“So you really thought that was a gun,” I said, smiling idiotically. “That certainly is a good one.”
The maid looked around uncertainly. “Mr. Shriber!” she called. “Mr. Shriber!”
Then she started for the bedroom.
“Keep out of there!” I said. “Get out of there!”
But I was too late.
She saw his body and began to scream. She was reaching for the phone before I got to the door.
The human brain is an amazing instrument. Sometimes it’s hard to believe how quickly and apparently without conscious direction it can act.
On my way out the door, without hesitating, without thinking what I was doing, without even breaking my stride as I ran, I jerked the maid’s passkey out of the door lock.
I hardly realized what it was but I knew I had to hang on to it. By the time I had hit the fire stairs the maid was finished phoning. At least I figured she was because she’d started to scream again.
I took the stairs about five at a time. I pounded down six or seven flights and then, still not really thinking, just acting on instinct, I stopped and pushed open the exit door. I was standing in a corridor. There were more apartments to a floor now. Eight or ten.
I stood by the stairway door listening. I must have stayed there five minutes. Then I heard the voices from above. And I could hear footsteps racing down the stairs.
Very gently I closed the stairwell door and moved along the corridor.
That was when it first dawned on me why I needed the passkey.
I paused in front of an apartment door. Inside I could hear a radio. I moved on. I could hear voices in the next two apartments. But the fourth one was quiet.
From the stairwell I could hear the sound of voices and footsteps growing louder.
I decided to take a chance. I put the passkey into the lock. The door opened easily and I stepped quickly inside.
The apartment was pitch black. The blinds and curtains were drawn. I closed the door behind me very softly, and slipped the catch. I stood by the door in the dark for a moment or two breathing heavily.
I was moving my hand carefully along the wall hunting for the light switch when the voice said, “Is that you, darling?”
It was a soft, melting feminine voice. I grunted an affirmative sound.
“I’m glad you came back so soon. Wasn’t Mr. Pearson there?”
I made a negative grunt.
“I’m so glad. The hell with Mr. Pearson, darling. It’s perfectly stinking to have to see a man on business on your honeymoon. I’m glad he was out.”
There was a long pause.
I had my hand on the doorknob. But the voice stopped me.
“Darling?”
“Huh?”
“I did just what I promised. I said I wouldn’t move out of bed till you got back. And I haven’t.”
I made what was supposed to be a small sound of ecstasy.
“I haven’t even opened the blinds or turned on the lights. I’ve just been lying here thinking about…”
And for several paragraphs she told me, quite explicitly, what she had been lying there in the dark thinking about.
I pressed my ear to the door.
I could hear people moving in the corridor outside. And I could hear voices.
“Come over here, darling. Where are you?”
Obediently I made my way toward the voice. I was doing fine till I knocked over a lamp.
She laughed.
“Maybe I better turn on the light. Just for a tiny second.”
“Uh-uh,” I said, as forcefully as possible.
“Aren’t you the cutest!”
I moved toward her and after a moment a hand reached up out of the darkness and touched my face. “There you are!”
The hand caressed my face and stopped suddenly.
“Sweetie, you know Dr. Bryson told you to wear your glasses. Why haven’t you got your glasses on?”
“Dark,” I whispered. “Don’t need ’em.”
Then she pulled my head down and kissed me. It was a long, honeymoon-like kiss.
There was a kind of madness about it.
It didn’t seem real. It wasn’t happening.
Then her hand took my hand and conducted it very carefully beneath the sheet.
I tried to take my hand away. She held it there.
“Lady,” I said, “please don’t scream. But I think you ought to turn on the light.”
She gasped.
I heard her fumbling for a moment and then the lights came on.
She was a rather pretty blonde girl. About nineteen or twenty. She had pretty, wide blue eyes.
She looked at me sitting on the edge of the bed holding a gun in one hand and her in the other.
Her eyes widened even more. Then she closed them, gasped and fainted.
I put the gun in my pocket, crossed the room, and darted out the door.
A uniformed policeman and a man from the hotel were standing in the corridor.
“Thank God,” I said. “Can you help me? My wife has fainted. Is there a doctor in the hotel?”
“What’s the matter, mister?” The cop looked at me suspiciously.
“My wife has fainted,” I said. Then I managed to stammer boyishly, “It’s our honeymoon, officer. I’m afraid we got a little overexcited.”
I pushed the elevator button hysterically.
“Will you give her first aid, Officer? I’ve got to get her some brandy. She has these attacks sometimes. Brandy is the only thing that can help.”
The cop peered into the room. She hadn’t moved. The sheet was almost all the way off.
“O.K.,” the cop said, rather cheerfully, I thought. “You get some brandy. I’ll see what I can do. Take it easy.”
The elevator doors slid open and I got in.
“Ground floor, please,” I said.
On the ground floor I walked briskly through the lobby and out to the street.
I walked very fast for several blocks. Then I got on a bus. I got off the bus and got into a cab. I could not think of where to tell the cab driver to take me. Rockefeller Center was the best I could think of.
I stood for almost an hour watching the skaters down in the Plaza. For a while I stood there trying not to think about anything. Then I began to think about Janis.
Chapter Eleven
I had met Janis Whitney at a party.
It was a terrible party. A lot of unemployed and largely unemployable actors were gathered at somebody’s apartment on West Fourth Street.
The same faces you met all day long. At lunch in the mirrored basement at Walgreen’s on Forty-second Street. And in the afternoons in agents’ and producers’ offices.
Some of the faces we knew in those days-it was the winter of 1940-have since become well known. Janis was one of the fortunate ones.
But for every successful Janis there were fifty girls whose names I have forgotten who quietly gave it up and went back to wherever it was they’d come from.
It’s hard to say what makes a Janis different from the others. Luck, maybe. But I doubt it.
Talent? Possibly. But a lot of the others whose names I’ve forgotten were talented too. I think it’s something else. I think it’s some kind of drive. An almost monomaniac desire. A willingness to sacrifice your life, your youth. Anything. Everything.
I don’t think Janis could tell you herself. I don’t think the question has ever occurred to her.
I’d seen her, before the party, once or twice in offices. I even knew her last name. I don’t think anyone at the party actually introduced us.
When we left the party we walked all the way uptown from Fourth Street. We held hands and I kissed her lingeringly at her door.
Then I said to her, “Say, what the hell is your name, anyway?”
I’m a little embarrassed to remember that line today. It was the tag-line of the first act of “Stage Door.” At the time it seemed very apt and very witty and very tender.
I was proud of having said it at the right moment. I was twenty-two years old.