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“You don’t know?”
“It happened around the time I was graduating. “
“What did you major in?”
“I was a dance major, specializing in Labanotation. That’s the way you write choreography.”
“It’s all electives, I gather. You don’t have to take anything required, like sciences, for
example.” He didn’t change tone as he said, “That was a terrible thing last night. I saw you
watching. I guess a lot of us were watching. It was a really terrible thing.”
She nodded dumbly. Fear came back.
“I understand the cops got him. Some nut, they don’t even know why he killed her, or why
he went charging into that bar. It was really an awful thing. I’d very much like to have dinner with
you one night soon, if you’re not attached.”
“That would be all right. “
“Maybe Wednesday. There’s an Argentinian place I know. You might like it. “
“That would be all right.”
“Why don’t you turn on the elevator, and we can go,” he said, and smiled again. She did it,
wondering why she had stopped the elevator in the first place.
On her third date with him, they had their first fight. It was at a party thrown by a director of
television commercials. He lived on the ninth floor of their building. He had just done a series of
spots for Sesame Street (the letters “U” for Underpass, “T” for Tunnel, lowercase “b” for boats, “c”
for cars; the numbers 1 to 6 and the numbers 1 to 20; the words light and dark) and was celebrating
his move from the arena of commercial tawdriness (and its attendant $75,000 a year) to the sweet
fields of educational programming (and its accompanying descent into low-pay respectability).
There was a logic in his joy Beth could not quite understand, and when she talked with him about it,
in a far corner of the kitchen, his arguments didn’t seem to parse. But he seemed happy, and his
girlfriend, a long-legged ex-model from Philadelphia, continued to drift to him and away from him,
like some exquisite undersea plant, touching his hair and kissing his neck, murmuring words of
pride and barely submerged sexuality. Beth found it bewildering, though the celebrants were all
bright and lively.
In the living room, Ray was sitting on the arm of the sofa, hustling a stewardess named
Luanne. Beth could tell he was hustling; he was trying to look casual. When he wasn’t hustling, he
was always intense, about everything. She decided to ignore it, and wandered around the apartment,
sipping at a Tanqueray and tonic.
There were framed prints of abstract shapes clipped from a calendar printed in Germany.
They were in metal Bonniers frames.
In the dining room a huge door from a demolished building somewhere in the city had been
handsomely stripped, teaked and refinished. It was now the dinner table.
A Lightolier fixture attached to the wall over the bed swung out, levered up and down,
tipped, and its burnished globe-head revolved a full three hundred and sixty degrees.
She was standing in the bedroom, looking out the window, when she realized this had been
one of the rooms in which light had gone on, gone off; one of the rooms that had contained a silent
watcher at the death of Leona Ciarelli.
When she returned to the living room, she looked around more carefully. With only three or
four exceptions--the stewardess, a young married couple from the second floor, a stockbroker from
Hemphill, Noyes--everyone at the party had been a witness to the slaying.
“I’d like to go,” she told him. “Why, aren’t you having a good time?” asked the stewardess, a
mocking smile crossing her perfect little face.
“Like all Bennington ladies,” Ray said, answering for Beth, “she is enjoying herself most by
not enjoying herself at all. It’s a trait of the anal retentive. Being here in someone else’s apartment,
