Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  “Now, listen—” I remonstrated.

  “Don’t talk to me,” she said, but inconsistently remained in the room and turned to me to do some talking on her own part. “So you finally decided it was time to come back, did you? Probably because you were hungry or needed a shave or something.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong,” I laughed grimly, “I passed a million barber shops on my way here.”

  “I suppose you think I should feel flattered that you came back at all. Well, I got along beautifully without you, it was so peaceful and quiet!”

  “Sure it was.” I said, “with all the neighbors’ radios going at the same time.”

  “You try that again,” she went on, “and you won’t find me here when you get back!”

  I finally took my shoulder away from the door and came into the room. I sank into a chair and put a match to a cigarette. “What are you trying to do?” I said. “Start all over again? Didn’t we have enough yesterday?”

  “You think all you have to do,” she assured me, “everytime anything comes up, is walk out the door and that ends it. Then you can come back when you please and everything’ll be peaches and cream.”

  She was crying meanwhile.

  “You don’t act the least bit sorry. And oh, Wade, the awful things you said! They haunted me all night.”

  Outside the window a radio started to play Kiss and Make Up. She drooped toward me until our foreheads touched. I closed my eyes, thought hard of Bernice, and kissed her devoutly. But she must have noticed something, because she remarked half-laughingly, but with an undertone of injury, “It’s just like taking medicine, isn’t it?”

  I told her it wasn’t at all. “How do you get that way?”

  Lord knows, it shouldn’t have been. I watched her as she stood by the window looking out, holding the green net curtain pinned to the frame with one hand. She was young, younger than I was, undoubtedly younger than Bernice was. She was slim-waisted. We had decided not to have children. I didn’t want them around. She had never had any, so didn’t know what it would be like and consequently didn’t miss them. Hence her figure and her face were just what they were the night I first looked at her. But I had looked at that face daily now for several thousand days. I mean, even Cleopatra would have palled on one in less time than that. And furthermore, Maxine had never outgrown the fads and foibles of the season I met her. It was as though she had crystallized immediately after marrying me. She still wore the lumpy, chopped-off, bobbed hair of 1920. She still put rouge on in two round fever sores when she went out. Though I hadn’t danced with her in a long time, I suspected her of still shaking her whole body in your arms. The jazz age had been deplorable enough, as I remembered it, but to have to live with a leftover from it was asking too much. Good looking or otherwise.

  “You’ll never know,” she said, still at the window, “just what I went through last night and this morning.”

  “We’ve got to cut out this animal-baiting, both of us,” I suggested dully.

  “It’s funny about a man,” she went on, as though talking to herself. “In the beginning, they do all the running after you, they can’t let you alone, can’t live without you. And then just as soon as you begin to see things their way, and tell yourself, ‘Yes, he was right, I can’t live without him either,’ they seem to have gotten over it. When anything comes up, you walk out that door with a bang, and I know what you’re thinking just as though I were inside your head. You’re thinking: ‘I’ve had enough of her for a while! I’m not going to think about her again until I’m good and ready to come back.’ But I sit here thinking about nothing else but you the whole time you’re gone. It’s funny, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’m here now,” I said with an inward sigh, “so come on over, and if you still want to cry some more, I’ll mop up after you: and if you want to smile, why, I’ll smile right back at you.”

  She didn’t cry any more, but she didn’t smile much either; she seemed to be contented just as she was, in my arms. I thought, “Good Lord! what am I going to do with this kid? I wish she’d fall in love with someone else all at once.” I stroked the top of her head and pressed my check to it, and touched the tip of her ear, where she had a little pendant of violet glass attached, and lifted it with my finger and let it drop again, the stupid ornament.

  I was too sensible to wish I’d never met her and never married her, because our love had been beautiful while it lasted, but all my life I’ve hated responsibility, and what worse responsibility was there than this: to have her keep right on loving me after I had stopped loving her (except as a reflex action).

