A late-cruising police car assigned to the midtown business district spotted him on the corner of Fourth and Central at eleven twenty-six. At first they thought he was just another lonely drunk. Then they got a good look at him…
The first time Runyan saw her, she was walking along in front of his apartment building. It was evening and he had just returned from work at Ye Oulde Corner Booke Shoppe, where he’d been a clerk for six years. It wasn’t that Runyan didn’t see a good many pretty girls. Possibly nothing would ever have happened if he hadn’t at that precise moment decided to light his pipe.
She walked past and he looked at her. He took his pipe from his pocket, tamped the unfinished mid-afternoon tobacco heel with his finger, and struck a match.
She glanced at him as she went by. It was nothing more than that; a casual, expressionless look at a rather undistinguished man standing in front of an apartment building, lighting his pipe.
Something happened to Runyan. He stared after her. His gaze snarled in the black hair tumbling from beneath a tan beret to very nice white-sweatered shoulders, the smooth tan skirt that held a sheen and shadowed pleasantly as she moved her long legs. She carried a glossy brown purse under her arm and her high heels went click-click.
The match continued to burn.
He watched her. She turned abruptly in at the door of the next apartment building, just beyond the broad alley.
She lives next door, Runyan thought.
The match burned his fingers. He dropped it and moved on down by the alley, then over to the entrance where she had vanished. He was still holding the pipe to his mouth.
He glanced around to see if anybody had noticed his abrupt preoccupation. Not a soul. The pinks and purples of twilight were fading past the ambers of dusk. He returned to his own apartment building, took the elevator to the third floor and went to his room.
As he unlocked his door, he realized he was still holding the pipe to his mouth. He put the pipe away, his mind pressing the aspect of very smooth nylon covering the most beautifully curved legs he’d ever seen.
He swallowed. The choking, elated sensation inside him wouldn’t back off.
His apartment was living room, bedroom, kitchenette and bath. It was situated with the outside walls of all the rooms flush on the alley separating the two apartments. The living room also had two windows opening onto the street out front.
After locking his door, Runyan moved rapidly to the front windows, flicked the Venetian blinds open and stared out there at the coming night. He went to the other window. Then he moved into the bedroom and just stood there.
Finally he undressed, went and took a shower, put on a blue flannel robe and returned to the kitchenette. He stood in front of the small electric stove for a time. Then he opened the refrigerator door. Cold food smells touched him. Sometimes he ate out, sometimes not. It was a matter of momentary preference. Tonight he wasn’t hungry.
He went into the living room and slumped into the easy chair beside the radio. His TV set was against the wall opposite him, beside a window looking on the alley. He tilted his head far back, staring at the darkening ceiling.
It was as if that girl had burned herself into his mind like a kind of acid. It was almost as though he could reach out and feel her. He became very tense in the chair, then gradually began to think about his work during the day.
It had been another very usual day. Nothing had happened; nothing at all. He’d sold some books, some pens, a ream of paper, two briefcases and a dozen bottles of window cleaning fluid they were carrying as a gesture to some ink company.
He looked again at the window in front of him and saw her move through the lighted room of her apartment directly across the alley.
From that moment on Runyan was doomed.
He came out of his chair fast, knelt down, hugging the sill, watching. He hadn’t turned on a light in his apartment and it was dark outside, so he pulled up the Venetian blinds, very carefully he opened the casement window.
His heart hammered. He was breathing rapidly, and his knees were weak.
Imagine! She lived right there. Right across from him, maybe twenty-five feet away—on the same floor he did.
How long had she been there?
What had he missed?
She was in her living room, the window open, the blinds up. He looked quickly for her bedroom. It was dark, if it was her bedroom, and he could see the drawn blinds.
She was standing in the middle of the room. Combing her hair.
Runyan began to perspire. He watched her with a steadfastness that caused the sides of his jaws to pain. He unclamped his teeth, never once moved his gaze from her.
She had changed to a blue dress that clung and her skin was very white, the black hair accentuating the boldly disturbing skin tone. The windows were large and he could see all of her but her shoes. He stood, stretching, peering at an angle. The black pumps were the highest, slimmest-heeled he’d ever seen.
She turned and looked directly at him, not seeing him of course. He concentrated on her features. They were delicately beautiful. There was a tenderness about the partly open red mouth…her eyes, too, were tender and large and he supposed blue. They had to be blue. He tried to recall from down on the street.
Were they blue?
