Night’s Edge (23 page)

Her fingers touched it, buried deep in the folds of the left-hand pocket, slipped away from it, then grabbed it and flicked it on. Nothing above her on the stairs—she whipped around fast, shaking with shock, saw him….

Saw his shadow.

He was farther away than she’d thought, at the bottom of the stairs behind her, beyond the range of the flashlight’s weak beam. A man’s shape, tall and looming, a darkness against the deeper dark of the hall. Still his voice seemed to be right up against her ear as he whispered, “Bitch…”

And was gone.

Maddie climbed the stairs fast. The light switch was farther from the top than any sane remodeler would find useful, and as she hunted for it, sweeping the feeble beam along the walls, she listened desperately behind
her, wondering if she’d just heard the stair creak, the floor creak.

Tessa
, she thought,
Jesus Christ, Tessa, be okay
….

She flipped the switch. One light went on, far down at the end of the hall. Nothing worked near the stairwell.

In her mind she still heard the whispering. She couldn’t tell where it was coming from, for it seemed to fill the air around her, some of it intelligible, some half heard and foul beyond the borders of sanity.

He’s down there. Behind me
.

Maddie retreated down the main hall toward the light. A corridor gaped to her right and she whipped the watery flashlight beam down it, the knobs of locked doors gleaming furtively in darkness. Something lay on the floor, something small—Maddie didn’t know why she recognized it as one of the bandannas Tessa wore in her hair, but she did. She looked for a light switch but there was none, turned a corner into a dead end, retraced her steps, turned another…

Damn it
, thought Maddie with a sinking heart,
I miscounted. Looks like there’s another floor above this one
….

Stairs, narrower yet and as unlit as the fire escapes in hell, ascended at the end of the short hall….

The next second she realized that Tessa was standing at the foot of them, her back to Maddie, looking up.

“Tessa!”

The girl swung around, startled, catching at the corner of the wall for support. In her tights and leotard she looked about thirteen, her thin form half concealed by a baggy T-shirt, whose old rock-concert logo had been nearly chipped away by time and laundering. Her marvelous black hair was wound up into a neat ballerina’s bun on top of her head.

“Maddie?” She sounded puzzled rather than afraid.

“Are you all right?” Maddie strode down the hall, put a hand behind Tessa’s back, drew her toward the faint light still visible from the main hall. Through leotard and T-shirt she could feel every vertebra, as if she’d put her hand on a pile of jacks. “I was coming back from Al-Medina, and I thought I’d walk you home….”

They turned the corner by a locked door marked,
Vulgarian Records
, Tessa looking around her uncertainly, as if not entirely sure of where she was.

Maddie herself was just praying that the main hall would be empty when they reached it. “I saw your stuff still in the studio….”

There were still, of course, the stairs to get down….

“Thank you.” Tessa sounded hesitant, but then made herself smile. “How was your gig? You get a lot of tips?”

“Decent.”
And I left them downstairs in my bag, like an idiot, for our pal Whispering Smith to help himself
…“Tessa, listen, there’s somebody else in the…”

They stepped around the corner and there he was.

Maddie’s breath jerked in her lungs, and Tessa stepped toward the tall shadow and said, “So what happened to the lights?”

“When I fired up the Doomsday Machine to destroy the planet, I had the microwave on and I blew a circuit.” He stepped into the weak glimmer of the flashlight: brown eyes, pleasantly craggy features, dark, stiff hair hanging in disarray over his forehead. Under a greenish-brown wool sweater the tails of a much-faded denim shirt protruded, finished off by patched and battered jeans. “You need something? Other than a better flashlight?”

“Maddie,” said Tessa, “this is Phil Cooper. He plays
piano for the ballet classes—he’s got a studio here in the building.”

“Hi.” Maddie’s heart was still pounding so hard it almost nauseated her. Her fingers closed around the pepper-spray can in her pocket, though her common sense told her that unless he were armed, the man probably couldn’t take on the two of them. She wanted to pull Tessa back out of arm’s reach but didn’t know how to manage it unobtrusively.

“Maddie’s my roommate,” continued the girl blithely. “She dances over at Al-Medina—
and
reads tarot cards.” Her pride and delight in both of these accomplishments rang in her voice. “She’s really good.”

“Remind me to consult you the next time I get offered a recording contract.” His voice was pleasant, husky and a little hesitant, but Maddie could see that he didn’t miss the way she drew back from him.

“I suggest you save your money for a lawyer,” she said. “Tessa, we’ve got to get out of here. It’s almost midnight.”

