She came in a few nights later all excited.
“I’ve been offered a job as an assistant buyer with a department store,” she told him. “It’ll mean some travel, but you could manage alone and...”
“No!” he shouted. “I know all about buyers and salesmen on the road. Drinking and carousing around and raising hell, and...”
“I don’t drink and I don’t carouse,” she said and there was such repressed white fire in her voice that I put down my pencil and pushed my stool back nearer to the closet. “Sometimes I wish I did. Believe me, if I found the right man...”
I heard him laugh uncertainly, frightened by her anger.
“Now you’re talking silly,” he said. “You’re not the type.”
Brother! How little you know! I wanted to say. You just give me a week with your beautiful, smouldering Elise...
Thinking of the cat-grace of her body, I missed a good bit of what followed upstairs. When I became conscious of their voices again, Sam had started feeling damn sorry for himself and his voice was filled with tears. Elise said, “Poor Sam. Poor baby. Everything will be all right. Everything.” Her voice was soft and warm. Like a purr. I slammed my pencil down and went out for a drink.
But that incident affected both Sam and me. I kept thinking, “A week with smouldering Elise...” and Sam got to brooding about Elise “carousing around” as he called it.
He went into jealous tantrums. From that day on, she couldn’t be five minutes late coming home from work, without Sam putting her through a third degree. Where did she have lunch? With whom? Did anyone try to pick her up on the bus?
He even accused her of flirting with Mr. Tenelli, the grocery man, who had a fat wife and nine kids.
When she got tired of listening to his tirades, Elise would walk out, and go and sit on the front stoop and smoke a cigarette. I made a point of meeting her in the hall a few times when she was coming down, but she just nodded and walked by. Well, no. Not quite. Always, her eyes clung to mine for an infinitesimal fraction of a second too long.
One night, she told him that she was going out to mail a letter to his folks, and he stopped her.
“What are you writing to them all the time?” he wanted to know.
“I just write to tell them how wonderful you are,” she said.
But he forced her to give him the letter and he tore it open — I could actually hear the paper tearing, with those fantastic acoustics — and he read it out loud. And sure enough, it was a letter telling his parents how wonderful he was, and for them not to worry because she loved their son so much and was trying to take such good care of him.
“Hm...” he said. “I guess it’s all right. I’m sorry...”
He sounded pleased; as pleased as a child that has been patted on the head. But I felt shivers running up and down my spine and was goose-flesh all over. The letter told how wonderful he was, all right, but there was something in its wording, in its careful exaggeration, that reminded me of only one thing. An obituary.
Then, one night, they had an argument, and he slapped her. I don’t remember what the argument was about. To hear that slap, and her startled cry, seemed to make my mind go suddenly blank.
“I could kill you,” she said softly. Then, as if she found the wording inadequate, she repeated even more softly, “If I were a man, I would kill you.”
I listened for a few moments, but there was no other sound from upstairs and I snapped off my light and went out.
I met Elise coming down the stairs. She turned her face, as if to hide the red mark on her cheek from me, and passed by me.
I caught up with her in the hall.
“You look like you need a drink,” I said.
She turned and looked at me, and the smouldering glow of her anger seemed to make her eyes even more luminous.
“I just might,” she said. “I just might.”
Then a veil seemed to cover the glow and the anger and she glanced up the stairs and smiled. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. She had small teeth. So small, that in that dim light, they seemed almost as if they were pointed.
“But, really, no,” she said. “I’ll just sit out on the stoop for a while.”
“Some other time?”
She looked at me for that fraction of a second too long, that fraction of time that is the most important in all eternity, and I felt something inside of me tremble.
“Of course,” she said softly.
She came to me that night. I’m quite sure of it. I know it sounds ridiculous to have doubts about a thing like that, and yet, there are times when I do. I’m sure you’ll understand. Didn’t you ever have a dream so real that you were certain it was reality... or experience moments of reality so unreal that you were certain they were part of a dream? It was like that with me. I think the reason for it was the darkness. The utter and complete darkness.
The sound of the key in the lock woke me. I remember that I was not surprised, as if I had been lying half-awake, expecting it. With that thin metallic sound, complete and instantaneous awareness flowed through me. I felt things in a flash so rapid that there was no time nor need to think in words. I knew that it was Elise... that she had kept the key to my apartment... that she was using it... that each night, for many nights, I had lain half-awake waiting for her to use it.
It was dark in my room. I turned over on my side and reached for the lamp. A voice whispered.
“Please... no light...” A whisper is not a voice. It has no identity. It is nothing.
My room faces an alley and a blank wall. It was dark. More than dark. I did not know whether my eyes were open or shut. I listened, and for a few moments, I heard faint rustling, then it stopped and my sense of hearing disappeared too.
I felt her there in the room, as a blind man must feel the presence of his beloved. I felt her through every naked nerve of my body, through every vibrant desire. I felt her with my whole being, no longer hampered by sight and the reality of sight, nor hearing and the reality of hearing. In that complete blackness, I closed my eyes better to see the alabaster glow. I felt its warmth long, long before I touched it.
And even then, she used darkness. She used it to hide in, to tease me, to draw me groping after her. In that sightless and soundless void, we were as lovers in the sunlight, and sometimes she ran from me with silent laughter and hid in a forest, and sometimes she let the waves of the sea carry her deep beyond my reach... but never for long... never forever.
In that empty nothingness of blind space, I found the greatest fulfillment I have ever known.
I remember the weight of her head against my shoulder, the scent of her hair, the warm stirring of her breath against my throat. The last thing I remember was thinking that soon it would be dawn and I would see her.
I was alone when I woke.
It was three days later that Sam Berringer was murdered.
Elise had to work late at the bank “clipping coupons”, whatever that was. She came home and prepared Sam’s supper, because he claimed he couldn’t boil water without burning it, and like a petulant child he did everything to delay her leaving him. He had a headache, he said... he didn’t feel hungry... maybe if they had a cocktail before dinner, it would give him an appetite...
“You know I don’t like cocktails,” she said, but Sam went ahead and mixed them anyway. He was still fussing over his dinner when she got up and left him to go back to the bank. I heard him slam his fork down on the table in his peeve.
An hour later, someone knocked on Sam’s door, interrupting the final inning of the twilight game he was watching on TV. When Sam opened the door, someone pressed the muzzle of a .25 caliber automatic against his heart and pulled the trigger. A few of the tenants heard the muffled shot. Most of them mistook it for another one of the hundreds of shots fired each evening on the kid’s TV programs, but somebody finally called the superintendent just in case. The super saw blood seeping out from underneath Berringers’ door and called the police.