Into The Night (7 page)

"I can show it to you when we go back.

"Every time I go to the closet to get something out I see it, and I don't like to. It does something to me. One night I even dreamed about it. It came out of the closet by itself."

"I'll take it off your hands," Madeline said, lost in thought.

That evening she sat down at the little table-desk in her hotel room. It was a desk, really, only by grace of two shallow drawers holding hotel stationery, telegram blanks, a pad of printed laundry lists, and a large sheet of green blotting paper that covered its entire surface. She placed her handbag on top of this and opened it. She took out the revolver that Charlotte had turned over to her with unfeigned relief a little while ago, and examined it curiously.

She didn't know anything about revolvers, only that they could kill (and who should know that better than she?). She couldn't identify the caliber of this one, other than that it was fairly small. The typical kind that a woman or girl would buy and carry. But small or not, it could take away life. It was nickel-plated, at least she supposed the gleaming silvery finish to be nickel plating, and its grip was either bone or ivory, which of the two she wasn't sure.

She put it down to one side on the blotting-paper surface and left it there for the moment. She unzipped one of the inner compartments of her handbag and took out a small, inexpensive pocket notebook, the kind that can be bought at any five-anddime or stationery store. Its two-by-four pages bore ruled blue lines across them, as further indication of its low cost. On the cover was stamped, with unintentional irony, the single word "Memo."

But inside there was almost nothing written yet, only one brief phrase:

    1. To get even with a woman.

She took a metal pencil with an ink cylinder in it from the handbag and ejected the point with a little click. Then she held it poised, but didn't write (as if once she wrote, what she wrote would be irrevocable, and she would be held fast to it). She thought of that line in the -Rubaiyat- that goes: "The moving finger writes, and, having writ, moves on/Nor all your piety and wit/Shall lure it back to cancel half a line/Nor all your tears wash out a word of it."

She looked at the gun, she looked at the pencil, she looked at the page between the two of them that was still blank but for the single phrase. It was a little like signing a death warrant.

She sat there for long moments, motionless. So still the ticking of her little traveling clock on the bureau could be plainly heard in the hush of her heart and her mind, the debating hush.

Once she wrote, she must obey it, follow it through to the end, for she was that way, and nothing could make her other than what she was.

Suddenly the pencil dipped to the paper, and the numeral "2" came out.

    1. To get even with a woman.

    2.

She stopped it again. She clasped her two hands, the pencil still caught between their multiple fingers, and brought them up before her mouth and held them there like that, pressed against her lips as if she were whispering to them.

The medicine I take to cure my illness is the illness itself repeated a second time, she thought. But have I the right to do this? -She- had hate for him, I have none. How can I have, I don't even know him. Have never even seen him.

-I promised her. I pledged it to her. You cannot break faith with the dead, or they will arise to accuse you-.

Suddenly the pencil struck the paper, rippled along in a quick, staccato line, rolled free and unfingered two or three times over. It was done.

    1. To get even with a woman.

    2. To kill a man.

Madeline first saw her one night at a place called the Intime. She was the singer there. She had a small combo of three backing her up, piano, traps, and bass. She was the singer there, and she was good.

"Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h,

There's a lull in my life,

Since you have gone away

There is no night, there is no day..."

There was a sort of narrow platform or balcony running along one side of the room just a little above head level, and she was on it, hands on railing, looking down on the listeners. A pencil spotlight from the other side of the room measured off her face with the exactitude of a white mask, leaving not a sixteenth of an inch of light over, leaving her throat and shoulders and arms and dress in smoky brown dusk.

Singing of love, of love lost. There was that utter velvet hush that means complete command of the listeners.

Couples side by side, holding hands, heads nestled on shoulders, believing it, drinking it in, living it. No one in the place was too much over thirty. It was for the young. The operator had had a good idea there, and Madeline caught on at once what it must have been.

