Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

“If I don’t get some sleep soon, I’ll die,” Betty persisted.

“I’ll heat the coffee,” Margaret said.

She moved to the stove, and Betty watched her. She would have been lying to herself if she’d pretended that the sight of Margaret Gault did not delight her. When she looked at Margaret, she saw an ash-blonde whose brown eyes were fringed with thick lashes. She saw a well-shaped nose, and a full mouth with a wide lower lip. She saw an enviable bosom, a narrow waist, wide hips, good legs, an over-all picture of total femininity.

There was, she supposed, a certain flamboyancy to Margaret’s good looks. They bordered on the narrow edge of cheapness but only because of their plenitude; and generous endowment was not, to Betty, a saving grace. Had the hair been less blonde, the eyes less brown, the bust less emphatically pronounced, the legs turned not quite so splendidly, the woman could have been forgiven. Had the smile been less radiantly perfect... there, the smile. Even the smile. Margaret Gault carried a scar below her right cheek, the result of a childhood accident. The scar was in the shape of a small cross, almost invisible when her face was in repose. But when she smiled, the scar became a deep dimple in her cheek, enhancing the smile. The one-sided dimpling of her face, the sudden revealed whiteness of her teeth behind the red lips made her smile a startlingly radiant thing.

It was unfair. Her beauty remained consistent, and its consistency rankled. But, curiously, Margaret’s beauty was the only thing about her which Betty could find to dislike. And even that, paradoxically, delighted her traitor eye.

“I think he’s oversexed,” she said.

“Do you really?” Margaret asked.

“I think they all are, if you want to know the truth.”

Margaret shrugged.

Betty watched her shrewdly. Nothing would have pleased her more than the thought that something was amiss in the Gault relationship. Unfortunately, though, the signs as Betty read them did not point in that direction. Being an avid sign reader, but only of those which pertained to where she was going, she dropped the thought as quickly as she had picked it up.

“I wanted to watch Steve Allen,” she said. “I certainly don’t think that’s too much to ask after a day of running around after his monsters.”

“Do you take cream?” Margaret asked.

“And sugar. Six months she knows me, and she still asks.” She stirred her coffee and then sipped at it. “Steve Allen had Louis Jordan as his guest. I like him.”

“I do, too,” Margaret said, sitting down at the table opposite Betty.

“He sang this thing, ‘Beware, Brother, Beware.’ It’s a hot sketch. I was getting a kick out of it. That’s when Felix came in with his ideas. I can smell his ideas six miles away, even before he gets off the train. If it was up to Felix—”

“What else did he sing?”

“I don’t know. Felix turned off the set.” She leaned forward confidentially. “He carried me upstairs like a hero. Except that he had his hand under my skirt all the way. You don’t see that in the movies, Miss.” Betty chuckled in reminiscence. “I’ll tell you the truth, it wasn’t so enjoyable. I’ve got to be in the mood, and right then I was in the mood for Steve Allen.” Betty paused. “Do you ever feel that way?”

“What way?”

“As if you just don’t feel like it?”

“Yes.”

“Felix always feels like it. But always! There must be a difference between men and women. Don’t you find Don that way?”

“What way?” Margaret asked again.

“Always ready.”

“Oh. Yes. Yes.”

“Sometimes I don’t even feel like looking at him, let alone going to bed with him. Sometimes he bores me stiff.” Again Betty paused. “Does Don bore you?”

“No,” Margaret said quickly.

“Never?”

“No, he’s always very interesting.”

“Well, a girl like you...” Betty started, and then let the sentence trail.

Margaret stared through the kitchen window, past the chintz curtains, and she wondered why the women she knew eventually confided to her the intimate details of their married lives. She was not unaware of her good looks and she suspected that most women, as well as men, unconsciously equated beauty with sexuality. Their automatic assumptions annoyed her. In female company she invariably started the game at a disadvantage, putting women on the defensive the moment she stepped into a room. And even if she’d sat in a corner all night mentally reciting the Lord’s Prayer, no woman present could look at her without imagining that the most sensual thoughts lay concealed behind her pretty face.

Having reached the primitive conclusion that where there’s smoke there’s fire, they then progressed to the next level of their dubious reasoning. Margaret Gault automatically received attention from men, and the women assumed she provoked it by cold premeditation. They all wanted to know what Margaret had that they didn’t have — even though the answer smacked them squarely between the eyes. And so they engaged her in conversation, and the talk was a curiously preordained thing. Having decided that a face so beautiful, a body so provocative, were made for nothing but sin, they then proceeded to impute to Margaret a sexual wisdom which, in the beginning, she truly did not possess. At the same time, they treated her like the classic and decorative dumb blonde who was good for one thing alone, so that it was almost impossible for her to venture into any other fields of conversation without being laughed off as an ambitious nitwit.

“... when it was all over. So what can you say to a man like that?” Betty stopped abruptly. “Are you listening to me?”

“What? Oh, yes, of course.”

“Where were you?” Betty wanted to know.

“I was just thinking... It’ll be winter soon.”

“You’re too cheerful for me, Miss,” Betty said. “I’m going home.”

“Have another cup of coffee.”

“No. Thanks.”

She was already out of the kitchen and walking through the living room. In the entrance hallway she paused. She seemed about to say something, then abruptly changed her mind, opened the door, and left. Margaret stood at the door, watching her cross the street. The leaves whipped about her small figure like a horde of multicolored birds in frenzied flight.

The telephone rang.

For a terrified moment Margaret stood frozen at the door. The piercing clamor of the phone shrieked through the silent house.

“I’ll let it ring,” she said aloud, and then she began counting the rings — three, four, five ...

“I’ll let it ring,” she said again, hearing her own words in the stillness of the hallway, hearing the phone shrilling in the kitchen — eight, nine, ten ...

She closed the door and walked through the living room, and then to the phone, where it rested on the counter top near the sink. She stared at it, biting her lip, not wanting to pick it up. And then her hand reached out, and she took the receiver from the cradle and held the phone to her ear, not speaking for a moment, waiting, not knowing for what she was waiting.

When she spoke, her voice was very low.

“Hello?” she said.

“Margaret?” the voice asked.

“You,” she said.

“People sing songs about Indian summer,” Altar said, “but they very rarely recognize it when it’s all around them.”

“Like the Lucky Pierre joke,” the blonde said. “Everybody knows the punch line, but nobody remembers the story.”

“That’s not exactly what I meant, doll,” Altar said. He glanced at Larry and added, “She’s stupid, but she’s a doll.”

Coming from Altar, the Broadway cliché sounded like an accurate description. The blonde was a doll, a round doll’s face and round blue doll’s eyes and a doll’s Cupid’s-bow mouth. There was nothing doll-like about her body, though, or about the way she managed to cross her legs with expert abandon on the front seat of the convertible. She was, Larry realized, one of the few single women with whom he’d come into contact socially for a good many years, and he found her realistic approach to the basic necessities of life bewildering but refreshing.