The Dark Descends Page 2
It had also been painful. Stupid of her not to have anticipated that it would be. She should have taken it for granted that she would be subjected to a barrage of questions. The harpies had probed and probed, sometimes moved by politeness or simple decency to sheathe the claws, but always managing to draw blood. Well, they couldn't be blamed for being curious. It was only natural. People were inevitably curious about a failed marriage.
A failed marriage. How bleak that sounded. Like a storm-tossed vessel smashing to bits on a reef. The harpies had expended a lot of energy in probing for causes, doubtless thinking in terms of lipstick on the collar or appetite jaded by too monotonous a diet. And, of course, it had not been like that at all. But how explain a decision to separate by two people who still respected each other; still liked each other; still, perhaps, even loved each other, whatever that meant? A decision, moreover, subject to review today, tomorrow, or ten years from now? Marriage pending. No way of explaining that to anybody else, and none of anybody else's business even if there were. In any event, a matter of semantics. For all practical purposes she was on her own, and this evening had shown her she had a long way to go in adjusting to the idea. She would have to get herself over the distance. Pronto. The sooner she stopped feeling like poor little castaway, boo-hoo-hoo, the better.
She had quite a few other adjustments to make as well. First and foremost, the adjustment to living in such close quarters. Odd how crowded the room appeared, in spite of all her planning, in spite of all the work she had done to make the best use of what space there was. The furniture, every stick of it, had come from the den-cum-spare room in Moccasin, and that room had never seemed crowded, though it was actually much smaller than this one. Why on earth did everything look so busy here? The clever arrangement of walnut shelves spanning one wall practically shrieked its own cleverness. The orange and red geometric-print upholstery on the sofa bed, so cheerful and amusing and easy to live with heretofore, now seemed to be trying too hard. And had it really been a good idea to extend the kitchen by building a counter in front of it? Perhaps modern super-functional decor only worked when it wasn't really required to function. Perhaps—
Damn Phil Norman and his ship's cabin analogy. Damn herself, for letting it get to her. If you were strapped for space, you did the best you could. The trouble was, she waS spoiled after the years of having a whole house to herself. Well, she would just have to get unspoiled. Lots of people didn't have more than one room to live in, and they managed. She would learn to do as the other cliff dwellers did. It would simply take time. Everything took time. She had tried to do too much too fast, and that was doubtless the reason she was experiencing a feeling of deflation now. She would force herself to slow down from now on, take things as they came.
Joyce sipped bourbon and swallowed it slowly, letting it trickle down her throat drop by savory drop. All at once she became aware of footsteps overhead. Prince Charlie (or Queen Charlie) was on the march again in those high heels; must have been on the march for some time without her taking notice. A good sign. Surely if she could accommodate herself to that annoyance she could accommodate herself to anything. Time. It was all a question of time.
...
Not quite awake. Not quite asleep. Nowhere. Consciousness in limbo, suspended there for eternity, unable to go or stay. It went. Joyce was awake. Her brain resisted, tried to retreat. The awakening was too precipitate. She never awoke betimes. Never. The world's soundest sleeper, that's what she was. She could sleep through an atomic blast, Eliot said. Once he had made love to her while she slept and she had responded without waking. Or so he'd told her. She'd never been sure it wasn't pure invention. Never been sure—Strangeness. Dislocation. Where was she? She sat up, her eyes raking the unfamiliar darkness, searching for something known, some sort of landmark. There was nothing. How could that be? How—
Someone was shouting. A man. A man with a heavy, booming voice. Shouting unintelligible words that fell all over each other. It sounded terribly, terribly urgent. Now his voice gave way to another voice. Not so heavy, this one, but the same urgency seemed to be driving it. What was up? What on earth was going on? Something of the magnitude of the Titanic, from the sound of it. Fire? Air raid? No, nothing like that, because the voices were coming from the same place, not moving around. Some sort of dispute, evidently. An argument over a card game? A police raid on a cache of grass or acid? God, the things the imagination came up with in the middle of the night!
