Anyway, I wanted it. So at the end of the column I wrote:
1. Money in the bank.
I thought about it, decided that was too vague, and changed it a little:
1. Fifty thousand dollars in the bank.
That was a nice round sum. I don’t know exactly why I hit on it, but it had a good substantial feel to it. Poverty is not without its charm, but neither, for that matter, is money. I mean, what the hell.
What else? Well, I wanted to be successful, didn’t I? Fifty thousand dollars would make me successful, but it wasn’t just a matter of being successful. You have to be successful at something.
Newspapering? Making that kind of dough in the newspaper business is something that doesn’t happen unless your name is Hearst. Mine isn’t, and I’m glad of it.
The answer, then, was to make a wad of dough somehow — that would come in the second list — and then find the proper niche in the newspaper world. The proper niche? That was easy. It wasn’t pounding a beat on a metropolitan daily. It wasn’t swinging a desk or writing heads or rewriting or any of that nonsense. It was what half the newspapermen in the world spend their lives dreaming about. The other half, in case you wondered, spend their lives dreaming about being either foreign correspondent for the New York Times or editor of the Times, and they have as much chance of getting there as my half does. I wrote:
2. Ownership of a small county weekly in the middle of nowhere.
Now that was more like it. Settling down in some godforsaken town in the state of Atrophy, putting a paper out once a week, writing news the way I wanted it written and saying the kinds of things I wanted to say in the editorial column. Getting back to the printshop and getting ink on my hands once in a while. Setting type and making up the paper on the stone and selling ads and sending out bills and working up circulation campaigns and all the myriad of tasks that are the sole responsibility of the poor dumb son of a bitch who happens to own the tiny little paper that nobody reads anyway.
It was what I wanted. And, therefore, it belonged on the list.
There was one thing more. It was dream time, and I was the unbeautiful dreamer of the beautiful dream, and only one item remained to make the dream complete. It didn’t make much sense to put it on the list, but then it didn’t make a hell of a lot of sense to have the list in the first place if you want to get technical about it.
I didn’t want to get technical about it. I wrote, printing very carefully:
3. A wife and kids.
A wife who loved me all the way, the kind of wife who would be a complete wife, who wouldn’t grow away from me, who wouldn’t disappear some fine night with a nameless, faceless bastard and wind up in a smoking ruin of a car at the foot of an ugly ominous cliff. A wife who would help with the paper and cry when I was sad and laugh when I was happy, a wife who would have children for me and keep the house nice and make mad and passionate love and sleep by my side every night.
When you dream you might as well go all the way. But that’s the whole point of writing it down. That way it isn’t just a dream — it’s there on paper when you’re done mooning over it and you can’t just look away and forget it. It had worked before — one fine day I made a list and two days later landed my first newspaper job, a copyboy slot on the Louisville Courier. A year later I was on the Times, and a year after that I had a desk of my own.
And, I swore up and down, it was going to work again. Or my name was not Ted Lindsay.
It was all there in black and white — money, a business, a family. Now it was time to get some of the specifics on the list.
I wrote: Now I have to—
1. Find some foolproof scheme for getting money in a hurry.
That was going to take a little thought: If a person could just sit down with a pencil and paper and wind up with a hatful of money, nobody in the country would have to work for a living. That might be nice, but as sure as God made little green spiders there was more to it than that. I went on to the next point, the paper. I sat around for a while but I couldn’t think of anything more compelling than Buy a newspaper, and at the moment the only sort of newspaper I could buy was the kind you pick up at a candy store. Step two couldn’t be solved until step one was all tied up with a pink ribbon.
Step three?
Hmmmmmm.
I was beginning to get a message. It had no logic behind it, but there was an intuitive impulse that said the same thing over and over, and a reporter’s intuition is the next best thing to a woman’s intuition — much as, as a wag once remarked, a reporter is the next best thing to a woman. I’m not sure what the bastard meant by that. Let’s forget it for the time being.
The intuitive impulse went along these lines. A certain doll had a whole bunch of things going. A certain doll was the key to a whole host of appealing possibilities. This babe could figure quite prominently in steps one and two and three.
Three guesses what chick I’m talking about.
Well, it wasn’t Rosie Ryan.
Nor was it Grace.
It wasn’t Mrs. Murdock either.
Give up?
The intuitive impulse said, over and over, Get a line on Cinderella Sims.
So, printing as neatly as any third-grader, I wrote on my list:
2. Get a line on Cinderella Sims.
I can’t explain the intuitive impulse. Intuition, by definition, is illogical. Rather, it’s extra-logical. There may well be logic involved, but if so it is a form of logic that operates without the knowledge of the human brain. An intuitive logic, if you will.
What the hell.
What had happened? I’ll tell you what had happened. I was walking down the street, minding my business, when out of an orange-colored sky a girl came along who knocked me far enough out of orbit to make me take a flier with a sexed-up bomb like Rosie. There was an aura about this girl that was more than beauty and more than sex, a fascination that hovered over her like a halo, except, somehow, not like a halo at all.
Call it chemistry, or biology. Call it any damned thing you please, but there was a legitimate impulse telling me that the fascination meant that my path and Cinderella Sims’ path had to cross, that she was the key to everything I wanted and that I, somehow, was the key to everything she needed. Call it stupidity, or insanity, or catatonia, in the language of the incomparable Dr. Strom. Call it whatever you damn well please, I believed it.
I went over to the window and stared through the rain at the basement window across the street. There didn’t seem to be any lights on — either she wasn’t home, or she was sleeping, or in the dead of night she had moved to Saudi Arabia. Still, looking at her window gave me something to do.
I stared so intently at the window that I did not hear the footsteps in the hallway.
Nor did I hear my door open.
But I heard the voice, sweet as honey, soft as dewdrops, malicious as a scandal sheet.
The voice said: “Put up your hands, Mr. Lindsay. And turn around. Slowly.”
I put up my hands. I turned around, slowly.
And I caught my breath.
And stared.
There was rain in her hair and color in her cheeks. She was dressed in a man’s flannel shirt and a pair of blue jeans but no man ever looked half so good in them. Her eyes were filled with fire and her pretty chest was heaving like mad, probably because the damned stairs were so damned steep.