Little Doors (13 page)

Revelation burst on Edward then, and he dared to get to his feet and interrupt. “You mean to possess her.”

“I already have.”

The officers had drifted back silently during Edward’s audience, and now stood outside the door of the hut. Sally Lunn spoke softly.

“It only remains for you, as Lucy’s husband, to marry me.”

Edwin Landseer, the Plowman, was helping Edward to remove his clothes, while Betty Rhinebeck, the Attendant, was slowly pulling the robe off Sally Lunn’s wrinkled shoulders. The Presbyter was aspersing them both with crisp water, while Alice Cotten, the Thresher, plumped up a bed of fragrant herbs and ferns. As Edward stared, Sally Lunn’s robe pooled about her waist.

She was no longer old. She was young as spring, a nymph with unmottled skin and abundant flesh, supple as a reed. Her hair was as thick as wheat in a field. She looked like Lucy and like every woman he had ever coveted. A heady perfume rose from her loins, indistinguishable from the earth.

Nancy Rook, the Sluicekeeper, was behind Sally Lunn, lowering her backward to the bracken. The goddess dug her heels into the ground and arched her back off the ground so her robe could be removed from underneath her, then finally pulled off her uplifted feet when she settled back down.

Calvin Culver, the Sower, guided Edward between her legs.

It was infinitely more intense than what Edward had experienced with Lucy in the garden. And that had been the headiest sex he had ever had.

He rose to meet the sun.

He answered the moon’s pull.

He tasted the earth.

He was a long, hot root in the soil.

He found the spring, the honeyed well on the hill, and drank deeply.

The act felt as immemorially old as the grinding of one stone against another, with the grain being crushed between.

Then he flowered whitely, like an anemone.

When it was over, he lay for a time in Sally Lunn’s arms, eyes closed. He dared not look whether she was young or old again.

“Would you die for me right now, Edward?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I am pleased to say it won’t be necessary. But someday I might ask again.”

After a quiet interval, he somehow knew he was expected to get up and redon his clothes, so he did. The sashes came to lead him back downhill. He looked over his shoulder once, like Orpheus. The hut was empty.

The fires were dying down, the people dispersing. He found Lucy. Her hair was crazy, and her shirt hung out of her pants.

Driving back home, he was too baffled at being alive to be able to talk.

But in bed, holding the wife he had never known, whom he had so recently remarried, he found his voice and asked, “What I did tonight—it doesn’t bother you?”

Sleepily, Lucy said, “But why should it, dear? She was only me.”

SLEEP IS WHERE YOU FIND IT

[co-written with Marc Laidlaw]

1

Sunday Morning in Manhattan

Down in the Lincoln Tunnel, alone with his headlamps and the dashboard’s glow, he hears a voice and thinks for one second that it’s the police dispatcher. “Tonight’s the night,” it says, a tiny little voice.

Weegee scowls to himself and answers back, “What do you know? Tonight’s always the night.”

But the radio is mute; really. Under the river there’s hardly even static. He looks around and discovers a girl fading in like another station, her own signal getting stronger and brighter as he nears the end of the tunnel. For a lingering moment she’s nothing but a silvery glow condensing out of darkness, pure potential, and then suddenly she’s flesh, sitting half-naked on the fabric-covered seat, her grimy right elbow on the passenger’s armrest.

Not bad
, Weegee thinks to himself.
The Darkroom’s being nice to me tonight.

He’s used to far worse, and it’s hard not to squirm when he thinks of all the things that have appeared next to him on other occasions, messing up the seat covers. The Mob hits that insist on talking with half their faces blown away; the weary-looking accident victims, stanching bloody noses; the roasts, with their skin so crisp and blackened that it crackles as they reach out wistfully for a puff off his cigar. Why they hound him, Weegee doesn’t know. It’s as if they consider him responsible somehow. But then this whole nighttime city, and everyone in it, has a haunted look.

It’s a relief not to share his car with something that makes him want to puke or scream or bawl his eyes out; but even so, Weegee has made it a matter of principle not to speak to the spooks. With the worst of them, he stops at the mouth of the tunnel and makes them get out and walk … or crawl. But tonight—well, he’s tempted. Strongly tempted.

The kid must be about twelve. Glossy black hair pulled back with a Li’l Orphan Annie clip to reveal the delicate whorls of one perfect ear. Rosy lips and dark eyes, slightly Spic or Portagee features. She wears only a black skirt and incredibly filthy white bobby sox. In her lap, she’s got a gray tiger kitten gripped so tightly by its throat that the creature can’t even mew.

Her adolescent breasts are obviously new as a Brooklyn dawn and twice as pretty—not to mention almost as rare a sight to Weegee. The nipples are pink as frosting flowers on a birthday cake, so pink—

Weegee tears his eyes off the girl’s chest and puts them back on the road. The end of the Lincoln Tunnel has appeared ahead, although out there is only another order of darkness.

Now he recognizes her, remembers where he caught her. He hasn’t thought of her in … how long? It was a sweltering summer night, and leaning from his tenement window you could see, all up and down the side of the building, whole families out sleeping on their fire escapes. He’d spotted her by the faint light from the street, the oldest of nearly a dozen kids sprawled on the bars below. A brief flash from his camera, the secret glow of infrared, and he pulled back inside to develop the image and study it in secret. He could still remember the voyeur’s thrill on discovering that she was almost naked, an innocent bud cloistered in the safe darkness, never knowing he’d been watching. He had never been quite sure how he felt about that. That’s why she’s come for him, isn’t it?

She’s an unresolved tension, a fragment of undigested guilt, in her way more troubling than the corpses.

He has seen girls her age hooking, sure. The places he goes, you see everything after a while. But in his mind, in his photographs, he’d always thought of the girl as kept safe somehow, fixed in that innocent moment, protected not only by the other children but by his photography, as if the infrared flash were an angel’s halo hanging over her.

