Mischief

by Charlotte Armstrong

  “This isn’t my room,” she chuckled.

  He thought to himself that this was no worse a dodge than any. “That’s funny. The room over there isn’t my room, either. Coincidence?” He leaned back, grinning.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jones went out,” she said frowning.

  “The fellow whose room I was in went out, too,” said Jed, still grinning. “He’s got a date.” He felt anger pulse in his neck and jaw. “Lucky guy. Or is he? Or am I?”

  She sat down on the bed and stuffed a pillow behind her. “I’m going to South America tomorrow,” she remarked lightly.

  “Oh? What part?” She didn’t answer. “I’m off to Europe, myself,” he lied cheerfully. He didn’t believe a word she’d said, so far.

  “Mr. Jones is my brother,” said the girl. “I hate him. I hate all my relatives. They won’t let me do anything. They don’t want me to have dates.” She looked both dreamily and sullen. Jed began to believe some of this. Something was real about it.

  “Shall we make it a date?” he suggested. “Would you like to go dancing?”

  Her head jerked. He saw her quick desire to go and her recollection of some reason why not … the jump of a flame and its quick quenching. “I haven’t any evening clothes,” she said, and he gawped at such an excuse. If excuse it was. “Mrs. Jones had a beautiful evening dress.”

  “Your … sister-in-law?”

  “And a velvet wrap the color of this.” She touched the negligee. “You can’t buy that for fifty cents an hour.”

  Jed made no sense of what she was saying. A rap on the door cut into his puzzling. Boy with the ice. Jed got up and turned his back, looking out through the blind as if there was something to see. There was nothing to see but some old biddy writing letters there. Jed hardly noticed even that. He was annoyed by the notion that he ought not let himself be seen in there.

  Still, a hotel, he guessed, in its official consciousness, usually knew by some nervous sympathy what went on within its walls. It pounced or it did not pounce. But it knew. Probably he wasn’t fooling anybody.

  “Sign, miss?” The boy was mumbling.

  The girl was at a complete loss. She had never seen this in the movies. Her grand air was punctured. She didn’t know anything about signing a check.

  Jed turned around. “Better let me get it, honey.” He fumbled for money. “What time did your brother go out?” he asked her over his shoulder.

  She said nothing.

  “Do you know?” Jed watched the boy’s worldly young eyes. “Notice a couple in evening clothes? She wore a wrap, that color.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jones?” said the boy smoothly. “Yeah, they left quite a long while ago.”

  “How long will they be?” Jed asked the girl.

  She shrugged. “Some shindig …”

  “Yeah? Well …” Jed watched the boy whose eyes were first satisfied, then veiled. The boy took his tip and departed.

  The boy, whose name was Jimmy Reese, went down the corridor jauntily, his lips pursed to whistle, shaping a tune without the breath to make it audible. Eddie’s elevator picked him up. They eyed each other with a kind of professional contempt. Jimmy’s whistle went right on.

  The guy in 807 belonged in 821. This Jimmy knew. Who that girl was, Jimmy did not know. So she was Jones’s sister. For all he knew. He didn’t know she had anything to do with Eddie. He looked up at the grillwork, coming to the chorus. He didn’t think 821 was looking for Jones in there, though. Jimmy kept a lot of amusing things to himself.

  Eddie didn’t know that Jimmy had just been to 807. He’d listened hard at the eighth floor. He’d eyed the boy. All seemed quiet.

  So they sank down, professionally aloof, exchanging no comments, no gossip, no information.

  Jed, fixing drinks, thought it over. He hadn’t been trying to set up a picture of himself, the dropper-in who had missed his host He guessed he wasn’t fooling anybody. On the other hand, he had established something. Mr. and Mrs. Jones had gone out. Who was this, then?

  “You got a name?” he asked gently.

  “Nell.” She told him so absent-mindedly he believed it was true.

  Nevertheless, he lied, saying, “I’m John.” He handed her a glass.

  She took a deep swallow, looked up, and laughed at him. “You don’t know what to think about me. You’re nervous. You’re funny.”

