Evan Hunter - Nobody Knew They Were There

I do not answer. I turn and start to walk away.

“No, wait a minute,” he says. He puts his hand on my arm, and then immediately pulls it back. He continues looking into my face. “That was your wife here yesterday, wasn’t it? Does she know you’re fooling around with Sara?” I still do not answer him. “Do you know Sara has a boyfriend in Arizona? She’s a nice girl,” he says. “Leave her alone.”

“I’ll leave her alone when she asks me to.”

“She already has,” Ralph says. “You just weren’t listening.”

He turns abruptly and walks off toward the park near Chatham Hall. I stand watching him for several moments and then turn in the opposite direction, toward Seth Wilson’s apartment on North Harrington.

Seth answers the doorbell on the fourth ring.

He is wearing only a blue flannel robe and buckle ski boots. He sees my puzzled look and says, “I’m breaking them in. Do you ski?”

“i ski.”

“You have to break them in,” he says, and shrugs.

“Is Sara here?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“I don't think you want to see her, Mr. Sachs.”

“I think I do want to see her. Where is she?”

He stands in the doorway silently, blocking my way. He is smaller than I am, but stronger. And younger. Infinitely younger.

“Let’s not hassle,” he says. “Come back later. Or better yet, tomorrow morning. She should be fine by them.”

“What do you mean? What's the matter with her?”

“Nothing serious. She's drunk.”

“You're lying.”

“Mr. Sachs, she has been drunk since approximately eight o'clock last night. She…”

“Sara?”

“I believe that’s the lady we’re discussing,” Seth says. “She got here about four o’clock yesterday afternoon, said she needed to get away from it I figured…”

“Away from what?”

“From it, man. It. I thought at first she wanted to bust a joint, maybe drop some acid. But she…”

“You'd have given her acid?”

“Why not? Wouldn’t have been the first time. I’ve got some pretty good stuff right now, as a matter of fact Some white owsley, are you familiar?”

“No.”

“Best you can get. You drop something like green flats, you’re swallowing strychnine, speed, all kinds of shit mixed together, you never know. But this is good stuff.” He shrugs. “All academic. Sara wasn’t having any. ‘No dope,’ she told me, ‘absolutely no dope.’ So she drank instead.” He smiles. His teeth are very white against his black skin. “And drank And drank. And drank. Slept a little last night, but started in again first thing this morning.”

“Where is she? I want to see her.”

He studies me in silence for a moment. Then he shrugs, and steps back out of the doorway. “The bedroom,” he says.

I move past him and into the living room, W. C. Fields pering at me over his spread cards, the piano on my right, through the door into the kitchen, and then turn sharply left and walk into the room with the paper stars on the ceiling. Sara is on the bed. She is wearing blue jeans and a white cotton blouse. The top button of the jeans is open. The bed under her is drenched with perspiration. Her hair is matted to her forehead. I lean over her. “Late,” she mumbles, “late,” and then rolls away toward the wall and covers her face with her hands. There is a comforter at the foot of the bed. I draw it up over her, and she immediately kicks it off, and says, “Oh God, late, he’s going to die, oh God,” and then sighs heavily, and crosses her arms over her chest and tucks her hands into her armpits, as if she is cold. I draw the comforter over her again. This time, she does not kick it away.

I go into the living room where Seth is standing in his flannel robe and buckle boots.

“She’ll be okay,” he says.

“Why’d you do this to her?”

“She did it to herself,” Seth says. “Man, don’t bug me. Sara’s a big girl now. She does what she wants to do.”

“I’m taking her out of here.”

“Not right now,” Seth says. “Let her sleep it off.”

“I’ll wait”

“Fine. We have things to talk about, anyway.”

“We have nothing to talk about, Seth.”

“How about the bridge?” he says.

He is standing before the poster of W. C. Fields. The effect is one of Fields peering simultaneously over his cards and Seth’s shoulder, waiting for my response. I recognize all at once that this is not a game of chance, not the way they play it. Everyone in town seems to know about the goddamn bridge. If I get away from it alive come Saturday, it’ll be a miracle.

“What bridge?” I say.

He does not answer. Instead, as though remembering he must break in the buckle boots, he begins clomping around the living room, walking in a wide circle that takes him to the picture window and past the easy chair and the hanging mobile and the upright piano and around in front of the couch and back to the window again, the whole house shaking with his heavy tread. In the other room Sara again mutters, “Late, or God, late.”

“What bridge?” I ask again.

He does not stop his circular clomping. As he moves past me and back again like some Frankenstein monster lost on his way to the showers, robe flapping about his muscular black legs, black thick-soled buckle boots thumping on the naked floor boards, he says, “The bridge Sara mentioned.”

“Better ask her about it then.”

“I did.”

He stops walking. The effect is highly dramatic, the silence deep and ominous after the noise of his boots.

In the other room, Sara says, “I always circle it.”

“Of course, drunks don’t often make sense,” Seth says, “but Sara…”

“Sara’s not a drunk!”

“True, true, I stand corrected. She was drunk when we talked, however.” He grins. “Still is, matter of fact.” He pauses. The grin drops from his face. “Would you like to hear what we talked about?”

“No.”

“I’ve got it all on tape, Mr. Sachs.”

“You taped Sara while…?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“You taped a girl who…?”

“I’m a writer, he says in explanation.

I do not know whether to hit him or laugh at him. The notion that he imagines himself free to tape the conversation of a girl who’s drunk, merely because he’s a writer, is ludicrous. And the reverse notion, that he imagines himself to be a writer, merely because he can tape a conversation, is equally ludicrous. But he has already brought out the machine, and he rewinds the tape now, locating the portion he wants me to hear.

I sit on the sofa before the poster of W. C. Fields and listen to the voices, one distinctly Sara’s, rambling and thick, the other Seth's, gently probing.

SARA: It’s no use, I blew it.

SETH: What do you mean, honey?

SARA: He’s forty-two…

SETH: Who is?

SARA: I blew it. So damn careful, and I blew it.

SETH: Honey, I don’t follow you.

SARA: What time is it?

SETH: Close to midnight.

SARA: Late.

SETH: It’s early yet, Sara.

SARA: No, no. Late. He’ll die.

SETH: Who’ll die?

SARA: Big jackass.

SETH: Who, honey?

SARA: On a stupid bridge.

SETH: Somebody you know going to jump off a bridge?

SARA: I circled it, you know. So damn careful.

SETH: The bridge?

SARA: Of course not the bridge. How can someone circle a bridge?

SETH: I don’t get you, Sara.

SARA: I don’t even know you.

SETH: You know me. This’s Seth here.

SARA: I mean, to tell you such personal things.

SETH: What’s so personal about a bridge?

SARA: Who’s talking about the bridge? That’s the second, plenty of time to worry about that.