Mischief

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “Spare a dime,” he mocked. “For Lord’s sake, Lyn, let’s not fight about it.”

  “No.” She pushed her glass to and fro on the cloth and she smiled. “But you do expect the worst of people, don’t you, Jed? I’ve … noticed.”

  “Certainly,” he grinned. “You damn well better, as far as I can see.” He offered her his certainty with careless cheer.

  She took a deep swallow of her drink, set down the glass, and looked across the room. “I don’t think I care for cheap cynicism,” she said.

  “Cheap!” he exploded. Women were the limit! What a thing to come out with, just like that! He realized he must have hurt her, somehow. But he also knew he hadn’t meant to. “For Lord’s sake!” he said, “that’s about the most expensive piece of education I ever got myself. I’d hate to tell you what I had to pay for it.” He was still genuinely astonished.

  “You don’t believe …” she began and her lips were trembling.

  “Don’t believe!” he scoffed. “Listen—aw, you baby! What I believe or what you believe makes no particular difference to the way things are. Lyn, honey, sooner or later you get to know that. All the difference it makes is whether you’re comfortable or not. Well, it just happens I don’t like to be fooled and I’ve got to the point where I don’t even enjoy fooling myself.” She flicked her lashes. “This,” he said soberly, “is a pretty stinking lousy world.”

  “Is it?” said Lyn.

  He was annoyed. “If you haven’t noticed that you’re unintelligent,” he said crisply.

  “And what do you do about it?”

  “Mind your own business. Take care of yourself, because you can be damn sure nobody else will. Lyn, for the love of Mike, let it go, will you? Anybody thinks he can save the world isn’t weaned yet. You’re old enough to know that much.”

  “If everybody figured the way to do …” she began, looking unhappy.

  “You like the boy-scout type?” he challenged. “The sunshine kids?”

  “No.”

  “The dreamy boys? The old stars in the eyes?”

  “Stop it!”

  “O.K.,” he said. “So I’m not going to water myself down and play pat-a-cake with you.” He canceled his anger. He offered, again, his smile and himself.

  “I don’t want you to,” she said. “I’m interested in what you think about things.” Her voice was low again.

  “But you don’t think much of my way of thinking?” he said, more challenging than he had intended to be. “Is that it?”

  She turned her hand.

  “Well …” he shrugged. “I’m sorry, honey, but one thing that stinks high in this lousy world is the lip service to sweetness and light. Everybody’s for it. But does their left hand know what their lip is saying?” At least, I’m honest, his eyes were saying. I’m telling you. “Look, I didn’t expect an inquiry into my philosophy of life. I thought this was a date … you know, for fun?”

  Her lips parted. He read in her look that they both knew it wasn’t just a date … for fun. But she didn’t speak.

  “Show?” he said lightly. If they went to a show, it would deny, somehow, their ability to be together. He felt that, suddenly.

  She said, “In such a stinking lousy world, what do you expect?”

  “Oh, say, the love of a good woman,” he answered lightly, because he didn’t want to discuss this kind of thing seriously any more. And then he was sorry. He saw her lips whiten. He’d hurt her, again, when all he wanted was to get lightly off the subject. “Aw, Lyn, please … What are we yapping about? How’d we get off?”

  “Coffee now?” inquired the waiter.

  “Coffee, honey?” Jed put his hand on hers.

  “Please,” she said, not smiling. But it seemed to him that her hand was on his and he thought if he could kiss her, hard, right now, it would be a fine thing.

  Bunny listened politely to the story. When Mommy read, the story seemed more interesting. When Daddy read to her, it was interesting, too, although Daddy never did finish a story. He always got off to explaining something, and the explaining turned out to be another story. She sat quietly against her pillow, her stuffed dog under her arm, until the voice stopped. Nell looked at her, then. “I better go to sleep, now,” said Bunny, “I guess.”

  “O.K.” The mattress moved, the spring changed shape, as Nell stood up.

  “I can turn off my light,” said Bunny kindly.

  “O.K. then,” Nell said. She put the book down on the other bed. She walked away. She picked up the candy box, looked once over her shoulder, and went through the door.

