Well, whatever the truth was about the “How long?” business, she needn’t worry about it for a while. The last few days (and weeks, or hours and minutes, who cared?) she’d been having a brand-new adventure. Yes, you could call it a flirtation if you wanted, but whatever you called it and in spite of the fact that it had its bad and scary parts, it had made her feel happier, gayer, braver, even more devil-may-care than she had in ages. Why, already it had revealed to her, what she’d seen in the big fat boy and in the old man before him. My goodness, she’d simply seen them, felt interest in, them, felt concern for them, yes, loved them. For that was the way it was now.
But that was then and this was now.
From the first time she’d happened to see Ryker (she didn’t; know his name then, of course) gazing so admiringly and wonderstruck at her from the front door, she’d known he couldn’t possibly mean her harm, be one of the dangerous ones who’d send her back to the hospital or the black layer, or whatever. What had surprised her was the extent of her own inward reaction. She had a friend!—someone who thought she amounted to something, who cared. It made her dizzy, delirious. She managed to walk only a few steps, breasting the emotional tide, before she collapsed happily into the arms of darkness.
The second time it happened almost exactly the same way only this time she was anticipating and needed only the glimpse—a flicker of her eyes his way—to assure herself that there hadn’t been any mistake the first time, that he did feel that way about her, that he loved her.
By the time of their third meeting, she’d worked herself up into a really daring mood—she’d prepared a surprise for him and was waiting for him in the elevator. She’d even mischievously switched off the light (when she had the strength to do things like that, she knew she was in fine fettle), and was managing somehow to hold the door open (that surprised even her) so that she’d gradually be revealed to him as she came down the hall—a sort of hide-and-seek game. As to what happened after that, she’d take her chances!
Then when he’d walked past her, making a feeble excuse about his mailbox—that was one of the bad parts. What was the matter with him? Was he, a tenant, actually scared of her, a trespasser, a waif? And if so, how was he scared of her?—as a woman or as a possible criminal who’d try to rob or rape him, or maybe as a ghost? Was he shy, or had his smiles and admiration meant nothing, been just politeness? She almost lost her hold on the door then, but she managed not to. “Hurry up, hurry up, you old scaredy cat!” she muttered perkily under her breath. “I can’t hold this door forever!”
And then someone on an upper floor buzzed the elevator, startling her, and she did lose her hold on the doors and they closed and the cage moved upward. She felt a sudden surge of hopelessness at being thwarted by mere chance, and she blacked out.
But next time she came, awake her spirits were soon soaring again. In fact, that was the time when on sheerest impulse, she’d darted into a crowded elevator after him, which was something she never did—too much chance of being forced against someone and revealing your presence that way even if invisible.
Well, that didn’t happen, but only because she kept herself pressed as flat against the door as possible and had some luck. At the first stop she hopped out thankfully, and changing her plans simply flew up the stairs, outdistancing the creaking cage, and when he didn’t get out at Twelve, went on to Fourteen, and changing her plans again (she had the feeling it was almost time to black out), she simply followed him as he plodded to his room and noted its number before she lost consciousness. That was how she learned his name—by going to the mailboxes next time and checking his number, which said: R. RYKER. Oh, she might be a stupid little orphan of the apartment tree, but she had her tricks!
That time his arrival down on the ground floor front hall caught her unawares. Another man was holding the elevator door for two other ladies and with an encouraging glance at Ryker (he smiled back!) she darted in after them (she didn’t mind a few fellow passengers, she could dodge them), thinking the man would go on holding the door open for Ryker. But he didn’t, and she hesitated to hold it open from where she was standing (it would have looked too much like magic to the others) and so that chance of a shared ride and meeting was botched.
But that one failure didn’t break her general mood of self-confidence and being on top of the situation. In fact, her mind seemed to be getting sharper and her memories to be opening. She got a hunch that something had once happened on the third floor in the front hall that was important to her, and it was while brooding there about it that she had her second unexpected encounter with Ryker. He came walking down the stairs and saw her and for a moment she thought he was going to march straight up to her, but once again his courage or whatever seemed to fail him and he kept on down and in her disappointment she blacked out.
These unanticipated meetings wouldn’t do, she told herself, they didn’t work, so the next time Ryker arrived by the front door she was waiting for him in the lobby. Then, just as things appeared to be working out, her courage failed, she got a sudden terrible fit of stage fright and fled up the stairs, though managing to turn at the top of the first flight and watch. She saw him pass the elevator after a hurried inspection of it, move toward the mailboxes and back hall. But he returned from there almost at once and entered the elevator. She realized that he’d gone to the back hall to look for her and, her courage restored, she flew down the stairs, but there only time to peer once through the little elevator window at him (and he peered back) before the cage’s ascent blocked the window. She waited dejectedly by the shaft, heard faintly the elevator stop at the top—and then immediately start down again. Was he coming back on her account? she asked herself, feeling dizzy, her mind wavering on the edge of blackness. She managed to hold onto her consciousness just long enough for it to tell her that, indeed, he was!—and looking anxious and expectant as he came out of the elevator—before it blacked out entirely.
Ramsey Ryker did not reenter the apartment tree from his own apartment until the next evening. Any attentive and thoughtful observer, had there been one to accompany him down in the elevator and match his measured footsteps to the front door, would have deduced two things about him.
First, from cologne-whiff overlying a faintly soapy fragrance and from gleaming jowl, spotless white collar, faintly pink scalp between strands of combed white hair, and small even tie-knot, that he had recently bathed, shaved very closely, and arrayed himself with equal care, so that except for his age you might have been sure he was going out on a romantic date.
Second, from his almost corpselike pallor, his abstracted expression, and “slow march” ritualistic movements, that the evening’s business was a not altogether pleasurable or at least a very serious one.
And if the observer had in addition been an imaginative or perhaps merely suggestible person, he might have added these two impressions together and got the sinister total of “If ever a man could be said to have dressed himself for his own funeral…”
And if that same hypothetical observer had been on hand twenty minutes later to witness Ryker’s return to the apartment tree, he would have got an additional funereal shudder from the circumstance that Ryker’s lapel now sported a white nation while his left hand carefully held a small floral spay, the chief feature of which was a white orchid.
But even this observer would have been surprised at the expression of excited delight that suffused and faintly colored Ryker’s pale forward-straining countenance as he entered the hall. Of course sometimes merely getting cleaned up and dressed and venturing outdoors will cheer an elderly person amazingly, but this mood change seemed to and indeed did have a more specific outside stimulus.