Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  Lights flashed out where lights had no business to be — on the blank side walls of buildings and in midair — without giving the day a chance to die decently, so that the twilight was done to death with splashes of tropical yellow, scarlet, and green that moved, that sputtered, flashed and blinked. At the end of one of the side streets a brazen comet flashed by halfway between the roofs and the ground carrying a long tail of lights with it — an elevated train headed uptown The streets were a kaleidoscope; every drug store, every millinery shop, had its glowing neon tubes of jade and vermilion spelling out what it had to say and dyeing the pavement in front of it, and the throngs that went by on the sidewalk took on for a minute a tinge of greenish or of reddish hue until they had gone on to the next to become some other color, like chameleons. Only directly overhead, if you threw your head back as far as it would go, was anything serene, and there a round blush moon that had been unobtrusively present since four in the afternoon now stood out like a porthole in a chaotic stateroom, with no one able to reach it and look through to the other side. Evening had descended upon New York.

  I had a roast beef sandwich and a cup of coffee at a counter shaped like an 8, with waitresses in little yellow linen dresses on the inside and the customers seated on revolving seats around the outside. Which proved nothing at all as far as the sandwich was concerned, but I was in a trance anyway and wouldn’t have known whether it was shoe leather or ambrosia I was eating. And when the handmaiden in yellow asked me whether I would like some more coffee, I drew back my cuff and answered that it was a little after seven.

  “I’m certainly glad of that,” she answered tartly, “and now while I have the perk right here with me, maybe you’ll let me know if you can stand another cupful.”

  So I stood another cupful to kill time, and while its inkiness grew cold before me, kept making mental calculations, although people were standing up in back waiting for seats, mine included. “Now,” I said to myself, “she is out somewhere eating with somebody (hope he chokes!) If he’s the one she’s going out with, then nine chances to one she’s dressed already for the evening and won’t go back to the place any more. But if she’s going out alone or with some one else, then maybe she’ll get rid of whoever she’s with now and rush back to change. Then if I stick around, I may have a chance to see her before she goes out. It’s worth trying.” So I paid my check and got out of there, and went up to Fifty-Fifth Street to the tall white building Bernice lived in. But I approached it on the opposite side of the street, and when I had located her floor and the windows that I judged to be hers, they were pitch-dark; no one was in. So I crossed over, and the doorman spun the door around for me, and I found myself in her lobby, with its hidden flesh-colored lighting and its uncomfortable Italian furniture and its chocolate hallman the envy of his race in kid gloves, padded shoulders, and gilt braid. “Yessir,” he said, “good evening.”

  “Phone up Miss Pascal for me, will you?” I said.

  “Miss Pascal?” he said. “She stepped out just about fifteen minutes ago.”

  “Alone?” I said.

  He looked at me without smiling and answered, “I couldn’t say.”

  “Oh, yes, you could,” I insisted, and slipped something into one of his kid palms, at the same time wishing him all sorts of calamities but without telling him so.

  “She left with a gentleman,” he said.

  The pink lights weren’t as pink as they had been until now, “That’s all right,” I remarked. It wasn’t at all. “She left her key with you, didn’t she?”

  “I didn’t know it was that,” he said naively. “She left a little envelope with me and told me a gentleman would call for it later on. Is that you?”

  “That’s me, all right,” I answered disgustedly. I saw I’d made a mistake by mentioning the key, she hadn’t wanted him to know what it was. But in any case, he would have seen me go upstairs in the elevator to her floor and, knowing she was out, surmised the rest. And who the hell was he, anyway?

  I tore the little white envelope he passed me open right there under his eyes and shook out Bernice’s brass latchkey, which was all it contained. Not a word, or anything. But maybe she hadn’t had time. “I’m going up,” I said, and he clicked a little metal snapper he held between his fingers, and a lot of Florentine bas-relief done in bronze and copper slid out of the way, and I stepped in the car.