  Bunny snapped off the light, watched the pattern of shadows establish itself. She wondered if the window was open. Nell hadn’t looked to see. The room felt stuffy and dusty hot. Bunny wasn’t quite sure she knew how to work the Venetian blind. She lay still quite a long time, but it didn’t feel right to go to sleep, not knowing whether the window was open. She sneaked her feet out and felt the bristles of the carpet. She fumbled with the thin ropes and after a while there was a soft rattle and the slats changed. Now, she could see. The window was open. It was all right, then. Bunny crept back under the blankets. The air smelled dusty, just the same, and the pillow didn’t smell like her pillow at home, either. Bunny pushed her nose into it and lay still.

  Nell set the communicating door at an angle that almost closed it. Then she stood absolutely still, tipping her head as if to listen. Room 809 was quiet, behind her. Room 807 was a pool of silence. Her eyes shifted. The big lamp flooded the spot near the windows where the big chair stood. The small lamp touched the upper ends of the twin beds. Elsewhere, there were shadows.

  Nell put the candy box down on a bed and walked back with a silent gliding step to the windows and tripped the blind. The court was too narrow to see very far up or down. Across, there was only one lighted window. The blind, there, was up a third of the way, and she could see the middle section of a woman, seated at the desk. A black and white belt marked a thick waist on a black dress. There was nothing else to see. Not many spent their evenings in, at the Hotel Majestic.

  Nell pivoted, glided in that same step to the middle of room 807 and stood still. She did not stand still long. Although her feet remained in the same flower of the carpet pattern, they began to dance. The heels lifted and fell fractions of an inch, only, as her weight shifted. Her hips rolled softly, and her shoulders and her forearms. Her fingers were the most active part of her body in this dance. They made noiseless snaps and quick restless writhings of their own. Her chin was high and her head, swaying with the tiny movements of her body, wove the pattern of a wreath in the silent air.

  Meantime, Nell’s eyes, wide open, darted as she danced. Very alive and alert, they were. Her whole face was vivid, more sly than shy, not in the least demure.

  In a little while, the feet danced daintily, in the tiniest of steps, off the one flower. Nell swooped over Peter’s suitcase. Her hand, impiously, not tentatively at all, scooped through its contents. Handkerchiefs and ties flew like sand from a beach castle. There were some letters and a manila folder flat on the bottom. The girl snatched them out, opened the folder awkwardly, and all the paper slid out in a limp curve. She stood with the empty folder in her hands and looked down at the spilled papers in the suitcase. Then she yanked the letters from the clip that held them to the folder. They didn’t interest her for long. She dropped all the paper out of her hands, as if it were merely paper, with no other meaning. She flipped the lid of the suitcase with one finger and it fell.

  She made three long steps and pivoted with one leg out like a dancer’s, pulling it slowly around. She sat down, with an effect of landing there by sheer accident, on the bench in front of the dressing table. Ruth had turned the two little lamps out. It did not seem to occur to Nell to switch them on. She rummaged in Ruth’s box of jewelry. There were three bracelets and Nell clasped them all on her left arm. There were two brooches and she pinned one above the other on the left lapel of her dress. There were a string
of coral colored beads, and Ruth’s three-strand pearls, and a silver locket on a silver chain. All these Nell took up and fastened around her neck. A pair of tiny turquoise and silver earrings that matched one of the pins, she put at her ears. She looked at herself in the shadowy glass, solemnly, lumpishly. She smiled. Slowly, she began to take everything off again. As she removed each piece she did not return it to its place in the box. When the table top was scattered with most of the things, Nell seemed to lose interest. She still wore the earrings.

  She turned, very slowly, sliding around, moving her legs as if they were in one piece. She kicked off her black pumps. Ruth’s aquamarine mules with the maribou cuffs were standing neatly under the dressing table. Nell put her feet into them. She rose and walked up and down in them, watching her feet, acquiring more and more skill and arrogance in the ankles and the arches. At last, she seemed almost strutting. Then, she seemed to forget, and moved about as easily as if the mules had long been her own.

  She ate three pieces of candy, slowly.