People with a lot of money to spend on their night life go to one of the big flashy clubs with their dance floors, chorus lines, and twenty-piece bands. People with no money to spend on their night life go to the bar on the corner and watch TV with their neighborhood friends around them. But there is an in-between group that doesn't fall into either category. The young engaged couples and the young married pairs, still wrapped in rosy mists of love, still believing in it, still wanting to hear it sung. This place was for them and the buck or two they had to spend; Madeline could see them all around her, stars in their eyes, cheek pressed to cheek, dreaming their dreams. They'd come back again and they'd bring their friends, others of their own kind: the youngand-in-love. Mr. Operator had a built-in patronage. Young Mr. and Mrs. Tomorrow. Yes, he had a good gimmick there.

Throughout the song and the two or three that followed, she kept thinking, But this isn't enough. How do I get to know her? Get to really know her? Send her a fan note, saying I admire her, want to meet her? That's only good for a smile, a handshake, a few polite phrases, and then I'm expected to be on my way again. When men wanted to meet a performer, they became stage-door J ohnnies. That's what I'll do, she decided. Become something on that order, but with a slightly different purpose in mind. I'll become a stage-door Jenny.

She waited just long enough to gauge the applause. It wasn't thunderous, it wasn't crashing, it wasn't that kind of place. But it was warm and friendly, like soft summer rain belting a tin shed. They liked her, which is always half the battle.

From the outside the place was so inconspicuous you could easily have missed it. There was no canopy, no doorman, no conveyor belt of arriving or departing taxis. There was a very modest neon in handwriting script that spelled "Intime" over the door, and to one side a sandwich board on an easel that simply said "Adelaide Nelson, song-stylist," and had her photograph on it and the name of the combo, "The Partners Three."

After a few minutes of standing about uncertainly in front of the place, she got a cab by forfeit, so to speak. One drove up, unloaded, and she got in and sat down before the seat was even cool.

The driver finally glanced around inquiringly, after waiting for her to give the destination of her own accord.

"I'm waiting for someone to come out," she told him, "so just stand awhile. Do you see that vacant slot up past the car just ahead of us? See if you can slide in there; that'll leave the entrance clear."

He did so, with a dexterity and sleekness only a professional cabman could have shown. That took her out of the direct line of Adelaide Nelson's vision when she would come out. She tested for range of visibility on several people who came out ahead, and found she could see them perfectly at that distance by looking through the rear window with a half turn of her head.

The driver smoked and toted up his logbook.

She just sat watching and waiting.

"Turn out the light," she said suddenly.

Adelaide Nelson had a fur scarf slanted carelessly over one shoulder, and no hat. Madeline got a perfect look at her. She had the same wait Madeline had had. At one point she even started up toward the cab Madeline was in, although its dome light was plainly off. Madeline cowered back into a corner. Before the woman could reach Madeline's cab, another one came gliding by, and she hailed and stepped into that instead.

Madeline said, "See that cab that woman just got into right in back of us? Just follow that the rest of the way from here."

"One of those things," he said noncommittally.

"You don't have to crowd it, but don't lose it either."

He was one of those rhythm drivers. He'd learned to time himself and space himself so that he took each light just before it changed, didn't have to stop once.

The lead cab got blocked off by a transverse bus at one crossing and lost the light, so he had to let himself lose it too and stay back in company with it. After that, the beat was lost and neither one of them got across a single light without stopping. But they both stayed together on the same block each time.

The pilot cab finally stopped, Adelaide Nelson got out, transacted her fare, and went inside a building under a long dark green sidewalk canopy.

"What's the number on that?" Madeline asked, peering closely at it.

"Two-twenty."

She'd already made it out for herself by that time.

"All right, now you can keep going." She gave him her own address.

"That was it?" he asked blankly.

"That was it."

She knew more was coming. It did.

"She take your fellow away from you, is that the angle?"

"I don't have any fellow to take. And if I did, and he took that easy, she could keep him."

