69 Barrow Street

Chapter two

Morning.

Ralph Lambert rolled out of the bed gingerly, being careful not to wake Stella. He yawned and rubbed sleep from his eyes. Then, before leaving the bedroom, he stood silently by the side of the bed and looked down at Stella.

She was sound asleep, her mouth pressed against the side of the pillow and her lush white body curled like a cat about to spring. Sleep softened the hard lines around her mouth and eyes and made her far more gentle and feminine than she was when she was awake. She invariably slept nude, and because the night was so warm she had thrown back the covers and slept on top of the bed.

Ralph saw her with the eye of an artist. While any man would have been captivated and excited by Stella’s body, Ralph was able to study it in detail and to realize just how beautiful it was.

Stella was thirty, three years older than Ralph. With the sort of life she had been leading it was almost a miracle that no signs of wear or aging appeared to the eye. Her breasts were still perfectly firm, and breasts as large as Stella’s generally show the signs of age earlier than smaller ones. Her complexion was clear and perfect from head to toe.

She was so beautiful, Ralph mused. How could anyone so beautiful be so inexplicably bad? It was impossible to understand.

He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him. A fast shower made him feel alive once again, his skin fresh and clean and his mind able to concentrate. He toweled himself dry and stood at the open bathroom window, gulping huge breaths of the early morning air. The air was as fresh as air ever got in New York and it made him feel even more awake and more alive.

He almost felt good.

But not quite. Not quite, because he knew that no man in his position could ever feel good. No man with Stella hanging on his neck like a millstone.

A millstone? That wasn’t a particularly good image, and he closed his eyes to hunt for a better one. An albatross, perhaps. A sexy blonde albatross. He remembered the poem by Coleridge in which a sailor shot an albatross and the corpse of the bird hung around his neck for months bringing terrible luck to the ship.

That was Stella, all right. Hanging around his neck and lousing him up.

Returning to the bedroom, he dressed quickly and quietly. Stella slept on. He glanced at her again and the events of the previous night flashed through his mind briefly — the insults, the slapping, the humiliating way she had forced him to make love to her on the floor with her dress on, the terrible laughter that tore from her throat all the while until passion caught her up and the laughter changed in midstream to a gush of foul obscenities. For a moment a wild impulse gripped him and he longed to kill her, to press the pillow over her nose and mouth and hold it there until she choked to death.

But the impulse passed quickly. Ralph was not by nature a violent man. He could fight when pressed and he could lose his temper easily enough, but he had never yet gotten mad enough to commit murder.

But he had to admit the idea was an attractive one.

For a moment he considered frying himself a couple eggs in the apartment’s small kitchen. Then he decided against it. He didn’t want to be around when Stella woke up. Even if he didn’t get up the guts to leave her, he wanted to spend as little time around her and the apartment as possible.

He left the apartment and walked down the hallway to the door. The weather was nice out, with a hot yellow sun just coming into view and the sky clear-blue with hardly a cloud in it. He sat down for a moment on the stoop in front of the building and lit the first cigarette of the day, enjoying the lift it gave him as the strong smoke hit his lungs.

When the door opened behind him a second or two later he turned his head slightly to see who it was. That’s when he saw her for the first time.

She was wearing black toreador pants that were tight around her hips and legs and a light green sleeveless blouse that looked as cool as the grass in the mountains. She wore sandals on her feet and her hair was short and dark brown. Her body was trim and neat; in fact, there was an overwhelming impression of neatness and coolness and quiet self-possession about her which hit him at once.

He liked her instantly.

“Hello,” he said. He smiled.

She smiled back.

“I haven’t seen you around before,” he said. “Did you just move in recently?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“First time in New York?”

“No,” she said, and she smiled as if the question were very funny.

“Been in the Village before?”

She nodded. “For several years.”

Suddenly he said: “Sit down for a minute. It’s very nice here.”

She seemed to be hesitating.

“Come on,” he said, indicating that she could sit on the stoop beside him. “The sun’s nice and it’s still cool out. Later in the day you’ll want to spend your time sitting in front of a fan, but now it’s nice enough just sitting in the sun and enjoying it.”

“All right,” she said. “But only for a minute.” She sat down.

He wasn’t sure where to begin. He felt that he wanted to get to know this girl, wanted to talk to her, but it was hard to hit on a conversational opener. Still, she was obviously willing to talk with him. Otherwise she wouldn’t have sat down.

“My name’s Ralph,” he said. “Ralph Lambert.”

“I’m Susan Rivers.”

“Have you had breakfast, Susan?”

“Not yet. I just got up.”

