Nobody Knew They Were There

by Ed McBain

  “At any rate,” Koblenz says, and goes on to deliver an abbreviated version of his lecture, expounding the theory that Playboy is responsible for the look of the seventies by having openly pioneered nudity in its pages, thereby paving the way for exposure of the female form in films, on the stage, in fashions, and so on. But more than that, it is equally responsible for the morals of the seventies, having convinced its male and female readers alike that fornication is quite all right and in fact sometimes desirable. Forget for the moment that it has also relegated women to the position of mere chattels.…

  “I am not a mere chattel,” Jean says.

  “Not only are you a mere chattel, but you enjoy being one,” Koblenz says.

  “Victor is a sadist,” Jean explains.

  “If you say that one more time,” Koblenz warns without a trace of a smile, “I’ll beat you senseless.”

  Jean shrugs somewhat apologetically. I notice for the first time that there is a faint bruise on her cheek. I look at Koblenz with sudden loathing and barely listen as he goes on about the Beatles who, he maintains, while partially responsible for today’s look—the long hair, the costume-like apparel—are solely responsible for today’s sound, the very sound emanating from the record player in the other room, which sound has in turn contributed to the entire psychedelic experience and hastened the widespread use of drugs.

  “After all,” he tells me seriously while I envision him beating a naked Jean Trench in a student apartment somewhere off campus, “after all, if public figures publicly announce in their music and in their life styles that they are experimenting with mind-blowing drugs, will not their idolatrous fans seek to emulate their postures, hunh?”

  “What this party could use,” a voice at my elbow says, “is a little pot,” and I turn to find the black girl in the turtleneck shirt and faded jeans standing at my side and reaching for my bottle of scotch.

  “Take this young lady,” Koblenz says, his eyes coveting her. “You’ll notice, for example, that she’s not wearing a brassiere.”

  “Can you notice?” the girl says, pouring scotch. “I’m Adele.”

  “Hello, Adele,” I say. “I’m Arthur.”

  “Of course you can,” Koblenz says. “But ten years ago, this same young lady … how old are you, Adele?”

  “Twenty-four,” Adele says. “Cheers,” she says and lifts the glass and drinks.

  “A twenty-four-year-old girl would never have dreamt of walking around in such an exposed manner.

  “Sure, we would have.”

  “In 1964? Never.”

  “Anyway, who’s exposed?” Adele asks. “I’m free, is all.”

  “Nobody’s free,” Jean says, and immediately adds, “I still wear a bra.”

  “Really, honey?” Adele asks. “How come?”

  “I like secrets,” Jean says.

  “There are no more secrets in America,” Adele says. “You think there are any secrets, Arthur?”

  “A few,” I say.

  “Name one.”

  “If I name it, it won’t be a secret any more,” I say, and smile.

  “You’re too smart for me, Whitey,” Adele says, and goes off to join a group on the other side of the room.

  (In the room, the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo. I look up at the clock. Where is Sara?)

  In the other room, Seth Wilson tells me there are only six important writers in America, and he goes on to name them. He also tells me he is going to be more important than any of them because, aside from his obvious talent (he was chosen for the writer-in-residence fellowship over six hundred other applicants from all over the country), he has the added advantage of being black and therefore able to deal with America’s problems as revealed through its polarization into two separate and distinct nations.…

  “White and black?” I ask.

  “No, Immigrant and Wasp,” he says. “Now those are broad generalizations, I know,” he says, “but I think we can safely conclude that there are two Americas side by side today and that one of them is Immigrant America, in which category we can locate black people and young people, and the other is Wasp America, where we can locate the Establishment and all previous immigrant groups that have been assimilated into the culture.” He goes on to tell me that of course these categories can be divided and subdivided, as for example, the long-haired youths and the straights, the militant blacks and the integrationists, the long-arrived immigrant-now-Wasp groups like Italians and Irishmen and Jews and the newly arrived Wasp contenders like Puerto Ricans (“Have you noticed,” he asks in an aside, “that the only men to set foot on the moon so far have been Wasps?”), but that essentially the categories are valid and true, and he is possibly the one talented writer around who can straddle both Americas, being black and young and therefore Immigrant both emotionally and of course by heritage, but being Wasp intellectually and creatively.

