And, when the sleep-thickened eyes fluttered open for a second, he raised his arm and drove the jagged glass edges straight down into them.
1:15 AM
Bob looked up from his work as the kitchen door swung open and Ruth came in carrying a tray with sandwiches and milk. She was wearing her pink quilted robe and her blonde hair was drawn back in a ribbon-knotted horse’s tail. She smiled at him as she moved across the rug.
He put down his blue pencil.
“Honey, you should be in bed,” he scolded her.
“If you can work until one o’clock Sunday morning I can stay up to feed you.”
She set down the tray on the card table over the sheaf of papers he’d been working on.
“There,” she said.
He smiled tiredly and stretched.
“You look cute,” he said.
She leaned over and kissed him on the nose.
“That’s for flattery,” she said.
She got the hassock by the chair and drew it up to the table. Then she sat down on it and smiled up at him. A slight yawn parted her red lips.
“There, you are sleepy,” he said. “You should be in bed.”
“You’re sleepy too,” she countered. “Are you in bed?”
“I am the wage earner,” he said. “The bread-winner. The proletariat.”
“Eat.”
He picked up a sandwich and bit into it.
“Mmmm. Good,” he said.
“How’s the work coming?” she asked.
“Oh, pretty good, I guess.”
“Almost finished?”
“Just about,” he answered. He sighed and reached for the glass of milk. He took a sip and put it down.
“I’m sorry we had to miss that dance,” he said.
“Oh, don’t be silly,” she said. “Anyway—I guess I won’t be gallivanting around much any more.”
He grinned and patted her warm cheek.
“Little mother,” he said.
Then he leaned over and kissed her on the mouth.
“I take mustard,” she said.
“How romantic.” He yawned again.
“I bet you say that to all the expectant mothers.”
“Not all.”
“All the girls then.”
“Only those I love,” he said.
“That would be—” she estimated, “Ava Gardner, Lana Turner…”
“Marie Dressler.”
She made a tiny amused sound.
“How about Jane?” she said. “She’s a hot number.”
“She’s an odd number,” he said. “All she has is a body.”
He grinned at her. Her face had fallen a little.
He knew what was bothering her. Ever since Ruth had become pregnant she would keep looking in the mirror, searching for signs that she was getting fat. It bothered her. She always liked to look her best for him.
“Well…” she said.
“Honey, you know you’re the only one.”
“She is sort of pretty,” she said.
“Who, Marie Dressler?”
When she didn’t answer he pulled her hair gently.
“Now cut it out,” he said.
She took his right hand and pressed it to her cheek. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly.
“Okay.” He finished the sandwich. “Speaking of that,” he said, wiping his fingers on the napkin, “when is Stan going to wise up?”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Poor Stan.”
“Well,” he said, “he made his own problem. He knew what she was before he married her.”
“He never should have married her.”
“That is the observation of the week,” he said.
“I guess he still wants her, though.”
“The world is strewn with the remnants of men who wanted what they shouldn’t have had.”
She looked at her hands. “I suppose so,” she said.
“He just ain’t her speed,” he said.
“Oh, he’s not that old.”
“Stan is forty-six and Jane is twenty-five. He’s no Gregory Peck and she’s a good looking woman.”
She shook her head again.
“It’s a shame,” she said.
“Sure it’s a shame. Hey, aren’t you having some of this food?”
“No, I’d just get an upset stomach,” she said, “You know about ladies in my condition.”
He stroked her cheek once and smiled affectionately at her.
“What’ll we call him?” he asked.
“Him. It’s decided already?”
“Sure. A son for the McCalls.”
She sat there smiling to herself.
“Maybe,” she said.
He leaned over and kissed her.
“Love ya,” he whispered in her ear.
Then he straightened up, selected a cookie and bit into it.
“What was we talking about before we smooched?” he said. “Oh, yeah, I remember. Why Stan still hangs on the ropes.”
“I don’t know.”
“He ought to ditch her. She’s going to drive him out of his mind.”
“You think it’s that bad?”
“Sure it is,” he said.
He smiled at the look on her face.
“I know, I know,” he said. “You went to college with her and she’s always been your friend. Well, you can’t live in the past. Let’s face it, she’s a nympho. She’ll sleep with anybody.”
He reconsidered.
“Except maybe her husband,” he amended.
“Oh, she can’t be that bad. I won’t believe it.”
“Honey, anybody that would try to seduce Vince must be that bad.”
Ruth looked down at her hands again. She thought about Vince for a moment. Vince, so young and so eager. And so damned.
“Poor Vince,” she said. “It was a pity.”
“I know,” he said, “Well, Vince I can feel sorry for. That father of his.”
He shook his head. Then he smiled cheerfully at her. “Come on, let’s get off the subject. How about a brief discussion on a name for our seven-month-distant heir?”
“Don’t you have to work?”
“Oh, I can finish up in the morning. Right now I want to relax with my wife for a while.”
