The Beatles declared that they all lived in a yellow submarine.
Later that day, David exited the apartment, leaving the door unlatched behind him as he strode quickly to the end of the corrldor.
Ignoring the white framework of PVC pipes that supported bags labeled PLASTIC and ALUMINUM, he glanced around to make sure he was alone. Preserving the environment was the last thing on his mind. Self-preservation had brought him here.
He removed Deirdre’s videocassette from beneath his shirt and quickly dropped it down a chute whose steel door was lettered INCINERATOR.
Then he hurried back to the apartment before Molly realized he was gone.
31
Chumley stood that night in the arched stone doorway of the building across the street from Deirdre’s apartment. He was wearing a blue shirt, gray pants, and his clunky walking shoes. In the darkness, he was almost invisible in the shadowed doorway.
He didn’t know exactly what to expect from his vigil, but curiosity about Deirdre had driven him there. So far all it had netted him were a few glimpses of her as she passed her living room window, a traversing image that had entered his life and made him alternatingly ecstatic and uneasy.
Maybe he should leave, he thought. The night was warm and the air in the doorway was still. A swarm of gnats had found him and seemed to regard pestering him as the purpose of their brief lives, flitting about his eyes and nostrils, making him itch.
He was vigorously scratching an elbow when a motion across the street caught his eye.
Deirdre emerged not from the street door, but from the narrow walkway alongside the building. Chumley knew from helping her move that it led to a side entrance and the service elevator. She was wearing slacks, and what appeared to be a light sweater despite the heat. And she was pushing something.
Chumley glanced up and saw that her apartment’s windows had gone dark. He should have noticed earlier; he’d been distracted by the gnats.
As she moved quickly away from the building and passed beneath a streetlight, he saw that what she was pushing ahead of her on the sidewalk was a baby stroller.
She began rolling the empty stroller at a slower pace. Staying on the opposite side of the street, Chumley followed.
Near Columbus, she stopped in front of a small combination grocery store and deli. She glanced around, collapsed the small, portable stroller, then went inside.
Chumley took up position across the street from the deli and waited.
So she was going shopping, he figured, and used the stroller to carry her groceries. But why had she exited her apartment building from the side door and walked through the narrow, dark gangway? It was a place most women would avoid. And there had been, Chumley was sure, something definitely furtive about her manner.
Ten minutes later she pushed the stroller out onto the sidewalk. In its cloth seat sat a brown paper grocery sack with what appeared to be the leafy end of a cluster of celery stalks jutting up from one side at an angle.
Chumley walked a few steps toward the corner, then turned and began trailing her back along West Eighty- fifth Street toward her apartment. He watched her pause and bend forward from time to time, as if something about the groceries or stroller demanded her attention.
He took a chance and moved closer, to where he could look across the street at an angle that enabled him to see what was happening. She pushed the stroller another fifty feet, paused, then bent forward over it again, her grip still on its handles. Chumley saw with surprise that she was smiling, and she seemed to be talking. Yes, undeniably her lips were moving as if she were talking to whatever was in the paper sack.
His mood plunged. Surely there was an explanation. Maybe she had a reason, a puppy or some other sort of pet in the bag. Possibly a goldfish.
But he doubted that a store specializing in take-out food and groceries would sell any kind of fish not destined for the dinner plate.
Chumley was familiar enough with people who talked to imaginary companions, as was everyone living in New York, and passed them on the sidewalk almost every day. Schizophrenics who carried their own vocal agonies inside their heads, who should be receiving treatment instead of roaming or begging on the streets. But it shook Chumley to think that Deirdre might secretly be one of those people. He preferred to believe that if he asked her about tonight, she’d laugh and offer an easy explanation that hadn’t entered his mind.
When she reached her building, she rolled the stroller into the dark walkway without hesitation, as if confident that any waiting predator, and not she, would be in danger. Chumley wouldn’t have walked into that black maw with such resolution. He was impressed by her bravery.
He stood for a while waiting for her apartment lights to come back on. Then he saw her walking from the dark gangway. The stroller was gone and she was carrying the sack of groceries.
He watched her push open the glass doors and enter the building’s lobby.
The elevator door opened immediately when she pressed the Up button. She stepped inside, punched her floor button, then stood leaning against the elevator’s back wall, clutching her groceries to her breast and staring in the direction of the street.
Chumley was sure the bright lobby’s reflections on the glass doors would prevent her from seeing him out on the sidewalk, across the street and on the other side of a row of parked cars. He watched as the elevator door smoothly closed, cutting her from his view.
Her actions confused him, and made him even more uneasy about the irregularity in the files.
On the other hand, what had he actually seen? A woman pushing a baby stroller, then buying groceries and using the stroller to convey them to her apartment. It didn’t compute that she’d store the stroller someplace in the building’s basement, compact and portable as it was, and come and go via the service entrance. But then there was so much in life that didn’t compute if you really stopped to think about it.
She’d paused here and there on the sidewalk and done a little talking to herself, but was that a crime? And was talking to yourself even so unusual these days? Maybe what he was doing was technically a crime, stalking her. Only
Chumley considered dropping in unexpectedly on her for a visit, perhaps asking her about the walk with the stroller, about the files.
But he’d seen her sudden anger and didn’t want to provoke her again.
He stood in the shadows on West Eighty-fifth Street and stared for a while, puzzled. Her apartment lights came on again, but the living room drapes drew closed without him catching sight of her.
He slapped at the gnats, who’d patiently awaited his return, then he shrugged elaborately and walked away.
Molly pushed the empty stroller along West Eighty-fifth Street the next morning, after dropping off Michael at Small Business. Traffic was heavy, and the sidewalks were teeming with people on their way to Monday morning work.
There was a store nearby that had a coupon sale on Healy’s Cat Gourmet Meatloaf, the only brand Muffin would eat-in various flavors, of course. Molly needed some other groceries, so she thought this was a good morning to buy them, at the same time stocking up on cat food for the week and hoping Muffin wouldn’t suddenly decide to switch brands.
She was waiting for the traffic light to change at Columbus when she noticed a woman in a green dress entering a clothing store across the street.
Molly stiffened behind the stroller.
The woman had looked familiar.
So had the dress.
The light read WALK and the knot of people at the corner began to move. Molly sped up and shot out ahead of most of them, pushing the stroller so fast that the rhythmic squeal of one of its wheels was almost a steady
