‘Yes,’ he answered her. ‘Just a little. I’ll be all right.’
She reached up, touched his cheek, let her hand fall lightly down upon his shoulder. She dug her fingernails into the cloth of his coat like a playful cat.
‘Do you want to leave?’
He looked at her gratefully. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, let’s get out of here.’ And he felt that he must leave, and at that very instant. He felt that he would suffocate if he were forced to stay in this noisome room much longer. He could hardly wait for her to make the move which would signal departure.
She smiled at him lazily. Her fingers dug more deeply into his coat.
‘Where do you want to go?’ she asked softly.
The words he had thought of saying, the words he had rehearsed so carefully in his mind, the words which would charmingly answer this expected question, died on his lips.
He swallowed. ‘Anywhere,’ he mumbled, not looking at her. ‘Only let’s get out of here.’
Her smile deepened. She leaned very close to him. She looked up into his eyes and when she spoke, he could feel her warm breath caressing the lower half of his face.
‘Do you want to go to my place?’ she asked.
Even here, even in this smelly, unpleasant room, he could feel the cool sweet breeze that her words made. He caught his breath sharply. This was the moment he had awaited, the moment he had expected, had desired so much; and now that it was here upon him, now that it was so near his possessing, he realized bitterly that again he had been obscurely cheated. He tried to smile happily.
‘Yes,’ he said, he whispered hoarsely through his dry pink lips. ‘Yes.’
She got up slowly, invitingly, her slumbering eyes never leaving his face. He fumbled a handful of bills out of his pocket, glanced at them once, dropped them on the table. He turned. She swayed away from him, and he followed her slim red-gowned figure out into the night.
The taxi hurtled along the street like a projectile exploded into a dark rifle barrel. In the back seat, Arthur relaxed against Claire’s shoulder. The window of the cab was open, and the wind rushed in and ruffled his lank hair, whipped it furiously about his head. With half-opened eyes he stared at the alternately black and fiery kaleidoscope that flashed by him on either side.
His alcoholic haze had been shocked into partial nonexistence back in the club during the horrible moment after Volita. Now the night air, fresh and sharp and pungent, swirled in upon him and cleansed his lungs; and as that enervating air was replaced by the new, the familiar feeling of alienation returned to him.
For a moment, he wondered at himself in this taxi on this street, beside this person who was a stranger, however lovely. He felt a shuddering distaste for himself, his surroundings, and everything he touched. And there was also his tiny silent voice which insisted that everything he knew, or felt, or saw did not actually exist, that all was nightmare and all unreal.
Then that was gone and there came a dull, empty anguish. He had run a long race and now the running was through for one more day, and all that was left for him was the slowly subsiding pain which follows violent exertion.
His head throbbed regularly with the pounding of his pulse; his forehead was dank and cold and he breathed rapidly, with deep shudders. Beside him, Claire was unknowing, sequestered by private thought and private anticipation. She too was breathing deeply, but with the slow rhythm of peace and contentment. Her eyes were shut, her lips relaxed in a smile that seemed to him coeval with the night.
Watching her, he was assailed again by an awareness of the evident and essential separateness of all people. Here were two persons, so close that their bodies touched, each conscious of the other’s presence, each in his private way solicitous of the other, each striving to pierce the other’s shell to find an inner reality, each trying to make the other’s egress into his or her own particular shell as easy as possible— and each failing miserably in every attempt.
It was a strange battle where one could not even succeed in bringing about his own defeat.
So partly out of pity for himself and partly out of pity for her, he raised himself up from his slumped position and put one arm about her shoulder, cradled her clumsily and tenderly to him. With a small grateful sigh, she buried her head in the sharp angle between his shoulder and neck. Her warm moist breath crept daintily on his skin. He was aware of the pleasant odor of her hair, the cool feel of her dress under his hand, the suggestion of warm, clinging flesh under that material. A faint twinge of pleasure returned to him. Resolutely, he grasped at that weak twinge, nursed it in him, protected it from ravenous thought.
