The Best American Noir of the Century

1968 CORNELL WOOLRICH FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE

Their eyes met in Rome. On a street in Rome — the Via Piemonte.

He was coming down it, coming along toward her, when she first saw him. She didn’t know it but he was also coming into her life, into her destiny — bringing what was meant to be.

Every life is a mystery. And every story of every life is a mystery. But it is not what happens that is the mystery. It is whether it has to happen no matter what, whether it is ordered and ordained, fixed and fated, or whether it can be missed, avoided, circumvented, passed by; that is the mystery.

If she had not come along the Via Piemonte that day, would it still have happened? If she had come along the Via Piemonte that day, but ten minutes later than she did, would it still have happened? Therein lies the real mystery. And no one ever knows, and no one ever will.

As their eyes met, they held. For just a heartbeat.

He wasn’t cheap. He wasn’t sidewalk riffraff. His clothes were good clothes, and his air was a good air.

He was a personable-looking man. First your eye said: he’s not young anymore, he’s not a boy anymore. Then your eye said: but he’s not old. There was something of youth hovering over and about him, and yet refusing to land in any one particular place. As though it were about to take off and leave him. Yet not quite that, either. More as though it had never fully been there in the first place. In short, the impression it was, was agelessness. Not young, not old, not callow, not mature — but ageless. Thirty-six looking fifty-six, or fifty-six looking thirty-six, but which it was you could not say.

Their eyes met — and held. For just a heartbeat.

Then they passed one another by, on the Via Piemonte, but without any turn of their heads to prolong the look.

I wonder who that was, she thought.

What he thought couldn’t be known — at least, not by her.

Three nights later they met again, at a party the friend she was staying with took her to.

He came over to her, and she said, “I’ve seen you before. I passed you on Monday on the Via Piemonte. At about four in the afternoon.”

“I remember you, too,” he said. “I noticed you that day, going by.”

I wonder why we remember each other like that, she mused; I’ve passed dozens, hundreds of other people since, and he must have too. I don’t remember any of them.

“I’m Mark Ramsey,” he said.

“I’m Linda Harris.”

An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion, and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths.

As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be.

It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk cafe, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk cafe. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place — while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting.

One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower.

And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does: a desire to please, to look one’s best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift — a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on.

So it goes.

And suddenly they part, and suddenly there’s a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment.

Rome passed into the past, and became New York.

Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again — while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting — then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love.

She was thinking of him at the moment the phone rang. And that helped, too, by its immediacy, by its telephonic answer to her wistful wish of remembrance. Memory is a mirage that fools the heart…

“You’ll never guess what I’m holding in my hand, right while I’m talking to you…

“I picked it up only a moment ago, and just as I was standing and looking at it, the phone rang. Isn’t that the strangest thing!…

“Do you remember the day we stopped in and you bought it…

“I have a little one-room apartment on East Seventieth Street. I’m by myself now, Dorothy stayed on in Rome …”

A couple of months later, they were married …

They call this love, she said to herself. I know what it is now. I never thought I would know, but I do now.

But she failed to add: If you can step back and identify it, is it really there? Shouldn’t you be unable to know what the whole thing’s about? Just blindly clutch and hold and fear that it will get away. But unable to stop, to think, to give it any name.

Just two more people sharing a common human experience. Infinite in its complexity, tricky at times, but almost always successfully surmounted in one of two ways: either blandly content with the results as they are, or else vaguely discontent but chained by habit. Most women don’t marry a man, they marry a habit. Even when a habit is good, it can become monotonous; most do. When it is bad in just the average degree it usually becomes no more than a nuisance and an irritant; and most do.

But when it is darkly, starkly evil in the deepest sense of the word, then it can truly become a hell on earth.

Theirs seemed to fall midway between the first two, for just a little while. Then it started veering over slowly toward the last. Very slowly, at the start, but very steadily…

They spent their honeymoon at a New Hampshire lakeshore resort. This lake had an Indian name which, though certainly barbaric in sound to the average English-speaker, in her special case presented such an impassable block both in speech and in mental pre-speech imagery (for some obscure reason, Freudian perhaps, or else simply an instinctive retreat from something with distressful connotations) that she gave up trying to say it and it became simply “the lake.” Then as time drew it backward, not into forgetfulness but into distance, it became “that lake.”

Here the first of the things that happened, happened. The first of the things important enough to notice and to remember afterward, among a great many trifling but kindred ones that were not. Some so slight they were not more than gloating, zestful glints of eye or curt hurtful gestures. (Once he accidentally poured a spurt of scalding tea on the back of a waitress’s wrist, by not waiting long enough for the waitress to withdraw her hand in setting the cup down, and by turning his head momentarily the other way. The waitress yelped, and he apologized, but he showed his teeth as he did so, and you don’t show your teeth in remorse.)

