Manhattan Love Song

by Cornell Woolrich

  “With some blonde, I bet,” I said aloud.

  “He’s not that kind of a man,” she pouted. “They’re a very devoted couple—”

  At which precise moment, as though they had only been waiting for a signal from us to begin, a sound of angered footsteps crossed our ceiling, and words of dispute came crackling through sections of the fragile plaster, now here, now there. “You should be such a man like he is!” And then over in the other corner, “You should live so long — I’m too good for you!” It was timed too perfectly; it was unreal. It was not life, it was the movies. And yet it happened.

  Maxine made no attempt to save her face in the matter; her laughter mingled unabashedly with mine. We rocked uncontrollably on our chairs and looked into each other’s eyes to add fuel to our enjoyment of the situation.

  “They live like doves!” came from over the chandelier. I could see the chandelier throbbing from the force of this statement.

  For a moment I even harbored the delightful suspicion that we were the couple in question, but it seemed not. “Believe me, Sadie don’t know how lucky she is! I’ll tell her the next time I see her—!”

  “Tell her a thing or two about yourself, why don’t you, ha?”

  I noticed, however, in spite of this last, that the repartee or whatever you might call it was predominantly feminine. Perhaps Mr. Greenbaum was a devoted man after all. Or else his wife’s voice carried much better through laths and plaster.

  When we were both completely laughed out, and the situation had begun not only to abate but to pall as well, Maxine leaned confidentially forward in her chair and said to me, “Wade, darling, I was so upset about what happened this afternoon, I didn’t get a thing in for tonight. If I get my hat and coat, will you take me out to a restaurant? We haven’t done that in such a long time,” she added coaxingly. “Will you, Wade?”

  “Sure,” I said generously, touching her cheek with one finger, “why not?”

  When she had come running back with her things on and preceded me out the door, I remarked, “But no postmortems, do you hear?”

  She looked around at me tenderly over her shoulder. “I’m sorry I was mean to you, Wade,” she said. “It’ll all come out all right, won’t it?”

  I was too busy locking the door to answer.

  By the very next morning, which was Thursday, I had already begun to get up later, now that I didn’t have to be in on time any more. We had breakfast at ten, and Maxine rather seemed to enjoy the idea than otherwise. The peace, well-being, and even amiability that had descended upon us following the Greenbaum explosion the evening before persisted in the sunlight of the breakfast nook. Maxine’s green curtains looked cozy, and I had a paper there I had stepped out to buy while she was getting the coffee ready. It was all okay; I mean as a temporary vacuum to tide me over until Paradise began with Bernice, it would do very nicely.

  I finished the paper and she the dishes at about the same time. The check from my late concern had come, and I had it in my pocket; I had told her a little earlier that I didn’t think I would go back and cringe to Stewart just for the sake of getting the job back, that this had pulled me out of the rut I’d been in all along, if nothing else, and I preferred to go out and get a newer, more lucrative job, even if it took me a week or two to find what I wanted. Which is not altogether the empty boast it may sound; jobs were plentiful and times were good.

  I got up from the table, stretched, yawned, and said, “I think I’ll blow now.”

  “I wanted to go downtown too today,” she told me. “They’re selling out those little collar-and-cuff sets at Gimbel’s; I need one for my dark blue.” Which didn’t interest me at all. I didn’t even know what she meant by her dark blue — probably one of her dresses.

  “If you’ll wait till I put something on.” she went on. “we could ride in together.” She was still in her pajamas.

  “All right,” I said, “how long will it take you?”

  “I won’t be five minutes,” she promised, and went into the bedroom.

  When eight of the five were up, she came out again fully dressed to tell me: “Wade, what do you think? I just found a hole in the heel in one of my stockings!” This calamity leaving me unmoved, she went on: “Maybe you’d better go ahead; I have another pair drying over the steam pipe in the bathroom, but they’re still a little too damp to put on.”

  “I’ll go ahead,” I decided, “and meet you down there later. Whereabouts you going to be?”

