Phantom lady (12 page)

"Don't you care for your drink, miss?"

This was meant to be a hint, a spur to get her to move on. It failed; she blunted it.

Her answer was toneless, told nothing. "Leave it there."

The circumstances were in her favor, for she was a girl, and girls are under no compulsion to be repetitious spenders at a bar, as a man customarily is if he expects to continue to be welcome. Moreover, she was not flirting, she was not seeking to have her check lifted, she was not behaving rep-rehensibly in any way; he was powerless against her.

He drew away from her again, worsted, looking back at her all the way down the curve of the bar, and her eyes followed him as persistently as ever.

Discomfort was settling into something chronic now. He tried to shrug it off with a squirming of the shoulders, an adjustment of his collar about the nape of his neck. He knew she was still looking, and he wouldn't look over himself any more to confirm it. Which only made it worse.

The demands of other customers, the thicker they came, instead of harassing him, were a relief now. The necessary manipulations they brought on gave him something to do, took his mind off that harrowing stare. But the lulls would keep coming back, when there was no one to attend to, nothing that needed polishing, no glass that needed filling, and

it was then that her concentration on him would make itself felt the most. It was then that he didn't know what to do with his hands, or with his bar cloth.

He upset a small chaser of beer as he was knifing it atop the sieve. He punched a wrong key in the cash register.

At last, driven almost beyond endurance, he tackled her again, trying to come to grips with what she was doing to him.

"Is there anything I can do for you, miss?" he said with husky, choked resentment.

She spoke always without putting any clue into her voice. "Have I said there is?"

He leaned heavily on the bar. "Well, is there something you want from me?"

"Have I said I do?"

"Well, pardon me, but do I remind you of someone you know?"

"No one."

He was beginning to flounder. "I thought maybe there was, the way you keep looking at me—" he said unsteadily. It was meant to be a rebuke.

This time she didn't answer at all. Yet neither did her eyes leave him. He finally was the one had to leave them again, withdraw as discomfited as ever.

She didn't smile, she didn't speak, she showed neither contrition nor yet outright hostility. She just sat and looked after him, with the inscrutable gravity of an owl.

It was a terrible weapon she had found and she was using. It does not ordinarily occur to people how utterly unbearable it can be to be looked at steadily over a protracted period of time, say an hour or two or three, simply because it is a thing that never happens to them, their fortitude is not put to the test.

It was happening to him now, and it was slowly unnerving him, fraying him. He was defenseless against it, both because he was confined within the semicircle of the bar, couldn't walk away from it, and also because of its very

nature. Each time he tried to buffet it back, he found that it was just a look, there was nothing there to seize hold of. The control of it rested with her. A beam, a ray, there was no way of warding it off, shunting it aside.

Symptoms that he had never noted in himself before, and would not have recognized by their clinical name of agoraphobia, began to assail him with increasing urgency; a longing to take cover, to seek refuge back within the locker room, even a desire to squat down below the level of the bar top where she could no longer see him readily. He mopped his brow furtively once or twice and fought them off. His eyes began to seek the clock overhead with increasing frequency, the clock that they had once told him a man's life depended on.

He longed to see her go. He began to pray for it. And yet it was obvious by now, had been for a long time past, that she had no intention of going of her own accord, would only go with the closing of the place. For none of the usual reasons that cause people to seek a bar were operating in her case, and therefore there was no reprieve to be expected from any of them. She was not there to wait for anyone, or she would have been met long ago. She was not there to drink, for that same untouched glass still sat just where he had set it hours ago. She was there for one purpose and one alone: to look at him.

Failing to be rid of her in any other way, he began to long for closing time to come, to find his escape through thai. As the customers began to thin out, as the number of counter-attractions about him lessened, her power to bring herself to his notice rose accordingly. Presently there were large gaps around the semicircle fronting him, and that only emphasized the remorseless fixity of that Medusalike countenance all the more.

He dropped a glass, and that was a thing he hadn't done in months. She was shooting him to pieces. He glowered at her and cursed her in soundless lip movement as he stooped to gather up the fragments.

And then finally, when he thought it was never coming any more, the minute hand notched twelve, and it was four o'clock and closing time had arrived. Two men engaged in earnest conversation, the last of all the other customers, rose unbidden and sauntered toward the entrance, without interrupting their flow of amicable, low-voiced talk. Not she. Not a muscle moved. The stagnant drink still sat before her, and she sat on with it. Looking, watching, eyeing, without even a blink.

"Good night, gentlemen," he called out loudly after the other two, so that she would understand.

She didn't move.

He opened the control box and threw a switch. The outer perimeter of lights went out, leaving just an inner glow coming from behind the bar where he was, a hidden sunset creeping up the mirrors and the tiers of bottles ranged against the wall. He became a black silhouette against it, and she a disembodied, faintly luminous face peering in from the surrounding dimness.

He went up to her, took the hours old drink away, and threw it out, with a violent downward fling of the hand that sent drops leaping up.

"We're closing up now." he said in a grating voice.

She moved at last. Suddenly she was on her feet beside the stool, holding it for a moment to give the change of position time to work its way through her circulatory system.

His fingers worked deftly down the buttons of his jacket. He said cholerically, "What was it? What was the game? What was on your mind?"

She moved quietly off through the darkened tavern toward the street entrance without answering, as though she hadn't heard him. He had never dreamed that such a simple causative as the mere sight of a girl quitting a bar, could bring such utter, contrite, prostrate relief welling up in him. His jacket open all down the front, he supported himself there on one hand planted firmly down upon the bar. and

leaned limply, exhaustedly out in the direction in which she had gone.

