Hearts in Atlantis(48)

(Nuit en Paris)

her perfume and he could hear her radio in the next room. It was Freddy Cannon, that bebop summertime avatar of Savin Rock: 'She's dancin to the drag, the cha-cha rag-a-mop, she's stompin to the shag, rocks the bunny hop . . . '

He was aware - faintly, far away, in another world farther up along the swirls of the spinning top - that the cab in which they were riding had come to a stop right next to the William Penn Grille, right next to that purple bruise of a DeSoto. Bobby could almost hear the car in his head; if it had had a voice it would have screamed Shoot me, I'm too purple! Shoot me, I'm too purple! And not far beyond it he could sense them. They were in the restaurant, having an early steak. Both of them ate it the same way, bloody-rare. Before they left they might put up a lost-pet poster in the telephone lounge or leave a hand-printed CAR FOR SALE BY OWNER card; upside-down, of course. They were in there, low men in yellow coats and white shoes drinking martinis between bites of nearly raw steer, and if they turned their minds out this way . . .

Steam was drifting out of the shower. B.B. raised herself on her bare painted toes and opened her towel, turning it into brief wings before letting it fall. And Bobby saw it wasn't Brigitte Bardot at all. It was Carol Gerber. You'd have to be brave to let people look at you with nothing on but a towel, she had said, and now she had let even the towel fall away. He was seeing her as she would look eight or ten years from now.

Bobby looked at her, helpless to look away, helpless in love, lost in the smells of her soap and her perfume, the sound of her radio (Freddy Cannon had given way to The Platters - heavenly shades of night are falling]., the sight of her small painted toenails. His heart spun as a top did, with its lines rising and disappearing into other worlds. Other worlds than this.

The taxi began creeping forward. The four-door purple horror parked next to the restaurant (parked in a loading zone, Bobby saw, but what did they care?) began to slide to the rear. The cab jolted to a stop again and the driver cursed mildly as a trolley rushed clang-a-lang through Puritan Square. The low DeSoto was behind them now, but reflections from its chrome filled the cab with erratic dancing minnows of light. And suddenly Bobby felt a savage itching attack the backs of his eyeballs. This was followed by a fall of twisting black threads across his field of vision. He was able to hold onto Carol, but he now seemed to be looking at her through a field of interference.

They sense us ... or they sense something. Please God, get us out of here. Please get us out.

The cabbie saw a hole in the traffic and squirted through it. A moment later they were rolling up Asher Avenue at a good pace. That itching sensation behind Bobby's eyes began to recede. The black threads across his field of interior vision cleared away, and when they did he saw that the naked girl wasn't Carol at all (not anymore, at least), not even Brigitte Bardot, but only the calendar-girl from The Corner Pocket, stripped mother-naked by Bobby's imagination. The music from her radio was gone. The smells of soap and perfume were gone. The life had gone out of her; she was just a . . . a . . .

'She's just a picture painted on a brick wall,' Bobby said. He sat up.

'Say what, kid?' the driver asked, and snapped off the radio. The game was over. Mel Alien was selling cigarettes.

'Nothing,' Bobby said.

'Guess youse dozed off, huh? Slow traffic, hot day . . . they'll do it every time, just like Hatlo says. Looks like your pal's still out.'

'No,' Ted said, straightening. 'The doctor is in.' He stretched his back and winced when it crackled. 'I did doze a little, though.' He glanced out the back window, but the William Penn Grille was out of sight now. 'The Yankees won, I suppose?'

'Gahdam Injuns, they roont em,' the cabbie said, and laughed. 'Don't see how youse could sleep with the Yankees playing.'

They turned onto Broad Street; two minutes later the cab pulled up in front of 149. Bobby looked at it as if expecting to see a different color paint or perhaps an added wing. He felt like he'd been gone ten years. In a way he supposed he had been - hadn't he seen Carol Gerber all grown up?

I'm going to marry her, Bobby decided as he got out of the cab. Over on Colony Street, Mrs O'Hara's dog barked on and on, as if denying this and all human aspirations: roop-roop, roop-roop-roop.

Ted bent down to the driver's-side window with his wallet in his hand. He plucked out two singles, considered, then added a third. 'Keep the change.'

'You're a gent,' the cabbie said.

'He's a shooter,'' Bobby corrected, and grinned as the cab pulled away.

'Let's get inside,' Ted said. 'It's not safe for me to be out here.'

They went up the porch steps and Bobby used his key to open the door to the foyer. He kept thinking about that weird itching behind his eyes, and the black threads. The threads had been particularly horrible, as if he'd been on the verge of going blind. 'Did they see us, Ted? Or sense us, or whatever they do?'

'You know they did . . . but I don't think they knew how close we were.' As they went into the Garfield apartment, Ted took off his sunglasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket. 'You must have covered up well. Whooo! Hot in here!'

'What makes you think they didn't know we were close?'

Ted paused in the act of opening a window, giving Bobby a level look back over his shoulder. 'If they'd known, that purple car would have been right behind us when we pulled up here.'