  Going up, I thought the ghost of her Narcisse Noir still lingered in the corners of the car; I was sure it was her elusive perfume that I caught with each prolonged breath. I hissed so, trying to draw it to my nostrils, that the starter even turned his head and glanced back over his shoulder at me, evidently under the impression I was either sobbing softly or suffering from a cold in the head. I lowered my eyes.

  He stopped the car a trifle above her floor, meticulously lowered it again an inch or two to the right level, opened the slide for me, and I stepped out. I waited until he had hidden himself again and gone down (as a little lighted garnet above the shaft door indicated) before I took out her key and got ready to enter. First I took the precaution of ringing the bell. No one answered it. So then I put the key in the door and let myself in.

  I took my hat off before I even crossed the threshold, because here was where she lived, here was where my dreams began. All respect, all homage to love.

  And now magic began, and the world dropped away behind me as I carefully, tenderly shut her door after me. The air around me was the air she had breathed all morning, all afternoon; the floor, the rug I moved across was where her feet had carried her a hundred times a day. Oh, everything in here she had touched before me, and so I went around touching chairs and cushions, mirrors, tabletops and doorknobs, light chains and cigaretteboxes, holding a communion with her through the medium of my coarse, yellowed, banal fingers. And when I found her handkerchief in a corner of a divan, I put it to my mouth there in the dark and kissed it lingering. Until the horrible thought presented itself: it may belong to the maid! I nearly retched for a minute, and couldn’t wait until I had scratched a match and held it up and searched the corners of it. In one corner it had B. That was all right then, so I whipped out the match and drew the handkerchief to my mouth once more and kissed it again and kissed it again, and put it in my inside pocket. And not being a very intelligent man, all the poetry my mind was capable of at the moment was: “Gee, I love you; I wish you would come home.”

  I didn’t light the electricity because she had asked me not to over the phone that afternoon, as some one who knew her and knew her windows from the street might pass and look up and think she was home and decide to drop in, etcetera. But I didn’t really need lights anyway, because in the living room the portières were drawn far back, exposing the whole of each window, and the night was so bright, it made a swath of blue across the floor from each window, like twilight in a grotto when the day is dying outside. I stepped over and looked out without opening the window, and the moonlight lighted my face up and fell across my tie and shirt like one of those diagonal ribbons foreign diplomats are so fond of wearing. There were stars out there too, and city lights, but the moon was the whole cheese. It looked to me from where I was exactly like a gilt thumbtack nailing the blue plush carpet that was the sky closer to the floor of heaven. As I thought of Bernice and wondered where she was, I could almost feel its light swimming in my eyes like soft golden tears. Here was the moon and here was I — why wasn’t she here? She would only come home when the moon was gone, perhaps, and something of perfection would be lacking. But even in the dusk of moonrise, how could her arms seem anything but white?

  I got so lonely standing there thinking about her that I had to get out of the moonlight. I went back into the depths of the room, with its two funnels of sapphire blue spilled across the floor, and I felt weak all over and my knees begged me not to move any more and my blood felt like honey that is about to run over the edge of a saucer, so sweet, so lazy, so slow. I threw myself face downward on the divan where I had found her h
andkerchief before, and took the handkerchief out of my pocket and pressed it between my shut eyes and groaned, I think, aloud.

  When I had quieted down, I lit a cigarette and stayed there like that for a long, long while, with just a spark of red in front of me that ebbed and glowed again as I drew upon it. And when the heat began to reach my nails and I knew that I better drop it, I found something to drop it in, and then I got up and found the radio and fumbled with it until I had it going and its midget amber bulb shone through the dial into my face. And while it was warming itself up, I felt my way to the telephone and got the downstairs operator on the line. “What time you got down there?” I asked him.

  “Twenty to ten,” I heard him say. That was what my watch said too, hut I had been praying that it would be slow. Gee, there was a long time to go yet.

  “I want some sandwiches sent up to Miss Pascal’s,” I added. Might as well do that now, I thought, and have it over with in case she really did come home early. “Is there a delicatessen handy?”

