The Black Angel

by Cornell Woolrich

  Fear flickered over me—I didn’t know of what or of whom—and then rippled away again. I think the closing of that door. I was coming into a new world.

  The place was barren-looking and musty. Tables huddled in a corner, piled atop one another two and three at a time, and the whole thing threatening to come down. One had been left out where it belonged, and there was a man sitting at it, his coat turned inside out over the back of his chair. He wasn’t doing anything, just sitting waiting in the gloom. There were eight or ten girls there, grouped about. They weren’t doing anything either. They, too, were just standing waiting. Some had jumpers over their upper bodies. All were barelegged.

  There was something hideously naked about it. Obscene, almost. Pleasure, turned inside out to show its lining, always is.

  The man at the table said, “You an applicant? Awright, drop your dress.”

  “On the floor?” I quailed.

  They all roared. He said, “The maid’ll be right around to pick it up for you. She ain’t here right now. Makes it very inconvenient.”

  I compromised by rolling it into a neat oval and packaging it on top of a fire-extinguisher cylinder clamped to the wall.

  They were all smirking about something. I still had on more than most of them, so I couldn’t see the point.

  A rather gaunt-looking brunette sauntered over finally and stood looking me up and down as though I were something curious to her.

  “You’ll never make it,” she said. “You may as well get dressed again and save yourself the time.”

  “Why? What makes you say that?” I answered docilely.

  “Anyone that comes to an audition without having her practice trunks already on under her street dress has never been in this business before. Look around you; where you going to change here?”

  I stood there huddled helplessly in my white rayon briefs.

  She finally took a sort of contemptuous pity on me. Turned her back and made herself into a screen. “All right, make it fast and keep down.”

  While I was doing it I said from behind her, “Give me a hint, will you? Where’ll I say I worked before? I need this job.”

  “Pick an out-of-town joint someplace.” Then she added, “If it’ll do you any good.” The last thing she said as she turned away to rejoin her more experienced fellow applicants was, “I’m telling you again, you’ll never make it. I c’n tell ’em just by looking at ’em.”

  I felt great.

  A door opened and men came out. First there were five of them, all talking at once. “Here’s an angle, boss. For three or four days ahead run a little square space in all the papers with nothing in it, blank, just the number ninety by itself in the middle of it, until they start wondering what it——” “Yeah, if I can get that kind of red you want, but it ain’t going to be easy. I’ve already been all over——” “I told him if he won’t meet our price we’ll let somebody else supply us, but he’s holding out till the last minute to see if——” Then they started to break up, until there was just one left. A looming figure, blank in detail, little better than an outline against the light filtering out of the office behind him. Tall, almost grotesquely tall, but that might have been partly due to the uncertain dimness in which they kept this outer place.

  He said, “Okay, Dolan. You ready out here?”

  The man at the table said, “Give us a couple of lights out here, Harry.”

  A sort of flare path swept into being between me and him, and there was a lot of shuffling around. It seemed that way, anyway: as though I were at one end of it and he was at the other and it was a path that I had to travel. Sooner or later I had to traverse.

  I missed most of the rest of it. I looked over at him hard. He slowly lit up, came into existence, came into this funny story that was my life. I guess the lights went on slow, but that was the way it seemed: as though he were gradually brightening from the floor up.

  Tall. Over six and something. Carrying it without trouble, as though every joint were newly oiled. Black-pitted eyes and hair almost as dark, brown only in the superficial sheen that hovered over it. A face with an Irish cast to it. Handsome, I suppose. But hard. Not hard in a brutalized, vicious way, if you can understand the distinction, for that bespeaks heat, even though a warped heat; but hard with the passionlessness of concrete, of a steam roller that flattens you impersonally if you happen to be in its way.

  I looked at him hard. Looked at his hands: one at a pocket, one to the knob, ready to close the door he had just come through. Sure, they could have. Sure, they already must have—not once but many times. I looked at his eyes. Sure, they could have watched that other thing, unflinching, as they watched this line of girls now. I had to get up that flare path that stretched between us, to where the answer waited.

