Phantom lady (2 page)

It was uphill work getting started. There were heavy restrictions on her choice of topics, and she had his leaden

mood to combat as well. Manlike, he left most of the effort to her, made very little attempt to keep his own end up. Though he gave a sketchy appearance of listening, his thoughts were obviously elsewhere most of the time. He would bring them back again each time, and with an effort that was almost a physical wrench, only when his abstraction had become so noticeable it threatened to be flagrantly discourteous.

"Don't you want to take your gloves off?" he said at one point. They were black, like everything else about her but the hat. They hadn't appeared awkward with the cocktail or puree, but with the sole came a slice of lemon that she was trying to mash with her fork.

She stripped the right one off immediately. She took a little longer with the left, seemed about to leave it on after all. Then finally, with a touch of defiance, she followed suit with that.

He carefully refrained from seeing the wedding band, looked out and across at something else. But he could tell she knew that he had.

She was a good conversationalist, without being spectacular about it. She was dexterous, too, managed to eschew the obvious, the banal, the dry; the weather, the newspaper headlines, the food they were engaged with.

"This crazy South American, this Mendoza, in the show we're seeing tonight: when I first saw her a year or so ago, she had hardly any accent at all. Now, with every engagement she has up here, she seems to unlearn more English, acquire a heavier one than the time before. One more season and she'll be back in pure Spanish."

He gave one third of a smile. She was cultured, he could tell that about her. Only someone cultured could have gotten away with what she was doing tonight and not made a ghastly mess of it, either in one direction or the other. She had balance, to take the place of either propriety or recklessness. And there again, if she had leaned a little more one way or the other, she would have been more memorable,

more positive. If she had been a little less well-bred, she would have had the piquancy, the raffishness, of the parvenu. If she had been a little more, she would have been brilliant—and therefore memorable in that respect. As it was. polarized between the two, she was little better than two dimensional.

Toward the end, he caught her studying his necktie. He looked down at it questioningly. "Wrong color?" he suggested. It was a solid, without any pattern.

"No, quite good, in itself," she hastened to assure him. "Only, it doesn't match—it's the one thing that doesn't go with everything else you— Sorry, I didn't mean to criticize." she concluded.

He glanced down at it a second time, with a sort of detached curiosity, as though he hadn't known until now, himself, just which one it was he had put on. Almost as though he were surprised to find it on him. He destroyed a little of the tonal clash she had indicated by thrusting the edge of his dress handkerchief down out of sight into his pocket.

He lit their cigarettes, they stayed with their cognacs awhile, and then they left.

It was only in the foyer—at a full-length glass out in the foyer—that she finally put her hat on again. And at once she came alive, she was something, somebody, again. It was wonderful, he reflected, what that hat could do to her. It was like turning on the current in a glass chandelier.

A gigantic theater doorman, fully six-four, opened the cab door for them when it had driven up, and his eyes boggled comically as the hat swept past, almost directly under them. He had white walrus-tusk mustaches, almost looked like a line drawing of a theater-doorman in the New Yorker. His bulging eyes followed it from right to left as its wearer stepped down and brushed past him. Henderson noted this comic bit of optic byplay, to forget it again a moment later. If anything is ever really forgotten.

The completely deserted theater lobby was the best possible

criterion of how late they actually were. Even the ticket taker at the door had deserted his post by now. An anonymous silhouette against the stage glow, presumably an usher, accosted them just inside the door, sighted their tickets by flashlight, then led them down the aisle, trailing an oval of light backhand along the floor to guide their advancing feet.

Their seats were in the first row. Almost too close. The stage was an orange blur for a moment or two, until their eyes had grown used to the foreshortened perspective.

They sat patiently watching the montage of the revue, scene blending into scene with the superimposed effect of motion picture dissolves. She would beam occasionally, even laugh outright now and then. The most he would do was give a strained smile, as though under obligation to do it. The noise, color, and brilliance of lighting reached a crescendo, and then the curtains rippled together, ending the first half.

