Woman in the Window

by Thomas Gifford

  In the late afternoon, MacPherson came back to her office. He wore that shadow of a smile and was carrying a brown paper sack and a newspaper. Unfolding the paper on her desk, he dumped the contents of the sack. There was a heavy clunk.

  “That’s a .38, Ms. Rader. A gun, you might say.”

  It was disfigured by clinging bits of half-hardened cement. It seemed large and ugly and frightening. She had never seen a gun before, up close.

  “It was right where it should have been. They had to move about five tons of wet cement. … I’m relieved there was a gun at the bottom of it, frankly.”

  “But why didn’t someone see it before they poured the cement?”

  “Those forms are full of leaves, sandwich wrappers, all kinds of debris. Who looks?”

  She took a deep breath. She wanted the gun off her desk. MacPherson seemed to sense her response and scooped it up, newspaper and all, and put it back in the sack.

  “What do you do now?” she asked.

  “Do a work-up on the gun. Check here and there. We’ll keep busy.” He had his hand on the door, turned back. “Proves one thing, though.”

  “It does?” She glanced at him, startled.

  “Proves your imagination wasn’t working overtime. To tell you the truth, I thought maybe it was. Good afternoon, Ms. Rader.”

  She stayed in the office until seven o’clock and once outside decided to walk home. She was damned if she’d let fear of the faceless gunman restrict her everyday life. It was a brisk night, dry for the first time in a week, and the bite of winter invigorated her. She walked crosstown to First Avenue and turned left, kept glancing back over her shoulder, feeling foolish, trying to ignore the frisson she felt whenever she noticed a man of a certain build in what was becoming a very common kind of trench coat She wondered at one point if a trench-coated fellow with clicking leather soles might actually be following her: she had heard him behind her as she passed through the dark shadows beneath the Roosevelt Island Tramway at Fifty-ninth. In the Sixties, still hearing his steady tread, she stopped at a florists window and watched him pass behind her in the reflection. He seemed utterly unaware of her and she gave a sigh of relief, calling herself a fool in the process. You couldn’t live your life worrying about an entire population clad largely in trench coats.

  She stopped at a new, gleaming white shop, bought a wedge of cheese, some walnuts, and a cold green-and-white pasta salad. Two doors later she nipped in and bought an already chilled bottle of Orvieto. She was walking more quickly than she liked. In the next block it was a fresh box of Bonz for Sir, and by then she was practically racing.

  She got home fed up with her own anxiety, fed up with her tendency to let it discolor a perfectly pleasant walk on a beautiful night.

  She fumbled with her keys, her arms full of sacks, and finally managed both locks. Something struck her as strange as she stood silently before the door.

  No half-barks and no scratching at the inside of the door. Where was he?

  She swung open the door. Waited.

  “Sir?” she called tentatively. “Where’s Sir? Where could Sir be?” That kind of babbling was sure to bring him.

  It was so dark in the flat.

  She went in, set the sacks on the mail table, and tripped over something as she went toward the light switch.

  She fell to her knees.

  She had tripped over the limp body of Sir. …

  Chapter Seven

  IT WAS AMAZING WHAT the mind was capable of, how many functions could be thrown into the struggle at one time.

  On one elemental level, reaching down into herself, Natalie confronted her own sudden vulnerability and terror: she exercised her will. Everything there in the dark was wrong, she sensed it, she knew it, though she couldn’t see it.

  On another level, she dealt with the limp, warm, furry body of Sir. She registered the thump of the heartbeat within his fragile rib cage. Her circuits were humming beneath the surface: Sir was alive, whatever else might be wrong. His head lolled sideways when she picked him up, and she quickly cradled him as she would have held a baby.

  She finally found the light switch and went down to the living room. She turned on a table lamp and in the glow she saw what had happened, went rubber-legged, sank onto a couch with Sir in her lap.

