The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  There he was; that was he. And meanwhile he’d been studying me equally deliberately on his part. And, I suppose, telling himself those things about me that I was telling myself about him.

  “So you’re you.” He smiled finally.

  I nodded. “How do you find me?”

  He screwed up one eye in self-disgust. “Of course it pays to look before you leap, but I shot twenty minutes of our time to pieces for no good reason. I’m just yellow, I guess.”

  “Well, maybe you’ve been stuck before,” I suggested.

  “There’s no good reason for getting stuck, really. It’s the simplest thing in the world. You see the thing through past the cocktails. I mean, a cocktail will see you through practically anything, anyway. If it’s the face that bothers you you’ve got an olive to look at instead. Then with the soup, you step outside a second to buy a pack of cigarettes. You pick some brand you’re darned sure they won’t be able to bring to your table, in case there happens to be a ciggie girl in the place. Rameses the Third, or something, straw-tipped. Never smoke anything else. Then with the main course comes the rescuing phone call. Somebody’s dying in your house, or somebody’s having a baby, or your office is on fire. You pay the waiter for the rest of her dinner—that’s to make sure she’ll have to stay and finish it, not try to come with you—you apologize; you’ll call her, and you’re out of it.”

  I laughed a little. “How many times have you done that?”

  “Well, that, of course, is the funny part of it. I told you I’m yellow. I never have yet. I’ve sat and planned the whole thing out in my mind, but somehow when the coffee comes around I’m still sitting there, just suffering. They always look so trusting. The most I’ve ever been able to do is just cut the evening a little short at the other end.” I liked the answer; it spiked the conceit that otherwise would have been implicit in the discussion.

  “I must remember that; from now on all soup-course phone calls are open to suspicion.”

  He grinned. “Don’t clutter your mind up with stuff you’ll never have to use. I bet the only time they leave you during a soup course is to put a padlock on the inside of the door so you can’t get away from them.”

  “A spoonful at a time,” I begged. “Not with a shovel like that; you won’t have any left.”

  “Another?”

  “No, two are enough, thanks.”

  “A cigarette, then?”

  “A cigarette, then.”

  He held a lighter to it.

  I said, “Do you have your initials over everything like that?”

  He chuckled, as though he didn’t think much of it himself. “No, that was my sister’s idea. Last Christmas. I suppose so I couldn’t return it or something.”

  He blew it out, forgot about it. “You haven’t told me your name yet.”

  “Didn’t I? I thought I did. Alberta French.”

  “What do they call you?”

  “Alberta French.”

  “I’ll have that worn out in a week,” he promised.

  “Well, you’ll be fresh out of a name for me, then.”

  “Maybe I’ll just be plain fresh, without the rest of it.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” I told him demurely.

  He called Matt over to settle his bill. Then he thumbed a dime down onto the table directly before him. “Mustn’t forget the waiter,” he said to me confidentially. “That ought to be enough, don’t you think? He wasn’t so good.”

  “Oh, he was worth more than that,” I urged plaintively.

  He added a nickel to it with a show of reluctance. Then in the brogue he’d affected before he said to himself: “Thank you, sorr.” And out of the side of his mouth, in a seething undertone: “Cheap skate!”

  I couldn’t help tipping my head back and laughing.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here. We’ve got places to go and things to do.” He shifted my chair for me. “You’re in my clutches now.”

  “You mean,” I thought somberly as I rose to join him, “you’re in mine. Whether you know it yet or not.” And I wasn’t kidding as he was.

  A scrubwoman on hands and knees kept chasing us around the mosaic-floored hotel lobby, out before the elevator, from dry spot to dry spot in a sort of concentric circular pattern.

  “Now I’ll really have to break away and go up,” I laughed. “We’re back where we started. Don’t you remember this place with the wriggly crack in it?”

  “I knew I’d seen it before. It must have been our last trip around.”

  The scrubwoman wrung out a cloth and grinned toothlessly up at us. “I’m catching up with yez,” she said.

  It was starting to get light out. There was light blue peering in through the doors. It seemed like a year ago I’d first met him, not just twelve hours. He knew how to make time fly.

  “What’re you waiting for?” I demanded, still laughing. “You’ve got me to that silly stage now, where I laugh at everything you say and do. We’ve been standing here like this for nearly an hour, doing nothing but laughing. That night desk man over there thinks we’re crazy.”

  He turned to him and blurted out, “Isn’t she nice? I just met her tonight.”

  He turned back to me without waiting for any comment. “I keep waiting to see how you look when you get tired. And you don’t get tired.”

  “With you one doesn’t get tired in the face; one gets tired in the larynx. Mine’s positively raw. Well, tired or not, up I go. This is positively it now.”

  He took leave of me matter-of-factly enough, when at last he did. “I’ll call you.” Picked up my hand, dropped it again, turned, and went out. As limberly as though it had been six the night before.

  “Nice kid,” the desk man offered, unasked, gazing after him.

  I didn’t answer. “Nice kid,” I thought, going up in the elevator, “but I wonder if he’s ever killed a woman?”

