The Intuitionist (23 page)

Later, she realized he saw her coming. Her hands fiddling anxiously in her trouser pockets, tentative footfalls, looking up at the street numbers. An easy mark. She stopped at the corner, confounded. Lila Mae was sure this was where she had emerged from underground this very morning. Chastised herself. This was a ridiculous mistake, not one she allowed herself to make. She’d spent the previous Sunday on her couch decoding the subway map, superimposing its feeble order over the few scattered sections of the city she was already acquainted with. Never mind that she found the entire mechanism distasteful. Shuffling into mole holes: aesthetically weak, not to mention just plain atavistic, this horizontal maundering about. She closed her eyes at the intersection. Lila Mae could see the map sagging over her knees in her
apartment, the tangled train routes—but she couldn’t remember the stops. The street numbers. He was there when she opened her eyes, he said, “Nice evening,” his foot on the green chipped lamppost, his hand brushing grit off his white spats. “Nice evening,” he repeated.

She inspected him. Perhaps thirty (an older man), pretending to be a rogue. He wore one of the new slim suits she had observed with increasing frequency since she moved into the city, a vaguely European cut that hung close on his body, sharp along the shoulders thanks to a layer or two of padding. How many of her city paychecks would it take to get one of those numbers? The perfect point of his white silk tie was matched by the opposite-tending arrow of the handkerchief launching from his breast pocket: two halves of a diamond. He had a boy’s face, she reckoned, or a man’s face bulging with boyish mischief, topped by the elegant waves of an obviously well-maintained conk. These are the kind of men they have in the city, Lila Mae told herself, dispatching her daze to the back of her mind. Keep alert. She said, “I’m looking for the subway.”

“Where are you trying to go?” he asked, slapping his foot off the lamppost.

“I’m looking for the uptown train,” she said. The traffic light changed with an audible clunk and the downtown automobiles surged.

She could cross now if she wanted to, right now, cut off this young gentleman before he got any ideas. She looked into his face again. He had wild bristly eyebrows, a nice touch, one deliberate unkempt spot to offset his careful preening. “That’s a few blocks over,” he offered. “I’ll escort you—a beautiful lady like yourself shouldn’t be out by herself at this hour.”

Lila Mae remembered that very line from the movie she had seen not two days ago. At least he likes going to the picture show, she thought. “That’s not necessary,” she said. Waited for the light to change.

“I’d curse myself all night if I didn’t,” he said, and when the light changed and he stretched his arm wide across the avenue, after you, she walked and did not rebuke him as he trotted alongside her. City charm, playing games. He kept talking (even though she did not answer him as she stared ahead to the next corner to see if she could sight the train entrance), informing Lila Mae that he’d just left a business meeting of some sort, and that the meeting had gone well, though he was sad that it had run so late because it was not often he had free time when he came to the city. He enjoyed the sights and the people here. They were characters. He didn’t know anyone, he said, his voice falling a bit theatrically into mock woe, and she smiled at this. Despite her self and her armor. She walked quickly, out of fear, she knew. She didn’t know how to act in situations like this. Last Friday at this time she was packing her few possessions into boxes, under the faint overhead bulb in her janitor’s closet. Lila Mae and her new companion crossed another street. He held out his hand to traffic, stop, even though the stoplight held the automobiles still and idling. Mock gallant. She smiled at this gesture too, though inwardly now: her game face was in place. He said his name was Freeport Jackson and asked her name, although, he added, if she didn’t want to tell him he understood. This was a dangerous city and you never knew. She gave him her name, in the cracked syllables she had already decided, after much practice, would be her work voice, the voice she would present to building representatives as she snapped open the gold badge of her office. He said, “Lila Mae Watson, may I walk you to the subway?” She said he already was. Past an all-night druggist, which surprised her, she’d never encountered such a thing before. But in this city people need things at all hours of the night, she thought. This place will take some getting used to.

Then there it was. The street entrance of her train. Freeport said, “Here we are. At your stop. And mine—my hotel is right here.”

The grease in Freeport’s hair snatched the lights from the Chesterfield Hotel and glistened like a frog’s back. They were just outside the corona of the hotel, the bow of illumination that demarcated the establishment’s domain from the craggy pavement of the metropolis without. Lila Mae said, “You were going my way all along.”