  The place had been burglarized. Julie had warned her. But, of course, it hadn’t done any good. The door to the backyard stood open to the night. The heavy cast-iron bars had been removed and stacked neatly on the flagstones. Sir opened his mouth in a groggy yawn, whimpered. His eyes flickered. She hugged him to her chest, burying her face in his ears, cooing to him, trying to stay calm, fighting off the desire to cry and swear and scream.

  The shelf of glass tigers twinkled at her. The cold breeze from the open door had made the room uncomfortable. She felt the warmth of Sir’s body, his breathing growing stronger. He began to squirm halfheartedly. He’d obviously been drugged, which was apparently the work of the humane criminal element these days. She fumbled in one of the sacks, ripped open the top of the box, and held a Bonz under his nose. He licked it, pulled it into his mouth on his tongue. She sat with him until holding him was impossible: he had recovered and wanted to get free, though he wobbled a bit once he was on all fours.

  Goddamn crooks!

  She looked around the living room, finally got up and did a survey. A small television set was gone, a compact stereo system from the bedroom but not the Bang & Olufsen, which was just too involved to cart away easily, a video-cassette recorder, a Magnavox video-disc player with laser, a couple of cameras from an antique chest, some silver. … For some reason they’d ignored the Schiaparelli mink coat, a pre–World War II masterpiece she’d bought a few years before.

  She locked the door into the backyard again. The bastards! Her temper kept flaring as she walked from room to room double-checking. Why did they have to pick now of all times? It seemed that her life had speeded up in the few days since she’d seen the man with the gun. Faster, faster, like a carnival ride out of control, like the carousel at the end of Strangers on a Train …

  She wanted to slow it down, get everything back in perspective. Stop thinking about the man with the gun, about Jay Danmeier and his moods and his binoculars watching her, about Tony and his big mouth and his doubts, about MacPherson and his smart-ass attitude … and stop thinking about the gun on her desk, crusty with damp cement. …

  She slowly, carefully made a picnic of her cold pasta salad and wine. She brought her plate and goblet into the newly “denuded living room, sat down, and called her insurance man. She left a message on the machine belonging to the man who had made the iron bars for the door.

  Instinctively, as it seemed she so often did when frustration and irritation got the better of her, she grabbed the telephone and began ringing Lew Goldstein’s number. She hesitated halfway through the process, fingertips poised over the buttons, and wondered if she was acting childishly. Running to Lew … She’d known him for nearly twenty years, since they were freshmen together at Northwestern. … Never lovers, always pals. And now he was an Upper East Side psychiatrist, lived only a few blocks away, and she still took her crises to him, and he still teased her the half-dozen times a year they saw each other, “still crazy after all these years. …” But she stopped, put the telephone down, feeling silly, but still …

  Dammit, it was the kind of experience when you wanted to call a man, just to tell about what a frightening mess you’d found behind your front door. What was wrong with that? She drank some wine and wondered why she was bothering to defend herself to herself. And wished there were a man to turn to …

  Sir came in and flopped down on the carpet in front of her, his chin resting between his paws, his eyes looking up beseechingly, a crescent of bedraggled, wet tennis ball protruding from his mouth. Ever hopeful. She had to laugh.

  Natalie had just changed into jeans and a sweater when Julie arrived, out of breath, bubbling with something she wanted to tell. Then she
noticed that things were not quite right, and Natalie told her the story of the burglary and the apparently dead body of Sir, and Julie gasped dramatically, threw her long body into a chair, and began working on her own glass of wine. Once Natalie started talking she ran on through the events of the day, including MacPherson and the foreman and the finding of the gun. Julie was an appreciative audience. Finally, when Natalie had come to a full stop, Julie looked at her brightly: “As David Letterman says, you think that’s bad—last night my shoes exploded!”

