The front door buzzed ajar. The door of Apartment One was the first to my left. A stairway rose beyond it to the second floor. The air in the hallway was chilly and oppressive.
A woman’s voice said through the door: “What do you want?”
“You have an apartment for rent.”
That opened the door. A wispy-haired large-eyed woman looked out at me from the internal dimness:
“Mr. Girston isn’t here. Can you come back?”
“Not easily. I’m driving through. I noticed your sign and thought I’d see what you have.”
“But I’m not dressed.” She glanced down at the pink robe gathered carelessly at her bosom. She spread her hand on the dead white flesh above the robe. “I haven’t been too well this winter.”
She looked as though she’d been through a long illness. Her eyes were fogged by the basic doubts you get when your body lets go under you. The hollows of her temples and eyes were blue and sharply cut like shadows in snow. Though she wasn’t old, her mouth was beginning to seam.
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
The cheap words seemed to revive her spirits. “That’s all right. I’ll put something on and show you the flat myself. I think I can make the stairs all right.”
“The vacant one is upstairs?”
“Yessir. Were you wanting something down? Upstairs has many advantages. You get more light and air, especially when you’re on the corner.”
“This is an upstairs corner flat?”
“Yessir. It’s the most desirable one we have, when you consider the furnishings. They’re included in the rent.”
“How much is the rent?”
“We’re asking one-seventy-five on a year’s lease. The previous tenant had a year’s lease, it just ran out the end of the year. She left all her good furniture, which is what makes it such a steal.”
“Why did she leave it? Couldn’t she pay her rent?”
“Of course she could pay her rent.”
“I was only kidding. I believe I know her family, as a matter of fact.” We grew up together in the last twenty-four hours.
“You know Mrs. Smith’s family?”
“I think we’re talking about the same girl.”
“I wouldn’t call her a girl. She must be as old as I am.” The woman touched her faded hair and looked expectantly into the mirror of my eyes. What she saw there made her insistent: “I swear she’s as old as I am, though she does her best to cover it up with her paints and her bleached hair.”
Illness had made her reactions self-centered and dull. I took the mild risk of showing her Phoebe’s picture. She stabbed at it with her forefinger:
“This isn’t Mrs. Smith. It’s Mrs. Smith’s young daughter. She used the apartment for a while last fall.”
“I thought that’s what I said.”
Confusion puckered her eyes. It changed to concern, which wasn’t for herself.
“I hope she’s all right. I was worried about the girl.”
“What made you worried?”
“I don’t know. I never saw a young girl so sad and mournful. I would of tried to do something for her, but I was getting sick myself around about that time.”
“Around about what time?”
“The early part of November. She’s all right now, though, eh?”
“I haven’t seen her lately. When did she leave here?”
“She was only with us for a week or two – I don’t know how long exactly.”
“Did she leave a forwarding address?”
“Not that I know of. Maybe my husband would know. I was in the hospital when she moved out. The flat’s been standing vacant ever since.”
“May I see it?”
“Yessir, I’ll put something on.” She plucked absently at her frilly breast. “You don’t have any dogs or children, do you? We don’t take dogs or children.”
“I live by myself,” I said. “Look, why don’t you give me the key and let me go up by myself?”
“I guess that would be all right.”
Her mules thumped softly away. I looked in through the open door. Her living room, if living was the word, smelled of perfumes and medicine and chocolates. The outside light sliced fiercely at the cracks between the slots of the Venetian blinds. Thin slanting rays flaked with dust leaned across the tangled sheets of a studio bed in one corner. A table crowded with medicine bottles stood beside the bed.
The woman trudged back into the room with a key in her hand: “Number Fourteen, it’s the last one on the right.”
I went up the stairs and along the hallway to the end. While I was fumbling at the lock, a typewriter behind the door of the next apartment drummed a brief inscrutable message and fell silent. The door opened directly into a dark room. The switch in the wall beside it turned on no light. I crossed to the windows and pulled back the heavy drapes.
Through the ornamental iron balcony, I could see Gallorini at the wheel of his cab. His head was cocked up sideways towards me as if he suspected snipers. He saw me, and withdrew his head into the cab’s yellow shell. Behind me, behind walls, the typewriter rattled again.
The room was expensively and badly furnished in a stuffy “modern” style that had been fashionable two or three years ago and was already old-fashioned. Bulky square-cut armchairs and a divan covered with boucle were grouped around a heavy free-form coffee-table. It reminded me of the three-walled rooms you sometimes see through the windows of furniture stores.
The bedroom contained a king-sized bed with a bare mattress which remembered the press of bodies. It was decorated in pink, with flouncy curtains and lampshades and wall-to-wall carpeting like pink quicksand. This room was so overpoweringly feminine that it made me feel enwombed.
I raised a blind and let in more light. A picture on the wall above the bed jumped out at me like a bright square chunk of chaos. It was very much like the Rorschach picture over Wycherly’s mantel in Meadow Farms. I took it off the wall to examine it: blobs and swirls and jagged lightning strokes of oil paint, in a bleached wood frame, signed with the initials C.W.
I reached up to hang it back on its hook. Two or three inches below the hook, a hole in the pink plaster had been roughly plugged with white plaster. The hole had been about as big as the tip of my little finger, or a .45-caliber bullet. I took out my penknife to dig out the plaster plug, and then thought better of it as the typewriter behind the wall started up again like a lackadaisical woodpecker.
I formed a powerful desire to know if the hole had been made by a bullet and went clear through the wall. I made a rough estimate of its height from the floor, about six feet, rehung Catherine Wycherly’s painting on it, and went and knocked on the door of Number Twelve.
A startling young woman answered. She had on a fuzzy orange sweater over a black leotard, no shoes. Her brilliant red hair was pulled up tight in a topknot and held in place by an elastic band. The topknot had a pencil skewered through it. Her eyes were the color of slightly adulterated sagebrush honey.
“I thought you were Stanley,” she whispered, but she didn’t sound particularly disappointed. Her honey-colored gaze poured down my frame. She adjusted hers to take advantage of the light behind her.
“I’m Lew. I’m flunking of moving in next door.”
“Oh. Good.”
“I heard you typing. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m working at the story of my life. I call it ‘Deep in the Heart of Darkness.’ You like that title?”
“I do like it.”
“I’m glad. Outside of Stanley, you’re the first person I tried it on. I thought you were Stanley. But Stanley doesn’t usually leave the shop until six.”
“Stanley’s your husband?”