The house lights came on, and there was a stir all around them as people got up and went outside.

"Care for a smoke?" he asked her.

"Let's stay where we are. We haven't been sitting as long as the rest of them." She drew the collar of her coat closer around the back of her neck. The theater was stifling already, so the purpose of it, he conjectured, was to screen her profile from observation as far as possible.

"Come across some name you've recognized?" she murmured presently, with a smile.

He looked down and found his fingers had been busily turning down the upper right-hand corner of each leaf of his program, one by one, from front to back. They were all blunted now, with neat little turned-back triangles superimposed one on the other. "I always do that, fidgety habit I've had for years. A variation of doodling, I guess you'd call it. I never know I'm doing it, either."

The trap under the stage opened and the orchestra started to file back into the pit for the second half. The trap-

drummer was nearest to them, just across the partition rail. He was a rodentlike individual, who looked as though he hadn't been out in the open air for ten years past. Skin stretched tight over his cheekbones, hair so flattened and glistening it almost looked like a wet bathing cap with a white seam bisecting it. He had a little twig of a mustache that almost seemed like smudge from his nose.

He didn't look outward into the audience at first; busied himself adjusting his chair and tightening something or other on his instrument. Then, set, he turned idly, and almost at once became aware of her and of the hat.

It seemed to do something to him. His vapid, unintelligent face froze into an almost hypnotic fascination. His mouth even opened slightly, like a fish's, stayed that way. He would try to stop staring at her every once in a while, but she was on his mind, he couldn't keep his eyes away very long, they would stray back to her each time.

Henderson took it in for a while, with a sort of detached, humorous curiosity. Then finally, seeing that it was beginning to make her acutely uncomfortable, he put a stop to it in short order, by sending such a sizzling glare at him that he turned back to his music rack forthwith and for good. You could tell, though, even with his head turned the other way, that he was still thinking about her, by the rather conscious, stiff way he held his neck.

"I seem to have made an impression," she chuckled under her breath.

"Perfectly good trap-drummer ruined for the evening," he assented.

The gaps behind them had filled up again now. The house lights dimmed, the foots welled up, and the overture to the second act began. He went ahead moodily pleating the upper corners of his dog-eared program.

Midway through the second half there was a crescendo build-up, then the American house orchestra laid down its instruments. An exotic thumping of tom-toms and rattling of gourds onstage took its place, and the main attraction of

the show. Estela Mendoza, the South American sensation, appeared.

A sharp nudge from his seat mate reached him even before he had had time to make the discovery for himself. He looked at her without understanding, then back to the stage again.

The two women had already become mutually aware of the fatal fact that was still eluding his slower masculine perceptions. A cryptic whisper reached him. "Just look at her face. I'm glad there are footlights between us. She could kill me."

There was a distinct glitter of animosity visible in the expressive black eyes of the figure onstage, over and above her toothsome smile, as they rested on the identical replica of her own headgear, flaunted by his companion there in the very first row where it couldn't be missed.

"Now I understand where they got the inspiration for this particular creation," she murmured ruefully.

"But why get sore about it? I should think she'd be flattered."

"It's no use expecting a man to understand. Steal my jewelry, steal the gold fillings from my teeth, but don't steal my hat. And over and above that, in this particular case it's a distinctive part of her act, part of her trademark. It's probably been pirated, I doubt that she'd give permission to—"

"I suppose it is a form of plagiarism." He watched with slightly heightened interest, if not yet complete self-forget-fulness.

Her art was a simple thing. As real art always is. And as getting away with something at times is. too. She sang in Spanish, but even in that language there was very little intellect to the lyric. Something like this:

"Chica chica boom boom Chica chica boom boom"

Over and over. Meanwhile she kept rolling her eyes from side to side, throwing one hip out of joint at every step she took, and throwing little nosegays out to the women members of the audience from a flat basket she carried slung at her side.

