Эд Макбейн - Barking at Butterflies and other stories

“Did we do the right thing?” Beth asked, and put her hand on my arm, and leaned into me.

“I hope so,” I said, and tried to light a cigarette.

“No, tell me,” she said. “Did we do the right thing, Gene?”

“I don’t know.”

“It was difficult.”

“It was very difficult, Beth.”

“Do you know how difficult it was for me that night?”

“What night?”

“The night we told him.”

“Very difficult,” I said.

“Yes, but do you know how difficult?”

“How difficult?”

“We were lovers,” she said.

I was looking full into her face, she was leaning very close to me, clinging to the bar and my arm, her eyes misting over. “Danny and I,” she said, and I nodded, and she said, “Long time ago.”

“Listen,” I said, “maybe we ought to get back.”

“Back where?” she said.

“Across the street.”

“What for? Nothing’s changed across the street.”

“Even so...”

“Nothing’s changed.” She lifted her glass, drained it, and put it down on the bartop. “I’ve never been lucky with men,” she said. “Never. Do you want another drink? Two more,” she said to the bartender. “Lasted longer with Danny than I thought it would,” she said. “I met another man, an instructor at Yale, I was up there trying out a new show. In New Haven, I mean.”

“Yes,” I said.

“And we fell in love.” She shrugged, looked to see if the bartender was fixing our drinks, and then said, “We were living on Fifty-eighth Street at the time, Danny and I. Little apartment on Fifty-eighth. I drove down from New Haven at three in the morning. On the Merritt. You know the Merritt?”

“Sure, I know the Merritt.”

“It was empty. This was three o’clock in the morning. Danny was in bed when I got back to the apartment. Everything was very quiet. I had to tell him. I figured that was best. Not to lie about it, not to pretend everything was... the same. So I sat on the edge of the bed, it was very quiet, I don’t know, it was almost, I don’t know, the building was so still . I said, ‘Danny, it’s finished.’ ”

“Martini straight up, and a scotch on the rocks,” the bartender said.

Beth picked up her glass. She sipped a little of the whiskey, and then said, without looking at me, “Danny wouldn’t believe it. He said, ‘No, Beth, it isn’t true.’ It was so goddamn quiet in that building. I told him there was another man, and he just kept saying, ‘No, no,’ and you could hear this awful silence everywhere around us, as if the world had already come to an end. ‘No, no,’ he kept saying, and I said, ‘Please understand, Danny.’ ”

“Let’s get back,” I said. “Beth, I want to see what’s happening.”

“So last week, I did the same thing to him all over again. And I asked him to understand again.” She lifted her glass and drained it. “I did it for your play,” she said.

“I know you did.”

“I don’t mean hiring him. That was for me . To square it, to make amends for having kicked him out. Give him something back, you know? A chance. But firing him was for you and your play.” She shook her head. She was very close to tears. I kept watching her. It all seemed suddenly senseless. The play across the street was a failure.

“It had to be done,” she said, fiercely, her eyes snapping up at me, blue and hard and cold. “Sure, now that we’ve got a flop, it’s easy to say we should have stuck by him, seen it through with him, sure. But tell me something, Gene. Suppose the play had been a hit? Would it have been worth it then?”

And because I was drunk, I had no answer.

He was still very intoxicated when the pilot or the purser, or whoever it was, made the announcement. His head rolled over to one side, and he gazed through the window just level with his right shoulder and down to the ground below where he could see beginning pinpoints of light in the distance. He was wondering what it was the loudspeaker had announced, when a blond stewardess came up the aisle and paused and smiled. “Would you please fasten your seat belt, sir?” she asked.

“I would be happy to,” he answered. He smiled back at her, and then began looking for the seat belt, lifting his behind and reaching under him to pull it free, and then fumbling very hard to fasten it, while the blond stewardess stood patiently smiling in the aisle.

“May I help you, sir?” she asked.

“Please,” he said.

She ducked her head a little as she moved toward him past the empty aisle seat. Smiling, standing balanced just a bit to his left, she caught up both ends of the seat belt and was clasping them together when he lightly and impishly ran his right hand up the inside of her leg. She did not jump or scream or anything. She just continued fastening the seat belt, with the smile still on her face, and then she backed away into the aisle again, saying, “There you are, sir.”

He was enormously surprised. He thought Now that is poise, that is what I really call poise, and then he wondered whether there possibly hadn’t been a short-circuit from his brain to his hand, causing the brain command to be issued but not executed. In which case, nothing at all had happened and the girl’s tremendously impressive icy poise and aloofness, her ability to remain a staid and comforting mother-image in the face of danger was really nothing to marvel at, boy am I drunk, he thought.

He could not imagine how he had got so drunk since he absolutely knew for a concrete fact that it was an ironbound rule of airplane companies the world over never to serve any of its passengers more than two drinks of whiskey. He suspected, however, that he had been drinking a stupefying amount of booze long before he’d boarded the plane, though he couldn’t quite remember all of it too clearly at the moment, especially since everything seemed to begin spinning all at once, the lights below springing up to his window in startling red and green and white proximity, oh mother, we are going to crash, he thought.

He recognized at once, and to his enormous relief, that the plane was only banking for a turn on its approach to an airport, probably New York though he could not remember ever seeing lights like those on the approach to New York, scattered for miles, spilled brokenly across the landscape, oh that was a beautiful sight down there, he wished he knew where the hell he was.

The poised young blond stewardess opened the folding door between sections, and then walked briskly forward again, preparatory to taking her own seat and fastening her own belt. She was carrying a blanket or something, they always seemed to be tidying up an airplane just before it landed. He said, “Miss?” and when she stopped he noticed that she kept her distance. “Miss, where are we? We’re coming down someplace, aren’t we?”

“Yes?”

“Well, where are we coming down?” he asked.

“Los Angeles,” she said.

“Oh good,” he answered. “I’ve never been to Los Angeles before.” He paused, and then smiled. “Miss?”

“Yes, what it is? I’ve got to take a seat.”

“I know. I just wanted to ask you something. Did I put my hand under your skirt?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Just a little while ago?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“Is that all?”

“Yes, thank you.”

The stewardess smiled. “All right,” she said. She started up the aisle again, stopped, turned back, leaned over, and whispered, “Your hands are cold.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“All right,” she answered, and smiled, and left.

He pressed his forehead to the glass and watched the lights drawing closer and closer. He could see moving automobiles below now, and neon signs, and traffic signals blinking on and off, the Lionel train set his father had bought him for Christmas long ago, toy houses puffing smoke, reach down like God and lift the little automobiles, the movie with Roland Young where the huge pointing finger of God came down over his head. There was speed suddenly, a sense of blinding speed as the ground moved up and the airport buildings flashed by in a dizzying blur. He felt the vibration of the wheels when they touched.