It started to get dark, and as nature’s generator went dead, the town turned on its auxiliary ones and went ahead working on its own juice. A sort of blazing neon moon came up all around that made the real one of six hours or so before seem as if it had been dim and dingy by contrast.
I kept right on standing there where I was while the changeover took place around me. I’d been standing there like that without moving for some little time now, as if I’d taken root on the spot. As if the impulse to keep on going had run down and needed winding up again. Or as though I’d forgotten what had brought me that far. But I hadn’t.
I was right at the edge of the intersection, my toes almost overlapping the curb-lip. Across the way from me, one flange of a street-directional sign spelled out “Lexington Ave.” Abbreviated like that, with no room to take in the whole designation. The second wing, at right-angles, was telescoped by perspective so that it narrowed-down and couldn’t be read.
But I knew which street it was. It was the right one, it was the one I wanted. It had been the street she lived on; now it was going to be the street she died on.
A pedestrian cross-walk sign facing me bloomed a warning red, but only the WALK part of it came on, in palsied letters. The wiring loose. Then DONT showed up beside it after it was nearly time for the whole thing to go off again. But nobody had mistaken it for a go-ahead anyway. They went by the color and not the capitals. (Parenthetically the thought occurred to me: Acolor-blind person could’ve got knocked down right then, in those few seconds.)
Then it made the switch-back to green, and the whole process repeated itself. But I still didn’t go over to the other side.
It wasn’t because I was undecided; if I was undecided, I wouldn’t have come this far. It wasn’t because I was afraid; if I was afraid, I wouldn’t have come at all. It wasn’t because I wanted to back out; if I wanted to back out, all I had to do was turn around and go away.
It isn’t as easy to kill someone as they tell you it is. It isn’t as easy to kill someone as you think.
People were going by in droves, but none of them looked at me. They wouldn’t have believed it if someone had said: See that man standing where you just went past? He’s on his way right now to kill someone, someone who lives down on the next block.
Here’s what they might have said, various ones of them: How can you report it before he’s done it? You have to wait till he does it first, and then report it. You can’t arrest him just for carrying a thought around in his head.
Or: You report it. I have to meet my wife and pick up my car. I’m late now.
Or: Not me. I have an appointment at the beauty-parlor. If I miss it by even ten minutes, they won’t hold it for me, I might have to wait a whole week before I can get one again.
Or: I have my own troubles. I just got a ticket. Why should I cooperate with those guys? It’s their baby, not mine.
If you looked straight up overhead, the buildings made a picket-fence around the sky that only left a little well of it open in the middle. The rest was all converging lines of aluminum lashed together with gleaming zircons. Like railroad-tracks tilted up into the sky, with tiers and tiers and tiers of twinkling ties spanning them, growing smaller, smaller, smaller as they climbed... Until your eyes got tired and dropped off, and you lost them near that end-of-the-line called heaven. That subway-station in the sky.
This was New York, beautiful but cold.
And not for little men and little women and their grudge-matches.
Billowing life all around, and imminent death standing there, still, in the middle of all of it. Elbowed a little bit over this way, edged a little bit over that, nudged a little bit back the first way again. A bus overshot its yellow-stenciled unloading-slot, came a little too far forward, and opened its steaming door right in front of my face. A woman in rubber jack-boots got down heavily sideways, and one of them landed right on the toes of my left foot. I pulled them out from under, and she glared at me for having my toes there right where her foot was going to come down.
I reached to feel for the gun, not to use it but to see if it had become dislodged, the way you touch your hat to straighten it after a slight collision.
It was all right, it hadn’t been disturbed.
The bus paled into an azure silhouette for a moment behind a parting gush of exhaust-fumes and then went on its way. CINZANO stared back from its rear end, in a diagonal, in big block-capitals. Then they contracted into lower-case. Then they contracted into italics. Then into undecipherable molecules. Then the traffic coming behind blotted them out altogether. But the world had read their message.
The deep-freeze or whatever it was that had held me, thawed and dissolved, and I’d broken stance and was starting to go across at last. I almost wouldn’t have noticed it myself, but the ground seemed to be slowly moving backward under me like some sort of conveyor-belt, or a flattened-out escalator-tread going the other way. And now that I’d started, I didn’t stop anymore after that. That had been the last time.
I moved slowly, but I kept moving. Going down the street, just going down the street. Like I had no reason, had no purpose, had no thought in mind. I touched the gun once, it was still there.
It felt heavier than it had in the old days, but I’d been in the hospital meantime and had lost weight. It was Government Issue, I’d brought it back with me from Saigon. You’re supposed to turn them in when you’re separated, but I hadn’t.
