“What in the world are you talking about? You were behind me. How could I have seen you? I didn’t even know you had started down.”
“Okay. Forget it. I’ll give you a call when I get to the apartment.”
“Yes, do. You can leave a message at the desk if I don’t answer.”
The woman held up her sketch and narrowed her eyes. She ripped out the page and crumpled it, tossed it into the waste can.
“I think I’m too tired after all.”
“It’s getting cold in here again. Your hands are probably too cold.” He got up and took the funnel from the wall. “I’ll get more snow and see if we can’t get the furnace going again.”
“You should put something over your face, so the cold air won’t be such a shock. Don’t you have a muffler?”
He stopped- He had crushed the funnel, he realized, and he tried to smooth it again without letting her see what he had done. He decided that it would do, and opened the door. A drift had formed, and a foot of snow fell into the station. The wind was colder, sharper, almost deliberately cutting. He was blinded by the wind and the snow that was driven into his face. He filled the funnel and tried to close the door again, but the drift was in the way. He pushed, trying to use the door as a snowplow. More snow was being blown in, and finally he had to use his hands, push the snow out of the way, not outside, but to one side of the door. At last he had it clear enough and he slammed the door, more winded this time than before. His throat felt raw, and he felt a constriction about his chest.
“It’s getting worse all the time. I couldn’t even see the bus, nothing but a mountain of snow.”
“Ground blizzard, I suspect. When it blows like this you can’t tell how much of it is new snow and how much is just fallen snow being blown about. The drifts will be tremendous tomorrow.” She smiled. “I remember how we loved it when this happened when we were kids. The drifts are exciting, so pure, so high. Sometimes they glaze over and you can play Glass Mountain. I used to be the princess.”
Crane was shivering again. He forced his hands to be steady as he pushed the thumbtacks into the funnel to hold it in place next to the thermostat. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Did the prince ever reach you?”
“No. Eventually I just slid back down and went home.”
“Where? Where did you live?”
“Outside Chicago, near the lake.”
He spun around. “Who are you?” He grabbed the back of a bench and clutched it hard. She stared at him. He had screamed at her, and he didn’t know why. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You keep saying things that I’m thinking. I was thinking of that game, of how I never could make it to the top.”
“Near Lake Michigan?”
“On the shores almost.”
She nodded.
“I guess all kids play games like that in the snow,” he said.
“Strange that we should have come from the same general area. Did your milk freeze on the back steps, stick up out of the bottle, with the cap at an angle?”
“Yes. And those awful cloakrooms at school, where you bad to strip off snowsuits and boots, and step in icy water before you could get your indoors shoes on.”
“And sloshing through the thaws, wet every damn day. I was wet more than I was dry all through grade school.”
“We all were,” she said, smiling faintly, looking past him.
He almost laughed in his relief. He went to the radiator and put his hands out over it, his back to her. Similar backgrounds, that’s all, he said to himself, framing the words carefully. Nothing strange. Nothing eerie. She was just a plain woman who came from the same state, probably the same county that he came from. They might have gone to the same schools, and he would not have noticed her. She was too common, too nondescript to have noticed at the time. And he had been a quiet boy, not particularly note-worthy himself. No sports besides the required ones. No clubs. A few friends, but even there, below average, because they had lived in an area too far removed from most of the kids who went to his school.
“It’s only two. Seems like it ought to be morning already, doesn’t it?” She was moving about and he turned to see what she was doing. She had gone behind the counter, where the ticket agent had said there was a telephone. “A foam cushion,” she said, holding it up. “I feel like one of the Swiss Family Robinson, salvaging what might be useful.”
“Too bad there isn’t some coffee under there.”
“Wish you were in the diner?”
“No. That bitch probably has them all at each other’s throats by now, as it is.”
“That girl? The one who was so afraid?”
He laughed harshly and sat down. “Girl!”
“No more than twenty, if that much.”
He laughed again and shook his head.
“Describe her to me,” the woman said. She left the counter and sat down on the bench opposite him, still carrying the foam cushion. It had a black plastic cover; gray foam bulged from a crack. It was disgusting.
Crane said, “The broad was in her late twenties, or possibly thirties-”
“Eighteen to twenty.”
“She had a pound of makeup on, nails like a cat.”
“Fake nails, chapped hands, calluses. Ten-cent-store makeup.”
“She had expensive perfume, and a beaver coat. I think beaver.”
She laughed gently. “Drugstore spray cologne. Macy’s Basement fake fur, about fifty-nine to sixty-five dollars, unless she hit a sale.”
“And the kid gloves, and the high patent leather boots?”
“Vinyl, both of them.” She looked-at him for an uncomfortable minute, then examined the pillow she had found. “On second thought, I’m not sure that I would want to rest my head on this. It’s a little bit disgusting, isn’t it?”