“There’s a place down the street where they make a good mushroom omelet. Interested?”

She hesitated, and this time it wasn’t hard to see her hesitation. She seemed genuinely worried about something and he wondered idly what it might be.

“I’m not trying to make a pass,” he assured her. “I live on the first floor here and there’s a girl who lives with me, so I’m not a guy on the make. I just thought you might like to have breakfast with me.”

She relaxed visibly. “All right,” she said. “A mushroom omelet sounds like a good idea.”

They stood up simultaneously and began walking along Barrow Street toward the restaurant, a small quiet place around the corner on Bedford. He noticed things: the way the top of her head was just level with his shoulder, the clean freshly bathed smell of her that rose to his nostrils, the cool, calm air about her. As they walked they talked about nothing in particular and he hardly managed to follow the conversation even though he was a participant in it. His mind was wrapped up in an appraisal of the girl. He felt that he wanted to get to know her, wanted to find out for himself just what sort of a person she was and what made her tick.

They both ordered mushroom omelets at the restaurant, with orange juice and toast and coffee. They ate in relative silence — the food was good and they were both quite hungry.

Then, over coffee and cigarettes he said: “Do you work, Susan?”

She nodded.

“Where?”

“Do you know the ceramic and jewelry shop on Macdougal Street just below Eighth?”

“I think so.”

“That’s where I work. I design ceramics and do a little of the actual throwing myself, too.”

“That sounds pretty good.”

She shrugged. “It doesn’t pay much but I like it. I can work pretty much my own hours and knock off for a day or two whenever I feel like it. And it’s… well, creative, I guess.”

“That makes a difference.”

“It really does, Ralph. I’m not talking about the artistic angle of it or anything. I don’t pretend to be artistic, whatever that means exactly. I’m just making things — ashtrays and vases and bowls that people can use and enjoy. It’s more a craft than an art.

“But the thing is that I’m figuring out a way to make something and then making it, sort of with my own two hands.” She held up her hands to illustrate the point. He noted that her hands were quite small with slender and well-formed fingers. Her fingernails were clipped short and she didn’t wear any nail polish.

He said: “I know what you mean.”

“It’s a feeling of building something,” she went on. “It makes a difference, a tremendous difference. Sometimes I get the feeling that my life is just a waste, that I’m not doing anything important and I might as well not be alive at all. But then I put on a smock and go in the workroom behind the shop and put some clay on the wheel and throw a pot and bake it and glaze it and… it just makes me feel a lot better, Ralph. As if I’ve accomplished something. As if I have a… a reason for existing, if you can understand what I’m trying to say.”

“I understand.”

They fell silent. He took a last drag on his cigarette and ground it out in the glass ashtray on the table. He felt very comfortable with her, more comfortable than he had felt with a woman in years. There was a definite feeling of ease between them, as if they understood and appreciated and respected each other, thinking the same things and experiencing the same emotions. Why, her attitude about her ceramics work was damned similar to his own feelings about his painting.

As if she were reading his mind she asked: “What do you do, Ralph?”

“Not much of anything.”

She waited for him to explain.

“I’m a painter,” he said at length. “Or at least I was a painter. I haven’t done anything in months.”

“How come?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been in an awful slump, Susan. I just haven’t had the slightest desire to do any work. My brushes don’t even feel right in my hand anymore. Not too long ago I set up the easel in my front room and hauled out the paints and brushes. And I stood there looking at the canvas and I didn’t know what to do or where to begin. I felt like a damned fool, just standing there pretending to be an artist and not even getting a drop of paint on the canvas.”

“That’s awful.”

“It’s a weird sort of feeling. Guys I’ve talked to say it can happen in any line of work. There’s even a term for it — a writer friend of mine calls it writer’s block. He says it happens to him every once in a while and there’s not a damn thing he can do about it.”

“I guess you just have to ride it out, huh?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “In my case I think it’s something different. It’s not just that I can’t paint, it’s that I don’t even want to paint anymore.”

“You’ll probably snap out of it.”

“I guess so.”

“You will, Ralph. All you have to do is keep trying. I think you’ll make it.”

He smiled at her.

Stella woke up like a cat. First her eyes opened slowly and closed again. Then she opened her eyes a second time and stretched herself slightly, tensing the muscles in her legs and reaching up over her head with her arms.

She yawned, her mouth opening wide and the air rushing into her lungs. She stretched again, her whole body tensing and flexing to send the blood coursing through veins and arteries.

The waking-up process took almost five minutes and by the time she clambered out of bed she was fully awake with her eyes wide open. She wondered where in hell Ralph might be.