  He told me there was a drugstore right in the building. “Good,” I said. “Send them up with the elevator boy,” and then I told him just what kind I wanted. And I thought, “If she doesn’t like olives and pimento, I can always send down for some other kind. In that way I’ll find out exactly which kind she likes most, and I’ll always remember it.”

  I hung up and decided to mix some drinks for the two of us, and turned off the radio because it was singing a sad love song and this was going to be a night for happy love. I found that the serving pantry didn’t have any window, so after shutting its two doors I could light the light in there without any danger. Its flashy brightness blinded me for minutes, and I had to shade my eyes until I got used to it. Then I pulled a couple of trayfuls of ice cubes out of the Frigidaire, found the Gordon Dry where Tenacity (no doubt) kept it — on the floor of the broom closet — and began to peel oranges and lemons with my cuffs rolled back. I was happy and I was whistling with my head bent over my task.

  After a while the bell rang, and the fellow with the sandwiches was standing at the door. I took them from him and, happening to lift up a corner of one, found that it was spread with crescents of cucumber. “I ordered olive and pimento,” I told him with repugnance.

  He had a wearied air, I thought, as of some one who had gone through this trial many times before. “Yessir, half of ’em are olive and pimento,” he explained. “The others are for Miss Pascal; they’re the only kind she eats. They weren’t all for you, were they?” This last had a matter-of-fact intonation to it, as though no answer were really required.

  “Oh, so your counterman has what kind she likes down pat?” I said grimly. “She must send down pretty often.”

  He smiled out of the corner of his mouth. “Yessir, she does,” he said.

  “For two, I s’pose.”

  “Always,” he said, and if he had winked I was going to run my hand into which ever eye did it, but he didn’t wink, just looked worldly-wise and bored.

  I paid him and closed the door, and went back to the serving pantry not so happy, as I had left it. For one thing, I had stopped whistling. I was in there quite a while, because I kept tasting the drinks as I mixed them, and consequently I had to keep making them over again. When I had finally accumulated two braces of two each, I quit and carried them inside and set them down next to the sandwiches. Then I put the lights out and sat down there in the dark, with just me and the moon. “Boy, how you’re getting wasted!” I remarked to it aloud. After about five or ten minutes, I started to munch one of the sandwiches; that made me thirsty, so I had to sip one of the drinks along with it. By the time I put the empty glass down, the drink had made me hungry, so I had to start munching a second sandwich.

  My arm was beginning to ache a little by now from lifting it to my face to look at the time so much, so I unstrapped my wrist-watch and laid it down in front of me among the glasses. The whole dial of it vanished at that distance from my eyes, and just the twelve little glowing numbers arranged in a circle remained, with the two little glowing hands aiming at 9 and at 12. Not that that meant nine, it meant quarter to twelve. “She’ll be here before midnight,” I told myself. “Maybe she’ll come in on the hour, like Cinderella.” And I had another drink. But they moved so quick, those hands! The minute hand deliberately skipped 10, 11, and 12, and took a flying leap down to I under my very eyes. So she hadn’t come in on the hour, after all. And now it was a new day. But it was the same old night.

  A vagabond cloud about the size of a fist passed over the moon and immediately turned silver all around the edges as though it had caught fire. “Sure,” I encouraged it, “hide the damn thing! What good is it doing me?”

  Oh, I was sore at everything right then: the moon, and the night, and myself most of all! “Here I sit,” I mumbled, “when if I was a man I’d get up, slam the door, and never come ’round her again. Who does she think she is?” But something inside me whispered, “Maybe you love her because she treats you this way. Maybe she’s wise, maybe she knows you better than you know yourself.” So I went to the window, and I went to the door. And then I sat down again. And I had another sandwich. And I had another sandwich. And I had another sandwich.