She was wide awake now; she knew where she was. But the noise? What was all the shouting about? It was coming from Charlie Bancroft's apartment, and it was so loud that the floor was vibrating, the bed moving under her. What was he doing up there? What in God's name was he doing up there?
Crash! A collision and a half. Like a planeload of bricks coming down on the Lever Building. The bed not only moved, it actually rose up from the floor. If she hadn't been awake before, she would certainly be awake now. So would anyone who wasn't either cataleptic or comatose.
A television set. Or a radio. It had to be one or the other. Stupid of her not to have realized it at once. The human voice didn't have the power to shake floors without some kind of amplification. A radio, most likely. A radio turned to one of those night-long discussion programs. Long John, perhaps. The crash was probably one of the disputants slapping the table that held the microphone. Damn the producers of such programs anyway! Understandable that they should want a wide audience, but did they have to seek it by swelling the ranks of the sleepless?
Her mind was still befogged, that was clear. The one to merit damnation was Charlie Bancroft, who had his volume control turned up too high. Inconsiderate wretch. Possibly he suffered from insomnia, but that was no excuse for blasting off at this time of night. Ten to four, by the luminous dial of her old alarm clock. A familiar sight, with its minute hand that was broken off to half the length of the hour hand. Reassuring.
Throwing off the bedclothes, Joyce swung her feet to the floor and thrust them into her mules. Alarm swept over her. Where was her bathrobe? Over there. On the armchair beneath the window—a crumpled heap of crimson terry cloth, fiery in the light coming in slivers through the closed Venetian blinds. All was well. Amazing how much importance trivial things could assume when one was surrounded by the unknown. Amazing, and a bit frightening.
With the robe swathing her naked body she felt considerably more secure, even though the floor was shaking under her feet as she went to the door. Outside in the hall, the floor felt a little more stable. The reverberations were not so great—though the noise was still loud enough, God knew—and the voices, both shouting at once, sounded almost human. She could even distinguish the occasional phrase: "unwanted fetus"; "right to life"; "battered babies." Well, she knew what they were going on about, at any rate. As if she cared, at four in the morning.
She switched on the hall light, blinking against the glare of the unshaded bulb suspended from the ceiling. As she crossed the hall, she noticed that the bright blue enamel was streaked with dirt and grease. A new paint job was in order. And the stairs leading up needed a thorough scouring, as did the stairs below. Well, she would get around to everything. Eventually.
The hall light on the top floor was controlled by the same switch as the light on her floor, and here, too, all was bright as day. The door of Bancroft's apartment, directly above her own door, was painted white like her own door and, except for a jagged rust-colored scar cutting diagonally across the upper half, might have been her own door. Oddly, this made her feel uneasy. Or something did. Her hand, poised in midair with the index finger almost touching the doorbell, dropped to her side.
Was it really advisable to barge in on Bancroft at this time of night, however just the cause? He was an unknown quantity, and such a move was scarcely calculated to get neighborly relations off to a flying start. His radio was intolerably loud, that was beyond dispute, but it might well be he had no idea there was anybody within earshot to object. Her apartment had been emp
ty for a while, and she had done her renovations during daylight hours, when Bancroft wasn't home, to judge from the fact that she had not heard so much as a footfall overhead. This was the first night she was spending in the apartment, and she hadn't yet put her name over the mailbox, so it was quite likely that Bancroft was still unaware—
No, that couldn't be right. How could he have escaped hearing the departure of her guests earlier? They had made plenty of noise clomping down those rickety stairs. Possibly he had been too engrossed in whatever he was doing to take notice. Or possibly he was hard of hearing, and that was why the radio was so loud.
Pointless to speculate about it. She raised her hand to the doorbell again, lowered it to her side again.
What if Bancroft had fallen asleep? Preposterous as the idea seemed, she knew very well (who better?) that it was possible to sleep through anything. Now the question was whether she was prepared to rouse somebody from slumber. To be sure, she had been roused from slumber herself, but tit for tat merely constituted two wrongs, and what they didn't add up to was proverbial. Ethics aside, it stood to reason that someone awakened in the middle of the night wouldn't be likely to have his best foot forward, and this was a someone it was to her advantage to be on good terms with. What if he came to the door with his hair in curlers or cold cream on his face?
