Escape the Night (15 page)

They were on the elevator before he'd really taken her in. Her hair and eyes were black and she was quite slim, with sharp, specific gestures; each word and movement seemed to have a Mediterranean intensity. “Are you Greek?” he asked.

“Italian.” She marched him to the sidewalk.

“What's your name?”

“Ciano. And you're Peter Carey, right?”

“As best I recall.”

She looked past him at the ornate entrance to Van Dreelen & Carey. “Let me check the shadow.” She handed him the camera and stood in the doorway. “How's my face?”

“Terrific.”

She gave him a quick, level glance. “I mean the shadow.”

“Perfect,” he assured her. “You look just like Lena Horne.”

Frowning, she took the camera, backed far enough toward the street to capture “Van Dreelen & Carey” in gold script above Carey's head, and began shooting. Cars rushed behind her, pedestrians in front. A small blonde girl and her mother froze next to Carey at the sound of the camera; the mother began apologizing. Ciano grinned. “Don't worry,” she told the woman. “I like people in my pictures.”

The girl stared at her. “Is this your job?”

“Uh-huh.” Ciano knelt, snapped a photo of the girl, and said, “I'll send this to you, okay?” She looked up at her mother. “What's your address?” The woman gave her an address in New Jersey; Ciano scrawled it down and sent them smiling on their way. Then she shook back her hair, said, “Next,” and popped three more shots of Carey.

“Do you always work this fast?”

She took four more pictures, moving to her left. “When I know what I'm after.”

“How long have you been doing this?”

“Since college.” She snapped another picture. “Like you.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know a lot about you.” She took one last picture and began putting her camera back in its case. “It helps my work.” Finishing, she gave a quick mock bow. “Well, that's it. Thanks.” She looked around, checking the cars and traffic light, and started crossing the street.

All at once Carey had to say something, do something. “Hang on,” he called after her. “I'd like to see you again.”

She turned, smile snapping over her shoulder, quick as a photograph. “Then it'll happen,” she said carelessly, and disappeared into the crowd.

The next morning, Carey called her …

“When you took my picture,” he asked as they ran back along the Mall, “did you expect I'd ask you out?”

Noelle looked across at him. “What made you think of that?”

“Running's dull.”

She smiled. “Yes. I thought you'd ask me.”

“Why?”

“Because of how you looked when I talked to the little girl. Hey, did I tell you I'm shooting Doug Sutcliffe?”

“The lead singer for Lethal? I thought he was still in the woods somewhere, doing drugs and statutory.”

“Developing social consciousness, his publicist claims. Anyhow, he's coming here to put on a concert for Haitians and boat people sometime in March—it's been six years since anyone's even seen his face.” She tapped her chest. “That's where I come in.”

Carey felt threatened, without knowing the reason. “Why you?” he asked, and then disliked himself.

“Because I like faces.” Noelle grinned across at him. “Look, Peter, they didn't retire my uniform when I took your picture.
I
just retired my body.”

Carey laughed. They ran in companionable silence, all the way to his apartment.

Carey and the woman disappeared.

Inside, Martin knew, she would peel off her sweatsuit …

He knew this from the way she would reappear, fresh and clean and lithe. But for the next forty minutes, he must wait alone, to see her …

Slowly, he raised his eyes to the tenth-floor window.

For now, he would imagine himself hidden in their apartment, hoping that, if the small man wished, he no longer need imagine her undressing, but watch.

He hoped it would be soon.

He hoped the small man did not know this.

In his reports, he made no special mention of the woman, kept his voice and language neutral. But he knew that the man for whom he watched, watched him, turned on him the eerie sensitivity with which he twisted others to his will. The man still frightened him; he alone knew Martin's weakness …

Martin's orders were to cover Peter Carey.

This afternoon was special, the small man warned: for the first time Carey might feel his life begin to change, and his reactions must be closely watched. But it was morning yet, Martin mentally replied; it would be easy to catch up …

In his mind, Noelle Ciano stepped into the shower.

Carey stripped and ran the water; Noelle followed, to his low whistle of admiration.

