Authors: John Lutz
Several months ago, curiosity had goaded Graham to find out what his downstairs neighbor looked like. He’d lurked about the third-floor hall like a burglar until he’d seen her emerge from her apartment. Already he’d gotten her last name from her mailbox in the lobby.
Seeing her up close this afternoon had changed things somehow, made her vividly real and his eavesdropping both more intimate and shameful, no longer an innocent diversion before sleep. But the vent was beside his bed; there was no way
not
to hear what went on in the apartment below. Even in his living room, when he was working and didn’t have the stereo or TV on, sound from her living room carried through the ducts. It wasn’t exactly as if he were in the room with her and whoever she was talking with, but he might as well have been in the next room with his ear pressed to the door.
And now he’d seen her up close, and she was interesting. In fact, fascinating. Much more attractive than from a distance. Direct gray eyes. Soft blond hair that smelled of perfumed shampoo. Firm, squared chin with a cleft in it. She had a sureness about her that was appealing and suggested a certain freedom. Not like the rest of us; a woman with a grip on life.
Graham’s apartment was cheaply furnished, mostly with a hodgepodge of items he’d bought at second-hand shops. The living room walls were lined with shelves he’d constructed of pine and stained to a dark finish. The shelves were stuffed with theatrical books, mostly paperbacks, that he’d found in used bookstores on lower Broadway. One glance at the apartment might give an interior decorator a month of nightmares, but it was neat, functional, and comfortable. Despite the deprivation, Graham liked it here.
Both apartments were quiet now. Graham was in his contemplative mode, and Allie and Sam had either left or gone into the bedroom.
Graham puffed on his meerschaum pipe and paced to the window, then stared out at the darkening city. Some of the cars had their headlights on, and windows were starting to glow in random patterns on the faces of buildings. New York was putting on her jewelry, hiding squalor with splendor.
Four years ago he’d been divorced; he’d put a genuinely horrific marriage out of its misery before children arrived. Six months later, after quitting his job in Philadelphia to pursue his true calling, Graham had moved to New York and attempted to get one of his plays produced.
Some move! Even the lower echelons of the New York theater world weren’t impressed by a real-estate agent from Philadelphia with the chutzpah to fancy himself a playwright. Didn’t he know there were a million others in his mold?
With a final glance outside, he turned from the window and crossed the living room to an alcove directly above the one in Allie’s apartment. There a thick sheet of plywood was laid over two black metal filing cabinets, creating a desk that supported a used IBM Selectric, a phone and answering machine, stacks of paper, and several reference books. Graham sat down on the folding chair in front of the makeshift desk and got
Dance Through Life
out of the top drawer of one of the filing cabinets.
Dance
was the play he’d been working on for over a year. An off-Broadway company had expressed interest in producing it, if he could satisfy them with some suggested revisions in the last act. He didn’t agree with some of the advice, but this would be his first produced play. So he was in the process of following suggestions, doing the minor and, here and there, major revisions, trying all the while to preserve the essence of the play.
He picked up a red-leaded pencil and began tightening dialogue and making notes in the margins. The last scene needed more emotional punch, he’d been told. The theme had to be more clearly defined. Well, he could supply punch and clarity to order, if only they’d produce his play. If only he could see real actors walking through his script, mouthing his lines. Striking life in it onstage.
The evening, his apartment in New York, faded to haze, and he was in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Starshine Ballroom, where the play was set. Smoke from his pipe swirled around him as dancers and dialogue whirled through his mind.
He hunched over his typewriter and script, absently puffing on the pipe and absorbed in his work, and forgot about his downstairs neighbor until he’d gone to bed at eleven-thirty. The Scotch and water he’d downed after leaving the typewriter had eased the tension fueled by his intense concentration on the revisions, and he’d almost fallen asleep when he heard the muted ringing.
Her bedroom telephone.
He stared into darkness, not liking himself very much, but telling himself he was a playwright and the study of human nature was his business. It was almost a professional obligation. Arthur Miller wouldn’t pass up this kind of opportunity. Would he?
The phone abruptly stopped ringing. Allie had answered.
Graham rolled over on the cool, shadowed sheet.
To the side of the bed near the vent.