Tessa’s eyes widened with shocked guilt. “No way! Oh, sweetie, I’m sorry….” She let Maddie pull her down the stairs, Phil trailing behind. Maddie almost told him to get lost but decided that it was better if she knew where he was. The lights worked fine once they got down to the Dance Loft.

“Makes sense,” said Phil cheerily as the bright glare flooded the halls. “If the Dayforths left, the owners would be stuck with two whole floors to rent out. They don’t give a rat’s ass what we think about them up on the sixth floor.”

Maddie said nothing. As they collected their bags Tessa chatted with Phil about the long explanation Quincy the caretaker had given her concerning the
building’s electricity—“I swear the man took twenty minutes to tell me about buying a lightbulb! Well, first he told me about how electricity worked,
then
he told me about the lightbulb….”

“They’ve got a twelve-step program for that,” said Phil as he followed the two women down that last long spooky flight of stairs to the lobby. “On-and-On-Anon. You ladies be okay walking over to the subway?”

“We’re fine,” Maddie snapped, and stepped out onto the stoop. Phil remained in the building and gave them a polite wave as Tessa followed Maddie out the door.

The night’s icy mist had almost thickened to rain. Maddie’s boots knocked sharply on the wet pavement as they headed for the subway stop on Park, making her glance back more than once, as if she expected to see someone drifting behind them in the dark. “Is he the night watchman for the school as well as the piano player?” she asked after they had walked a little way in silence. “Or does he just like sneaking around old buildings in the dark?”

“I think he lives there these days.” Tessa huddled her pea coat more closely around her and glanced worriedly at the sharp note in her roommate’s voice. “But don’t tell Mrs. Dayforth, okay? He rents this studio on the top floor and writes music, and about two weeks ago his roommate at his apartment told him his girlfriend was moving in, so Phil had to vacate—way harsh, I thought. I mean,” Tessa added contritely, “if you wanted me to boogie so you could bring in a boy, I know you’d give me more than a day to find someplace else. Horny is one thing, but you don’t got to be rude.”

“Sweetheart,” smiled Maddie, “after my previous experience in the male-roommate department, I promise
you, you have nothing to worry about.” They walked on for another half block, detouring around the ubiquitous clusters of trash cans at the curb, glancing down narrow areaways where lights burned in tailor shops, button stores, basement clubs full of smoke. At the corner of Lexington Avenue an all-night Korean grocery glowed like a jewel with produce, bottles, steam trays filled with Oriental chicken salad and lasagna. At length—so as not to let her mind return to the male-roommate department—Maddie asked, “What were you doing up on the sixth floor? Why did you go there?”

“I don’t…” Tessa hesitated. “I guess I thought I heard a noise or something. Or…or voices talking.” In the yellow glare of the grocery’s lamps her dark pixie brows drew down over the straight little nose; her glance darted sidelong to Maddie again. “I think maybe it had to have been my imagination.”

“Did someone call you? Or…or whisper to you?”

Theresa shook her head. “Whisper what?”

Maddie shivered, remembering the note of vile gloating in the voice, as much as the obscenity of the words. Had it really been Phil Cooper? It was hard to put that hoarse voice together with the piano player’s easygoing friendliness. But then, she thought, she’d trusted Sandy, too.

L
YING AWAKE IN HER BED
later, staring at the street lamps’ distant glare reflected on the hanging sheets that separated her “bedroom” niche from the rest of the big studio apartment, Maddie thought about Sandy.

Had it really been ten and a half months since that deep voice had spoken to her over the phone: “Mrs. Weinraub?”

“I
was
Mrs. Weinraub,” Maddie had replied care
fully. “But I’m no longer married to Sandy Weinraub.” And she’d thought,
Oh, God, not another collection agency….
Though she could no longer be responsible for his debts after the date separation was filed, she still lived with the nightmare of some unsuspected creditor crawling out of the woodwork, some hitherto unrevealed legal technicality that would haul her back into the craziness of poor Sandy’s existence.

But the deep voice had said, “I’m Officer O’Neill of the NYPD. Mr. Weinraub’s body was found by his landlord this morning. His death appears to have been from natural causes. We’d like you to come down and identify it.”

It still seemed like last week.

Had he always lied to her? Maddie was still trying to figure that one out. Nothing in her peaceful—if rather obsessive—childhood had prepared her for marriage to a man whose life was a surreptitious quest for chemical oblivion. Certainly nothing had prepared her to look behind Sandy’s intelligence and charm into the nightmare of addiction and lies. Asking him to leave had been one of the hardest things she’d ever done, and for nearly a year she’d lived with the pleading phone messages, the desperate requests for money, the fear that she’d encounter him one day panhandling, homeless, in the street.