One morning when she woke up, he had already dressed and gone out of the room. They had a beautifully situated front-view of rooms which overlooked the lake itself (the bridal suite, as a matter of fact), and when she went to the window she saw him out there on the white-painted little pier which jutted out into the water on knock-kneed piles. He’d put on a turtleneck sweater instead of a coat and shirt, and that, over his spare figure, with the shoreward breeze alternately lifting and then flattening his hair, made him look younger than when he was close by. A ripple of the old attraction, of the old attachment, coursed through her and then was quickly gone. Just like the breeze out there. The little sidewalk-cafe chairs of Rome with the braided-wire backs and the piles of parcels on them, where were they now? Gone forever; they couldn’t enchant anymore.

The lake water was dark blue, pebbly-surfaced by the insistent breeze that kept sweeping it like the strokes of invisible broom-straws, and mottled with gold flecks that were like floating freckles in the nine o’clock September sunshine.

There was a little boy in bathing trunks, tanned as a caramel, sitting on the side of the pier, dangling his legs above the water. She’d noticed him about in recent days. And there was his dog, a noisy, friendly, ungainly little mite, a Scotch terrier that was under everyone’s feet all the time.

The boy was throwing a stick in, and the dog was splashing after it, retrieving it, and paddling back. Over and over, with that tirelessness and simplicity of interest peculiar to all small boys and their dogs. Off to one side a man was bringing up one of the motorboats that were for rent, for Mark to take out.

She could hear him in it for a while after that, making a long slashing ellipse around the lake, the din of its vibration alternately soaring and lulling as it passed from the far side to the near and then back to the far side again.

Then it cut off suddenly, and when she went back to look it was rocking there sheepishly engineless. The boy was weeping and the dog lay huddled dead on the lake rim, strangled by the boiling backwash of the boat that had dragged it — how many times? — around and around in its sweep of the lake. The dogs collar had become snagged some way in a line with a grappling hook attached, left carelessly loose over the side of the boat. (Or aimed and pitched over as the boat went slashing by?) The line trailed limp now, and the lifeless dog had been detached from it.

“If you’d only looked back,” the boy’s mother said ruefully to Mark. “He was a good swimmer, but I guess the strain was too much and his little heart gave out.”

“He did look! He did! He did! I saw him!” the boy screamed, agonized, peering accusingly from in back of her skirt.

“The spray was in the way,” Mark refuted instantly. But she wondered why he said it so quickly. Shouldn’t he have taken a moment’s time to think about it first, and then say, “The spray must have been — “ or “I guess maybe the spray — “ But he said it as quickly as though he’d been ready to say it even before the need had arisen.

Everyone for some reason acted furtively ashamed, as if something unclean had happened. Everyone but the boy, of course. There were no adult nuances to his pain.

The boy would eventually forget his dog.

But would she? Would she?

They left the lake — the farewells to Mark were a bit on the cool side, she noticed — and moved into a large rambling country house in the Berkshire region of Massachusetts, not far from Pittsfield, which he told her had been in his family for almost seventy-five years. They had a car, an Alfa Romeo, which he had brought over from Italy, and, at least in all its outward aspects, they had a not too unpleasant life together. He was an art importer, and financially a highly successful one; he used to commute back and forth to Boston, where he had a gallery with a small-size apartment above it. As a rule he would stay over in the city, and then drive out Friday night and spend the weekend in the country with her.

(She always slept so well on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays. Thursdays she always lay awake half the night reminding herself that the following night was Friday. She never stopped to analyze this; if she had, what would it have told her? What could it have, if she didn’t realize it already?)

As far as the house was concerned, let it be said at once that it was not a depressing house in itself. People can take their moods from a house, but by the same token a house can take its mood from the people who live in it. If it became what it became, it was due to him — or rather, her reaction to him.

The interior of the house had crystallized into a very seldom evoked period, the pre-World War I era of rococo and gimcrack elegance. Either its last occupant before them (an unmarried older sister of his) had had a penchant for this out of some girlhood memory of a war-blighted romance and had deliberately tried to re-create it, or what was more likely, all renovations had stopped around that time and it had just stayed that way by default.

Linda discovered things she had heard about but never seen before. Claw legs on the bathtub, nacre in-and-out pushbuttons for the lights, a hanging stained-glass dome lamp over the dining-room table, a gramophone with a crank handle — she wondered if they’d first rolled back the rug and then danced the hesitation or the one-step to it. The whole house, inside and out, cried out to have women in the straight-up-and-down endlessly long tunics of 1913, with side-puffs of hair over their ears, in patent-leather shoes with beige suede tops up to the middle of the calf, suddenly step out of some of the rooms; and in front of the door, instead of his slender-bodied, bullet-fast Italian compact, perhaps a four-cornered Chalmers or Pierce-Arrow or Hupmobile shaking all over to the beat of its motor.

Sometimes she felt like an interloper, catching herself in some full-length mirror as she passed it, in her over-the-kneetop skirt and short free down-blown hair. Sometimes she felt as if she were under a magic spell, waiting to be disenchanted. But it wasn’t a good kind of spell, and it didn’t come wholly from the house or its furnishings …

One day at the home of some people Mark knew who lived in the area, where he had taken her on a New Year’s Day drop-in visit, she met a young man named Garrett Hill. He was branch head for a company in Pittsfield.