  “You can wait for me in front of Gray’s Drugstore,” she said.

  “Make it about one,” I told her, “we can run into the State or the Rialto and take in a show before they jack the prices up.”

  “Fine!” she agreed. “I’ll be through by that time.”

  “And see that you make it one,” I warned her as I opened the door, “and not three or four!”

  “I’ll be there,” she sang.

  I got off at Times Square and shuttled over to Grand Central first of all, and went up to the ticket office in the station to find out what the fare to the Coast came to roughly. Roughly was right, too; I nearly fell over when he told me. “Is that one person?” I gasped. “I didn’t say a caravan,” he answered tartly. “She was right when she said we ought to be sure of what we’re doing ahead of time,” I told myself despondently. “You’re blocking the window,” the ticket seller reminded me, so I asked him about New Orleans. That was pretty nearly as bad, but then, when I left the window, I looked at a relief map they had hanging up on the wall and found out that New Orleans wasn’t nearly as far away, so it seemed a much better buy and more of a bargain to pick California when the time came to leave. Also, I didn’t know much about New Orleans, but I knew that all kinds of flowers and fruits grew in California, and so it seemed to me to be the place to start life with the one you love.

  As I walked west along 42nd Street, I was figuring with a pencil on the back of an envelope, and I kept bumping into people at every step. I went into the Automat and had a ghost of a lunch, and all the time I was in there kept figuring; when the back of the envelope was all used up, I started in to use the shiny, white top of the table, until a busboy with a greasy rag came along and, whether accidentally or on purpose, effaced the whole thing with a sweep of his arm.

  When the dispute had died down and every one had gone back to their seats again, I started over again, this time using the margin of a newspaper I’d picked up from the floor. I started in to mumble to myself, like the old, the feebleminded, and the preoccupied do. “Three-hundred-and-some-odd would make it six hundred, roughly, for the two of us. Now let’s see, without counting what I’ve got in the Corn Exchange — I don’t want to touch that if I can help it; leave it here for Maxine, that’s the least I can do, even if she hasn’t got a kid — nearly three hundred in that compound-interest account over in Brooklyn — and if I put in that check for eighty I got today, that’ll bring it up to four hundred by the time I’m ready to go. That leaves me two hundred short, even on the fare alone. Wait! I can borrow two hundred on my insurance, that does it! But that leaves me without anything when we get off the train there — and I don’t want Bernice to help me in any way.”

  The interested stare of my table companion, who was getting an earful while he dipped little round crackers in clam chowder, put an end to the soliloquy. I left the place and continued westward toward my appointment with Maxine, still calculating as I went, except when crossing streets. “All right,” I argued with myself, “suppose Maxine is a good kid and has given me eight years of her life, why should I give her a better break than the girl I love? I’ll take half of that Corn Exchange account with me, or all if I have to, and send it back to her as soon as I start to make some money out there. It won’t put her out much anyway; she can stay on in the flat rent free the first month after I’m gone, on the deposit we paid on the lease. And she’s got her stepbrother and his wife, they’ll do something for her if worst comes to worst. So that takes care of that, and all I ha
ve to do now is bide my time and keep a good crease in my trousers for the day we leave!” I threw the newspaper away, brushed my hands hygienically (it hadn’t belonged to me originally), and backed up against the glass-window front of Gray’s Drugstore to wait for Maxine. It was five to one on the Paramount clock across the way.

  Swarms of people, principally women, were going in and out the door, buying theater tickets at the cut-rate counter and keeping their appointments on the sidewalk outside, like I was. I thought, “Maybe I ought to get out of the way instead of standing here like this. Suppose Bernice should just happen to come along and bump into me, and Maxine should find me talking to her!” But I’d never seen Bernice on the street after the night we’d first met, and there was no reason why I ever should again. “She’s only just about getting out of bed by now, anyway,” I assured myself.

