Into the Night

Once she wrote, she must obey it, follow it through to the end, for she was that way, and nothing could make her other than what she was.

Suddenly the pencil dipped to the paper, and the numeral “2” came out.

1. To get even with a woman.

2.

She stopped it again. She clasped her two hands, the pencil still caught between their multiple fingers, and brought them up before her mouth and held them there like that, pressed against her lips as if she were whispering to them.

The medicine I take to cure my illness is the illness itself repeated a second time, she thought. But have I the right to do this? She had hate for him, I have none. How can I have, I don’t even know him. Have barely even seen him. Only his smile in a torn photograph.

I promised her. I pledged it to her. You cannot break faith with the dead, or they will arise to accuse you.

Suddenly the pencil struck the paper, rippled along in a quick, staccato line, rolled free and unfingered two or three times over. It was done.

1. To get even with a woman.

2. To kill a man.

Madeline first saw her one night at a place called the Intime. She was the singer there. She had a small combo of three backing her up, piano, traps, and bass. She was the singer there, and she was good.

“Oh-h-h-h-h-h-h

,There’s a lull in my life,
Since you have gone away
There is no night, there is no day...”

There was a sort of narrow platform or balcony running along one side of the room just a little above head level, and she was on it, hands on railing, looking down on the listeners. A pencil spotlight from the other side of the room measured off her face with the exactitude of a white mask, leaving not a sixteenth of an inch of light over, leaving her throat and shoulders and arms and dress in smoky brown dusk.

Singing of love, of love lost. There was that utter velvet hush that means complete command of the listeners.

Couples side by side, holding hands, heads nestled on shoulders, believing it, drinking it in, living it. No one in the place was too much over thirty. It was for the young. The operator had had a good idea there, and Madeline caught on at once what it must have been.

People with a lot of money to spend on their night life go to one of the big flashy clubs with their dance floors, chorus lines, and twenty-piece bands. People with no money to spend on their night life go to the bar on the corner and watch TV with their neighborhood friends around them. But there is an in-between group that doesn’t fall into either category. The young engaged couples and the young married pairs, still wrapped in rosy mists of love, still believing in it, still wanting to hear it sung. This place was for them and the buck or two they had to spend; Madeline could see them all around her, stars in their eyes, cheek pressed to cheek, dreaming their dreams. They’d come back again and they’d bring their friends, others of their own kind: the young-and-in-love. Mr. Operator had a built-in patronage. Young Mr. and Mrs. Tomorrow. Yes, he had a good gimmick there.

Throughout the song and the two or three that followed, she kept thinking, But this isn’t enough. How do I get to know her? Get to really know her? Send her a fan note, saying I admire her, want to meet her? That’s only good for a smile, a handshake, a few polite phrases, and then I’m expected to be on my way again. When men want to meet a performer, they became stage-door Johnnies. That’s what I’ll do she decided. Become something on that order, but with a slightly different purpose in mind. I’ll become a stage-door Jenny.

She waited just long enough to gauge the applause. It wasn’t thunderous, it wasn’t crashing, it wasn’t that kind of place. But it was warm and friendly, like soft summer rain belting a tin shed. They liked her, which is always half the battle.

From the outside the place was so inconspicuous you could easily have missed it. There was no canopy, no doorman, no conveyor belt of arriving or departing taxis. There was a very modest neon in handwriting script that spelled “Intime” over the door and to one side a sandwich board on an easel that simply said “Adelaide Nelson, song-stylist,” and had her photograph on it and the name of the combo, “The Partners Three.”

After a few minutes of standing about uncertainly in front of the place, she got a cab by forfeit, so to speak. One drove up, unloaded, and she got in and sat down before the seat was even cool.

The driver finally glanced around inquiringly, after waiting for her to give the destination of her own accord.