I looked up at an ascending angle and recognized the building where I’d used to live. I even saw the windows which had once been mine. I counted up to them, that’s how I knew them, but I didn’t use my finger, I didn’t want anyone to notice me do that. I just counted with my eyes instead.
I didn’t see the man on door-duty outside, when I turned and went in. Then when I entered, he was in there but he didn’t see me. He had his back to me, he was on the house-phone and he was talking to someone in the building, and he seemed very engrossed. More than engrossed, he seemed very excited. Or they were, which amounted to the same. “Now take it easy,” I heard him say. “Now pull yourself together and try to talk more slowly so I can understand you.”
I went around the turn to the elevator-bank, off-side to the front entrance, and pushed for the car. It came gliding down silent as a pin-drop, all glossy chrome and all empty. I got in and pushed the six-button and it closed and started to take me up.
It had been so easy to get in here unobserved, I almost couldn’t believe it. I’d never been able to pass him like that in the old days when I’d still lived here. But maybe it wasn’t the same guy, I hadn’t seen his face, and they all looked alike in the uniform.
The minute I got out, somebody unseen called it away from me, and it went on further up somewhere else, so it didn’t even leave a trace of which floor I was on.
And then I came to the door, the door that had been our door, but wasn’t anymore.
I remembered how many times I’d come to it before, cold from being outside, overheated from being outside, tired from being outside. Now I was bringing a gun to shoot and kill with, in from being outside.
Once we’d hung a Christmas-wreath on it.
I remembered the last time, how it had slammed. And I’d thought of a line from a song I used to know: “And as the door of love between us closes—”
I got out the key I’d still kept, and opened it, and went in.
I saw the chairs I knew, the lamps I knew, the windows, the walls, the doors I knew. That same water-color in its same white-leather frame, of a Montmartre street-scene signed by someone named either Cobelle or Cubelle (I’d never been able to make sure) was still on the wall up there. A book on the table said: Tom Jones. We’d had that one then. A record on the player said: Once Upon a Time, Never Comes Again. We hadn’t had that one then.
She must have just come in. Her coat was over a chair-seat dribbling downward to the floor. A glass with half a highball in it that she was coming back to in a minute was on a stand beside the chair. She’d never drunk before. Not by herself I mean. At parties, out with friends. Maybe she had something now to drink by herself about.
I knew she was in the bedroom, must be, although I couldn’t hear her making any sound.
I called her name, not loudly, routinely as though we both still lived there in those rooms together, and she came in to me.
She wasn’t frightened. She was surprised but she wasn’t frightened. She must have been changing her clothes: to rest, to be more comfortable, maybe to get ready for a bath. When she came in she had on just a light-blue corduroy wrap-around over her foundation pieces.
I saw her pull it more closely closed across her when she looked at me. It couldn’t have been modesty. We’d been married. It must have been apprehension. Must have been apprehension; she sensed.
“What’d you come back for?” she said. “You said you never were, you never would.”
“For this,” I said. I took out the gun. “I came back for this.”
She stared at it with an odd look of fascination, as though she’d never seen one before. I knew that wasn’t it, I knew that was a misreading. It was fear, but it looked like hypnotic fascination.
“Will that,” she asked me vaguely, the pupils of her eyes a thousand miles away, on the gun, “undo anything that’s been done? Will that rub out the past?”
“It’ll rub out the future,” I said, “and that’s even better.”
“There is no future,” she said. “It doesn’t need a gun to tell us both that.”
“No, but it says it awful well.”
“You’re like all men,” she said. “Like they always have been. Like they always will be. Kill, when you’re hurt. Kill. Hurt someone else when you’re hurt. Two hurts are better than one. Two hurts hurt more than one hurt.”
She crossed her arms in front of her breast (with an odd suggestion of chastity, I don’t know where I got it from) and lowered her head, waiting.
“Go ahead, kill,” she said.
“Look at me then. Look up at me. I want to see your eyes.”
She lifted her face. “Here are my eyes,” she said.
“Traitor’s eyes,” I hissed, “that looked at someone else. Softened then closed, for someone else.”
“Time never ended, you never came back. Then he came. You told me he would, you wrote me to look for him. He came from Saigon, and brought me love from you. He brought me messages. He brought me little snapshots, of a grubby face, unshaven beard, unkempt fatigues, that Filled my heart with heaven and filled my eyes with tears. You’d eaten together side by side, drunk together side by side, fought together side by side and almost died together side by side. It was the closest I could get to you. It was as much of you as I could have or hope for. He was your proxy. The kiss was still your kiss, though it came from someone else. The hug was still your hug, though it came from someone else. The possession was still your possession, though it came from someone else. How can you explain these things? I was faithful to you, to only you and only you, through someone else’s body.
