Tours of the Black Clock (26 page)

She didn’t want to go back down into the dark yet. She walked back toward his room; in the door she turned to watch him lying there. She decided he was a bit dim. She turned on the light; the room was undistinguished, a quaint blue paper on the wall, a small desk by the window that looked directly across to Ingrid’s flat except that her flat was several floors higher. “You don’t have to lie on the floor,” she said finally.

After ten or twelve seconds he slowly and clumsily got up off the floor. He walked into his room and for a moment seemed unsure what to do next; he sat down at the desk. He got back up and turned another chair for the woman to sit, then returned to the desk. He didn’t take off his coat or do anything that had the appearance of making himself at home; if his speech and manner had been any more of a monotone she might have regarded him as frightening. She sat in the chair he’d turned, looking past him out the window to the building across the street. Neither of them said anything at all for a moment. The big man pointed to the phone on the desk. “You can make a call.”

“No, I’ll just stay a bit. Actually,” she thought for a moment, and then finished, “I live just across the street with Ingrid.” He turned and looked through the window at the building across the street. “I don’t want him to know where I live.” She paused. “Maybe he already knows.”

“Does he always follow you?” the big man said.

“Yes. It seems to have happened every day for a long time now, on my way to and from work.”

“Maybe you should call the police.”

She looked around the room for a clock but couldn’t find one. In the light from the street she saw the red blotches of broken blood in his face, she could smell the liquor. “I’m going to go.”

“Would you like me to walk with you across the street?” he said.

“No.” For a moment she stayed where she was; then she slowly stood, always with her eye on him. At the open door she said, “It isn’t necessary. Thank you, though.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind …”

“OK.”

“Perhaps you wouldn’t mind,” she finished; “watching from the window, as I cross the street. You can watch to see that I get across the street all right.”

“OK.”

“Can you do that? Can you just watch me?”

He hadn’t moved from his place in the dark; his hands were flat on his legs before him. “Yes, I can do that,” he said. Downstairs, in front of the hotel, she stepped from the door and looked up and down the street; then she walked, arms folded with determination, to the other side. At the door of Ingrid’s building she turned and looked up to Blaine’s lighted window. Then she turned back to the door and disappeared into the building, and in the window across the street the curtain fell back before his silhouette.

B
LAINE DIDN’T ACTUALLY LIVE
in this particular hotel room; he’d taken it only some time after the client first hired him to follow and watch Dania, and when Dania then moved in with Ingrid from her place uptown near where Blaine left her on Riverside Drive wrapped in his coat one night. That was the night he no longer worked for the client, that was the night the client’s case became a different sort of case. The client had said that night that none of what happened made sense since Dania wasn’t beautiful, but it was pretty obvious to Blaine that she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. He’d seen her dance many times. He discovered that every time she danced something terrible happened, something terrible to slow aging men like himself. He didn’t understand what the dance meant, the only dancing he’d ever seen before was the kind in clubs and movies. No more than Joaquin Young, who was smarter and more sophisticated than Blaine, was Blaine able to consciously understand how she danced to the resurrection of his memories and certain possibilities precluded forever; he hadn’t begun to be even more than dimly aware that there
were
possibilities until long after he’d allowed them to slip away. Blaine was caught to the moment of Dania like the strand of her hair to the wet red of her mouth when the dance finished. He’d been devastated by that first inkling which everyone eventually knows, that there are things which are irrevocable. This moment is the one when one either saves his spirit or watches it die in tandem with his body.

The morning after he’d followed her to the door of his own room, he followed her to work. She was about to turn when he raised his hand and waved; she was relieved to see him. She no longer had the sense of someone following her. When she told him she was a dancer he said the only dancers he knew were in clubs and movies. I don’t dance anymore, she told him. Why, he still wondered, there on the sidewalk outside her bookstore eight hours later, his hands in his coat pockets that were secretly stuffed with newspaper clippings. I used to dance this one dance, she tried to explain in Washington Square, as she moved from the shadow of one tree to the shadow of the next, circling Blaine as he remained in place, his hands in his pockets now black with ink; sometimes he could see her speaking and sometimes he could only hear her. She tried to explain in a way that she understood herself, let alone him. This dance was written especially for me. She paused and went on. There was something dangerous about it; it was written for something dangerous in me. She paused; he couldn’t see her now; and went on. And, uh, I knew it was dangerous, and I loved it. She stepped from the shadow of the tree into one of the lights of the square. She turned to Blaine and he could see her beautiful face more clearly than he’d ever seen it. But then I stopped loving it, she said returning to something of a circle again: it hurt too many people. And when I finished with the dance, I finished with all dances.

