A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

New York Blues

It’s six o’clock; my drink is at the three-quarter mark — three-quarters down, not three-quarters up — and the night begins.

Across the way from me sits a little transistor radio, up on end, simmering away like a teakettle on a stove. It’s been going steadily ever since I first came in here, two days, three nights ago; it chisels away the stony silence, takes the edge off the being alone. It came with the room, not with me.

Now there’s a punctuation of three lush chords, and it goes into a traffic report. “Good evening. The New York Municipal Communications Service presents the 6:00 p.m. Traffic Advisory. Traffic through the Holland and Lincoln tunnels and over the George Washington Bridge, heavy westbound, light eastbound. Traffic on the crosscut between the George Washington and Queens-Whitestone bridges, heavy in both directions. Traffic through the Battery Tunnel, heavy outbound, very light inbound. Traffic on the West Side Highway, bumper to bumper all the way. Radar units in operation there. Traffic over the Long Island Expressway is beginning to build, due to tonight’s game at Shea Stadium. West 70th Street between Amsterdam and West End avenues is closed due to a water-main break. A power failure on the East Side I.R.T. line between Grand Central and 125th Street is causing delays of up to forty-five minutes. Otherwise all subways and buses, the Staten Island Ferry, the Jersey Central, the Delaware and Lackawanna, and the Pennsylvania railroads, and all other commuter services, are operating normally. At the three airports, planes are arriving and departing on time. The next regularly scheduled traffic advisory will be given one-half hour from now—”

The big weekend rush is on. The big city emptying itself out at once. Just a skeleton crew left to keep it going until Monday morning. Everybody getting out — everybody but me, everybody but those who are coming here for me tonight. We’re going to have the whole damned town to ourselves.

I go over to the window and open up a crevice between two of the tightly flattened slats in one of the blinds, and a little parallelogram of a New York street scene, Murray Hill section, six-o’clock-evening hour, springs into view. Up in the sky the upper-echelon light tiers of the Pan Am Building are undulating and rippling in the humidity and carbon monoxide (“Air pollution index: normal, twelve percent; emergency level, fifty percent”).

Down below, on the sidewalk, the glowing green blob of a street light, swollen to pumpkin size by foreshortened perspective, thrusts upward toward my window. And along the little slot that the parted slats make, lights keep passing along, like strung-up, shining, red and white beads. All going just one way, right to left, because 37th Street is westbound, and all going by twos, always by twos, headlights and tails, heads and tails, in a welter of slowed-down traffic and a paroxysm of vituperative horns. And directly under me I hear a taxi driver and would-be fares having an argument, the voices clearly audible, the participants unseen.

“But it’s only to Fifty-ninth Street—”

“I don’t ca-a-are, lady. Look, I already tolje. I’m not goin’ up that way. Can’tje get it into your head?”

“Don’t let’s argue with him. Get inside. He can’t put you out.”

“No, but I can refuse to move. Lady, if your husband gets in here, he’s gonna sit still in one place, ’cause I ain’t budgin’.”

New York. The world’s most dramatic city. Like a permanent short circuit, sputtering and sparking up into the night sky all night long. No place like it for living. And probably no place like it for dying.

I take away the little tire jack my fingers have made, and the slats snap together again.

The first sign that the meal I phoned down for is approaching is the minor-key creak from a sharply swerved castor as the room-service waiter rounds a turn outside my door. I’m posted behind a high-backed wing chair, with my wrists crossed over the top of it and my hands dangling like loose claws, staring a little tensely at the door. Then there’s the waiter’s characteristically deferential knock. But I say “Who is it?” anyway, before I go over to open it.

He’s an elderly man. He’s been up here twice before, and by now I know the way he sounds.

“Room service,” comes through in that high-pitched voice his old age has given him.

I release the double lock, then I turn the knob and open the door.

He wheels the little white-clothed dinner cart forward into the room, and as the hall perspective clears behind him I get a blurred glimpse of a figure in motion, just passing from view, then gone, too quickly to be brought into focus.

I stand there a moment, holding the door to a narrow slit, watching the hall. But it’s empty now.

There’s an innocuous explanation for everything. Everything is a coin that has two sides to it, and one side is innocuous but the other can be ominous. The hall makes a right-angle turn opposite my door, and to get to the elevators, those whose rooms are back of this turn have to pass the little setback that leads to my door.

On the other hand, if someone wanted to pinpoint me, to verify which room I was in, by sighting my face as I opened the door for the waiter, he would do just that: stand there an instant, then quickly step aside out of my line of vision. The optical snapshot I’d had was not of a figure in continuous motion going past my point of view, but of a figure that had first been static and then had flitted from sight.

And if it’s that, now they know which room I’m in. Which room on which floor in which hotel.

“Did you notice anyone out there in the hall just now when you came along?” I ask. I try to sound casual, which only makes me not sound casual.

He answers with a question of his own. “Was there somebody out in the hall, sir?”

“That’s what I asked you, did you see anyone?”

He explains that years of experience in trundling these food-laden carts across the halls have taught him never to look up, never to take his eyes off them, because an unexpected bump on the floor under the carpet might splash ice water out of the glass and wet the tablecloth or spill consommé into its saucer.

It sounds plausible enough. And whether it is or not, I know it’s all I’m going to get.

I sign the check for the meal, add the tip, and tell him to put it on the bill. Then just as he turns to leave I remember something I want to do.

“Just a second; that reminds me.” I shoot one of my cuffs forward and twist something out of it. Then the other one. And I hold out my hand to him with the two star-sapphire cuff links he admired so much last night. (Innocently, I’m sure, with no venal intent.)

He says I’m not serious, I must be joking. He says he can’t take anything like that. He says all the things he’s expected to say, and I override them. Then, when he can’t come up with anything else, he comes up with, half-hopefully (hopeful for a yes answer): “You tired of them?”

“No,” I say quite simply, “no — they’re tired of me.”

