The bride wore black Page 4

  Miriam squirmed her shoulders with anticipatory delight. “Go ‘head,” she encouraged breathlessly. This was nearly as exciting as having your palm read by a fortuneteller, free of charge.

  “He’s not very tidy. That necktie twisted around the light fixture—”

  “He’s a slob,” confirmed Miriam pugnaciously.

  “He’s not very well off. But of course the hotel itself would tell me that; it’s not very expensive—”

  “He’s been a month and a half behind in his rent fo’ eight years straight!” divulged Miriam darkly.

  The lady paused—not like one who is trying to put one over on you, but like one who wants to weigh her words carefully before committing herself. “He doesn’t work,” she said finally. “There’s an early edition of today’s paper standing on end in the wastebasket. I can see it from here. He evidently gets up around noon, reads for a while before going out for the rest of the day…”

  Miriam nodded enthralled, unable to take her eyes off this apparition of wit, wisdom and graciousness. The mop handle could have been snatched away from under her and she probably would have retained her half-inclined position unaltered, without noticing it. “He shiftless, all right. He live on some kind of a sojer pension come in each month, I dunno what it is.” She shook her head reverently. “Gee, you sho’ good.”

  “He’s lonely, hasn’t many friends.” Her eyes went up to the wall. “All those pictures up there, they’re a sign of loneliness, not popularity. If he had many friends, he wouldn’t have to bother with pictures.”

  Miriam had never thought of it in this light before. In fact, if the pictures had meant anything at all to her— which they hadn’t for years past now—they had stood for a certain nastiness of mind on their owner’s part, a gloating over his misdeeds. In the beginning she had even expressed this aloud once or twice, at sight of them. To wit: “Dirty ol’ thing!”

  “Even,” the lady went on, “if he actually knew all those girls well—which he probably didn’t—he knew them only one at a time, not all in a group. There are the ear puffs of right after the war and the Japanese-doll bob of the early twenties and the flat, shoulder-length hair of a few years ago…”

  Miriam had swiveled her head, was looking around and up at the wall behind her; the rounded point of the mop handle now rested just above one ear. She even scratched her head by moving it slightly back and forth in this position.

  “He’s never actually found the girl he’s looking for; there wouldn’t be so many of them up there if he had. There wouldn’t be any of them up there if he had. But they …” She tapped the rim of one of her lower teeth reflectively. “Blend them all together, into one composite

  picture, and they try to tell you what he has been looking for.”

  “Blame!” marveled Miriam, who apparently hadn’t even known he had been looking for anything. Or at least, not something that you discussed in polite company.

  “He’s been looking for mystery. An illusion. A type of girl who is not to be found anywhere in this world. Who does not exist outside his own imagination. A rootless creature floating detachedly above the everyday world, with no points of contact. An odalisque. A Mata Hari.”

  “Who?” queried Miriam alertly, swinging her head around.

  “Just look at them up there. Not one of them as she really is—or was, rather. Soft-focused in tulle, haloed in photographic mist, peering through a lace fan, ogling the camera in reverse through a mirror, biting a rose…” She smiled a little, not altogether unkindly. “A man and his dreams.”

  “I ‘spect he never goin’ get one like he really wants her,” suggested Miriam.

  “You never can tell,” the lady in the doorway smiled. “You never can tell.”

  Then she deferred to Miriam with an enchanting, quizzical little quirk of her head. “Tell the truth now, haven’t I been right more than I’ve been wrong?”

  “You been right all the way!” Miriam championed her stoutly.

  “You see? That’s what I mean. It just goes to show you what an empty room can tell you.”

  “Don’ it though! It sho’ do.”

  “Well, I mustn’t keep you from your work any longer.” She gave a chummy little flurry of her fingers, an extra-warm smile of parting, and moved on her way.

  Miriam sighed regretfully as the doorway showed

  blank. She let the mop staff stagger against the wall, went over to the entry and stood in it, watching her down the hall and around the turn. Then that showed blank, too.

