Ed McBain: Cinderella

She was not wearing sunglasses this time around.

No mask, so to speak.

Her eyes were as blue as chicory in bloom.

Yesterday — in jeans and a tank top, the sunglasses hiding her eyes — he’d thought she was a teenager.

Today — at three in the afternoon, wearing a short, shiny, fire-engine red rainslicker over a pleated white skirt and shiny red boots, a blue scarf over her short auburn hair — she looked twenty-three or four, all red, white, and blue in rehearsal for the Glorious Fourth yet two weeks away.

“Hello,” he said.

The blue eyes flashed.

“Matthew Hope,” he said.

“Who?”

But she knew him; he knew she recognized him.

“Yesterday,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. Curtly. In dismissal. “Yes.”

And walked out into the rain.

The wonder of it. Saturday morning. Rain beating against the windowpanes. Lightning flashing and thunder booming. And Susan in bed beside him.

“Aren’t you glad Joanna decided to spend the night with a friend?” Susan asked.

“Yes,” Matthew said. “What time do you have to...?”

“Eleven.”

“Then we have—”

“Hours yet.”

The sound of the rain outside.

A car swishing by on wet asphalt.

“How many women have been in this bed since the divorce?” she asked.

“Not very many,” he said honestly.

“How come you didn’t buy a motorcycle?”

“A motorcycle would scare me to death. Besides, I couldn’t afford one,” he said.

“Ah, poor put-upon,” she said. “All that alimony. Is that why you’re courting me? So you can stop paying—”

“ Courting you?”

“Well, what? Dating me? God, I hate that word, don’t you? Dating? It sounds like ‘Happy Days.’ Don’t you hate grownups who say I’ve been dating So-and-so. Dating!” She rolled her eyes. “Courting is much nicer. Anyway, courting is what you’ve been doing. I looked the word up.”

“What do you mean? When?”

“When you started courting me,” she said solemnly.

He almost burst out laughing. It was...

He was...

It was just that he felt so goddamn happy lying here beside her, listening to her talking nonsense about courting as opposed to...

“I am not courting you,” he said, and did burst out laughing.

“Yes, you are,” she said, and began laughing with him. “You are , Matthew, admit it. This is infinitely more serious—

“Oh, yes, in finitely,” he said, laughing.

“—than when we were kids. That was dating. This is courting. Now stop being so silly.”

“What was the definition?”

“What def... oh. Well, it means ‘to woo.’”

“To woo ? Oh my God,” he said, and burst out laughing again.

“That’s not my definition, it’s American Heritage ’s.”

“To woo ?”

“To woo, yes. Which means ‘to attempt to gain the affections or love of.’”

“And that’s what I’ve been doing, huh?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Of course,” she said. “Do you want to know the derivation?”

“I can hardly wait.”

“It’s from the Old French cort , from the Latin cohors , the stem of which is cohort .”

“Okay, now I get it. Cohorts.”

“Courtesan is from the same root.”

“What do you think of my root?” he said.

“You’re the dirtiest man I’ve ever met in my life, that’s what I think.”

“You know something?” he said.

“No, don’t say it,” she said.

“What was I about to say?”

“I don’t know. Yes, I do. And I don’t want you to say it. Not yet.”

“Okay,” he said.

They both fell silent.

Rain plopped on the leaves of the palms outside.

“Why won’t you let me say it?” he asked.

“Because maybe it’s not me, not us, maybe it’s... I don’t know, Matthew, I really don’t. Maybe it’s the new haircut, maybe it makes me look like someone very different, and maybe you’ve fallen—”

She cut off the sentence.

“Maybe you’ve been attracted to someone who looks different but who’s only the same person underneath and you’ll be disappointed when you discover it’s still only me after all.”

“I love you, Susan,” he said.

“Oh, shit,” she said, “you had to go say it, didn’t you?” and began weeping.

He took her in his arms.

“I love you, too,” she said.

Sobbing now.

“I’ve always loved you.”

Tears rolling down her face.

“Hold me.”

She had left ten minutes ago, and he could not stop thinking about her.

But as he showered, he wondered if what she’d said wasn’t perhaps true.

Maybe it was only the haircut after all, a surface alteration, the same old Susan underneath, a woman who — by the time the divorce happened — was a stranger to the girl he’d married in Chicago. And a stranger to Matthew. And, by that time, a stranger he didn’t very much like.

So here was Susan in the here and now — not physically here, she was already on her way to pick up Joanna, but here in his mind — two years later, give or take, and not an hour ago he’d told her he loved her. He did not think he was the sort of man who used those words as cheap currency in an easy market. He had meant what he’d said, and he was bewildered now by his reaction to a woman he’d known and loved, later known and disliked, still later known and abandoned, and now knew (or did he?) and loved (or did he?) all over again.

Maybe he was only in love with a goddamn haircut.

Change a woman’s hair, you change the woman.

Cut it short, put her in a yellow dress, she’ll come swinging out of church like a hooker.

And yet, the same woman underneath. Had to be. You looked into those dark eyes, wet with tears not an hour ago, and you saw Susan, no one else. People who saw her every day of the week — the people who worked with her, for example — probably hadn’t even noticed that she’d cut her hair and had it restyled. But someone like himself — well, look what had happened at the Langerman party. Hadn’t recognized her at all until those dark eyes flashed, and there was Susan.

The eyes were always the same.

Cut your hair, paint your toenails purple, it didn’t change you except for people who knew you only casually. To anyone else, the eyes were the clue to who you were and who you’d always be. The eyes. Brown, blue, hazel, green, it didn’t...

The eyes.

Blue.

He wished he had the photograph, but the photograph had been stolen when Otto’s office was burglarized.

He wished he could have it in his hand when she opened the door. Look at her face, look at those blue eyes, negate the short red hair, compare only eyes with eyes, nose with nose, cheeks with cheeks, face with face.

Without the photograph, he would have to rely only on memory.

It was eleven-thirty by his watch, still raining here on Whisper Key, the rain sweeping in over the bay and lashing the open corridor that ran along the outside wall of Camelot Towers. He knocked on the door to apartment 2C, knocked again.

“Who is it?” a voice called.

A man. The person she’d been visiting when he was here on Thursday.

“Matthew Hope,” he said. “You don’t know me.”

Silence inside.

He knocked again. “Hello?” he called.

“Just a minute, please.”

He waited.

The man who opened the door was wearing designer jeans and a long-sleeved red shirt, the sleeves rolled up onto his forearms. He was in his late twenties, Matthew guessed, with a pale oval face, hazel eyes, high cheekbones, and a pouting delicate mouth. Black hair swept high off his forehead in a sort of punk hairdo, was he gay?