by Joan Smith
‘He don’t wanna tell me his name, no way. Soon’s I ask him, he’s out the door.’ He nodded towards the swing doors Loretta had just come through.
Loretta said: ‘What did he look like?’
The porter shrugged. ‘Was a guy.’
‘Young? Old?’ The porter was black and she hesitated before adding: ‘Was he white?’
He nodded. ‘White guy. How old? I can’t rightly –’
The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up, turning his back on Loretta, who waited just long enough to hear him embark on a lengthy conversation about a faulty air-conditioning unit in one of the apartments. When he took out a ledger and began to record the problem, insisting nothing could be done before Monday, she finally pressed the call button and got Tracey into the lift.
It occurred to her now, several hours later, that the porter must have noticed something about the unknown visitor, some detail like hair colour or height which might help to identify him next time she spoke to Toni. She pulled the quilt more tightly round her, frowning and shivering even though she had turned the air conditioning down. Taken in isolation, the fact that someone had tried to come up to the flat in this slightly clandestine manner meant nothing, other than suggesting that the stranger was unfamiliar with the building security system. It might have been one of Toni’s students, someone who was used to seeing her in her office at Columbia; it was not unknown for students to descend uninvited on their lecturers, it had happened to Loretta in Oxford the previous winter when one of her third-years had had an alcohol-fuelled panic attack. Yet there was nothing unusual about having to check in with a building superintendent or porter. Loretta thought the system was likely to be the same at most apartment blocks in this part of New York. Perhaps he hadn’t liked the look of the admittedly rather surly porter, and thought he could sneak past when his attention was engaged elsewhere. There were sufficient unknowns to worry Loretta and although it was an eccentric time to go downstairs and interrogate the man again — twenty minutes to five when she checked her watch once more — she thought it was worth it to put her mind at rest. Anyway — and this hadn’t occurred to her before — if she left it much later he might go off shift at six or eight. She flung off the quilt, swung her legs out of bed and padded over to the chair on which she had discarded her own clothes and Tracey’s jacket.
His wallet, she saw as she slithered into her underwear, had fallen out of his jacket and was lying on the floor. She bent to retrieve it and several pieces of paper fluttered out, including his return air ticket to Washington. It was too long to fit in any of the wallet’s compartments so she tucked it back between the covers as Tracey must have done, giving the other pieces of paper a cursory examination before doing the same with them. There were several taxi receipts, the printed sort which issued from the meter in yellow cabs if a passenger asked for one, and Loretta looked curiously to see how much he had paid for the journey to his hotel from LaGuardia that afternoon. Three dollars more than it had cost her, she discovered, but it was the times on the print-out which arrested her attention: ‘St. time 09:18 am,’ it recorded, ‘End time 10:01 am’.
Tracey had arrived in New York hours earlier than expected, early enough to have been in the Metropolitan Museum at lunchtime as the journalist, Carole What’s-her-name, had suggested. Loretta turned to look at the recumbent form of her ex-husband on the sofa, only his wavy grey hair visible above the blanket, but it was enough to stir the deep affection she still felt for him. Whatever Tracey had been doing in New York that morning, Loretta was 99 per cent certain that he hadn’t been spying on her. As though they might contain the answer, she hastily looked through the other taxi receipts, discovering only that Tracey seemed to have spent the day making short journeys up and down the city. She shrugged, telling herself there was bound to be a simple explanation, and turned over a blue air mail envelope which had also fallen from the wallet. It had been posted four days ago by Swiftair, the express letter service, and Loretta was immediately curious to know who was sending Tracey urgent letters from Hampshire.
Neither the sender’s name, M Stephenson, nor the address — a house called The Warren, in a village near Basingstoke — meant anything to Loretta. She held the envelope between her finger and thumb, studying the writing for clues. There were longish spaces between the words and the letters were crammed together with tall perpendicular strokes, but it didn’t tell her whether the writer was a man or a woman. Loretta perched on the edge of the chair, careful not to crush the clothes she’d taken off earlier, and slid the thin pages from the envelope. Suddenly aware that she was sitting there in her knickers, she picked up a shirt and slid it over her head, distracting herself from the moral problem of what she was doing reading Tracey’s private correspondence.