  He let it ride. He went over and fixed the blind. Then he sat down on the bed next to her. “Where you from, Nell?”

  “California.”

  “What part?”

  “All of it.”

  “You can’t do that. California’s too big.”

  “It’s not so big.”

  “San Francisco?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Tulsa?” he said.

  “There, too,” she answered serenely. She was rolling this stuff off the top of her head, not even bothering to make sense.

  “Where is Tulsa?” he asked, in sudden suspicion.

  “In California.” She looked surprised.

  “Nell,” he said amiably, “you’re a liar.”

  “Oh, well,” she said, suddenly soft as a kitten, leaning against his arm, “you’re lying to me, too.”

  “I haven’t said anything.”

  “You’re lying, just the same.”

  He took her chin in his left hand, turned her face and searched it and his pulse jumped, recognizing the cockeyed honesty there. You’re a liar. I’m a liar. Well? No, it wasn’t a look, given cynically, after long practice. There was something perfectly fresh about it.

  She was not a type he knew.

  “Well?” he said, aloud. He bent his mouth to kiss her.

  The taste of her lips was very close when a ripple went down his spine. He turned Nell’s quietly waiting face with his hand, pressing it to his shoulder. His neck worked stiffly, slowly. He looked behind.

  There was a little girl with dark pigtails, barefooted, in pink pajamas. She was watching them silently.

  A wild animal could have startled him no more.

  CHAPTER 7

  The shock seemed to lift him into the air. He croaked, controlling his voice better than his reflexes, “Seems to be an audience.” He had pushed Nell to her balance. He had pivoted without straightening his knees. He was suddenly sitting on the other bed, facing the child … reaching for his glass.…

  Jed, going about his business, brushed by the children in the world without making any contact. They didn’t interest him. Like philatelists or monks or surrealist painters, they were out of his orbit. Events that had artificially aged him had also knocked awry the continuity of his own memories. It seemed a long time ago, if not in another planet, that he himself had been a child. Fathering none, and, in fact, acquainted with few young parents, Jed didn’t know any children, as friends. He would have mentioned “a bunch of kids” as he would comment on a “flock of chickens” or a “hill of ants.” He didn’t individualize them. He simply had no truck with them.

  This little girl, with her dark eyes in an angular face, wasn’t a pretty little girl. Too thin. Too solemn.

  Nell was in a crouch, leaning on her arms. “Get back in there,” she said viciously.

  “I want …”

  Nell went across the bed on her knees. “Go on. Get back in there and go to sleep.” Her fingers clawed the little shoulders.

  Nobody spoke to Bunny O. Jones in such a fashion. Nobody came crawling at her like a big angry crab. Nobody handled her so cruelly. Bunny was severely startled. She began to cry.

  “And shut up!” said Nell.

  “Yours?” said Jed coolly.

  “She’s not mine,” said Nell angrily. “She belongs to the Joneses.”

  “Oh … your niece?”

  Nell laughed.

  “You’ve got my mommy’s things on,” wailed Bunny.

  “Shut—”

  “Just a minute.” Jed rose. Glass in hand, he came toward them. He was very tall next to Bunny O. Jones. He had no insti
nct to bend down. “What’s your name?” He felt awkward, speaking to this mite, and was impelled to speak loudly as one does to a foreigner or someone who may not readily understand the language.

  “I’m Bunny O. Jones.” She twisted in Nell’s harsh hands.

  “Let go of her, Nell. Bunny Jones, eh? This isn’t your aunt, is it?”

  “What are you asking her for? She’s not supposed to be in here …”

  “Suppose you shut up a minute,” Jed said.

  “She’s my sitter,” sobbed Bunny.

  “Oh, for Lord’s sake.” Jed put his glass down and settled his jacket around him with angry shoulder movements. Now he knew what he had got into.

  Nell’s hands were off the child but not far off. “I don’t like you,” sobbed Bunny.

  “I don’t like you either, you damn little snoop,” Nell said.

  One did not speak to these strange little creatures in such terms. Jed felt this much out for himself. It came slowly to him with a sense of how big he was, how big and how powerful even Nell was, and how helpless was the child.

