"You're all right," he said.

They had two more drinks. Then they each had a sandwich, to soak up some of the liquor. Then, with the room this gave them, they had a final round. Then they got up and went out. They'd had a quiet, pleasant, completely-average wartime evening together. A little on the slow side, maybe. No fights or anything.

He walked her home to the door of her rooming house.

There he took his arm away, and left hers hooked around an empty space. "I'll be seeing you," he said.

She gave him a blank look. Not a resentful one so much as a completely puzzled, uncomprehending one.

"Then what the hell was the whole evening's build-up for? Just nice sisterly companionship?"

He took a moment to answer, looking at her steadily the while as though wondering ahead of time how she would take a projected answer he intended giving her. He smiled at her with an odd mixture of candor and sheepishness.

"I wanted to get to meet your friend," he said.

Her slam of the door was like the explosion of a cartridge shell.

He withdrew one foot from the doorsill, but that was the only move he made. As though he had read her deep and unerringly, in that look of a moment ago.

The door reopened. He was still standing there. Her bray of laughter split the night. She thrust her hand out in proferred partnership.

"I never could stay sore at anything in pants longer than thirty seconds. Come around tomorrow night. I'll fix it for you."

She said to Sharon the next night, about a quarter to eight, "Come on downstairs to the company-room, I want you t'do something for me." She seized her arm, tried to propel her forward with windmill energy.

Sharon said, "What?"

"I want you t'meet a friend of mine."

"Can't she come up here? What's the matter with that?"

"It's a fellow, it's a guy."

Sharon drew back, dug her heels in. She couldn't budge her after that.

"Look," Rusty pleaded, "I want you t'do something for me, I want you t'do me a favor." She spread out her hands in excited expostulation. Then she dragged a chair out into the middle of the room and sat Sharon down on it, by pressing against her shoulders; as if there were a better chance that way of getting her to listen to reason. Then she dragged another chair over, set it face to face with the first, and sat down on that one herself.

She leaned forward in intensity of inquiry, palms to knees and her elbows cocked out akimbo.

"Look, you like me, don't you?"

"Yes, sure, you're all right," Sharon said, a little uncertainly, as if realizing that if she committed herself on this point she was probably also committing herself to more than just this.

"Well, wouldn't you do something for me if I asked you to, wouldn't you get me out of a fix?" And then to influence the answer, she added craftily, "I would, if it was you asking me."

"What kind of a fix?"

Rusty dropped her voice to a hoarse whisper, though there was no more danger of their being overheard now than there had been a minute before. It made for better dramatic effect, however.

"I been going with this guy for some time now," she rasped. She semaphored her hands violently. "He's a nice guy, nothing wrong with the guy himself. Only tonight I--well, I made other arrangements. He's down there now waiting for me; I don't want to just turn him down flat." She took hold of one of Sharon's hands, patted the back of it coaxingly. "Take him off my hands just for tonight. I've got a date with somebody else, and I can't break it. I would if I could, but I just can't ."

"Can't you tell him that yourself?"

"I don't want to do it that way. I don't want to hurt his feelings. You go out with him in my place. Will you do that for me?"

Sharon rose from the chair and stepped around to the clear of it. "I'm married. I don't--"

Rusty squinted, in an effect intended to convey chaste abhorrence. "This has nothing to do with that. It's not that kind of a date. I wouldn't ask you. Poor fellow's all alone, it's just friendship . You don't have to care for him. Can't you just keep'm comp'ny for me? In half an hour you ditch him and you're home." She threw up her arms overhead, in dramatic termination.

"I don't like the idea," Sharon said, narrowing her eyes in remote speculation. "In all the time Buck's been away, I never did that yet. I'm not going to begin it now. I don't see why I should let you talk me into--"

"What's matter, don't you trust yourself?" Rusty couldn't resist flinging at her cattily. "All right," she said, without giving her time to answer that, "all right." She did some more hectic hand passing, this time before her own forehead, as if warding something off. "We won't talk about it any more. Subjick's dosed. We won't say another word about it. Forget I asked you."

She slung the two persuader chain back where she'd gotten them. Her mien was that of a thoroughly disillusioned but patiently forebearing person. "Just goes to show you," she said. "Human nature's a funny thing. You pick a girl to be your friend. You break her in at the plant. You speak up for her when the foreman bawls her out. You share a room with her. You do everything you know how. And then the first little thing you ask--" And then, quickly warding off any prospective appeasement, though none had been offered up to this point, she concluded, "All right, skip it. Let's forget I mentioned it."

