Evan Hunter: Nobody Knew They Were There

“I’m in love with someone,” she says in a whisper.

“Yes, I know.”

“I really am,” she says.

“Yes, yes.”

I ease her onto the pillow and begin kissing her. I kiss her mouth, and her closed eyes, and tip of her nose, and her ears, and her throat, and her breasts, and the wild tangle of her crotch. I touch her everywhere. She responds to me with genuine passion, though occasionally she sighs heavily and seems about to shake her head.

I talk to her all the while we are making love. I do not talk in bed with Abby, never, but with this girl, with this Sara, I am garrulous and lyrical. I tell her how I love to watch her move, the clean stride, the long swift look of her in boots and abbreviated skirt (I tell her that at the airport my first inclination was to run my hand up the inside of her leg to her crotch, that I had to use every effort of will to prevent myself from doing so and being arrested on the spot), the brown leather sombrero tilted wantonly over one eye, the long brown hair falling loose down her back, loose and free.

She listens while I cover her with kisses and conversation.

I tell her that I was furiously jealous last night when I called and found her line repeatedly busy, suspecting she was in deep and intimate conversation with sundry snotnosed college boys while I longed to hear her voice. I tell her that her voice excites me, even when she is being phony and haughty and precisely articulate. I tell her that I love the theatricality of her, the way she opens a package of cigarettes, or lifts a drink, or removes her contact lenses, the very dramatic way she has of performing unimportant tasks to make them somehow personally her own (had anyone ever really torn the red cellophane strip from a package of cigarettes before Sara pulled it free like the rip cord on a parachute?). I tell her I love the trappings of her, the leather headband that makes her look like a sullen Indian princess, her grandmother’s wedding band, the fresh-water pearl from the suicidal Chicago hack, the idiotic container for her contact lenses, with its single open eye socket where one of the blue rhinestones is missing. I tell her all this while we kiss and touch together, and she listens, and occasionally sighs as though in sorrow.

When I am inside her, when she is open to me, cradling me and enfolding me, intimate now I think, possessing her now I think, I whisper into her ear gutter talk of cunts and cocks and lustful fucking, and she listens quietly until at last we come not a heartbeat apart, and fall back against the pillows spent.

I kiss her often during the night. Her mouth is always there, receptive and responsive. She sleeps straddling my thigh, her legs scissored around me.

In the morning, when I awake, she is gone.

(Confirming my surmise that this is all a fantasy.)

She arrives at the hotel at the stroke of noon. The university bell tower is tolling the hour when the battered red Volkswagen pulls to the curb. A Negro is at the wheel. (I am forty-two years old, and the word “black,” drummed into my head as derogatory, still comes hard to me. But I am learning all the time.) Sara introduces us. His name is Seth Wilson. He is the university’s writer-in-residence fellow. He wears his hair in an Afro cut, and he ducks his head and smiles sheepishly when he takes my hand. His grip, however, is firm and strong. I immediately distrust him because: He is a writer and Sara has already exhibited a strong proclivity toward such types; he has no reason to smile the way he does unless he is hiding something; it is stupid to have him here on the morning I am going out to reconnoiter a bridge I expect to blow up; he is black, and the thing he is hiding with his guilty smile is his desire to chop off my head with a machete.

We stand awkwardly on the sidewalk in the middle of a Western mountain town, each of us separately wondering what the other has done or is doing to Sara. Race relations are not improved an iota. Sara breaks the deadlock by waggling her fingers at him and sending him off to write the Great American Novel.

“Do you want to drive?” she asks me.

“I thought maybe you had someone else in mind,” I say.

“What?”

“I thought maybe you wanted to take a few dozen other college kids along, explain to them that this is the bridge I’m going to blow up, you know, give them the exact time and date. I thought maybe that’s what you had in mind.”

“Seth is an old friend,” she says.

“And entirely trustworthy.”

“He knows nothing about any of this.”

“Yet.”

I start the car. We drive through the main street of the town in silence. She is wearing a long coat that affords only occasional glimpses of her legs.

“Have you been to bed with him?” I ask.

“Once.” She pauses. “But we didn’t do anything.”

“I'll bet.”

“Well, we necked.” She pauses again. “He has stars on his ceiling. Luminous little stars. I love his ceiling.” She seems to search for words, she is different today. The bored sophisticate is gone. There is only a little girl in a large black coat. “Actually, we talked mostly. He’s a very nice boy.” Her voice sounds wistful.

“Did you tell him you were in love with Roger Harris?”

“I tell everyone I’m in love with Roger Harris. Because I am.”

“Oh? Do you go to bed with everyone?”

“I’ve been to bed with only three people in my life. Roger, you, and Seth. And I didn’t do anything with Seth. Except neck a little. And talk.”

“And look at his luminous stars on the ceiling.”

“Yes, they’re lovely. I love little paper stars on the ceiling.”

This girl, this waif in the enormous black overcoat, is as phony as the one with the haughty expression. Her voice is almost a whisper, she speaks of paper stars in something like profound awe, she wears on her face a look of incandescent wonder. Her hands are folded in her lap like a third grader’s. I notice for the first time that her hair is caught in a pony tail at the back of her neck, fastened there with a wrought silver barrette (another souvenir of Arizona, no doubt). She is wearing flat black ballet slippers. She is lost in her big coat, poor girl, lost in a universe too immense for her, poor little lost darling who spends the night with a Negro looking up at his luminous stars and wondering about the mystery of it all. She is totally full of shit.

“Don’t be cross,” she says. “It’s such a beautiful day. Isn’t it a beautiful day?”

“Gorgeous.”

“Soon, they’ll all be gone. Leaf after leaf after leaf.” She turns to me suddenly, the coat opening over a quick flash of remembered knees. “Do you know what the plural of leaf is?”

I glance at her face. Her green eyes are bright with discovery. I am thinking that the only time she is honest is when she is in bed, and I am also beginning to wonder about that

“Of course I know what the plural of leaf is,” I say, and turn my eyes back to the road. We have come beyond the town now. The grade is beginning to slope gently upward as we enter the foothills.

“What is it then?”

“Leaves.”

“No. Leafs.” She nods. “One leaf, two leafs, three leafs. I love leafs, don’t you?”

“No, I love little paper stars.”

“Those, too,” she says, and hugs herself in satisfaction.

“Where’s the heater in this damn car?” I ask.

“There’s a little knob down there. Are you cold? Do you want me to turn it on?”

“Please.”

She begins twisting a knob somewhere near the floor.

“This is Seth’s car,” she says. “I know you’ll be pleased to learn that.”

“Yes, I’m thrilled.”

“It’s very much like Seth, actually. Sweet, and battered, and comfortable and dependable. It’s a nice little car.”