He thanks me over and thanks me under and thanks me over again, and then he’s gone, and I’m glad he’s gone.

Poor old man, wasting his life bringing people their meals up to their rooms for thirty-five, forty-odd years. He’ll die in peace, though. Not in terror and in throes of resistance. I almost envy him.

I turn my head a little. The radio’s caroling “Tonight,” velvety smooth and young and filled with plaintive desire. Maria’s song from West Side Story. I remember one beautiful night long ago at the Winter Garden, with a beautiful someone beside me. I tilt my nose and breathe in, and I can still smell her perfume, the ghost of her perfume from long ago. But where is she now, where did she go, and what did I do with her?

Our paths ran along so close together they were almost like one, the one they were eventually going to be. Then fear came along, fear entered into it somehow, and split them wide apart.

Fear bred anxiety to justify. Anxiety to justify bred anger. The phone calls that wouldn’t be answered, the door rings that wouldn’t be opened. Anger bred sudden calamity.

Now there aren’t two paths anymore; there’s only one, only mine. Running downhill into the ground, running downhill into its doom.

Tonight, tonight — there will be no morning star — Right, kid, there won’t. Not for me, anyway.

There’s a tap at the door, made with the tip of a key, not the tip of a finger. The voice doesn’t wait, but comes right through before the signal has a chance to freeze me stiff. A woman’s voice, soft-spoken, reassuring. “Night maid.”

I wait a second to let a little of the white drain from my face before she sees me, and then I go over and let her in.

Her name is Ginny. She told me last night. I asked her, that’s why she told me. I wanted to hear the sound of somebody’s name, that’s why I asked her. I was frightened and lonely, that’s why I wanted to hear the sound of somebody’s name.

On her face the beauty of two races blends, each contributing its individual hallmark. The golden-warm skin, the deep glowing eyes, the narrow-tipped nose, the economical underlip.

While she’s turning back the bedcovers in a neat triangle over one corner, I remark, “I notice you go around the outside of the room to get to the bed, instead of cutting across the middle, which would be much shorter. Why do you?”

She answers plausibly, “People are often watching their television sets at this time, when I come in, and I don’t want to block them off.”

I point out, “But mine isn’t on, Ginny.”

I see how the pupils of her eyes try to flee, to get as far away from looking at me as possible, all the way over into their outside corners. And that gives it away. She’s afraid of me. The rumors have already reached her. A hotel is like a beehive when it comes to gossip. He never leaves his room, has all his meals sent up to him, and keeps his door locked all the time.

“I want to give you something,” I say to her. “For that little girl of yours you were telling me about.”

I take a hundred-dollar bill out of the wallet on my hip. I fold the bill a few times so that the corner numerals disappear, then thrust it between two of her fingers.

She sees the “1” first as the bill slowly uncoils. Her face is politely appreciative.

She sees the first zero next — that makes it a ten. Her face is delighted, more than grateful.

She sees the last zero. Suddenly her face is fearful, stunned into stone; in her eyes I can see steel filings of mistrust glittering. Her wrist flexes to shove the bill back to me, but I ward it off with my hand upended.

I catch the swift side glance she darts at the fifth of rye on the side table.

“No, it didn’t come out of that. It’s just an impulse — came out of my heart, I suppose you could say. Either take it or don’t take it, but don’t spoil it.”

“But why? What for?”

“Does there have to be a reason for everything? Sometimes there isn’t.”

“I’ll buy her a new coat,” she says huskily. “A new pink coat like little girls all seem to want. With a little baby muff of lamb’s wool to go with it. And I’ll say a prayer for you when I take her to church with me next Sunday.”

It won’t work, but — “Make it a good one.”

The last part is all she hears.

Something occurs to me. “You won’t have to do any explaining to her father, will you?”

“She has no father,” she says quite simply. “She’s never had. There’s only me and her, sir.”

Somehow I can tell by the quick chip-chop of her feet away from my door that it’s not lost time she’s trying to make up; it’s the tears starting in her eyes that she wants to hide.

I slosh a little rye into a glass — a fresh glass, not the one before; they get rancid from your downbreaths that cling like a stale mist around the inner rim. But it’s no help; I know that by now, and I’ve been dousing myself in it for three days. It just doesn’t take hold. I think fear neutralizes alcohol, weakens its anesthetic power. It’s good for small fears; your boss, your wife, your bills, your dentist; all right then to take a drink. But for big ones it doesn’t do any good. Like water on blazing gasoline, it will only quicken and compound it. It takes sand, in the literal and the slang sense, to smother the bonfire that is fear. And if you’re out of sand, then you must burn up.

I have it out now, paying it off between my fingers like a rosary of murder. Those same fingers that did it to her. For three days now I’ve taken it out at intervals, looked at it, then hidden it away again. Each time wondering if it really happened, hoping that it didn’t, dreading that it did.

It’s a woman’s scarf; that much I know about it. And that’s about all. But whose? Hers? And how did I come by it? How did it get into the side pocket of my jacket, dangling on the outside, when I came in here early Wednesday morning in some sort of traumatic daze, looking for room walls to hide inside of as if they were a folding screen. (I didn’t even know I had it there; the bellboy who was checking me in spotted it on the way up in the elevator, grinned, and said something about a “heavy date.”)

It’s flimsy stuff, but it has a great tensile strength when pulled against its grain. The strength of the garotte. It’s tinted in pastel colors that blend, graduate, into one another, all except one. It goes from a flamingo pink to a peach tone and then to a still paler flesh tint — and then suddenly an angry, jagged splash of blood color comes in, not even like the others. Not smooth, not artificed by some loom or by some dye vat. Like a star, like the scattered petals of a flower. Speaking of — I don’t know how to say it — speaking of violence, of struggle, of life spilled out.

