The Moonlight (4 page)

The bed still had its boxspring and mattress, covered with a single sheet which he took off and tossed into the bedroom across the hall.  There was a linen closet next to the bathroom, where he found a pile of sheets.  He took two from the middle, so that only their outer edges were yellowed and dusty.  There were also half a dozen blankets, pillow cases and, oddly, only two pillows.  The bed, after he had made it, looked quite appealing.  He sat down on the edge and heard a satisfying squeak from the bedsprings.

Then, after he had swept the baseboards and the exposed hardwood floor around the edges of the room, he went to work with the carpet sweeper.  He hadn’t been at it for more than thirty seconds when he uncovered the most appalling stain he had ever seen in his life.

It was a kind of reddish brown and badly faded, and not only by time—someone had once worked very hard to get this out, but without much success.  Phil reached down and touched it, but there was nothing his fingertips could find except carpet.

With the care of an archeologist, he worked the sweeper around to discover the perimeters of the stain and found that it measured about two feet by ten inches and was roughly kidney-shaped.  He picked up the carpet at its nearest edge and peered underneath.  The stain had gone right through to the other side.

What the hell was it?  What had happened in this room?  And when?  Somebody, in the distant past, had made a hell of a mess.

He took a luggage rack out of the closet, set it under the window, and laid his open suitcase across it.  He hung his coats and trousers in the wardrobe and his shirts and underwear in the chest of drawers.

There was an unopened carton of cigarettes at the bottom of the suitcase—you never knew what emergencies could befall you in foreign parts, and he put this in the drawer of his night table, upon which rested a reading lamp with a suspiciously blackened bulb and his newly liberated ashtray.  He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the bed, taking a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket.

When he looked inside, he realized he had smoked the last one, so he sat up, opened the drawer of his night table, peeled up the flap of the carton with his thumb and took out a fresh pack.  He lay down again and lit the cigarette with a paper match.  As the smoke filled his lungs he began to relax.

It was almost five o’clock.  What would he do for dinner?  Walk into Brookville, he imagined, and try that seafood place.  Then buy the necessities at the grocery store and walk them back.  It probably wasn’t more than a mile each way and the road was straight, so he was entitled to hope he wouldn’t get lost.

It had been a good day, he decided.  A long day—he had had to catch red eye flight from San Francisco—but one that had required no complicated decisions and was ending with him sleeping under a roof he actually owned.  It was okay if he hadn’t inherited the Waldorf Astoria, because at least it was his.  It would bring in something, enough to help him get his life back on track.

. . . . .

“You’re a new face,” the waitress said, smiling.  She was between twenty-five and thirty, a dishwater blonde with a knowing face and no wedding ring.  The body under her rayon uniform, while not heavy, suggested a generosity that made Phil smile back.

“I’m one of the old established families.  I’ve lived up the street from here for about four hours now.”

They both laughed.  Phil was sitting in the designated smoking section of the Lobster Pot restaurant, which was empty enough that the waitress probably didn’t feel too many demands on her time.

“What’s ‘Manhattan Clam Chowder’?” Phil asked, studying the menu.  He hadn’t had a friendly conversation with a member of the opposite sex in longer than he cared to think about, so he felt an impulse to string this one out.

The waitress shrugged.

“If you like tomato soup, you’ll like it,” she said.  “Otherwise, stick with the original.  What’s the trouble—don’t they have clam chowder where you come from.”

“Only in cans.”

It occurred to him that he didn’t even know if that was true.  Why had he never eaten seafood in California?  What had he been doing with his time?

“Why don’t you order for me,” he went on, closing his menu.  “Anything but lobster.”

This seemed to please her.  “You like salad or cole slaw?” she asked.  “You care for a drink first?”

“Sure.”

She brought him a gin and tonic and then, about twenty minutes later, a plate with more food on it than had been seen in living memory.

“That’s bluefish,” she said.  “It tastes better than it looks. And those are potato pancakes.”  She set down a bowl of salad that looked like it had been made by Salvador Dali.

“Cook makes a nice ranch dressing.  You’ll like it.  You want to order dessert now or you want to think about it?  We got apple pie, blueberry pie, chocolate mousse cake, cheese cake, crème caramel, and ice cream—chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, rum raisin and mint.  Dessert’s included. You want regular coffee, decaf, or tea?”

He didn’t know what to say, particularly since it seemed to matter so much to her.  It was with some difficulty that he fought down the temptation to ask her to run through the list again, just for the pleasure of listening to her.

“What do you like?”

She seemed to give the matter about ten seconds of very serious thought before she said, “I like the chocolate mousse cake, but then I’m a chocolate freak.”

She smiled with something between embarrassment and pleasure, as if she had let him in on the secret of her success.

“Chocolate mousse cake then.”

“Regular coffee, decaf or tea?  Everybody’s got an opinion on
that.
”

“Regular coffee.”

“You want it with your dessert or now?”

“Whichever’s easier.”

“O-kay,” she answered, stretching out the first syllable and then letting the word go with a snap.  He noticed that as she left she glanced at him again over her shoulder.

It was been a long time since he had flirted with a woman, if that was what he had been doing.

Dinner was good and even the chocolate mousse cake wasn’t bad, although he wasn’t a big fan of chocolate.  He left a bigger tip than he could afford and the waitress gave him another one of her great-hearted smiles and said, “Bye now.  Don’t be a stranger.”

He decided he would eat here a couple of times a week and maybe strike up enough of an acquaintance to ask her out for a drink sometime.  Except how would he do that if he didn’t have a car?  He would have to get a car—maybe lease one.  It didn’t have to be a Rolls Royce.

In town for not even one day and he had a house, was planning to get a car, and had a semi-serious lead on a lady.  Maybe his luck was changing.

