The door slams shut as they pull away.
NINE
Who Was That Masked Man
HER CLASS had ended early and she decided, provoked perhaps by Curt’s warning against it, to walk all the way home. The June night warm, half light — the moon like a slightly damaged eye. A woman in her class named Margo kept her company, as was her habit, to Park and Eighty-second, chattering about her problems (she suspected her husband of cheating on her and considered getting even) as if Rosemary could give her advice. It was a relief when Margo left. There were times, this one of them, when she preferred being alone. At Eighty-fifth, exhausted, tired of thinking about herself, she would have taken a bus, thought she would if one was coming, but there was none.
At the entrance to the park, she was composing a poem in her head — What tears we hide behind our winter eyes/His Son, to get away from loving us, He died — the first two lines. A voice, not hers, behind her, interrupting, telling her to move to the right, something hard pressing against the base of her spine.
“I have a knife,” the voice said.
She did as she was told.
He directed her to between two trees, sounds of life in the distance, of movement, a police siren somewhere. She thought to scream, dreamed of opening her mouth and no sound coming out. A bird cry climbing in her chest, dying.
“Lie down,” he whispered, and though she was going to, he grabbed her around the neck and threw her to the ground. Her first impression was that he had no face. He fell on her, his hand over her breath. His weight soft. He warned her — his face a white rubber thing like a second skin — not to make a sound. She closed her eyes, said (heard herself saying), “Don’t.” His hand between her legs. “Don’t.” Her voice a tremor. She suffered bravely, touched by terror, anointed. Her body dying under his weight — her spirit an icy wind, a ghost. She felt in the presence of mystery, disembodied.
Though she was no longer there, she felt his pulse inside her. Her body fleshless. Like water. It was as if he were a log floating in her dark river. Her name for no reason between them. “Rosemary.” Yes. Something danced in her, something. “Rosemary.” Again. In answer, she tore at the rubber skin. Again. Again. Again. Tearing at his face, stabbing him with her blunt fingers, until he was off. Her voice in her ears like a scream. Groaning, he stood over her, holding his pants up. She was sitting, feeling on the ground for a rock. His head like a balloon. He didn’t attack again, stumbled back, turned, ran. As if she were, rock in hand, coming after him. What was he afraid of? She watched him flee, her body shivering, aware, not wanting to know, that she knew who it was. Spitting dirt and grass from her mouth, pieces of herself, choking. How untouched she felt.
She walked away, straightening her skirt, as if nothing had happened. Had anything? Her horror was not that he had done what he had done, but that she had felt something, had, against herself, wanted him.
Curt was dozing when, as in a dream — his students cheering a speech against the war he had made — he heard the phone ring. Carolyn coming into the bedroom to answer it.
“It’s for you,” she said.
He said hello into the phone.
Silence.
“Hello.”
The voice was barely audible. “I don’t want to see you again,” it said.
What? A sense of danger like a car coming at him. “Why not?”
“I just don’t want to see you again. That’s all.”
He thought if he could keep the voice from leaving, he was safe. “Rosemary, what’s the matter? Has something happened?”
“I just don’t want to….” And then, Curt waiting for the end of her sentence, she was gone.
“Who was it?” she asked, staring at him in the dark.
“Rosemary,” he said, not yet awake, the phone call still part of his dream.
“Is she your girl?”
He nodded, lost. Without the energy to lie.
She laughed in her throat. “It wasn’t very nice of her to call you at home, was it? What did she want?”
“Nothing,” he moaned.
“How is that supposed to make me feel?”
He couldn’t answer. She left the room.
Carolyn was on the couch in the living room, a coat over her feet, as he went by on his way out. “I need some air,” he said, not looking at her. She was silent, and he waited, his head bent, to be assaulted by her wit. There was nothing for him.
The phone booth on the corner out of order, he had to walk three blocks to find another.
On the fourth ring Imogen answered, said she didn’t think Rosemary was home, though she wasn’t sure, had been sleeping. He hung on while she checked. “No, she’s not here, Professor. Wait, I think I hear someone in the hall. Hold on.”
He held.
“No, next door.”
Not able to explain why, he said he was worried, but the aunt insisted there was nothing to worry about. She would be back any minute.
Frantic, he walked up and down the block, counting seconds, a sense of menace touching him like a hand from behind. Though all alone, he felt his student’s eyes on him. Only five minutes had passed, but he called again. This time he waited six rings (had he waked the damn aunt again?) but then Rosemary answered.
“Why did you call like that?”
“I don’t want to talk about it. I meant what I said, Curt.”
He asked her to explain; why, what had he done?
“I want you to promise not to try to see me.”
He groaned. “Rosemary, I love you.”
“No.” She was crying. “Curt, please accept my decision. I can’t go on this way, not anymore. Will you please, please do as I ask?”
“How can I?”
She sobbed, unable to talk, sobbed, sobbed, her grief exploding into the phone. Her sobs riding over him like waves.
He cried, listening to her. “Rosemary.”
“Your time is up,” a voice interrupted. “Five cents for the next five minutes.”
“Will you promise?” she begged.
He promised, hating himself. And that was it.
What kind of monster am I? he asked a world of silent victims — his wife upstairs, crying. He was whistling softly to himself as he went up the steps of his house.
TEN
July 23
I’LL BE TAKEN by the Army in ten days. I have two weeks at most. Practice marching, salute myself in the mirror. (Nothing else to do here but sleep.) It makes me tired. I take off like an astronaut in my sleep. Listen to my heartbeat, write myself fan letters.
Call Parks. No one answers.
An old war movie on television. I like it when the hero holds off the whole enemy army himself, machine-gunning them as they come over the hill. His sidekick feeding him the ammunition and telling jokes. “The Marines’ Hymn” on the sound track.
I feel trapped in this place, cut off from what I have to do. Five strange rooms to myself. An oversize double bed. Too much comfort. Other reflections (not mine) in the mirror. In the walls. Like wearing someone else’s clothes. (My mother once made me wear the suit of a cousin who died. She said it was a shame to let a perfectly good, almost new garment go to waste.) I pace around, touch everything — padded chairs, porcelain figurines, the fiber of the rug. My fingers numb. I don’t go out. Too much violence in the street. Except sometimes to find out what’s happening. I’m growing a mustache, a whole new face.
CITY WARNED
ON RAT DANGER
A city health official has warned of a “potentially explosive condition” if the city’s estimated 8-million rats are exposed to bubonic plague and typhus from returning servicemen.