Obviously she isn’t safe anymore. She’d slipped down from that fire escape, unknit herself from the limbs of her brothers and sisters, and found her way to him in the darkness, in the tunnel, where everything found him eventually, each with its fresh burden of unwelcome thoughts, its chain of unsavory associations.…

She’s only a girl, but she reminds him of a woman—reminds him of all sorts of things he can never really have, thanks to the camera.

When was the last time I had a woman, one I didn’t have to buy like a dancehall hostess?
Weegee asks himself.
Can’t get close to one with this damned camera always in front of my face, hanging at my hip, keeping me up all night without sleep.…

Weegee shakes himself out of his self-pity. Aloud—he’s a talker, Weegee, loves to talk to anyone, high or low, young or old, and in a pinch his own forlorn forty-five-year-old self will do—Weegee says, “Oh, shut up, you rummy old bastard. If you wanna cry, go buy yourself one of those heartbreak pillows at Lewis and Conger’s, fer chrissakes.”

He looks reproachfully at his warped reflection in the windshield. The cigar ember flares orange in the corner of his distorted mouth. Out of the corner of his right eye, he sees the girl coolly watching him, saying nothing.

As he drives from the gas-fumed tunnel and out under streetlamps again, both car speakers kick in at full volume, a loony Rossini overture tinkling from one while the other crackles with the police dispatcher’s voice. (It’s illegal for the average citizen to have one of these rigs in his jalopy. But Weegee has special dispensation from the police, who always welcome the ’38 Chevy coupe with license plates 5728Y, its trunk stuffed full with cigars, film, flashbulbs, flashlights, a pair of fireman’s hipboots, disguises, even a typewriter and a ream of paper, for quick captioning of photos, notation of who, what, and where, of disaster, death, and—too rarely—laughter.)

The dashboard clock says one minute past midnight, but for Weegee the night is just beginning.

Neon light from a hundred signs-HORSEFLESH SOLD HERE; ROOMS 35 CENTS & UP; TROMMER’S WHITE LABEL—slides liquidly up the maroon hood of the big car. A salami rolls across the seat as he takes a corner. He wolfs down an oily slice of meat he’s slightly surprised to find in the fingers of his free hand. He can’t remember cutting it. Can’t, in fact, remember where he was headed before the tunnel. Consciousness is fragmentary, a sign of exhaustion. When was the last time he slept? He tells everyone—himself included—that he sleeps in the day, but when was it ever day?

Weegee wipes his greasy fingers on a wad of teletype notes that poke from his jacket pocket like a stiff handkerchief. Idly, pointedly ignoring the girl, he uncrinkles the sheets, holds them up at eye-level, so he can still scan the street.

They’re blank, except for salami grease.

“What’s this, Mister?”

The girl’s voice startles him. It’s the voice that had said, “Tonight’s the night.”

Weegee looks to where she’s pointing. It’s the camera resting on the seat between them. Always between him and everyone else.

2

Camera Tips

The camera is a 4 x 5 Speed Graphic with a Kodak Ektar lens in a Supermatic shutter, all American made. The film inside is Super Pancro Press Type B. A flashbulb is always used, since most pictures are taken at night. But even when shots are made by daylight, the flash is still used. A Graflex flash synchronizer is employed. Exposure is always the same: 1/200 of a second, stop f/16. That is, at a distance of ten feet. At six feet, it may be stepped down to f/32. Focusing is always at either ten or six feet.

There is no time for anything else on a story.

3

The Curious Ones

The girl releases her cat’s neck, her hands still arched around its belly, ready to grab. The animal inches forward to sniff the camera.

Ignoring her question, which lingers in the air like a prostitute’s recriminatory perfume, Weegee continues to drive down Forty-second Street, past crowds outside theaters and bars, idlers and gawkers, lovers and fighters, musicians and sailors, the people of a sleepless New York poised on the precipice of another Sunday morning hangover. He’s wondering just how seriously he’ll have to take this phantom.

It’s a slow night, though still early. Weegee is jumpy, anxious for distraction, despite the fact that something always happens, and he always turns up just in time to capture it. It’s the girl making him nervous, isn’t it? He reaches forward and twiddles the Rossini to soften it slightly, then turns up the police radio, alert to any news that might concern him. The radio gives out a soft babble, like the voice of a crowd, teasing him with the sense of speech but no actual words. But he rarely needs the police; he gets his instructions from somewhere else.

The car slides over the streets like the planchette on a grimy Ouija board, spelling out clues he’s too close to read, rolling over letters in ripped-up broadsides, smashing the labels on bottles and cans; ghost fingers move him this way and that, from “Hello” to “Goodbye.” Sometimes he thinks that if he takes his hands off the wheel, the car will keep driving, taking him to another crime’s aftermath, another dark scene that is his alone to illuminate. Something is coming, something developing in this Darkroom the size of Manhattan. He’s at the mercy of forces that make him feel small and alone. Ghost fingers tickle the back of his neck.

But it’s the kitten’s whiskers. The creature comes crawling over the back of the seat, hunting for the salami. Instinctively he reaches for the camera, pulling it toward him, as if the cat had any interest in it.

“Where did you get it?”

Against his better judgment, Weegee answers her question with another.

“Get what?”

“The camera.”

The question makes no sense. He’s always had the camera. There was never a time without it, this appendage vital as his hand, foot, or balls. So baffled is Weegee that all he can do is repeat her last words.

“The camera?”

The girl unselfconsciously lifts one arm and scratches her downy pit. The breast on that side flattens, the pink nipple rising slightly up her ribcage.

The kid yawns, and Weegee thinks,
Kinda late for her to be up. Kids need their sleep.…