Эд Макбейн - Strangers When We Meet

“Look out there on the dance floor,” Ramsey said. “You see that tall guy with the glasses? That girl he’s dancing with isn’t his wife. Look at where his hand is.”

Everyone looked.

“All right, all right,” Felix said.

“Who’s more honest?” Ramsey asked. “Them or the ones who go to bed? Who’s crazy?”

“Is that your point?” Felix asked.

“That’s my point.”

“Okay, you made it. Now let’s talk about the weather or something.”

Ramsey chuckled. “I always distrust the ones who don’t want to discuss it,” he said.

“Sure,” Felix answered, smiling.

“Doesn’t anybody want to dance?” Arthur asked.

“Come on, honey,” Felix said and lovingly he took Betty into his arms.

The Picasso print of the boy leading the horse had been his favorite and now the moving man lifted it gingerly from the wall and carried it past Eve to the front door. She could remember when they’d bought the print. It had been a bitter cold day in January and they’d stopped at the museum only to escape the frigid streets. She watched as the man put the framed print into the truck, and then another man carried out the Saarinen chair which had cost them something like three hundred dollars, their one extravagance when they were first married and furnishing the three-room apartment they had in the Bronx.

She watched the chair move out of the house, and she marveled at how quickly the place she had called her home could become nothing but a bare shell stripped of whatever personality its owners had given it. Standing in the living room as the moving men rushed past her like a silent demolition crew, she felt lonelier than she had at any time since the accident. She tried to put the horror of that night out of her mind now, the phone call from the harbor police, and then the wild rush to the hospital in the hope they’d been wrong, please, please let them have been wrong, and the terrible pallid stillness of the mortuary, the somber, embarrassed attendant and the swift, clean pain of looking into the dead face of what had been her husband and knowing it was over.

I must not think about it now, she thought. Life goes on. I must not think about it.

Alone, she stood in the living room as the furniture which had surrounded her life was moved into a truck backed to the curb. How easily they take apart a home, she thought. How easily they pack a life into the back of a truck. This afternoon she would move into the apartment on Fifth Avenue with her parents. Her furniture would go into storage, and she would become a guest in the apartment which had once been her home. If she ever thought back to Pinecrest Manor again, it would only be with pain. Her loneliness was a completely engulfing thing. She did not know what was ahead for her. A job, she supposed. She could not, after all, ask her father to assume the responsibility of her and her two children, nor did she want to. A job then, and perhaps her own apartment eventually and a nursery-school arrangement for David, and a woman to help with the house. A new life alone. She had always believed her life was set, its course charted. And now...

The living room was empty.

Leadenly, Eve looked at the blank walls.

She wondered again about that night in August, and again she told herself that he really truly was going on a trip alone, and that he was coming back to her at the end of that trip. And this she believed, and this she would always believe until the day she died.

One of the moving men came to her. He wiped his forehead and said, “That looks like it, lady. Is there anything else?”

Eve shook her head and said, “No, there’s nothing else.”

And then she walked out of the house and did not even try to look back at it.

The girl with Roger Altar was a honey blonde with bright blue eyes. She unbuttoned her blouse and said, “This is a great house. I’ve never been in a pad like this one. I really dig it.”

“Good,” Altar said. “I had it built just so you could dig it.”

Outside the bedroom windows, the woods were a riot of fall color. The girl threw her blouse over a chair and walked to the windows. “It’s the end,” she said. “Who ever thought nature was so crazy? Did you design this house?”

“No,” Altar said.

“Who designed it?”

“A man named Larry Cole,” Altar said.

“A friend of yours?”

Altar hesitated. “Yes,” he said at last. “A friend.”

“We can really have a ball in this house,” the girl said. “This is the absolute most. Crazy!”

“Yeah,” Altar said.

For a moment his mind had gone back to the night of the hurricane and the last time he’d seen Larry. And for a moment he was possessed of an impulse he’d had ever since that night, a desire to rush to the telephone and call the widow of his architect and say, “Eve, I want you to know how sorry I am. Eve, I want you to know how much I thought of your husband. I just want you to know.”

He had never made the call. And once, sitting down to write a letter to Eve Cole, he had discovered that he — a professional writer — could not put what he felt into words.

The girl went to the big bed and rolled on it luxuriantly.

“Sunlight and love,” she said. “What a wild mixture!”

“Would you like a drink?” Altar asked. “I can use one.”

“Sure,” she said. “I’m game for anything. I dig this pad.”

Altar mixed the drinks silently. The girl stretched her arms to the ceiling, ecstatically digging the pad all over again. He handed her one of the drinks.

“Where do you get ideas for books?” she asked him.

“Oh, you just get them,” he said.

Someday he would make that call. Someday, he promised himself, I will call Eve Cole and pay my respects. Someday before it’s all forgotten.

“Let’s ball,” the girl said.

The pavement was covered with fallen leaves of red and yellow and orange and russet and gold. She walked with her head bent, and the wind grasped at the leaves and sent them rasping along the pavement, parting in whispers before her high-heeled stride. Her blonde hair blew free in the wind. With one hand, she held her collar pressed to her cheek, covering the small scar. High in the naked treetops, the wind sang a wild, keening song.

There was a wind on the night he died.

She could remember it rattling the front door of the small luncheonette. She could remember the young boy who sat at the end of the counter with a cup of coffee. She could remember the storm flailing the streets, and she could remember clenching and unclenching her hands in her lap as the clock steadily advanced past eleven. At twelve o’clock, the proprietor told her he was closing and asked her if she wanted a lift home. She had refused with an ever-mounting sense of dread, and then had stood in the doorway of the closed luncheonette and watched the storm gradually subsiding. By one o’clock she knew that he was not coming to her, and she went home. She learned of the accident from Betty Anders the next day. She almost screamed aloud, and then with carefully disguised anguish, she listened to the details. The news was all over Pinecrest Manor. She heard the story a hundred times that day, and that night she wept in the darkness of the bedroom and Don made no move to console her. When she awoke the next day, the Cape Cod seemed empty. She kept waiting for the telephone to ring, but it did not. She kept waiting for his voice and his expected “Hi,” but it never came. She cried again. She could not seem to stop drying. In the middle of a simple household chore, the tears would suddenly spring to her eyes. She cried for a week, and then there were no tears left to shed. Then she felt only the terrible emptiness of being alone again.

Now, walking with her head bent, with the leaves scattering before her on the pavement, she wondered if things did really end after all, if everything always came to a suddenly terrifying halt. She wondered about her own life, about the long empty years ahead, alone. And she shuddered, hunching her shoulders against the wind.