“Nothing you haven't seen before.” She tossed her hair, arching backwards to rinse it under the nozzle.

“That doesn't mean I've gotten used to it.”

She squeezed out shampoo and began scrubbing. “Then why”—she stopped to rub soap from her eyes—“do you never come first.”

“Because all the manuals say I shouldn't.” He reached for a bar of soap. “Was that a serious question?”

“I guess so. Yes.”

“Okay. I've never been able to let go. Is it really that important?”

“It's just not that flattering to fuck the ‘Man of Steel.'” She opened her eyes to look at him. “One time, Peter, I'd like to feel as though it really mattered who you were inside.”

Like the other fears he could not define, Carey could not explain this fear of needing her. “It
does
matter,” he finally answered. “Maybe that's the problem.”

“Not for me.” She shot him a querying look, and then gave up. Turning, she asked, “Think you can get me in back?”

“With soap, you mean?”

They got out, laughing.

Carey dressed; Noelle dried her hair, put on jeans and a white wool sweater, and packed her overnight bag. “Meet me at the Lion's Head, okay? We can do dinner in the Village.”

“Sure.” He reached for a sports coat. “You know, it
is
good about Sutcliffe.”

“It's not for a couple of months yet—I just hope he shows.” Carey walked her to the door, unlocking it. She paused in the doorway. “About six, then?”

“Make it six-thirty.” He touched her hair. “If I ever
were
to lose myself, Ciano, it would be with you. I knew that the first time we made love.”

She smiled. “You forgot to tell me.”

Noelle took the steps at the corner of West 72nd Street down into the subway, fished a token from her purse, and stuck it in the slot. She moved down the ramp amidst jostling commuters, one hand on the strap of her camera, body relaxing to move with the flow, face and mind becoming blank. Her watch and jewelry were in the flight bag; two months earlier a gang kid had ripped the gold chain off her neck. A dark man rushed past, snarling “Fucker” at no one in particular; she looked up at the billboard clock advertising Merit cigarettes above the waiting herd of passengers, learning that it was 9:25 and that, according to the Surgeon General, half the commuters were dying of cancer.

Stopping at the platform, she leaned slightly forward, half listening for the roar of incoming trains. The tunnel was dark and grimy: Noelle, who had once visited a coal mine to photograph the women there, recalled the loss of space and light. An express thundered past, lights flickering like a silent film; when the second train ground screeching to a stop, Noelle moved for its sliding door. Half the door was jammed. She turned sideways, and found a seat between two women who looked neither up nor down. She placed the overnight bag between her feet; without seeming to, she quickly noted the near-cadaver sitting down across from her. He wore a black leather jacket and boots; his rouge, penciled eyebrows and bleached-blond hair gave him the spoiled, sadistic look of a decadent Weimar German in a bad cabaret. The man's head was framed by illiterate graffiti, scrawled in red like the inarticulate warning of some roiling urban underclass. The train rocked; she leaned back, moving with its rhythm, and thought of Peter Carey.

Slowly, over time, she had fallen in love with him.

She had not been surprised when he had called her. What surprised her that first evening, when they had eaten by candlelight at La Chaumière, was the sense that he could slip into her skin, feeling what she felt. His blue eyes seemed to penetrate without threat. Speaking little of himself, he preferred to ask questions and hear her answers. The questions seemed to have no pattern: suddenly she could see her past constructed in his mind from the pieces she had thrown him, as historians project epochs from the bones of animals. He grasped her moods before she did, left when it was good to leave, knew the grace of silence. He touched her. When it was time, they slipped from the restaurant, leaving too much money on the table, and walked to her apartment on West 12th Street, to make love.

She began to undress; he had stopped her, gently grasping both wrists. “Let's not do this,” he said, “as if it were just another thing.” Kissing her mouth, he unbuttoned her without hurry until, their mouths still touching, her blouse lay on the floor, and she felt the front of his shirt grazing her nipples. A chill excitement brushed her skin. Turning, she flicked off the lamp, lit the candle on her bureau. He was naked when she turned again. Candlelight danced on the sinew of his stomach. Looking into his face, she slid out of her jeans. She had been three weeks in Asia, where children starved, and had had no sexual thoughts: now she wanted to feel his life inside her. He reached both hands toward her. She took them. They lay down on the bed. His skin smelled fresh.