  “You are also quite modest,” I mention.

  He does not laugh. He does not even smile.

  The blonde named Lucille tells me she has been playing piano since she was six years old, that she had a strict piano teacher who beat out the cadence on the piano top with a cane she carried because she had suffered polio as a child. She would clutch the piano top with one gnarled hand (she also had arthritis, poor soul) and rap out the tempo with the cane while Lucille, in terror, kept wishing she would fall over and break her neck, thereby adding to her miseries. Lucille confides that her entire life has been a series of severe training episodes. She was, for example, toilet-trained at the age of eight months, which she supposes sets some kind of record, though when anyone makes her laugh hard enough, she still wets her pants.

  “I had better not make you laugh,” I say.

  “I doubt if you could,” she tells me. “I have no sense of humor.”

  “I saw you laughing earlier,” I say. “With Davey.”

  “No. Davey was laughing. I was showing him a chord that group uses over and over again.”

  “I saw you laughing, too.”

  “That wasn’t when I was showing the chord to Davey.”

  “I thought it was.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Lucille says. “I have total recall.”

  “So have I.”

  “One of us is wrong.”

  “It must be me,” I say, and go to sit at the piano alone.

  I have had this American party scene, I have had it in a hundred different homes on a thousand different occasions (total recall), and there is nothing different about this one. The settings change, the faces change, the costumes change, the ages change, the music changes, but they are all one and the same, and I am bored to tears with each and all. I am amazed only that it is possible for the party to continue with such unabated energy. I can forgive myself—I have always been magnanimous that way—because I am here to do something. But what of the others? Will the party go on and on (with the same stale smoke and canned music and forced laughter and pointless conversations) until one bloody dawn a year from now, two years from now, ten years from now, when all the revelers will stagger out into the streets and ask themselves where they were while it all was happening? We were talking, they will say. We were laughing. We were singing. It was too painful to do otherwise. Anyway, we were only following the historic precedent set by countless nations. We did not know what was going on out here during the night. We were inside where it was warm and protected, and friends gave tolerant respect to opinions earnestly expressed. We laughed a lot. We sang sometimes. We danced and joked and listened and forgot. We did not know what was happening outside here, we did not expect so shattering a dawn, we only wanted to spend a pleasant hour or so together. Sitting before an upright piano whose strings vibrate with the tumultuous sound coming from the record player, I listen, and I watch, a drink in my hand (always a drink in my hand, always and ever the same), the smoke rising, the chatter floating, the music throbbing. I am essentially alone, an outsider, but I wonder—for all my magnanimity—if I can re
ally forgive myself.

  I suddenly know why I am here.

  To kill a man.

  Yes, but I have known that all along.

  I ask myself the question again: Why are you here? Drowning in sound, trying in this ocean of sound to find a meaningful straw of dialogue to which I can cling, I hear instead the same endless chatter about Updike and all that crowd, Bernstein and all that crowd, our beloved loyal leader and all that crowd, God help us, and I am here with all my crowd (but not my crowd) and very close to panic, very close to losing complete control and exposing either the plot or myself (Freud and all that crowd) because I can only think I am here to kill a man and the answer does not satisfy me, the answer is as repetitive and as dull as the party that engulfs me.

  She throws open the front door as though expecting a surprise.

  She is wearing her long black coat and a black woolen hat. She takes off the coat immediately, draping it over the extended leg of the boy in the cast, revealing at once that she is draped in beads, yards and yards of beads that twinkle and gleam over black slacks and black sweater, short strands of beads that bounce between her breasts, longer strands that fall to her waist, still longer ropes that dangle to her knees, beads in every conceivable color and size, some as large as golf balls, some as tiny as tears, she is aglow in a swirl of color and motion, an open glittering treasure chest, a fantasy reborn.