  Someone shoved a piano out away from the wall, sat down at it, rubbed his elbow along the keyboard to dust it. It had a panel missing, and you could see the wires move each time he struck notes over on that side.

  The man at the table said, “All right, line up for a time step.”

  I tried to get up his way. All the others seemed to have the same idea. I got in third from that end. Then I got crowded back to fourth, side-stepped to fifth, elbowed to sixth, detoured around to seventh, while the line wriggled into straight like a worm. I wound up third from the wrong end, away from him. My face must have been just a pinkish dot to him.

  This was to weed out the obvious incompetents before they interviewed and passed on the remainder individually. I was the first one to be weeded. Every time he said left I raised my right leg and every time he said right I raised my left. I didn’t know how to change over once I’d got started wrong.

  Finally the man at the table said, “Hey, you, number three. Step out. You’re tangling up the whole line.”

  I stepped out. I looked up there, not at him. He thumbed the fire exit. “Get dressed,” he said wearily.

  The tall figure lounging by the closed office door spoke. “Give her a chance,” he said. He was more lenient than his hired man. I suppose the latter wanted to show how conscientious he was.

  “What do you do?” he asked me with a sort of aloof kindliness. “You got some sort of specialty or solo? Is that it?”

  Thus for the first time McKee had spoken to me. Even though my face was still a pink blob to him. I had edged one foot forward along the flare path.

  If I said no it meant the fire exit. “Yes,” I said, “I—I do a solo.”

  “What’ll you have?” the man at the piano said, spitting out a loose leaf of his cigar.

  I couldn’t think how anything went. I remembered something that Kirk used to like, but by name alone, not how it went. “‘Moonlight and Roses,’ “ I stammered.

  He started it, and only then I realized it was too slow to do anything with. I didn’t know anything about dancing. I could only think of two things to do. Pirouette; that is, swing around. And kick high. So I pirouetted. And I high-kicked. And I pirouetted. And I high-kicked. The third high kick was too high. I sat down. Straight, in a vertical line, almost with economy of movement.

  A howl went up. Even the face by the doorway joined in it. I scrambled to my feet, and this time I started over for the fire extinguisher where my dress was cached without being told.

  Suddenly his face froze. His own hand started up toward it, as if to touch it, then dropped again. He asked the man at the table in surprised discovery, “Wait a minute, was I laughing just then?”

  “Who wasn’t?”

  “I don’t laugh easy. I never laughed in one of my own clubs yet. Or anybody else’s. If she can do that to me and to everyone else in the place here, what’ll she do to an audience with fizz under its belts?” Then he said to me, “Stay where you are.”

  I stayed. He thought about it for a minute. “Can you do that every night? Sit down like that every three or four kicks you take, for about five minutes straight?”

  “Certainly,” I said.

  “Pretty looks, you’ve got
a specialty. She’s in for seventy-five a week.”

  A hiss of reptilian antagonism went up from the line behind me.

  Even after I’d given my name and address I didn’t go right away. I hung around. It didn’t do me any good. He didn’t look at me again.

  I left when it was all over and they were milling around getting dressed. He’d gone by then by the front entrance. On my way out I cut across the brunette’s path and nicked her with my elbow. “Who wasn’t going to make it?” I said softly.

  I never got near him all that week. I used to see him sometimes in the distance. He never watched rehearsals; that wasn’t his job. His show was set and he let Dolan beat it into shape.

  I rehearsed wearing a sort of protector of quilting on wires around my hips so I wouldn’t injure my spine. I would have been in the hospital in forty-eight hours if I hadn’t. Then later, when they made up the gown, they put heavy pads into it down around there. It was one of these spreading, hoop-skirt things, so it couldn’t be detected. It was a lovely-looking piece of business, clouds of filmy black like mist. Then there were two long streamers attached to my wrists, and when I moved my arms they opened out like wings. And for the head there was a sort of silver arc that went halfway around on the order of a halo. You get the most unexpected allies.

