SWF Seeks Same (16 page)

Allie had found part-time work as a computer programmer for a small camera store on Sixth Avenue. She was busy during the day setting up a program that would keep a running inventory on thousands of lenses, filters, and accessories. She hadn’t realized there were so many ways for a professional photographer to change and shape what appeared in the viewfinder, so many ways to bend reality to a purpose.

She’d finished her coffee and was about to leave with Sam. An old sensation was back; it gave her a secret thrill, the way they were lovers inside the apartment but had to act like strangers the minute they stepped out into the hall. Was that the sort of emotion that might disappear with marriage?

He’d stood up and was shrugging into his suit coat. He scooped up his attaché case. Prince of commerce in a hurry. She smiled and placed a hand on his chest to stop him, then kissed him on the lips. She didn’t mind the taste of yogurt.

“What brought that on?” he asked.

“I love you. I’m happy. I want you to know.”

He gave her a quick hug. “I’m happy, too, Allie, but neither of us’ll be quite as happy if I’m unemployed.”

“You leave first,” she said.

He nodded, then opened the door to the hall and glanced in both directions. He blew her a kiss and stepped outside and closed the door, all in one nimble, graceful motion.

Allie counted to fifty, listening to the humming silence of the apartment, then followed.

By the time she reached the lobby, he was nowhere in sight.

A shipment of Nikon accessories hadn’t arrived at the camera shop that morning as scheduled, and the shop’s owners, two implacable brothers of Iranian descent, gave Allie the afternoon off rather than pay her for doing drone work.

The weather was glorious, so she walked up to Central Park, past the lineup of bored and patient horses waiting to pull tourists in carriages along the congested streets. She entered the park and sat in quiet coolness on a hard concrete bench near the lake. Beyond the trees she could see the reach of skyscrapers, the newer ones with squared-off tops that seemed to flatten against the sky, the older ones piercing the blue like needles, or curving gracefully in Art Deco elegance. A trio of young men pedaled past on the new, thick-tired bicycles known as mountain bikes. Chains clinked against metal guards, and gears ticked and whirred in the quiet afternoon. On the grassy slope near the lake, a man and a woman lay on a blanket with their heads close together, talking. The woman had red hair and was rather stout. The man looked younger and was wearing a white shirt and red tie. A business type, like Sam. Every once in a while the woman would laugh and grab the tie and flick it in his face. The musical sound of her laughter floated on the bright, clear air. Allie watched them for a while, thinking about Sam and the way the fragments of their shattered lives had so seamlessly fit back together.

The breeze picked up and carried exhaust fumes from nearby Central Park South into the park, reminding Allie that she’d been sitting for almost an hour and her world waited just beyond the trees.

She surrendered the park to pigeons, dope dealers, the homeless, cyclists, joggers, and lovers, and got up and walked back to the street. Vital and diverse New York, she decided, maybe wasn’t such a heartless place after all.

If she and Sam were frugal, money should be no problem. She rode a subway instead of a cab back to West 74th. As she walked past Goya’s toward the Cody Arms, she peered in the window but didn’t see Graham Knox.

When she entered the apartment, the living room window was open and a cool breeze was sluicing through. Allie didn’t remember leaving the window raised but was glad that she had. She slipped off her high-heeled shoes, sat down in the wing chair, and massaged her feet. Concrete against flesh, separated only by a thin slice of leather, could take its toll. She was getting a blister on the bottom of her left big toe. A bandage wouldn’t be a bad idea.

She stood up and padded barefoot toward the bathroom, limping slightly and carrying her shoes.

She was five feet from her closed bedroom door when she heard a noise. A soft creaking sound. Then another.

Another.

A rhythm old as time.

Her heart expanded painfully in her chest. Her throat tried to close, and she was having difficulty breathing.

Silently, she edged forward.

She heard a soft, regular moaning. What she’d known in the back of her mind leaped like something uncaged to the front. She stepped forward and pushed open the door.

They were on the still-made bed, both of them nude. Hedra was straddling Sam, her hands propped on her hips. Only Allie didn’t know at first that it
was
Hedra.