And then he was gone.

Natural causes, if you could call the results of a lifetime of drug and alcohol abuse “natural.”

And looking back at nine years of memories, from the moment she’d walked into that first writing class at Tulane and been struck speechless by the youthful teacher’s slow, wry smile, Maddie still couldn’t hate
him, or be angry at him. He certainly had not torn her life to pieces in malice.

According to everyone she’d talked to, that was just something addicts did.

Or something men did. Maddie wasn’t sure which. All the promises, and all the lies, and all the things she’d given up, trying to make a relationship work with someone who wasn’t present in his body upward of fifty percent of the time. Had it been different, she wondered, when first they’d met? When first she’d dropped out of college to go to New York with him, to be his adored one and his admiring wife? Or had she just been too naive to notice?

She stretched out her hand to scratch Baby’s black-and-white ears. The cat put a paw over Maddie’s wrist and began to lick her hand; at times Maddie thought Baby considered herself Maddie’s kitten, at times, Maddie’s mother. Baby had been Sandy’s cat, a useful lesson, Maddie thought, in human relations. Animals only understood what you did, not what you said. When Maddie had begun looking at what Sandy did, and not listening to what he said, the mist of infatuation started to clear from her eyes.

But she’d never ceased loving him.

On the other side of the sheet-wall, she heard the springs of the old sofa creak softly under Tessa’s too-slight weight. The girl cried out something, a muffled sob in her sleep. Maddie half sat up, for her young roommate suffered occasionally from nightmares. Maddie couldn’t imagine how, after three hours of class, ten hours ofwork and individual practice on top of that, Tessa had the energy even to dream. She listened, ready to go out and wake her if her nightmare continued, but the sound was not repeated.

Did she dream of her parents? Maddie wondered. Of the chaos she’d only hinted at in their conversations: her father’s drunken rages, her mother’s screaming efforts to control him, the ugly separation battle that had resulted in Tessa traveling back and forth from El Paso to San Francisco several times a year? Was she imagining herself at the age of eight, alone on a Greyhound bus?

Or the fears about what she’d do if she couldn’t get into a ballet company, couldn’t get a job doing what she loved?

Or did she dream of the darkness of the Glendower Building? Closing her eyes, Maddie saw Tessa again, standing in the darkness at the bottom of the stairway to the seventh floor, listening to a man’s voice whispering obscenities while he reached out to her with his shadow hands.

“C
AN
I
JOIN YOU?”

Maddie turned, startled, from watching the dirty granite doorway of the Glendower Building across the street, and looked up to see Phil Cooper standing beside her table.

So he exists in daytime, and outside the building.

And the next instant,
What’s
that
about?

...little sluts are all alike…good for one thing…

He seemed very tall, standing over her in the heatless morning brightness from the window of the Owl Café. She took a deep breath.

“Okay.”

He drew back a bit from the chill in her tone. For a moment she thought he was going to say,
Well, don’t do me any big favors,
and walk off. She couldn’t tell whether she’d feel angry at him or immensely relieved if he did.

He set his coffee cup on the table and said—without sitting—“Look, I’m sorry if I pissed you off with that stupid crack about consulting you next time I signed a contract. Tessa tells me you take your card-reading pretty seriously….” He winced and added, “So now that I’ve shoved my
other
foot into my mouth, I’ll just roll myself out the door. But I really didn’t mean it to sound like it did.” He picked up the cup and was turning to go when Maddie laughed.

“You’ll never make it out the door with both feet crammed in your mouth.”

“Hide and watch me.” His shoulders relaxed and he came back. “If the lady in the yoga studio on the fifth floor can walk around on her hands with her ankles crossed behind her neck, I can sure get out with both feet in my mouth.” He must have read the look in Maddie’s eye, because he set his cup on the table again and sat down. For a man who was presumably sleeping on the floor of a practice studio he was clean and shaved, if scruffy. His hair was clean and still slightly damp—Maddie guessed he was sneaking showers in the Dance Loft’s dressing rooms.

Mrs. Dayforth would be beyond pissed if anyone ratted on him.

At this hour, shortly after two, the Owl was emptying out, the clerical staff and warehouse handlers from all the small companies in the neighborhood heading back to work and leaving the battered tables and the hard-worn bentwood chairs to the dance students, the lawyers from the offices overhead and their clients, and stray shoppers from Lexington Avenue.

He added with a rueful grin, “I’ve had lots of practice at it.”