Sharon shook her head hopelessly. She gave a deep sigh. She looked at her whimsically. Finally she stepped up behind the martyr and took her briefly by the shoulders.

"Oh, for heaven's sake, if you're going to take it that big-- All right, I'll go. You and your social complications."

Rusty suddenly launched into a flurry of grateful preparation and assistance without wasting time on any intermediate stage. "All right, here, this all right? Or how about this one, you want to wear this one?" She danced around her in circles, she tried to become so helpful so fast. "Want a little of my lipstick, the new shade?" She tried to apply it herself, on the hoof, but Sharon deftly averted her face.

"All right, now come on, I'll take you down and introduce you." She hustled Sharon out the door before her, as if afraid she'd change her mind if given the chance.

He'd been sitting there in the downstairs room listening to the radio, carefully ignoring another man waiting for some other girl in the same house at the same time.

He stood up. He didn't look as bad as she'd feared.

Rusty gave them a whirlwind introduction, above the radio.

"Joe Morris, this is Sharon Paige."

" Mrs . Sharon Paige," Sharon said quietly but firmly.

He gave her an odd look that she couldn't quite fathom. Certainly, whatever it was, it wasn't disappointment. Almost, you might have said, there was a grim satisfaction in it.

Rusty gave each of them, impartially, a clap on the back. "All right, you two run along," she said. "Don't wait for me."

"Would you like to take a walk?" he asked Sharon deferentially.

Her acceptance was almost driven out of her by Rusty's vigorous nudge in the kidneys, unseen by him behind her back. She didn't answer directly, but turned and led the way out into the hall, to show him she agreed.

He followed. Rusty brought up in the rear. After he had already gone through the front doorway, however, she brought him back to her momentarily with a surreptitious but sharp hiss. He returned to where she was waiting, and they stood there with her forehead almost meeting his chin, they were so close.

"How's that for fixing?" she breathed.

Without a word he took something out of his pocket, in such a way that Sharon couldn't see him do it from where she was, peeled off the top layer, and crushed it into Rusty's unprotesting hand.

She didn't look down. But she wasn't surprised either. Her hand closed up like a small, voracious pink octopus feeding on something.

She gave him a portentous wink.

He winked back at her.

Somehow, there was something a little cold-blooded about each wink. They weren't the lighthearted glancing things winks are supposed to be.

She thumped him familiarly on the chest with the back of her hand.

"Don't keep her out later than all night," she snickered.

They walked down to where the pleasure lights were. Then when they got there, the orange tide sucked them up, drew them slowly along, almost without any further effort of their own. The thickly-peopled sidewalk seemed to carry them along as if they were on a moving belt.

She didn't know what to say to him, so she said nothing. He, whether for the same reason or not, didn't say anything to her either. She decided to wait and let him do the talking.

"Would you like something to drink?"

"I don't drink," she said without looking at him.

"No, I meant a soda or orangeade. I wasn't offering you anything else."

"No thanks. I just had supper."

They kept on walking in the crowd, like two people who don't know what to do with themselves.

A marquee, studded all over its underside with lighted bulbs like nailheads, came drifting toward them overhead.

"Would you like to go to a picture?"

"No!" she said, this time almost vehemently. "No-- they're all about the war."

"I understand," was all he said.

She repented a little. A very little. "Don't let me spoil your evening. Why don't you go and do something, if you feel like it?"

"I'm doing exactly what I want to do," he assured her.

She couldn't think of anything to say to that. It seemed to stand by itself.

They kept on walking.

"He's in the war, isn't he?"

"My husband. Yes." She thought, Why aren't you?

He said, "I know what you were thinking just then. 'Why aren't you?'"

She admitted it tacitly by not answering.

"I've tried three times. What more can I do?"

She didn't say anything.

"And I know what you were thinking that time too. 'That's what they all say.'"

This time, inadvertently, she turned her head sharply toward him for a moment. Which again was a tacit admission.

He reached for his back pocket. "Look, I'll show you my classification card."

She waved him not to. Again he read her thoughts. "I know, you're not interested." He took it out anyway and offered it to her. She wouldn't look at it. He put it back again at last.

"I have arrested tuberculosis," he said.

Then he smiled and asked her, "Are you afraid to walk with me, now?"

"No," she said. "No. Of course not." And meant it. But suddenly she became aware that, somehow, without quite realizing how it had come about herself, she had been maneuvered into a false position. If she quitted him now and turned around and went back, it would be a reflection on her, and not on him any longer. A large part of her freedom of action had been subtly stripped away from her in the course of just those few harmless remarks.