Add up the two ideas. Suppose the identical desires of millions of people focused on one telepathic person. Say a girl. Shaped her in their image.
Imagine her knowing the hiddenmost hungers of millions of men. Imagine her seeing deeper into those hungers than the people that had them, seeing the hatred and the wish for death behind the lust. Imagine her shaping herself in that complete image, keeping herself as aloof as marble. Yet imagine the hunger she might feel in answer to their hunger.
But that’s getting a long way from the facts of my story. And some of those facts are darn solid. Like money. We made money.
That was the funny thing I was going to tell you. I was afraid the Girl was going to hold me up. She really had me over a barrel, you know.
But she didn’t ask for anything but the regular rates. Later on I insisted on pushing more money at her, a whole lot. But she always took it with that same contemptuous look, as if she were going to toss it down the first drain when she got outside. Maybe she did.
At any rate, I had money. For the first time in months I had money enough to get drunk, buy new clothes, take taxicabs. I could make a play for any girl I wanted to. I only had to pick.
And so of course I had to go and pick—
But first let me tell you about Papa Munsch.
Papa Munsch wasn’t the first of the boys to try to meet my model but I think he was the first to really go soft on her. I could watch the change in his eyes as he looked at her pictures. They began to get sentimental, reverent. Mama Munsch had been dead for two years.
He was smart about the way he planned it. He got me to drop some information which told him when she came to work, and then one morning he came pounding up the stairs a few minutes before.
‘I’ve got to see her, Dave,’ he told me.
I argued with him, I kidded him, I explained he didn’t know just how serious she was about her crazy ideas. I pointed out he was cutting both our throats. I even amazed myself by bawling him out.
He didn’t take any of it in his usual way. He just kept repeating, ‘But, Dave, I’ve got to see her.’
The street door slammed.
‘That’s her,’ I said, lowering my voice. ‘You’ve got to get out.’
He wouldn’t, so I shoved him in the darkroom. ‘And keep quiet,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll tell her I can’t work today.’
I knew he’d try to look at her and probably come busting in, but there wasn’t anything else I could do.
The footsteps came to the fourth floor. But she never showed at the door. I got uneasy.
‘Get that bum out of there!’ she yelled suddenly from beyond the door. Not very loud, but in her commonest voice.
‘I’m going up to the next landing,’ she said, ‘And if that fat-bellied bum doesn’t march straight down to the street, he’ll never get another pix of me except spitting in his lousy beer.’
Papa Munsch came out of the darkroom. He was white. He didn’t look at me as he went out. He never looked at her pictures in front of me again.
That was Papa Munsch. Now it’s me I’m telling about. I talked around the subject with her, I hinted, eventually I made my pass.
She lifted my hand off her as if it were a damp rag.
‘Nix, baby,’ she said. ‘This is working time.’
‘But afterwards…’ I pressed.
‘The rules still hold.’ And I got what I think was the fifth smile.
It’s hard to believe, but she never budged an inch from that crazy line. I mustn’t make a pass at her in the office, because our work was very important and she loved it and there mustn’t be any distractions. And I couldn’t see her anywhere else, because if I tried to, I’d never snap another picture of her—and all this with more money coming in all the time and me never so stupid as to think my photography had anything to do with it.
Of course I wouldn’t have been human if I hadn’t made more passes. But they always got the wet-rag treatment and there weren’t any more smiles.
I changed. I went sort of crazy and light-headed—only sometimes I felt my head was going to burst. And I started to talk to her all the time. About myself.
It was like being in a constant delirium that never interfered with business. I didn’t pay any attention to the dizzy feeling. It seemed natural.
I’d walk around and for a moment the reflector would look like a sheet of white-hot steel, or the shadows would seem like armies of moths, or the camera would be a big black coal car. But the next instant they’d come all right again.
I think sometimes I was scared to death of her. She’d seem the strangest, horriblest person in the world. But other times…
And I talked. It didn’t matter what I was doing—lighting her, posing her, fussing with props, snapping my pix—or where she was—on the platform, behind the screen, relaxing with a magazine—I kept up a steady gab.
I told her everything I knew about myself. I told her about my first girl. I told her about my brother Bob’s bicycle. I told her about running away on a freight, and the licking Pa gave me when I came home. I told her about shipping to South America and the blue sky at night. I told her about Betty. I told her about my mother dying of cancer. I told her about being beaten up in a fight in an alley back of a bar. I told her about Mildred. I told her about the first picture I ever sold. I told her how Chicago looked from a sailboat. I told her about the longest drunk I was ever on. I told her about Marsh-Mason. I told her about Gwen. I told her about how I met Papa Munsch. I told her about hunting her. I told her about how I felt now.
She never paid the slightest attention to what I said. I couldn’t even tell if she heard me.
It was when we were getting our first nibble from national advertisers that I decided to follow her when she went home.
Wait, I can place it better than that. Something you’ll remember from the out-of-town papers—those maybe murders I mentioned. I think there were six.
I say ‘maybe,’ because the police could never be sure they weren’t heart attacks. But there’s bound to be suspicion when heart attacks happen to people whose hearts have been okay, and always at night when they’re alone and away from home and there’s a question of what they were doing.
The six deaths created one of those ‘mystery poisoner’ scares. And afterwards there was a feeling that they hadn’t really stopped, but were being continued in a less suspicious way.
That’s one of the things that scares me now.
But at that time my only feeling was relief that I’d decided to follow her.
I made her work until dark one afternoon. I didn’t need any excuses, we were snowed under with orders. I waited until the street door slammed, then I ran down. I was wearing rubber-soled shoes. I’d slipped on a dark coat she’d never seen me in, and a dark hat.
I stood in the doorway until I spotted her. She was walking by Ardleigh Park toward the heart of town. It was one of those warm fall nights. I followed her on the other side of the street. My idea for tonight was just to find out where she lived. That would give me a hold on her.
She stopped in front of a display window of Everly’s department store, standing back from the glow. She stood there looking in.
I remembered we’d done a big photograph of her for Everly’s, to make a flat model for a lingerie display. That was what she was looking at.
At the time it seemed all right to me that she should adore herself, if that was what she was doing.
When people passed she’d turn away a little or drift back farther into the shadows.
Then a man came by alone. I couldn’t see his face very well, but he looked middle-aged. He stopped and stood looking in the window.