The city lights were flashing less frequently. The street where they now traveled was darker; and, being darker, was more than ever like a limitless tunnel. There was nothing he could see outside to define the width of their passage; darkness began at the windows of the vehicle and stretched endlessly out. The night was a solid mass through which they ploughed recklessly.
Now the traffic which had swarmed about them thinned, and the driver pushed his cab to a swifter speed. They careened around the corner. The momentum threw them off balance for a moment, and they half-reclined on the inner upholstered wall. Claire made no move to right herself, so he remained in that forced position, slightly beneath and bearing her weight. He was curiously unresisting, lax and detached.
So gradually did the car decrease its speed that he was scarcely aware that they had stopped. The driver turned, faced them, flexed his mouth in a mirthless grin, and said:
‘Okay—here we are.’
He pushed himself up, raising her weight with him. They got out of the cab, stood unsteadily for a moment on the sidewalk. He paid the cab-driver. It was his last bill, he noticed with some surprise. He stood and watched the cab whirl away and disappear. He turned to Claire.
She took his arm and held it tight against her body.
‘Here we are,’ she whispered.
The driver had said the same thing; yet, from different lips, the meaning was heightened and enhanced, changed and more significant. He nodded.
He was not drunk now at all. That was gone, and in its place there was a new sort of intoxication which, unlike that of alcohol, made more perceptive his every sense. At this moment he felt that every part of him—every muscle, every cell, every drop of blood, each nerve—was alive and tinglingly aware.
Slowly they turned and walked toward the characterless brick building which was Claire’s apartment house. This was a part of the city he did not know, where each house was much the same as each life seemed to be—inexpensive, slightly soiled, and forgotten. He was surprised that Claire should live here; her surroundings gave an ironic lie to her appearance.
They went up the wide cemented steps. There were fourteen of them. At the door, Claire put her lips to his ear.
‘Be very quiet,’ she whispered. ‘Just follow me. I live on the second floor.’
He squeezed her arm beneath his own and nodded, happy in the conspiratorial silence. She opened the door cautiously, and they went inside. The hall was lighted by a dim bulb, recessed somewhere in its great depth. The foyer where they stood was mysterious with shadows. To his left he discerned the bulk of a stairway. No light illumined it; they looked up into a massive darkness. Claire caught at his hand guidingly; he followed her blindly.
And again there was the familiar contentment he always felt when going up a dark way. As he walked up, he thought of his apartment and of the stairway there. It seemed so long since he had been there.
The small glow of the feebly lighted second floor hall greeted them at the stair landing. Cat-like, almost, they padded down its thin-carpeted length. They halted and stood in a dark shadow where the light did not penetrate. Claire fumbled with a key, opened the door, slipped inside, and he followed her into a room filled with an eye-oppressing darkness, so heavy that it seemed tangible. His hand fumbled about the wall, searching for the light switch that he knew must be there.
But Claire, hearing
his movement, caught his hand.
‘Don’t turn the light on.’
He nodded gratefully at her voice, not trusting himself to speak. He had not really wanted the light; that had been a mere gesture, a concession. It was so much safer, warmer, more intimate in this liquid dark.
Upon speaking to him, Claire had disengaged his hand; now he was not touching her. But he felt, he knew that she was standing in front of him, very close, an indefinable fraction of the darkness. He listened carefully, and he could hear the little intake and outlet of her breath.
He stretched his hands out tentatively toward her. They touched the bare flesh of her shoulders. And with a sudden audible gasp she was inside the closed circle of his arms, her lips warm and fluttering against the prickling skin of his cheek and ear.
She whispered shakily, ‘Wait just a minute. Stay here.’
Then she was gone, somewhere in the darkness, away from him, away from his touch. He stood, trembling and uncertain, for an instant lost and forlorn, alone. He started to move forward, but he remembered her admonition.