The blood isn’t red anymore. It’s rusty brown now. But it’s still blood, all the same. Ten years from now, twenty, it’ll still be blood; faded out, vanished, the pollen of, the dust of, blood. What was once warm and moving. And made blushes and rushed with anger and paled with fear. Like that night — I can still see her eyes. They still come before me, wide and white and glistening with fright, out of the amnesiac darkness of our sudden, unpremeditated meeting.

They were like two pools of fear. She saw something that I couldn’t see. And fear kindled in them. I feared and I mistrusted but I couldn’t bear to see my fear reflected in her eyes. From her I wanted reassurance, consolation; only wanted to draw her close to me and hold her to me, to lean my head against her and rest and draw new belief in myself. Instead she met my fear with her fear. Eyes that should have been tender were glowing with unscreaming fear.

It wasn’t an attack. We’d been together too many times before, made love together too many times before, for it to be that. It was just that fear had suddenly entered, and made us dangerous strangers.

She turned and tried to run. I caught the scarf from behind. Only in supplication, in pleading; trying to hold on to the only one who could save me. And the closer I tried to draw her to me, the less she was alive. Until finally I got her all the way back to me, where I wanted her to be, and she was dead.

I hadn’t wanted that. It was only love, turned inside out. It was only loneliness, outgoing.

And now I’m alone, without any love.

And the radio, almost as if it were taking my pulse count, electrographing my heartbeats, echoes them back to me: For, like caressing an empty glove, Is night without some love, The night was made for—

The hotel room ashtrays are thick glass cubes, built to withstand cracking under heat of almost any degree. I touch my lighter to it, to the scarf compressed inside the cube. The flame points upward like a sawtoothed orange knife. There goes love. After a while it stops burning. It looks like a black cabbage, each leaf tipped by thin red lines that waver and creep back and forth like tiny red worms. Then one by one they go out.

I dump it into the bathroom bowl and flip the lever down. What a hell of a place for your love to wind up. Like something disembowled.

I go back and pour out a little more. It’s the seat belt against the imminent smash-up, the antidote for terror, the prescription against panic. Only it doesn’t work. I sit there dejectedly, wrists looping down between my legs. I’m confused; I can’t think it out. Something inside my mind keeps fogging over, like mist on a windshield. I use the back of my hand for a windshield wiper and draw it slowly across my forehead a couple times, and it clears up again for a little while.

“Remember,” the little radio prattles. “Simple headache, take aspirin. Nervous tension, take—”

All I can say to myself is: there is no fix for the fix you’re in now.

Suddenly the phone peals, sharp and shattering as the smashing of glass sealing up a vacuum. I never knew a sound could be so frightening, never knew a sound could be so dire. It’s like a short circuit in my nervous system. Like springing a cork in my heart with a lopsided opener. Like a shot of sodium pentathol up my arm knocking out my will power.

All I keep thinking is: this is it. Here it is. It’s not a hotel-service call, it can’t be, not at this hour anymore. The waiter’s been and gone, the night maid’s been and gone. It can’t be an outside call, because nobody on the outside knows I’m here in the hotel. Not even where I work, where I used to work, they don’t know. This is it; it’s got to be.

How will they put it? A polite summons. “Would you mind coming down for a minute, sir?” And then if I do, a sudden preventive twisting of my arm behind my back as I step out of the elevator, an unnoticeable flurry tactfully covered up behind the backs of the bellboys — then quickly out and away.

Why don’t they come right up here to my door and get me? Is it because this is a high-class hotel on a high-class street? Maybe they don’t want any commotion in the hall, for the sake of the other guests. Maybe this is the way they always do it.

Meanwhile it keeps ringing and ringing and ringing.

The damp zigzag path my spilled drink made, from where I was to where I am now, is slowly soaking into the carpet and darkening it. The empty glass, dropped on the carpet, has finished rocking on its side by now and lies still. And I’ve fallen motionless into the grotesque posture of a badly frightened kid. Almost prone along the floor, legs sprawled out in back of me in scissors formation, just the backs of my two hands grasping the edge of the low stand the phone sits on, and the rim of it cutting across the bridge of my nose so that just two big staring, straining eyes show up over the top.

And it rings on and on and on.

Then all at once an alternative occurs to me. Maybe it’s a wrong-number call, meant for somebody else. Somebody in another room, or somebody in this room who was in it before I came. Hotel switchboards are overworked places: slip-ups like that can happen now and then.

I bet I haven’t said a prayer since I finished my grammar-school final-exam paper in trigonometry (and flunked it; maybe that’s why I haven’t said a prayer since), and that was more a crossed-fingers thing held behind my back than a genuine prayer. I say one now. What a funny thing to pray for. I bet nobody ever prayed for a wrong number before, not since telephones first began. Or since prayers first began, either.

Please, make it a mistake and not for me. Make it a mistake.

Suddenly there’s open space between the cradle and the receiver, and I’ve done it. I’ve picked it up. It’s just as easy as pulling out one of your own teeth by the roots.

The prayer gets scratched. The call is for me, it’s not a wrong number. For me, all right, every inch of the way. I can tell from the opening words. Only — it’s not the one I feared; it’s friendly, a friendly call no different from what other people get.

A voice from another world, almost. Yet I know it so well. Always like this, never a cloud on it; always jovial, always noisy. When a thing should be said softly, it says it loudly; when a thing should be said loudly, it says it louder still. He never identifies himself, never has to. Once you’ve heard his voice, you’ll always know him.

That’s Johnny for you — the pal of a hundred parties. The bar-kick of scores of binges. The captain of the second-string team in how many foursome one-night stands? Every man has had a Johnny in his life sometime or other.

He says he’s been calling my apartment since Wednesday and no answer: what happened to me?

I play it by ear. “Water started to pour down through the ceiling, so I had to clear out till they get it repaired... No, I’m not on a tear... No, there’s nobody with me, I’m by myself... Do I? Sound sort of peculiar? No, I’m all right there’s nothing the matter, not a thing.”

I pass my free hand across the moist glisten on my forehead. It’s tough enough to be in a jam, but it’s tougher still to be in one and not be able to say you are.