  Then she sat down on the bench again and picked up Ruth’s perfume. The tiny glass stick, attached to the stopper, she discarded. She tipped the bottle on her forefinger and dabbed the forefinger behind her ears. She held the forefinger under her nostrils and inhaled dreamily, swaying to and fro as if she tantalized her own senses in a dreamy rhythm. The little bottle dropped out of her left hand, cracked on the table top, lay on its side. The liquid began to seep out among the jewelry. (The twelve dollars that had been Peter’s, the fifty cents that had been Bunny’s, last Mother’s Day.)

  Nell noticed it, finally. Her face did not change. She picked up Ruth’s hairbrush, dipped it, making a smearing motion, in the spilled perfume, and began to brush her tawny hair. She brushed it sharply back from her ears. Now her face took on another look. Now the shape of it, the sharp taper to the chin, the subtle slant of the eye sockets, became older, more sleek, reptilian.

  She drew the hairbrush once around her throat.

  She rose and walked between the beds, turned, and let herself fall supine on the one to the left of the telephone. After a little while she lifted her right arm, languidly, letting her hand dangle from the wrist, looking up at her fingers that hung limp off the palm.

  Then she sat up, propped her back with pillows, and opened the fat phone book. She opened it almost at the center and looked at the pages with unfocused eyes. She lifted her left hand and dropped it on the fine print. Where her left forefinger nail fell she gouged a nick in the paper.

  She picked up the phone with her right hand, asked sweetly for the number.

  “Yes?” A man’s voice came out of the city, somewhere, hooked and caught at the end of the wire.

  “Guess who?” Nell said in a soft high soprano.

  “Margaret, where are—”

  “Oh-ho no! Not Margaret!”

  “Who is this?” said the voice irritably. “I’m not in the mood—”

  “By the way, who is Margaret? Hmmmmmmmm?”

  “Margaret is my wife,” said the voice stiffly. “What’s the idea?”

  “Ha!”

  “Who is this?”

  “Virginia,” crooned Nell. “Don’t you remember me?”

  “I think you have the wrong number,” the voice said, sounding very old and tired, and he hung up.

  Nell sucked her cheeks in, turned pages, gave another number.

  “Hello?” A woman this time.

  “Hello. Oh, hello. Is Mr. Bennet there?”

  “No, he’s not. I’m sorry.” Brightly, “This is Mrs. Bennet.”

  “Oh,” said Nell without alarm. With nothing. Flatly. Her head tilted, listening.

  “Can I take a message?” the woman said, somewhat less cordially.

  “Oh, dear,” simpered Nell. “You see, this is Mr. Bennet’s secretary …”

  “Mr. Bennet has no secretary that I know of.”

  “Oh,” said Nell. “Oh dear me! Are you sure?”

  “Who is this?” The voice began to sound as if the face were red.

  “Just a friend. You know?”

  “Will you give me your name, please?”

  “Why, no,” said Nell flatly and then she giggled.

  The phone slammed shut at the other end. On Nell’s face danced a look of delighted malice.

  She stretched. She called the girl downstairs again. “Long distance.”

  “One moment, please.”

  Rochelle Parker, at the switchboard, was efficient and indifferent. She dealt with the barrage of calls from 807 for a long time without much comment, even to herself. She got in on part of a wrangle between the long-distance operator and whoever was calling, up there, over the existence of an exchange in Chicago. The person upstairs used language, softly. It was as bad as Rochelle had ever heard over the wires and she’d heard some. And this was worse, sounding so hushedlike.

  “Jeepers,” said Rochelle to herself. The eyebrows that Rochelle, herself, had remodeled from nature’s first idea went up to her bangs. It crossed her mind that she might say a word to Pat Perrin, the house detective. Probably, she thought, they were drinking, up there. People had a few, and went on telephone jags, sometimes.

  She decided it was none of her business. What went over the wire wasn’t disturbing the sacred peace of the Hotel Majestic. If 807 began to do that, somebody else would catch on.

  And the telephone bill would be part of the hangover. “Oh, boy,” she thought and grinned. Then 807 suddenly quit calling.