  “And I sat there until two o’clock,” she was saying, “and the light got so it burned my eyes, so I put it out and kept right on sitting there in the dark. And I thought any moment the phone would ring, I said to myself, ‘I can’t go to bed like this, without hearing from him. My Wade never did this to me before.’ But the phone just wouldn’t ring. I got up one time and took it in my hand and shook it, and still it kept quiet. Then after a while it got so I didn’t care very much any more, the worst was over, and I couldn’t’ve felt any more rotten than I did. You understand, don’t you, honey? I just couldn’t keep on wanting anything as much as all that. It was taking everything I had. Then I closed my eyes a second, and all of a sudden it was broad daylight and the dumbwaiter buzzed for the garbage. I felt like going down on it with the rest of the cast-off junk. That’s when I did most of my heavy crying, when the sun started to come in the kitchenette window and I smelt bacon broiling and heard the lady over us say, ‘Get up, Sam, your coffee’s ready.’ Gosh, it would’ve been sweet to see your morning grouch just then, and hear you say, ‘Where the hell are the towels?’ and ‘Jesus, how I hate this place!’ and all the things you always say! I even envied the morning you threw the cup of coffee at me, because I had you with me then, even if my chest did get scalded.”

  I was getting alarmed at all this. I covered her mouth with my hand. I didn’t want to hear all about how much she loved me. If she couldn’t tell me she was starting to grow indifferent, like I was, at least she could keep still. “That isn’t love, Maxie, that’s... that’s almost hypnotism. You want to cut it out, I don’t like to hear you talk like that. You make too much of me” (“and make it tough for me,” I added to myself.)

  We sat down to eat. Maxine had the table lowered from the wall and covered with orange and green dishes that came from Japan via the five-and-ten. We had canned tomato soup, canned spaghetti, canned pineapple, and evaporated milk. The bread was not canned, but it came wrapped by machinery in wax paper and already sliced. “Awfully thoughtless of them,” I remarked sociably, “to make us go to all the trouble of buttering it ourselves. Us pioneers certainly endure hardships.”

  “Well,” she observed, passing between the gas range and the table a number of times, “the little there was to do, I did it. You’re idea of chipping in is to get yourself smelling like a barbershop.”

  And over our heads, at the same time, we heard a chair indignantly clamped down, and the lady upstairs remarked in high dudgeon to her spouse: “Oh, yeah? Well, don’t eat it then, if you’re so particular! Too bad about you!”

  “Find out what it is,” I suggested. “If he doesn’t want it, maybe we could use it down here.”

  “What’s the matter with you, Wade?” Maxine remonstrated. “You’re crazy!”

  “Do you dare me?” I insisted.

  We listened a moment longer. “Believe me, I’ve got something better to do than slave over a hot stove all day for you. Shut up!” This last explosive admonition would have been audible even in a much better-built house than ours was. I thought: “It’ll be a feather in her cap; she won’t refuse,” and prided myself on my knowledge of feminine psychology.

  “Do you know her?” I asked Maxine eagerly.

  “No,” she said, “and this is no time to be interrupting them. You’ll get yourself disliked. Come back here.”

  I went to the d
umbwaiter shaft, opened the panel, and called up: “D-twelve! Oh, D-twelve!”

  The panel above me opened and a man’s voice growled, “Who is it?”

  “The floor below,” I answered cheerfully. “Couldn’t help overhearing your Mrs. just now. Listen, sport, how about sending down a little dish of that stuff, whatever it is? We don’t get much home cooking down here.”

  I heard Maxine’s wail from the depths of the kitchenette. “Oh, Wade, you’re terrible! You don’t know how mortified I am.”

  The gentleman I was conversing with replied truculently, “Think you’re wise, don’t you? Why don’t you learn to mind your own business!” And the panel slammed back. I waited. A second later it opened again and a persuasive feminine voice queried: “Hello? Hello below?”

  I reached behind me, seized the eavesdropping Maxine by the elbow and dragged her forward, changing places with her.