He could hear the sounds she made as she moved in the room, the soft secret rustlings of her clothing. Then, nothing. There was a long impenetrable silence in which he waited, tense, eager, almost frightened.
And then—He could never decide afterwards whether it was a dream or reality, but the moon was suddenly revealed by a shifting cloud and its beams shone through a window in the room, miraculously piercing the thick syrupy darkness. And he saw her, standing erect, bathed in the palely luminous column of light. Her clothing lay in a pathetic heap at her feet, and the moonlight streamed about her head and shoulders, silvered down in a symphony of light and shadow. Her head was thrown back, her hair flowing and losing itself in the dark. Her eyes were closed and upon her face there was an unaware expression of waiting delight. The moonbeams gilded the soft flesh of her shoulders and arms and breasts; she was a living statue, a motionless poem of light and flesh, of shadowing breast and ivory thigh.
The vision lasted only for an instant; another cloud obscured the moon and he could see no more.
He did not know that he moved, but somehow, he was in the center of the room and his arms were about her and she was pressed hard, hard against him, her breath swift and uneven upon his ear. Unseen in the darkness, only felt, her body trembled and quivered in his embrace like a fine tempered blade of steel. His arms were a resilient vice which tried with all their strength to draw her to, within him; and the hands upon the inflexible extremities of the vice were curiously flaccid and relaxed, fluttering like young leaves in a summer breeze, gently moving over her shoulders, her arms, the bare ribbed flesh of her back.
Then his breath came out of him in great gasping spasms as if he were sobbing. And to match that sob, Claire’s breathing became vocal with sharp quivering moans; her head upon the angle of his shoulder and neck rolled slowly, as if in exquisite agony, from side to side. Her arms hung about him, trembled electrically, caressed and pulled.
Then, moved uncontrollably, he tore his vice-like grip from around her body, dug his fingers into the warm moist flesh of her upper arms and pushed her away from him. He could barely see her face, now; the head was still thrown back, the body still worked and existed in its own passion. Her eyes were closed, staring inward. Her lips were parted in a rapt, unconscious little smile of expectation; he could see the tips of her small teeth gleaming beneath the red lips. And from those open lips oozed little moaning, unsteady words.
‘Arthur,’ she said. ‘Arthur . . . Arthur . . .’
And as the words were spoken, at the very moment they issued from her waiting lips, in the eternal vacuum which lasted but for an incalculable fraction of an instant, all the forces that had been gathering inside him for so long, for twenty-four years, for a lifetime, rushed up, screamed, battered and tore at the portals of his mind. There was a swollen river in him, and it was the sum of all his repressed love and hate and pity, his fear and dread, content, boredom, eagerness, ennui, passion, all—and the torrential rush was too terrible for him to dam.
In the helpless moment before the floodgate burst, when some part of him knew and acknowledged that the bursting was inevitable, he felt, almost abstractedly, a calm and all- encompassing regret which included, not only himself and this girl he now gripped before him, but everything he had ever known.
Then his pity and regret were inundated and drowned as the flood made a final, impossible heave; and he knew that he had been finally destroyed, he knew that he was now and forever lost; and the dark torrent rushed and he went out of his body and whirled up and up and away and an irresponsible part which was not himself saw Claire’s face that still was alone and pure in its halo of moonlight, her lips that still mouthed in the inarticulate little words of pleasure.
And another last great sob-like cry was torn from his throat and the last remnant was gone and he raised his arm, struck out blindly, savagely at her face, felt the back of his hand sink into the surprised flesh of her mouth; and before she could cry out, he struck again, he struck again and again, until his arms flailed only the empty air.
He heard a high thin wail from a great distance, and he realized that from somewhere in the dark room she was screaming.
Senselessly, monotonously she was screaming; and he stood stupidly in the center of the floor, his arms hanging laxly at his sides, his fingers twitching spasmodically. In the room above him, he thought, someone moved suddenly. There was a crash, then a muffled explosive word, a curse. He heard feet running swiftly.
And still he did not move.
