“All right. Get out,” he said.
She didn’t move. “That was a cruel thing to say. Men who feel inadequate tend to assert themselves by being cruel,” she said with impressive authority, “but I didn’t expect that of you; you have a kind, generous face. It’s not handsome but it’s a nice face, a kind face.”
“What do you want from me?” He worked himself into a sitting position to get a better look at her, a sullen, knowing witch.
“Not what you think,” she said, sucking on her wrist. “In fact, I don’t want anything from you. Okay?”
“Good.” Curling up on the bed of the floor, his eyes closed, Peter pretended to sleep, exhausted beyond the possibility of sleep — charting his wounds in the body’s memory. Several times, in and out of his dreams, he thought he heard his visitor leave — each time gently banging the door after her so as not to disturb him, so as to make him aware of her consideration. But when he got up, confident that he was alone, Helena was there, perched on his bed as before, a guardian owl, a mad-eyed witch. And the hell of it was, he was pleased to see her.
“Why don’t you come in?” he said, sitting next to her on the bed, receiving messages from uncharted pains.
She condemned him with a look, stared at the ceiling — he had to look around to make sure it was his room they were in. And who had asked her in?
What the hell did she want from him anyway? He wondered if his breath was bad — his tongue sour — unable to remember the last time he brushed his teeth. Why not? he told himself, putting his arm around her shoulders, only to have it lifted off and returned to him, his bruised knuckles brushing the wall.
He groaned.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” she said, holding his hand in front of her, reading his wounds like a prophetess. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I have a way of hurting people without meaning to.”
“Why don’t you go back to your room?” he said.
She looked at him piteously, her eyes filling with tears. “Please help me,” she said.
“What kind of help do you need?” he asked as a reflex, not wanting to know.
So she told him. A long story about a former teacher of hers — married, with a family — “a very good friend,” who was fatally in love with her. He listened uneasily, suspending belief, incapable of disbelief — the story familiar and incredible. And why was she telling it to him?
“I didn’t want to hurt him,” she said, “but to continue the relationship as it was would have been a lie. Do you see what I mean?”
He nodded out of courtesy, seeing nothing, which in its own way was too much.
“It was terrible,” she said, slowing down to reflect. “He refused to believe me. He said he knew I loved him — that it was my analysis that was screwing things up. The poor guy! He was deliberately blocking what he didn’t want to hear. I told him that I still admired him a great deal, that I thought he was a brilliant man, which he is, though he has certain blind spots, but that — I couldn’t help it — I no longer was in love with him. Then he broke up and started accusing me of things, and crying. It was pitiful.” She glanced at Peter’s face. “You think I’m a bitch, don’t you?”
He shrugged, scowled, depression embracing him like an unwanted lover.
“You think so, don’t you?”
“What difference does it make?”
“You do. I can tell from your face. But if you understand me better, you’ll know I don’t mean to be. I really felt sorry for Harry — do you know him? Harry Lowenstein? He teaches sociology at Barnard. I couldn’t stand seeing him, a man I had admired so much, behave so badly, so … this’ll sound silly to you … I went to bed with him. It was mostly out of pity.” She glanced at Peter to catch his response. “I did it to help him regain his confidence,” she said, the shakiness of her voice belying the smugness of her remark. “Afterward we agreed not to see each other again.”
Helena turned silent. Peter got up and paced the room, still wobbly from his bout with the furniture. “Was that the end of it?” he asked, curious in spite of himself. (He promised himself, no matter what — love and death all the same to him — not to get involved.) “What was Harry like?” he asked, merely to make conversation.
Helena stared at her hands, enjoyed the melodrama of silence.
Peter looked out his only window, which offered a choice view of the corner of Broadway and 113th Street, and suspected, in the space of five minutes, three different men, one enormously fat, of being Harry.
“I don’t know what to do,” she said. “He wants to see me again.”
When Peter sat down at his desk the chair collapsed under him, spilling him heavily, the floor receiving him as its own. What had he expected? The inanimate always seemed to have it in for him — in conspiracy against him. He decided to remain on the floor — his arms spread-eagled — accepting the fate of his role, awaiting sympathy.
The girl seemed unaware of his tragedy. “What am I going to do?” she complained. “He’s coming here tonight to see me; he may be here already, for all I know.” Without asking him, she latched his door from the inside. “Harry can be very violent when he doesn’t get his way. He’s a paranoid type, Peter, which as you probably know can be very dangerous. Did you hurt yourself?”
“A little.” Peter climbed to his feet recklessly, showing off.
“I put the chair together so that the room would look better. You weren’t supposed to sit on it.”
Peter wandered about, looking for a place to sit. Both chairs were broken; he settled for the edge of the bed.
Helena bounced up as though tilted from the bed by Peter’s weight. “No matter what I tell him, he insists on seeing me. When I told him that I didn’t want to break up his marriage, you should have seen him — he wasn’t rational, Peter. He grabbed my arm in such a way that I thought he was going to break it.” She stalked the window like a skittish kitten playing at being a tiger, and standing sideways at the window’s edge, peered through the half-closed blinds. “What time is it?” she asked in a conspiratorial whisper.
“About six. Do you see him?” Peter said. His clock had stopped — the glass smashed, one of the hands bent — at about twenty after five.
She shook her head in a pantomime of despair. Then, coming away from the window: “It’s possible that he’s already in the building. He won’t take no for an answer, Peter; he really means it, that’s the thing: he really means it. He insists that I’m really in love with him.”
“You have to make it clear to him how you feel.”
“Would you want the truth if you were in his place?”
Peter leaned forward on the bed, imagined himself in Harry’s place, which was not hard to do. “Yes and no,” he conceded.
“That’s no answer.”
He leaned his head against the wall, exhausted, deceived. “I can’t speak for Harry,” he said. “I don’t know him. I’ve never met him.”
“I don’t love you,” she said.
Peter raised his head, startled into memory. Grief visited his chest, knew his wounds. For no reason he could understand — indifferent to Helena’s feelings about him — he had to fight to keep from crying. “What does that mean?” he muttered.
“I was just practicing,” Helena said, looking out the window again.
Peter wiped his eyes. When he looked up, Helena was staring curiously at him — a pleasure of triumph around the mouth as if in a moment’s comprehension she had reduced him to bite-sized morsels of knowledge. “What …?” he asked.
Moving toward him, she turned away, swallowing a smile. “You’re nice,” she said softly, her voice nervous, cajoling.
“No, I’m not,” he said.