Корнелл Вулрич - A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

They were beginning to be in love. The very air transmitted it, carried it to and fro from one to the other and back again. It had perhaps happened to them so quickly, she was ready to admit, because they both came to it fresh, wholehearted, without ever having known it before.

The June day was slowly ebbing away at last, in velvety beauty. The twin towers of the Majestic Apartments were two-toned now, coral where they faced the glowing river-sky, a sort of misty heliotrope where they faced the imminent starting point of night. The first star was already in the sky. It was like a young couple’s diamond engagement-ring. Very small, but bright and clear with promise and with hope.

New York. This was New York, on the evening of what was to have been the last day in the world — but wouldn’t be now any more. It had been a lovely day, a nice day, too nice a day to die.

They emerged at the Seventy-second Street pedestrian outlet, and sauntered north along Central Park West for a few blocks, until they’d arrived opposite the side-street her apartment was on. There they waited for a light, and crossed over to the residential side of the great artery, on which the headlights of cars in the deepening dusk were like a continuous stream of tracer-bullets aimed at anyone with temerity enough to cross their trajectory. There they stopped and stood again, a little in from the corner — in what they both hoped was to be only a very temporary parting — for she had to cross once more, to the north side of the street, to reach her door.

For a moment he didn’t seem to know what to say, and for a moment she couldn’t help him. They both turned their heads and looked up one way together. Then they both turned the opposite way and looked that way together. Then they looked at each other and they both smiled. Then the muteness broke too suddenly, and they both spoke at once.

“Well, I guess this is where—”

“Well, I suppose this is where—”

Then they laughed and there was no more constraint.

She knew he was going to ask her to dinner — the first of all the many that they’d most likely share together — and he did. First she was going to agree with ready willingness, and then she remembered the things that were waiting upstairs. Waiting just as she’d left them, from last night. Waiting dark and brooding all through the sunny, glorious day — for tonight. The pillow on the floor, the cigarette-dish. The little bowl of water with the handkerchief still soaking in it, the blindfold that was to have shut out the sight of death. She shuddered to think of them now. But more than that, she didn’t want them to still be there if she brought him up with her. She wanted to go up ahead and quickly disperse them, do away with them.

“Look, I’ll tell you what,” she said animatedly. “The next time — the very next — we’ll go to a restaurant, if you want to. But tonight let’s do this: let’s eat in. It’s a good night for cold-cuts.” She knew he wouldn’t misunderstand if she had him up so soon after meeting him; she already knew him well enough to know that. “I want you to go to Schultz’ Delicatessen, and pick up whatever appeals to you — I’ll leave that to you — and bring it up to the apartment. I’ll make the coffee.”

“Schultz’,” he said dutifully. “Where is it?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted with a chuckle and a handspread. “But I know you can find it in the directory. I can give you the number. It’s Exmount 3-8448. It’s the same as my own number, just twisted around a little. Promise me you won’t go anywhere else. Only Schultz. I have a very special reason for it. I don’t want to tell you what it is right tonight, but some day I will.”

“I promise. Schultz’ and nobody but Schultz.”

They separated. She started across the street on a long diagonal. She turned and called back: “Don’t take too long.”

“I won’t,” he answered.

Then she turned unexpectedly a second time.

“I forgot to give you the apartment-number. It’s Three—”

It was a big black shape. It was less like a car than an animal leaping at its kill. It was feline in its stealth, and lupine in its ferocity, big malevolent eyes blindingly aglow. Whether its occupants were drunk, or crazed with their own speed, or fleeing from some misdeed, it gave her no warning. It came slashing around the corner like the curved swing of a scimitar.

She was caught dead-center in front of it. Had she been a little to one side, she might have leaped back toward her companion; a little to the other, she might have leaped forward to the safety of the empty roadway alongside it. She tried to, but at the same moment it swerved that way, also trying to avoid her, and they remained fixed dead-center to one another. Then there was no more time for a second try.

She didn’t go down under it. It cast her aside in a long, low parabola. Then it slowed, then it stopped, with a crazy shriek that sounded like remorse. Too late.

She lay flat along the ground, but with her head propped up by the sharp-edged curbstone it had crashed against. The sound it had made striking was terminal. There could be no possibility of life after such an impact.

And it had been too nice a day to die.

I lay there watching her with that languor some moments have. Such moments have. After-moments, moments of cessation.

On her side of the room there was movement, on my side none. We were the room apart; but we weren’t far, it wasn’t a large room. She moved twice each time; once in actuality, once in the mirror before her. Not flurried movements, but deft, economical, practiced movements. Each one with a purpose, each one no more than its purpose required. Calm to watch, soothing to watch, lulling.

On my side of the room nothing moved but the laced strings, like yarn, toiling above the two cigarettes left pointing together tip-to-tip from opposite rims of the little clay dish. At times they severed from one another in mid-air, those two strings, made an open loop, but quickly caught one another up again, followed the rest of their ascent tangledly intermingled.

I kept watching, not these, but the other, deft, economical, practiced movements across the room. The comb was reinserted in the handbag. Then she took the lipstick out. Made just two brief passes with it, to the right for the upper lip, to the left for the lower. Then she put the lipstick back. Her hand stayed on a moment, hidden down there. Then she found the money I had put into the handbag before.

She didn’t bring it up and reveal it, but I knew that was what her hand was on, that was what she had found down there. By some momentary halt of her arm, fluidly mobile until now, and by the intent look of her eyes, following the line of her arm downward.

I knew she was even counting it, by unaided thumb alone, or perhaps judging its plurality by the thickness-of-layer it offered her tracing thumb. But she never brought it up, and I liked her for that. There were already several other things to add that newest liking to.

Then she looked over at me and said, “You didn’t have to do that,” but with polite insincerity. It was as insincere as it was polite, but it was as polite as it was insincere.

Not to expose it to view, that had been chic, I reflected to myself; but not to have acknowledged it at all, that somehow would have smacked of underhandedness, surreptitiousness. A quality that I liked her for being entirely without, as far as I had been able to discover, up to this point.

I said, “But what would you have done if I hadn’t?” But in a lazy, objective sort of way, as if in academic question, not likely to give offense.