“How did you know I was here? How did you track me to this place?... You went down the yellow pages, hotel by hotel, alphabetically. Since three o’clock yesterday afternoon?... Something to tell me?”

His new job had come through. He starts on Monday. With a direct line, and two, count ’em, two secretaries, not just one. And the old bunch is giving him a farewell party. A farewell party to end all farewell parties. Sardi’s, on 44th. Then they’ll move on later to some other place. But they’ll wait here at Sardi’s for me to catch up. Barb keeps asking, Why isn’t your best-man-to-be here with us?

The noise of the party filters through into my ear. Ice clicking like dice in a fast-rolling game. Mixing sticks sounding like tiny tin flutes as they beat against glass. The laughter of girls, the laughter of men. Life is for the living, not the already dead.

“Sure, I’ll be there. Sure.”

If I say I won’t be — and I won’t, because I can’t — he’ll never quit pestering and calling me the rest of the night. So I say that I will, to get off the hook. But how can I go there, drag my trouble before his party, before his friends, before his girl? And if I go, it’ll just happen there instead of here. Who wants a grandstand for his downfall? Who wants bleachers for his disgrace?

Johnny’s gone now, and the night goes on.

Now the evening’s at its noon, its meridian. The outgoing tide has simmered down, and there’s a lull — like the calm in the eye of a hurricane — before the reverse tide starts to set in.

The last acts of the three-act plays are now on, and the after-theater eating places are beginning to fill up with early comers; Danny’s and Lindy’s — yes, and Horn & Hardart too. Everybody has got where they wanted to go — and that was out somewhere. Now everybody will want to get back where they came from — and that’s home somewhere. Or as the coffee-grinder radio, always on the beam, put it at about this point: New York, New York, it’s a helluva town, The Bronx is up, the Battery’s down, And the people ride around in a hole in the ground—

Now the incoming tide rolls in; the hours abruptly switch back to single digits again, and it’s a little like the time you put your watch back on entering a different time zone. Now the buses knock off and the subway expresses turn into locals and the locals space themselves far apart; and as Johnny Carson’s face hits millions of screens all at one and the same time, the incoming tide reaches its crest and pounds against the shore. There’s a sudden splurge, a slew of taxis arriving at the hotel entrance one by one as regularly as though they were on a conveyor belt, emptying out and then going away again.

Then this too dies down, and a deep still sets in. It’s an around-the-clock town, but this is the stretch; from now until the garbage-grinding trucks come along and tear the dawn to shreds, it gets as quiet as it’s ever going to get.

This is the deep of the night, the dregs, the sediment at the bottom of the coffee cup. The blue hours; when guys’ nerves get tauter and women’s fears get greater. Now guys and girls make love, or kill each other or sometimes both. And as the windows on the Late Show title silhouette light up one by one, the real ones all around go dark. And from now on the silence is broken only by the occasional forlorn hoot of a bogged-down drunk or the gutted-cat squeal of a too sharply swerved axle coming around a turn. Or as Billy Daniels sang it in Golden Boy: While the city sleeps, And the streets are clear, There’s a life that’s happening here—

In the pin-drop silence a taxi comes up with an unaccompanied girl in it. I can tell it’s a taxi, I can tell it’s a girl, and I can tell she’s unaccompanied; I can tell all three just by her introductory remark.

“Benny,” she says, “will you come over and pay this for me?”

Benny is the hotel night-service man. I know his name; he brought drinks up to the room last night.

As the taxi drives away paid, Benny reminds her with aloof dignity, “You didn’t give me my cut last week.” Nothing personal, strictly business, you understand.

“I had a virus week before last,” she explains. “And it took me all last week to pay off on my doctor bills. I’ll square it with you tonight.” Then she adds apprehensively, “I’m afraid he’ll hurt me.” Not her doctor, obviously.

“Na, he won’t hurt you,” Benny reassures.

“How would you know?” she asks, not unreasonably.

Benny culls from his store of call-girl-sponsorship experience. “These big guys never hurt you. They’re meek as mice. It’s the little shrimps got the sting.”

She goes ahead in. A chore is a chore, she figures.

This of course is what is known in hotel-operational jargon as a “personal call.” In the earthier slang of the night bellmen and deskmen it is simply a “fix” or a “fix-up.” The taxi fare, of course, will go down on the guest’s bill, as “Misc.” or “Sundries.” Which actually is what it is. From my second-floor window I can figure it all out almost without any sound track to go with it.

So much for the recreational side of night life in the upper-bracket-income hotels of Manhattan. And in its root-origins the very word itself is implicit with implication: re-create. Analyze it and you’ll see it also means to reproduce. But clever, ingenious Man has managed to sidetrack it into making life more livable.

The wafer of ice riding the surface of my drink has melted freakishly in its middle and not around its edges and now looks like an onion ring. Off in the distance an ambulance starts bansheeing with that new broken-blast siren they use, scalp-crimping as the cries of pain of a partly dismembered hog. Somebody dead in the night? Somebody sick and going to be dead soon? Or maybe somebody going to be alive soon — did she wait too long to start for the hospital?

All of a sudden, with the last sound there’s been all night, I can tell they’re here. Don’t ask me how, I only know they’re here. It’s beginning at last. No way out, no way aside and no way back.

Being silent is their business, and they know their business well. They make less sound than the dinner cart crunching along the carpeted hall, than Ginny’s stifled sob when I gave her that hundred-dollar bill, than the contestants bickering over the taxi. Or that girl who was down there just a little while ago on her errand of fighting loneliness for a fee.

How can I tell that they’re here? By the absence of sound more than by its presence. Or I should say by the absence of a complementary sound — the sound that belongs with another sound and yet fails to accompany it.