By the time she had run through two choruses of the thing, every woman in the first two or three rows was in possession of one of her floral tokens. With the notable exception of Henderson's companion. "She purposely held out on me, to get even for the hat," she whispered knowingly. And as a matter of fact, every time the hitching, heel-stamping figure on the stage had slowly worked her way past their particular vantage point, there had been an ominous flash, an almost electrical crackling, visible in her fuselike eves as they glided over that particular location.

"Watch me call her on it," she remarked under her breath for his benefit. She clasped her hands together, just below her face, in vise formation.

The hint was patently ignored.

She extended them out before her,, at half arm's length, held them that way in solicitation.

The eyes on the stage slitted for a minute, then resumed their natural contour, strayed elsewhere.

Suddenly there was a distinct snap of the fingers from Henderson's companion. A crackling snap, sharp enough to top the music. The eyes rolled back again, glowered maniacally at the offender. Another flower came out and winged over, but still not to her.

"I never know when I'm beaten," he heard her mutter doggedly. Before he knew what she meant, she had risen to her feet, stood there in her seat, smiling beatifically. passively claiming her due.

For a moment there was a deadlock between the two. But the odds were too unequal. The performer, after all was said and done, was at the mercy of this individualistic spectator, for she had an illusion of sweetness and charm to maintain at all costs in the sight of the rest of the audience.

The alteration in the stature of Henderson's seat mate also had an unforeseen result in another respect. As the hip-hiker slowly made the return trip, the spotlight, obediently following her and slanted low, cut across the head and shoulders of this lone vertical impediment, standing up on the orchestra floor. The result was that the similarity of the two hats was brought explosively to everyone's attention. A centripetal ripple of comment began to spread outward, as when a stone is dropped into heretofore still waters.

The performer capitulated and capitulated fast, to put an end to this odious comparison. Up came a blackmail-extorted flower, out it went over the footlights in a graceful little curve. She covered up the omission by making a rueful little moue, as if to say, "Did I overlook you? Forgive me, I didn't meant to." Behind it, however, could be detected the subcutaneous pallor of a lethal tropical rage.

Henderson's companion had deftly caught the token and subsided into her seat again with a gracious lip movement. Only he detected the wordage that actually emerged, "Thank you—you Latin louse!" He choked on something in his throat.

The worsted performer slowly worked her way off into the wings with little spasmodic hitches, while the music died down like the clatter of train wheels receding into the distance.

In the wings they glimpsed a momentary but highly revealing vignette, while the house was still rocking with applause. A pair of shirt-sleeved masculine arms, most likely the stage manager's, were bodily restraining the performer from rushing back onstage again. Obviously for some purpose over and above merely taking bows. Her hands, held down at her sides by his bear-hug embrace, were visibly clenched into fists and twitching with punitive intent. Then the stage blacked out and another number came on.

At the final curtain, as they rose to go. he tossed his pro-

gram into the discard, onto the seat he had just quitted.

To his surprise she reached down for it, added it to her own, which she was retaining. "Just as a memento," she remarked.

"I didn't think you were sentimental," he said, moving slowly up the choked aisle at her heels.

"Not sentimental, strictly speaking. It's just that—I like to gloat over my own impulsiveness at times, and these things will help."

Impulsiveness? Because she had joined forces with him for the evening, without ever having seen him before, he supposed. He shrugged—inwardly, if not visibly.

As they were fighting their way toward a taxi, in the melee outside the entrance, an odd little mischance occurred. They had already claimed their cab, but before they could get into it, a blind beggar approached, hovered beside her in mute appeal, alms cup all but nudging her. The lighted cigarette she was holding was jarred from her fingers in some way, either by the beggar himself or someone nearby, and fell into the cup. Henderson saw it happen, she didn't. Before he could interfere the trustful unfortunate had thrust probing fingers in after it, and then snatched them back again in pain.