  Upstairs in my room I sat for a long while, motionless, by the window, while the roofs below turned strawberry and then orange. Not laughing any more. Card-indexing him.

  “He was just showing off because I’m new to him. No one can be that happy-go-lucky, that harum-scarum, whatever you’d call it, that brimful of life, all the time. No one is. Don’t be taken in. There’s a darker side to the picture. Patience. Patience. It will turn my way.”

  He called as he’d said he would. I was there when the phone rang. I’d been waiting for it to ring. I knew it was he. Who else knew I was here in this place, here in this particular room? This room had been taken for him, to give me background, a setting, for him.

  I sat there in the chair without moving and let the call wear itself out into silence. That came under the heading of technique. Keeping him interested.

  It came again in about half an hour. Again I didn’t move. Then the next time it came within fifteen minutes. Interest was quickening to uneasiness, anxiety.

  I answered it the third time.

  He’d been worried. “You had me going. I thought maybe I’d lost you.”

  “I just came in. I was out window-shopping. You know, out-of-town girl in New York.”

  “Isn’t there something you would like to do tonight?”

  “Yes, very much.”

  His voice took an upcurve. “Fine. What is it? Tell me.”

  “Just go to bed early and get a good night’s sleep after last night.”

  His voice dipped again, even though there was a lugubrious laugh in it. “I meant something I could join you in. You don’t want to sleep in New York. New York isn’t for sleeping in.”

  “They tell me millions do. In fact, I’ve even seen beds. I’m looking at one right now, and it looks awfully good from here.”

  “Mason, are you slipping!” he said. “I never thought I’d play second fiddle to a Murphy.”

  “You couldn’t get me out of this building tonight,” I told him firmly. “I’ve got just about strength enough to take me downstairs and back for a sandwich. Then I’m going to stand u
p perfectly straight beside this Murphy, as you call it, and let myself go over backward.”

  I said to myself as I hung up: “He won’t take it. He’ll ring again before the night’s through.”

  I sat waiting, but he didn’t. One error out of four is permissible. After an hour, when he hadn’t, I finally did go down to get myself a sandwich.

  He was sitting there on a line with the elevator tier, grinning and patiently waiting. He was holding a terraced brown paper bag balanced on one knee, a bevy of paper napkins on the other.

  He said, “You took an awful long time getting down. I have them already, yours and mine both. Just a sandwich before bed, you said. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t eat them together, off in some quiet corner of the lobby, is there? And then I’ll see you back to your elevator and we’ll say good night.”

  Which was the pursuer and which the pursued? He couldn’t have told; I could.

  It was on a subway car that our lips first met. Of all unlikely places. That moth-eaten expression for once is apt; no other one will do. There was no intent there; it just happened that way. His lips struck mine.

  To him they were novel, and he didn’t know how to hold himself in them very well. He was bringing me home from someplace; it was abominably late, as it always was when I was out with him, and it had been my suggestion. “It’s the quickest way after all, even figuring on the station waits. Let’s be plebeian for a change.”

  The train jarred to a stop at the station with one of those flounces they sometimes give—maybe the motor-man up ahead was sleepy or something—and he was flung against me in the vestibule where we were standing waiting to get off. His head had been lowered to peer out, make sure it was the right station. His face went into me. Then he stayed that way.

  I refrained from moving too. The weapons weren’t of my choosing, but I wasn’t discarding anything.

  “You’d better hold that door,” I had to say finally; “it’s starting to go back again.”

  He was quiet going up the steps.

  Halfway to the top he turned to me. “Stand here a minute. Let me try that again.”

  I kept on moving. “The staircase doesn’t shake,” I reminded him. “It was the train that did.”

  I thought he was kidding, but when I looked he wasn’t. He had a pensive look in his eyes. Almost a little troubled.

  I was too, for some reason.

  It was like a premonition of disaster to both of us.

  “Here’s the street,” I said.

  “So it is.”

  He parted from me rather more hastily downstairs at the hotel elevator than he usually did. No laughing jags tonight, no shilly-shallying. “I want to leave you now. I have a lot to think about. And though you’ll be there, it’s better in a way if you’re not in front of me.”

  I turned away without a word and left him.

  Upstairs it kept ringing lingeringly in my ears for a long time afterward. Not so much what he’d said as the strange, grave way in which he’d said it. No lightness, no banter there any longer. “I want to leave you now. I have a lot to think about.”

  “Something on your conscience?” I answered to myself.

  “Something about a death that comes back now and then to plague you—particularly at the birth of a new love?

  “The death of an old love?

  “A death you caused?”

  From time to time I said something about going back. I had to. Technically I was still here only on a visit, elastically adjustable though it seemed to be. I still didn’t know where it was I was supposed to go back to, but I felt I had to refer to it every now and again, if only for the sake of plausibility. After all, he was no fool.

  His reaction to the test, each time it was made, provided a good barometer of his feelings. Unconsciously he was self-revelatory about it. The first time I mentioned the subject he winced half humorously, coaxed, “Ah, wait another week. A few days more can’t hurt. There’ll still be trains running.” The second time he sobered, looked down, and, I noticed, didn’t have much to say for quite some time after that. The third time he scowled, began moving restlessly about the room, and when he went out later was grouchy, ill-humored, drank considerably more than he usually did, and left the waiters and the rest anarchistically small tips.