A single word leapt out at her from the first page, ‘Darlingest,’ and the moral problem evaporated. She was hooked.
‘Darlingest,’ she read again, deliberately keeping her face averted from the slumbering figure on the sofa, ‘another whole day without a letter or phone call. Perhaps you’ve written and the letter’s gone astray or you’ve been travelling and haven’t had a chance to pop it in the postbox — I know you said you might have to go to Arkansas, darling. I’m sure Pete, you remember Pete the postman, I’m sure he thinks I’ve taken leave of my senses, waiting at the door every morning and snatching the letters from his hand! Pretending, of course, that I just happen to be taking in the milk — but who cares what he thinks? I’m not ashamed, it’s been a whole week since you phoned — yes, darling, I am counting the days and no letter either! You would –’
Loretta reached the bottom of the first page. On the sofa John Tracey stirred, muttered, and threw an arm free of the blanket. The pink halo was still there on his forearm, a little more faded now, and Loretta averted her eyes, not wanting to think about it. She turned the page.
— tell me if something was wrong, if you were having doubts? I understand, I truly understand what a big step it must seem, getting married again, especially after such a rotten experience first time round —
‘What?’ Loretta’s hand flew to her mouth and she looked fearfully at Tracey. He did not seem to have heard her exclamation and she turned back a page, reading the sentence again from the beginning, wondering just what exactly Tracey had told this M Stephenson person about their marriage. It hadn’t been that bad.
— first time round, but remember, darling, we’re in this together! We’re both older, and wiser (you are, at any rate, I can’t speak for me!) and I just know we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. Trust me! I was too young when I married Tim and then the children came so fast (Susie sends her love, by the way, and keeps asking when Uncle John’s coming home — yes, home, isn’t that sweet of her? And a bit of self-interest, of course, she’s longing to be a bridesmaid! I suppose it was a blessing in a way, you and Loretta not having children, but I know how miserable it must have been for you. A man needs a son, that’s what I’ve always thought, and I’m not too old! Look at that woman in Italy, twins at 59 and I’m years younger than her!
A bracket seemed to be missing somewhere in the paragraph, emphasising M Stephenson’s agitation. Loretta read on, the handwriting becoming steadily more difficult to decipher although she was able to make out a sentence about career women and their selfishness. From here the letter digressed abruptly into local news, recorded in a much more legible hand: Rufus had decided to give up German next year, he’d struggled with it for so long and they were just going to have to face the fact that he wasn’t a linguist. Susie was looking forward to the school holidays because she’d been invited to go to France for a week with Tamara, which meant that if John could get a week off, they’d only have Rufus to think about. Finally the letter returned to Tracey’s failure to phone or write:
Darling John, I know I’m not exactly Cinderella but you really have come into my life like Prince Charming and I just can’t bear the thought — I won’t bear it! I know I’m an old silly, doub
ting you like this, but you’ve no idea how lonely it is without you! When I come back from taking Susie to school in the morning, I’d go absolutely mad if I didn’t have the rabbits to see to, never mind all the orders for the shop. I know —
Tracey’s new friend kept rabbits? Loretta remembered that her house was called The Warren and pulled a face, scenting whimsy. He had had a series of unsuitable girlfriends in recent years, including a married gym teacher he had met in a launderette in Brixton and a Greek student half his age, but the fevered tone of M Stephenson’s letter made Loretta wonder if she knew him as well as she thought she did. The phrase ‘male menopause’ came into her head and she read on:
— we haven’t known each other for long, it seems like so much more than five months. I keep thinking about that day I sat down and wrote you a letter, never thinking — not in a million years did I imagine you’d write back. I thought someone as famous and important as you was bound to have a secretary and I was so touched when I saw the envelope with the Sunday Herald postmark and your writing — I didn’t recognise it then of course, I’d only ever seen the photo at the top of your columns. I don’t know if I ever told you but it was the photo that made me write. Your articles are so brilliant, I used to cry when I read about the poor children in Sarajevo —
Sorry, darling, I’m rambling! That’s the effect you have on me you see. Lord, I was so nervous that day, I could hardly dial the number you’d put in your letter. And then you very sweetly invited me to lunch and on the tube from Waterloo I had the feeling my life was about to change. And I couldn’t bear — no, I won’t bear the thought of — I can’t even write it.
