69 Barrow Street Read Free Page B

Stella’s body, Ralph was able to study it in detail and to realize just how beautiful it was.
    Stella was thirty, three years older than Ralph. With the sort of life she had been leading it was almost a miracle that no signs of wear or aging appeared to the eye. Her breasts were still perfectly firm, and breasts as large as Stella’s generally show the signs of age earlier than smaller ones. Her complexion was clear and perfect from head to toe.
    She was so beautiful, Ralph mused. How could anyone so beautiful be so inexplicably bad? It was impossible to understand.
    He left the bedroom and closed the door behind him. A fast shower made him feel alive once again, his skin fresh and clean and his mind able to concentrate. He toweled himself dry and stood at the open bathroom window, gulping huge breaths of the early morning air. The air was as fresh as air ever got in New York and it made him feel even more awake and more alive.
    He almost felt good.
    But not quite. Not quite, because he knew that no man in his position could ever feel good. No man with Stella hanging on his neck like a millstone.
    A millstone? That wasn’t a particularly good image, and he closed his eyes to hunt for a better one. An albatross, perhaps. A sexy blonde albatross. He remembered the poem by Coleridge in which a sailor shot an albatross and the corpse of the bird hung around his neck for months bringing terrible luck to the ship.
    That was Stella, all right. Hanging around his neck and lousing him up.
    Returning to the bedroom, he dressed quickly and quietly. Stella slept on. He glanced at her again and the events of the previous night flashed through his mind briefly—the insults, the slapping, the humiliating way she had forced him to make love to her on the floor with her dress on, the terrible laughter that tore from her throat all the while until passion caught her up and the laughter changed in midstream to a gush of foul obscenities. For a moment a wild impulse gripped him and he longed to kill her, to press the pillow over her nose and mouth and hold it there until she choked to death.
    But the impulse passed quickly. Ralph was not by nature a violent man. He could fight when pressed and he could lose his temper easily enough, but he had never yet gotten mad enough to commit murder.
    But he had to admit the idea was an attractive one.
    For a moment he considered frying himself a couple eggs in the apartment’s small kitchen. Then he decided against it. He didn’t want to be around when Stella woke up. Even if he didn’t get up the guts to leave her, he wanted to spend as little time around her and the apartment as possible.
    He left the apartment and walked down the hallway to the door. The weather was nice out, with a hot yellow sun just coming into view and the sky clear-blue with hardly a cloud in it. He sat down for a moment on the stoop in front of the building and lit the first cigarette of the day, enjoying the lift it gave him as the strong smoke hit his lungs.
    When the door opened behind him a second or two later he turned his head slightly to see who it was. That’s when he saw her for the first time.
    She was wearing black toreador pants that were tight around her hips and legs and a light green sleeveless blouse that looked as cool as the grass in the mountains. She wore sandals on her feet and her hair was short and dark brown. Her body was trim and neat; in fact, there was an overwhelming impression of neatness and coolness and quiet self-possession about her which hit him at once.
    He liked her instantly.
    “Hello,” he said. He smiled.
    She smiled back.
    “I haven’t seen you around before,” he said. “Did you just move in recently?”
    “Yesterday morning.”
    “First time in New York?”
    “No,” she said, and she smiled as if the question were very funny.
    “Been in the Village before?”
    She nodded. “For several years.”
    Suddenly he said: “Sit down for a minute. It’s very nice here.”
    She