  Natalie searched around for something soothing to put on the tape deck and settled for Antonio Carlos Jobim. She poured more wine and they had a laugh at the thought of calling the police about the burglary, a patently hopeless act in New York City. They sat quietly sipping. “Well, you’ve let me babble on, now it’s your turn—you sounded as if you had something to say when you arrived—”

  “Oh, my God, I forgot! It’s wonderful—well, it’s sort of ghastly but it makes a story that you particularly will appreciate, my dear.” Julie forked up a mouthful of Natalie’s pasta and settled back, one incredibly long leg pulled up under her. “I had a comparatively shitty day myself—there’s some kind of creature infesting one of our hotels in Rangoon and the preliminary reports indicate that it may be eating people, but never mind that—and I retired to Scandals for a drink after work. The insufferable Tillie insisted on accompanying me, unlike some friends of mine, but she quickly saw what an unpromising social desert presented itself and departed for home. At which time this sort of hunky guy moved in—looked vaguely familiar, until I realized that he was a clone of half the guys at the bar, the not-quite-right Burt Reynolds-Tom Selleck look, mustache and curly hair—whatever will finally happen to all these doll men, I ask you? Anyway, he sort of bellied up to the bar, said howdy ma’am, and began to bowl me over with his brilliance and wit. Yawn. But … here’s where the plot thickens. He was after you, Nat!”

  Natalie had been listening with only one ear, really, just enjoying having Julie there and talking, and she wondered if perhaps she’d missed something. “He was what?” she said meekly.

  “After you. Quite a newish opening gambit: come up to a hot lady at the bar and begin asking about her pal—remember, you did stop in at Scandals with me one night a couple weeks ago—then we went on to Pinocchio for dinner—”

  “I remember, sure, but I didn’t know the name of the bar.”

  “Naturally. Well, it was the same place—and this guy wasn’t thinking of someone else. He described you, got it all down pat—shiny black hair, purple wool suit with black piping, diamond earrings, little bitty five-three or -four, I mean he was talking about you. He said, let’s go back to your place and I can meet your roommate, too.” Julie sucked her lower lip back behind her front teeth and cocked her head appraisingly, looking at Natalie from the corners of her eyes. “A secret admirer.”

  “Just what I wanted. A secret, mustachioed, corny, doll-man admirer.” She grinned halfheartedly, a sliver of fear, a memory of the faceless man with the gun tickling at her. “You came running home to give me this bulletin? It passeth understanding.”

  She was absolutely certain there couldn’t be a connection. So why did the thought cling? She toyed with the idea of mentioning it to Julie—the connection she made now with any potentially ominous male—then rejected it. The gulf between them when it came to the subject of men was just not bridgeable. She wished it weren’t so, but there was nothing to be done about it.

  She wished she had the kind of female friend she could tell anything to, ask anything of, but she knew what Julie would say: Go for it, give the guy a chance, which meant, Go ahead, sleep with him, see how you like it. … For Julie that was always the test. Anything else she’d worry about later. Natalie’s loneliness was held inside her, nearly denied altogether, like a secret, shameful illness, while Julie said the hell with loneliness and went off adventuring, her vulnerability cloaked in bravado and drowned out by clattering bracelets. Julie could stand the pain: sometimes Natalie thought she actually sought it, like someone proving a theorem.

  “No,” Julie was saying, “I came running in because this guy browbeat me into letting him drive me home—don’t say it, I’m a fool, I admit it—and he was groping while he double-parked out front and I was trying to get the hell away. He was developing what appeared to be an apoplectic red face and it was not a pretty picture. I finally got the door open and he was talking pretty ugly by then about me and you. The I’m-going-to-stick-it-up-your-cunt-of-a-roommate-too speech, a farewell to the troops. A real charmer—and I knew you’d be pleased that your advice about my frequenting low dives was borne out yet again. …”

  Natalie sat pensively, watching the glass tigers glittering. Julie wearily threw Sir’s tennis ball again and again. Natalie was disgusted and worried by Julie’s story: it fit so well into the pattern of the past few days. Upsetting. Someone out there, dirty and vicious, had been watching her. You couldn’t know, you couldn’t defend yourself. I’m nothing special, nothing like Julie with her swagger and strut and drama. Just me. And I’m being watched. Welcome to Paranoia, just this side of Breakdown. She couldn’t give her feelings away to Julie. Julie wouldn’t have minded being watched: she wanted to be watched, admired, reached for, because it proved everything she believed about herself as well as the men who lusted for her. For Julie romantic love was an absurdity; for Natalie it was the only kind of love worth having. No common ground, not when it came to men. Julie had no illusions about them: Natalie was committed to hers. So her disappointment and fear was the greater.