  “Thought I’d never make it, eh, Bob?” she says to the boy in the cast.

  “Get that damn thing off my leg,” he answers.

  “Hello, Arthur,” she says, waggling her fingers at me. She scoops up the coat by its collar, twirling it about her legs like a bullfighter’s cape, the strands of beads flying out and away from her body simultaneously as she executes a neat swing toward the kitchen.

  “Where’ve you been, Sara?” Seth calls to her.

  “Oh, banking around,” she answers over her shoulder, “just banking around.”

  Sara is here.

  The party has begun.

  I am saved.

  She ignores me for the rest of the night.

  She dances with every man in the room, and even tries to coax Bob to get up and hobble around with her on his encased leg, but he flatly refuses, shaking his shaggy head, though he is grinning in his beard from ear to ear. She dances smoothly and gracefully, executing steps she undoubtedly learned in her cradle, steps I have never had the courage to try on a dance floor, steps that seem the exclusive property of the young. I am sharply aware all at once of the vast difference in our ages and terrified that she will approach me next and urge me onto the floor. But she does not. She ignores me thoroughly and completely, and I wonder why she asked Seth to invite me, and then wonder whether she really did. She drinks steadily and heavily, but as she once warned me, she does not get drunk. At one point, she asks if we have all seen Seth’s bedroom (I feel a twinge of jealousy, recalling her tale of the night they necked and talked) and then asks us to wait a minute, and then goes out through the kitchen and into the bedroom, and then comes back and says, “All right, everybody, it’s ready now,” and leads two or three of the guests away with her, coming back to stare at me and say, “Don’t you want to come, Arthur?” and holding out her hand to me and pulling me off the piano bench and then taking us all into Seth’s bedroom, where she flicks off the lights. I am the only one who knows where he is supposed to look, but obstinately I will not.

  “Don’t you see it?” she says to the others. “The ceiling. Look up at the ceiling. There are luminous little stars on the ceiling.”

  Everyone looks up at the ceiling. Everyone is wondering how Sara knows there are luminous little stars on Seth’s bedroom ceiling.

  “Aren’t they lovely?” she says. “I love shining little stars.” She looks up with a phony beatific smile on her face. “I had to come in first to turn on the lights for a few minutes. So the stars would shine when I turned them off again. Aren’t they gorgeous?”

  “Gorgeous,” I say, and she turns on the lights.

  There is a picture of Martin Luther King on Seth’s dresser. The walls are hung with bric-a-brac and souvenirs, picture postcards, scraps cut from magazines and newspapers, caricatures of Seth and of the bearded boy Bob, a poster announcing a play written by Seth and performed at the University of Wisconsin in the spring of last year, the ancient Esquire photograph of a glowering Sonny Liston with the words BLACK POWER lettered beneath it directly onto the wall, a dungaree jacket on a hook, a crutch on another hook, several train schedules, a calendar, a glossy photograph of a white girl laughing and obviously high and wearing no blouse, a list of THINGS TO DO NEXT WEEK (blank) and another list of THINGS ALREADY DONE (marked with Chapter Ten, Chapter Eleven, Chapter Twelve, all crossed out), a Catholic scapula tacked to the wall and dangling from its brown strings, alongside of which, also tacked to the wall, are a set of rosary beads and a Jewish mezuzah. The walls, in my estimation, are far more interesting than the goddamn ceiling with its gorgeous luminous stars.

  She is gone again.