Like:

There’s no sound of arrival, but suddenly two cars are in place down there along the hotel front. They must have come up on the glide, as noiselessly as a sailboat skimming over still water. No sound of tires, no sound of brakes. But there’s one sound they couldn’t quite obliterate — the cushioned thump of two doors closing after them in quick succession, staccato succession, as they spilled out and siphoned into the building. You can always tell a car door, no other door sounds quite like it.

There’s only one other sound, a lesser one, a sort of follow-up: the scratch of a single sole against the abrasive sidewalk as they go hustling in. He either put it down off-balance or swiveled it too acutely in treading at the heels of those in front of him. Which is a good average, just one to sound off, considering that six or eight pairs of them must have been all going in at the same time and moving fast.

I’ve sprung to my feet from the very first, and I’m standing there now like an upright slab of ice carved in the outline of a man — burning-cold and slippery-wet and glassy with congealment. I’ve put out all the lights — they all work on one switch over by the door as you come in. They’ve probably already seen the lights though if they’ve marked the window from outside, and anyway, what difference does it make? Lighted up or dark, I’m still here inside the room. It’s just some instinct as old as fear: you seek the dark when you hide, you seek the light when the need to hide is gone. All the animals have it too.

Now they’re in, and it will take just a few minutes more while they make their arrangements. That’s all I have left, a few minutes more. Out of a time allotment that once stretched so far and limitlessly ahead of me. Who short-changed me, I feel like crying out in protest, but I know that nobody did; I short-changed myself.

“It,” the heartless little radio jeers, “takes the worry out of being close.”

Why is it taking them such a long time? What do they have to do, improvise as they go along? What for? They already knew what they had to do when they set out to come here.

I’m sitting down again now, momentarily; knees too rocky for standing long. Those are the only two positions I have left; no more walking, no more running, no more anything else now. Only stand up and wait or sit down and wait. I need a cigarette terribly bad. It may be a funny time to need one, but I do. I dip my head down between my outspread legs and bring the lighter up from below, so its shine won’t glow through the blind-crevices. As I said, it doesn’t make sense, because they know I’m here. But I don’t want to do anything to quicken them. Even two minutes of grace is better than one. Even one minute is better than none.

Then suddenly my head comes up again, alerted. I drop the cigarette, still unlit. First I think the little radio has suddenly jumped in tone, started to come on louder and more resonant, as if it were spooked. Until it almost sounds like a car radio out in the open. Then I turn my head toward the window. It is a car radio. It’s coming from outside into the room.

And even before I get up and go over to take a look, I think there’s something familiar about it, I’ve heard it before, just like this, just the way it is now. This sounding-board effect, this walloping of the night like a drum, this ricochet of blast and din from side to side of the street, bouncing off the house fronts like a musical handball game.

Then it cuts off short, the after-silence swells up like a balloon ready to pop, and as I squint out, it’s standing still down there, the little white car, and Johnny is already out of it and standing alongside.

He’s come to take me to the party.

He’s parked on the opposite side. He starts to cross over to the hotel. Someone posted in some doorway whistles to attract his attention. I hear it up at the window. Johnny stops, turns to look around, doesn’t see anyone.

He’s frozen in the position in which the whistle caught him. Head and shoulders turned inquiringly half around, hips and legs still pointed forward. Then a man, some anonymous man, glides up beside him from the street.

I told you he talks loud; on the phone, in a bar, on a street late at night. Every word he says I hear; not a word the other man says.

First, “Who is? What kind of trouble?”

Then, “You must mean somebody else.”

Next, “Room 207. Yeah, that’s right, 207.”

That’s my room number.

“How’d you know I was coming here?”

Finally, “You bugged the call I made to him before!”

Then the anonymous man goes back into the shadows, leaving Johnny in mid-street, taking it for granted he’ll follow him as he was briefed to do, commanded to do.

But Johnny stands out there, alone and undecided, feet still one way, head and shoulders still the other. And I watch him from the window crevice. And the stakeout watches him from his invisible doorway.

Now a crisis arises. Not in my life, because that’s nearly over; but in my illusions.

Will he go to his friend and try to stand by him, or will he let his friend go by?

He can’t make it, sure I know that, he can never get in here past them; but he can make the try, there’s just enough slack for him to do that. There’s still half the width of the street ahead of him clear and untrammeled, for him to try to bolt across, before they spring after him and rough him up and fling him back. It’s the token of the thing that would count, not the completion.

But it doesn’t happen that way, I keep telling myself knowingly and sadly. Only in our fraternity pledges and masonic inductions, our cowboy movies and magazine stories, not in our real-life lives. For, the seventeenth-century humanist to the contrary, each man is an island complete unto himself, and as he sinks, the moving feet go on around him, from nowhere to nowhere and with no time to lose. The world is long past the Boy Scout stage of its development; now each man dies as he was meant to die, and as he was born, and as he lived: alone, all alone. Without any God, without any hope, without any record to show for his life.

My throat feels stiff, and I want to swallow but I can’t. Watching and waiting to see what my friend will do.

He doesn’t move, doesn’t make up his mind, for half a minute, and that half a minute seems like an hour. He’s doped by what he’s been told, I guess. And I keep asking myself while the seconds are ticking off: What would I do? If there were me down there, and he were up here: What would I do? And I keep trying not to look the answer in the face, though it’s staring at me the whole time.

You haven’t any right to expect your friends to be larger than yourself, larger than life. Just take them as they are, cut down to average size, and be glad you have them. To drink with, laugh with, borrow money from, lend money to, stay away from their special girls as you want them to stay away from yours, and above all, never break your word to, once it’s been given.

And that is all the obligation you have, all you have the right to expect.

The half-minute is up, and Johnny turns, slowly and reluctantly, but he turns, and he goes back to the opposite side of the street. The side opposite to me.

And I knew all along that’s what he would do, because I knew all along that’s what I would have done too.

I think I hear a voice say slurredly somewhere in the shadows, “That’s the smart thing to do,” but I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t, maybe it’s me I hear.