Loretta stopped reading, hastily collated the pages and shoved them back into the envelope. She put the letter on the coffee table and nibbled at a fingernail she’d broken on the journey back from the restaurant, wondering distractedly if Toni had an emery board. No wonder John Tracey was hanging round Washington, she thought, but how had he got in so deep in such a short time? She was about to put the flimsy blue envelope back in his wallet when she realised she had no idea what the initial M stood for. Mary, Marilyn, Maureen, Martha? Reluctantly Loretta reached for the envelope, drew out the letter and went straight to the last page.
‘Yours forever and always, darling — Mo,’ she read, and slid the folded sheets back inside. Mo for Maureen? She thrust the envelope into Tracey’s wallet, along with the air ticket and all his other paraphernalia, and slid it into the inside pocket of his jacket. Going down to interrogate the porter no longer seemed so urgent but she was less sleepy than ever; slightly shamefaced, Loretta pulled her jeans from her weekend case, slipped into them and stood up to fasten the button fly. She crossed the room to switch off the bedside lamp and gazed for a long moment at the grey dawn light which had begun to leak through the slats of the Venetian blinds. Then she picked up Toni’s spare keys and, without looking at Tracey, let herself quietly out of the flat.
Six
Growling, snarling, shouting: Loretta awoke to mayhem. ‘What’s going on?’ she heard herself say, almost before she was out of bed, but the racket was too great for either of the combatants to hear. John Tracey was standing on the sofa, rearing back out of the dog’s reach, his hands tangled in the blanket which he was using as a flimsy shield. ‘Get away,’ she heard him bellow, ‘get away, but the dog merely barked more ferociously, her front paws on the sofa, angrier than Loretta had ever seen her.
‘Stop it,’ Loretta bellowed, unsure whether she was addressing the man or the dog. ‘Stop it at once. Honey!’ she added menacingly, advancing on her from behind. The dog was so intent on hauling her stubby backlegs on to the sofa and finding a tender part of Tracey’s anatomy to bite that she failed to hear Loretta’s approach. Loretta seized her by the collar, pulled with all her strength and fell back against the coffee table, taking the dog with her.
‘Christ,’ exclaimed Tracey, crumpled and furious, ‘where’d it come from? Where am I? What the fuck’s going on? Loretta?’
‘Shut up,’ she said, struggling into a sitting position and hanging on to the dog. ‘Honey, stop it. Don’t you dare bite me. Sit, I said.’ She was mildly astonished and very relieved when the dog obeyed.
Tracey climbed down off the sofa, adjusting the open neck of his shirt and looking highly disgruntled. ‘Loretta, would you please tell me what’s going on?’
‘What did you do to her? She’s not normally aggressive.’ Except with other dogs, Loretta thought, but she didn’t mention that. ‘I mean, just look at her. She’s terribly upset.’
The dog was panting and shaking, her cavernous jaw hanging open and her thick pink tongue fully extended. Loretta hugged her, crooning — to her own surprise –’ there, there, it’s all right. He won’t hurt you.’
‘She’s upset? What about me? I wake up God knows where, in a totally strange flat, with this hound from hell slobbering all over my face. How’d you think I feel?’ Tracey sat on the sofa and put his head in his hands.
‘I’ll put her in the kitchen,’ Loretta said diplomatically. ‘It’s time she was fed. Honey, this way.’ She used her foot to herd the dog through the doorway and spooned food from a can on to a plate, enough to pacify her for the next few minutes, switched on the electric kettle and returned to the living-room. ‘Tea or coffee?’
Tracey said grumpily: ‘What I’d like is a civil explanation of what I’m doing here. And why’s it so bloody hot? Doesn’t this place have air conditioning? Where are we?’