  The fourth time he turned the tables on me. He brought the subject up, not I. “I can’t think of your going back,” he said. “I’m going with you when you do.” And then, when I tried to object, “I’m just as entitled to make a trip out there as you were to make one here. What do I do around here anyway? Sit in my old man’s chair at board meetings half the time without opening my face. They can take my vote by proxy for a couple months just as well!”

  I prudently let the entire matter lapse after that. It was the better part of valor. The elastically temporary sojourn became a permanent stay.

  I changed from the hotel room, which I had used as a springboard for meeting him, to a little one-room studio place over on Fifty-third, just east of Second Avenue. He’d helped me to find it, since I was supposedly still a little green in New York. There was not only the matter of expense, which was as actual a consideration to me on the real plane of my existence as on the camouflaged, two-dimensional one in which I presented myself to him, but my former surroundings had outlived their usefulness. I felt we were now at, or soon to approach, a stage, he and I, in which I needed more privacy, more seclusion, to work effectively.

  He accompanied me there the day I moved in. In fact, took me in his car.

  I said to myself, “It is only right that he should be on hand from the very first day, the very first minute that this room begins. For the day he ends the room ends with him. It is of him and for him and because of him; it is through him alone that it has any reality. Without him it isn’t there at all.”

  Little room on Fifty-third Street that I expected to forget so soon.

  I wasn’t expecting it.

  I could feel his eyes on me, studying me from close range, and finally I chose to become aware, said: “What are you looking at me for like that?”

  “I’m trying to think what to call you.”

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?”

  “There’s something about Alberta; it’s too stiff; it doesn’t ride easily on the tongue. Do you remember the night we first met? I told you I’d give that up after a week, and it’s long past that now. I have to find some name for you. Some name of my own. Stand up and let me look at you. I’ll see if I can get one.” He held me poised before him, his hands to my sides.

  His eyes went deep, went lonesome. I saw that and I tried to keep it light. “This is the oddest christening. I’m a little old and tall, aren’t I? I should be held in someone’s arms and have on a long trailing nightgown-dress. Who’s there to sprinkle the water on my head?”

  “Don’t,” he said. Just that one word. With a haunted severity.

  I shut up and looked away, waiting for it to blow over by itself.

  “Turn your head this way again, toward the lamp, so that the light falls softly on your face from the other side.”

  His breath caught.

  “That soft light, what it does to you. You look like an——”

  He rose slowly to his own feet before me, his hands still to my sides.

  I smiled a little, waiting.

  “I’ve found one for you,” he breathed. “You’ve got the face of an angel. I’m going to call you Angel Face. Angel Face I’m going to call you.”

  I wrenched myself away so suddenly, in such momentarily maddened pain, his hands were left there stretched out, empty, measuring off the space where I had been. And I was all the way across the room, not just a step away, a yard away, but all the far way across, as though he’d taken a knife to me and probed right there where my heart was.

  I saw his lips moving and I couldn’t hear what he said. I didn’t want to, anyway.

  He came over to me then, took my hands and drew them down from over my ear
s, where they’d been pressed in fierce closure.

  “What have I done to frighten you?” he said. “Why are you covering your ears like that? Look, you’re white—your eyes are so big——”

  “Don’t ever call me that name,” I said shakily. “Don’t even say it over a second time now to remind yourself what it was. Don’t use it again, Ladd, or I’ll—you’ll never see me again. Call me any other name, anything you want. Anything but that.”

  “There was someone else once, is that it?”

  He made his peace with my past.

  “There would have had to be, with a face such as you’ve got. You weren’t born yesterday.”

  I leaned against him and closed my eyes against his shoulder and saw a face before me that he didn’t know was there.

  Then later, of course, I was immeasurably glad I’d gone. But at the time I didn’t dream it would profit me anything. Everything comes so by chance, so haphazardly, even in the best-laid schemes. He was the one I was interested in, not his background, his mother and sister, or whoever it was, as the case might be.

  In addition, I was convinced there was the usual situation lurking behind it: he wanted me to be there; he was pulling the strings to force a sort of grudging affability out of them, considerably against their own inclinations, and in short was forcing me down their throats.

  It was his sister’s birthday.

  The invitation, of course, I had disregarded as being something he’d been responsible for himself, even though she put an inked personal message on it in addition. “Do come, so anxious to meet you, have heard so much about you from L.”

  I tried all the stalls I knew to get out of it.

  “I don’t belong there.”

  “You don’t belong there! You’re my Alberta; you belong wherever I am. What are we, the landed aristocracy or something?”

  “No, but I mean I’ll have no mutual interests with anyone that’s there.”

  “Fine, because you wouldn’t have a chance to exchange them if you did! You’re going to be with me all evening; no one else is going to get near you. I’m just looking out for myself in this, you see. I have to be there. Don’t you want me to enjoy my own sister’s party?”

  Finally I even fell back on the most moth-eaten excuse of all.