He winked and cocked his fingers into a gun and shot her. “Would you like to have a drink?” Freeport asked. “The hotel bar is something to see,” he said, “if you’ve never seen it.” The ruby carpet, adept at keeping the city’s gray encroachments at bay, climbed up steps to the Chesterfield Hotel’s brass entryway, up to the light within. She’d read about the Chesterfield. Most people had. The President stayed here on his very last visit. They kept a suite open for him, the newspaper said. She didn’t know they let colored people stay here. Behind Lila Mae, that sullen underground gorge, abandoned to the citizens’ abuse, cracked and stained. Freeport said, “It’s the least I can do to repay you for walking me home.”

“I thought you were walking me,” Lila Mae said.

“Exactly,” Freeport said with a smile, his palm open before the carpet. Of course they let colored people stay here. This is North. She looked up at the doorman, past him and through the glass, made a wager with herself—and stopped. She’d never know the outcome, after all, so there was no point in guessing at the make of the elevators. She said, “I’ll have one drink,” and stepped into the light. Disdaining the hole.

He steered her quickly into the cocktail lounge, allowing her only a glimpse of the famous and fabulous lobby of the Chesterfield Hotel, which she had read about. The Maple Room was subdued that Friday night with the quiet murmuring of couples in sophisticated attire, or so it seemed to Lila Mae, who counted the furs and pearl necklaces snug around delicate female necks as Freeport ordered their drinks. The Department had a dress code. She liked her new suit but it was not appropriate here. Not that
she had furs or jewelry locked in a box up at her apartment, but still.

“What do you do with yourself when you’re not out looking for the subway?” Freeport asked earnestly. The piano man kept his head down over his keys.

“I’m in the Department,” she answered. “I work for the Department of Elevator Inspectors.” The first time she ever said it. Heavy on her tongue.

“Elevators,” he said, feigning interest in how she spent her daylight hours, but making a good show of it as he attempted to gauge the bulbs beneath those stark lapels of hers, the potential there, continuing to nod his head or stroke his chin as she related that it was her first week on the job and she still didn’t know her way around the office but was getting the hang of it. She had learned, for one thing, that the only ladies’ room was three floors below the Pit, that’s what the inspectors called their rumpus room, the Pit, for reasons that were not yet entirely clear. She was getting her first case on Monday—she’d been riding with a partner all week, an owl-faced grumpus whom she didn’t particularly like, and who didn’t particularly like working with colored people, let alone driving with one. She guessed that some things take a little more time to change, even up here in this city. (Lila Mae did not tell him that Gus Crawford, the senior inspector in question, did not speak to her for their entire tour together. Not a single word, not even to dispatch her from the Department vehicle for a cup of coffee or rebuke her neophyte’s innocent questions, not a word, referring to her only a bit wearily as “the rookie” when asked by the stymied supers and building managers, who, expecting graft as usual, inquired as to who this unexpected third party was. The building representatives left their wallets in their pockets and took their lumps.) But next week she’d get her first case, her first case file. Freeport nodded. He shared his concern that the elevator shaft must be exceedingly dirty and it must be hard to keep one’s clothes clean. She assured him that she didn’t need to enter
the well: she could intuit it. She knew he had no idea what she was talking about, but continued anyway, dropping the names of Otis and Fulton, referring to the rival philosophical schools of Empiricism and Intuitionism. He did not trouble her with petty inquiries. He sipped his boilermaker and nodded, urged her to drink up as well, as he’d already gestured for a refill and there she was having barely taken a taste of her Violet Mary. The other colored couple in the hotel bar looked to be African. The woman wore an extravagant liquid red robe, the man a khaki suit with many pockets. They barely talked to each other and drank water.

