by Walter Blum
He had a second cup of coffee, paid his bill and stepped outside. A band of clouds hugging the horizon suggested rain—but later. From here, he walked a half block down the street to the bank, where he deposited his paycheck and cashed another to cover what he estimated would be his expenses for the week to come, and then moved on to Johnson’s Drug Store to pick up a tube of shaving cream. They usually had Palmolive, which he preferred, but when they were out he’d take Barbasol or even Burma Shave. He recalled the Burma Shave jingles that popped up along the highway and helped pass many a wearisome trip. He’d done enough driving to have memorized a few of them. One was going through his head at the moment.
And suddenly, she was there.
He forced himself not to stare. He knew how awful that would look. She was standing with her face to the wall. Johnson’s had set up a small rack of greeting cards, and she was going through the cards one by one. He could see her out of the corner of his eye, although he dared not turn around to stare. She was wearing a brown plaid skirt and a flowered yellow blouse and her hair was done up in a pony tail, those lovely tresses the color of cafe au lait, bound in back the way Sandra Dee did in the movies. Or was it Doris Day? Their paths hadn’t crossed since the dance at the country club. With her clothes and hairstyle, it was almost as if time, skittering backwards, had allowed her to grow younger.
He was instantly aware of her. She had a way of holding out one hand with the wrist slightly bent as though she were drying her nails, and when she laughed there was a kind of tinkle to it, like distant wind chimes. The rack bulged with greeting cards, many with lacy fringes and large quantities of flowers mixed with florid text, and he could tell from the sound of her laugh when she found a card she liked. She’d been looking for a funny one, apparently. The next thing he knew they were standing at the counter, having arrived almost simultaneously, he with his tube of shaving cream, she holding the card she’d picked.
The druggist, a gray-haired man with thick eyebrows and wire-framed glasses that kept sliding down his nose, served her first. His drawl was mellow, his smile friendly and inviting.
“How are things going, Susan?” he asked.
“Fine, Mr. Johnson.”
“Haven’t seen you in almost a month now. Your father’s in good health, I hope?” She nodded. He glanced down at the card as he punched up the sale on the store’s big brass cash register. The machine clanged shrilly. “Someone gotten engaged?”
“Sally Bouchard.”
The druggist wrinkled his nose for a moment. “Bouchard?” A light of recognition flashed across his face. “Oh, of course. Frank Bouchard’s daughter. Pretty little thing, a high school cheerleader if I recall rightly. My, oh my! How times do progress. Before long, you’ll all be going off to get married.”
“Well, some of us will be.”
They were standing side by side at the counter, he waiting his turn. They looked at each other, and suddenly he realized that she’d forgotten who he was. Gliding across the dance floor in his arms, looking up at him with eyes that promised future adventures, all of that was gone. His insignificance in her eyes was total. He could feel his heart thudding wildly, excitement combined with the bitterness of disappointment. The druggist slipped the card into a paper bag with the receipt and handed it to her. She turned, and in so doing, her hand brushed against his sleeve.
“Hello,” she said. Of course, that had to be the way she was with everyone, but then her expression changed, and a smile flooded her face. “I know you,” she blurted. “From the country club dance.” She fished for a name, and fortunately the right one came to her lips. “Adam.”
“That’s right.”
Was it an act? What did she really remember of that night at the country club? To him it was all so immediate: the low-cut blouse, the headiness of her perfume, the band playing The Song from Moulin Rouge, the couples who seemed to make room for them as they moved across the dance floor. He’d been ready to dismiss her from his thoughts, but now standing next to her at the counter he felt himself wound in a spider’s web once again, unable to break free.
“Adam Bell, the radio announcer.”
“That’s right.”
“How are you?” She glanced at the cast on his arm. “How did that happen?”
“I fell down the stairs,” he said, trying with a look of casual indifference to make it appear that this was something he did every day of the week and twice on Sunday. “It’s just a broken wrist.”
“Oh, my! Does it hurt?”
“Not really,” he shrugged. “When it gets bad, I take a couple of aspirin. How have you been?”
“Fine.” The great warmth of her smile lapped over him like waves on an ocean beach. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, it has,” he agreed.
It was like standing outside one of those new ranch-type houses, all windows and skylights and sliding glass doors, staring at the people who had locked themselves inside, sealed themselves away. Heads shaking in disapproval. Look, don’t touch. Smile, but don’t reach out. Wave, but don’t expect any waves in return because we, the residents, the people inside don’t want to know you are there.
He bought his shaving cream. She slipped the card she had just bought into her purse. They started for the door together.
“Beautiful day,” she said.
“Warm,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” she agreed.
“Do you still go to the country club?” he asked.
“Now and then,” she said. “When I don’t have anything better to do. My father insisted I become a member, and he paid my entrance fee, but there isn’t much to do there and most of the people who belong are so old.”
“The dances are nice, though.”
“Yes, you’re right. The dances are nice.”
