Into the Night

She rejoined Madeline a few moments later, poking her thumb resentfully over her shoulder. “That guy!” she steamed. “He sure gives me trouble. It’s getting so I’m afraid to go out on the street with him anymore, for fear my agent might pass and tip his hat to me, or the club manager might go by and give me a hello, or I might get a nod from somebody who once worked the same spot with me ten years ago. That’s all it takes, and I find myself explaining and trying to square myself all the rest of the evening. And then when I get all through he still doesn’t believe me, anyway.” She held one hand to the side of her face as though it hurt her there and took a few short steps this way and that. “I’d have to be quadruplets, and all four of us working on a double shift, to be able to crowd in all the cheating he gives me credit for.”

Madeline just looked at her solemnly, taking the tirade in. She didn’t ask who he was, and Dell didn’t say. She had a fairly good idea Dell wouldn’t have told her even if she had asked, and that was one of the principal reasons she hadn’t.

A few weeks after that, just as she was about to put the key Dell had given her into the outside door of the apartment, she held back, thinking she heard a voice somewhere on the inside. She inclined her head toward the door, but the sound didn’t repeat itself. But some cautious instinct made her put the key away and ring instead. She didn’t want any possible third party to know she had a key to the apartment in her possession, although she couldn’t have said why. In the final analysis it was no one’s business but Dell’s and her own.

Dell’s voice asked who it was, from the other side of the door. She sounded guarded, cautious, as though apprehensive about what the answer might be.

“Mad,” Madeline said.

The door opened immediately. A look of strain was just leaving Dell’s face and a look of relief coming on in its place. Nevertheless she lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I can’t ask you in right now. Got one of my Big Moments in here with me. You understand, don’t you?”

“Oh, sure. Perfectly all right. I’ll drop around tomorrow instead.”

“Do that.”

Suddenly a man’s voice cut in: “Who you talking to out there?”

“Just a friend,” Dell answered without turning her head.

A larger hand than hers took hold of the door edge above where her own was resting, and pulled the door a little wider open. Then a man’s face peered out at Madeline, a little to one side of Dell’s and about a foot higher up.

Sometimes you see a face a dozen and one times, and then later on forget it. Sometimes you see a face just once, and then see it over and over to the end of your days in retrospect. This bodiless face looking out at her now from a doorway was to be like an eyeless mask, one of those twin masks representing comedy and tragedy in the theater, pinned to the curtain of her memory from then on.

It was a face that had been handsome once. Its handsomeness had worn thin now, but the configuration of it could still be detected beneath the layer of the years and the experiences. Dark, lustrous Mediterranean hair, and dark, lustrous Mediterranean eyes. A cleft in the chin that years of shaving seemed to have ground into a blue-tinged, marbleized, scooped-out hollow.

But the eyes showed no recognition whatever of Madeline as a person. Just the fact that she was a woman, and not a rival, not a trespasser. They didn’t care if she was ugly or fair, tall or short, wide or narrow. They were the eyes of jealousy, of sheer possessiveness alone.

The face withdrew without having said a word to either of the two women. But its silence was a surly, not an appeased, one.

Then a moment after, from back within the apartment, his voice sounded in a growled order. “Well, come on back in here, whenever you get through exchanging cake recipes or whatever it is you’re doing out there.”

Dell said in a harassed whisper, “Never comes around in the afternoon like this. But never. Today’s the first time.”

Then she added hastily, “Well, I better get back in there before he cracks the whip over me some more.”

Madeline went away. There’s dynamite in it somewhere, she thought.

She got things piecemeal, but she kept getting them.

“What a beautiful bracelet.”

“Ange gave me that.”

Dell was already so lit she couldn’t fasten the thing without resting her whole elbow on the dresser top and leaning on it to try to steady it.

“That the broker?”

“No, the broker’s Walter. C’mere, see if you can do this for me.”

Then another time, answering the phone she said, “Hello, Jack.”

When she came back she gave Madeline a knowing smirk and pitched her thumb back over her shoulder in derision. “Ange, checking up on me. He didn’t have anything to say, just wanted to see if he could catch me at anything.”

“But I thought I heard you say Jack.”

“That’s his first name.” Dell was too busy prodding ice into a glass to keep much of a guard on her tongue. “In the old outfit days they called him ‘Little Angie.’”