The papier-mâché briefcase she'd bought in Woolworth's. The musical score sheets she'd bought at a music store. The notes on the score sheets were her own. Poor things but her own, she'd reflected as she set them down, and that wasn't kidding.

She knew piano, in a very circumscribed, lesson-a-week-at-theage-of-twelve sort of way. And she could hum, who can't? And she knew that in a lyric the end word on every second line has to rhyme with the end word two lines before, but the in-between lines don't have to. Which is about as far as some songs go, anyway. But she wasn't interested in salability, just plausibility. Getting to know a woman.

The door opened, and they were close to each other for the first time.

At such point-blank range, Adelaide's makeup was a caricature. But it wasn't individual personal makeup, it was performing makeup, Madeline realized, so that had to be allowed for. A pair of artificial eyelashes, superimposed on her own with no regard for nature, stuck out all around her eyes like rays in a charcoal drawing of the sun. A bouquet in which alcohol and floral essence strove for mastery was distinguishable for several yards around on all sides of her. Her hair was frizzy to the point of kinkiness, and the color of ginger. Combing it must have been like trying to comb a bramble bush. She had a pair of untrue blue eyes, which probably deepened almost to green when she hated. She probably hated a lot. She had on some sort of a hip-length quilted coat and a pair of quarter-thigh-length shorts, both white. Her feet were bare, and her toenails, Madeline noted, were painted gold.

There was something defiant about her as she stood there; not specifically toward Madeline, toward the world in general. Don't touch me or I'll claw you; an air like that.

"You the one?" she said. "I thought you were a man, the way the note read."

"I thought I stood a better chance that way," Madeline admitted.

"You did," Adelaide told her bluntly. "Come on in anyway," she added gruffly, "and let's see what your stuff is like."

She flung herself backward into a chair, but from the side, so that one leg caught over its arm and remained that way, cocked out at an angle from her body. She began to riff through the score sheets. She did remarkable things with a mouthful of smoke; protruded her underlip and sent it up in a jet so perpendicular that it actually stirred her hair a little where it overhung her forehead on that side.

"Not bad for a title," she remarked, and repeated it aloud. "Have a Heart (Take Mine)."

She got up and went over to the piano. Leaning over it standing up, she took one finger and started to tap out the notes on the keyboard. She shook her head dizzily, as if to clear it of the disharmony, and started over again. Shook her head again and stopped.

"What've you got here?" she growled. "This stuff doesn't even jell."

A sudden thought occurred to her. "Maybe I'm holding it upside down," she remarked, and reversed it on the music rack. Then she turned it back again. "No, the clef signs are all pointing this way."

She gave Madeline a long, skeptical stare. "Didja ever study composition?" she demanded.

"Not exactly," Madeline said disclaimingly. "All my friends say it comes naturally to me."

"Oh, it does?" Adelaide snapped. "Well, take my tip and send it right straight back again. I don't know what it is you're getting, but it sure isn't music. I think it's the Morse code in Slovakian."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean you don't know the least thing about music," Adelaide snapped. "You think all you have to do is throw a handful of notes on the page and they come out a song. That's not the way it works, any more than you can throw paint on a canvas and get the 'Mona Lisa.'"

"I worked hard on that song," Madeline protested.

"Oh, yeah? The way it looks to me, you don't know what hard work is. I knew a man once who was a physics teacher. He said there's a formula for work. I said sure, two parts elbow grease and one part sweat. But he told me the formula and it stuck. You know what it is?"

Madeline waited.

"Force times distance. In other words, it's not just how hard you push something. It's also how far you move it. If you push with all your strength against a wall, and it doesn't move an inch, you haven't performed any work. And this"--she brandished the score sheets--"this doesn't move anything. It certainly doesn't move me."

"I don't understand," Madeline said. "When you talk about walls--"

"You're beating your head against one," Adelaide said briskly, "if you expect to get anywhere with this. And you're wasting my time."