…as he stared at her arms.
He had to stop this. With a mental crash, he realized what he was doing. He turned and lurched across the room. He moved to the front windows, looked out on the street. Cars moved by, people passed on the sidewalk, but he saw nothing.
Without even remembering, he was back at the window.
She was gone.
For a long moment he remained there, watching the exact place where she had stood.
* * * *
He sat on his bed, his fingers clenched onto the side of the mattress. He was listening. Straining to hear something. He stared at the open bedroom window; he had opened all the windows on the alley side, lifted all the blinds.
That must be her bedroom, opposite. A dim pink glow suffused the firmly closed blinds over there. Then the pink light went out.
He ran into the living room, kneeling by the window again.
“Please,” he said.
He heard himself say it. It startled him, but he didn’t move. He couldn’t move. He was trapped there by the window, staring. She walked into the living room. She rubbed her throat with one hand. Then she lifted both arms and squeezed the thick mass of black hair with her hands, squeezing it back away from her face. She wore long earrings. A bracelet was slung loosely from her right wrist.
She looked at a gold watch on her left wrist. Then she ran one palm down her hip, bent slightly and began to smooth the seam of her right stocking.
Runyan pressed his forehead down against the cool hard windowsill.
He jerked his head up, staring. Suddenly he knew she was going out. Probably for dinner. He felt it, realized he was not dressed. He turned, rushed into the bedroom, grabbed underwear, pants and shirt and stumbled back to the window.
She had her back to him, reaching into a closet at the far side of the room. He stood there, subjugated by the way her blue dress lifted and clung as she reached.
She brought out a small tan jacket and looked around the room.
Runyan began to dress feverishly. He saw her pick up her purse from a chair, flick the light off. The moment was gone.
He hurried into the bedroom for his shoes, knowing he was much too late. From the front windows he saw her just vanishing beyond his line of vision. He tingled to the remote click-clack-click of her spike-heels on the pavement. Then she was gone.
There came a time of waiting. He slumped in the easy chair, not even thinking. Just waiting. He was very tense, still half-dressed, staring with a kind of petrified concern at the dark window across the alley from him.
Nothing mattered. He could have been told an atom bomb would land in the street outside—he wouldn’t have moved.
He had to see her at least once more tonight… He did.
Perhaps an hour later the light went on over there. He came from the cramped position in his chair rapidly to the window and knelt again.
He drank her with his eyes. He sucked her into his being with an all-out furious resignation to this newly joyous rack.
She came across the room with that languid, yet somehow efficient movement he would come to know well, and stared across the alley. Then she let down her blinds and flicked them shut.
If death were that simple, they would have buried him quite soon.
The days were spent thinking about her; constructing her life to his own pleasure. He was in love with her. She was a single sweetly succulent thought that bridged the hopelessness of his living into a sudden writhing wealth of soft pink light beyond closed blinds.
The bedroom he had never seen.
He began to know her—alone, as he was, vagabond upon the unresponsive city’s streets. And as the days passed, there were times when Runyan wept and laughed for her, for them together.
Because it had to be that way.
Nights he knelt by the window, watching, hoping with a kind of frantic need that she would give some sign of understanding. Or just that she would leave the living room blinds up, so he could watch.
Lonely, yes. He knew she was. Far into the night he sometimes heard the sound of her radio playing. He heard her cough, chuckle. And once she sang. Sometimes he heard the clank of her cooking at the stove in her kitchenette. Probably making coffee, because he had decided she usually ate out.
Whenever he saw her over there, he went completely to pieces. It was like striking a gong inside his head.
All of his time was spent thinking about her. But when he saw her, his entire being went into fine bright-white terrific focus.
He had to meet her.
He was afraid.
To look at her and know, was one thing. To meet her and be certain was something else again.
* * * *
It was now that Runyan began to realize he must plan. It would be only a matter of time before some man got her. It stood to reason—even Runyan’s reason. He knew he was a little crazy, the way he was acting. But the fact remained that he loved her.
Somehow he had to communicate this to her, or die.
But, take stock. What was he? Perhaps she made as much money as he did. How then to lure her?
Lure?
Yes, lure. Sweet lure.
He took Monday off, canvassed the city. Perhaps because of her, of hope, or promise, he became a completely different man. Instead of the rather shy, retiring bookstore clerk, he was possessed of a demon.