It was as simple as that — they met. As simple as only beautiful things can be simple, as only life-changing things, turning-point things, can be simple.

Then she met him a second time, by accident. Then a third, by coincidence. A fourth, by chance …Or directed by unseen forces?

Then she started to see him on a regular basis, without meaning anything, certainly without meaning any harm. The first night he brought her home they chatted on the way in his car; and then at the door, as he held out his hand, she quickly put hers out of sight behind her back.

“Why are you afraid to shake my hand?”

“I thought you’d hurt me.”

“How can anyone hurt you by just shaking your hand?”

When he tried to kiss her, she turned and fled into the house, as frightened as though he’d brandished a whip at her.

When he tried it again, on a later night, again she recoiled sharply — as if she were flinching from some sort of punishment.

He looked at her, and his eyes widened, both in sudden understanding and in disbelief. “You’re afraid physically,” he said, almost whispering. “I thought it was some wifely scruple the other night. But you’re physically afraid of being kissed! As if there were pain attached to it.”

Before she could stop herself or think twice she blurted out, “Well, there is, isn’t there?”

He said, his voice deadly serious, “What kind of kissing have you been used to?”

She hung her head. And almost the whole story had been told.

His face was white as a sheet. He didn’t say another word. But one man understands another well; all are born with that particular insight.

The next week she went into the town to do some small shopping — shopping she could have done as easily over the phone. Did she hope to run across him during the course of it? Is that why she attended to it in person? And after it was taken care of she stepped into a restaurant to sit down over a cup of coffee while waiting for her bus. He came into the place almost immediately afterward; he must have been sitting in his car outside watching for her.

He didn’t ask to sit down; he simply leaned over with his knuckles resting on the table, across the way from her, and with a quick back glance toward the door by which he had just entered, took a book out from under his jacket and put it down in front of her, its title visible.

“I sent down to New York to get this for you,” he said. “I’m trying to help you in the only way I know how.”

She glanced down at it. The title was: The Marquis de Sade: The Complete Writings.

“Who was he?” she asked, looking up. She pronounced it with the long a, as if it were an English name. “Sayd.”

“Sod,” he instructed. “He was a Frenchman. Just read the book” was all he would say. “Just read the book.”

He turned to leave her, and then he came back for a moment and added, “Don’t let anyone else see — “ Then he changed it to “Don’t let him see you with it. Put a piece of brown wrapping paper around it so the title won’t be conspicuous. As soon as you’ve finished, bring it back; don’t leave it lying around the house.”

After he’d gone she kept staring at it. Just kept staring.

They met again three days later at the same little coffee shop off the main business street. It had become their regular meeting place by now. No fixed arrangement to it; he would go in and find her there, or she would go in and find him there.

“Was he the first one?” she asked when she returned the book.

“No, of course not. This is as old as man — this getting pleasure by giving pain. There are some of them born in every generation. Fortunately not too many. He simply was the first one to write it up and so when the world became more specialized and needed a separate tag for everything, they used his name. It became a word — sadism, meaning sexual pleasure got by causing pain, the sheer pleasure of being cruel.”

She started shaking all over as if the place were drafty. “It is that.” She had to whisper it, she was so heartsick with the discovery. “Oh, God, yes, it is that.”

“You had to know the truth. That was the first thing. You had to know, you had to be told. It isn’t just a vagary or a whim on his part. It isn’t just a — well, a clumsiness or roughness in making love. This is a frightful thing, a deviation, an affliction, and — a terrible danger to you. You had to understand the truth first.”

“Sometimes he takes his electric shaver — “ She stared with frozen eyes at nowhere out before her. “He doesn’t use the shaver itself, just the cord — connects it and — “

She backed her hand into her mouth, sealing it up.

Garrett did something she’d never seen a man do before. He lowered his head, all the way over. Not just onto his chest, but all the way down until his chin was resting on the tabletop. And his eyes, looking up at her, were smoldering red with anger. But literally red, the whites all suffused. Then something wet came along and quenched the burning in them.

“Now you know what you’re up against,” he said, straightening finally. “Now what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know.” She started to sob very gently, in pantomime, without a sound. He got up and stood beside her and held her head pressed against him. “I only know one thing,” she said. “I want to see the stars at night again, and not just the blackness and the shadows. I want to wake up in the morning as if it was my right, and not have to say a prayer of thanks that I lived through the night. I want to be able to tell myself there won’t be another night like the last one.”

The fear Mark had put into her had seeped and oozed into all parts of her; she not only feared fear, she even feared rescue from fear.

“I don’t want to make a move that’s too sudden,” she said in a smothered voice.

“I’ll be standing by, when you want to and when you do.”

And on that note they left each other. For one more time.

On Friday he was sitting there waiting for her at their regular table, smoking a cigarette. And another lay out in the ashtray, finished. And another. And another.

She came up behind him and touched him briefly but warmly on the shoulder, as if she were afraid to trust herself to speak.

He turned and greeted her animatedly. “Don’t tell me you’ve been in there that long! I thought you hadn’t come in yet. I’ve been sitting out here twenty minutes, watching the door for you.”