Lying on his stomach, he nestled his forehead in the warm crook of his arm and guiltily listened.
ALLIE drifted up from indecipherable dreams, pulled like a hooked sea creature by some sound … she wasn’t sure what. Then she felt a moment of panic as the jangling phone chilled her mind. She hated to be awakened by phone calls; almost always they meant bad news. The worst of life happened at night.
Oblivious, Sam was snoring beside her, sleeping deeply on his side with one arm flung gracefully off the mattress as if he’d just hurled something at the wall. As she reached for the phone, Allie glanced at the clock on the nightstand. Only quarter to twelve. She’d thought she’d slept longer, that it was early morning. Maybe the phone call wasn’t bad news. Maybe somebody who thought everyone stayed up till midnight.
The darkness in the humid bedroom felt like warm velvet as she extended her arm through it and groped for the phone. She pulled the entire unit to her so she could lift the receiver and quiet it as quickly as possible. No sense in letting the damned thing wake Sam.
She settled her head back on the pillow, in control now, and pressed the cool plastic receiver to her ear. Her palm was damp, slippery on the phone’s smooth surface. She had to adjust her grip to hold on. “‘Lo.”
“I want to speak with Sam, please.” A woman’s voice. Young. Tense. And something else: angry.
“Who’s calling?”
“Tell him Lisa.”
“Well, listen, Lisa, Sam’s asleep.” Something cold and ugly moved in Allie’s stomach. Its twin awoke in her mind. “Is it important? About work?”
“Not about work.” Was that a laugh? “I don’t work with Sam. But it’s important, all right.”
Allie didn’t say anything. She was fighting all the way up from sleep, reaching out for answers and finding only questions. Lisa … Did she and Sam know a Lisa? Had Sam ever mentioned the name?
Lisa said, “Gonna let me talk to him?”
“It’s almost midnight; he’s asleep. Sure it can’t wait till morning?”
“It can’t wait.”
Allie stared into deeper darkness where she knew ceiling met walls. A corner; no way out. “Hold on.”
She nudged Sam’s ribs and whispered his name.
He rolled over, facing her. She caught a whiff of his warm breath, the wine they’d had with dinner. His upper chest and neck gathered pale light but his face was in shadow. “Whazzit?”
“You awake?”
“‘Course not.”
“Well, you got a phone call. Woman named Lisa.”
“She on the line now?”
“Now. Waiting. ”
Sam was quiet for a long time. Allie could hear him breathing rapidly. She felt her world sliding out from under her. It was making her sick, dizzy. Too casually, he said, “Tell her I’ll call her in the morning.”
Allie pressed the receiver back to the side of her head, so hard that it hurt. She gave Lisa Sam’s message.
“You’re his wife,” Lisa said, sounding furious and determined. “I know he’s married, ‘cause I followed him home from my apartment. Saw you two through the window, then saw you come out together and followed you. Saw how you acted together. Tell him that. Explain to him I know his name’s really Jones, just like it says on his mailbox. Tell him he better fucking talk to me, or I’ll talk a lot more to you.”
Allie listened to her own breathing. “I don’t think I will tell him. Anyway, he’s asleep again.”
“I really think you should.”
“Sorry, I don’t agree. You’ve got a lot of your facts wrong, Lisa.”
“Not the essential one. Wake up Sam, if he really is asleep. Put him on the goddamn phone.”
“No.”
Lisa laughed, not with humor. The bitter sound seem to flow from the phone like bile. “You poor, dumb bitch.” She hung up. Hard.
Allie lay unmoving, the receiver droning in her ear. The darkness closed in on her tightly, making it difficult to breathe.
Poor, dumb bitch
… There had been more than bitterness in Lisa’s voice; there had been pity. Allie slowly extended her arm, hung up the receiver with a tentative clatter of plastic on plastic. The buzzing of the broken connection continued in her head, like an insect droning.
After a while she said, “Sam?”
Seconds passed before he said, “Hmmm?” Drowsy. Pretending to be asleep. Maybe it was all a dream. Maybe hope could make it so, glue it where it was broken so nobody would know the difference and nothing was changed from the time they’d gone to sleep.
But Allie knew it couldn’t be repaired.