  She sighed again, more disconsolately than ever. What an enjoyable conversation! What an instructive, entertaining one! What a shame it had to be over so soon, couldn’t have kept on a little longer! Just until she finished one more room, for instance.

  The elevator door clashed faintly, out of sight around the turn there, and she was gone for good now. Miriam moved unwillingly back into the room to her uncompleted task.

  “She sho’ was nice,” she murmured wistfully. “I bet she don’ ever come back again, either.”

  MITCHELL

  MITCHELL CAME INTO THE shabby lobby of his hotel at his usual time, folded paper under his arm. He stopped at the desk to see if there was any mail. He got that special look from the clerk, reserved for those who are chronically a month and a half behind in their room rent. He got three letters.

  The first was a note from Maybelle, his blond friend from the restaurant. The second was a mistake, belonged in the pigeonhole above. The third one was either a circular or a bill, he could tell right away by looking at it. The address was typed, and the envelope bore no return address. He didn’t open it right away, for that reason. He could scent bills and advertisements a mile away.

  He went upstairs, closed the door and looked around the room. He’d been living here twelve years. The room had acquired facets of his personality in that time. There were framed photographs of girls galore all over the walls. A regular gallery. It wasn’t that he was a roue; he was a romanticist. He’d kept looking for his ideal. He’d wanted her to be glamorous, mysterious. Masks and fans and secret rendezvouses and that sort of stuff. And all he’d ever got was waitresses from Childs and salesgirls from Heam’s. Pretty soon it would be too late to find Her anymore; pretty soon it wouldn’t matter.

  He hung up his coat, with the third letter making a white scar above its side pocket. He got out the gin bottle

  from underneath his dirty shirts on the floor at the back of the closet, where the maid couldn’t get at it. He allowed himself only two fingers every evening, parceled out each bottle so that it lasted two weeks. He shot the pickup bodily into the back of his mouth, without put-‘^^ting lips to the jigger glass at all.

  Here it was night again, and nothing wonderful, nothing glamorous was ever going to happen to him. Just cheapness. A cheap hotel room, a chap man in his shirt sleeves, cheap gin, cheap regrets. He supposed he might as well call up Maybelle now as later and get it over with. He knew he was going to in the end, anyway. It was a case of Maybelle or nothing. But he knew just what she’d say, just what she’d wear, just what she’d think. Beer and liverwurst.

  He picked up the phone and gave the number of her rooming house. Then he always had to wait while her landlady yelled all the way up the stairwell to the fourth floor for her to come down. He’d done it so often he knew just how long to allow for it. He left the phone and went over to his coat to get out a cigarette. He saw that third, unopened envelope in his side pocket. He pulled it out, tore it open.

  A crimson ticket fell out. There was nothing else in the envelope. “Elgin Theater. Loge A-1. Good only Tuesday evening.” That was tonight. “$3.30,” it said in the corner. It couldn’t be goodit must be some kind of dummy. He turned it over and over and over, but there was no catch on it anywhere, no additional payment to be made. It was authentic. Who had sent him such a thing?

  The phone was making rasping metallic noises. He went back to it. “She’ll be right down,” Maybelle’s landlady was saying,
against background noises of clump, clump, clump. She always came down with her shoes left open and flapping.

  “Sorry,” he said firmly, “I got the wrong number,” and hung up.

  He started to get ready. It rang back when he was at the hair-smoothing stage. It was Maybelle. “Mitch, was that you just called me here?”

  “No,” he lied remorselessly.

  “Well, am I gonna see you tonight?”

  “Gee, no,” he whined falsely. “I’m laid up in bed with a touch of grippe.”

  “Well, should I stop over and keep you company?”

  “No, don’t do that,” he said hastily. “You might catch it from me and lose a week’s wages.” He hung up before she could bedevil him with any further unwanted kindnesses.