This was going overboard, of course. But still, why risk jeopardizing future relations by putting the guy on the defensive? Better to let it go for now. She could put up with the racket for one night. She could put up with anything for one night. She would slip a note into Bancroft's mailbox in the morning. That would settle the matter in a dignified fashion.
She turned and retraced her steps. Before getting back into bed she stuffed absorbent cotton in her ears. It didn't help much. She lay wakeful, hearing the voices rumble above her, feeling the floor shake below her, until the first slivers of dawn light poked through the Venetian blinds.
...
The employment agency looked extremely high-powered, all laminated imitation walnut and plastic patent leather, but the advertisements ("Got those small-cog-in-big-wheel blues? We have the cure." "We have the brain jobs if you bring us the brains!") had been sufficient preparation for that. And for the appearance of the interviewer—a knockout, with long legs and full, conspicuously braless breasts, lustrous artificial gold sausage curls and a startling quantity of rouge. The surprise was encountering, under that facade, not the expected professional hauteur and indifference, but warmth of manner and genuine helpfulness.
"Nothing here for you, honey. You don't have enough experience for anything high up, and the trainee jobs we handle call for girls just out of school. They're happy enough to start at the bottom, whereas somebody like you—" The interviewer shook her golden head, and not a single curl moved out of place. "Employers figure you'd have too much of a sense of yourself, if you know what I mean. Your best bet is to sashay into the personnel department of some big magazine or book publisher and try talking your way into something. Don't put 'Mrs. Joyce Chandler' on your application the way you did here—put 'Ms. Joyce Chandler.' Let them get the idea you're liberating yourself from the kitchen on principle rather than out of necessity. Just be careful not to come on too militant—that could hurt your chances."
It was excellent advice, carrying Joyce smoothly through the personnel department of Yardstick magazine and into the copy room, where she landed a job as copy-reader instantaneously. Well, almost instantaneously. First she had to prove her qualifications by submitting to a test.
"It was a bit humiliating," she reported to Sheila via telephone. "The rudiments of spelling and grammar. An insult to anybody with an IQ above seventy-five."
"Not these days. The present generation doesn't take the mechanics of written communication as seriously as ours did. Anyway, taking a test or standing on your head, what does it matter as long as you got the job? In a couple of months the editor in chief will probably be down on his knees begging you for ideas."
"Not unless you're willing to put in a little overtime on those knees first." Dick's voice, somewhere in the background.
"Dick says—"
"I heard. Tell him I think it's pretty unlikely. I think the major policy decisions are made by a computer."
Joyce had no great respect for Yardstick, which had always struck her as literary fare calculated to disagree with no one's digestion, like Pablum. But a job was a job. And what a lift to the spirit to have landed one the very first try (so much for you, Irene McCarthy!). They had asked her to start the very next day, and she had agreed. Not that she had taken their eagerness to have her as much of a compliment—no doubt they had been caught short-handed by a sudden departure—but what the hell, even a poor excuse for a compliment could make you feel good, if you kidded yourself a little.
In the meantime, she had a whole afternoon to play lady of leisure, and she decided to spend it exploring Greenwich Village, to which she had been a virtual stranger for the past few years. Armed with New York Places & Pleasures, she started out by having a roast beef sandwich at The Bagel, only to regret so conventional an opening almost immediately, as soon as she began passing eating places redolent of Italian and Middle Eastern cookery. The prominence of kabobs and souvlaki was something she didn't remember from earlier days. The Village had changed, no doubt about it. The scene was dominated by a generation much more flamboyant than her own, what with their macram6 vests and shirts like chain mail, their ponchos, kaftans, burnooses, and monks' robes. Their elders appeared to be trying either to conform (was there ever a sight so ludicrous as a well fleshed grandmother wrapped in a horse blanket?) or to efface themselves. Had the Village been so youth-centered in the days when she had frequented it? Probably. But she had been young herself then, and now she was a back number, boo-hoo-hoo.
