There Are Doors

He saw the doors to the elevator—the elevator that would take him to the Grand Hotel, the hotel that was so much nearer Lara. He started toward them, slowing as he felt the chill of fear. In the hotel he would have no money and no friends, not even Tina. If he ever found Lara, she would see only a silly middle-aged man. Yes, he was middle-aged now, and it was better to face it. Lara would see a silly man carrying dolls’ clothes, a doll’s tea set, and slacks that were probably too small for him by a couple of inches.

His finger pressed the buzzer.

The elevator did not come at once, and indeed did not come for a long time. He waited, squaring his shoulders, adjusting the bag from the toy store and the paper-shrouded slacks; and at last the doors slid back.

He stepped in. “Ground floor, please.”

Slowly and distinctly, the operator announced, “This is the ground floor.”

He recalled stepping through a doorway and out into a snow-covered parking lot—the ground floor. “The lobby level, then.”

“There’s nobody there.”

“Take me there anyway,” he said.

The elevator rose slowly and smoothly, and it came to him that there was nothing of the Grand Hotel’s wire cage about it. When the doors separated, they revealed the deserted lobby of an office building, a lobby a floor above the street. He stepped out and said, “Thanks,” then watched the doors close behind him. The world he saw from the windows of the lobby was his own, he felt certain. United and North were not there, and if Lara came it was only briefly and temporarily, to live with some fortunate man or to store her coat.

He should have watched the furrier’s; just as the cold had reminded him of this wool overcoat, it would have made Lara (if Lara were here) get her coat out of storage. He had forgotten, and it was too late now.

He went back to the elevator and pushed the buzzer just as he had before. Now the elevator was his only hope; yet he knew the hope was vain.

“I get it,” the operator said. “You wanted to use the john. There’s some downstairs too—if you’d asked me I could have told you.”

He nodded, not speaking, waiting for the doors to open.

“Sometimes kids want to go up, you know? I don’t let ’em. I could tell you were okay.”

The doors slid apart, and he was in a wide low room without flags. Most of the shops were dark. He went out into the main arcade, drawing up his muffler around his neck and buttoning the topmost button of the overcoat.

The street was dark, empty of everything save the wind. A prowl car went by fast, cops staring threats at vacant doorways. The wind cut his fingers to remind him that he had forgotten to put on his gloves. He set his parcels down on the icy sidewalk and took the gloves from the pockets of the overcoat, pulled each on carefully and fastened its cuff. There was enough tea for tonight at any rate; he could buy more tomorrow if Tina was real. If Tina was really there.

Another bus stop, one stop nearer his apartment, would be nearly as close as his usual one. As he walked toward it, he discovered to his surprise that he was happy. It took him half a block to find the source of his happiness in the knowledge that Lara was real even if Tina was not.

She might laugh at him; she probably would; he laughed at himself, now and then. But he would rather listen to her laugh than to anything that anyone else in either world might say. On television, some woman had mentioned that wild dogs did not bark, that tame ones barked in imitation of human speech. What was the talk of anyone else, of Bridget Boyd or H. Harris Henry, but an animal’s imitation of Lara’s voice, of the laughter of the goddess? Though she would surely reject him as a lover, would she reject him as a servant? If she did, he would become her slave.

A glance behind him showed a bus coming down the street. Hurrying, he got to the stop just as it pulled up.

It was not until he had risen to get off that he remembered he would have to tell Tina. She would be there, waiting for him in the living room, hiding among the sofa cushions in the place she called her secret fort; she would pop out when she heard his key in the lock. He would have to admit to her then that he had not been able to buy the desk.

Already the taste of failure was bitter in his mouth.

The Story

“I’m good at looking for stuff,” Tina said. When his expression betrayed his skepticism, she added, “Yes I am! And I don’t like to watch TV.”

“Neither do I,” he told her mildly. “But at night there’s not much else to do.”

“There’s looking, and you could read me a story while I do it.”

“You could listen to the TV,” he said. “That would be the same thing.” It was not until he had finished speaking that he realized he had conceded Tina’s ability as a searcher—probably much too soon.

“It isn’t the same thing at all.”

He had already turned down the volume; now he switched the television off. “Why not?”

“Reading would help you in school.”

“I don’t have to go to school any more.”

Tina stamped, impatient with his stupidity; the sound was like the tapping of a fingernail. “You’ll have to go back next year. It will help you then.”

“All right,” he said.