A look of pleasure crossed her face. He got up and helped her to her feet. They walked over to the couch and she sat down. Then he went over to the record player, put on a record and came back to the couch. As he sat down and put his arm around her the first strains of Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe filled the room.
Ruth cuddled close to him and lay her head against his shoulder.
He reached down and patted her stomach.
“Comfy, Guiseppe?” he asked.
“Is that what we’re going to call him?”
“Sure,” he said. “Guiseppe McCall; that’s a fine name.”
“Guiseppe McCall,” she said. “It has a ring.”
They sat in silence awhile, listening to the music and thinking about their coming child. While she listened and dreamed, Ruth looked up at her husband’s face, at his silky blonde hair, his straight nose, the strong chin line. She wanted to reach up and touch his slight beard. Emphatically, her right hand twitched in her lap and she made an amused sound to herself.
“Hmmm?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
Nothing, she thought, it was a good deal more than nothing. It was rapidly coming to the point where she adored him.
Sometimes she thought that maybe it was the child, maybe it was an instinct for love and protection in a needful time. But then she knew she’d felt this way before she’d become pregnant too; pregnancy had only made it worse. Or better.
She was afraid that sometimes it was too obvious. She dreaded making a pest of herself; men never loved that kind of clinging woman, she was sure. And yet there wasn’t a single detail of him that didn’t fascinate her. She watched him dress, admiring his tall, muscular body, pay
ing minute attention to each motion he made. Each morning she did that until he was dressed. Then she would rush into the kitchen and make breakfast.
She liked to watch him eat, enjoying the relish he gave each meal. She liked to watch him when he worked sometimes after office hours, bringing his briefcase full of papers to set out on the card table. She even liked to watch him shave; that’s how bad it was. Watching him do everything gave her the feeling of absorbing him completely, every detail of him. It gave her a strange yet certain feeling of safety; as if she belonged to him and was protected from all bad things.
She sighed and pressed against him.
“Now what are we going to call him?” Bob asked.
“Who?” she asked.
“Our son.”
“Mary?” she suggested.
“Not tough enough,” he said, “What about George?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
“Max?”
“Nope.”
“Sam, Tom, Bill, Phil, Jim, Len, Vince—oops, sorry, slip of the tongue.”
She didn’t smile.
“Wonder where he is,” Bob said.
“I don’t know,” she said.
She felt the other feeling now; the one that came whenever something was discussed that seemed to mar their happiness. It was silly to feel that way, she knew, as if she wanted to wear blinders or be like that sundial. What was the statement that went with it? I record only the sunny hours. Well, that was really silly. There was a lot of night in the world too.
But, at least, you didn’t have to think and ponder about things that were all over with. There was only one person who could let her past with Vince hurt them and that was her. She mustn’t dwell on the past, as Bob said.
“God, I’ll never forget that afternoon up in the agency,” he said, “It was—crazy.”
“Don’t,” she said.
“All right.” He smiled and kissed her cheek.
They sat listening to music some more. He tried to forget it but the memory of that scene stayed with him. Sometimes he would jolt up from the bed in the middle of the night, reliving it. The thunder storm, working alone in his office after a bad afternoon, and then, to top it all off…
He shook it off.
“Are we going to that party next Friday night at Stan’s?” he asked.
“It’s up to you, honey,” she said.
“Well, there’s no use lying; I don’t particularly want to go. Stan’s all right, but Jane gives me the creeps. I get the feeling she’s going to explode sometime right in my face; a million pieces of Jane Sheldon flying all over the apartment.”
“I get the same feeling,” she said. “At college, Jane used to throw herself around so much I wondered how she’d ever graduate.”
“Did she?”
“In the top ten per cent of the class.”
“My God. Wouldn’t you know it.”
He looked down at her and smiled as he stroked her soft hair. He shook his head slightly without her seeing it. How in hell she and Jane ever managed to stand each other’s company for three years at college, he’d never know. They were so utterly different. Jane was a hand grenade with the pin out. Ruth was…
No, you couldn’t pin a pat little metaphor on Ruth; she was too atypical.
Jane you could characterize. You could put her down in words. She was more like a taut spring than a woman, made of sharp lines and angles with no contour that was smooth or soft; stiff, high breasts, hips and buttocks flat and hard, and legs like taut pistons driving her on.
That was a woman, maybe, but not the kind of woman he wanted. It wasn’t that he’d been brought up so strictly; not that he was a momma’s boy who always sang within himself the old refrain of I want a girl just like the girl…
It was just that, after a man had lived a while, loved a while, been around a lot of women, he wanted a woman he could trust and be at ease with. One he could feel sensual heat with, sure; but not a heat that was so constant it started to consume. That was Stan’s trouble. You couldn’t burn at a constant heat without charring after a while.
No, you needed a girl you could relax with too. A marriage took place in all the rooms of an apartment.
Bob thought about the first time he’d met Ruth. He’d been doing publicity work on one of Vince’s concerts. One night Stan, Vince’s business manager, had held a party. One of those endless parties that seemed always to be going around Stan’s beleaguered head. It was there that he’d met Ruth.