  I was getting a little better at it. The falls came easier once they’d waxed the dancing floor for the opening. But Dolan warned me not to get too good. “If you get too good it looks like you rehearsed it; it takes some of the funniness out. Try and keep it looking accidental, like it was the first day.”

  We had a dress rehearsal around five in the afternoon, the day the show was to open. I put on the finished dress for the first time. Until then we’d just used practice shorts and things.

  I started to notice something; something was coming up as far as I was concerned. I kept getting signs that I was starting something. Something I only hoped I’d be able to finish.

  The first one came from the old woman who had charge of the costumes. That was her job, and she was old and tired and didn’t care one way or the other how we looked, only how her stuff fitted us. She helped me into the thing and fooled around a little down at the bottom. Then she happened to look up, I suppose to see if it was on right, and she stopped dead, stayed like that on her knees.

  “What’s matter?” I said.

  She sounded out of breath. “It’s a sin to say it around here, but you look like—like a vision up above the altar of a church.” And she almost acted afraid to come very near me and finish putting in the tacking and the pins.

  Then one of the others came in. I was the first one in there because I was the green one. It was the same brunette of the first day. She did something to her head; it gave kind of a quirk around my way, and her feet locked where she’d last put them. She stayed like that a moment, and then she fought it off and grunted: “You’re the first Jane I ever saw that looked better with her clothes on than with them off. They better have stretchers outside this place tonight; the casualties are going to be terrific.”

  And the third sign that I was under way came from Dolan himself, whom I’d overheard saying once that he was so sick and tired of looking at pretty girls that it was a relief to go to the zoo and stare at a cageful of the ugliest monkeys they had there. He dropped his lower jaw when my cue came up and kept it that way for a minute. He started to say, “Are you that same skinny little——?” Then he didn’t go any farther. He didn’t have to.

  I said to myself, “If I hit him like I’m hitting them I’m as good as at the other end of the flare path already.”

  I’d heard them all saying over and over, to explain their own difficulties, that there was no tougher audience to gain the attention of than the opening-night audience at a night club. I saw what they meant as soon as I’d stepped out there. With me it didn’t matter as much, because I had no lines to speak, no song to deliver. And the show I was giving had nothing to do with this crowd out here; it was a show for one.

  There was a blur of lights and faces. It was like a machine shop going full blast. Nobody was looking at the floor space. People talking from table to table, waiters cutting between me and ringside, dishes and glasses going. Even the cigarette girl was getting more attention than I.

  Somebody saw me at last. Someone at one of the back tables gave one of those long-drawn-out corner-loafer whistles. Then the commotion started to taper off. All of a sudden there was less noise. Then all of a sudden it was quiet. Then all of a sudden it was deathly still.

  You can feel things. I didn’t know what I looked like, and I wasn’t there to find out at this late date. All I knew was something about me was doing something to them. And since I wasn’t doing anything as yet, it must have been just the way I looked standing there.

  I heard a drunk say close by me, “Is it real? Boy, I’m getting good ones now for a change!”

  A mantle of oddly attentive silence seemed to have fallen over the entire place that had something nostalgic about it, pensive. Only the music went on, subdued, decorous, a little melancholy, for that was the way we had arranged it. For perfection of contrast, I was to fall to stately, muted music, not the raucous, laughing kind.

  I kicked and I fell, and a gasp went up. Then I did it again. The laughter was slow in coming, but it came finally, dragged out of them by sheer repetition of the grotesque. I knew I was destroying something, but I didn’t care. It was something I hadn’t sought, didn’t want. I was no performer.

  I had only one thing to ask, when I went off, of Dolan, the director, who was standing there looking on. “Did Mr. McKee see it? How did he feel about it? What did he say?”