By noon he had landed a job paying three times the salary he’d been getting. He became head clerk and top consultant at the state tax commission office in the city. All those lonely nights of correspondence courses paid off.
“You’re just what we’ve been looking for, Mr. Runyan. A man with the nerve and ability to state his due.”
Runyan agreed. He asked for a week off to straighten things out, and got it.
Good job. And money in the bank, saved from the long years of spare living.
The next thing was to meet her.
The first day he couldn’t make it. He saw her go out, but he couldn’t bring himself to follow her. But that night while he was at his kneeling post, she dressed in the living room with the blinds open.
From that moment on Runyan had no idea what he was doing. He moved in a savage dream of desire.
She went out and he followed her. She entered a nearby restaurant and so did he. He took a table near her, made believe he noticed her for the first time and smiled. She smiled back and went on chewing her steak.
He couldn’t stand that, either. He left his meal uneaten, went outside and stood across the street by a newsstand, waiting. His head ached.
She returned to her apartment, alone. He watched her enter, then stormed up to his room and knelt by the window. He wished he could hear better from her apartment, but something prevented this. Traffic noises, night winds. She closed the blinds and he went into his state of visualization, focused on the bedroom, the dim pink thinly showing between the tightly closed slats.
He felt sorry for her. He needed her. He would show her happiness she’d never dreamed of. By now he knew she had no man friend. Probably she hadn’t been in the city too long. He would have to act fast.
The light always burned very late over there. He pictured her moving about, lying on the bed among the pink, reading…
The light burned and Runyan accompanied its burning with a secret burning of his own.
Noon the next day, he discovered that she worked as a stenographer in a large department store. He’d seen her go into the store in the morning, following her. She had not come out. He went inside and methodically covered the place until he spotted her at a desk behind a low wall of freckled glass. She was finished with work at four-thirty. From there she sometimes went to a small cocktail lounge and had a drink, alone. Then home, and after that out to dinner—still alone.
He waited at the restaurant this time. When she came in, he nodded to her. She walked by his table. His fingers crept out automatically, like antennae, and brushed her smooth-fitting yellow skirt.
It nearly finished him.
“Hello, there,” Runyan said.
She smiled with care. “Why, hello.”
She remembered him.
She moved to a table against the far wall and it was as if she were moving in her apartment, to Runyan. When she sat down, she crossed her legs—carefully. He caught himself staring, as he did at his window.
Something became rampant inside him.
There could be no more waiting. Tonight had to be the night. He had to really meet her. Somehow get into her apartment. Yes.
More than anything, he wanted to meet her on home ground. Her apartment, with the pink…
He waited. He perspired. His head ached.
Finally she rose and moved to pay her check. He beat her to it, got outside and held the door as she came toward the street.
He gave a little laugh.
“Well, hello, again,” he said. “Seems we’ve picked the same place to eat.”
She looked at him, then away. She started past.
He couldn’t let it happen. Up close it was still more terrible than he could have imagined. She exuded the very thing he dreamed on. Her skin was soft and delicious looking, her lips red, her eyes frank and clear.
“Don’t misunderstand me,” he said. “But I couldn’t help noticing that you live in the apartment building next to mine. Noticed you several times, in fact. All right if we walk along together?”
He silently cursed the horrible tremors in his voice. He wondered if she noticed?
She looked at him. “Why, sure. All right.”
They moved along. Everything that he had created about her came to life. The noise of her heels striking the pavement put him in a kind of ecstasy, because in his dreams a great deal depended on that sound. The movements of her body—this close, this large, this real—had him desperately stupefied.
He was worked up to such a pitch that he was afraid if he spoke his quivering voice would explode in a shout.
“I believe I have seen you,” she said. “Somewhere.”
“Yes.” He told her his name.
She didn’t say anything. They were nearly to his apartment. He would have to leave her. Or should he accompany her to her door? He didn’t know what to do, what to say.
In front of his apartment, he turned on her, holding himself in somehow, and said, “I wondered if we might get together? Perhaps a movie? Something? Could I come and see you?”
There, it was out. He felt better. Relieved that he had said it.
“I don’t go out much,” she said.
“Oh.” She kept watching him. Then she smiled. It was a sweet smile and his backbone shuddered.
He said, “I’m—I’ll be frank. I don’t know anybody in town. I thought perhaps—since we. Could we? I mean, might I come and see you?”
Cars went by in the street. They stood there. He felt weak, ready to collapse. If she said no, he didn’t know what he’d do—but something, something.