Then when she sat down opposite him and he got a good look at her face, he quickly sobered.

“I couldn’t help it. I broke down in there. I couldn’t come out any sooner. I didn’t want everyone in the place to see me, the way I was.”

She was still shaking irrepressibly from the aftermath of long-continued sobs.

“Here, have one of these,” he offered soothingly. “May make you feel better — “ He held out his cigarettes toward her.

“No!” she protested sharply, when she looked down and saw what it was. She recoiled so violently that her whole chair bounced a little across the floor. He saw the back of her hand go to the upper part of her breast in an unconscious gesture of protection, of warding off.

His face turned white when he understood the implication. White with anger, with revulsion. “So that’s it,” he breathed softly. “My God, oh, my God.”

They sat on for a long while after that, both looking down without saying anything. What was there to say? Two little cups of black coffee had arrived by now—just as an excuse for them to stay there.

Finally he raised his head, looked at her, and put words to what he’d been thinking. “You can’t go back anymore, not even once. You’re out of the house and away from it now, so you’ve got to stay out. You can’t go near it again, not even one more time. One more night may be one night too many. He’ll kill you one of these nights — he will even if he doesn’t mean to. What to him is just a thrill, an excitement, will take away your life. Think about that — you’ve got to think about that.”

“I have already,” she admitted. “Often.”

“You don’t want to go to the police?”

“I’m ashamed.” She covered her eyes reluctantly with her hand for a moment. “I know I’m not the one who should be, he’s the one. But I am nevertheless. I couldn’t bear to tell it to an outsider, to put it on record, to file a complaint — it’s so intimate. Like taking off all your clothes in public. I can hardly bring myself even to have you know about it. And I haven’t told you everything — not everything.”

He gave her a shake of the head, as though he knew.

“If I try to hide out in Pittsfield, he’ll find me sooner or later — it’s not that big a place — and come after me and force me to come back, and either way there’ll be a scandal. And I don’t want that. I couldn’t stand that. The newspapers …”

All at once, before they quite knew how it had come about, or even realized that it had come about, they were deep in the final plans, the final strategy and staging that they had been drawing slowly nearer and nearer to all these months. Nearer to with every meeting, with every look and with every word. The plans for her liberation and her salvation.

He took her hands across the table.

“No, listen. This is the way, this is how. New York. It has to be New York; he won’t be able to get you back; it’s too big; he won’t even be able to find you. The company’s holding a business conference there on Tuesday, with each of the regional offices sending a representative the way they always do. I was slated to go, long before this came up. I was going to call you on Monday before I left. But what I’m going to do now is to leave ahead of time, tonight, and take you with me.”

He raised one of her hands and patted it encouragingly.

“You wait for me here in the restaurant. I have to go back to the office, wind up a few things, then I’ll come back and pick you up — shouldn’t take me more than half an hour.”

She looked around her uneasily. “I don’t want to sit here alone. They’re already giving me knowing looks each time they pass, the waitresses, as if they sense something’s wrong.”

“Let them, the hell with them,” he said shortly, with the defiance of a man in the opening stages of love.

“Can’t you call your office from here? Do it over the phone?”

“No, there are some papers that have to be signed — they’re waiting for me on my desk.”

“Then you run me back to the house and while you’re doing what you have to at the office I’ll pick up a few things; then you can stop by for me and we’ll start out from there.”

“Isn’t that cutting it a little close?” he said doubtfully. “I don’t want you to go back there.” He pivoted his wristwatch closer to him. “What time does he usually come home on Fridays?”

“Never before ten at night.”

He said the first critical thing he’d ever said to her. “Just like a girl. All for the sake of a hairbrush and a cuddly negligee you’re willing to stick your head back into that house.”

“It’s more than just a hairbrush,” she pointed out. “I have some money there. It’s not his, it’s mine. Even if this friend from my days in Rome — the one I’ve spoken to you about — even if she takes me in with her at the start, I’ll need some money to tide me over until I can get a job and find a place of my own. And there are other things, like my birth certificate, that I may need later on; he’ll never give them up willingly once I leave.”

“All right,” he gave in. “We’ll do it your way.”

Then just before they got up from the table that had witnessed such a change in both their lives, they gave each other a last look. A last, and yet a first one. And they understood each other.

She didn’t wait for him to say it, to ask it. There is no decorum in desperation, no coyness in a crisis. She knew it had been asked unsaid, anyway. “I want to rediscover the meaning of gentle love. I want to lie in your bed, in your arms. I want to be your wife.”

He took hold of her left hand, raised the third finger, stripped off the wedding band and in its place firmly guided downward a massive fraternity ring that had been on his own hand until that very moment. Heavy, ungainly, much too large for her — and yet everything that love should be.

She put it to her lips and kissed it.

They were married now.

The emptied ring rolled off the table and fell on the floor, and as they moved away his foot stepped on it, not on purpose, and distorted it into something warped, misshapen, no longer round, no longer true. Like what it had stood for.