It seemed only an instant later that the door to Claire’s room burst open. He heard the click of the knob as it was turned, sensed a difference in the quality of the room’s silence, heard the heavy breathing of the person, heard hands scrape against the wall in search of the light switch.
There was a soft snap and the room was flooded with yellow brightness. A surprised exclamation was torn from the lips of someone behind him. Still, he did not move.
Claire was huddled on the floor in the pool of sudden light, her eyes alive with fear and shock. A thin, almost transparent smear of blood smudged the corner of her mouth. It might have been mistaken for disturbed lipstick had not her lips begun to swell from the blows of his hand. One forearm supported her as she half-reclined on the floor. The other hand pressed her clothing to her breast in an action designed not so much, it seemed, to protect her nudity from strange eyes as it was to protect something in herself from this alien and incomprehensible force against which she had no weapon, only a meager, instinctive defense. Her lips quivered soundlessly now as if she were screaming without making any noise.
He felt a hand descend upon and grasp his shoulder; it was a machine-like, powerful hand. He felt that his bones were crushed, the muscles torn and bleeding inside; yet he sensed no pain.
Still he could not look at the man behind him. His eyes were fixed on Claire’s ivory body that seemed fastened permanently to the floor.
The man’s voice was harsh and hard with subsiding surprise and mounting anger.
‘What is it, Miss Hegsic? What the hell! What’s this guy done?’
She did not answer. Still in her private world of shock, she moved slowly, snake-like and strangely submissive, on the floor.
The man’s grasp tightened on his shoulder. He shook him angrily, demandingly, as if by that action upon him Claire might be prodded into answering.
‘Did this guy hurt you? What the hell’s going on here?’
Somehow the words pierced her armor of stupor; she raised her head, looked at both of them with eyes which now were dull and opaque.
‘No,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m all right. Just get him out of here. Both of you get out of here.’ There was no anger in her voice—only a tired incomprehension.
The man spun Arthur around until they were face to face. Arthur gazed at him disinterestedly, seeing with detachment the lifeless skin, white and dry, from which thick little br
istly hairs protruded at regular spaces, microscopically precise and short and black against the pallor. The eyes which burned down into his own were large and transparent, a greenish hazel in color, slightly oblique and moist, like the eyes of a goat.
‘Wait,’ Arthur said. His voice was a harsh croak in his throat. ‘Just a minute. I’ve got to . . .’
The man smiled. Gently, almost friendlily.
‘No, little man. You’re coming outside. With me.’
‘I know,’ he said wearily. ‘Just a minute.’
In the larger man’s grasp, he twisted, half-turned, looked at Claire who was still spread upon the floor. Their eyes met. No spark of recognition flared in her glance. There was nothing. She looked through him, beyond him, did not see him.
And in that static moment, there surged up into his failing spirit a last need to bridge somehow the illimitable chasm which separated them. He wanted her to know the inmost secrets of his life, he suddenly wanted her to have inside herself, but not part of herself, everything that was inside him, and part of him. Only then, having all those things, could she begin to know, to understand why.
So they looked at each other across a little space, looked long and intently; and no energy of knowledge or meeting charged the arc of sight between them. He turned to the man whose fingers still crushed his shoulder.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’
The pale smile deepened. The man did not speak. He pushed Arthur before him, out of the door, into the dim hall.
They walked to the stairs and began the descent. He knew what was going to happen. Instinctively he had known ever since Claire’s door had burst open, since the big man had entered and crushed his shoulder in his hand.
But as they walked in the gathered darkness of the long stair, the instinctive knowledge took shape and form, became very real and imminent, and he summoned a faint dread of the approaching ordeal. It was not that he minded so much the pain; that was part of it, of course, but only a small thing, after all. Perhaps it was because he so violently hated the futile indignity of it, the fruitless inutility. At the thought of what was to come, he cringed and would have held back had it not been for the steely hand that held his shoulder and pushed him on and down the stairs.
Nothing but the Night Page 10