  He said, “Nobody’s going to hurt you, Bunny. Don’t cry.”

  But she kept on crying. Perhaps she didn’t believe him. He couldn’t blame her for that. She was shrinking away from Nell. And Nell contrived to loom closer and closer, so that the child was menaced and pursued and sought to escape, although the chase was neither swift nor far, but done in tiny pulses of the foot on the carpet.

  “Why don’t you ask her what she wanted?” Jed said.

  “She wanted to snoop,” said Nell.

  But it was clear to Jed that the little girl hadn’t snooped for snooping’s sake. It was clear to him that she had done nothing in malice. He put his arm like a bar across Nell’s path and her throat came against it. “No,” he insisted. “There was something. What was it, hm? Bunny? What did you want?”

  “It’s too hot,” wept Bunny. “I want my radiator off.”

  “You might have asked,” Jed said scornfully to Nell “It’s simple enough. I’ll take care of it.”

  He strode through the communicating door, which for all his caution he had not noticed to be open. The other room was stuffy. He found a valve. He thought, Towers, fold your tent. He noticed the exit to the corridor from here, from 809, and the key in the lock.

  But the crying child, the girl again pursuing her in that gliding stepless way, was in the room with him.

  “It’s O.K. now,” Jed said. “Cool off in a minute. Better get back to bed.”

  “She’ll get back to bed.”

  Bunny broke and ran. She rolled into the bedclothes. She burrowed as if to hide. She was still crying.

  Jed stalked into 807, making directly for the bottle. He had a notion to leave without breaking his stride, snatch the glass, drain it, pick up the bottle, cross the room, and fade away. But he was angry. What a stinking evening! First one thing and then another! Cutting phrases came to his mind. Now he understood that crack about fifty cents an hour … this late!… when it should have informed him, before, if he’d had the wits. He was furious for having been stupid. He was embarrassed and humiliated. He was even half angry with the little girl for having walked in and stared at Towers making a jackass of himself. A baby sitter!

  He wanted this Nell to know he was angry. So he freshened from the bottle the drink in the glass.

  As Nell, on his heels, entered 807 and closed the door firmly behind her, he snarled, “Were you going to pay me my two bits an hour? Or wasn’t this a fifty-fifty proposition?”

  “What?” She spoke as if she’d been preoccupied, as if she hadn’t quite heard. Her face was serene. She drifted toward the mirror. She touched her hair. It was as if, now that the door was closed, it might as well never have opened.

  But Bunny was crying bitterly beyond the wall.

  Jed said, furiously, “Why didn’t you tell me there was a kid in there?”

  “I didn’t know she was going to come in here,” Nell said.

  Jed looked at her. For the first time, something nudged him, something said the word inside his head. But he didn’t believe it. The word is easy to say. It falls off the tongue. But it is not so easy to believe, soberly, in all reality.

  She walked to where he stood, by the desk that had become the bar.

  He’d had cats press themselves around his shoes and ankles.

  Nell fitted herself into the hollow of his shoulder and turned up her blind face. She was back where she’d been when so rudely interrupted. She was waiting for them to take up where they had left off. Jed stood still, angry enough to throw her brutally away from him, but bitter enough to stand still in unresponsive contempt.

  The little kid was crying, in there, a tearing, breaking—a terrible sound.

  Nell’s tawny head rested against him. He grabbed her shoulder. “Don’t you hear that? You got something the matter with your ears?” He shook her.

  “Hmmmmmmm?” She was smiling. She enjoyed being shaken. So he let her go. Her eyes opened. “I heard you. I know what you said. You’re mad at me. I don’t see why you’re mad at me, John. Johnee! I haven’t done anything.”

  “You haven’t done anything?”

  “No.”

  “Well,” Jed said. He put the stopper in the bottle of liquor and kept it in his hand. He was ready to go. He could make no sense here, no use arguing, no point to that.

  “Don’t go,” Nell said rather shrilly. “I haven’t done anything. It’s all right now, isn’t it? She’s gone.”