The new citizens for the new city, the cosmopolitan darlings out on the town, tipped martini glasses and stroked silver cigarette cases engraved with their initials and called the bartender by his name. She had long reckoned on the promise of verticality, its present manifestation and the one heralded by Fulton’s holy verses, but had never given a thought to the citizens. Who the people are who live here. Freeport Jackson calculated the final inch of his cocktail. The dapper men and women traded chatter over gin, white faces pink with alcohol heat in the cheeks, making toasts, discussing escrow. Rich white people, an African couple, Freeport Jackson and his evening’s date. You could never build a building like a martini glass, Lila Mae observed to herself, widening as it got higher like that, it would topple over, foolish. Talk did not travel in that room. Each couple alone with itself. No rowdy groups assembled to celebrate anniversaries or alma mater championship games related over the radio. (She did not tell her companion that she was out tonight so long after the office closed because she had discovered—it was a small office and you could hear the stomach growling of the guy across the room—that the inspectors congregated at a neighborhood bar called O’Connor’s on Friday nights to exchange ribald tales of various elevators and the buildings they lived in, jokes about verticality and its messy effects, to raise a glass to elevators fallen in the line of duty. Didn’t tell her companion that her excitement over this weekly
ritual of camaraderie had sent her into the Department elevator at quitting time with the rest of them to depart for said drinking establishment, assuming, in a moment of naive joy over her new circumstances—new apartment, new job, new city—that she was welcome. She walked two yards behind them, their backs to her. Her colleagues did not invite her to sit with them at O’Connor’s defaced tables, did not make any motions for her to join them at the tables, and Lila Mae sat at the bar with the civilian drunks and mumbling-to-themselves Irish nationalists, tasting beer and listening to the elevator brigade’s stories of battles won and lost. No one missed her when she slipped out, abandoning half a beer soon greedily quaffed by one of the keen-eyed drunks, and tried to find the subway home. No one noticed her departure except the bartender, who kept his own counsel.) No rowdies in the Charleston Hotel Bar. Just men and women in negotiations, in smart high-stepping evening wear, careful stitches.

Who the hell is this man anyway. Freeport ordered another drink, Lila Mae demurred; he said, “I sell beauty products. Everybody wants to look good, am I right or am I not right?” He dipped his fingers through the conk waves on his scalp, caressing. “And somebody’s got to give it to them. But you know that already. You’re a salesman yourself. Heck, we both sell the same thing—peace of mind. I’d never try to sell anything to you. You don’t need it, obviously. But most people do. I’ve been in sales seven years now. Seven years—jeez—it still surprises me when I think of it. Up and down the Northeast. I have a good route. I cover the distance. But I’m here now—here in the city—because I just had a meeting with a distributor. The outfit I work for, Miss Blanche Cosmetics, we started small and I’ve been there from the start. We’ve been doing so well we’ve decided to expand and hook up with one of the bigger distributors. We’ve been out there doing the footwork, putting in the long hours, knocking on doors—but a distributor, that’s the big time. I’m the one in charge of getting the deal on paper. Ink. I can’t tell you which company we’re talking
to, of course—the walls have ears, you know what I’m saying?—but we’re this close,” demonstrating with his manicured fingers, “this close to having it all in writing. I can feel it. You know how it is, you’re in the elevator and whatnot and you know when it’s right and when it’s not right. Well I think I got it right now. I got it right.”

“What is it exactly you sell?”

“Skin lighteners and hair straighteners mostly. Our clientele is colored, you understand, and the women we cater to want to look good. That’s why I made sure from day one that I was the one who got the city. I drive up with a dozen cases of the stuff in my trunk on a Monday afternoon—you have to catch them when their husbands aren’t home—and by Monday evening I’m sold out. Sold out! Like that. I don’t even do any cold-calling anymore. I got my regulars and they show off for their friends and then their friends want to know where they can get their hands on it. Word of mouth. You don’t see the encyclopedia and vacuum cleaner boys racking those numbers, let me tell you.”

When the waiter informed them that the bar was closing and Freeport asked Lila Mae to join him for a drink in his room, she agreed. Because it had already been decided. She was an inspector. This was an investigation. Freeport extracted a bill from his gold money clip and set her still half-full glass atop it. His eyes shifted about the room, searching for thieves. “You never know with white people around,” he said, chuckling. Said, “And a very good evening to you, dear chap,” to the waiter as they departed the cocktail lounge, him on unsteady feet, her with sure steps. She squinted in the sharp illumination of the lobby after the intimate lighting of the bar. Freeport’s fingers grabbed at her elbow. Lila Mae turned toward the elevator bank—they looked like Uniteds, she thought, from the extra-wide doors—and Freeport said, “You thought—you thought I was staying here? I could never afford this place. No, I’m staying across the street.”