It would have been nice to have him around, she decided. She loved sex in the morning, especially when you were still half awake and half asleep. Then you came together without preliminaries, almost like animals, two bodies reaching and straining for each other and possessing each other without the brains getting in the way.

It was good in the morning.

But Ralph wasn’t around — and, unfortunately, neither was anyone else. She hurried into the bathroom for a shower and turned on the water. Then she kicked off her slippers and climbed into the small bathtub.

A shower, like everything else she enjoyed, was a sensual experience for Stella. She didn’t just soap her body and rinse it. Instead she caressed herself with the soap, loving the smooth and slippery way it passed over her body.

She loved to soap her breasts. She kneaded the lather into the soft smooth skin in a manner that was almost physically arousing. She did the same for all the erogenous zones of her perfect body.

Then, when she was through, she turned on the cold shower full blast. Needles of icy liquid pain pelted her all over and hurt her in a deliciously invigorating way. The freezing water lashed at her breasts and belly and made her even more aware of herself.

When she had stepped out of the tub and toweled herself dry she stood for almost fifteen minutes before her mirror. She loved to spend time at her mirror; she had done so since she was a small child.

Stella had developed early. Her breasts began to grow when she was only eleven years old and reached their full size by the time she was fourteen. She was never physically awkward the way so many adolescent girls are. She grew from a pretty child to a beautiful woman with no unpleasant period of transition.

And since she was eleven she would spend time before the mirror, looking at her reflection and admiring it. She would cup her breasts and squeeze them gently, telling herself that they were beautiful. She would strike poses before the mirror and study the effect at great length.

Both her early development and her strong basic sex drives had a good deal to do with the course of her life. Stella’s father had been a doctor in Bay Shore and he had made a good deal of money. Her mother, who was a few years older than her husband, died of throat cancer while Stella was still in grade school. Her parents had been very close to one another and the shock ruined her father. He tended to blame himself for it. Since he was a doctor himself, he argued that he should have made certain his wife had periodic physical examinations which might have caught the disease in time, before it was too late.

And so he began to drink. His practice went quietly to hell and he spent all his time by himself in the room where he and Stella’s mother had lived, drinking bonded bourbon from an Old Fashioned glass and talking softly to himself. Stella was on her own by the time she was twelve — not on her own like a slum child, for she had plenty of money and a good home. On her own in that there was no one to take care of her, no one to talk to her, no one to love her.

And she needed love, needed it desperately. She sought love wherever it was available, but the empty, vacant atmosphere that was her home turned love to sex and emotion to passion. Love fell by the wayside; Stella never did find out what it really meant.

But she slept with a lot of people.

She approached sex the way that she approached life in general — bluntly, directly, and solely in her own self-interest. She took whatever she wanted and she wanted nearly everything.

Her father died shortly after she entered high school. Both high school and the three years she spent in college were a chore for her. She already knew precisely how she wanted to spend the rest of her life, and she didn’t need a college diploma in order to carry through with her plans.

The income from her father’s estate came to a little over twelve thousand dollars a year. While this didn’t make her really wealthy, it meant that she could lead a life of complete and total leisure, never working and never doing anything other than what she wanted to do. And this was fine with Stella James.

She moved to the Village, the one place where she was sure she could live as she pleased with no outside interference. She took lovers when she wanted them. That was her life and she enjoyed it.

Sometimes — but not very often — a vague feeling would pass through her mind that she was missing something, that her life was a waste and that the world she lived in was an empty one. The thought was essentially disturbing, and she fought that thought as she fought anything which threatened to disturb the relative security of her existence.

She found a new person to make love to or a new way to make love.

The thought was passing through her mind then as she looked at her body in the mirror. She remembered the previous night and something about it bothered her. It seemed as though every sexual encounter of late was getting just so much more depraved and twisted. Ordinarily this didn’t bother her; she looked upon perversion and depravity as the natural outgrowth of sex.

But something seemed wrong. She had to do something to make herself feel better.

She knew what to do.

Humming softly to herself she went to the bedroom and dressed quickly. Then she returned to the living room and picked up the receiver of the phone. She made herself comfortable on the couch and dialed a number.

After several rings a man’s voice said: “Hello.”

“Jimmy?”

“Speaking.”

“This is Stella James, Jimmy.”

“Hi, honey. What can I do for you?”

“I’m having a party,” she said. “Tonight. I wondered if you’d like to come.”

“Love to. I’ve never missed a party of yours yet, have I?”

“Swell. Drop up about nine.”

“Will do.”

“And Jimmy—”

“Yeah?”

“Bring some stuff,” she said. “You know what I mean.”