He gets back in the car, shoulders sagging, and keys it on. And as he glides from sight the music seems to start up almost by itself; it’s such second nature for him to have it on by now. It fades around the corner building, and then a wisp of it comes back just once more, carried by some cross-current of the wind: Fools rush in, Where wise men never dare to go — and then it dies away for good.

I bang my crushed-up fist against the center of my forehead, bring it away, then bang it again. Slow but hard. It hurts to lose a long-term friend, almost like losing an arm. But I never lost an arm, so I really wouldn’t know.

Now I can swallow, but it doesn’t feel good anymore.

I hear a marginal noise outside in the hall, and I swing around in instant alert. It’s easy enough to decipher it. A woman is being taken from her room nearby — in case the going gets too rough around here in my immediate vicinity, I suppose.

I hear them tap, and then she comes out and accompanies them to safety. I hear the slap-slap of her bedroom slippers, like the soft little hands of children applauding in a kindergarten, as she goes hurrying by with someone. Several someones. You can’t hear them, only her, but I know they’re with her. I even hear the soft sch sch of her silk wrapper or kimono as it rustles past. A noticeable whiff of sachet drifts in through the door seam. She must have taken a bath and powdered herself liberally just moments ago.

Probably a nice sort of woman, unused to violence or emergencies of this sort, unsure of what to bring along or how to comport herself.

“I left my handbag in there,” I hear her remark plaintively as she goes by. “Do you think it’ll be all right to leave it there?”

Somebody’s wife, come to meet him in the city and waiting for him to join her. Long ago I used to like that kind of woman. Objectively, of course, not close-up.

After she’s gone, another brief lull sets in. This one is probably the last. But what good is a lull? It’s only a breathing spell in which to get more frightened. Because anticipatory fear is always twice as strong as present fear. Anticipatory fear has both fears in it at once — the anticipatory one and the one that comes simultaneously with the dread happening itself. Present fear only has the one, because by that time anticipation is over.

I switch on the light for a moment, to see my way to a drink. The one I had is gone — just what used to be ice is sloshing colorlessly in the bottom of the glass. Then when I put the recharged glass down again, empty, it seems to pull me after it, as if it weighed so much I couldn’t let go of it from an upright position. Don’t ask me why this is, I don’t know. Probably simple loss of equilibrium for a second, due to the massive infusion of alcohol.

Then with no more warning, no more waiting, with no more of anything, it begins. It gets under way at last.

There is a mild-mannered knuckle rapping at the door. They use my name. A voice, mild-mannered also, says in a conciliatory way, “Come out, please. We want to talk to you.” “Punctilious,” I guess, would be a better word for it. The etiquette of the forcible entry, of the break-in. They’re so considerate, so deferential, so attentive to all the niceties. Hold your head steady, please, we don’t want to nick your chin while we’re cutting your throat.

I don’t answer.

I don’t think they expected me to. If I had answered, it would have astonished them, thrown them off their timing for a moment.

The mild-voiced man leaves the door and somebody else takes his place. I can sense the shifting over more by intuition than by actual hearing.

A wooden toolbox or carryall of some sort settles down noisily on the floor outside the door. I can tell it’s wooden, not by its floor impact but by the “settling” sound that accompanies it, as if a considerable number of loose and rolling objects in it are chinking against its insides. Nails and bolts and awls and screwdrivers and the like. That tells me that it’s a kit commonly used by carpenters and locksmiths and their kind.

They’re going to take the lock off bodily from the outside.

A cold surge goes through me that I can’t describe. It isn’t blood. It’s too numbing and heavy and cold for that. And it breaks through the skin surface, which blood doesn’t ordinarily do without a wound, and emerges into innumerable sting pin pricks all over me. An ice-sweat.

I can see him (not literally, but just as surely as if I could), down on one knee, and scared, probably as scared as I am myself, pressing as far back to the side out of the direct line of the door as he can, while the others, bunched together farther back, stand ready to cover him, to pile on me and bring me down if I should suddenly break out and rush him.

And the radio tells me sarcastically to “Light up, you’ve got a good thing going.”

I start backing away, with a sleepwalker’s fixity, staring at the door as I retreat, or staring at where I last saw it, for I can’t see it in the dark. What good would it do to stay close to it, for I can’t hold it back, I can’t stop it from opening. And as I go back step after step, my tongue keeps tracking the outside outline of my lips, as if I wondered what they were and what they were there for.

A very small sound begins. I don’t know how to put it. Like someone twisting a small metal cap to open a small medicine bottle, but continuously, without ever getting it off. He’s started already. He’s started coming in.

It’s terrible to hear that little thing move. As if it were animate, had a life of its own. Terrible to hear it move and to know that a hostile agency, a hostile presence, just a few feet away from me, is what is making it move. Such a little thing, there is almost nothing smaller, only the size of a pinhead perhaps, and yet to create such terror and to be capable of bringing about such a shattering end-result: entry, capture, final loss of reason, and the darkness that is worse than death. All from a little thing like that, turning slowly, secretively, but avidly, in the lockplate on the door, on the door into my room.

I have to get out of here. Out. I have to push these walls apart, these foursquare tightly seamed walls, and make space wide enough to run in, and keep running through it, running and running through it, running and running through it, and never stopping. Until I drop. And then still running on and on, inside my head. Like a watch with its case smashed open and lying on the ground, but with the works still going inside it. Or like a cockroach when you knock it over on its back so that it can’t ambulate anymore, but its legs still go spiraling around in the air.

The window. They’re at the door, but the window — that way out is still open. I remember when I checked in here the small hours of Wednesday, I didn’t ask to be given a room on the second floor, they just happened to give me one. Then when I saw it later that day in the light, I realized the drop to the ground from one of the little semicircular stone ledges outside the windows wouldn’t be dangerous, especially if you held a pillow in front of you, and remembered to keep your chin tilted upward as you went over. Just a sprawling shake-up fall maybe, that’s all.

