Deadline at Dawn

She looked at it longingly over this anonymous shoulder now, and it said to her: “Ten-to. The worst is about over, kid. Just grit your teeth, and before you know it—”

“Plenty crowded here tonight.”

For a minute she couldn’t even tell where it had come from, she was in such a vacuum of non-awareness. Then she centered it in the disembodied cipher steering her about with him at the moment.

Oh, so he was going to talk, was he? Well, she could take care of that. He was slower in reaching that point than most of them, at that. This was the third or fourth consecutive number he’d claimed her for. And before the last intermission, she seemed to recall a similar suit-coloring before her blurred eyes a great many times, although she couldn’t be sure, for she didn’t bother trying to differentiate one from another — ever. The tongue-tied or the bashful type, perhaps, that was the reason for the delay.

“Yuh.” She couldn’t have made the monosyllable any shorter without swallowing it altogether.

He tried again. “Is it always as crowded as it is tonight?”

“No, after it closes it’s empty.”

All right, let him look at her like that. She didn’t have to be agreeable to him, all she had to do was dance with him. His ten cents just covered footwork, not vocal exercise.

They’d darkened the place for this last number. They usually did, toward the end of the session like this. Direct lights out, and the figures on the floor moving about like rustling ghosts. That was supposed to make the customers mellow, that was supposed to send them out into the street feeling as though they’d had a private tête-à-tête with someone up here. All for ten cents and a paper-cupful of vegetable-coloring orangeade.

She could feel him poising his head back a little, looking at her closely, as if trying to figure out what made her that way. She centered her own eyes blankly on the flashing, silvery spirochete that went swirling endlessly across the walls and ceiling, cast off by the spinning mirrored top overhead.

Why look into her face to find out what had made her this way? He wouldn’t find the answer there. Why not look into the casting-offices all over town, where her ghost still lingered, poised on the chair nearest the door? Or should have, she’d haunted them so. Why not look into the dressing-room of that tawdry Jamaica roadhouse, the one job she’d actually gotten, that she’d had to flee from before rehearsals for its floor-show even got under way, because she’d been foolish enough to loiter behind the others at the proprietor’s suggestion? Why not look into the slot at the Automat on 47th? — the one that had swallowed up the last nickel she had in the world one never-to-be-forgotten day, and given her back two puffy, swollen rolls; and from then on wouldn’t open again for her, no matter how often she stood longingly before it, for she had no further nickels to put in. Above all, why not look inside the battered dog-eared valise under her bed back at the room at this moment? It didn’t weigh much, but it was full. Full of stale dreams, that were no good now any more.

The answer was in all those places, but not in her face. So what was the sense of his looking for it in her face? Faces are masks, anyway.

He tried his luck again. “This is the first time I was ever up here.”

She didn’t bring her eyes back from the pelting silver gleams streaking down the walls. “We’ve missed you.”

“I guess you get tired of dancing. I guess by the end of the evening, like this, it starts in to get you.” He was trying to find an excuse for her surliness, so that his self-esteem could tell itself it wasn’t on account of him, was for some other reason. She knew; she knew how they were.

This time she brought her eyes back to him, witheringly. “Oh no. I never get tired of it. I don’t get half enough. Why when I go back to my room after I leave here at nights I practise splits and high kicks.”

He dropped his own eyes momentarily, as the barb made itself felt, then raised them to hers again. “You’re kind of sore about something, aren’t you.” He didn’t ask it as a question but stated it as a discovery.

“Yeah. Me.”

He wouldn’t give up. Couldn’t he take a hint, even when it was driven home with a sledge-hammer? “Don’t like it here?”

That was the crowning irritant of the whole series of inept remarks he’d been awkwardly tendering her as conversational fodder. She could feel her chest beginning to constrict with infuriation. An explosive denunciation would have surely followed. Fortunately, the necessity of answering was removed. The spattering and jangling of tin buckets that had been going on ended on a badly-fractured note, the mirror-gleams faded off the walls, and the center lights went up. A trumpet executed a Bronx cheer of dismissal.

Their enforced intimacy was at an end. His ten cents had spent its course.