It was the wig. Hedra was wearing the blond Allie wig.

She and Sam were both perspiring and Hedra was grinning down at him with an intense expression though her eyes were half-closed. So preoccupied were they that they didn’t notice Allie at first.

Then Hedra sensed something. She stopped grinning, stopped the rising and falling contortions of her glistening body, and turned toward her.

A needle of fear penetrated Allie’s shock and rage. Hedra stared insolently at her as if Allie didn’t belong there. As if Allie were trespassing in her own apartment.

Sam had seen Allie now and was staring at her dumbstruck with his mouth hanging open.

Hedra glanced down at him, then back at Allie. She was grinning again. She said, “Oh, hi, Allie.”

When they were both gone, Allie sat paralyzed on the sofa. The breeze crept in through the open window and rippled coolly around her bare feet like chilled water. Hedra and Sam. Sam and Hedra. Oh, Jesus! She knew she shouldn’t be surprised. Some far corner of her consciousness had known but hadn’t admitted the possibility that her lover and former roommate were deceiving her. If Hedra—sick, conspiring Hedra—envied everything else about Allie, why
wouldn’t
she want Sam? It was logical, insofar as logic could be applied to Hedra, but Allie simply hadn’t wanted to believe it.

This … abomination, this
unfairness
, was sinking in, altering her world forever. The hum of traffic from outside grew louder and became a continuous roar, blotting out all rational thought. A beast devouring her mind.

Hedra had everything she wanted from Allie now. The rape and destruction were complete.

Oh, hi, Allie.

Allie dug her fingertips into her temples, harder and harder, wishing she could penetrate her skull and her mind and rip from them like raw matter the pain of what had happened to her.

The telephone rang.

She sat listened to it for a long time, then lifted the receiver and touched the hard, cool plastic to her ear. She didn’t say anything.

A man’s voice said, “Allie? Allie? Hey, Sweet Buns, it’s me. Remember? Hey, I know you’re there.”

She lowered the receiver slowly, letting it clatter back into its cradle. She sat staring at the wall, wondering who she was, and what she had done.

THAT night, Sam described Allie’s visit at the Atherton. It seemed the only way he could stop thinking about it; share it so it was halved. He knew that, with Allie, the final corner had been turned.

All the while he was talking, Hedra lay beside him in his bed in the Atherton suite. They’d made love. The room was totally dark and still smelled from their coupling. Hedra was smoking a cigarette, invisible to Sam except for the glowing red ember that now and then brightened like a beacon aimed his way, a warning to ships on a dark sea.

Hedra said, “Allie’s imagination must have been rolling in high gear. Actually, I did use her name, but it was no big deal. It came to mind when some guy was getting too friendly and I didn’t wanna give him my own name. He caught me off guard or I’d have given him the name of my third-grade teacher or somebody like that. The drug stuff is pure imagination. Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“I offered Allie some tranquilizers once. She was almost bonkers after losing her job. Maybe that put the idea of me and drugs in her mind.” Hedra drew on the cigarette, making its ember flare angry red in the darkness. “‘Nother thing. A couple of times I dissolved tranquilizers in her coffee or hot chocolate without her knowing it.”

“You
what
?”

“Nothing strong, Sam, just some old prescription medicine. Now, don’t get so excited. I did it for her own good. And tell you the truth, so I could live with the crazy bi—no, I shouldn’t say that. She’s under a strain. She’s got this hands-off thing about any kind of drug, and I just wanted to help her through the rough times, till she could feel better on her own.” Sam heard Hedra shift her body so she was lying on her side, facing him. He felt the mattress depress. She was still perspiring; he could feel the heat emanating from her. “I did it because I’m her friend, Sam.”

A tangle of thoughts spun through his mind. He couldn’t help asking, “Is that why you’re here with me? Because of Allie?”

She was silent for a moment. He saw her cigarette flare. Heard her exhale and smelled the smoke. “I don’t think so. What about you? Is it Allie you’re really sleeping with?”

He was silent. He couldn’t see her in the darkness, but he knew she was wearing the wig.
God! What kind of twisted creature have I become
?

