A Treasury of Stories (Collection of novelettes and short stories)

After a brief interval, the lower-hall lights went out. But there were lights at each floor-level along the stairs. It was only two flights; he lived on the third.

She took out the key he had once given her and put it in, and the door opened before her no more dramatically than it had at any other time. For instance, when she would let herself in to fix tea for him before he came home from work.

She stepped past the threshold. The light was on at the back of the bachelor-apartment, in the end-room, which was the bedroom. She could see it from where she was. The intervening room was dark.

As matter-of-factly as though this were any ordinary visit, she put her hand to the wall and turned on the light-switch, and then went on by.

“Who’s out there?” his voice called out.

“Fabienne,” she said with deathly intensity. “Tu te souviens de moi?” Remember me?

His voice said again, but to somebody else in the room with him, “I told you! I told you this would happen!”

She appeared in the bedroom-entrance, looking in at him. “Yes, you told!” she cried out shrilly as they came face to face. “You told well! You told right!”

That was all she said to him, nothing more, not another word.

He was completely dressed, save for his jacket and his tie, and the top button at the collar of his shirt. Her eye, glancing quickly over him, took in the detail of the finely pleated shirt he had worn at her party, without really seeing it at all.

But the girl behind him, sitting up in the bed, was just as completely not dressed. There was nothing to her at all, nothing to her from head to foot. A mop of scrambled black hair, large frightened eyes like those of a calf, a thin pipe-stem of a neck, bony shoulders the shape of a coat-hanger, a scrawny parody of breasts like an adolescent’s. She had nothing, nothing at all but one thing. But the one thing she had gave her the victory. She had: youth.

“You want him?” Fabienne cried out to her bitterly. “Take him! I give him to you! I give him to you like this, with my compliments!”

She pried open her handbag, scooped the gun out, and stood pointing it at him. The handbag fell with a discarded flutter, its lining coming up out of it like an air-blister.

His fate didn’t even have time to get white, just incredulous.

Instead of holding it close in to her own body and firing it from there as a man would have, she thrust it out toward him, as if it were a weapon with a cutting or stabbing point. Thus it was the easiest thing in the world for him to grasp her forearm and up-end it, backing the gun away from himself.

It clicked sterilely, once, midway between them.

But she was pulling, straining, in reverse impetus now, to get her arm away from him. And in his reflex of self-defense, he had caught it in an awkward place, midway to the elbow. Now, trying to shift his grasp to her wrist, the more natural place to hold her by, his grip slackened for an involuntary instant. Her arm, freed with all the straining effort she was putting into it, sprang back like a suddenly released mainspring, and the gun imbedded itself into her own breast. The impact itself must have detonated it.

There was a hollow, reverberating thud, like the sound an empty flower-pot might make if it were dropped many stories down an air-shaft. A minimal amount of smoke came up between their faces, not much more than if one of them had just released the vestiges of some long-pent-up cigarette-inhalation.

The gun, its treachery accomplished, fell inert to the floor.

The gap between them closed, as if they were in a final parting embrace. Her hand even crept up his shoulder toward the turn at the top of it, but whether in last conscious longing or whether in blind instinctive seeking of support, there was no way to know. And his arm went around her waist, to try to keep her upright.

So that at the very last moment, death had turned back to love again. Or at least the postures of it.

Then she tumbled downward in a straight line, slipping through the half-circle of his arm, which was only meant to keep her from falling outward and back. And rolled over once at his feet, with the ricochet of the fall, and then a second time, with the final galvanic death-spasm itself. And then didn’t move any more.

The girl gave a whinny like that of a frightened little foal. There was a blurred kaleidoscopic impression, swirling like a spinning pin-wheel, of clothes being snatched at from every direction and all being whisked inward toward a common center, too quickly for the eye to follow. Then, still only half-clad, she scissored her long legs to clear the form on the floor and scampered toward the outside door and the public stairway beyond, two shoes held in her hand by their straps knocking together clackingly all the way.