He held the door open for her. The air was warm, the smell of spring floated like butterflies around the corners of the city, over buildings and beyond, all the way to the tobacco fields in the north. Morning shoppers bustled down the street. Many of them knew his name and had heard his voice, but almost no one knew what he looked like. It was as though the whole world had bought the same ranch house, and he was the only one without a place to live. Look, don’t touch. Watch what we’re doing, enjoy the view, make believe you’re part of the show, but don’t think you’re one of us.
He felt like an idiot, bandying words so banal they could have been cut out of a book. In another century it would have been simpler. He would have simply whipped out a little leather case and handed her a card with his name on it and his title and maybe even his address. But the station didn’t bother giving its people business cards, and even if they did he would have felt like an ass giving her one. That was the kind of thing someone like Wally might do, not Adam Bell.
Too late, he realized he should have offered her a ride. She probably had her own car, but what would it hurt to offer? Moments later she smiled that pleasant, empty smile again and turned to her left. She was gone before he could say another word. Everything he wanted to tell her, all the passion that was bubbling just below the surface had to be suppressed, but every inch of the way home her name kept bouncing through his mind, with a melody and lyrics and rhythm, like one of those obsessive jingles that went with the commercials, or a song that had no end.
Susan, Susan, Susan.
Damn!
Until now, he’d managed to keep her out of his thoughts. Now, one look and he could feel the bottom drop out of his stomach. She glistened, she glittered, and yet when you stopped to think of it, she was also remarkably banal, remarkably ordinary. Was it just a physical reaction? No, there had to be more to it than that. The world was filled with goddesses who could freeze the eyes of men. You saw them everywhere, in the magazines and the movies. In the newspaper. On television. You could even buy a calendar with a body and face to die for, a woman for every month of the year. You could hang it on the wall, if that was what you wanted to do.
But that did
n’t change how he felt. He was so filled with her that he failed to notice the darkening sky, the clouds that earlier looked so harmless, building into an angry tower. Moments later he was being pelted with rain. He dashed back to the car, flung open the door, slid behind the wheel and started the engine. The windshield was quickly smeared with water. He turned on the wiper, and as the glass cleared, there she was again, as though on a movie screen, like some incredible deity, her face filling every inch of the glass, smiling at him, asking how long it had been, her lips moving, her eyes beckoning through the glass.
And then she was gone.
God, how could he let this happen to him! What idiocy had tempted him to let it go this far? He spent most of the day in the public library, poring through magazines, his thoughts too preoccupied for anything as weighty as a book. The rain kept up through the afternoon. Around three he had a quick meal and drove up to the station, where he spent the rest of the afternoon listening to records that had arrived during the past week. There was a new Sinatra album that particularly appealed to him. It seemed only yesterday that he had read stories about the skinny singer from Hoboken who was known as “Frankie,” the idol of impressionable adolescent girls, the bobby-soxers’ delight. It must have been longer than that because now here he was, a polished performer with a beat and a style and a big orchestra playing behind him and critics using words like “legend” and “epic.”
Susan. He tried to recall a singer by that name, but not one flashed into his mind. Frankie, Perry, Rosie—not a single Susan. What they all had in common was style, a distinctiveness that could not be overlooked. If he had just a dollop of it, even a modicum of finesse, he wouldn’t have been caught standing like that before the counter at Johnson’s Drug Store, sweating and tongue-tied, while this incredible young woman whose smile dazzled him and whose voice left him limp walked out into the street and away from his life as though he meant nothing more to her than a jelly doughnut on a plate, designed to be sampled and put away for next time.
Meeting her again raised the level of his loneliness by several degrees. Again, as on so many nights gone by, he was in two worlds. Part of him sat at the console, all enthusiasm for peanut butter and toothpaste and used car lots, cooing his romantic blather into the microphone and introducing the songs. The rest ran on autopilot. The rest of him was in Johnson’s Drug Store, playing back the words he had spoken to her, the few phrases she had given in return, but worst of all agonizing over the words that hadn’t come out of his mouth.
Hours later, he could think of a thousand things he might have answered when she said, “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” A thousand clever lines that should have been in the script that would never be written; it was too late. The story of my life, he thought. You let it slide by, and these things only come once—then it disappears.
It was fifteen minutes before sign-off when the telephone rang. Without thinking, he reached for paper and a pencil to write down the request. It was too late to fulfill this one, but he could save it for the next night. But this wasn’t a request. It was a man’s voice, and it seemed oddly muffled, as though the person on the other end had draped a piece of cheesecloth over the mouthpiece. Turning down the monitor helped, but even then he had to strain to catch the words.
“Adam, we’ve got to get together,” the caller said.
He thought he knew who was speaking—but how could that be? The voice sounded so strange. In the background he could hear what sounded like a jukebox playing a Duke Ellington number, and he thought he heard that familiar voice, very faintly on the phone, mixing with the music. He wondered if the caller was actually there, or if the effect was just an illusion.
“Simon?” he blurted.
“Listen, Adam—”
“Simon, what’s going on? Where did you disappear to?”
“I’ve been away. Listen…I have to see you.” There was a brief pause, as though the caller had turned away and was speaking to someone else nearby. Then the voice resumed. “You’re the only one at the station I can trust. You’re not like the others. It won’t take more than a few minutes of your time, but I promise you won’t be sorry.”