He drove her back out to the house and dropped her off at the door, and they parted almost in silence, so complete was their understanding by now, just three muted words between them: “About thirty minutes.”

It was dark now, and broodingly sluggish. Like something supine waiting to spring, with just the tip of its tail twitching. Leaves stood still on the trees. An evil green star glinted in the black sky like a hostile eye, like an evil spying eye.

His car had hummed off; she’d finished and brought down a small packed bag to the ground floor when the phone rang. It would be Garry, naturally, telling her he’d finished at the office and was about to leave.

“Hello — “ she began, urgently and vitally and confidentially, the way you share a secret with just one person and this was the one.

Mark’s voice was at the other end.

“You sound more chipper than you usually do when I call up to tell you I’m on the way home.”

Her expectancy stopped. And everything else with it. She didn’t know what to say. “Do I?” And then, “Oh, I see.”

“Did you have a good day? You must have had a very good day.”

She knew what he meant, she knew what he was implying.

“I — I — oh, I did nothing, really. I haven’t been out of the house all day.”

“That’s strange,” she heard him say. “I called you earlier — about an hour ago?” It was a question, a pitfall of a question. “You didn’t come to the phone.”

“I didn’t hear it ring,” she said hastily, too hastily. “I might have been out front for a few minutes. I remember I went out there to broom the gravel in the drivew — “

Too late she realized he hadn’t called at all. But now he knew that she hadn’t been in the house all day, that she’d been out somewhere during part of it.

“I’ll be a little late.” And then something that sounded like “That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

“What?” she said quickly. “What?”

“I said I’ll be a little late.”

“What was it you said after that?”

“What was it you said after that?” he quoted studiedly, giving her back her own words.

She knew he wasn’t going to repeat it, but by that very token she knew she’d heard it right the first time.

He knows, she told herself with a shudder of premonition as she got off the phone and finally away from him. (His voice could hold fast to you and enthrall you, too; his very voice could torture you, as well as his wicked, cruel fingers.) He knows there’s someone; he may not know who yet, but he knows there is someone.

A remark from one of the nightmare nights came back to her: “There’s somebody else who wouldn’t do this, isn’t there? There’s somebody else who wouldn’t make you cry”

She should have told Garry about it long before this. Because now she had to get away from Mark at all cost, even more than she had had to ever before. Now there would be a terrible vindictiveness, a violent jealousy sparking the horrors, where before there had sometimes been just an irrational impulse, sometimes dying as quickly as it was born. Turned aside by a tear or a prayer or a run around a chair.

And then another thing occurred to her, and it frightened her even more immediately, here and now. What assurance was there that he was where he’d said he was, still in the city waiting to start out for here? He might have been much closer, ready to jump out at her unexpectedly, hoping to throw her off-guard and catch her away from the house with someone, or (as if she could have possibly been that sort of person) with that someone right here in the very house with her. He’d lied about calling the first time; why wouldn’t he lie about where he was?

And now that she thought of it, there was a filling station with a public telephone less than five minutes’ drive from here, on the main thru-way that came up from Boston. An eddy of fear swirled around her, like dust rising off the floor in some barren, drafty place. She had to do one of two things immediately—there was no time to do both. Either call Garry at his office and warn him to hurry, that their time limit had shrunk. Or try to trace Mark’s call and find out just how much margin of safety was still left to them.

She chose the latter course, which was the mistaken one to choose.

Long before she’d been able to identify the filling station exactly for the information operator to get its number, the whole thing had become academic. There was a slither and shuffle on the gravel outside and a car, someone’s car, had come to a stop in front of the house.

Her first impulse, carried out immediately without thinking why, was to snap off all the room lights. Probably so she could see out without being seen from out there.

She sprang over to the window, and then stood there rigidly motionless, leaning a little to peer intently out. The car had stopped at an unlucky angle of perspective — unlucky for her. They had a trellis with tendrils of wisteria twining all over it like bunches of dangling grapes. It blanked out the midsection of the car, its body shape, completely. The beams of the acetylene-bright headlights shone out past one side, but they told her nothing; they could have come from any car. The little glimmer of color on the driveway, at the other side, told her no more.

She heard the door crack open and clump closed. Someone’s feet, obviously a man’s, chopped up the wooden steps to the entrance veranda, and she saw a figure cross it, but it was too dark to make out who he was.

She had turned now to face the other way, and without knowing it her hand was holding the place where her heart was. This was Mark’s house, he had the front-door key. Garry would have to ring. She waited to hear the doorbell clarinet out and tell her she was safe, she would be loved, she would live.

Instead there was a double click, back then forth, the knob twined around, and the door opened. A spurt of cool air told her it had opened.

Frightened back into childhood fears, she turned and scurried, like some little girl with pigtails flying out behind her, scurried back along the shadowed hall, around behind the stairs, and into a closet that lay back there, remote as any place in the house could be. She pushed herself as far to the back as she could, and crouched down, pulling hanging things in front of her to screen and to protect her, to make her invisible. Sweaters and mackintoshes and old forgotten coveralls. And she hid her head down between her knees — the way children do when a goblin or an ogre is after them, thinking that if they can’t see it, that fact alone will make the terror go away.

