Into the Night

“I’m waiting for someone to come out,” she told him, “so just stand awhile. Do you see that vacant slot up past the car just ahead of us? See if you can slide in there; that’ll leave the entrance clear.”

He did so, with a dexterity and sleekness only a professional cabman could have shown. That took her out of the direct line of Adelaide Nelson’s vision when she would come out. She tested for range of visibility on several people who came out ahead, and found she could see them perfectly at that distance by looking through the rear window with a half turn of her head.

The driver smoked and toted up his logbook.

She just sat watching and waiting.

“Turn out the light,” she said suddenly.

Adelaide Nelson had a fur scarf slanted carelessly over one shoulder, and no hat. Madeline got a perfect look at her. She had the same wait Madeline had had. At one point she even started up toward the cab Madeline was in, although its dome light was plainly off. Madeline cowered back into a corner. Before the woman could reach Madeline’s cab, another one came gliding by, and she hailed and stepped into that instead.

Madeline said, “See that cab that woman just got into right in back of us? Just follow that the rest of the way from here.”

“One of those things,” he said noncommittally.

“You don’t have to crowd it, but don’t lose it either.”

He was one of those rhythm drivers. He’d learned to time himself and space himself so that he took each light just before it changed, didn’t have to stop once.

The lead cab got blocked off by a transverse bus at one crossing and lost the light, so he had to let himself lose it too and stay back in company with it. After that, the beat was lost and neither one of them got across a single light without stopping. But they both stayed together on the same block each time.

The pilot cab finally stopped, Adelaide Nelson got out, transacted her fare, and went inside a building under a long dark green sidewalk canopy.

“What’s the number on that?” Madeline asked, peering closely at it.

“Two-twenty.”

She’d already made it out for herself by that time.

“All right, now you can keep going.” She gave him her own address, the residential hotel where she’d taken a room.

“That was it?” he asked blankly.

“That was it.”

She knew more was coming. It did.

“She take your fellow away from you, is that the angle?”

“I don’t have any fellow to take. And if I did, and he took that easy, she could keep him.”

The papier-mâché briefcase she’d bought in Woolworth’s. The musical score sheets she’d bought at a music store. The notes on the score sheets were her own. Poor things but her own, she’d reflected as she set them down, and that wasn’t kidding.

She knew piano, in a very circumscribed, lesson-a-week-at-the-age-of-twelve sort of way. And she could hum, who can’t? And she knew that in a lyric the end word on every second line has to rhyme with the end word two lines before, but the in-between lines don’t have to. Which is about as far as some songs go, anyway. But she wasn’t interested in salability, just plausibility. Getting to know a woman.

The door opened, and they were close to each other for the first time.

At such point-blank range, Adelaide’s makeup was a caricature. But it wasn’t individual personal makeup, it was performing makeup, Madeline realized, so that had to be allowed for. A pair of artificial eyelashes, superimposed on her own with no regard for nature, stuck out all around her eyes like rays in a charcoal drawing of the sun. A bouquet in which alcohol and floral essence strove for mastery was distinguishable for several yards around on all sides of her. Her hair was frizzy to the point of kinkiness, and the color of ginger. Combing it must have been like trying to comb a bramble bush. She had a pair of untrue blue eyes, which probably deepened almost to green when she hated. She probably hated a lot. She had on some sort of a hip-length quilted coat and a pair of quarter-thigh-length shorts, both white. Her feet were bare, and her toenails, Madeline noted, were painted gold.

There was something defiant about her as she stood there; not specifically toward Madeline, toward the world in general. Don’t touch me or I’ll claw you; an air like that.

“You the one?” she said. “I thought you were a man, the way the note read.”

“I thought I stood a better chance that way,” Madeline admitted.

“You did,” Adelaide told her bluntly. “Come on in anyway,” she added gruffly, “and let’s see what your stuff is like.”

She flung herself backward into a chair, but from the side, so that one leg caught over its arm and remained that way, cocked out at an angle from her body. She began to riff through the score sheets. She did remarkable things with a mouthful of smoke; protruded her underlip and sent it up in a jet so perpendicular that it actually stirred her hair a little where it over-hung her forehead on that side.

“Not bad for a title,” she remarked, and repeated it aloud. “‘Have a Heart (Take Mine).’”