“It wasn’t not-enough love for you that betrayed me, it was too much love for you. That one night, the only night there ever was, ask him, ask him if you ever see him again, ask him whose name he heard me whisper in the night.”
“Another man’s son,” I said bitterly. “Not mine, but another man’s. Out of my wife’s body, but another man’s. Another! Another! Another man’s!
“I wanted to dangle him on my knee when he was five. I wanted to play baseball with him when he was fifteen. I wanted to stand beside him and drink with him when he was twenty-five and married his girl.
“Gone now, all that gone now. Another man’s eyes, looking out at me from his little-boy’s face. Another man’s hand, holding mine when he trots along beside me. Another man’s tears, when he falls and barks his knee. Another man’s blood, peering through the scrape.
“And when I die, and find out all the answers that I missed along the way, another man’s son will stand by the grave with his head bowed down. Another man’s, not my own.”
My voice cracked, forlornly.
“Thief. Give me back the son you gypped me out of. You robbed me of my little hunk of eternity. It’s like dying twice and dying for good, when you die without leaving a son.”
She kept looking at me, like I’d told her to. She kept letting me see her eyes, like I’d told her to. Her eyelids flickered, though; they kept wanting to blink, and her eyes to shrink away from me. She wasn’t brave. Her skin was whiter than the paper you write on. But, here are my eyes, she’d said. She kept letting me see them. She kept holding them as steady as she could. So she was brave, after all.
“I walked up the aisle with you,” I remembered in a revery. “Away from the altar and away from the priest in his lace surplice. Your wedding-veil folded back clear of your face. The marriage-kiss from me still freshly pledged on your cheek, orange-blossoms, lilies-of-the-valley spraying in your arms.”
A sob that I hadn’t known was there blurted in my throat.
“No, I can’t kill you, I can’t shoot to kill you. No matter what you’ve done to me, you were the girl in my marriage-bed.”
I looked down at the outpointed gun as my mind told my fingers to lower it, but my heart already had, and it was down.
“When we first opened our eyes and looked at each other. The self-consciousness, the concern. That first searchingly shy look. (Did I do everything right? Was I the man for her?)”
She supplemented: “(Was he disappointed in me? I wasn’t too scared, I wasn’t too dainty?)”
“I wanted you to go to the bathroom first, you wanted me to go first. In the end we compromised. Neither of us went. Neither of us spoke, because neither of us knew what way to put it in.
“I went down to a public pay-place in the lobby, when I ‘stepped out a minute to get cigarettes.’ Where you went, I don’t know—
“Then the coffee came we’d asked them to send up. Remember that first coffee together, looking at each other over the tops of our cups? Couldn’t even take our eyes off long enough to swallow. Everything was so new, so first, so just-starting. Everything was ahead, nothing behind. Even the sun didn’t cast us any shadows in back when we walked.
“Children, making believe they’re grown-ups. Grown-ups, acting like the children they are and always will be. Children of God. Poor us.”
I swung from the shoulder and flung the gun with all the force that I had in me, against the wall over to the side and back of me. It struck with such violence the impact alone should have been enough to detonate it. I don’t know why it didn’t. The guard must have still been on. It fell down there in the corner, black and bulky and boding ill, its ugly intention inhibited.
She walked slowly and spent toward a small table there was against the wall, and first leaned over it pressing her hands down on it as though she weighed more than she could hold up. Then sank down upon a chair beside it and let her head roll on the table and clutched her arms around it.
She didn’t make much sound. Only the shaking told what it was. But how she shook. As if every hope and every happiness were coming loose.
I looked at her. What was there to say? What do you say, what can you say?
“Cry,” I said with sad accord. “Cry for you, for me, for the two of us.”
“Cry,” she agreed in a smothered voice, “for the whole world, and everyone that’s in it.”
“Cry and good-bye.” I turned slowly and went to the door. There wasn’t hate in my heart anymore, there wasn’t wanting to get even, there wasn’t will to kill.
“Good-bye,” she echoed faintly after me. And she said my name, and put that with it. My private name, my given name, my first name. Never mind what it was. It was still her right to use it, only she and no one else.
I opened the door with a strange sort of care, as when you don’t want to disturb someone, and let myself out. Then I closed it and looked at it from there.
Once I’d said, this is the door that love has come away from. Once I’d said, just a little while ago, this is the door I’m bringing death into. Now death had been there and had come away again without striking. A door that doesn’t hold love, and doesn’t hold death either. Oh what an aching empty barren place lies behind there.