  “He was there until a minute before you came out,” he said. “Then he got called to the phone, someone wanted to congratulate him on his opening. He’s been in there ever since. You’re the only part of the whole show he muffed seeing. There he is; he just came back now.”

  I turned and slunk back toward the dressing room, and even the gown couldn’t make me anything but a skinny, whipped little thing now. All those days and nights of drudgery for nothing. All those black-and-blue marks for nothing.

  Each time I’d come off the floor I’d ask: “Was Mr. McKee out there tonight? Did he see me?”

  Sometimes they said, “He was around before. He left just a little while ago.”

  Sometimes they said, “He hasn’t been here tonight yet. They expect him over a little later.”

  Five nights went by like that.

  The sixth night I kept the dress on after I’d come off the floor. I sat there in the dressing room in it, waiting, and when the wardrobe woman came to take it from me I said, “I’m staying in it.”

  “You ain’t supposed to,” she said. “I’m rissponsible for it; it’s got to go away. Now gimme it here.”

  “I’m staying in it awhile!” I snarled threateningly.

  They all came spilling in. “Hey, what’re you waiting for, an encore? The show’s over; didn’t you know that?”

  Yes, I was waiting for an encore. Or rather a première. But not the kind they meant.

  The old woman kept badgering me. “I gotta go home; gimme that dress!”

  “If you want it you’ll have to pull it off me piece by piece.”

  The brunette stopped at the door on her way out, gave me a look. Then she changed her mind, came back a minute. “I think I get it,” she said. She gave her head a hitch toward the door. “He’s out there now. He just came in before the finale.”

  I acted as though I hadn’t heard her, didn’t move.

  When the last of them had gone I got up. I warded off the old woman’s shakily interfering hands and opened the door and went out. I stood there for a minute at the mouth of the dressing-room passage, looking into the club room proper. He was at a ringside table over at the left, on the other side of the bandstand. There were two men with him, the same two that were always with him.

  There was a small table far back against the wall that h
ad been recently vacated. It wasn’t a very good one, but I made my way over toward it at an obtuse angle—by way of his table.

  They were talking avidly as I went by.

  They stopped talking on the down syllable.

  “I’ve made it,” I said to myself.

  I heard him ask in an undertone, “Who’s the angel with the folded wings?”

  I sat down all the way over against the wall and didn’t look at anyone in the room. A couple of minutes went by. Then a light-toned shadow blotted some of the cloth’s whiteness.

  “Haven’t I seen you before? Now please, before you answer, I know that’s old, but I’m asking it in all sincerity; it’s not a wisecrack.”

  “I work for you here, Mr. McKee.”

  “How much do I pay you?” Then before I could answer he said to someone, “Call Dolan over here a minute; is he still around?”

  Dolan got there fast.

  “Double this young lady’s salary. By the way, what’s her name?”

  “Miss Alberta French.”

  “What does she do?”

  This time I answered. “I sit down on the floor, Mr. McKee. From where I come in, all the way across the room in a straight line, over to where I go off. Don’t you remember me? I did it by mistake the first day, and now they have me doing it every night.”

  Something about it made him sore. It was his own idea, but he’d forgotten that. “You did it for the last time tonight. What’s the matter? Haven’t they got any sense around here?”

  Dolan got out of the way fast.

  He said, “Come on back to my table. It isn’t often that I have a chance to sit with an angel. I want everyone to see.”

  He didn’t waste finesse on the two men he’d been with. “All right,” he said curtly to one, and “See you around” to the other, and they both got up without delay, drifted away.

  I caught something one said to the other, though, before they’d quite gone beyond earshot. “It was about due. It’s been a long time now.” It wasn’t said maliciously; it was said philosophically.

  While we were waiting for the champagne I thought a little about Kirk. A voice penetrated my thoughts dimly. “Gee, you look so sad. I’ve never seen anything so lovely.” The voice of somebody or other from outside my innermost thoughts; they couldn’t exactly identify who it was at the moment. I sat and thought a little about Kirk while we were waiting for the champagne.