Эд Макбейн - Running From Legs and Other Stories

When she came back into the living room, Bobby was still watching television. He did not look at Laura as she came into the room.

She sat beside him on the sofa and, without preamble, said, “About Nessie.”

“What about her?” Bobby asked.

He still did not turn away from the screen, where a band of hapless cowboys were being ambushed at a waterhole by a larger band of Indians.

“Do you find her attractive?” Laura asked. She was not at all asking about Nessie Winkler’s attractiveness; only a blind man would not have noticed her startling beauty. She was simply asking whether Bobby was sleeping with her. Nor was she even asking that. She didn’t know what she was asking. Maybe she only wanted to know if he still loved her.

“I think she’s a good-looking woman, yes,” Bobby said.

“That doesn’t answer my question,” Laura said, and became immediately frightened of what might follow. She did not want this confrontation. She had been foolish to bring it to this dangerous point in the short space of several sentences.

Bobby turned from the television screen. His eyes met hers. Blue, steady, level — challenging. Evenly spacing his words, stretching them out interminably, he said, “What, exactly, is, your, question?”

Tell him, she thought.

Tell him the question is one of trust; you either trust someone completely, or you don’t trust him at all.

Tell him you stopped trusting him five years ago.

Tell him you would appreciate it if he kept his whores out of your home where they only embarrass and humiliate you before the hired help.

Tell him, damn it!

“Well?” he said.

She was trembling.

She smiled and said, “I forgot the question.”

His eyes held hers a moment longer, as if to make certain the matter had been finally and irrevocably put to rest. He turned back to the television screen.

“I think...” Laura started.

“Yes?” he said.

“I think I’ll go down for a walk.”

“At this hour?”

“I need some air.”

“It’s still raining, isn’t it?”

“I think it’s let up.”

“Suit yourself,” Bobby said, and shrugged.

Laura walked out into the entrance foyer. She took her yellow slicker and rain hat from the closet, put them on, and let herself out of the apartment.

The streets glistened with reflected light, green and yellow and red from the traffic signals, white from the overhead street lamps, a warmer white from the headlights of infrequently passing automobiles. The rain had indeed stopped. The city smelled fresh and clean.

Laura walked.

There was something evocative about the scent of the streets and the sound of rainwater rushing along the curbs. She could remember coming downstairs after summer thunderstorms when she was a child, taking off her shoes and socks against her mother’s wishes, splashing in the curbside puddles. She could remember being fifteen and wildly infatuated with a boy named Charlie, with whom she’d walked dizzily through a springtime city washed by rain. And she could remember meeting Bobby — in the rain.

What do I do now? she wondered.

Do I confront him the way I started to do five minutes ago?

What do I say?

Look, Bobby, enough is enough, I want out. I’m thirty-one years old, there’s still a life ahead of me if I can find the courage to reach out for it. I don’t have to stay married to a man who’s got his hands all over every new girl in town, the hell with that.

But is that what I really want to do?

Throw away nine years of marriage because my husband has a few minor flirtations... or adventures... or affairs... or whatever the hell you choose to call — damn it, I choose to call them infidelities! He has been unfaithful to me!

But...

Even so...

Do I... do I break up a marriage because of infidelity? Even the word sounded old-fashioned. Wouldn’t it be better, really, to look the other way, pretend it never happened, pretend it wouldn’t happen again?

Like the rainstorm, she thought.

It had been raining at ten o’clock when Bobby explored Nessie’s smooth white flesh under a similarly white tablecloth. But the rain had stopped shortly after midnight, and now the streets smelled fresh and clean. There was hardly even a memory of the storm now.

Wasn’t that the best way, after all?

Banish each sudden storm to a safe distance in the past, and then quickly forget it?

Bobby was a good provider. The children had a good father. He was handsome, witty, hard-working, and fun to be with most of the time.

Count your blessings, she thought. You’ve got everything you want or need. He probably loves you to death. It’s just that he has a roving eye. It’s the same in every marriage. Live with it. Forget it.

The hollow reassurances echoed noisily in her mind, raising a mental clatter so overwhelming that at first she wasn’t certain she’d heard the other sound at all. She stopped mid-stride, stood stock still on the sidewalk, heard the click of the traffic signal as the light changed to red at the end of the block.

Silence.

And then the sound again.

A whimper.

She turned toward the brownstone on the right.

The woman lay crouched in the far corner of the small courtyard, in the right angle formed by the facade of the building and the side of the stoop leading to the front door. She was wearing a black coat, and Laura could barely see her until she moved closer to the low iron railing that surrounded the courtyard.

She peered deeper into the gloom.

The woman whimpered again, and Laura went immediately to her. The woman’s coat was open, her clothes disarrayed, her dress pulled up over rain-spattered pantyhose.

The pantyhose were jaggedly torn.

At first, they didn’t recognize each other.

The courtyard was quite dark, and the woman was crouched into the deepest corner of it, as if seeking anonymity there. She looked up as Laura knelt beside her, and flinched as though expecting to be struck. Her eyes were unfocused, she continued whimpering piteously, and then the whimper changed to a name, and she repeated the name over and over again — “Oh, Mrs. Hollis, oh, Mrs. Hollis, oh, Mrs. Hollis” — as if the litany would invoke the past and somehow change it to a brighter present. Laura was startled at first to hear her name, and then she looked into the woman’s face — and saw that it was Lucille.

She leaned in close to her.

Lucille was trying to tell her what had happened. She was not articulate to begin with, and shock now rendered her almost unintelligible. Laura gathered that she and Mrs. Armstrong had parted outside the building, the cook to walk toward Lexington Avenue to board a subway train, Lucille toward Fifth to catch a downtown bus. The man had confronted her suddenly... stepping out of a doorway... ramming his forearm across her throat... knife point coming up, gleaming in the dull glow of the street lamp further up the street. He’d forced her into the courtyard, into the darkness... forced her legs apart... slashed her pantyhose...

“I didn’t know anybody was on the street with me, I didn’t hear a thing, didn’t see a thing until he... until he...”

Suddenly Lucille was sobbing.

And Laura began to tremble.

She trembled with rage and with fear.

Seeing Lucille this way, vulnerable and exposed, whimpering like a small animal that had been mercilessly beaten, Laura wanted only to kill whoever had done this, find the man who had so abused this woman and simply and swiftly kill him.

At the same time, she was terrified that the man might suddenly appear again, spring out of the darkness to claim her as his next victim, overpower her as he had Lucille, leave her quaking and whimpering on the stone floor of the same courtyard.