He touched her with his mouth and fingertips, so slowly that she felt no invasion when his hand slipped between her legs, but wanted more, hoping fiercely that Peter Carey could do what the others had not done, drive the tension from her body. Entering, he filled her. She grasped him with her arms and legs, began moving …

Afterwards they lay next to each other, fingers touching; Noelle waited, for his questions or his hurt. He had none. Instead they talked of small things until she curled in his arms, and the quiet of his voice, his hand stroking her spine, made her want him again.

She stiffened when he entered her. Peter smiled into her eyes. “This doesn't bear thinking about, Noelle—not that way.” He kissed her neck; his hips began moving, coiling and uncoiling, utterly controlled. She felt the weight of him, gently at first, his slow, insistent rhythm growing in intensity until she became part of it, urgent and demanding. Blood rushed to her womb, tightening …

When she came, body quivering from deep inside her, she cried out her celebration.

“You'll wake the neighbors,” Peter laughed afterwards.

She burrowed next to him. Only later, falling asleep as he held her, did she remember that he had made no sound …

That night he woke up screaming.

She bolted upright, clutching him by instinct. “Is someone here?”

His body felt taut and damp. He stared at her in seeming unrecognition; then his shoulders slumped. “Only my father.” He broke away from her and walked to the window.

“God,” he said, “I hate staring out of strange windows.”

“What is it?”

For ten minutes he said nothing. Then he sat on the end of the bed and, without emphasis or inflection, told her that his father, dying on a weekend he could not remember, had reappeared in nightmares he could not understand. They always ended in his screaming. “In prep school Phillip paid to have me room alone,” he said. “I told the others I had insomnia.”

He would not describe the dream.

Yet as weeks passed, and she trembled beneath his soundless loving, awakening to his screams, Noelle felt that this nightmare was the key to Peter Carey. She knew that, for the first time in his life, he slept only with one woman. But he could not lose himself in passion or say he cared. In her mind, the dream connected this silence to his cries: Peter Carey feared to love her for the hurt that it might cause.

He spoke little of his past. Yet, in that part which remained blank to him, he had been somehow terribly damaged: cool and polished on the surface, Peter awakened from his nightmare a deeply frightened man. Not remembering the crucial two days of his life, he seemed unable to trust the rest of it.

Noelle grew restive: these inhibitions became hers. She knew a life of drugged emotions to be impossible for her, yet pieces of the life they led were the richest she had known. He was sensitive; Noelle guessed that his grasp of nuance, in glance and tone, was the fossil of a childhood to which he gave only clues. One fresh spring day, strolling near the Wollman rink, Peter surprised her by stopping at a sight of increased rarity: a small, brown-haired boy, tended by his nanny, sailing a boat on a pond. Its string had tangled on a branch, and the boy was frustrated. Suddenly Peter moved toward him; he nodded to the nanny, as if to ask, “Is this okay?” and when she smiled, knelt.

“Here.” Peter took the string from the boy's hand; deftly, he worked it free. “Nice boat.”

The boy looked at him. “What's your name?”

“Peter.”

“Do you know Steven Birnbaum?”

Peter considered this. “I don't think so. What does Steven do?”

“We're friends sometimes, and sometimes we fight.” The boy's brow knitted. “But Steven can't come here.”

Noelle had never seen Peter with a child before, and yet he was perfect, quiet and attentive, as if he knew this from some memory. Now he offered, “I guess you're lucky, huh?”

The boy thought. “I
am
,” he decided. “I get to sail my boat. Do you think
you
could sail it?”

“I think so.” Peter's head tilted. “Is there anyone on it?”

The boy looked puzzled for a moment, and then smiled. “Me, and Steven Birnbaum. And my mom.” He thought further. “And maybe Marty—sometimes he stays with her.”