He had liked her appearance; the neat, unaffected way she dressed, the well-scrubbed facade she presented. He liked her smile.
But the thing he’d liked most was her complete difference from Jane. Jane was tight and hard, always brittle, always dashing around the party from one person to another, cigarette in one hand, cocktail in the other; always pushing so hard to be terribly clever and terribly sophisticated. It was against the aura of pseudo-smartness that Ruth had stood out so strongly.
Was there a word that typified his Ruth? It wasn’t old-fashioned because that had connotations of prudishness that didn’t apply to Ruth. Maybe real was the word. She didn’t try to impress anyone. And that was the secret of her impression on him. Even now, after three years of marriage, after long intimacies and discoveries, she was still something new and vital to him. And the fact that she carried within her a tangible part of him was something even more exciting and wonderful.
He tightened his arm around her and she grunted.
“Easy, strangler,” she said.
He chuckled. Yes, with a wife like this he could even stomach Hilton, Hilton, Joslyn and Ramsay: Advertising. He thought about his office there, bright and clean, the grey wall-to-wall carpeting, the soft lights.
Then, all of a sudden, he was back to that day when Vince had come there. He hissed in disgust at not being able to rid himself of the memory.
“What’s the matter, darling?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Thinking about Vince?”
He looked at her in surprise. “How did you know?”
“Expectant woman’s intuition,” she said, half in amusement.
He sighed.
“He was quite a boy,” he said, “I wonder what kind of a life you would have had with him.”
“I don’t even want to think about it. That temper…”
She slid her arms around him suddenly.
“I love you, Bob,” she murmured.
Just the music undulating in the air. Bob pressed his cheek against her hair.
“I know, sweetheart,” he said, “I love you too.”
They sat there on the big couch and listened to the record. Ruth looked around the room at the bookshelves, at the furniture. She kept trying to put Vince out of her mind. It was a terrible memory. She had been a small town girl fascinated by his lean good looks, by his smile, by his ability to play the piano. Only when she saw his temper did she realize it could never work out. And then Bob had come along.
The music ended.
“Bed?” he said softly.
“All right.”
They rose leisurely and, while Bob turned off the phonograph, Ruth looked at what he’d been working on all night.
“Will it sell cars?” she asked.
“It better,” he said, “or we’ll have to put Giuseppe in an orphanage.”
“He wouldn’t like that.”
“That’s why this has to sell automobiles,” he said.
“It will, honey.”
Arms around each other they walked slowly across the room and he flicked off the light as they went into the bedroom.
1:50 AM
Vince crouched over the body of the unconscious guard and jerked the heavy pistol out of its holster. It felt good to have it in his hands, a solid comfort. When a man was excited and nervous he needed a crutch, and a pistol could be that crutch. A gun made him strong and it would frighten people. Most important it would hurt Bob. It would leave him dead—suddenly and completel
y—the way Vince wanted him.
His face twitched and his finger almost tightened on the trigger, so urgent was his desire to empty the pistol into Bob. The fact that Bob was so many miles away made Vince tremble with frustrated hate.
He straightened up and moved for the office door, anxious to get to the subway.
It had been ridiculously easy to overpower the old guard. The man had been sitting at the office desk, half slumped over in sleep. Vince had only to pick up the lamp and smash it across his head. The old man had crashed back in the chair without a sound. Vince had dashed around the edge of the desk and now he was almost free.
He jerked at the heavy door that led to the outside hall. At first he couldn’t believe that it wouldn’t open. His eyes widened as if he was surprised. A questioning sound filled his throat. He pulled harder, but the door remained fast. Vince’s breath caught and he almost lunged against the heavy metal.
Then he stopped and held himself. It was not the time for temper. He had to escape. He closed his eyes. Why didn’t the door open?
Then he opened his eyes. A key.
Now wasn’t that terribly difficult to deduce.
His lips trembled as he moved back for the office. Always the voice of Saul in the background like an inescapable prompter hissing his cues from behind the dark curtain. No matter where Vince went, no matter what he did, there was always some old remark of Saul’s that would fit the occasion. His teeth gritted together. If only he knew where Saul was, he’d kill him too.
Vince bent over the guard again and felt through his pockets until he found the ring of keys. Then he returned to the door. He kept listening carefully while he tried one key after another. The hallway was silent, but in his mind’s ear he could hear, ludicrously, an old movie house piano playing “escape” music. It taunted him while he sweated over the lock.
Then the door opened. He was free. All he had to do was get down the stairs and out of the building. No one could stop him now. He gripped the pistol tightly.
The heels of his shoes were hard leather and they clattered on the metal steps. He had to slow down and hold onto the railing to ease himself down as noiselessly as possible. He put the pistol into his side pocket. It made a comforting bulge. Vince liked the pressure against his right leg.
Third floor. He stopped suddenly and his face went blank. Quickly he leaned over the railing and looked down. A gasp cut short his breathing.