‘Toni’s flat,’ Loretta said shortly, going to the window and pulling up the blinds. She turned various knobs on the control panel of the air conditioning unit and cold air began to blow. ‘I can’t seem to get this thing right, I woke up in the night and it was actually quite chilly so I turned it off.’ She turned back to Tracey. ‘After you passed out last night –’
‘Is that what happened?’ Tracey looked puzzled. ‘I don’t remember anything after — I mean, I remember a bar. And noses. Why do I remember noses?’
‘There was a mural in the restaurant. Or a picture, I can’t remember which. Famous people’s noses.’
Tracey scowled. ‘No wonder I feel peculiar.’
‘You were sitting at the bar when I got to the restaurant. You didn’t seem drunk but you were in a bad mood right from the start, you complained about our table and you wanted to send the wine back. You drank it, though.’
‘It’s beginning to come back. You say I passed out?’ Tracey rubbed the back of his neck, methodically massaging the muscles.
Loretta nodded. ‘We’d just finished the main course when you went very pale. Next thing I knew, you’d more or less keeled over.’ She pulled the chair closer to the coffee table and sat down, leaning towards him, and said earnestly: ‘John, are you on anything?’
He stopped rubbing and looked at her, completely blank. ‘On what? What d’you mean?’
She rolled her eyes upwards, cross that he was making her spell it out. ‘You know. Drugs. You can trust me,’ she added, a bitter note entering her voice. The remarks about her in Mo Stephenson’s letter, and career women in general, were fresh in her memory.
‘I haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’ He leaned back and stretched out his arms. ‘God, I’m stiff. Why on earth did you bring me back here?’ Suddenly he looked embarrassed. ‘You weren’t — we didn’t –’
‘What?’
‘You know.’ It was her turn to look blank and relief flickered in his eyes. ‘Obviously we didn’t. Look, I’m sorry about last night –’
‘John, you haven’t answered my question.’
‘I told you, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘That,’ she said, leaning forward and jabbing his forearm. ‘What was it?’ She hesitated and added tentatively: ‘Heroin?’
‘Heroin?’ Tracey looked down at the puncture mark and began to laugh.
Loretta sat back in her chair. ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You are. Honestly,
Loretta, do you have to be so melodramatic? You really want to know what this is?’ He touched the pink dot with his finger and winced. ‘Christ, it’s still sore.’
She said nothing.
‘A wasp sting,’ he said, grinning in anticipation of her reaction. ‘I was taking my jacket off before I got into the taxi and the little bugger got me. At the airport, this is. LaGuardia.’
‘You were stung by a wasp?’
‘Well done, Loretta, full marks for comprehension. You know I’m allergic? I mean, I haven’t been stung since I was a kid but you can’t take risks. Some people go into what’s-it-called, anaphylactic shock. Soon as I got to the hotel I asked the receptionist and she gave me the address of a doctor, some bloke they have an arrangement with. He gave me some tablets, he said not to mix them with alcohol but I forgot.’ Tracey saw Loretta’s expression and added: ‘All right, that’s not strictly true, I thought he was being over-cautious. Obviously he wasn’t.’ He leaned forward and touched her bare knee. ‘Sorry, love, did I give you a fright?’
She said stiffly: ‘Only in so far as I didn’t have the faintest idea what was wrong with you. And I had to get you out of the restaurant, into a taxi and all the way up here.’
‘What floor are we on?’
‘The fifteenth.’
He grimaced. ‘If it’s any consolation, I feel terrible. Like a bad hangover or flu. Did you say something about coffee?’
‘Mmm.’ She got up. ‘Black?’
‘Please. I suppose I ought to take another one of those tablets.’ He felt in his trouser pocket and brought out a foil-covered strip.
Loretta said: ‘Should you? I mean, you’ve survived the night.’
Tracey shrugged and put them away. ‘You’re probably right. By the way — why didn’t you put me in a taxi and send me back to my hotel?’
‘I didn’t... I don’t know where you’re staying.’
‘The Gramercy Park. Right at the bottom of Lexington.’