  He was almost sure, when he got down to the Elgin and presented it at the door, that the ticket chopper was going to turn him down. Instead, he accepted it, even passed him in with an extra touch of deference because it was a loge seat.

  Then it was good, there could be no further doubt of it. But who had sent it to him? Would the person be up there in the loge when he got there? Suppose there was more than one; how would he know which one it was?

  There wasn’t anybody in the loge at all, he discovered to his secret disappointment when the usher had led him to it. Each loge was fitted with four chairs, walled off from its neighbors on either side and from the balcony behind it. There was more privacy to be obtained in them than in any other part of the house, even the boxes.

  He felt funny sitting there alone with the three vacant chairs around him, kept looking around to see if anyone was coming. Even kept half expecting to be tapped on the shoulder by the usher and told a mistake had been made and he’d have to leave, there was someone else downstairs at the box office claiming his ticket. But nothing like that happened. All the other loges gradually

  filled up, but no one came near this center one, which was the choicest of the lot. At overture time, when the house lights went down and plunged the audience into blue twilight, its three remaining chairs were still unspoken for, almost as though they had been bought up ahead of time to make sure they would remain unoccupied.

  The play began, and as its glamour and make-believe unfolded before him, little by little he began to forget the strange circumstances that had brought him here, to lose himself in its spell. Then suddenly—at exactly what point during the first act she’d arrived he did not know— there was someone already sitting there next to him. There hadn’t even been a flick of the usher’s flashlight or a rustle of garments to warn him. Or if there had, he’d missed them.

  No one ever came to claim those two other chairs just in back of them. He never saw any more of the show than just that first half of the first act. He couldn’t take his eyes off her from then on. She was beautiful; gee, she was beautiful! She was red haired and had a face like a cameo. She had a dark velvet wrap around her, lighter on the inside, and she seemed to rise out of its folds like a—like a nymph out of a seashell.

  He would never have dared to speak to her, but suddenly she had turned to him, was holding a cigarette to her lips, waiting for a light. “Would you mind?” she said, with just a trace of foreign accent. “One is allowed to smoke in these loges, I believe.”

  And that was the start of the acquaintanceship.

  He had everything in readiness long before she could be expected to come. He still couldn’t believe she’d meant it, that she was really coming here to see him. It had been her own suggestion, he would never have dreamed of… He had told her how to reach the room

  without having to pass through the inquisitive lobby downstairs, by the service stairs at the back of the house that only old-timers like him knew about. And yet, with all that, she had managed to convey, tactfully and deftly, that this wasn’t to be an affair. Certainly it wasn’t; you don’t have an affair with your ideal. You worship her.

  He stood back, looking the place over for the tenth time. All those girls’ pictures that he’d taken down from the walls had left yellowed stains behind them from being up so long. What did he want those counterfeits for, now that he’d found the real thing at last? He’d got hold of a screen and put it around the bed. He couldn’t do much else for the room; it still remained a shabby $8-a-week cubbyhole.

  He rubbed his hands nervously. He looked in the mirror again to see how the new necktie looked on him.

  The phone rang, and he almost tripped all over himself trying to get to it fast enough. Wasn’t she coming? Had she changed her mind? Then he slumped disappointedly, with a wearied grimace. It was only Maybelle.

  “How’s your grippe? I been worried about you all day, Mitch. Look, I snitched some of the rest’runt’s chicken broth that goes with our special dolla’ dinna’, I’m gonna bring it over in a container, it’s the best thing for you when you’re laid up like that—”

  He writhed agonizedly. God, tonight of all nights! “I thought you had the night shift Wednesday nights,” he snarled ungraciously.

  “I changed places with one of the other girls so I could come over and take care of you.”

  “No, some other time, I can’t see you tonight—”

  She was starting to snivel at the other end of the line. “All right for you! You’ll be sorry!”

  He hung up heartlessly just as the delicate tap he’d been waiting to hear sounded on the room door.

