I was standing too close to take a swing at him, so I brought up my elbow and struck his nose. The glancing blow stunned him long enough to allow me to step back and punch him as hard as I could with my good arm. He stumbled off the edge of the catwalk, bounced onto the hood of a car and melted into the deep shadows, moaning and whimpering.
When I turned to her she was looking at me with horrified eyes, as though I had been the sole aggressor. I opened my mouth to say something in my own defense, but she ran up the nearest set of stairs. I took one last look at the Shabbie man lying between two cars and then followed her.
She was on the top step, looking out at the city lights as though she had never seen anything like them in her life.
“Are you all right? Miss? Did he hurt you?”
The sound of my voice sent a brief tremor across her face. She reluctantly took her eyes from the skyline and looked me in the eyes.
“I didn’t mean to scare you like that. Down there, I mean.”
Once her eyes locked into mine, she would not let go. She looked at me as though I was something disgusting she had just been ordered to eat. She nodded toward the buildings, trying to draw my attention to them.
“It’s a pretty skyline, isn’t it? When they turn on all the lights…”
But she wasn’t listening. I looked at her closely then, because she seemed to have lost all interest in me. Her hair was thin and medium brown, laced with silver streaks and hanging limp and careless to her shoulders. From this vantage point, only a couple of feet away, it was almost impossible to resist trying to make out the skull beneath that clear skin and those delicate blue veins just beneath the surface. But her face was too wide—or her head was too narrow; at any rate, the effect was to jut her nose and the center of her lips forward and pull her eyes and the edges of her mouth around to the side.
I could make out her delicate slenderness even beneath the shapeless brown rags she wore. Her feet were big and her breasts were small, like a young girl’s, but she was clearly more than a girl. There were traces of age and pain in her face. In spite of her plainness, her strange face and her ragged clothes, I found her unusually attractive and appealing. The fact that she was one of the Shabbie People who had been haunting stretches of Lower Wacker Drive only made the attraction stronger.
“Miss, could I… buy you something to eat? A cup of coffee or something?”
She made no response, so I turned away, humiliated, and headed for the train. I did not bother going back down to Lower Wacker; I was only two blocks from the train now and the crowds were beginning to thin. As I walked I tried not to think of the latest, capstone humiliation of this wretched day; I had saved a pretty girl from an attacker only to have my respectful advances ignored afterward. The incident seemed to have neutralized me. I no longer felt any anger, only that creeping numbness that was my biggest enemy but probably also the one thing that had kept me from taking my own useless life years before.
I went downstairs to the ticket window and showed my monthly pass. As I pushed through the turnstile I turned and saw her standing there, looking at me, looking at the turnstile and the glass booth, confused and afraid. She stared me straight in the eye, the skin of her brows furling over her eyes.
“What?” I asked her, my voice impatient and suddenly exasperated. I was not so numb that I wasn’t willing to strike out just a little at the woman who’d rebuffed my only minutes before. “Huh? What is it? Do you need money? Is that what you want? You could say something to me, you know.”
I turned away and headed for the stairs, but as I reached them I heard that cry again. But this time it was not a cry of fear over a man who was beating her and probably about to rape her, but the cry of a young child, alone and lost with absolutely no idea what to do. When I turned back she was looking at the lady in the pay booth with a terrified expression.
So I did what I had to: I paid her fare. She followed me down the stairs and when the first train came and I did not get on it, she gazed thoughtfully back and forth from me to the train and then let out a strained breath and relaxed at my side, no more than six inches away from me.
When my train came, we got on. There were no seats, so I had to stand, clutching a vertical bar; and when the train lurched for the first time, she grabbed the shoulder of my jacket and did not let go until we stopped at my station.
She followed me down the street, into the foyer of my building, up the steps and finally, while a quaking mixture of excitement and suspicion surged through my every limb, up to my door.
“Do you need a place to stay? Is that it?” I opened the door and she followed me in, passing by me and moving through my apartment with a timid, quiet grace, her face stretched with the same wonderment with which she’d looked at the skyline.
She was the first woman who had ever stepped into my apartment. She did not react when I shut the door and locked it, and didn’t even bother to turn and look me in the face for another hour.
II
What was I to think, so afraid of her presence and the peculiar bearing with which she carried herself through my cheap, unkempt room? She would not respond to my questions, and though she seemed interested when I finally got the nerve to step into my kitchenette and fry myself a cheese sandwich, she seemed not even to understand when I offered the sandwich to her. As soon as the sizzling in the pan died, she turned away from me and the kitchenette and returned to the window, where she looked out with rapt fascination upon a brick wall, a neon sign, an alley and a sliver of street. Or maybe she was just enthralled by the duct patterns on the window. Her manner was so strange, the sudden shifts of attention so abrupt, and yet, to judge by her expression, so true to some obscure inner logic, that there was no way of telling just what she saw when she looked at the shambles in which I lived.
I considered throwing her out, but of course I couldn’t. This strange but otherwise very plain young woman seemed graced by a kind of dangerous beauty when seen in the context of my lonely little apartment. I tried ignoring her as the evening progressed, drinking a beer or thumbing through a book, but I literally could not take my eyes off her, so finally I just watched her until I caught myself nodding off to sleep in my chair.
I offered her my bed, indicating with hopelessly loud and well-articulated words and awkward arm gestures that I would sleep on the couch. I lay on the couch then, a blanket pulled up to my eyes, watching her in the semidarkness. She continued to move from one end of the apartment to the other, occasionally stopping at the window before moving on again, examining books, wall prints, the dirty plates in the sink.
The last thing I remember is her going into the bathroom and using the toilet with the door open. I could see nothing—would not even look—yet I ended up with a furious erection that followed me into sleep and writhed its way to climax within the confines of some forgotten dream.
I tried to convince her to leave the next morning. At least I told her she should. In truth, I didn’t want her to leave at all. She had slept on the floor at the foot of the bed and was still there when I left. I wondered whether she would be there when I got back as I locked the bottom lock but not the top, giving her the final option—but only after debating for a full minute whether I should just lock her in.
I was thirty-four years old at the time and still a virgin. Only my hands—and even those with awkward, infrequent rendezvous—stood between me and a lifetime of abstinence. Perhaps it was because I was ugly or had difficulty speaking to people, or because of some kind of physical or social flaw to which I was simply blind. Whatever the cause, I had never slept in such close proximity to a woman, and all day I reeled with the myriad implications of that event. I fantasized that on my return home she would be communicative, thanking me for saving her virtue or maybe even her life the day before and for offering her refuge and, of course—inadvertently though it might have been—for having been a gentleman through it all.
When I returned home she was watching television. She stared at the screen as though hypnotized not by the images themselves but by the thousand flickering signals that made up the images. I tried talking to her, I offered her food, I offered her the bed; but nothing worked. Once again she slept on the floor.