“Gotcha. How much?”

“Enough for about a dozen people,” she said. “We’ll have a real blast.”

She hung up and relaxed on the couch, smiling happily to herself. Then she lifted the receiver again and dialed another number.

“I’d like to paint you some time,” Ralph said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe sometime.”

“I mean it, Susan. You’re a very lovely girl.” She looked away.

“This isn’t a line,” he went on. “And I enjoy being with you. Hell, you’ve broken down my painter’s block. This is the first time I’ve felt like painting anything in a long while.”

“I’ve never posed before, Ralph.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“I probably wouldn’t be a very good model.”

“You’ll be all right.”

She thought for a moment. “Where would you do it? Your apartment?”

“If there’s no place better. The lighting’s kind of weak. What floor are you on?”

“Fourth floor front. Why?”

“You get a good north light there,” he explained. “I could paint there, if you’d let me. It would be a lot better than my place.”

She nodded absently. Then she took a puff of her cigarette and studied the glowing tip of it for a moment before she spoke.

“Ralph,” she said, “how would you paint me?”

“In oils.”

“I know that. I mean… nude?”

“Not if you’d rather not, if you prefer I’ll do a head and shoulders study of you. But I’d rather do you full figure, with or without clothes. Your head and your body go very well together.”

“They’ve been together a long time.”

He laughed. “That’s not what I meant. An artist looks at everything a little bit differently, especially people. Sometimes the various parts of a person complement each other more than other times. Your particular head looks better attached to your particular body, and vice-versa.”

“Naturally,” she said. “Either of them would look kind of silly just rolling around by themselves.”

“That’s not what I—”

She laughed, delighted. “I know what you meant, silly. I was just teasing you. But I do think it might be nice to pose for you, if you really want me to.”

“I do.”

“I will, then — and we can use my apartment if you’d rather. I think I might be embarrassed posing at your place anyway.”

“Whatever way you want it.”

“And… Ralph?”

“What, Susan?”

She closed her eyes for a minute. Then she opened them and said: “I know you told me before that you weren’t a guy on the make. But I have to make sure, Ralph. I… I’m not looking for anything remotely resembling a sexual relationship. Not for the time being and not for the foreseeable future.”

“I understand.”

“I don’t want to keep harping away at this,” she went on. “It’s just that this is such a standard set-up in the Village. Village artist meets Village girl and asks her to pose for him and they go to an apartment and crawl into a bed. I don’t think that’s what you want but I want to get everything set straight at the beginning so that neither of us will be disappointed.”

“I understand,” he said again. “Besides, there’s already a girl. I told you.”

“I know. But down here it’s not too uncommon for a person to be sleeping with more than one person at the same time.”

Thanks for telling me, he thought, thinking of Stella.

“But I really would like to pose for you,” she said. “I like you, Ralph. As a person, I mean. I like you very much and I think I’d enjoy getting to know you better. But only as a person.”

“I like you, too, Susan. We hit it off pretty well together. I usually have trouble talking to people.”

She smiled softly. “So do I. But I want to emphasize that no matter how well I get to know you or how much I get to like you, our relationship will have to stay on a purely platonic level. Just friends.”

“Okay,” he said. “And I’m just as glad that you put everything out in the open at the start. Down here if a guy doesn’t make a pass at a girl the first day he meets her she feels insulted, or else thinks he’s a fruit or something. If you hadn’t said something I might have had to throw you a pass just to keep up appearances.”

“Don’t ever do that. Maybe we’ll be very good friends, Ralph. That’s a rare enough thing.”

“Right,” he said. “Hello, friend.”

“Hi,” she said. “Hi, friend.”

She insisted on paying half the check. Then they left the restaurant and walked back to 69 Barrow Street, walking slowly with the sun beating down on them. Ralph glanced at his watch and noted that it was close to noon. Where had the time gone to? Evidently they had been talking for quite a while.

The traffic was getting heavier and he could hear trucks and buses rolling by on Seventh Avenue. Barrow Street was filled with neighborhood children playing the myriad games that children played in New York, where there was no place to play but the street. Stickball, stoop-ball, chinese handball — the kids never seemed to tire of the street games, never lacked a way to amuse themselves.

Just like Stella, he thought. She can always find a way to amuse herself. And it’s usually in a horizontal position.

Not always horizontal, he realized. Stella had a marvelous imagination.

At 69 Barrow he opened the door for Susan and followed her inside. They said goodbye at the staircase and he returned to the door of his apartment, fitting the key in the lock.

He listened to Susan’s footsteps on the staircase for several seconds before turning the key and entering his apartment.