  With that, a taxi edged up to the sidewalk, stopped in front of the entrance to Gray’s, and a girl got out of it alone and paid it off. She turned around then, and it seemed to me I’d seen her somewhere before. But you so often feel that way about people. She was dark-haired and she was handsome. I don’t mean beautiful, I mean handsome; there’s a difference.

  She was still putting the change the driver had given her back in her purse, but she looked up to make sure no one was about to collide with her — and saw me. She took a second look — then she finished putting the money away, snapped her handbag shut, came across the sidewalk, and stopped in front of me. At first I thought she was looking at the display of cosmetics in the window behind me, but I saw that her eyes were right on mine.

  “What’s the matter, can’t you say hello?” she said in a husky voice. The clock on the Paramount said one.

  “Hello,” I said obediently, and still at a loss.

  “You don’t remember me, do you?” she said unfriendly. “You ought to, you drank enough of my liquor the other night!”

  “What makes you think I don’t remember you?” I said uneasily.

  She took her eyes off me at last and looked sullenly up the street and then down the street. “Well, the name’s Marion,” she said.

  It was no paean of joy to my cars. “Well, I knew that all along,” I said. “So what? What about it?”

  She turned her eyes on mine again. “Still in good with Bernice?” she wanted to know.

  “Bigger and better than ever,” I answered shortly, and then as a hint, “Going to a show?” The clock over there said four after, now. I was praying she’d go away. What’d she want with me anyway?

  “She gotten any mail from Detroit lately?” she wanted to know.

  “Who, Bernice?” I said. “Why should I tell you that?”

  She flashed me a dark look and said: “Oh, I guess she has, if that’s the case. Just let me find that out! Just let me find that out!”

  Because I didn’t like her anyway, and because she was annoying and worrying me by standing there like that when I expected Maxine to show up momentarily, I revenged myself by teasing her and telling her what I thought would be most likely to get her angry. And at the same time rid me of her. “She gets ’em from Detroit at the rate of two and three a week, sometimes,” I informed her amusedly. And then, remembering something she had said the other night, added, “You know, funny scrawly handwriting, like a little kid at school.”

  I could see that made her angry enough to eat the glass window we were standing in front of. “And you stand for that!” she snarled. “What kind of a guy are you?”

  “What’s the harm?” I said smilingly, “he’s in Detroit.”

  She finally prepared to depart, although by the stony look in her eyes it appeared doubtful to me whether she could see where she was going at all.

  “You better run along to your show and cool off.” I advised her jocularly.

  “Show be damned!” she rasped, and darted into a taxi that someone had just gotten out of. Through the door I saw her lean forward and say something to the driver; he put on the gas and turned up 43rd Street, and that was the last of her.

  I kept smirking to myself for a long while afterward at the state of mind I’d managed to get her into.

  Meanwhile Maxine didn’t put in appearance, and the afternoon prices went on at all the picture houses. It was too late now to go to a show and still be economical. Presently, as the hands of the clock circled slowly around, I was nearly as angry as my late acquaintance had been. All the theatergoers had gone from the scene long ago. At quarter to three, wondering if perhaps she had never come downtown at all today, I went inside and phoned home to the apartment. Sure enough, she came to the phone herself. “Wade?” she said noncommittally.

  “Well, who’d you think it was!” I burst out maniacally. “Mayor Walker?”

  As though she were thinking about something else entirely, she repeated evenly after me, “No, I didn’t think it was Mayor Walker.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me before I left that you weren’t coming downtown today, instead of making me hold down the street corner for two solid hours waiting for you like a goddam fool!” I shouted at her.

  “I was downtown, and then I came home again,” she said quietly.

  “What was the bright idea of doing that? Didn’t you remember you had an appointment with me? Couldn’t you at least have gone past here and told me you were going home? What am I supposed to be, anyway, a flagpole sitter?” And more along the same lines.

  Finally she said, “Oh, what do I care? I’m standing here dazed, I can hardly hear what you’re saying at all. I’m going to hang up; you better tell me first whether you’re coming home or not.”

