Flowers for Algernon

and panties.

'Sorry!' I gasped, closing the door again. From out­side, I shouted. 'I'm your neighbor across the hall. I locked myself out, and I wanted to use the fire escape to get over to my window.'

The door swung open and she faced me, still in her underwear, a brush in each hand and hands on her hips.

'Didn't you hear me say come in?' She waved me into the apartment, pushing away a carton full of trash. 'Just step over that pile of junk there.'

I thought she must have forgotten—or not realized— she was undressed, and I didn't know which way to look. I kept my eyes averted, looking at the walls, ceiling, every­where but at her.

The place was a shambles. There were dozens of little folding snack-tables, all covered with twisted tubes of paint, most of them crusted dry like shriveled snakes, but some of them alive and oozing ribbons of color. Tubes, brushes, cans, rags, and parts of frames and canvas were strewn everywhere. The place was thick with the odor compounded of paint, linseed oil, and turpentine—and after a few moments the subtle aroma of stale beer. Three overstuffed chairs and a mangy green couch were piled high with discarded clothing, and on the floor lay shoes, stockings and underthings, as if she were in the habit of undressing as she walked and flinging her clothes as she went. A fine layer of dust covered everything.

'Well, you're Mr. Gordon,' she said, looking me over. 'I've been dying to get a peek at you ever since you moved in. Have a seat.' She scooped up a pile of clothing from one of the chairs and dumped it onto the crowded sofa. 'So you finally decided to visit your neighbors. Get you a drink?'

'You're a painter,' I burbled, for want of something to say. I was unnerved by the thought that any moment she would realize she was undressed and would scream and dash for the bedroom. I tried to keep my eyes moving, looking everywhere but at her.

'Beer or ale? Nothing else in the place right now ex­cept cooking sherry. You don't want cooking sherry, do you?'

'I can't stay,' I said, getting hold of myself and fixing my gaze at the beauty mark on the left side of her chin. 'I've locked myself out of my apartment. I wanted to go across the fire escape. It connects our windows.'

'Any time,' she assured me. 'Those lousy patent locks are a pain in the ass. I locked myself out of this place three times the first week I lived here—and once I was out in the hall stark naked for half an hour. Stepped out to get the milk, and the goddamned door swung shut behind me. I ripped the goddamned lock off and I haven't had one on my door since.'

I must have frowned, because she laughed. 'Well, you see what the damned locks do. They lock you out, and they don't protect much, do they? Fifteen burglaries in this goddamned building in the past year and every one of them in apartments that were locked. No one ever broke in here, even though the door was always open. They'd have a rotten time finding anything valuable here anyway.'

When she insisted again on my having a beer with her, I accepted. While she was getting it from the kitchen, I looked around the room again. What I hadn't noticed be­fore was that the part of the wall behind me had been cleared away—all the furniture pushed to one side of the room or the center, so that the far wall (the plaster of which had been torn off to expose the brick) served as an art gallery. Paintings were crowded to the ceiling and oth­ers were stacked against each other on the floor. Several of them were self-portraits, including two nudes. The paint­ing she had been working on when I came in, the one on the easel, was a half-length nude of herself, showing her hair long (not the way she wore it now, up in blonde braids coiled around her head like a crown) down to her shoul­ders with part of her long tresses twisted around the front and resting between her breasts. She had painted her breasts uptilted and firm with the nipples an unrealistic lollipop-red. When I heard her coming back with the beer, I spun away from the easel quickly, stumbled over some books, and pretended to be interested in a small autumn landscape on the wall.

I was relieved to see that she had slipped into a thin ragged housecoat—even though it had holes in all the wrong places—and I could look directly at her for the first time. Not exactly beautiful, but her blue eyes and pert snub nose gave her a catlike quality that contrasted with her robust, athletic movements. She was about thirty-five, slender and well proportioned. She set the beers on the hardwood floor, curled up beside them in front of the sofa, and motioned for me to do the same.

'I find the floor more comfortable than chairs,' she said, sipping the beer from the can. 'Don't you?'

I told her I hadn't thought about it, and she laughed and said I had an honest face. She was in the mood to talk about herself. She avoided Greenwich Village, she said, be­cause there, instead of painting, she would be spending all her time in bars and coffee shops. 'It's better up here away from the phonies and the dilettantes. Here I can do what I want and no one comes to sneer. You're not a sneerer, are you?'

I shrugged, trying not to notice the gritty dust all over my trousers and my hands. 'I guess we all sneer at some­thing. You're sneering at the phonies and dilettantes, aren't you?'

After a while, I said I'd better be getting over to my own apartment. She pushed a pile of books away from the  window—and I climbed over newspapers and paper bags filled with empty quart beer bottles. 'One of these days,' she sighed, 'I've got to cash them in.'

I climbed onto the window sill and out to the fire es­cape. When I got my window open, I came back for my groceries, but before I could say thanks and good-bye, she started out onto the fire escape after me. 'Let's see your place. I've never been there. Before you moved in, the two little old Wagner sisters wouldn't even say good morning to me.' She crawled through my window behind me and sat on the ledge.

'Come on in,' I said, putting the groceries on the table.

'I don't have any beer, but I can make you a cup of coffee.' But she was looking past me, her eyes wide in disbelief.

'My God! I've never seen a place as neat as this. Who would dream that a man living by himself could keep a place so orderly?'

'I wasn't always that way,' I apologized. 'It's just since I moved in here. It was neat when I moved in, and I've had the compulsion to keep it that way. It upsets me now if anything is out of place.'

She got down off the window sill to explore the apartment.

'Hey,' she said, suddenly, 'do you like to dance? You know—' She held out her arms and did a complicated step as she hummed a Latin beat. 'Tell me you dance and I'll bust.'

'Only the fox trot,' I said, 'and not very good at that.'

She shrugged. 'I'm nuts about dancing, but nobody I ever meet—that I like—is a good dancer. I've got to get myself all dolled up once in a while and go downtown to the Stardust Ballroom. Most of the guys hanging around there are kind of creepy, but they can dance.'

She sighed as she looked around. 'Tell you what I don't like about a place so goddamned orderly like this. As an artist… it's the lines that get me. All the straight lines in the walls, on the floors, in the corners that turn into boxes—like coffins. The only way I can get rid of the boxes is to take a few drinks. Then all the lines get wavy and wiggly, and I feel a lot better about the whole world. When things are all straight and lined up this way I get morbid. Ugh! If I lived here I would have to stay drunk all the time.'

Suddenly, she swung around and faced me. 'Say, could you let me have five until the twentieth? That's when my alimony check comes. I usually don't run short, but I had a problem last week'

Before I could answer, she screeched and started over to the piano in the corner. 'I used to play the piano. I heard you fooling around with it a few times, and I said to myself that guy's goddamned good. That's how I know I wanted to meet you even before I saw you. I haven't played in such a goddamned long time.' She was picking away at the piano as I went into the kitchen to make coffee.

'You're welcome to practice on it any time,' I said. I don't know why I suddenly became so free with my place, but there was something about her that demanded com­plete unselfishness. 'I don't leave the front door open yet, but the window isn't locked, and if I'm not here all you've got to do is climb in through the fire escape. Cream and sugar in your coffee?'

When she didn't answer, I looked back into the living room. She wasn't there, and as I started towards the win­dow, I heard her voice from Algernon's room.

'Hey, what's this?' She was examining the three di­mensional plastic maze I had built. She studied it and then let out another squeal. 'Modern sculpture! All boxes and straight lines!'

'It's a special maze,' I explained. 'A complex learning device for Algernon.'

But she was circling around it, excited. 'They'll go mad for it at the Museum of Modern Art.'