Joyce took the Greenwich Village ramble recommended by Kate Simon and enjoyed herself thoroughly, particularly on Bleecker Street, where Italian foodstuffs overflowed from the shops onto the sidewalk. But the best treat of the afternoon awaited her in the old Jefferson Market Courthouse, now a branch of the New York Public Library. Stepping inside to confront stained-glass windows and a spiral staircase was like stepping into the time capsule for a trip back to a vanished age. An illusion, lasting only a moment or two, but somehow that was long enough.
The stern-faced brunette who handled registration looked a veritable bluestocking, in spite of her up-to-the-minute Aran sweater and flaring trousers. She peered through her granny glasses at Joyce's application and frowned.
"Ms. Chandler?" The query was frosty.
"Ms. Chandler," Joyce said firmly.
The librarian grinned, and every trace of the bluestocking was gone. "A fledgling. I can always tell a fledgling from a wise old bird by the intonation. Am I right?"
"Right," Joyce admitted. "But are there really many wise old birds in the Women's Lib movement?"
"Not many. Mostly the very, very old. The ones who threw the bricks and went to jail to get the vote. The issueS were a lot clearer for them, of course. For us there's a hell of a lot of clutter."
"Well, that's a straight answer anyway."
"A good question deserves a straight answer. If you didn't expect one, why did you ask the question?"
"I don't actually know. Impulse, I suppose. You sent a challenge, I sent one back. It's always seemed to me that all the shouting and striking of attitudes camouflages a lot of uncertainty."
"You're dead right there." The librarian scribbled something on a piece of paper and held it out. "You might be interested in this. Particulars of my rap group. We meet once a week at my place. Why don't you drop around for the next meeting?"
"I don't really think—"
"You're not obliged to do a striptease. I mean that literally—some groups require taking all your clothes off. Ours doesn't. We don't pressure anybody to do anything. Not even talk. You can just sit and listen if you want to. Drop around. What have you got to lose but your chains?"
What indeed? “I might do that. Thank you"—Joyce glanced at the paper—"Ms. Shanks."
"Kitty." The grin flashed again. "You're welcome, Joyce."
Joyce left the library humming the "Osanna" from Bach's B-minor Mass under her breath, and half an hour later, setting out the ingredients for a martini, she was humming it aloud. Why not sing? Or dance a jig? It had been a successful day from any point of view. She had found a job. She had received an invitation to join a consciousness-raising group, Something that wouldn't have occurred to her to do on her own initiative but that seemed like a fine idea, since she was bound to meet other women who were in the same boat she was in. Last but not least, she had acquired a table. The housewarming had proved that, while dining off one's lap might be okay for snacks, a proper feed demanded a proper table. Which meant a gate-leg table, that symbol of versatility or adaptability or whatever, and she had anticipated a long hunt, such tables being hideous more often than not. But the acquisition had been as simple as spotting one of solid walnut with clean, unfussy lines in the window of the shop downstairs, writing out a check, and carrying the table up the stairs with the help of the shop's proprietress, a dour, hard-faced girl with hair as improbably red as the hair of the employment agency interviewer had been improbably gold (incomprehensible, this obsession with trying to look like something created in a test tube).
Joyce poured vermouth into the martini pitcher and back into the bottle. She poured gin and let it remain. She added ice. She stirred. Slowly. Gently. And then, all of a sudden, a sense of desolation swept over her, suppressing song. How forlorn the tall, slender pitcher looked on the counter—out of place, like an aristocrat at a saloon bash. Eliot had insisted on her taking it ("Who's the champion martini mixer anyway?"), and she hadn't needed much persuading. Now the mere sight of it was enough to arouse pangs of nostalgia. But nostalgia was the least of it. The pitcher was barely a third full—a quantity for a solitary drinker. That thought was positively painful. It shouldn't have been. She was used to drinking alone. How many times had she started on a martini before Eliot came home? Or had one by herself when he wasn't expected home for dinner? Countless times.