He hoped he would never be forced to kill any of these men. He hoped it with all his heart.
It was one in the morning when they finally stopped work, and they all trooped back to the house for a late snack in the kitchen before going to bed. The madman felt a delicious exhaustion, a comfortable drowsiness. The kitchen was bright and warm; the faces around him were happy and tired.
How good this was! He nearly wept at the beauty of it.
He was so tired, when at last they all went upstairs to their beds, that he didn’t even think of Cissie Walker. He just went into his room and undressed and crawled between clean sheets and fell immediately asleep.
Thursday morning, the mood of the night before was still with him. He reveled in the comradeship of the breakfast table, the automatic way in which the others accepted him as one of them. He glanced at Cissie Walker and was pleased by her, but only as a pleasant member of this pleasant company. The hunger of yesterday afternoon had disappeared completely.
It came back slowly during the day. In the morning, the men worked with Arnie Kapow, carrying flats out back for the girls to wash. For now, they were only concerned with the flats for the first week’s set. They carried out the flats Arnie selected, and then they went back to the stage to lay the ground-cloth and to fly the cyclorama. While the work was being done on the cyc, the madman was up in the fly loft with Perry again. Looking down through the ropes at the stage, he saw Mary Ann McKendrick moving around down there, checking the furniture list with Arnie. And Cissie Walker brought them coffee twice. She was the only girl in blouse and skirt; the others all wore blue jeans. Looking down at the stage from the fly loft, the madman watched Mary Ann McKendrick and Cissie Walker, and the hunger began again, building slowly.
And it built more after lunch. Ralph Schoen started the first rehearsal then. He didn’t need Linda and Karen, so they went back to work for Arnie some more, but he did need all the men.
Ralph gave them copies of the play, the acting version published by Samuel French. Then, while the rest of them just sat around, Ralph concentrated on the opening scene between Loueen Campbell and Richard Lane.
Loueen Campbell was playing the merry widow, a sophisticated nymphomaniac with a gift for smug repartee. Even in this first rehearsal, reading from the playbook, she was working at getting the character across. She was wearing a white blouse and black slacks, and her body was solid-looking, heavily girdled. Her hard and somewhat bitter face suited the character she was playing, adding just the slightest touch of coarseness to the widow’s sensuality.
The madman watched. He stared at her, and the imaginings began to build up again, with this time yet another leading lady, and he fabricated ways to get her alone. His mind invented entire sequences of lust with Loueen Campbell, in all of which she was, if anything, even more eager than he.
Late in the afternoon he had to answer a call of nature which was distracting him from his daydreams. There was no bathroom on the first floor, so he went upstairs, and on the way back down he met Cissie Walker coming up.
“Hi, there,” she said. She smiled. “How’s it going with mean ol’ Ralph?”
He stared at her, unable for a second to say anything at all. But he had to say something, before the silence became unnatural. “It’s all right,” he muttered finally, and grimaced at the flatness of it.
She went on by, smiling, and as she passed him she gave him another of those sidelong looks from the corner of her eye. He stopped, six steps from the bottom, but could think of nothing to say.
It wasn’t his kind of cleverness. He had learned to be clever, but only in a certain way, only in the direction of silence and deception. The kind of cleverness that found things to say to women was something else entirely.
He turned and looked up after her. Her rump switched back and forth as she went up the stairs, making the skirt flare this way and that. She was wearing loafers and white socks; her legs were bare. Looking up, he saw her bare legs halfway up the thighs, in brief glimpses through the swaying skirt. Pale shadowed thighs, hidden away within the skirt.
She was the one. Not Loueen Campbell or Mary Ann McKendrick or anyone else at all. Cissie Walker was the one.
Because she had such a round body. And because she looked at him sidelong out of the corner of her eye. And because she would be eager, he was sure of it. As eager as he himself. As eager as Loueen Campbell in his daydreams.
He heard her go on up the stairs to the third floor, and after a minute he followed her.
Cleverness. Cleverness. He had to know what he was going to say before he got there. He had to be ready to say witty things, funny things, but suggestive things.
Like the people in The Merry Widow of Vichy. They were always saying witty and suggestive things to one another, and smiling.
His own face was frozen; he looked sullen and bitter and enraged, and defiantly afraid. He stopped in the second-floor hallway to try to make his face more pleasant. He stretched his lips wide in a grimace, hoping they would fall into a smile. He pressed his cheeks with the palms of his hands, and his cheeks were cold.
Was this any way? He had to appeal to her, he had to make her want him. He couldn’t be silent and frozen-faced.
But he could think of nothing witty to say to her. And he couldn’t make the muscles of his face relax. His hands clenched into fists, and he beat his fists together, furious at himself.
He had to think. He would go upstairs, up to her room. She would look up and see him. What would she say?
She would ask him what he was doing there.
He would say...
“Life is too boring downstairs.”
He whispered it aloud. “Life is too boring downstairs.” And — “I have better things to do.”
And she would say: “Oh? What things?”
He would glance meaningfully at her breasts. “All sorts of things.”
What would she say then?
He couldn’t think. He had no idea what she would say then.
But at least he had a beginning, he had something to get the conversation going. Once they were talking together, he would think of more things to say. The important part was to get started.
He went on upstairs to the third floor.
All the doors but one were closed. He went over to the open doorway and looked in. She was sitting on the bed. She was taking off her right shoe; her right leg was crossed over the left, hiking her skirt up to her hips. A band of yellow sunlight gleamed on her bare legs.
She saw him standing there, and leaped to her feet, pushing her skirt down over her legs. She was very angry. She snapped, “What the hell are you, a Peeping Tom?”
It was the wrong beginning, but he tried to keep to his part of the script. He smiled at her, a shaky and nervous smile, and said, “Life is too boring downstairs.” The words came out flat, like the memorized speech they were.
“Listen, you get away from here,” she said. “You want me to tell Bob Haldemann?”
He stepped into the room, his hands out in front of him in a pleading gesture. “I just want to be friends,” he said.
“You pick a funny way to be friends.” She flounced over to the closet, with only white socks on her feet, and got another pair of shoes, a pair of white sneakers. They reminded him of the asylum, and Doctor Chax.
He couldn’t help himself any more. He crossed the room and reached out and touched her arms, the flesh warm beneath his fingers. “Cissie—” he said.
“Now listen.”
She was backing up, more angry than frightened, and he kept moving toward her. She tried to push his hands away, and he gripped her arms, refusing to let go. “Be a good girl, Cissie,” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. “Be a good girl.”