  He opened the door and Romance came in, just as he’d always daydreamed it would, someday, somewhere. She was muffled in that same velvet cape she’d worn at the theater.

  He didn’t know what to say or how to act; he’d never been with an Ideal before. “Did you find those stairs all right? I—maybe I should have gone down and met you at the comer.”

  He turned on the radio, but it was a sports commentary, so he turned it right off again.

  She brought a bottle of something out from under the folds of her cape. Yet she could even make that act, which would have seemed unspeakably shoddy if committed by anyone like Maybelle, appear gracious and intriguing. “This is for us,” she said. “Arak. I brought it as my contribution to our evening.” It hadn’t been opened yet, foil still sealed its neck, and he had to pull up the cork with a screw.

  It was heady stuff, but it made you see the world through rose-colored glasses. It took away his tongue-tiedness, made him speak without difficulty and say the things that came to his mind. “You’re just like I always dreamed of someone being, almost as though you came out of my own head.”

  “The really clever woman is all things to all men. Like the chameleon, she takes her coloring from his ideal of her. It is her job to find out what that is. Those pictures on the wall, they told so plainly what you had looked for in women—”

  He nearly dropped the glass he was holding, stared at her wide-eyed. “How did you know there were pictures on the wall? Have you ever been in this room before?”

  She drank a sip of liquor, coughed very slightly. “No,” she said. “But it is easy to see from the stains that there were pictures there. And anyone who does that is a romantic and romanticizes women.”

  “Oh,” he said, and took up his glass again. His perceptions were already a little dulled. He was too happy to be captious. “It’s funny…”

  “What is?”

  “Just by being here, you change this mangy room into something warm and glamorous. You take away twenty years and make me feel—like I useta feel walking down the bullyvards on leave under a tin hat, and around every corner I was sure I’d find…”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, something wonderful. I never did, but it didn’t matter, because there was always another corner. It was the feeling that mattered. It made your footsteps sing. I’ve always wanted it back again, but I was never able to get it anymore after that. You must be magic.”

  “Black or white?”

  He smiled vacantly. He evidently didn’t get the allusion.

  “HI have to go now.” She stood up, crossed over
to the dresser. “One more drink before I do. I think there’s enough in it for one more.” She held up the bottle, eyed it against the light. They had been using the bureau top for a serving table. She filled the two glasses, then interrupted herself, letting them stand there on it a moment, a considerable distance apart. “I must make myself beautiful—for your last look at me,” she smiled across her shoulder.

  A little metal powder holder flashed open in her hand. She leaned across the bureau top toward the mirror. She made little flurried motions that bespoke the will rather than the deed, for the vast majority of them failed to come anywhere near the surface of her nose. She was really powdering the air between it and the mirror.

  He sat there, smiling over at her in hazy benevolence.

  Her nose didn’t grow any noticeably whiter—but then

  maybe that was the whole art of powdering it, so that it wouldn’t show. A grain or two of white had fallen on the dark-wood surface of the dresser. She bent down toward them, the epitome of neatness. Her breath stirred them off into oblivion.

  She picked up the glasses and went back to him.

  He looked up at her with an almost doglike devotion. “I can’t believe all this is really happening to me. That you’re really here. That you’re bending over me like this, handing me a glass. That your breath is stirring my hair. That there’s just a little sweetness, like one carnation in a whole room, in the air around me…”

  He’d put his glass down meanwhile, and so had she, as if in some kind of obligatory accompaniment.

  “When you go outside the door, I’ll know it wasn’t true. I’ll dream about you tonight, and in the morning I won’t know which was the dream and which was the real part. I don’t already.”

  “Drink.” And then as he reached for the wrong one, “No, that one’s yours, over there. And you forgetting?” she said with unexpected sharpness.

  “To what?”

  “To the coming dream. May it be a long and pleasant one.

  He hitched his glass. “To the coming dream.”