“Never mind,” she said. “Some things it’s better not to think about, and we don’t have to think about them, do we?”

“No,” he said, “we don’t. But it’s eerie, what’s happened. Sometimes the way you talk even when we’re
not
in bed, the way you dress, or motion with your hand or tilt your head, it’s … well, so damned strange.”

“Face it, the real thing turned out not to be the real thing. You regret this, Sam? Me and you?”

“Not at all.” Was that a lie? he wondered. Maybe so, but what was the point of regretting what you couldn’t change or resist? What was the use of hating a weakness in yourself if you knew you couldn’t overcome it?

“Listen, I don’t have to be here if you don’t want me.”

He thought about her not being with him and didn’t like the idea. When he and Hedra were in the same room, it was as if each of them had swallowed half of a powerful magnet. He had to be near her, to touch her. Once he’d allowed their affair to start, he was caught up in a force ponderous and irresistible. Whatever he still felt for Allie was dwarfed and crushed before it.

The real thing turned out not to be the real thing.

“Believe it,” he said, “I want you here.”

He felt her hand glide down to his pubic hair and caress his penis. She did something quick and rhythmic with her fingers and immediately, almost against his will, he had an erection. He was struck again by the contrast between the Hedra he’d first met and this woman. In the dark, she was somebody else. Somebody else …

He heard a fizzing, sputtering sound, as with her other hand she dropped her cigarette in her glass with melted ice in it by the bed.

In an amused voice she said, “Another dead soldier,” and climbed on top of him.

Allie almost lacked the willpower to climb out of bed in the morning. Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to “take to her bed and die” like the heart-stricken Victorian women in romantic novels. Self-pity, something she’d always despised in others, had attached to her like a parasite and wouldn’t be dislodged by reason.

She had dreamed of Sam and Hedra, of them making love in
her
bed, where she and Sam had lain together. She heard their groans, the rocking and banging of the headboard. The keening of the bedsprings mingled with their own subdued moans. In the dream she tried to block it from her hearing, drifting to the window and staring out at the universe beyond the glass. She pretended what was going on in the bedroom wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be happening. But the relentless rhythm of their lovemaking was persistent, and she couldn’t deny the extent to which Hedra had taken over her life, as the sounds coming from the bedroom crashed into her tortured mind.
My bed! Bed! Bed! Bed
!

When she awoke she thought she heard Sam singing in the shower, as he often did. Water gushed through the plumbing in the old walls, nearly drowning out his voice. “I’m takin’ the A-Train,” he was singing, giving it an exaggerated jazzy glide. For an instant there was nothing wrong in Allie’s life and her dream had been a cruel fluke that had nothing to do with reality.

For an instant. Before she was entirely awake.

Then her depression wrapped itself around her. She had to use all her will to struggle out of bed, even though she had to relieve herself so badly she couldn’t lie still. She commanded each leg to move as she plodded into the bathroom.

She didn’t bother eating breakfast, opting instead for a cup of instant coffee, and it was an effort to spoon the dark granules into a cup of water heated in the microwave.

As she settled into the sofa to hold her cup with both hands and sip at the hot coffee, she was surprised to hear a knock at the door.

Even more surprised when she’d trudged to the door, opened it, and found the hall empty.

Then she glanced down and saw on the mat a long-stemmed flower on a folded sheet of white tissue paper. She stooped and picked it up. It was a dark orchid with petals the consistency of flesh. A small white card was Scotch-taped to the paper. In black felt-tip pen it read, “Thanks, Sweet Buns. Until next time.”

Allie touched the thick, fleshlike petals and revulsion welled up in her. She flung the orchid on the hall floor. Then she backed into the apartment and slammed and locked the door.

ALLIE didn’t leave the apartment for days. She ignored her temporary job at the camera store. The Iranian brothers must have called, she was sure, but she didn’t bother answering her phone. By now they’d probably replaced her and not thought much about it. People did strange things in New York. People came and went for their own reasons, and life continued its raucous, zigzagging slide toward eternity.

She didn’t call Sergeant Kennedy about the orchid and note she’d found by her door; the thought of more contact with the police repelled her. She wanted only to escape from unpleasant reality.