Woman Who Loved the Moon (21 page)

He hung up. Then he stood with his forehead pressed to the cold plastic of the phone booth, forcing himself under control.
Get cool. Get cool.

* * *

Jake Susman stood at the window of his house.

Bitch.
Charlie had gotten the blanket spread out under the tree, and the girl was making him wait. Jake sympathized. There she was. Nice. She came quickly across the yard and into the shadows, screened by the tall grass. Almost immediately they were in each other’s arms, clothes off and pushed to one side. Jake could feel himself getting hot.

He left the window. What are you, a voyeur? Getting into teen-agers? The air in the cottage smelled suddenly stale, poisoned with the reek of a thousand dead cigarettes. Marta’s right, I should stop smoking.

He was sure, positive, that Marta Riordan had once had something going with Dellara. She jumped so quickly to his defense...”He’s a sensitive man.” He went to the window again, and opened it. They were still at it.

It was not enough to tell himself that there were a lot of other women, that all cats were gray in the dark, and that if he waited long enough, asked often enough, she would say yes, or he would lose interest.

Monday, he thought. Monday I’ll get in there again, talk to her about Dellara. Suggest that she have an impartial observer evaluate the success of the burning program. The Army? She’s so damn sure of herself, always. I need to shake her up a little.

Despite himself, he looked out the window. Charlie and the girl were still joined, but clearly finished. The tension in his own groin was turning into an ache. Ah, damn. He went to the bed. Marta, he thought. So cool—so beautiful and so cool—bitch...

* * *

Tony Dellara went prowling on Henry St. Monday night. There were lights on in the second floor apartment of the Victorian. He eased open the basement door. The passageway to the yard was cluttered with garbage cans. He went through. A dark shape in the back of the yard, the cottage seemed very small. Nice yard; well kept. A lemon tree. A concrete barbecue pit. He went to look at it. Perfect.

It was stuffed with papers and old rags. He dropped the laundry bag he was carrying to the ground. In it were more rags, stained with paint and turpentine. A coil of dirty clothesline, a can of paint thinner. A half-used, untraceable book of matches.

Party noise blared from the house in front. Tony took a pair of cheap gardener’s gloves from the bag and stooped to rub them in the dirt. Then he put them on and unrolled the clothesline. He uncapped the paint thinner and began to dip the line in the can at random. When it was spotted completely with liquid, he laid one end of it in the barbecue pit and snaked it through the yard to the steps of the cottage, letting it fall in haphazard circles. He peered in curiously through the front window, but could see nothing except the shadowy fronds of a hanging fern.

Get moving. There are people in that front house. He went back to the barbecue pit and stuffed the rags he had brought on top of the debris already there. Then he poured some paint thinner around, not very much, and lodged the partially full can in the pit.

You can’t stay and watch this one. You’ll have to imagine it. The adrenaline rush was beginning to race his heartbeat. He took out a cigarette and lit it, savoring the blue flare of the little flame in the darkness. He took a few puffs. Then he stuck the cigarette against the inside of the matchbook, almost touching the cardboard but not quite. He folded the flap over, compressing the cigarette a little, and tucked the end in.

He cleared a space in the pit and laid the matchbook in it. Then he picked up the laundry bag, and, with one quick backward longing look, left.

He threw the laundry bag into an alley a block away, after scuffing his feet on it a few times. He threw the gloves over a fence. Then he went to the pay phone.

She answered at once, as if she’d been expecting it. It’s been a long time. “A gift for you,” he said. “The one hundred block of Henry Street.”

She said nothing. He hung up. He began to run slowly, a man out jogging on a summer’s night.

* * *

Jake Susman saw the fire trucks halfway down the street. Hell. Hope it’s not too close. A few steps more he realized how close it was, and ran.

They had snaked a hose through the basement steps of the Victorian. A fireman blocked his way. “Can’t get in there, buddy.”

“But that’s my house back there!” They had another hose going up the front steps. Charlie was standing on the sidewalk. “Charlie, what happened?”

“Dunno, man. We were partying, and all of a sudden—whoosh! Fire. These folks sure messing up our house.”

“How bad—”

“Couldn’t see. Looked like it started in the yard, but it spread fast.” He spoke with unconscious relish. “You got insurance?”

“Are you kidding?” Jake grabbed at one of the firemen. There seemed to be fifty of them around the house. “Can I go in there—” he pointed to the first floor of the Victorian. “All I want to do is look. That’s my cottage back there.”

“Yeah, okay.” Jake ran down the hall, jumping over the hose. Obscenely stiff with water, it went through the hall, into the kitchen, and out the back door into the yard. A fireman grabbed him before he got to the kitchen.

“But that’s my
house
!” said. He looked over the man’s shoulder. All he could see was flame.

“We’ve got to wet this place down; get outside! There’s enough alcohol upstairs to fly a plane. You want the rest of the block to go, too? Get out of here!”

He went back into the street. A crowd had gathered. They always do at fires. Goddam ghouls. Disaster’s a spectator sport. Smoke stung his eyes. A red glow came through the windows of the Victorian. The firemen were still inside. They came out, running, dragging the hose, and began to back into the street, playing a stream of water on the front of the house. “Back, get back.” The police were there. Helplessly, Jake moved back. This isn’t real, he thought. It’s a movie by Sam Peckinpah.

Fire shot out the second-floor window of the Victorian.

Jake suddenly saw Marta.

She was backed against the street light, her eyes on the firemen—no, on the flames. He shoved his way over to her. “Marta!” he yelled. “What are you doing here?”

For an instant he thought she had not heard him, and he took a breath to yell again. Then she turned to stare at him. She seemed to be looking at him from very far away.