I pull at the blind cords with both hands, and it spasms upward with a sound like a lot of little twigs being stepped on and broken. I push up the window sash and assume a sitting position on the sill, then swing my legs across and I’m out in the clear, out in the open night.

The little stone apron has this spiked iron rail guard around it, with no space left on the outer side of it to plant your feet before you go over. You have to straddle it, which makes for tricky going. Still, necessity can make you dexterous, terror can make you agile. I won’t go back inside for the pillow, there isn’t time. I’ll take the leap neat.

The two cars that brought them here are below, and for a moment, only for a moment, they look empty, dark and still and empty, standing bumper to bumper against the curb. Someone gives a warning whistle — a lip whistle, I mean, not a metal one. I don’t know who, I don’t know where, somewhere around. Then an angry, ugly, smoldering, car-bound orange moon starts up, lightens to yellow, then brightens to the dazzling white of a laundry-detergent commercial. The operator guiding it slants it too high at first, and it lands over my head. Like a halo. Some halo and some time for a halo. Then he brings it down and it hits me as if someone had belted me full across the face with a talcum-powder puff. You can’t see through it, you can’t see around it.

Shoe leather comes padding from around the corner — maybe the guy that warded off Johnny — and stops directly under me. I sense somehow he’s afraid, just as I am. That won’t keep him from doing what he has to do, because he’s got the backing on his side. But he doesn’t like this. I shield my eyes from the light on one side, and I can see his anxious face peering up at me. All guys are scared of each other, didn’t you know that? I’m not the only one. We’re all born afraid.

I can’t shake the light off. It’s like ghostly flypaper. It’s like slapstick-thrown yoghurt. It clings to me whichever way I turn.

I hear his voice talking to me from below. Very near and clear. As if we were off together by ourselves somewhere, just chatting, the two of us.

“Go back into your room. We don’t want you to get hurt.” And then a second time: “Go back in. You’ll only get hurt if you stand out here like this.”

I’m thinking, detached, as in a dream: I didn’t know they were this considerate. Are they always this considerate? When I was a kid back in the forties, I used to go to those tough-guy movies a lot. Humphrey Bogart, Jimmy Cagney. And when they had a guy penned in, they used to be tough about it, snarling: “Come on out of there, yuh rat, we’ve got yuh covered!” I wonder what has changed them? Maybe it’s just that time has moved on. This is the sixties now.

What’s the good of jumping now? Where is there to run to now? And the light teases my eyes. I see all sorts of interlocked and colored soap bubbles that aren’t there.

It’s more awkward getting back inside than it was getting out. And with the light on me, and them watching me, there’s a self-consciousness that was missing in my uninhibited outward surge. I have to straighten out one leg first and dip it into the room toes forward, the way you test the water in a pool before you jump in. Then the other leg, and then I’m in. The roundness of the light beam is broken into long thin tatters as the blind rolls down over it, but it still stays on out there.

There are only two points of light in the whole room — I mean, in addition to the indirect reflection through the blind. Which gives off a sort of phosphorescent haziness — two points so small that if you didn’t know they were there and looked for them, you wouldn’t see them. And small as both are, one is even smaller than the other. One is the tiny light in the radio, which, because the lens shielding the dial is convex, glows like a miniature orange scimitar. I go over to it to turn it off. It can’t keep the darkness away anymore; the darkness is here.

“Here’s to the losers,” the radio is saying. “Here’s to them all—”

The other point of light is over by the door. It’s in the door itself. I go over there close to it, peering with my head bowed, as if I were mourning inconsolably. And I am. One of the four tiny screwheads set into the corners of the oblong plate that holds the lock is gone, is out now, and if you squint at an acute angle you can see a speck of orange light shining through it from the hall. Then, while I’m standing there, something falls soundlessly, glances off the top of my shoe with no more weight than a grain of gravel, and there’s a second speck of orange light at the opposite upper corner of the plate. Two more to go now. Two and a half minutes of deft work left, maybe not even that much.

What careful planning, what painstaking attention to detail, goes into extinguishing a man’s life! Far more than the hit-or-miss, haphazard circumstances of igniting it.

I can’t get out the window, I can’t go out the door. But there is a way out, a third way. I can escape inward. If I can’t get away from them on the outside, I can get away from them on the inside.

You’re not supposed to have those things. But when you have money you can get anything, in New York. They were on a prescription, but that was where the money came in — getting the prescription. I remember now. Some doctor gave it to me — sold it to me — long ago. I don’t remember why or when. Maybe when fear first came between the two of us and I couldn’t reach her anymore.

I came across it in my wallet on Wednesday, after I first came in here, and I sent it out to have it filled, knowing that this night would come. I remember the bellboy bringing it to the door afterward in a small bright-green paper wrapping that some pharmacists use. But where is it now?

I start a treasure hunt of terror, around the inside of the room in the dark. First into the clothes closet, wheeling and twirling among the couple of things I have hanging in there like a hopped-up discothèque dancer, dipping in and out of pockets, patting some of them between my hands to see if they’re flat or hold a bulk. As if I were calling a little pet dog to me by clapping my hands to it. A little dog who is hiding away from me in there, a little dog called death.

Not in there. Then the drawers of the dresser, spading them in and out, fast as a card shuffle. A telephone directory, a complimentary shaving kit (if you’re a man), a complimentary manicure kit (if you’re a girl).

They must be down to the last screwhead by now.

Then around and into the bathroom, while the remorseless dismantling at the door keeps on. It’s all white in there, white as my face must be. It’s dark, but you can still see that it’s white against the dark. Twilight-colored tiles. I don’t put on the light to help me find them, because there isn’t enough time left; the lights in here are fluorescent and take a few moments to come on, and by that time they’ll be in here.

There’s a catch phrase that you all must have heard at one time or another. You walk into a room or go over toward a group. Someone turns and says with huge emphasis: “There he is.” As though you were the most important one of all. (And you’re not.) As though you were the one they were just talking about. (And they weren’t.) As though you were the only one that mattered. (And you’re not.) It’s a nice little tribute, and it don’t cost anyone a cent.