The steps went up the stairs, on over her, up past her head. She could feel the shake if not hear the sound. Then she heard her name called out, but the voice was blurred by the many partitions and separations between — as if she were listening to it from underwater. Then the step came down again, and the man stood there at the foot of the stairs, uncertain. She tried to teach herself how to forget to breathe, but she learned badly.

There was a little tick! of a sound, and he’d given himself more light. Then each step started to sound clearer than the one before, as the distance to her thinned away. Her heart began to stutter and turn over, and say: here he comes, here he comes. Light cracked into the closet around three sides of the door, and two arms reached in and started to make swimming motions among the hanging things, trying to find her.

Then they found her, one at each shoulder, and lifted her and drew her outside to him. (With surprising gentleness.) And pressed her to his breast. And her tears made a new pattern of little wet polka dots all over what had been Garry’s solid-colored necktie until now.

All she could say was “Hurry, hurry, get me out of here!”

“You must have left the door open in your hurry when you came back here. I tried it, found it unlocked, and just walked right in. When I looked back here, I saw that the sleeve of that old smock had got caught in the closet door and was sticking out. Almost like an arm, beckoning me on to show me where you were hiding. It was uncanny. Your guardian angel must love you very much, Linda.”

But will he always? she wondered. Will he always?

He took her to the front door, detoured for a moment to pick up the bag, then led her outside and closed the door behind them for good and all.

“Just a minute,” she said, and stopped, one foot on the ground, one still on the wooden front steps.

She opened her handbag and took out her key—-the key to what had been her home and her marriage. She flung it back at the door, and it hit and fell, with a cheap shabby little clop!— like something of not much value.

Once they were in the car they just drove; they didn’t say anything more for a long time.

All the old things had been said. All the new things to be said were still to come.

In her mind’s eye she could see the saw-toothed towers of New York climbing slowly up above the horizon before her at the end of the long road. Shimmering there, iridescent, opalescent, rainbows of chrome and glass and hope. Like Jerusalem, like Mecca, or some other holy spot. Beckoning, offering heaven. And of all the things New York has meant to various people at various times — fame, success, fulfillment — it probably never meant as much before as it meant to her tonight: a place of refuge, a sanctuary, a place to be safe in.

“How long does the trip take?” she asked him wistful-eyed.

“I usually make it in less than four hours. Tonight I’ll make it in less than three.”

I’ll never stray out of New York again, she promised herself. Once I’m safely there, I’ll never go out in the country again. I never want to see a tree again, except way down below me in Central Park from a window high up.

“Oh, get me there, Garry, get me there.”

“I’ll get you there,” Garry promised, like any new bridegroom, and bent to kiss the hand she had placed over his on the wheel.

Two car headlights from the opposite direction hissed by them — like parallel tracer bullets going so fast they seemed to swirl around rather than undulate with the road’s flaws.

She purposely waited a moment, then said in a curiously surreptitious voice, as though it shouldn’t be mentioned too loudly, “Did you see that?”

All he answered, noncommittally, was “Mmm.”

“That was the Italian compact.”

“You couldn’t tell what it was,” he said, trying to distract her from her fear. “Went by too fast.”

“I know it too well. I recognized it.”

Again she waited a moment, as though afraid to make the movement she was about to. Then she turned and looked back, staring hard and steadily into the funneling darkness behind them.

Two back lights had flattened out into a bar, an ingot. Suddenly this flashed to the other side of the road, then reversed. Then, like a ghastly scimitar chopping down all the tree trunks in sight, the headlights reappeared, rounded out into two spheres, gleaming, small — but coming back after them.

“I told you. It’s turned and doubled back.”

He was still trying to keep her from panic. “May have nothing to do with us. May not be the same car we saw go by just now.”

“It is. Why would he make a complete about-turn like that in the middle of nowhere? There’s no intersection or side road back there — we haven’t passed one for miles.”

She looked again.

“They keep coming. And they already look bigger than when they started back. I think they’re gaining on us.”

He said, with an unconcern that he didn’t feel, “Then we’ll have to put a stop to that.”

They burst into greater velocity, with a surge like a forward billow of air.

She looked, and she looked again. Finally, to keep from turning so constantly, she got up on the seat on the point of one knee and faced backward, her hair pouring forward all around her, jumping with an electricity that was really speed.

“Stay down,” he warned. “You’re liable to get thrown that way. We’re up to sixty-five now.” He gave her a quick tug for additional emphasis, and she subsided into the seat once more.

“How is it now?” he checked presently. The rearview mirror couldn’t reflect that far back.

“They haven’t grown smaller, but they haven’t grown larger.”

“We’ve stabilized, then,” he translated. “Dead heat.”

Then after another while and another look, “Wait a minute!” she said suddenly on a note of breath-holding hope. Then, “No,” she mourned quickly afterward. “For a minute I thought — but they’re back again. It was only a dip in the road.

“They hang on like leeches, can’t seem to shake them off,” she complained in a fretful voice, as though talking to herself. “Why don’t they go away? Why don’t they?”