  “Look, Nat,” Julie said quietly, “I didn’t mean to upset you, it was stupid to tell you after the evening you’ve had—”

  “I’m not upset, really I’m not. It’s just an icky experience. I’m sorry you had to go through it. I wish to God you wouldn’t end up in places where that kind of stuff happens, that’s all.”

  “Funny thing is, you’ve just about got me convinced. I should probably wait for Don the Jet to get back from the coast and start going to art galleries with him.” She stood up and stretched her arms over her head, like someone getting ready for a slam-dunk. An avalanche of bracelets cascaded down one forearm. “I’m just possibly getting too old for all this carrying-on. Time to pack it in and have babies and move to a farm. Look at all the fun Lady Chatterly had. …”

  Natalie smiled to herself. She had heard the barefoot-and-pregnant speech before.

  Once Julie had gone upstairs to her own apartment, Natalie was too wide awake to go to bed. Sir was back to normal, bounding around, throwing his tennis ball into the air and chasing it with utter abandon. “Poor old Sir,” she remarked to him, “hasn’t been for a real walk all week. Good idea, Sir?” He threw himself ecstatically against the front door, rattling his leash that hung from the doorknob. Natalie slipped into her old sheepskin jacket, hooked his chain through the loop on his collar, and set off.

  Sir’s impatience was showing. He tugged hard, pulling Natalie behind him, heading across First, down to York Avenue, then insisting on his favorite walk—across the footbridge over the FDR Drive, with the endless streams of traffic with the headlights and tail-lights looking like solid, molten streams of brightness below, like time-lapse photography. There were some ships in the East River and steam rising like smoke from the water around them. The wind was cold and clean-smelling, like true winter. For the moment, with Sir and the biting cold and the hum of traffic, she wasn’t thinking about any of the events of the day. She felt momentarily free of all that, unencumbered, the way she wanted to feel. The walkway along the fence, with the river coursing beyond, was lit by antiseptic lights on poles separated by pools of darkness between. A man walking his Great Dane waited while the dog barked at a motor launch. Looking out over the water, she felt isolated from the city, from the lights just back across the FDR, past the hulks of darkness that were the hospitals and the condos that lined the eastern boundary of the Upper East Side.

  She mus
t have been drifting in her own thoughts because she let the leash slip from her grasp, and Sir, sensing a romp, was off like a bullet, bounding along the fence heading uptown like a dog late for a very important date.

  She stood helplessly, watching him go. There was no point in chasing after him. He’d just think it was a game and run all the harder, farther, faster. She’d have to wait him out, just saunter along behind, until he noticed he was alone and began to get nervous. Sir wasn’t used to being out in the great world all by himself. Instinctive fear would begin to work its way.

  Watching Sir, she heard, riding on the wind behind her, someone whistling tunelessly. Suddenly she didn’t want to look back. Now she felt the fear in the belly … who was whistling? Had someone followed her? She went to the fence, tried to look casually out at the lights of Queens across the river, straining to see who was behind her.

  A man in a trench coat, hands deep in his pockets, stood like Natalie, looking out across the water. Far behind her. The equivalent of a block away. Just a man. A shape. In a trench coat. She bit into her lip, proving to herself that she existed, and set off hurriedly toward Sir.

  Sir had wandered to a stop, was sniffing the air curiously. He strolled slowly on, looked back at Natalie, but didn’t speed up. He was ready to be taken home, wherever the hell that was: doubt showed in his every step.