The Dark Descends (3 page)

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.

Still, solitude with an end in sight and solitude without were two different things. It was the latter condition that produced that bugaboo of old wives' tales, the solitary drinker. But what kind of thinking was this? Old wives' tales indeed! If she didn't watch out, she'd be hiding under the bed next.

She opened the refrigerator door and reached for the glass she had put inside to chill. As her fingers curved around it, there was a soft knock at the door.

Something crawled down her spine. A convulsive movement of her hand sent the glass over on its side.

Who on earth— Of course. Bonnie Prince Charlie, or, more formally, C. Bancroft, responding to the note she had left in his mailbox this morning. Anybody else would have to ring the outside doorbell to get into the building. Unless it was the landlord, come to greet his new tenant, which didn't seem likely.

"One moment," she called out.

The glass wasn't broken, fortunately. She righted it, then tried to put the pitcher into the refrigerator, but the shelves were too close together. She returned the pitcher to the counter. What to do? If she asked Bancroft in he could hardly miss seeing the pitcher and might take it into his head to fish for an invitation. Circumstances didn't warrant an invitation, but the way people tended to presume when it was a question of neighbors— On the other hand, Bancroft might have a thing about drinking, and letting him view the preparations for— To hell with it. The only solution seemed to be stashing the pitcher away in the cupboard, and damned if she was going to stoop to that. They would hold the powwow out in the hall.

Stepping outside, Joyce released the door too soon and had to jerk an elbow back to prevent a slam. Most ungraceful, but then she might just as easily have fallen flat on her face. For C. Bancroft was a woman. If indeed this was C. Bancroft.

Doubt was immediately dispelled. "I—got—your—note." the woman said. Her voice was thin and high-pitched, like a little girl's, and she took short breaths between words. "I'm Charlotte Bancroft," she added, the words flowing normally.

"How do you do?"

"How do you do?" Joyce returned. Just like a parrot.

What next? No clue from Charlotte Bancroft, who was clearly waiting. For what? She was the one who had sought the interview; surely she had a reason. Perhaps she was shy.

Joyce ventured a faint smile, Encouragement. Also to keep herself from showing pity, an emotion this woman would evoke as a matter of course. She stood six feet if she stood an inch, and if she wasn't as thin as a broomstick she wasn't much thicker. The right clothes might have helped, but hers—a gray tweed suit of a cut long outmoded, with padded hips, and a long circular skirt that sagged at the hem; stiletto-heeled brown pumps with pointed toes—were all wrong. Getup for a costume party was the thought that came to mind, only to be driven out by the certainty that a costume party or any other kind of party would be out of bounds for anyone so devoid of attractions as this. Poor creature.

And yet the woman wasn't really ugly. Her face was too thin, and her mouse-colored, baby-fine hair had been tormented into frizzy curls by a God-awful permanent, but her features were acceptable enough. The pale-blue eyes, wide awake and observant, not dull and glazed as eyes that shade of blue often were, could have been a definite asset, with strategic use of makeup, the features that weren't so good—" the narrow nose with a rather insipid upward tilt, the thin, pursed lips, the slightly receding chin, the overly long neck—could have been—

"I—stopped by to—to apologize," Charlotte Bancroft said.

Joyce abandoned her mental inventory. Who did she think she was—Elizabeth Arden? "That isn't really necessary."

"Oh, but it is. I kept you awake." The thin lips parted in a smile, baring protruding out-sized upper front teeth—a rabbit's teeth. A pointed pink tongue darted out from under them, moistened the upper lip, moistened the lower lip, retreated. "That's what your note said. That my radio kept you awake."

"Well, as a matter of fact, it woke me up. Out of a sound sleep. You had the volume turned up so high that—"

"I'm very, very sorry. I can't tell you how sorry I am. I know the radio bothers people sometimes. You're not the first to complain about it. But you see, listening to it relaxes me so I can get to sleep. Sometimes I drop tight off while it's playing." There was a plaintive note in Charlotte Bancroft's voice; her head inclined forward on its long stalk of neck. "You do see, don't you?"