“And I’ve had lots of practice hearing people make cracks about the cards. People believe in them or they don’t. There’s no reason why you should.” Maddie spread her hands. “You didn’t…” She hesitated again, looking into those brown eyes and wondering,
Was it the same man?

Was it the same voice?

The smell of him certainly wasn’t the same, that horrible rancid stink of grimy wool and cologne.

If she asked him, would he tell her the truth?

“You didn’t hear anyone else in the building the other night, did you?” And as she spoke the words something in her flinched and she wished she could snatch them back, shove them in her pocket and walk away and be safe.

“Did you?”

It was him.

Was it him?

He’d drawn back from her at the question, suddenly wary. Maddie shook her head. “Tessa tells me you’re sleeping there these days.”

“Shh!” He hunched his shoulders and put a finger dramatically to his lips. “If the building management heard that they’d terminate my lease, and then I’d
really
be in trouble. I’m hoping it’s just temporary, till I build up enough of a nest egg to get a place…but in this town you need a nest egg the size of a forklift. Between playing for the ballet classes I teach private piano students in my studio. If I lost that place I’d be back bustin’ rods in Tulsa.”

Maddie’s eyebrows went up. “So you’re really in construction?”

“I
was
really in construction,” said Phil, then he looked down at his coffee cup, turning it so the handle lined up with the edge of the table. “Or rather, I was always really a musician but I had to do the construction thing when I lived at home. My dad would pay for me to go to college in engineering or business—he’s a contractor—but music?”

He shrugged and glanced up to meet her eyes again. “That’s one reason I wasn’t in the best mood last night. It was my birthday—the big three-oh. Sleeping on the floor in an empty building wasn’t the way I thought I’d be spending it.”

Maddie looked down at his hands. Big hands, knotty from carrying steel rebars—“bustin’ rods,” the lowest level of the construction trade—but long-boned and supple. A musician’s hands. His face, in daylight, seemed younger than it had last night in spite of the lines around the corners of the eyes, the few flecks of silver in the thick dark hair.

She found herself wondering under what circumstances he’d acquired the old break in the bridge of his nose, the short scar under his left eye. Wondering what he’d gone through to come here, and what kind of music he wrote in that desperately held studio on the sixth floor.

“I sent him the two CDs I cut,” said Phil, more quietly. “Last time I was home I found them in a drawer, still wrapped in plastic. My stepmom keeps asking me how come I don’t write the kind of music real people like?” He caught himself and glanced up at her, apologetic. “Sorry. You’re not into classical music, are you?”

“You know,” said Maddie solemnly, folding her hands beneath her chin, “I tried for years to work out a belly dance routine to Mozart’s
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
, and I just couldn’t fit in a drum solo.”

“Ow!” He flinched ruefully. “I’m sorry. ‘Man develops third foot, shoves it in mouth—film at eleven.’ I don’t seem to be doing too well. It’s just after years of having people’s eyes glaze over when I talk about music…”

“I run into the same thing,” said Maddie gently, “from all those people who think a belly dancer is the same as a stripper.”

Phil looked away. In a Victorian novel, Maddie reflected, he would have blushed.

“Have you ever seen a good belly dancer perform?”

“Um…uh…”

In a topless bar with the other construction workers,
she thought—she knew.

And then, like the recollection of a nightmare, in her mind she heard again…
little sluts are all alike….

And saw the wary look that had come into his eyes when he’d dodged her question and asked instead,
Did you?

What are you doing sitting here talking to this man? Much less imagining what he’d look like on a construction site at the age of twenty-four in an undershirt?

Maddie got quickly to her feet. Instead of saying,
You should come on over to Al-Medina and check it out some evening,
she opened her mouth to retort,
You figure anyone who dances for tips couldn’t tell the difference between Rossini and Tchaikovsky without a crib sheet and a copy of
101 Classical Favorites
in her Discman?

Sandy had had the same attitude—it was due to his good-natured contempt for the art that Maddie had abandoned dancing, nine years ago.

But the genuine distress in Phil’s eyes as he looked up at her—the helpless apology for having, as he thought, inadvertently angered her yet again—stopped her. For a moment there was silence between them, Maddie looking down into his face as he sat with his big hands around the coffee cup, an exile like herself who couldn’t go home.

She let her breath out. “There’s Tessa,” she said, nodding across the street at the thin pea-coated figure on the steps of the Glendower Building. “I guess I’ll see you around the school.”

And she added, though she didn’t know why, “Good luck.”

“Thank you,” he said. “These days I sure need it.”