She nodded, once, and then, as if pulled by a magnet, she turned back to the flames. Christ. Oh, Christ. His mouth was suddenly dry. He wet his lips to talk to her. Another tongue of flame shot out the window of the house. Her whole body shook.

He understood, then. But there was nothing he could say to her that she would hear. Dellara, he thought. But it barely seemed important.

He slumped against the street light pole. “Ahh,” said the crowd, moving restlessly. The fire made a hungry sound. Then it began to eat out the front of the house.

The Woman in the Phone Booth

This story is a piece of fluff. Once every year I write something like this, just for fun. It will usually end up in the garbage. But this one seemed more coherent than the others, so I sent it out, and people seemed willing to give me real money for it! That’s more than I would have done.

* * *

I am riding the bus, coming home from work on the 22 line like I always do, when I see this woman sitting in a phone booth.

She isn’t making a call. She isn’t waiting for one either; people are impatient when they do that, and they keep looking at the phone. She’s just sitting on the floor of the booth, knees flexed, hands clasped around her knees, real relaxed.

I’m pretty close to my stop. So I get off and walk back up the hill to the corner. I do things like that. I want to know how come this lady is sitting in a phone booth.

I got nothing much against phone booths; sometimes they have great graffiti. They are plastic and too small and the phones rarely work. Clark Kent liked to change clothes in them, which maybe explains why he never made it with Lois Lane. I mean, who wants to go out with a guy who takes off his clothes in transparent boxes? But I never thought of them as being restful.

So I walk up to her, lean against the door, and say: “How come you’re sitting in a phone booth?”

She doesn’t tell me to flake off. She just looks up and says, “I’m waiting for a friend. But I’m early.”

She’s nice-looking. She has brown skin and brown eyes and long brown hair all pulled back and tied up on her head in some complicated way which I admire. Her eyes slant, which makes me wonder where she comes from, or her parents, or whoever. So I ask her. I’m not shy.

She tells me. It’s a place I never heard of. “Where’s that?” She points. Up.

“About fourteen light years away.”

Now, I am not as dumb as some people think. She’s telling me she comes from another planet. I don’t believe it—I mean, suppose somebody tells you she comes from another planet, you expect her to look weird, or smell weird, or something. Well, this woman has five fingers on each hand, and two eyes, and one nose, and she smells of toothpaste. So I know she is putting me on.

But I get off on other people’s fantasies, too. “Then how come you’re sitting in this phone booth?” I ask her. “Shouldn’t you be in Washington, saying,
Take me to your leader?
”

“Him?” She laughs. “Who wants to talk to him?”

I happen to agree with her, no argument there. I laugh, too.

“Phone booths are very useful,” she says. “Anyone can use one. They’re practically free. They appear in every city and town in most civilized countries. They’re light, easily movable, and no one is surprised to see one—or to see one gone. This one”—she pats the plastic—”has been traveling with me for almost five months.”

Wha—wait a minute. Flying phone booths? Is this the answer to the UFO racket? But she looks so serious that I get kind of edgy. Mostly just for something to do, I lean in to look at the phone. “Oh, it doesn’t work,” she says. “We disconnected it. We got it in Chicago.”

I look at the dial. The area code is 312, and the prefix is one I’ve never seen before.

I decide to humor her. “Why,” I ask, “are you, an alien from another planet, traveling around in a phone booth? It’s not very, um, elegant. If you want to communicate with our government, or take us over, or something, why don’t you land in your spaceship?”

“Why would we want to do that?” she says.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“Studying,” she says, kind of primly.

“Oh, a government survey.” I can’t help my tone. I know about those things. My brother works for some regional office that’s always doing them, and he makes $17,000 a year for stamping forms with a red stamp and putting them on someone else’s desk.

“Oh, no.” She shakes her head. A bus goes by, going the other way, and she stops talking to look at it. “Just a school. Comparative galactic cultures 437.”

“Graduate school?” I guess. A friend of mine who went to graduate school told me about spending six months in Nepal.

“Like that. I didn’t have the money but my mother lent it to me for an early graduation present.”

“When do you graduate?”

“In
¢
%#
¢
@$.” I don’t know what she said. It makes me nervous again. I don’t believe, really, that this woman is an alien. I’m not sure how she gimmicked the phone booth, but you never know about the phone company, maybe they borrowed a booth from Illinois Bell and haven’t gotten around to changing the number and hooking up the line. Maybe it is hooked up. I only have her screwy word for that.

I pick up the receiver, take out a dime, drop it in the slot, and dial a number. The door closes, pushing me inside the booth. I reach one hand to open it. It’s stuck.

“I told you it didn’t work!” She takes the phone from my hand and sets it back on the cradle. Now she’s standing up. I can see why she sits on the floor in phone booths. She’s way over six feet. Her head bumps the top of the booth and she has to kind of hunch down. It’s pretty cramped. “Now you’ve called the ship!”

“What ship?”

“They come whenever anybody starts to use the phone. The door locks automatically. I was going to wait here for them but I’m early, and they’ll think you’re a specimen.” She glares at me. “I can’t take you. I talked to you. Go away. Now. Go!” She does something brusque. The door snaps open.

I go. I scramble the hell away from that thing as if it were radioactive. I scoot across the street, and the kids who’re playing on the sidewalk stare at me. Maybe I look funny. I sit down on a stoop to catch my breath. Then I watch, real quietly.

And what I see is—nothing. Whatever comes down out of the sky is invisible, but it isn’t transparent. It’s, whadayacallit, opaque. I see a blank, moving across a backdrop of old painted houses and dirty street. It’s dizzying. I can’t look at it. So I look at the phone booth.