  “Yes,” she said embarrassedly, “my husband got a notion he would like to try somebody else’s cooking for a change. You know how men are. The grass is always greener in the other fellow’s yard.” She laughed apologetically. “Oh, that’s awfully nice of you. I’m Mrs. Wade. Thank you so much, Mrs. Greenbaum.” This went on for quite some time. They seemed to be exchanging recipes.

  “Here,” she said, coming away from the dumbwaiter at last with a platter in her hand, “you nut! Here’s some lovely tapioca pudding for you.”

  “Oh, God!” I said, sinking weakly back in my chair and covering my eyes with one hand, “and I thought it was a steak!”

  “Now,” she said, “I hope you’re satisfied. As a result of this, I’ll probably have to say hello to her every time I meet her going up in the elevator. Or else sit here and entertain her all afternoon when you’re away. Phone the movie house and find out what’s going on.”

  I felt like saying, “It’s polite to wait till you’re asked.”

  I thought the picture would never be over. I squirmed and gritted my teeth in the baleful silverish glow that went on and on. I thought, “It’s not they who should be paid a couple of grand a week for making faces, it’s we who ought to be paid for sitting and watching.” Then we were back again, and Maxine snapped on the lights, while I put the milk bottle outside the door and locked the apartment for the night. Another day was over. But what good was that, when the one after would be just like it?

  I delayed as long as I could, after she had gone to bed and even after she had turned out the bed light. I stalked around in the living room with my coat off and my tie loosened. There wasn’t going to be any making up of the row of the night before. I mean, we were made up already, but there weren’t going to be any tokens of it. But there wasn’t anything to read (and I hated reading, anyway) and there wasn’t anything to do. I went into the kitchenette, and there was that awful tapioca pudding of Mrs. Greenbaum’s staring me in the face. I emptied it into the sink and came out again. I pulled up the shades and looked out of the window. The sky was all brick dust, and there was no moon. Suddenly, standing there like that, I realized I had been praying, I had been saying, “Oh, Lord, give me a break. Let something romantic, something exciting, happen to me. Only once, if never again. Before I’m too old. Break up this life of mine. Never mind about mending it again, I can do that myself. Why did I ever marry her? Without her, every minute would have been an adventure! It isn’t fair—”

  I went inside, jumped out of my things, and got into my own bed. She may have been awake or she may have been asleep, it didn’t matter to me.

  Noise woke me up, great rolling drumbeats of it. I opened my dazed eyes, and outside the windows it would be all black one minute and all platinum the next, with a great big crash. And in that minute rain began to hiss down, and the curtains did a dance of the seven veils. “Quick, close the windows, Wade!” Maxine whimpered, and one of the tinsel flashes showed her to me in the next bed, with her arm flung before her face and the pillow over her head instead of under it.

  “What’s the matter, scared?” I laughed, and got up and pulled down the sashes. That robbed the storm of all its dignity, made it just a stage effect in an old-fashioned melodrama, with the room very quiet all of a sudden and the flashes removed to a distance and not much better than an electric sign with the current flickering and dying down.

  “I’m still scared,” she informed me in a certain tone.

  “Have a cigarette,” I said. “I’m going back to sleep.”

  Presently she said, “I have a cigarette, but I haven’t got a match.”

  I took a folder of them from under my pillow and passed them to her across the aisle between the two beds. In grasping them, she reached too far up on my arm. I could feel her fingers slip almost up to my elbow. I left the matches and took the arm away.

  In the morning I was dreaming of Bernice. I was saying. “There’s nothing worse than an earthquake; stand close to me in the doorway here until it passes,” when Maxine woke me by shaking my shoulder.

  “My goodness,” she said. “I don’t know where you were the night before last, but you certainly act as though you’re making up for lost sleep. Come on, the coffee’ll get cold.”

  “Where’s a towel?” I grumbled, with my eyes still shut.

  “Now don’t start that,” she said. “I laid one out for you.”

