 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
The phone rang. It was the secretary from the Taylor Dance Company, asking when she
would be free. She had to beg off. She looked at her hand, lying on the graph sheets of figures Laban
had devised, and she saw her fingers trembling. She had to beg off. Then she called Guzman at the
Downtown Ballet Company, to tell him she would be late with the charts.
“My God, lady, I have ten dancers sitting around in a rehearsal hall getting their leotards
sweaty! What do you expect me to do?”
She explained what had happened the night before. And as she told him, she realized the
newspapers had been justified in holding that tone against the twenty-six witnesses to the death of
Leona Ciarelli. Paschal Guzman listened, and when he spoke again, his voice was several octaves
lower, and he spoke more slowly. He said he understood and she could take a little longer to prepare
the charts. But there was a distance in his voice, and he hung up while she was thanking him.
She dressed in an argyle sweater vest in shades of dark purple, and a pair of fitted khaki
gabardine trousers. She had to go out, to walk around. To do what? To think about other things. As
she pulled on the Fred Braun chunky heels, she idly wondered if that heavy silver bracelet was still
in the window of Georg Jensen’s. In the elevator, the young man from the window across the
courtyard stared at her. Beth felt her body begin to tremble again. She went deep into the corner of
the box when he entered behind her.
Between the fifth and fourth floors, he hit the off switch and the elevator jerked to a halt.
Beth stared at him and he smiled innocently.
“Hi. My name’s Gleeson, Ray Gleeson, I’m in 714.”
She wanted to demand he turn the elevator back on, by what right did he presume to do such
a thing, what did he mean by this, turn it on at once or suffer the consequences. That was what she
wanted to do. Instead, from the same place she had heard the gibbering laughter the night before,
she heard her voice, much smaller and much less possessed than she had trained it to be, saying,
“Beth O’Neill, I live in 701.”
The thing about it, was that the elevator was stopped. And she was frightened. But he leaned
against the paneled wall, very well dressed, shoes polished, hair combed and probably blown dry
with a hand dryer, and he talked to her as if they were across a table at L’ Argenteuil. “You just
moved in, huh?”
“About two months ago.”
“Where did you go to school? Bennington or Sarah Lawrence?”
“Bennington. How did you know?”
He laughed, and it was a nice laugh. “I’m an editor at a religious book publisher; every year
we get half a dozen Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, Smith girls. They come hopping in like
grasshoppers, ready to revolutionize the publishing industry.”
“What’s wrong with that? You sound like you don’t care for them.”
“Oh, I love them, they’re marvelous. They think they know how to write better than the
authors we publish. Had one darlin’ little item who was given galleys of three books to proof, and
she rewrote all three. I think she’s working as a table-swabber in a Horn & Hardart’s now.”
She didn’t reply to that. She would have pegged him as an anti-feminist, ordinarily, if it had
been anyone else speaking. But the eyes. There was something terribly familiar about his face. She
was enjoying the conversation; she rather liked him.
“What’s the nearest big city to Bennington?”
“Albany, New York. About sixty miles.”
“How long does it take to drive there?”
“From Bennington? About an hour and a half.”
“Must be a nice drive, that Vermont country, really pretty. They went coed, I understand.
How’s that working out?”
“I don’t know, really.”