  “You talk like you were drunk,” I said to her.

  “I wish I was,” she answered. “That’d be something, anyway.”

  “What’s the matter, don’t you feel well?” I asked solicitously.

  I heard her say to herself: “He asks me whether I feel well!” and then she did hang up. I immediately tried to get her back again, but she wouldn’t answer the operator’s calls.

  So I gave up and took the subway home, wondering what had got into her now. “I know it hasn’t anything to do with me, this time,” I reasoned on the way back. “Maybe somebody she knows just died; why couldn’t she have told me over the phone just now? Or maybe she’s going down with the flu— That’d be a real treat; doctor bills at a time like this, when I’m trying to hang on to every cent I’ve got!”

  I couldn’t wait until I got up the steps again, those subway steps that I seemed to spend so much of my life going up and down; and over to the place, and in the door. I could’ve saved my breath and energy: she was as well as I was. Not only that, she looked much better than she did at other times. Sartorially, if not physically. For she had on full makeup instead of just half makeup or none at all. And she had a pair of her 1920-model glass prisms dangling below her ears. And a dress that I associated vaguely with the words, “Oh, I can’t wear that; it’s too good!” And perfume escaped from her at all angles, although rather faintly, as though it had been doing so for a considerable number of hours now. All in all, her getup denoted that she aimed, or had aimed, to please and charm.

  For a moment I even misled myself to the extent of thinking that I might be the object of her pleasure-giving efforts, or whatever you want to call them. But she hadn’t met me as she had promised, and somehow I had an idea that all this finery dated from earlier in the day. I knew darn well she hadn’t put it on just to greet me when I came home. Only a year ago, and I would have been open to jealousy at a juncture like this. Worrying, wondering if she had been seeing someone. The time for that was gone, though, now. She could have done what she wanted. What would I have cared any more?

  “Boy, you look classy!” I remarked cordially, sticking my thumbs into my vest pockets and studying her with my elbows akimbo.

  “I tried to make myself look that way today,” she said dully. “I meant to change when I got back here, and then I forgot to, I guess.”

  “You act all down-in-the-
mouth, though,” I remarked. “What was the matter with you over the phone just now? Why didn’t you show up today?”

  “Sit down,” she said indifferently, brushing my questions aside with a limp drop of her wrist, as though they were of no moment at all. “I have something I want to talk to you about.”

  Not her appearance but still her attitude, even the very way she had just seated herself sidewise on the chair and rested her forearm and her chin along the back of it, suggested a gin-soaked old scrubwoman to me. One of those old crones tired out with life and chronically stewed to the gills.

  I wondered if thirty or forty years from now she was really going to wind up that way, the way she had just now struck me as seeming for a moment. I wouldn’t know her any more in those still-far-off days, and she wouldn’t know me any more, but too bad if it had to happen: the little flapper I had danced the Japanese Sandman with eight years ago! She had been the youthful of the youthful—

  She began to speak.

  “I went to see her today. And, honey, she was nice. I expected her to laugh at me, I expected her to make me eat dirt. And, honey, she was nice. Honey, you won’t believe me, but she was nice to me—”

  I could feel my eyes growing bigger.

  “—real nice to me. Honey, you’ll only laugh, I know, but we cried together, me for her and she — she for herself, I guess. But I mustn’t lose you. Honey, I mustn’t lose you.”

  “Who?” I panted. “Who?”

  “You. Who else? You.” She tried to stretch out her arms toward me. I pushed them aside. “No, who? Who were you with?” I could hardly talk with my windpipe all closed up.

  “Bernice,” she said. And as I heard the name on her lips for the first time, but spoken so casually, as though shock or grief had turned all values upside down for her and made a name like that seem like an everyday household name to her ears, I simply sat back; I was beyond surprise, regret, humiliation, or anger. “Here,” I remember thinking, “is either an unusually wonderful person, whom I have no longer the wish nor the time to understand, or the biggest dumbbell in the world, who doesn’t deserve any better than she’s going to get.”