Into the Night

“I no sooner did it than I came to my senses with a bang. I yelled at myself. What am I doing this for? Why should I make it even easier on him than it is already? I’m gonna live! I’m gonna live so that I can get hunk with him, get square with him, screw him up but good! And I grabbed up the phone and hollered into it, ‘Judas, Joseph, and Mary! Somebody send me a stomach pump up here quick, for the love of Pete!’”

“I met him on the street one day. It wasn’t planned, it was quite by accident. It was the sort of thing happens to two people maybe once in ten years in a town the size of New York.

“He looked at me and recognized me. Of course he recognized me, why shouldn’t he? I saw that he wasn’t going to stop, so I did instead, and that more or less forced him to stop against his will.

“He looked good and happy, and that didn’t make me feel good and happy.

“He said Well?

“I said Well?

“Then he said So?

“I said So?

“No great soundtrack of a conversation up to that point. But there were a thousand unspoken words in it. Hope and indifference and mockery and entreaty.

“Finally he said, ‘There’s no use standing here like this. We haven’t anything to say to each other.’

“I said, ‘If you think I’m going to give you up without a fight, you better think twice.’

“‘You already have,’ he said. ‘It’s over and done with. There’s nothing you can do about it.’ And he started to walk

“‘Isn’t there?’ I called after him. ‘Isn’t there? Watch. Watch and see.’ But he never even turned around again.

“That brought the thing to a head. That got it going, that brush-off on the street. Love ended there. There wasn’t any more love, only hate from then on. Hate, and figuring out how to hurt him.

“I worked on it, steady. While I earned my feed singing, I worked on it. While other men made love to me, I kept working on it. I worked on it in the morning, and I worked on it in the afternoon, and I worked on it at night.

“Finally, I thought I had a way figured to frame him, pin something on him he didn’t do. The details don’t matter now anymore. But I needed some help. So I turned to this friend I had, who still had connections from the old days, even though he’d gone legit a long time ago, the way most of the smart ones have.

“To my surprise, he wouldn’t have any part of it, and he talked me out of it and advised me to drop it. Those things always backfire, he said. They’re never foolproof. You’ll be the one to get hurt, Dell, not him. Let the guy go. Don’t keep trying to get him back. He made a clean break of it. Let it stay that way. Leave him alone.

“That was the man’s point of view, not the woman’s. And I was wise to his little personal angle too; he was in love with me himself, and Vick had been too much competition for him. He’d had to take a backseat the whole time I was married to Vick. No wonder he liked it better this way, Vick safely out of the way.

“Well, I gave that particular project up as unfeasible, but I didn’t quit for a minute. If he thought I’d quit trying, he didn’t know me.

“Since I couldn’t get at him himself, I decided maybe I could get at him through her. In fact the more I thought of it, the more I liked it. I decided this was the better way of the two. Do something to him, and he still had her to love him. Do something to her, and he didn’t have anyone to love him. That hurt the more of the two ways.

“She had religion of a sort, more or less. I had ways of finding out things. I found out she always went to early morning mass on Sundays. Seven o’clock mass. He never went, and she never went herself any other time the week around. She always went to this same little neighborhood church, and to get to it she had to pass through this deserted side street. On early Sunday mornings it was practically dead, not a soul around. There was a new development going up, and the old buildings that were still standing had all been vacated and boarded up. I saw that for myself. You know how they do, whitewash X’s marking the windowpanes. Then where the new construction was already well advanced, there was this long plank scaffolding to protect the sidewalk. Like they always put up, in case anything should fall from above. Walking along under it was almost like going through a long tunnel, it was so dim and walled in. And on Sunday morning no workmen would be around. She would be boxed in there, unable to advance, unable to retreat, if anyone caught her fairly in the middle of that confined place.

“Next I got hold of the addresses of a number of low-type dives or joints that were said to be hangouts for ex-cons and petty hoodlums and the like. For nearly a week straight each night after the show instead of going out on the town, I’d strip off the glitter, change to a plain black dress so I wouldn’t attract attention, and put on a pair of dark glasses.

“Then I’d go to one of those places and hang around. Oh, there were plenty of passes made, but when they saw that wasn’t the game, they gave up trying.