I finished with all the dances, she says to herself in the dark, behind the door of Ingrid’s building as she listens to Blaine walk away. She’s been saying it to herself since Washington Square, in the silence of their return home; and now she knows she doesn’t believe it. Now she knows the danger of it still lures her, the depraved druglike thrill of it beckons her on the other side of resolve, and she hasn’t gotten three steps up the stairs toward Ingrid’s flat before she’s turned and, peering surreptitiously out the door, loosed herself back into the night and the street. She looks toward Blaine’s window to make certain he doesn’t see her; it’s still dark, he hasn’t gotten up to the room yet. She walks down the street and turns toward the direction of the theater. Halfway there she hears all their footsteps, not one lover or two but a legion of them. When she comes to the theater she goes around the back and walks up the twelve flights; by the eighth she’s pulling the dress off over her head. By the time she’s in the dark studio before the long window that looks out over Manhattan she’s nude, absolutely alone in the single light that shines from the ceiling. As she begins to dance she’s unaware of Joaquin and Paul; Joaquin and Paul are unaware of each other there, and barely aware of her. They’re mostly aware of their own danger, which they allow themselves to believe, as most men do, has something to do with her. In their approach to her they’re frozen in a way that suggests they’re moving in relation to each other; only when they recognize that relationship, however, does it lapse into something hostile. If she’s aware of the presence of either of them, she’s displayed no recognition; perhaps she loves not being aware of them in the way she loved being loved by a lover she never saw. It’s as though no one could conceivably be worthy of this moment or this danger; circling her own reflection in the mirror she can barely see the forms of Joaquin and Paul in confrontation with each other against the night and the city beyond the window, until they simply take off from her dance, grappling. The shatter of the window cuts off midchord. She stops and for a stunned moment considers that men who were there a moment ago are gone now: there’s nothing in the window but the still Manhattan night rushing in at her.

Blaine did not need to turn on the light in his room to see the clippings. Sitting at the desk, he pulled them from his pockets with his dark grubby fingers and laid them out before him; he’d studied them so many times that now he knew which was which by their shapes. If he turned on the switch and was faced with them in the bald light, he would once again begin to feel the guilt, and then he’d certainly want a drink, and he’d tried hard for some time now not to have a drink. And at this moment he might well have succumbed to his desire for a drink, even in the dark, had he not looked out the window just as Dania was walking up the street. By the time Blaine got down to the street she was already gone. He walked around the neighborhood a quarter of an hour and when he didn’t see her the only place he could think of was where he’d seen her so many times before. In front of the theater he watched the studio window high above him, waiting as discreetly as he knew how until she came back down. He had certainly never seen anything in his life before like the two men who launched themselves out into the night in a spray of glass. Oddly, in their fall, they regained the balletic composure they’d abandoned when interlocked with each other; but Blaine didn’t know much about that. There was no sound as they fell, they didn’t even cry out. In Blaine’s mind perhaps, but only in his mind, was the echo of the glass breaking. He followed them down with his gaze, he watched the way the two men danced down. There was silence for several moments and after they hit there was only the small sound from twelve floors above him, and it took some time for him to recognize it.

She doesn’t look at the window. She kneels on the floor wondering, in the middle of the strange sound that comes from her, what in the turning of the black clock has made her play this role. She finally rises. Walking away from the window, she still doesn’t look, in the same way she didn’t look at either her father in the street or Reimes in the glass of his own window nearly ten years before; she doesn’t look at herself in the mirror, she doesn’t need to look to see the woman who couldn’t resist dancing one last time. She doesn’t take the elevator down. She walks the twelve flights figuring that around the sixth she’ll pull her dress back over her head and around the third she’ll begin to hear the sirens. She hasn’t a clue how to explain it. As it happens she’s all the way to the bottom before the sirens come, and they’re so far away there’s no telling which atrocity in the city they’re answering. She opens the back door of the theater and steps across its threshold to find the tide that’s come in, that rolls into Manhattan in our sleep, leaving the edifices dark and wet and its watermark high above our heads. She dives into the street and the roots of civilization drift past her black cold glide.