S
HE INTERCEPTED
T
ESSA
halfway across the street and suggested a quick lunch at the Twenty-ninth Street Café—a little to her roommate’s surprise, since they usually had a sandwich at the Owl on the days when Maddie taught at the SoHo YWCA. Tessa, Maddie noticed, barely ate anything; she hoped her young roommate would go back to the apartment and take some rest between her afternoon class and the start of her late shift at Starbucks, but she knew it wasn’t likely.

Afterward, Maddie managed to put Phil Cooper from her mind for the rest of the day. She had five scheduled card readings in the candlelit back room of the Darkness Visible bookstore in the West Village, and two more walk-ins while she was there—forty dollars per half hour, a substantial contribution to the rent.

Only that night, as she took the subway home from her usual Al-Medina gig, did Phil return to her mind.

This was partly due to Josi, the other dancer at the restaurant that night, a kittenish California blonde who had, Maddie suspected, gotten most of her experience in topless clubs. She was younger than Maddie and stunningly pretty, and had a habit of taking drinks from customers’ glasses, or wiping her face with a napkin filched off a businessman’s lap, or casually adjusting her overflowing bra mid-shimmy. If she thought a man would stump up a bigger tip she’d invite him to tuck the money into her bra, which was adorned with large, pink, rhinestoned lips, rather than her belt. Everyone was thoroughly entertained: the Americans in the audience didn’t know the difference, and the Arabs and Iranians were simply enchanted. But, as Abdullah, the owner, confided to Maddie later, it wasn’t really dancing.

But when Maddie’s own set came, and she trailed out
in a swirl of purple veils and Farid Al-Atrash’s timeless dance music, all her annoyance washed away—with Josi, with Phil, with the scheduling directors of the SoHo Y, with her mother….

For a time there was just dancing. The Moroccan and Egyptian waiters—and Abdullah himself—drifted in from the other dining rooms to watch, clapping along with the music and gathering up dropped dollar bills and her discarded veil for her after the set was done.

Josi, thought Maddie as she rode home on the subway later—though the girl was perfectly sweet and good-natured—was probably what Phil thought of when he heard the word
belly dancer.

Yet he would not leave her mind. As she sat wedged between a couple of home-going green-haired club rats and an elderly gentleman reading a Yiddish newspaper, their conversation at the Owl returned to her. She remembered again the shape of those long hands, strong and work-hardened and deft-looking as they cradled the coffee cup. Remembered the fleeting downward quirk of the corner of his mouth. Spending your birthday sleeping on the floor of an empty building was probably enough to make anyone flippant.

Had that disappointed father, that clueless stepmom, even remembered to send him a card?

I was always really a musician but I had to do the construction thing when I lived at home….

Maddie’s stomach curled in sympathy as she recalled the look on her mother’s face, patronizingly amused when Maddie had come in breathless over that first belly dance class.
Honestly, what will they be teaching
at that studio next?
And later, in those glass-sharp accents of disapproval,
Dearest, I understand you wanting to branch out a little bit, to improve your ballet, but what’s wrong with tap? Your cousin Lacy takes tap
.

Cousin Lacy was also a cheerleader, a modeling-school graduate, a steady participant in teen and sub-teen beauty pageants since kindergarten and a practicing bulimic who was routinely two hours late to everything because it took her that long to get her makeup and hair perfect before emerging from her room.

Maddie couldn’t explain what it was about the visceral joyfulness of Middle Eastern dance that drew her. Only that when she entered that first class at sixteen, for the first time she had felt that she could dance un-criticized and imperfect, for herself and not for her mother, her teachers, some future competition judges.

Only for herself.

She wondered if Tessa would know where she could get hold of one of Phil’s CDs. Or both of them.

She dreamed about Phil that night.

Dreamed of the warm, lapping waters of the Gulf of Mexico, on whose shores her parents used to rent a summer house. Dreamed of lying on the beach, below the yellow-flowered tangles of wild jasmine, in the perfect restful stillness of the gathering dusk. Phil was lying beside her, on one of those faded old blankets that came with the rental house—only there was no house in sight, no other houses at all, just two crumbling Roman pillars marking the path down to the beach, and the luminous colors of the sky.

She said, “I wanted you to see this place. It’s quiet. The world is too noisy.”

And Phil’s hand stroked her shoulder, drawing her
down to him, so that her long hair veiled his face. “Were you happy here?” he asked, and she said, “Yes.”

His hand slid up to the back of her neck and she lowered her face to his, their lips meeting, the soft whisper of his breath warm on her cheek. “It’s safe,” she said for no reason she could recall.