“Why did you want me to describe that woman? You have your opinion of what she is; I have mine. There’s no way to prove either of our cases without having her before us.”
“I don’t need to prove anything. I don’t care if you think you’re right and I’m wrong. I felt very sorry for the girl. I noticed her.”
“I noticed her, too.”
“What color was her hair, her eyes? How about her mouth-big, small, full? And her nose? Straight, snub, broad?”
He regarded her bitterly for a moment, then shrugged and turned toward the window. He didn’t speak.
“You can’t describe what she really was like because you didn’t see her. You saw the package and made up your mind about the contents. Believe me, she was terrified of the storm, of those men, everything. She needed the security of the driver and people. What about me? Can you describe me?”
He looked, but she was holding the pillow between them and he could see only her hands, long, pale, slender fingers, no rings.
“This is ridiculous,” he said after a second. “I have one of those reputations for names and faces. You know, never forget a name, always know the names of the kids, the wife, occupation and so on.”
“Not this side of you. This side refuses to see anyone at all. I wonder why.”
“What face are you wearing tonight, Randy?” Mary Louise touching him. “Do you see me? Why don’t you look at me?”
Wind whistling past his ears, not really cold yet, not when he was standing still anyway, with the sun warm on him. But racing down’ the slope, trees to his right, the precipice to his left, the wind was icy. Mary Louise a red streak ahead of him, and somewhere behind him the navy and white blur that was McCone. Holding his ,. own between them. The curve of the trail ahead, the thrill of the downward plummet, and suddenly the open-mouthed face of his wife, silent scream, add in the same instant, the ski pole against his legs, tripping him up, the more exciting plunge downward, face in the snow, blinded, over and over, skis gone now, trying to grasp the snow, trying to stop the tumbling, over and over in the snow.
Had his wife tried to kill him?
“Are you all right, Mr. Crane?”
“Yes, of course. Let me des
cribe the last man I sold insurance to, a week ago.
Twenty-four, six feet one inch, a tiny, almost invisible scar over his right eyebrow, crinkle lines about his eyes, because he’s an outdoor type, very tanned and muscular. He’s a professional baseball player, incidentally. His left hand has larger knuckles than the right . . . .”
The woman was not listening. She had crossed the station and was standing at the window, trying to see out. “Computer talk,” ,. she said. “A meaningless rundown of facts. So he bought a policy for one hundred thousand dollars, straight life, and from now on you won’t have to deal with him, be concerned with him at all.”
“Why did you say one hundred thousand dollars?”
“No reason. I don’t know, obviously.”
He chewed his lip and watched her. “Any change out there?”
“Worse, if anything. I don’t think you’ll be able to use this door at all now.
You’d never get it closed. It’s half covered with a drift.”
“There must be a window or another door that isn’t drifted over.”
“Storm windows. Maybe there’s a back door; but I bet it opens to the office, and the ticket agent locked that.”
Crane looked at the windows and found that she was right. The storm windows couldn’t be opened from inside. And there wasn’t . another outside door. The men’s room was like a freezer now. He tried to run the water, thinking that possibly cold water would work on the thermostat as well as snow, but nothing came out. The. pipes must have frozen- As he started to close the door, he saw a small block-printed sign: “Don’t close door all the way, no heat in here, water will freeze up.” The toweling wouldn’t hold water anyway.
He left the door open a crack and rejoined the woman near the window. “It’s got to be this door,” he said. “I guess I could open it an inch or two, let that much of the drift fall inside and use it.”
“Maybe. But you’ll have to be careful.”
“Right out of Jack London,” he said. “It’s seventy-two on the thermometer. How do you feel?”
“Coolish, not bad.”
“Okay, we’ll wait awhile. Maybe the wind will let up.”
He stared at the puddle under the thermostat, and at the other larger one across the room near the door, where the snowdrift had entered the room the last time. The drift had been only a foot high then, and now it was three or four feet. Could he move that much snow without anything to work with, if it came inside?
He shouldn’t have started back to town. She had goaded him into it, of course. Had she suspected that he would get stranded somewhere, maybe freeze to death?
“Why don’t you come right out and say what you’re thinking?” Red pants, red ski jacket, cheeks almost as red.
“I’m not thinking anything. It was an accident.”
“You’re a liar, Randy! You think I guessed you were there, that I let go hoping to make you fall. Isn’t that what you think? Isn’t it?”
He shook his head hard. She hadn’t said any of that. He hadn’t thought of it then. Only now, here, stranded with this half-mad woman. Half-mad? He looked at her and quickly averted his gaze. Why had that thought come to him? She was odd, certainly, probably very lonely, shy. But half-mad?