Another look, and he could sense the sudden stiffening of her body.

“They’re getting bigger. I know I’m not mistaken.”

He could see that, too. They were finally peering into the rearview mirror for the first time. They’d go offside, then they’d come back in again. In his irritation he took one hand off the wheel long enough to give the mirror a backhand slap that moved it out of focus altogether.

“Suppose I stop, get out, and face him when he comes up, and we have it out here and now. What can he do? I’m younger, I can outslug him.”

Her refusal to consent was an outright scream of protest. All her fears and all her aversion were in it.

“All right,” he said. “Then we’ll run him into the ground if we have to.”

She covered her face with both hands — not at the speed they were making, but at the futility of it.

“They sure build good cars in Torino, damn them to hell!” he swore in angry frustration.

She uncovered and looked. The headlights were closer than before. She began to lose control of herself.

“Oh, this is like every nightmare I ever had when I was a little girl! When something was chasing me, and I couldn’t get away from it. Only now there’ll be no waking up in the nick of time.”

“Stop that,” he shouted at her. “Stop it. It only makes it worse, it doesn’t help.”

“I think I can feel his breath blowing down the back of my neck.”

He looked at her briefly, but she could tell by the look on his face he hadn’t been able to make out what she’d said.

Streaks of wet that were not tears were coursing down his face in uneven lengths. “My necktie,” he called out to her suddenly, and raised his chin to show her what he meant. She reached over, careful not to place herself in front of him, and pulled the knot down until it was loose. Then she freed the buttonhole from the top button of his shirt.

A long curve in the road cut them off for a while, from those eyes, those unrelenting eyes behind them. Then the curve ended, and the eyes came back again. It was worse somehow, after they’d been gone like that, than when they remained steadily in sight the whole time.

“He holds on and holds on and holds on — like a mad dog with his teeth locked into you.”

“He’s a mad dog all right.” All pretense of composure had long since left him. He was lividly angry at not being able to win the race, to shake the pursuer off. She was mortally frightened. The long-sustained tension of the speed duel, which seemed to have been going on for hours, compounded her fears, raised them at last to the pitch of hysteria.

Their car swerved erratically, the two outer wheels jogged briefly over marginal stones and roots that felt as if they were as big as boulders and logs. He flung his chest forward across the wheel as if it were something alive that he was desperately trying to hold down; then the car recovered, came back to the road, straightened out safely again with a catarrhal shudder of its rear axle.

“Don’t,” he warned her tautly in the short-lived lull before they picked up hissing momentum again. “Don’t grab me like that again. It went right through the shoulder of my jacket. I can’t manage the car, can’t hold it, if you do that. I’ll get you away. Don’t worry, I’ll get you away from him.”

She threw her head back in despair, looking straight up overhead. “We seem to be standing still. The road has petrified. The trees aren’t moving backwards anymore. The stars don’t either. Neither do the rocks along the side. Oh, faster, Garry, faster!”

“You’re hallucinating. Your senses are being tricked by fear.”

“Faster, Garry, faster!”

“Eighty-five, eighty-six. We’re on two wheels most of the time — two are off the ground. I can’t even breathe, my breath’s being pulled out of me.”

She started to beat her two clenched fists against her forehead in a tattoo of hypnotic inability to escape. “I don’t care, Garry! Faster, faster! If I’ve got to die, let it be with you, not with him!”

“I’ll get you away from him. If it kills me.”

That was the last thing he said.

If it kills me.

And as though it had overheard, and snatched at the collateral offered i(, that unpropitious sickly greenish star up there — surely Mark’s star, not theirs —at that very moment a huge tremendous thing came into view around a turn in the road. A skyscraper of a long-haul van, its multiple tiers beaded with red warning lights. But what good were they that high up, except to warn off planes?

It couldn’t maneuver. It would have required a turntable. And they had no time or room.

There was a soft crunchy sound, like someone shearing the top off a soft-boiled egg with a knife. At just one quick slice. Then a brief straight -into-the face blizzard effect, but with tiny particles of glass instead of frozen flakes. Just a one-gust blizzard — and then over with. Then an immense whirl of light started to spin, like a huge Ferris wheel all lit up and going around and around, with parabolas of light streaking off in every direction and dimming. Like shooting stars, or the tails of comets.

Then the whole thing died down and went out, like a blazing amusement park sinking to earth. Or the spouts of illuminated fountains settling back into their basins …

She could tell the side of her face was resting against the ground, because blades of grass were brushing against it with a feathery tickling feeling. And some inquisitive little insect kept flitting about just inside the rim of her ear. She tried to raise her hand to brush it away, but then forgot where it was and what it was.