  She has left something on the porch outside, and she goes to get it now, tracking in a flurry of leaves in her wake. She holds a huge pumpkin in her extended hands, bright orange against the black of her sweater and slacks. She puts it into the center of the living-room floor and then goes into the kitchen for newspapers and carving knives, spreading the papers carefully, setting the pumpkin down on them, and then passing out the knives and inviting people to carve the pumpkin because All Hallows’ Eve is only five days away. She glances at me. There is something strange in her eyes. She is wearing her contacts, and her eyes are dark, I cannot read what is in them, I do not know what she is trying to say to me. Her attention is caught by the music on the turntable, a song unfamiliar to me but one she obviously knows well. She leaves the pumpkin carvers, who are scattering seeds and pulp onto the newspapers, and stretches out on the couch and dreamily listens to the song, and then sits upright suddenly, and knowing that I am the only person watching her, slowly and deliberately reaches down to pick up a solitary leaf from the floor. She examines it for a moment, and then puts it into the back pocket of her slacks. She looks at me, and turns away.

  Slowly and deliberately, I reach down to pick up another leaf. Slowly and deliberately, I put it into my back pocket. She seems about to cry. Our eyes hold. I am reminded of the meeting in Hester’s office, when neither Hester nor I would turn away. Sara and I seem incapable of performing this simple task now, but I know it is she who will turn away first, and I wait, but still she does not turn, and finally she says, “You carve the mouth, Arthur. Make a smiling mouth, Arthur. You never smile.”

  “I smile.”

  “No,” she says. “Never.”

  The party is breaking up.

  In couples or alone, the guests are beginning to depart. The smiling pumpkin (it is Seth who finally carves the mouth), illuminated now with a single glowing votive candle, sits in the uncurtained window facing the black street outside. My follower has left with Lucille. Epstein, sitting in the same easy chair, is apparently telling Adele about yet another woman he knew abroad, rambling on drunkenly about Connie and the cellar near Rouen, “feared day and night,” he is saying, “feared it might have to come off,” making about as much sense as Koblenz who is explaining his Beatles-Playboy theory to yet another stranger in the kitchen, while Jean Trench snipes at him and courts another beating. The music drones on, but someone has had the good grace to lower the volume. Sara sits on the couch under the picture of W. C. Fields. (Someone is explaining that the still photo was taken from a film called My Little Chickadee, and that Field’s line in answer to the question “Is this a game of chance, sir?” was “No, not the way I play it.” I remember the line. I saw the film when I was eight years old. To Sara, that is during the time of the American Renaissance.) Epstein, finally stirring himself from reveries of La Belle France, says it’s time he was going, and offers me a lift back to the hotel. Sara sits up.

  “Can you drop me,
too?” she asks.

  We look at each other.

  In the automobile, we are silent. Epstein drives slowly and carefully over the snow-covered streets. The town is deserted. The windshield is coated with rime. (I can recall the gondola moving to the top of Sugarbush, the rime on the plastic, and my son Adam revealing his plans to me. “Total recall is a curse,” Sara once told me.) She says nothing now.

  When we reach the hotel, I get out, and Sara asks Epstein to let her out here, too. She feels like walking home, she says, she feels like a little fresh air. He is concerned for her safety. It is two o’clock in the morning. She assures him that she will be all right, and steps onto the sidewalk beside me. Together, we watch the car go off into the night, a blue exhaust puffing from its tailpipe.

  We stand awkwardly silent.

  “Would you like to come up for a nightcap?” I ask.

  “You know it wouldn’t be a nightcap,” she answers.

  “Would you like to come to bed with me then?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Good-bye, Sara.”

  “Arthur … if I came upstairs, it’d only be because I feel sorry for you.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t want you to feel sorry for me, Sara.”

  “Then please don’t ask me.”

  “I’ve already asked you, and you’ve already said no. And I’ve already said good-bye.”

  “You mean good night.”

  “I mean good-bye. Good-bye, Sara,” I say, and go into the lobby, and walk to the elevator, and take it up to the fifth floor, and go to my room.

  I am undressed and in bed when the telephone rings.

  “Arthur?”

  “Yes, Sara.”

  “Why do I worry about you?”

  “I don’t know. Why do you, Sara?”

  “You’re making me feel sorry for you. That isn’t fair, Arthur.”

  “Sara, do you want to come here?”

  “No. I have studying to do.”

  “Then why did you call me?”

  “I don’t know.”