“Simon, I can’t leave the station now.”
“Of course. I know that.” There was a pause. “Fifteen minutes. You’ll be going off the air then, right?”
“Why don’t you come up here? We’ll talk. We’ll—”
“No, that won’t work.” The voice sounded breathless. “You have to meet me. After you sign off, that’ll be time enough. Do you know where the Paradise Lounge is?”
Adam said he did.
“That’s where I’ll be. Drive over when you’re finished with your shift. I’ll be waiting. Adam, I need some money.”
“I’ll do what I can.” He was about to say something about not liking bars, and how he would prefer to meet in a coffee shop, and of course if it was a matter of money, there was not much he could do in that department, but the line had gone dead. He would simply have to wait until his shift was over.
Damn it! Why did he have to promise Simon something he didn’t want to do? It was late, the show took a lot out of him. He was tired. He could as easily end his shift, put away the records, close up the station and head off to his little room at Mrs. Warren’s. He could follow the same routine that occupied him every night, brush his teeth, put on his pajamas, read a book for a while and go to sleep. Beyond the Bell Tower, the night lay dark and silent. Below the tower, something slept and murmured with its head between its paws, something with golden eyes and fiery breath, waiting for him to come down. Had he known what would happen . . .
6
Long after their conversation was finished, it occurred to him that Simon had never actually identified himself. The voice was so different from what he remembered—thin, diffident, almost as if the person at the other end were speaking from inside a huge wine barrel—that he hardly recognized it. Could it actually be Simon? How dependable was a voice like that? In the world of radio, at least in those days, the so-called “talent” tended to come and go like moths in the night, hovering around a lamp for a while, enjoying the brilliance and notoriety, then disappearing, with a shiver, in a dusting of white powdery stuff.
It was well past midnight when he took his last transmitter reading, flipped off the switches, locked the door behind him and made his way across the gravel parking lot to his car.
Driving down the county road into town, he felt as though he’d been swallowed up by a gigantic cloud of nothingness. There was no moon. The blackness was overwhelming, like a vast bubble in which he had become trapped, a specimen to be examined in detail by pairs of alien eyes. Seldom had he felt so alone, so vulnerable to the goblins that chittered and growled just beyond the safety of his car, protected only by metal doors and glass that could be easily shattered.
For the first time, he was truly aware of what it meant to be an outsider, of what it was like to inhabit a space and share time with those around him, but never actually be there. Incapable of calling on others for help. Incapable of saying to the world, “I belong.” The original transparent man, that’s what he was. There were times when he had the feeling people were literally looking through him.
At least, that’s how it had felt seeing Susan again in Johnson’s Drug Store. Her behavior made all the sense in the world, because if she hadn’t seen him, how could she know who he was? The incident preyed on his mind. He found himself picking at it, as he would scratch a wound that refused to heal. At first he’d thought she must be laughing at him, playing a little game at his expense, the way girls in high school used to do, singling out one student to embarrass and humiliate and make the object of their giggling intimations.
But Susan wasn’t mean. He was sure of that. Maybe he was reading too much into what appeared at first to be a snub. Maybe she was telling the truth, that she’d really forgotten his name. After all, someone that marvelous could have had a thousand suitors if she wanted, a dozen men fighting to
hold her hand and touch her face and guide her across the dance floor at the country club. If he was the outsider, the guy with his face pressed against the window, fighting to get in, what right did he have to fight the others for the privilege of enjoying her favors?
Damn it! All this fighting and jockeying for position wore him out. It had been a long day. If nothing else, a good night’s sleep would help mend his mood, but here he was at one o’clock in the morning in a car headed downtown in response to a command he should have had the sense to ignore. And yet his curiosity was piqued. The more he thought about the voice on the phone, the more convinced he became that something strange was going on.
“You have to meet me.” Why “have to”? Why couldn’t they meet at the station? Why did it have to be tonight?
He was making a fool of himself again. He should have let Simon know in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t in the mood, that their business could wait until morning, or even the day after tomorrow. For the first time in his life he felt more than a little apprehensive about what he was getting into.
And yet, he found it impossible to resist.
Years later, when he recalled how it felt to be in that place, strange, unpleasant images came to mind. Dark, warm air currents, a cloud of tobacco smoke floating in the air, a smell of whiskey and beer. He remembered three small, round tables in the center, none of them occupied. A bar against the wall, stools with men drinking, a single woman in the corner, old, bedraggled, wearing a black wool stocking cap, nursing a beer. An overwhelming desire to run, to put as much space as possible between himself and the man he was supposed to meet.
The Paradise Lounge was little more than a workingman’s tavern, half a block from the railroad tracks, in a part of town he rarely frequented and he knew many shunned. After midnight on a weeknight it served as a grim reminder that some people had nowhere to go and would rather not drink alone. There was nothing convivial about the place. Reaching behind him, he felt the door slam shut and turning, he tried to pretend that this was just one more place where he didn’t belong, all the while steeling himself to flee.