He walked back through the darkness, since out here they didn’t seem to believe in street lights, carrying two plastic shopping bags from the Grand Union.

About a quarter of the way along the Old River Road—was there a river anywhere near here? he hadn’t seen one—he shifted both bags to his right hand and tried to get a cigarette out of his shirt pocket.  The problem was that the pack, which was still half full, came out with the cigarette and dropped into the impenetrable blackness.

“Oh shit,” he murmured, stooping over to feel around in the weeds which, just there, were knee-high and wet.  He looked up to notice the glittering silver spray of somebody’s lawn sprinkler coming at him and managed to dodge out of the way just in time.

Deciding that there were limits to what anyone should be prepared to risk for half a pack of cigarettes, which, in any case, were probably soaked through, he lit his last remaining smoke and continued on his way.  Fortunately, he was well provided for at home.

Except for a quart of milk and two pint cartons of ice cream, which went in the refrigerator, he just left everything on the kitchen counter, not even bothering to take them out of the shopping bags.  He discovered he was tired.  It had been a long day, and he wasn’t used to walking.  He went upstairs to his newly-designated bedroom.

It was only about twenty to nine, and Phil knew that if he went to bed now he wouldn’t be able to sleep.  Too much had happened, and lately he had grown unaccustomed to an eventful life—he needed some time to wind down.

There was no television set around and, except for the prehistoric
National Geographics
upstairs, there was nothing to read.  Fortunately, smoking was a vice that could be practiced under almost any circumstances.  He opened his night table drawer.

He had shaken a pack out and was almost ready to put the carton back when he realized that three packs were gone.

He had opened the carton that afternoon—he knew that.  He had taken out one pack, which he had lost on the way back from dinner, and he was holding a second in his hand.

So where was the third pack?

Maybe it had fallen out into his suitcase.  He checked, but it wasn’t there.  How could it be?  He had opened the carton
after
he had taken it out.  So what was going on?

The house was locked, and there were no signs that anything had been disturbed.  Besides, nobody was going to break in just to steal a pack of cigarettes.  He was letting his imagination get out of hand.

He had been up too long and too much had happened—that was all.  He was getting punchy.  Probably he had taken the third pack out himself and simply forgotten it somewhere, except that that was the sort of thing he never did.

But it was a day for doing things he never did.  It wasn’t too much to believe that he had simply mislaid a pack of cigarettes.

He opened the pack in his hand, shook one out and lit it.  Almost at once he felt better.

“Watch yourself, Phil,”
he thought. 
“People get peculiar ideas when they’re all by themselves.”

He decided he would take his ashtray and his cigarettes, go downstairs to the big room, where there was probably a sofa under one of those dustcloths, and spend an hour or two thinking about that waitress.  Maybe she was divorced, just like him.  It stood to reason, since she wasn’t wearing a ring and a woman who looked like that wasn’t going to be suffered to run around loose forever.  He would plan his campaign.

By eleven o’clock he began to feel that it might be worth the trouble of going to bed.  He went back upstairs and, in conformity to habits acquired during his time as Peggy’s husband, undressed in the dark.

He lay down, staring up at a ceiling that was lost in the gloom, too tired to think, awake but hardly aware of it.  He seemed to float out of himself, as if his weariness belonged to someone else.  It was a delicious sensation to feel his mind blurring into unconsciousness.

Perhaps he did sleep.  Yet suddenly he was stark awake, and listening.  He could feel his heart pounding and noted, with something like surprise, that he was frightened.

What was it?  He had no idea of the time and would not have dared to turn on the lamp on his night table to look.  He did not move.  He tried to breathe as quietly as he could, as if to disguise the fact of his existence.

And then he heard it.  Directly over his head—it must have been coming from George Patchmore’s old apartment—a rhythmic sound, as if someone were up there, pacing the floor.

But it was too quiet for that.  Even someone moving about in his stocking feet would have made a more definite sound—Phil had been up there only that afternoon, and he had heard the floorboards squeak under his own tread.  This was hardly more than a whisper, like the ghost of a sound.

Probably it was nothing.  Old houses made noises in the night—everybody knew that.  He was letting his imagination run away with him, as if had over that business with the cigarettes.  He was scaring himself to death over trifles.  He would forget about it and go back to sleep.

But for a long time he lay awake, listening.

The next morning, even before he had changed out of his pajamas, Phil went back up to the third floor for another look at the empty apartment.  It was still empty.  Nothing had been disturbed.  The floorboard still creaked heavily under his feet.  Feeling like an idiot, he went down and took his shower.  By the time he was dressed he had almost forgotten about the whole thing.

Over a breakfast of coffee and raisin bran, he decided he would fix up the yard.  The lawns—or, more accurately, the places where he conjectured there must once have been lawns—were so overgrown they looked like rice paddies, and a day spent working out of doors, he figured, would clean out the evil humors and produce a healthier state of mind generally.

One of the set of keys he had collected from Jack Matheny fix the padlock on the garage, and in one of the closets in the back he found a bamboo rake, a canvas tarp, various weeding tools, one of those old-fashioned hedge trimmers that work like a gigantic pair of scissors, a pole saw for cutting down tree limbs, several generations of worn-out work gloves, about four lengths of garden hose, and a push mower.  There was also a shelf, high up on the back wall, covered with unlabeled cans, and a couple of wooden chests on the floor, one empty and the other containing various implements the uses of which he could not begin to guess.

Phil had lived in apartments all his life.  His understanding of yard work was restricted to what could be learned from watching television adds.  But he was reasonably certain that a lawn mower, particularly one you pushed yourself, wasn’t going to cut grass that had grown to be almost waist high.  Accordingly, he opted for the hedge trimmer.