  The phone book had fallen off the bed. Nell rolled over on her stomach and looked at it, lying on the carpet.

  She sat up, curling her legs under her. She yawned. She listened. Her rambling glance passed the half-open closet door and returned.…

  CHAPTER 4

  A tall man looks best in tails, they say. Ruth thought that, although Peter O. Jones was not too terribly tall, he looked wonderful. She saw no man there who looked more distinguished than he. Erect, compact, controlled, he walked beside her. And if the bold lines of his face were not handsome, they were better than that People remembered Peter.

  She saw herself, too, in the mirror walls of the passage to the ballroom and she began to walk as if she were beautiful. For the frock was becoming and in the soft light, she even liked her nose. Maybe it did turn up, as Peter insisted, against all evidence, that it did. At least it had, as he said, the air of being about to turn up, any minute.

  Her hand with the rosy nails pressed the black cloth of his left sleeve and Peter crossed his arm over and touched her hand. Here they stood, at the portal. Black and white men, multicolored ladies, flowers, like polka dots over the floor, but the long white bar of the speakers’ table dominated.

  “Peter O. Jones,” said her husband very quietly to somebody. A black back bent. They followed toward the speakers’ table and Ruth could see their path, opening, and the turning faces marked it as if flowers were being thrown under their feet.

  Somebody stepped into their way, holding out his hand. “Peter O. Jones?” he said joyfully. “Want you to meet …” “Beg pardon, sir, but this is …” “How do you do?” “Mrs. Jones, ah …” They were in a cluster. Yet they were moving slowly, surely, toward the speakers’ table. Peter had the nicest way about him. So many people knew who he was. Ruth struggled to remain balanced, to lock names to faces. It was confusing! It was glorious!

  Jed and Lyn were still sitting in the restaurant. Coffee, brandy, more coffee, and many cigarettes had gone by. They’d had no ambition to stir themselves, to go to a show. They were caught in the need to settle something. Maybe it was never to be settled. This was what they needed to know. Jed shared, now, Lyn’s feeling that it was important They were hanging onto their tempers, both of them.

  They’d about finished, speaking awkwardly, obliquely for the most part, with God.

  “What I know,” he said, “the Lord ain’t Santa Claus. You got them mixed, honey. Santa Claus, sure, he’ll open his pack if you been a good girl. I don’t think it
’s the same.” His brows made angles.

  “You don’t believe in it at all,” she said wearily.

  “I don’t nag myself about it.” He shrugged.

  “All I’m trying to say, Jed,” she was making an effort to be sweet, “is just this. I’d like … all right, call it soft … call it anything you want … I’d have liked it, if you had given that old man a coin. What would it matter if he really needed it or not? It would have been good for us.”

  “Aw, that’s junk, Lyn. Pure junk.”

  “It isn’t junk!”

  His voice slipped. Dammed-up irritation slipped out “It’s ridiculous!”

  Her eyes flashed. They had worked to smile, too long. “I’m glad to know you think I’m ridiculous.”

  “Maybe it’s a good idea to know these things,” he agreed coldly. “You called me a cheap cynic, remember?”

  “And perhaps you are,” she said shortly, “just that.”

  “It’s no chore of mine, Lyn,” he fought to sound reasonable, “to contribute to the income of a perfect stranger who’s done nothing for me.”

  “It’s not a question of your responsibility. It’s your charity.”

  “Nuts to that kind of charity. I intend to earn what I get.…”

  “People can’t, always. There’s such a thing as being helpless … through no fault …”

  “The rule is, you get what you pay for, pay for what you get. You grow up, you know that.”

  “Suppose you needed food … or a place to …”

  “Then, I go beg from organized charities who recognize that so-called helplessness and, incidentally, check up on it to see if it is real. I’ll never expect a stranger on the street to shell out for me. Why should he? Why should he believe me? It works both ways. You look out for yourself in this world, that’s all I …”

  “It’s not true! People have to believe …”

  “Why?”

  “Why, anything, then?” she blazed. “What are you living for?”

  “How do I know? I didn’t put me here. Of all the idiotic—”

  “I think you’d better take me home.”