There was a night light standing at the outer entrance, and she came back into view again when she had reached there. She stopped just short of the doorway, and turned, and looked back at him across the intervening distance, long and solemnly and with purposeful implication. As if to show that the whole thing had been no illusion; more than that, to show that this was not its end, that this was just an interruption.

He turned from keying the door locked, and she was standing there quietly on the sidewalk, only a few yards off. She was turned expectantly facing toward the doorway, as if waiting for him to emerge.

He was forced to go toward her, because it was in that direction his path lay on leaving here of a night. They passed within a foot of one another, for the sidewalk was fairly narrow and she was posted out in the middle of it, not skulking back against the wall. Though her face turned slowly in time with his passing, he saw that she would have let him go by without speaking, and goaded by this silent obstinacy, he spoke himself, although only a second before he had intended ignoring her.

"What is it ye want of me?" he rumbled truculently.

"Have I said I want anything of you?"

He made to go on, then swung around on his heel to face her accusingly. "You sat in there just now, never once took your eyes off me! Never once the livelong night, d'ye hear me?" He pounded one hand within the other for outraged emphasis. "And now I find you outside here waiting around—"

"Is it forbidden to stand here in the street?"

He shook a thick finger at her ponderously. "I'm warning vou, young woman! I'm telling you for your own good—!"

She didn't answer. She didn't open her mouth, and silence is always so victorious in argument. He turned and

shambled off, breathing heavily with his own bafflement.

He didn't look back. Within twenty paces, even without looking back, he had become aware that she was advancing in turn behind him. It was not difficult to do so, for she was apparently making no effort to conceal the fact. The ticking off of her small brittle shoes was clear cut if subdued on the quiet night pavement.

An up and down intersection glided by beneath him like a slightly depressed asphalt stream bed. Then presently another. Then still another. And through it all, as the town slowly veered over from west to east, came that unhurried tick-chick, tick-chick, behind him in the middle distance.

He turned his head, the first time simply to warn her off. She came on with maddening casualness, as though it were three in the afternoon. Her walk was slow, almost stately, as the feminine gait so often is when the figure is held erect and the pace is leisurely.

He went on again briefly, then turned once more. This time his entire body, and flung himself back toward her in a sudden flurry of ungovernable exasperation.

She stopped advancing, but she held her ground, made no slightest retrograde move.

He closed in and bellowed full into her face, "Turn back now, will ve? That's enough of this now, d'ye hear? Turn back, or I'll—"

"I am going this way, too." was all she said.

Again the circumstances were in her favor. Had their roles been reversed— But what man has sufficiently stout armor against ridicule to risk calling a policeman to complain that a solitary young girl is following him along the streets? She was not reviling him, she was not soliciting him, she was simply walking in the same direction he was; he was as helpless against her as he had been in the bar earlier.

He maintained his stance before her for a moment or two, but his defiance was of that face-saving kind that only marks time while it is waiting to extricate itself with the least possible embarrassment from a false situation. He

spun around finally with a snort through his nose, meant to convey belligerence, but that somehow sounded a bit like windy helplessness. He drew away from her, resumed his homeward journeying.

Ten paces, fifteen, twenty. Behind him, as at a given signal, it recommenced again, steady as slow rain in a puddle. Tick-chick, tick-chick, tick-chick. She was coming after him once more.

He rounded the appointed corner, started up the roofed over sidewalk stairway he used every night to reach his train. He halted up above, at the rear of the plank floored station gallery that led through to the tracks, scanning the chutelike incline he had just emerged from for signs of her.

The oncoming tap of her footfalls took on a metallic ring as her feet clicked against the steel rims guarding the steps. In a moment her head came into view above the midway break in the stair line.

A turnstile rumbled around after him, and he turned there on the other side of it, at bay, took up a defensive position.

She cleared the steps and came on, as matter-of-factly, as equably, as though he wasn't to be seen there at all in the gap fronting her. She already held the coin pinched between her fingers. She came on until there was just the width of the turnstile arm between them.

He backed his arm at her, swinging it up all the way past its opposite shoulder, ready to fling it loose. It would have sent her spinning about the enclosure. His lip lifted in a canine snarl. "Get outa here, now. Gawan down below where ye came from!" He reached down and quickly plugged the coin slot with the ball of his thumb just ahead of her own move toward it.

She desisted, shifted over to the adjoining one. Instantly he was there before her again. She shifted back to the original one. He reversed himself once more, again blocked it. The superstructure began to vibrate with the approach of one of the infrequent night trains.

This time he finally flung his arm out in the back sweep he had been threatening at each confrontation. The blow would have been enough to fell her if it had caught her. She turned her head aside with the fastidious little quirk of someone detecting an unpleasant odor. It fanned her face.

Instantly there was a peremptory rapping on glass somewhere close at hand. The station agent thrust head and shoulder out of the sideward door of his dingy little booth. "Cut that out, you. Whaddye trying to do, keep people from using this station? I'll run you in!"

He turned to defend himself, the taboo partially lifted since this intercession wasn't of his own seeking. "This girl's nuts or something, she ought to be sent to Bellevue. She's been follying me along the street, I can't get rid of her."

She said in that same dispassionate voice, "Are you the only one that can ride the Third Avenue El?"

He appealed to the agent once more, who continued to hang slant-wise out of the doorway as a sort of self-appointed arbiter. "Ask her where she's going. She don't know herself!"

Her answer was addressed to the agent, but with an emphasis that could not have been meant for him, that must have had some purpose of its own. "I'm going down to Twenty-Seventh Street, Twenty-Seventh Street between Second and Third Avenues. I have a right to use this station, haven't I?"

The face of the man blocking her way had suddenly grown white, as though the locality she had mentioned conveyed a shock of hidden meaning to him. It should have. It was his own.

She knew ahead of time where he was going. It was useless therefore to attempt to shake her off, outdistance her in any way.