The elevator was somewhere else, so I went down the safety-stairs. It was quicker than waiting for it to come. Down and around, then down and around again, five times, from the sixth floor down, at a jogging trot that sounded a little bit like a tap-dancer’s time-step, because the steps had steel rims that clicked under me. Then gave the springed end-door at the bottom a sweep aside that opened up the lobby. And as it did so, there was a sudden flare-up of excitement. It had been there all the while but the soundproof door had kept it muffled.
Outside the building-entrance were two, not one but two, police patrol-cars, sometimes called Mickey Mouses in the vernacular, their red roof-reflectors swinging away and spattering all the walls opposite with blood — or red paint or mercurochrome, as your fancy sees and calls it. A cop was posted just inside the street-door, obviously to keep anyone from leaving the building. He’d already kept two people, a man and a woman; I could tell that by the way they were standing awkwardly to one side. Whether they were together or not I couldn’t make out. There was a second cop acting as a sort of liaison between the lobby and the cars outside, going back and forth all the time. In the lobby were several more nonuniformed men who were very much of the police, it stood out all over them. The doorman, on the house-phone, was saying to someone: “Keep your door locked, please. Don’t open it.” Then he was saying it to someone else. Then to still a third.
They pounced as soon as I appeared, one of them on each side of me like magic. I never knew people could move so fast. I couldn’t use my arms anymore, before I’d even felt anything.
“Where’d you just come from? Identify yourself.”
“From 6-B. I was up there to see someone.”
“How’d you happen to use the stairs?”
“Thought I’d save time. I didn’t know there was an ordinance against it.”
I started skittishly. One of them had had his hands going up and down me without my being aware of it until it was over.
They interrupted the doorman’s relay of warning calls to ask: “He live in the house?”
“No, I never saw him before.”
He hadn’t, and I hadn’t either.
“What’s it about? I asked, not indignant — because you don’t get indignant when they mean business like they did, not if you’re sensible — as much as uncomprehending. And let’s say, resolutely clear both of eye and inner knowledge and determined to show it. “What’s up?”
They didn’t answer. The attitude: You don’t ask us questions. We do it.
When I turned to the doorman in an unvoiced repetition, he didn’t, either. Apparently unsure he had their approval and not wanting to risk disfavor.
But the man over by the door whom I have said it was my impression was being kept in on a stand-by basis, being a civilian answered as one civilian sometimes will to another, police or no police. And notably when they’re being inconvenienced.
“There’s been an armed hold-up, and the man’s still at large somewhere upstairs, he never got out. They’re combing the building for him floor by floor.”
They gave him a curt look of aside (spelling: never mind talking so much) but nothing was said I noticed to contradict him. So the story stood up.
They took me back up to where I’d just come from, using the car this time.
They rang the bell, and waited, and there wasn’t any answer, no one came.
“6-B’d, you say?” they asked, beetling their brows at me in menacing distrust.
“6-B’s what I said,” I said.
They rang again.
My God, I thought, suddenly cold and constricted at the throat, I left my gun in there. I never took it out with me again. I remember now.
One of them had his hand up pummeling now — the hand that wasn’t holding my arm in a twist. And nobody answered.
“Police Department,” they kept saying, taking turns at it. And still nobody answered.
Finally they sent a call down for the building-superintendent; he came up in response and he opened it up with his master pass-key.
She’d gone back again to where I’d last seen her (I say back again for she must have got up from there in the meantime, in-between, and then gone back again; she’d have had to, there was no other way about it, no other explanation). She was lying just as before, only not shaking, not crying now. Through with crying. Her head down on the little table against the wall, one arm curved around it. The other though was hanging straight down now toward the floor, inert. Like a pendulum that has stopped.
And the gun, as if a feat of magic levitation had been performed, or as if it had been jerked by a wire suspended from a pulley, had leaped clear across the room, in a straight diagonal from the comer into which I’d thrown it over to the side she was on, and lay under her dangling hand. Not right under, out a few inches.
All that was said was: “No wonder you took the stairs coming down.”
There might be her fingerprints on the gun now where mine had been before, but they wouldn’t matter much. (Fingerprints can be manipulated by somebody else after the fingers’ owner is already dead; they knew that, and I did, too.) Erasing them of all importance was the fact it was my gun, and I had been in there with it.
What strange turns life takes, I thought, gazing down hypnotized into the gloomy pool of my own future. I came here to kill her, I changed my mind, and now they’ve nailed me for it anyway. As though it were the intention that counted, and not the act. The thought leading up to the deed, and not the deed itself.
And maybe it does. Who can say? Maybe it does.