Why did she watch him so? As if aware of his thoughts, she turned her back and walked to the ladies’ room. He had to go too, but he remembered the frozen pipes in the men’s room. Maybe she’d fall asleep eventually and he’d be able to slip into her rest room. If not, then he’d wait until morning. Maybe this night had come about in order to give him time to think about him and Mary Louise, to really think it through all the way and come to a decision.
He had met her when he was stationed in Washington, after the Korean War. He had been a captain, assigned to Army Intelligence. She had worked as a private secretary to Senator Robertson of New York. So he had done all right without her up to then. She had introduced him to the president of the company that he worked for now. Knowing that he wanted to become a writer, she had almost forced him into insurance. Fine. It was the right choice. He had told her so a thousand times. But how he had succeeded was still a puzzle to him. He never had tested well on salesmanship on aptitude tests. Too introverted and shy.
“You make other people feel stupid, frankly,” she had said once. “You are so tight and so sure of yourself that you don’t allow anyone else to have an opinion at all. It’s not empathy, like it is with so many good salesmen. It’s a kind of sadistic force that you apply.”
“Oh, stop it. You’re talking nonsense.”
“You treat each client like an extension of the policy that you intend to sell to him. Not like a person, but the human counterpart of the slick paper with the clauses and small print. You show the same respect and liking for, them as for the policies. They go together. You believe it and make them believe it. Numbers, that’s what they are to you. Policy numbers.”
“Why do you hang around if you find me so cold and calculating?”
“Oh, it’s a game that I play. I know there’s a room somewhere where you’ve locked up part of yourself, and I keep searching for it. Someday I’ll find it and open it just a crack, and then I’ll run Because if it ever opens, even a little, everything will come tumbling out and you won’t be able to stop any of it. How you’ll bleed then, bleed and bleed, and cry and moan. I couldn’t stand that. And I can’t stand for it not to be so.”
Crane put his head down in his hands and rubbed his eyes hard. Without affect: that was the term that she used. Modern man without affect. Schizoid personality.. But he also had a nearly split personality. The doctor had told him so. In the six sessions that he had gone to he had learned much of the jargon, and then he had broken it off. Split personality. Schizoid tendencies. Without affect. All to keep himself safe. It seemed to him to be real madness to take away any of the safeties he had painstakingly built, and he had quit the sessions.
And now this strange woman that he was locked up with was warning him not to open the door a crack. He rubbed his eyes harder until there was solid pain there. He had to touch her. The ticket agent had seen her, too, though. He had been concerned about leaving her alone with a strange man all night. So transparently worried about her, worried about Crane. Fishing for his name. He could have told the fool anything. He couldn’t remember his face at all, only his clothes. All right, the woman was real, but strange. She had an uncanny way of anticipating what he was thinking, what he was going to say, what he feared. Maybe these were her fears too. She came back into the waiting room. She was wearing her black coat buttoned to her neck, her hands in the pockets. She didn’t mention the cold.
Soon he would have to get more snow, trick the fool thermostat into turning on the furnace. Soon. A maniac must have put it on that wall, the only warm wall in the building. A penny-pinching maniac.
“If you decide to try to get more snow, maybe I should hold the door while you scoop it up,” she said, after a long silence. The cold had made her face look pinched, and Crane was shivering under his overcoat.
“Can you hold it?” he asked. “There’s a lot of pressure behind that door.”
She nodded.
“Okay. I’ll take the waste can and get as much as I can. It’ll keep in the men’s room. There’s no heat in there.”
She held the doorknob until he was ready, and when he nodded, she turned it and, bracing the door with her shoulder, let it open several inches. The wind pushed, and the snow spilled through. It was over their heads now, and it came in the entire height of the door. She gave ground and the door was open five or six inches. Crane pulled the snow inside, using both hands, clawing at it. The Augean stable, he thought bitterly, and then joined her behind the door, trying to push it closed again. At least no blast of air had come inside this time. The door was packing the snow, and the inner surface of it was thawing slightly, only to refreeze under the pressure and the cold from the other side. Push, Crane thought at her. Push, you devil. You witch.”
&n
bsp; Slowly it began to move, scrunching snow. They weren’t going to get it closed all the way. They stopped pushing to rest. He was panting hard, and she put her head against the door. After a moment he said, “Do you .think you could move one of the benches over here?”
She nodded. He braced himself against the door and was surprised at the increase in the pressure when she left. He heard her wrestling with the bench, but he couldn’t turn to see. The snow was gaining again. His feet were slipping on the floor, wet now where some of the snow had melted and was running across the room. He saw the bench from the corner of his eye, and he turned to watch her progress with it. She was pushing it toward him, the back to the wall; the back was too high. It would have to be tilted to go under the doorknob. It was a heavy oak bench. If they could maneuver it in place, it would hold.
Orbit 8 - [Anthology] Page 23