  “Gone!” The sound of the child, crying in the next room, was preying on Jed’s nerve ends. As bad, he thought, as if a cat had been yowling under his window and he trying to sleep. It was too irregular even to be a background noise. It pierced. It carried you with it into its anguish. “Can’t you hear that!”

  “That? She’ll go to sleep.”

  “She will?”

  Nell shrugged. Using one hand, she lapped the long silk robe so that it didn’t drag. She whirled, seeming quite gay. “Can’t I have another drink?”

  The sounds the kid was making were not, Jed discovered, quite like a cat crying. Either a cat shut up, or it went elsewhere, or you went elsewhere. You got away. And if the cat cried where you couldn’t hear it, why, let it cry. He didn’t know anything about kids. But you didn’t need to know anything. Just listening told you. This sound of this crying had to stop.

  “Does it bother you?” the girl said rather casually, holding out her glass.

  “It bothers the hell out of me,” Jed said roughly. “She’s scared. And you did that. Why did you have to jump at her like a wildcat? This the way you always treat your customers?” He poured whisky into her glass, hardly aware he was doing so.

  She looked sullen. “I didn’t mean to scare her.”

  “She startled me. O.K. But you knew she was in there. You’re supposed to be taking care of her, aren’t you? Listen …”

  He was listening, himself, all the time. The sound was intolerable. “You better get her to stop that”

  “When she gets tired …”

  “You want the whole hotel up here?” he snapped.

  “No.” She looked alarmed.

  “Then do something. I’m telling you.”

  He stalked toward an ash tray, walking between the beds. “If I go in there, you’ll sneak out,” Nell said flatly. The thought was crossing Jed’s mind as she spoke. He put the whisky down beside the phone. He took his hand off the bottle as if it were hot.

  “I don’t have to sneak out, you know,” he said cuttingly. “I can walk out, just about any time. I won’t stay here and listen to that, I’ll tell you.”

  “If she stops crying, will you stay?”

  “I doubt it.”

  She put her glass in her left hand and worked her right as if it were stiff and cold. Her blue eyes had too much blue.

  “This is no business of mine, remember,” Jed said, slashing the air with a flat hand. “Nothing to do with me. But I’m telling you …
Why don’t you try being a little bit nice?”

  “Nice?”

  “Don’t smirk at me. Nice to the kid in there. Are you stupid? What am I wasting my—”

  “This is a date, isn’t it?” she began. “You asked me—”

  But Jed was thinking how that little throat must ache. His own throat felt raw. He growled, “Get her quiet. Get her happy. Go on.”

  “If I do?”

  “If you do,” he said rather desperately, “well … maybe we can have a quiet little drink before I go.”

  The girl turned, put down her glass, went to the door and opened it quietly. She moved obediently. She vanished in the darkness.

  “I’m afraid,” Lyn said, “Mr. Towers must have gone out again. His room doesn’t answer.”

  “I can only say I didn’t see him, Miss.” The man behind the desk at the Majestic wasn’t terribly interested.

  “But you did see him come in a little while ago?”

  “Yes, I did.” He threw her a mildly irritated glance.

  “Well …” she turned uncertainly.

  “A message?” he suggested politely. She was a cute girl, trim and cuddly in the bright blue coat with the big brass buttons. And she seemed distressed.

  “Yes, I could leave a note.”

  He used a pencil to point the way to a writing desk in the lobby, aiming it between a pillar and a palm.

  “Yes, I see. Thank you.” Lyn sat down at the desk, put her purse down under her left forearm. She shifted the chair slightly so that she could keep an eye on a spot anyone entering the Hotel Majestic from the street must pass.

  She thought he must have gone out again, perhaps through the bar. She hoped he wasn’t, even now, upsetting her family. She herself didn’t dare call home to ask. If they didn’t know she was alone, so much the better. They’d have a fit, she thought. A fit. But … never mind. If they were anxious, too bad, but she was actually safe enough and they’d forgive and perhaps they’d even have confidence enough in her not to worry too much.

  This was something she had to work out for herself. The family tended to side too blindly with her. Any man, they would assume, so benighted as to quarrel with their darling would never be worth her efforts to patch it up.

  But I can be wrong, she thought, not far from tears.