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

It hadn’t worked. She hadn’t really expected it to. It was just, she hadn’t known what else to do, what other way to try to cover up.

Oh God, she thought with a sickish sinking sensation in her stomach, do I have to have that all over again now for the rest of the evening, until I can pull my flat street-door closed after me?

She couldn’t look back anymore, not without turning her whole head around, which would have given her away (she was already given away, to him anyway: he had singled her out, he had isolated her from the rest of the crowd; what she didn’t want to give away was the fact that she was on to this, knew that he had spotted her; she wanted to hang onto this one last flimsy buffer for whatever slight advantage there might possibly be in it). She didn’t have to look back anyway, to know that if he hadn’t already started on the prowl after her, he was going to from one minute to the next.

I may live a long time, I may live only a short one, she told herself with a bitter inward shudder, but somehow I’ll never be able to look at a pair of men’s shoes and not have a little bit of recollection of tonight come back to me.

At the corner she diverged from the other three. They kept going straight ahead, and she turned aside and went over to where the bus-stop was, just a little past the intersection. It was packed, this was the time for it to be that, and she wedged herself into the bee-swarm of people standing there all clustered together. Then later-comers, who kept coming every moment, closed her in and soon she was in the very core of the mass. You couldn’t see anyone’s shoes, there wasn’t spread enough above to look down.

The first one wasn’t hers, and then the next one was. She debated whether to hang back and let it go by. But this wouldn’t fool him, he’d already been on it with her, he’d only hang back himself and let it go by. And of the two evils, she didn’t want to be left there with him in a smaller crowd, or in no crowd at all. Which would soon happen if she let too many go by.

It was so packed you couldn’t get inside it anymore, but she managed to get onto the round back-apron, which was left open except for a guard-rail, so that people actually bulged out over its sides. She put her newspaper up alongside her face again, this time with a weary, disheartened gesture, as if to say, what good is this doing me? Her head inclined a little, as part of the same mood.

Alongside her were a pair of snub-toed mouse-colored pumps. And over right next to them — hubs with a design like a musical clef-sign. Like a handwritten capital S with a slanting line through it.

The stops came and the stops went past, and they all quivered and jittered a little in unison, like in a toned-down version of that dance that once was called the Twist. Electricity turned the sidewalks into a dazzling beach, so that even the particles of sand mixed into the cement glittered like spilled sugar. Red, blue, green, white neons warred and clashed in a long perspective that finally ended with a blurred, flashing, spinning Catherine-wheel-effect as its focal point. Inside lighted show-windows wax figures engaged in Leone’s own profession, that of modeling clothes, stared down their noses haughtily at the real people going by. Most of the show-windows were oblongs, but a few were ovals with the excess space left over outside their frames blacked-out, as if you were looking into a magnified peephole. Then as they left the more affluent section of the city behind and gradually worked their way into a lower-income district, these status-symbols became fewer and finally disappeared altogether. A movie-theater marquee blazed up like a real, live fire licking up the walls in back of it, proclaimed GIGI for an instant, and then was gone again as suddenly as it had appeared.

A teen-ager on a bicycle caught hold of something on the back end of the bus, lifted both legs to a near-horizontal position, and let it do her work for her and tow her along, blonde pigtailed hair slapping up and down behind her. The man sitting beside the nearest window to her turned his head her way and cautioned her with a typical middle-aged mildness. She gave a wild yell of derision for an answer, let go, and began to pedal madly and to actually outpace the bus and pull ahead of it. It was starting to slow for a stop ahead, anyway.

People had to get off, and this dispersed the pattern of the feet arranged around Leone as they pushed their way through and past them. Then when it had re-formed itself again, she saw that he had taken advantage of the wider amount of space now offered to move — not closer to her still, but further away, all the way over beside the opposite platform-railing. He was holding onto one of the upright stanchions and staring studiedly out and away from her on that side of the bus. All she could see was the back of one ear-rim and the nape of his neck. And a very thin sliver of profile, thin as the peel of an onion.