T
HE CLIENT HAD SAT
in Blaine’s office striped by the gold slits of twilight that came through the blinds. He was nearing sixty with the kind of paunchiness that had only now begun to show in his face; at first appearance he seemed groomed and well dressed. After a while, though, Blaine noticed the dapper clothes had frayed at the corners of the collar on his coat; it wasn’t a new suit. Blaine didn’t have much imagination and was just smart enough to know he wasn’t very smart, but he was observant after years of training himself to be, so he saw that about the client, the way he was frayed. Had Blaine more imagination he might have seen the way the man’s story was frayed too. The client explained that someone had been following his girlfriend eighteen months and now he wanted Blaine to keep an eye on her and if necessary protect her. For a man in a frayed suit he set a fair amount of money on Blaine’s desk. He didn’t give his name but Blaine didn’t question that, nor did he question whether eighteen months wasn’t rather a long time for someone to be followed by someone else without anything coming of it. Blaine didn’t involve himself with the subtle complications of a case, he didn’t feel possessed by an investigator’s compulsion to know the truth of something. He took the money and did the job, as long as he believed he could live with it. This was the nature of being in business for himself. He’d been in business for himself since he and his partner split up over a case Blaine couldn’t remember anymore; sometimes he’d run into someone who’d mention it and Blaine just got uncomfortable. He always wanted to say, Well then, tell me all about it, will you, because it’s just entirely slipped my mind. But that didn’t seem like it would sound so intelligent. All he remembered was spending the rest of the 1930s and the war in the corner of a bar down on West 59th called the Unforeseen where the name curled out of the wall above the door. Once Blaine was walking at four in the morning through Times Square, it was deserted, all that was left was the long peach-colored veil of a bridal gown floating down the middle of the intersection until a stray car roared through catching it on its fender, and the smell of someone’s sour liquor overwhelmed him, he became sick there on the curb, made himself walk several more blocks to get away from this smell of drunks but couldn’t, went back to where he lived, the smell was still there, got his big lug body in the hot shower and the smell rose in the steam of the water and he realized he was oozing it. He was oozing the smell of the Unforeseen. So he opened up an office for business. It was piddling business, without bravado or anger, anger having become buried so long in him that the very name anger eluded the confounded emotion it finally became; he never bothered trying to explain to himself why he was and always would be small time. He stopped drinking awhile. Ninety-nine nights of a hundred were alone, the hundredth spent with some woman or another who wanted to know if he wore a badge or trenchcoat, if he picked locks. After the war the nitty-gritty cases got nittier and grittier in weirder ways for some reason; there were nitty-gritty ones back when he first began but they still resembled something like normal sins then, normal people breaking normal commandments, not ones God never thought of. For instance, in this particular case involving this particular client, the dancer wasn’t really the client’s girlfriend at all; she hadn’t even laid eyes on him. The client was the one who’d been following her for eighteen months, the client who hired Blaine to follow the dancer because she was being followed. This doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to me, Blaine thought to himself standing there in the old dark vacant building that final night while the client held the unconscious body of a fainted dancer in one arm and the gun in the other hand. The client kept looking at the woman’s face in the dark and then far up into the ceiling, anguished by the way a man who’s had a great deal of what he wanted in life can arrive at a point when the only thing he wants lies right there in his arms and yet remains somehow untouchable: God, she’s not even beautiful, Blaine heard him say there in the dark. What happened to me, the client said, how did everything change? You see the way she dances? he said to Blaine. Blaine answered, Yeah, I’ve seen. The client said, I was one of those guys who only a few years back ran the world, wasn’t it only a few years back? The next day the papers said he once ran a club on the Upper West Side; Blaine might have even been there once. Say, do I know you from way back, did we once meet long ago? Blaine asked only seconds before the shot, before the smell in the dark, the only smell stronger than that of the booze Blaine drank a world ago, the smell of brains and gunfire. He pried the unconscious girl from the dead man’s arms, carried her out onto Seventh Avenue and Houston, hailed the cab and directed it up the shores of the Hudson.