“All right. It’s apartment 302-B.”
“What time would be—?”
“Eight?”
“Eight, then.”
“Maybe we could get to know each other,” he said.
“Maybe we could,” she told him. She turned and walked away.
Eight o’clock.
Runyan went into a blank, until that time. He dressed and sat in the easy chair, staring, waiting. He didn’t think. He didn’t do anything. He just sat there, drowning in a sea of anticipation.
When he tried to think, it was impossible. His mind wouldn’t stand it. Everything was jumbled and wild and she lay across his brain naked with want.
He heard himself talking to her.
He couldn’t stop.
He checked the clock in the kitchenette over the stove. He drank some water. He washed his hands and face again and again and dried them, but the perspiration burst out quickly.
How sweet she was. And as lonely as himself.
He would make a new world for her.
My God, so beautiful.
Going to her very apartment with the pink!
* * * *
She opened the door and let him into the hallway that ran the length of her rooms.
“Hello,” she said. She smiled and closed the door.
She was wearing a thin dressing gown. He was too early. In his haste, he’d read the time wrong. He hadn’t given her time to dress.
“Here,” she said. “Would you wait in here, please?”
She walked along the hall with him, past the closed bedroom door to the living room entrance. He moved in a thick fog. He could smell her now, all right. There was something diabolically sleepy about her eyes and her lips were very red. She must have just been putting on her makeup.
He noted that she had her stockings on. She was wearing a pair of spike-heeled black pumps. He heard the secret sounds of her body moving beneath the flowing turquoise gown.
“Just wait here,” she said.
He went into the living room, looked back. She was gone. He heard the bedroom door close. Then he heard her radio a bit louder. Soft music.
The room was furnished with comfortable modernistic chairs and a couch. A newspaper was on the floor by the couch. He just stood there. Waiting.
He moved to the window and flicked the blinds open and looked across the alley at his room. He could hear her moving in the bedroom.
She was just like he was. Quiet. And because of her loneliness, she spoke seldom.
He heard the bedroom door open, heard her walking.
She came past the living room entrance, moving down the hall toward the kitchenette. She looked in and smiled at him. She was carrying a basin in her hands. She wore a black lace slip that just touched her knees.
“Right with you,” she said.
He moved into the hall.
A man stepped from the bedroom, put on a straw hat, looked at him and winked and let himself out the door.
She came toward him up the hall.
“Go to the bedroom, honey,” she said.
He looked at her. Her hair was mussed and she smiled and her eyes were sleepy looking. She moved with him toward the bedroom, the pink seething glow of light.
He stepped into the light and she brushed past him, moved to the bed, quickly, deftly brushed her hands across the pink spread.
“Just a sec, honey.” She moved quickly past him, her heels clicking, and away down the hall. The radio played softly atop a bureau. There was a queer antiseptic smell to the room. The pink light became a throbbing inside him. He began to tremble.
She returned, kneed the door shut. She looked at him, smiling that way. She was carrying a small basin and a towel and a cake of soap.
She set these things on the bureau, stepped up to him, wrapped her arms around him.
He couldn’t move or think. His mind was numb, paralyzed, and he couldn’t have moved if he had wanted to. So he stood there, dumbly staring at her knowing the life was running out of him fast. The blood had drained from his face and even the pink light didn’t conceal his pallor.
She chuckled.
“After this, you’ll have to use the back door like everybody else, Mister. I can sneak you in that way, all right. No questions, but once in a while maybe I’ll let you use the front entrance…if you’re nice.”
He stared at her.
“Scared, honey?” she said.
He couldn’t speak.
She stepped back a bit, and lifted the black slip high until it clung to her breasts, and stuck her tongue out at him. She wore stockings rolled halfway up her thighs, nothing else. She whirled around so he could have a better look at it all.
“You like?”
And then Runyan snapped. A hideous sound came out of his mouth…a sound like a hungry wild animal whose food has been snatched from him by the vultures. And at the same time he went for her. He couldn’t see the horror in her eyes, because he couldn’t see. He was blind with his passion and his fury. He was no longer Runyan. He wasn’t anybody.
She tried to scream. She never made it. He committed mayhem with a vengeance.
* * * *
He was carrying a small pink lamp. He didn’t speak when they picked him up. In the police car, he just sat there holding the blood-covered lamp. He had left a bloody trail to her apartment and when they got there, it was pretty bad. Finally, he told them about it.