“Lisa told me to say she knew you were married. That she followed you home.”
He gave a long, phony sigh, as if this didn’t concern him and he resented it interfering with his rest. “Whaddya say her name was?”
“Lisa.”
“Last name?”
“You tell me.”
Nothing but silence from the darkness on Sam’s side of the bed. A jetliner roared overhead like a lion in a distant jungle. The echo of traffic rushed like flowing black water in the night.
She watched him in silhouette. “She’ll call back, Sam.”
Lying on his stomach, he raised himself up so that his upper body was propped on his elbows, head hanging to stare at his pillow. It was a posture of despair. His hair had fallen down over his forehead and was in his eyes. “Yeah, I guess she will.”
Allie said in the calm voice of a stranger, “Who is she, Sam?”
He flopped over to lie on his back. The mattress swayed beneath his shifting bulk; springs squealed. The back of his hand brushed her bare thigh and quickly withdrew, as if he’d touched something forbidden.
“Sam?”
“Yeah.” Resigned.
“Who is she?”
“A girl, is all.”
Allie was thrown by the simple evasiveness of his answer. He was speaking to her as if she were twelve years old. She didn’t like what was welling up in her but she couldn’t stop it. She couldn’t even put a name to it. “Christ, is that what she is, a girl is all? Is that what you’ve got to say, like some goddamned adolescent caught two-timing his steady?”
“I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry. But really, that’s all she is to me.”
“Sam, that’s so shabby. So fucking banal.”
“So maybe I’m banal. I’m sorry about that too.”
He was working up anger now, preferring it to guilt. The hell with him. He wasn’t fooling her.
“How long you two been being banal together?” she asked.
“This isn’t an ongoing relationship,” he said. “Something happened one time. Only one. Damn it, Allie, I wish it hadn’t happened. I sure didn’t plan it. Neither did she.”
“God’s plan, huh?” she said bitterly.
“More like the devil’s,” Sam said. “A moment of weakness on my part, and it led to something. I thought that kinda thing only happened to the clowns on soap operas, but I was wrong.”
She said, “I don’t believe things like that just happen, Sam.”
“But they do. Then the people involved regret it but can’t change the past. Please, Allie, try to understand this. Try not to be—”
“Try not to be what?” she interrupted.
“I dunno. Naive, I guess.”
She sat up, and switched on the lamp by the bed. Sam twisted his head away from the light, shielding his eyes, as if he might decompose under the glare like Dracula caught in the sun. Allie knew it was the truth that was making him come apart.
“You
have
to do that?” he asked. “Turn on that damned light?”
“What do you mean by naive? That I trusted you?”
Now he did roll onto his side to face her, his head resting on his upper arm so that his cheek was scrunched up. His eyes were still narrowed to the light. “No. But I don’t want you to think an accidental affair with another woman means anything important.” He scooted toward her, touched her hip gently with his fingertips, making her suddenly aware and ashamed of her nakedness. She pulled away violently, startling him. “Allie, please!”
Allie kept her distance. “She said on the phone she thinks you’re married. Talks as if you lied to her, led her to believe she was the only one in your life. The way you’ve been lying to me.”
“The point is, it doesn’t matter a gnat’s ass to me what she thinks.”
“Sure, I can believe that.”
“Oh, c’mon, Allie. You’re mad right now, not thinking straight. Not putting this in perspective. And I don’t blame you. But it was a one-time affair of the glands, not the heart. And it’s over, I swear it! It meant no more than a shared dance that can never happen again.”
“Lisa would disagree with you, I bet.”
“Maybe. But so what? I only care what
you
think, Allie. That’s all that’s important to me in this crazy world. Honestly. You believe me, don’t you?”
“No.”
He made a sound almost like a moan. “I don’t know what I can do about that. I only wish I could do
something
to make you see the facts. The Lisa thing just sort of happened and then ran its course and no longer matters. Please, Allie, accept that as the truth, because it is.”
“You’re not denying it, only repeating that it doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t like lying to you. Never did. I admitted I slept with Lisa Calhoun. If you need to hear it again, I’ll admit it again. I can’t see why you don’t realize the rest of what I’m saying’s true.”
“I don’t
need
to hear it, Sam. Not anymore.”