  I got up, leaned sleepily against the wall for a minute, then went out, jumped under the cold water, and began hitting myself from all directions. It was only when I was all through that I realized I had forgotten to take my pajamas off. They were clinging around me like wet elastic. So I knew by that what kind of a morning it was going to be. I felt sorry for her for a moment, and wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder and more advisable to walk straight out as soon as I was dressed and swallow a glass of orange juice at the corner drug store instead of raising hell for the next half-hour. But she wouldn’t have understood if I had, and what’s the use of being self-sacrificing when the motive isn’t made clear to the bystander?

  But when I was dressed and went in and sat down, I kept the fingers of my right hand crossed.

  She laughed charmingly, poor Maxine. “It’s cleared up beautifully,” she said. “I was terribly scared when we were having that storm last night.”

  “I know,” I said briefly.

  “Well, you didn’t do much about it,” she went on good-naturedly.

  “What did you expect me to do, lay a hot-water bottle at your feet?”

  “Well, you don’t have to look so awful, Wade.”

  “Well, don’t look at me, then.”

  She got off the subject in a hurry. “The lightning turned the milk sour. We’ll have to use some of the evap., I’m afraid.”

  “I knew that was coming,” I said.

  “Why, you must be a mind reader.” she suggested gently.

  I thought, “It’s a good thing you’re not. If you could read mine right now, you’d dive under the bed in a hurry.”

  “Lousy,” I said in reference to the coffee.

  “It would be,” she sighed, “no matter what was in it. If I hadn’t told you, you wouldn’t know the difference.”

  I enlarged on the subject.

  “Well, don’t take it, then,” she said indifferently. “You don’t have to, you know. Nobody’s going to make you.”

  “Yeah!” I barked, “and I’m going to feel swell by the time I get to Forty-Second Street, you didn’t stop to think of that, did you?”

  “Oh,” she moaned, “what am I going to do with this man?” And glanced entreatingly at the clock.

  “Don’t worry, affectionate, I’m going,” I laughed grimly. And I looked down at the coffee cup for a second.

  She saw me and forestalled me. She had learned by experience what I was thinking. She quickly took it off the table and emptied it down the sink. “No matter what happens to me now,” she said, “at least it won’t be another scalding.”

  That turned the trick, somehow. She probably expected it to as little as I did myself, but nevertheles
s it did. I laughed, went over to her, put my arms around her, and pressed my face against hers. “You poor kid,” I droned, “why don’t you go out and get yourself a pair of brass knuckles one of these times and rearrange my front teeth?”

  “I’m just a dumb frail, like you say when you’re drunk,” she said. “I wouldn’t hurt a tooth in your head. It’s funny,” she added thoughtfully, “in this life, one of us always has to do the bossing. Upstairs it’s Mrs. Greenbaum, to judge by the sounds we hear, but in this family it’s you.”

  “Since when?” I said. “It’s news to me. I’m afraid you’re taking me for a sleigh ride.”

  She came to the door with me, and then when I got down to the street she came to the window to say good-bye some more. I didn’t bother looking up, so she tapped on the pane. When I turned my head, she threw up the sash and leaned out to call down that old one of eight years ago. “Don’t take any wooden nickels.”

  “Sure I will,” I answered, “so I can pass ’em on to you.” And waved, and went away.

  For a little while everything was all right. I even stepped up on a high rickety chair under an awning to have my shoes shined. All my life, that, and a haircut, and a shower, have been barometers of well-being to me. Then my newly glistening shoes, gleaming like burnished bronze, carried me down into that twilight grotto they call the subway. The turnstiles made a continual popping sound, like machine-gun fire in that faraway war I so blissfully missed. Then a red comet and a green one, side by side, came hurtling out of the gloom, and behind them, like an accordion, a long row of lighted cars expanded and came to a standstill. I took my place before a seated lady with a little boy on her lap, tilted my chin, and stared down my nose at a gaudy placard showing a girl with what looked like a strip of gelatine pasted over her mouth. The little boy started to wipe the soles of his shoes on my trousers. The lady noticed it and said indulgently, “Put your feet down, Stefan.” “Or else put your hands up,” I thought, “and fight like a man,” and moved away from there.