And so I say this to them now, as I find them on the top glass slab of the shallow medicine cabinet: There you are. Glad to see you — you’re important in my scheme of things.

As I bend for some running water, the shower curtain twines around me in descending spiral folds — don’t ask me how, it must have been ballooning out. I sidestep like a drunken Roman staggering around his toga, pulling half the curtain down behind me while the pins holding it to the rod about tinkle like little finger cymbals, dragging part of it with me over one shoulder, while I bend over the basin to drink.

No time to rummage for a tumbler. It’s not there anyway — I’d been using it for the rye. So I use the hollow of one hand for a scoop, pumping it up and down to my open mouth and alternating with one of the nuggets from the little plastic container I’m holding uncapped in my other hand. I’ve been called a fast drinker at times. Johnny used to say — never mind that now.

I only miss one — that falls down in the gap between me and the basin to the floor. That’s a damned good average. There were twelve of them in there, and I remember the label read: Not more than three to be taken during any twenty-four-hour period. In other words, I’ve just killed myself three times, with a down payment on a fourth time for good measure.

I grab the sides of the basin suddenly and bend over it, on the point of getting them all out of me again in rebellious upheaval. I don’t want to, but they do. I fold both arms around my middle, hugging myself, squeezing myself, to hold them down. They stay put. They’ve caught on, taken hold. Only a pump can get them out now. And after a certain point of no return (I don’t know how long that is), once they start being assimilated into the bloodstream, not even a pump can get them out.

Only a little brine taste shows up in my mouth, and gagging a little, still holding my middle, I go back into the other room. Then I sit down to wait. To see which of them gets to me first.

It goes fast now, like a drumbeat quickening to a climax. An upended foot kicks at the door, and it suddenly spanks inward with a firecracker sound. The light comes fizzing through the empty oblong like gushing carbonation, too sudden against the dark to ray clearly at first.

They rush in like the splash of a wave that suddenly has splattered itself all around the room. Then the lights are on, and they’re on all four sides of me, and they’re holding me hard and fast, quicker than one eyelid can touch the other in a blink.

My arms go behind me into the cuffless convolutions of a strait jacket. Then as though unconvinced that this is enough precaution, someone standing back there has looped the curve of his arm around my throat and the back of the chair, and holds it there in tight restraint. Not choking-tight as in a mugging, but ready to pin me back if I should try to heave out of the chair.

Although the room is blazing-bright, several of them are holding flashlights, all lit and centered inward on my face from the perimeter around me, like the spokes of a blinding wheel. Probably to disable me still further by their dazzle. One beam, more skeptical than the others, travels slowly up and down my length, seeking out any bulges that might possibly spell a concealed offensive weapon. My only weapon is already used, and it was a defensive one.

I roll my eyes toward the ceiling to try and get away from the lights, and one by one they blink and go out.

There they stand. The assignment is over, completed. To me it’s my life, to them just another incident. I don’t know how many there are. The man in the coffin doesn’t count the number who have come to the funeral. But as I look at them, as my eyes go from face to face, on each one I read the key to what the man is thinking.

One face, soft with compunction: Poor guy, I might have been him, he might have been me.

One, hard with contempt: Just another of those creeps something went wrong with along the way.

Another, flexing with hate: I wish he’d shown some fight; I’d like an excuse to—

Still another, rueful with impatience: I’d like to get this over so I could call her unexpectedly and catch her in a lie; I bet she never stayed home tonight like she told me she would.

And yet another, blank with indifference, its thoughts a thousand miles away: And what’s a guy like Yastrzemski got, plenty of others guy haven’t got too? It’s just the breaks, that’s all—

And I say to my own thoughts dejectedly: Why weren’t you that clear, that all-seeing, the other night, that terrible other night. It might have done you more good then.

There they stand. And there I am, seemingly in their hands but slowly slipping away from them.

They don’t say anything. I’m not aware of any of them saying anything. They’re waiting for someone to give them further orders. Or maybe waiting for something to come and take me away.

One of them hasn’t got a uniform on or plainsclothes either like the rest. He has on the white coat that is my nightmare and my horror. And in the crotch of one arm he is upending two long poles intertwined with canvas.

The long-drawn-out death within life. The burial-alive of the mind, covering it over with fresh graveyard earth each time it tries to struggle through to the light. In this kind of death you never finish dying.

In back of them, over by the door, I see the top of someone’s head appear, then come forward, slowly, fearfully forward. Different from their short-clipped, starkly outlined heads, soft and rippling in contour, and gentle. And as she comes forward into fullface view, I see who she is.

She comes up close to me, stops, and looks at me.

“Then it wasn’t — you?” I whisper.

She shakes her head slightly with a mournful trace of smile. “It wasn’t me,” she whispers back, without taking them into it, just between the two of us, as in the days before. “I didn’t go there to meet you. I didn’t like the way you sounded.” But someone was there, I came across someone there. Someone whose face became hers in my waking dream. The scarf, the blood on the scarf. It’s not my blood, it’s not my scarf. It must belong to someone else. Someone they haven’t even found yet, don’t even know about yet.

The preventive has come too late.

She moves a step closer and bends toward me.

“Careful — watch it,” a voice warns her.

“He won’t hurt me,” she answers understandingly without taking her eyes from mine. “We used to be in love.”

Used to? Then that’s why I’m dying. Because I still am. And you aren’t anymore.

She bends and kisses me, on the forehead, between the eyes. Like a sort of last rite.

And in that last moment, as I’m straining upward to find her lips, as the light is leaving my eyes, the whole night passes before my mind, the way they say your past life does when you’re drowning: the waiter, the night maid, the taxi argument, the call girl, Johnny — it all meshes into start-to-finish continuity. Just like in a story. An organized, step-by-step, timetabled story.

This story.