“In the salon.” The clerk lowered her voice. “The more expensive things are up there, and they get a better class of people.”
A pokey elevator carried him to the second floor, wheezing like an asthmatic old man. Here the carpets were white and the lights seemed touched with blue. He located a male clerk and described Lara again, adding that it was extremely urgent that he speak to her.
The clerk asked frostily, “You don’t by any chance recall the young lady’s name?”
“Lara Morgan,” he said. “She sometimes uses the name Laura Nomos.”
The clerk did not turn a hair. “Then if you’ll come with me, sir, I can examine the book for today and tell you whether she’s been here.”
They went to the back of the store, where a ledger lay open on a desk. The clerk studied its pages. “Ms. Morgan was indeed here today, sir. At eleven thirty.” The clerk glanced at his watch. “It’s now nearly eleven forty, so I would imagine she’s left the store. Ms. Morgan left her coat with us for cleaning and storage, as I believe she always does.”
A tiny flower of hope blossomed in him. He asked, “She’ll come for it, then, in the fall?”
“Or send someone, sir, if she wants it taken from storage.” The clerk flipped pages. “Here we are, sir. She picked it up last October. But it had been with us for twenty-six months, sir.”
His Apartment
The mailbox was full, and among its bills and ads he discovered a yellow ticket advising him that still more were being held for him at the post office. A little strawberry-shaped clock he had gotten in a drugstore clung to the door of his refrigerator, its display faithfully flashing the time and date—1:38, 4 15, 1:38, 4 15, 1:39, 4 15.
It was the middle of April; he tried to remember when Lara had left him, but could not. Her note lay on the coffee table, undated save for a light coating of dust. He read it again.
Darling,
I tried to say good-bye last night, but you wouldn’t listen. I’m not a coward, really I’m not.
If it weren’t for the doors I wouldn’t tell you a thing—that would be the best way. You may see one, perhaps more than one, at least for a little while. It will be closed all around. (They must be closed on all sides.) It may be a real door, or just something like a guy-wire supporting a phone pole, or an arch in a garden. Whatever it is, it will look
Please read carefully. Please remember everything I’m saying.
If you go through before you realize it, don’t turn around.
Her signature was exactly as he remembered it, its first
A paper lay under the coffee table. March 13th—thirty-three days since Lara had gone. A night in the hospital, or perhaps two. Say two nights in the hospital, a night in the hotel with North, a night in the hotel alone. That was four nights, for thirty-three days.
He switched on the television and chanced upon a feature story about the rush to file income tax returns. April 15th; this was the day you were supposed to file. Mechanically, he walked to the post office and got the rest of his mail. His form was there, and the store had sent his W2 already—it was in the pile of papers on the bedside table. The bed was still unmade, still rumpled from the night he had staggered into it with Lara and the day he had awakened alone.
He used the short form and had nothing to report but his salary; it was complete, sealed and stamped, in twenty minutes. He had not worn the overcoat when he went to the post office, and now he debated whether to wear it when he went out to mail his return. The packet of fifties was still in the right side pocket. He took it out, wondering what Internal Revenue would do if they knew he had it; no doubt profits had to be reported, even if they were the profits of buying several thousand dollars for a dime. The brown paper wrapper was still stamped PUROLATOR COURIER, still marked with a Chinese character and the symbols for ten cents by Mr. Sheng’s industrious brush. Where was Mr. Sheng now? And his nephew, Dr. Pille? On a different channel, in another show.
Taking Marcella’s bills out of his wallet, he folded them, bound them with a rubber band, and put them in the pocket of the overcoat. Slipping the paper wrapper from Mr. Sheng’s fifties, he crumpled it and tossed it into a wastebasket, and deposited the fifties in his wallet.
He felt like an international traveler—like James Bond—felt that he should have a small but deadly automatic tucked away somewhere, and several passports. He laughed at himself as he hung the coat in the closet, draping the muffler over its collar while he resisted, always resisted, the impulse to take out the Tina doll and study it, to kiss it perhaps, and comb its hair as the woman in the haberdashery had.
“Too old to play with dolls.” He spoke the words aloud, but softly.
Returning from the post office a second time, he felt cold despite the sweater-vest and stopped to buy a new topcoat. At his own store—the store where he worked, or at least where he had worked—he could have gotten an employee discount. But the topcoat was on sale, and his discount would not have made it any cheaper; the discount applied only to the full price, never to a sale price. His new topcoat was tan, like his old one.
Back at his apartment, he stripped the bed, showered, and changed clothes, discarding his scorched slacks. There was a musty shirt on the floor of his closet. He bundled it with the sheets and pillow slips, and the soiled shirt, socks, and underwear he had removed, and looked around to see whether Lara had left anything.