  Then, when there was only one left, it occurred to me too late that that wasn’t enough to offer her with any propriety. I should have thought of that before when there were two, but now there was only one, and offering her one would be a slight. It would look much better if there weren’t any in sight, than to have just the remaining one staring her in the face, seeming to say, “Take me or leave me.” So I reached out and picked it up and ate it, slowly, thoughtfully, mournfully — and the little dream of a midnight snack to be shared by the two of us dissolved in crumbs and went the way of all my other dreams, big and small. I know it would have made a swell comedy scene, but I wasn’t looking in a mirror, and so my heart sang a blue song while I sat there and chewed.

  Then I wiped my mouth on the back of my hand, and I dusted my knees, and I heaved a deep sigh that seemed to come up from my feet. And still she didn’t come home. I had given up believing that she would ever come home; I was almost beginning to doubt that there was a Bernice.

  When I thought of how much I thought of her — why, my head nearly cracked. She was everything to me in one. She was my God, my Garbo. She was dearer to me than a sandwich at Reuben’s, sweeter than a soda at Schrafft’s. I would rather have looked at her than at the Ziegfeld Follies, rather have folded her in my arms than folded a ten-grand check, rather have held her hand than held a royal flush. It was wicked, it was wild, it was swell.

  The hands of the clock were at 8 and at I now; I turned it over on its face to try and stop looking at it so much, but that didn’t do much good. I kept turning it over all the time, anyway. Finally I put an end to the agony by picking it up by the end of its strap, carrying it to the window, and pitching it out into the night. I don’t know where it landed, never heard a sound. After it was gone, I remembered how Maxine had slipped it under my pillowcase the first Christmas Eve after we were married. That made me twice as glad I had done it. And immediately afterward, as though I had dispelled a charm in getting rid of the watch that way, I turned from the window just in time to see the door open and close again noiselessly at the far end of the apartment. Not a sound, just a chink of light there, then gone again.

  In the dark she came back to me, in the dark she came home. Into the blue-black emptiness of the room she stepped, with only me there; where there had been nothing before, now there was something, and my temples beat like tom-toms and strange pulses I never knew I had, in strange places like my neck and back of my ears, throbbed delightedly as though they were calling her to my attention — “Oh, Wade, she is here!” As though I didn’t know it! As though my mind needed the dumb mechanical parts of me to tell it!

  I got so excited, I could hardly see her any more; a sort of rose-red mist swept over her and hid her from my eyes. Then presently she emerged from it aga
in, but her image was still limned in coral like a motionless white statue in a garden flushed by a hidden carmine reflector at its base. Then she spoke, and as her voice flashed into my ears, the peculiar rigidity of a statue that my inflamed senses had given her changed into the mobility of a Bernice coming home to her apartment as she did on any other night, brushing her hair from her eyes with the back of her hand, carrying the same hand to her shoulder to rid it of the short velvet jacket that hung over it, and then with the other hand touching a certain spot on the wall and making the whole place grow light with a sort of jazz dawn, instantaneous and blinding, of lamps and brackets on the walls.

  “I thought it was you,” she had said, just as the lights went on, “but I never can be sure. I’m a little drunk.” The little velvet cape that she had dislodged from one shoulder still clung to the other, hanging like a pennant toward the floor. She twitched, and down it went, sliding off her like a snake and lying coiled around her feet. I stooped to pick it up, and then I stayed there. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t kiss my knees; Lincoln freed the slaves,” and bending over, touched my face with a little gesture that was half a slap and half caress. “Oh, I’m so tired, Wade,” she said. “I’ve had this all night long, in every room I went into to get away from someone in the room before. After all, I couldn’t spend the evening in the bathroom sitting on the rim of the tub—” And then she pushed my shoulders back a little and stepped out of the circle of my arms. “I want to be alone a little, and just talk to someone from across a room. Oh, I like love, I even love love, but for just a minute I want to feel nothing but air on all sides of me. So go back there in a chair and drink and look at me if you want to, make your love by remote control.”