CHAPTER 56
The scenic elevator was halfway down the side of the building when the explosion ripped away the wall below it. The elevator bucked and dropped for an agonizing second. There was the harsh squeal of metal on metal and then the car jerked to a halt. The overhead lights flickered out’and Jenny Barton was left in semidarkness, surrounded by the elevator’s hysterical passengers.
“What happened? What happened?” somebody kept Yelling. There were shouts and screams and the sound of somebody close by sobbing.
And then over all the babble was the bellow of Wyndom Leroux’s voice shouting something unintelligible.
Oh my God, Jenny thought, we’re going to fall the rest of the way.
She sank to her knees, fear knotting her stomach. For a moment she couldn’t breathe. Beneath her, the floor of the car shuddered as the elevator slid an additional foot down the rails before stopping.
For a moment she wasn’t sure whether the floor was slightly canted or whether it was her imagination. No, she decided, the floor now had a distinct tilt to it.
Leroux’s voice roared out again over the babble of shouting and crying. “Listen to me, listen to me, everybody. Don’t panic-we’re perfectly safe!”
“What happened?” a man’s voice demanded once more.
“Explosion down below!” Leroux shouted. “It bent the rails outward.
We’re jammed in the rails or the friction brakes under the cage have been activated. In either case, we’re safe.”
“Safe?” The man sounded incredulous. Looking up, Jenny could see him outlined against the glass walls of the cage. S.he remembered him from the dining room-a big man who had been drinking far too much and whose loud voice had set everybody in the restaurant on edge.
“Safe? What happens when the brakes let go, mister?”
It was quieter in the cage now, the passengers listening intently to the exchange between the questioner and Leroux. “Nothing happens if the brakes fail,” Leroux said calmly. “If they do the cables will hold us. There are six of them and any one will be sufficient. The hoist motor has braked automatically-the brakes go on when the electricity is shut off.”
“That’s great,” the man said sarcastically. “So how the, hell do we get down?”
“We don’t,” Leroux said. “We wait out the fire and then they hoist us back up.”
Jenny recognized Thelma’s voice next. “We can’t get down, Wyn?”
Leroux spoke directly to her. “I’m afraid not, Thelma.
The rails are gone below us. We’ll have to wait until they can activate the hoist motor. Right now the power is out-the explosion must have cut the electric lines.”
“Just great,” the man muttered sourly. “We hang out here and freeze.” Jenny suddenly realized two things- the cage was noticeably cooler and the man seemed more calm. She wished that she was; she was still shaking. In her mind’s eye she could see the cage falling into the night to scatter her and the other passengers over the terrazzo plaza below.
“Are you all right?” Thelma Leroux asked, kneeling beside her.
Jenny started to get up and Thelma motioned her back, then tucked her own skirts beneath her and sat down. “There’s room enough; we might as well be comfortable since we’re going to be here awhile.”
Jenny detected the nervousness in her voice but admired the effort to keep it calm. The passengers standing around them loomed up like a wall, sealing them into a little world all their own. “It’s a matter of waiting,” Thelma continued.
“To let yourself be afraid won’t help anything at all.”
Jenny tried to shut out the fear but she couldn’t keep from trembling and she couldn’t control her voice.
“I’m scared stiff,” she said, and bit her lip to keep back the sobs she felt within. She fought them back for a minute, acutely aware of the passengers around them.
She now knew what it meant when they said a dog could smell a person’s fear-the cage stank of it. “I guess I don’t have your fortitude.”
Thelma was silent for a moment, then laughed a little.
Her voice was easier now, even more in control. “I’m being unfair.
Perhaps I feel less fear because I know I’ve lived the most of my life and you’ve yet to really start yours.”
It wasn’t philosophic, it was personal, Jenny suddenly thought.
The idea caught at her for a moment and she became slightly less aware of the people pressing around them. “You mean Craig and I,” she said flatly, not quite sure whether she welcomed the chance to, talk about it or resented the statement as an intrusion of her privacy.
“We’ve been married two years.”
“Really?”
For a moment it seemed like the car was moving again and Jenny caught her breath, then forced herself to talk, anything to take her mind off of being suspended in space If she let herself think about it she was deathly afraid she would come down with screaming hysterics.
“No-not really, I guess. I have competition. Craig’s job.” She realized what she had said as soon as she had said it, and whom she had said it to. But it was true and she had been wanting to say it for two years.
“I know,” Thelma said quietly. “Jobs have a way of being more demanding than any mistress. If they had a choice I sometimes think a new wife would prefer their husbands have a mistress. At least their time demands are predictable.”
Jenny flushed. It had been common gossip in the company.
Thelma laughed quietly in the dark, in contrast to the muffled sobbing around them. “Of course I know. I’m hardly that - isolated.
And it’s not the sort of thing a man can keep from his wife.”
“I could never tolerate that,” Jenny said stiffly.
“Any more than you can tolerate Craig’s present mistress-his work?”
Somebody had started praying in the darkness of the cage above them.
Jenny felt her mind start to wander back to the reality of their situation and forced herself to return to the conversation. One thing was true-there, was something about Thelma that invited confidences.
“All right-it’s true that we’re not doing very well. That’s easy enough to guess.”
Thelma placed her hand lightly on Jenny’s shoulder.
“It’s not what you expected of marriage, is.it? But then, most women are raised with romantically outrageous ideas of what marriage should be like. At least my generation was. We were never taught that men are human and have weaknesses just as women do. Perhaps more of them.”
Thelma was probably just as frightened as she was, Jenny thought; talking probably eased her fears as well.
The idea suddenly lent her a sense of equality. “I don’t know if you would call it a weakness to lead two lives -his professional one and his home life. I’m not invited to participate in the one and there’s very little of the other left to me.”
“That sounds like a damaged ego,” Thelma accused.
“The sudden realization that you are not the center of his whole life. Men need to be dedicated to something. I learned long ago that there was only a part of Wyn’s life in which I could play a role. The rest was forever closed to me.”
“That’s inhuman.”
“No, it’s very human. Why ‘should Craig devote his every waking moment to you? He’s a person in his own right.”
“I’m a person in my own right,” Jenny protested fiercely.
There was a babble of shouting above them and then’ the sound of a sudden, hard slap. “Get control of yourself,” Leroux suddenly said in a loud voice, his tone icy.
“There’s not a damned thing you can do.
“Build a world that centers around you,” Thelma said quietly.