But then forgot…

When they picked her up at last, more out of this world than in it, all her senses gone except for reflex-actions, her lips were still quivering with the unspoken sounds of “Faster, Garry, faster! Take me away — “

Then the long nights, that were also days, in the hospital. And the long blanks, that were also nights. Needles, and angled glass rods to suck water through. Needles, and curious enamel wedges slid under your middle. Needles, and — needles and needles and needles. Like swarms of persistent mosquitoes with unbreakable drills. The way a pincushion feels, if it could feel. Or the target of a porcupine. Or a case of not just momentary but permanently endured static electricity after you scuff across a woolen rug and then put your finger on a light switch. Even food was a needle — a jab into a vein …

Then at last her head cleared, her eyes cleared, her mind and voice came back from where they’d been. Each day she became a little stronger, and each day became a little longer. Until they were back for good, good as ever before. Life came back into her lungs and heart. She could feel it there, the swift current of it. Moving again, eager again. Sun again, sky again, rain and pain and love and hope again. Life again — the beautiful thing called life.

Each day they propped her up in a chair for a little while. Close beside the bed, for each day for a little while longer.

Then at last she asked, after many starts that she could never finish, “Why doesn’t Garry come to me? Doesn’t he know I’ve been hurt?”

“Garry can’t come to you,” the nurse answered. And then, in the way that you whip off a bandage that has adhered to a wound fast, in order to make the pain that much shorter than it would be if you lingeringly edged it off a little at a time, then the nurse quickly told her, “Garry won’t come to you anymore.”

The black tears, so many of them, such a rain of them, blotted out the light and brought on the darkness…

Then the light was back again, and no more tears. Just — Garry won’t come to you anymore.

Now the silent words were: Not so fast, Garry, not so fast; you’ve left me behind and I’ve lost my way

Then in a little while she asked the nurse, “Why don’t you ever let me get up from this chair? I’m better now, I eat well, the strength has come back to my arms, my hands, my fingers, my whole body feels strong. Shouldn’t I be allowed to move around and exercise a little? To stand up and take a few steps?”

“The doctor will tell you about that,” the nurse said evasively.

The doctor came in later and he told her about it. Bluntly, in the modern way, without subterfuges and without false hopes. The kind, the sensible, the straight-from-the-shoulder modern way.

“Now listen to me. The world is a beautiful world, and life is a beautiful life. In this beautiful world everything is comparative; luck is comparative. You could have come out of it stone-blind from the shattered glass, with both your eyes gone. You could have come out of it minus an arm, crushed and having to be taken off. You could have come out of it with your face hideously scarred, wearing a repulsive mask for the rest of your life that would make people sicken and turn away. You could have come out of it dead, as — as someone else did. Who is to say you are lucky, who is to say you are not? You have come out of it beautiful of face. You have come out of it keen and sensitive of mind, a mind with all the precision and delicate adjustment of the works inside a fine Swiss watch. A mind that not only thinks, but feels. You have come out of it with a strong brave youthful heart that will carry you through for half a century yet, come what may.”

“But— “

She looked at him with eyes that didn’t fear.

“You will never again take a single step for all the rest of your life. You are hopelessly, irreparably paralyzed from the waist down. Surgery, everything, has been tried. Accept this …Now you know — and so now be brave.”

“I am. I will be,” she said trustfully. “I’ll learn a craft of some kind, that will occupy my days and earn me a living. Perhaps you can find a nursing home for me at the start until I get adjusted, and then maybe later I can find a little place all to myself and manage there on my own. There are such places, with ramps instead of stairs — “

He smiled deprecatingly at her oversight.

“All that won’t be necessary You’re forgetting. There is someone who will look after you. Look after you well. You’ll be in good capable hands. Your husband is coming to take you home with him today.”

Her scream was like the death cry of a wounded animal. So strident, so unbelievable, that in the stillness of its aftermath could be heard the slithering and rustling of people looking out the other ward-room doors along the corridor, nurses and ambulatory patients, asking one another what that terrified cry had been and where it had come from.

“Two cc’s of M, and hurry,” the doctor instructed the nurse tautly. “It’s just the reaction from what she’s been through. This sometimes happens — going-home happiness becomes hysteria.”

The wet kiss of alcohol on her arm. Then the needle again — the needle meant to be kind.

One of them patted her on the head and said, “You’ll be all right now.”

A tear came to the corner of her eyes, and just lay there, unable to retreat, unable to fall…

Myopically she watched them dress her and put her in her chair. Her mind remained awake, but everything was downgraded in intensity — the will to struggle had become reluctance, fear had become unease. She still knew there was ‘cause to scream, but the distance had become too great, the message had too far to travel.

Through lazy, contracting pupils she looked over and saw Mark standing in the doorway, talking to the doctor, shaking the nurse’s hand and leaving something behind in it for which she smiled her thanks.

Then he went around in back of her wheelchair, with a phantom breath for a kiss to the top of her head, and started to sidle it toward the door that was being held open for the two of them. He tipped the front of the chair ever so slightly, careful to avoid the least jar or impact or roughness, as if determined that she reach her destination with him in impeccable condition, unmarked and unmarred.

And as she craned her neck and looked up overhead, and then around and into his face, backward, the unspoken message was so plain, in his shining eyes and in the grim grin he showed his teeth in, that though he didn’t say it aloud, there was no need to; it reached from his mind into hers without sound or the need of sound just as surely as though he had said it aloud.

Now I’ve got you.

Now he had her — for the rest of her life.