"Any time," she assured me. "Those lousy patent locks are a pain in the ass. I locked myself out of this place three times the first week I lived here—and once I was out in the hall stark naked for half an hour. Stepped out to get the milk, and the goddamned door swung shut behind me. I ripped the goddamned lock off and I haven't had one on my door since."
I must have frowned, because she laughed. "Well, you see what the damned locks do. They lock you out, and they don't protect much, do they? Fifteen burglaries in this goddamned building in the past year and every one of them in apartments that were locked. No one ever broke in here, even though the door was always open. They'd have a rotten time finding anything valuable here anyway."
When she insisted again on my having a beer with her, I accepted. While she was getting it from the kitchen, I looked around the room again. What I hadn't noticed before was that the part of the wall behind me had been cleared away—all the furniture pushed to one side of the room or the center, so that the far wall (the plaster of which had been torn off to expose the brick) served as an art gallery. Paintings were crowded to the ceiling and others were stacked against each other on the floor. Several of them were self-portraits, including two nudes. The painting she had been working on when I came in, the one on the easel, was a half-length nude of herself, showing her hair long (not the way she wore it now, up in blonde braids coiled around her head like a crown) down to her shoulders with part of her long tresses twisted around the front and resting between her breasts. She had painted her breasts uptilted and firm with the nipples an unrealistic lollipop-red. When I heard her coming back with the beer, I spun away from the easel quickly, stumbled over some books, and pretended to be interested in a small autumn landscape on the wall.
I was relieved to see that she had slipped into a thin ragged housecoat—even though it had holes in all the wrong places—and I could look directly at her for the first time. Not exactly beautiful, but her blue eyes and pert snub nose gave her a catlike quality that contrasted with her robust, athletic movements. She was about thirty-five, slender and well proportioned. She set the beers on the hardwood floor, curled up beside them in front of the sofa, and motioned for me to do the same.
"I find the floor more comfortable than chairs," she said, sipping the beer from the can. "Don't you?"
I told her I hadn't thought about it, and she laughed and said I had an honest face. She was in the mood to talk about herself. She avoided Greenwich Village, she said, because there, instead of painting, she would be spending all her time in bars and coffee shops. "It's better up here away from the phonies and the dilettantes. Here I can do what I want and no one comes to sneer. You're not a sneerer, are you?"
I shrugged, trying not to notice the gritty dust all over my trousers and my hands. "I guess we all sneer at something. You're sneering at the phonies and dilettantes, aren't you?"
After a while, I said I'd better be getting over to my own apartment. She pushed a pile of books away from the window—and I climbed over newspapers and paper bags filled with empty quart beer bottles. "One of these days," she sighed, "I've got to cash them in."
I climbed onto the window sill and out to the fire escape. When I got my window open, I came back for my groceries, but before I could say thanks and good-bye, she started out onto the fire escape after me. "Let's see your place. I've never been there. Before you moved in, the two little old Wagner sisters wouldn't even say good morning to me." She crawled through my window behind me and sat on the ledge.
"Come on in," I said, putting the groceries on the table.
"I don't have any beer, but I can make you a cup of coffee." But she was looking past me, her eyes wide in disbelief.
"My God! I've never seen a place as neat as this. Who would dream that a man living by himself could keep a place so orderly?"
"I wasn't always that way," I apologized. "It's just since I moved in here. It was neat when I moved in, and I've had the compulsion to keep it that way. It upsets me now if anything is out of place."
She got down off the window sill to explore the apartment.
"Hey," she said, suddenly, "do you like to dance? You know—" She held out her arms and did a complicated step as she hummed a Latin beat. "Tell me you dance and I'll bust."
"Only the fox trot," I said, "and not very good at that."
She shrugged. "I'm nuts about dancing, but nobody I ever meet—that I like—is a good dancer. I've got to get myself all dolled up once in a while and go downtown to the Stardust Ballroom. Most of the guys hanging around there are kind of creepy, but they can dance."
She sighed as she looked around. "Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist… it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. Ugh! If I lived here I would have to stay drunk all the time."
Suddenly, she swung around and faced me. "Say, could you let me have five until the twentieth? That's when my alimony check comes. I usually don't run short, but I had a problem last week"
Before I could answer, she screeched and started over to the piano in the corner. "I used to play the piano. I heard you fooling around with it a few times, and I said to myself that guy's goddamned good. That's how I know I wanted to meet you even before I saw you. I haven't played in such a goddamned long time." She was picking away at the piano as I went into the kitchen to make coffee.
"You're welcome to practice on it any time," I said. I don't know why I suddenly became so free with my place, but there was something about her that demanded complete unselfishness. "I don't leave the front door open yet, but the window isn't locked, and if I'm not here all you've got to do is climb in through the fire escape. Cream and sugar in your coffee?"
When she didn't answer, I looked back into the living room. She wasn't there, and as I started towards the window, I heard her voice from Algernon's room.
"Hey, what's this?" She was examining the three dimensional plastic maze I had built. She studied it and then let out another squeal. "Modern sculpture! All boxes and straight lines!"
"It's a special maze," I explained. "A complex learning device for Algernon."
But she was circling around it, excited. "They'll go mad for it at the Museum of Modern Art."
"It's not sculpture," I insisted. I opened the door to Algernon's living-cage attached to the maze, and let him into the maze opening.
"My God!" she whispered. "Sculpture with a living element. Charlie, it's the greatest thing since junkmobiles and tincannia."
I tried to explain, but she insisted that the living element would make sculpture history. Only when I saw the laughter in her wild eyes did I realize she was teasing me. "It could be self-perpetuating art," she went on, "a creative experience for the art lover. You get another mouse and when they have babies, you always keep one to reproduce the living element. Your work of art attains immortality, and all the fashionable people buy copies for conversation pieces. What are you going to call it?"
"All right," I sighed. "I surrender…."
"No," she snorted, tapping the plastic dome where Algernon had found his way into the goal-box. "I surrender is too much of a cliche. How about: Life is just a box of mazes?"
"You're a nut!" I said.
"Naturally!" She spun around and curtsied. "I was wondering when you'd notice."