‘You are. I can tell.” She smiled at him sweetly, stroked his face. He turned away in a rage.
“Cut it out, huh?”
“Will you let me stay here? I promise to be good.”
“No.”
“Please.” She turned to him again, her eyes making special plea — the promise of incalculable reward.
He wasn’t interested, though something in him registered the pressure of attraction. Not for him. Among other disabilities — exhaustion, multiple wounds, the self-satisfaction of pity — Peter was suspicious: he suspected Helena of smiling behind the mask of desperation she wore on her face. He trusted no one. It had been a long day — none longer since last week — and he wanted, if he wanted anything, a night of painless sleep (a week of sleep would not be too much), though he thought also of calling Dr. Cantor — he had questions to ask — and of going back to Gloria and, maybe in a day or so, of leaving New York, just for a vacation, just to get away from … where he was.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Helena, who was sitting next to him on the bed. “I don’t think I ought to get involved in things that are none of my business.”
“All right.”
He had expected more of a fight. Was she desperate or wasn’t she? “You’re going to have to face him eventually,” he said, hoping to ease her distress. “You’ll feel better if you get it over with.” He attempted a smile, his mouth intractable.
She didn’t answer, sucked nervously on the back of her wrist.
“Besides,” he said, “there’s no place for you to sleep here. Where would you sleep?”
“You’re right. No place.” Wearily, she climbed off the bed. ‘Where are you going?”
She shrugged airily, mock-curtseyed. “Good night.”
“You can stay,” he said impulsively — no one more surprised to hear it than Peter. “I’ll sleep on the floor. It’s really more comfortable on the floor.”
“No, no,” Helena said bravely, hoarding her martyrdom. “I wouldn’t think of taking your bed.” She put her ear to the door. “Shh!”
“I wasn’t saying anything.” Peter watched her butt jiggle as she concentrated on hearing what might be heard — a man who knows a good thing when he sees it jiggle. He blew his nose to pass the time, jiggled a bit himself. A tired lecher, a lover of mad witches.
“Shh! He’s out there,” she whispered. “I can hear him.”
“How do you know it’s Harry and not someone who lives here?”
Helena edged her way across an invisible tightrope to the bed. “I know it’s him,” she whispered. “He’s walking back and forth, working himself up into a rage.” She offered Peter a sad, conspiratorial smile, shrugging whimsically — a love gesture between thieves. “I’ll stay until he leaves. All right?” She smiled in the face of adversity. “Poor Harry. It must be terrible to love someone that way.”
With the rakish courage of a private eye — who needs movies? — Peter went to the door to see what he could hear, heard the toilet flush and nothing else. “There’s no one there,” he said, his ear still to the door.
“Shhh!” Helena listened next to him, a breast nudging him in the back. “Listen,” she whispered. Peter listened, sweated (sweat steaming out of him).
Helena moved to the other side of the room, beckoned to him. “Did you hear him?”
“No.”
“You didn’t hear anything?”
“I didn’t hear anyone pacing.”
“He’s standing outside the door to my room, waiting for me to come back. Every once in a while he paces around a bit. Didn’t you hear someone moving in the hall? He has a light step.”
“Do you want me to go out and look?” Peter asked. But when he thought about it, the idea of confronting Harry unnerved him. If Harry were unhinged, who knows what he might be capable of? At the same time he wondered if there was a real Harry — afraid of a man who possibly didn’t even exist. He called himself a coward, insulted to be called coward by a coward.
“You don’t have to go,” Helena said, sneaking a look out the window, then back to the door, now huddling against his arm, her breasts cozening him. “I appreciate you wanting to do this for me.”
Who wanted to? The truth was, he was ashamed of not wanting to go, but the private eye in him was curious and the bathroom was across the hall. Nervous, Peter felt the need to urinate — an old habit of the bladder. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t talk to him. I’ll just go to the bathroom and come back.”
“Okay.” She begrudged him his departure, blew him a good-bye kiss. “Come back soon now.” She stretched languidly, stifling a yawn, her breasts flowering suddenly against the skyline of her blue sweater; she was wearing, he discovered, no bra underneath. (He left with a pastoral vision of nipples.)
When he got into the hall he was wearing the horny side glance of an erection — a fool’s fool. No one was at Helena’s door, but there was a man he hadn’t seen before hanging about the entrance to the kitchen, facing away from Peter toward the stairwell at the far end of the hall. The man turned quickly; their eyes met briefly without acknowledgment as Peter ducked nervously into the bathroom. For all Peter knew — people in rooming houses change faces regularly — the man at the end of the hall was one of his neighbors.
Peter was about his business — in the middle of things — when the door opened and someone light-footed came in. The man was standing somewhere behind him, tapping his foot, which made Peter nervous, regretful that he hadn’t latched the door. He finished in a hurry, a few reluctant drops staining his pants. Uneasy about meeting people in the bathroom, he washed his hands with the kind of concentration that jewelers affect when they anatomize a watch.
The man — doubtless Harry — walked around, a tourist, inspecting the walls, occasionally glancing at Peter as though he wanted to talk, but saying nothing.
Peter kept washing his hands, waiting for Harry to do or say something. I’m not who you think I am, he was prepared to say in his defense — a lie in the service of truth; but recalling in a sweat of pleasure the touch of Helena’s breast against his back, he decided to keep his mouth shut. When he turned, Harry, feet apart, head forward, confronted him. “Do you live here?” he said solemnly — a strange question to ask a man in his bathroom.
“Here?”
“You know what I mean. Do you live in this building?”
Peter hesitated, looked around. On the wall above one of the urinals someone had written: Look where you’re going, squinty. Peter turned back to Harry, who had the face of a sensitive boxer: a thick-necked, curly-haired man, turning gray at the temples, who looked to have taken more than his share of beatings. It was, in all — the pitted skin, the scarlike hollows under gentle, tortured eyes — a sympathetic face. Peter almost liked him.
“I asked you a question,” the man said softly, belligerently reasonable, “and I’d sure as hell like an answer.”
“Why should it concern you where I live?” Peter said with equal reasonableness — the madness reflected in the mirror above the sink; he wondered if Harry would try to stop him if he moved toward the door.
“If you want trouble,” Harry said, backing up a step, “Ican help you out. I’ll tell you something. The way I feel now, there’s nothing I’d like more than to beat the hell out of someone.” He beat his fist into his palm. “What are you — some kind of idiot?”
“Who’s an idiot? I came in here to take a piss and you ask me if I live here. Get out of my way, please.”
Harry’s head jutted forward, his arms hanging at his sides like handles. “I think what you need, buddy, is a lesson in manners. Now tell me nicely whether you live in this building or not.”