The Black Angel Read Free

and challenged long ago if anyone had been in there.
    I lingered outside a moment or two longer. For some strange reason it seemed less reprehensible to be caught trespassing in her living room than to be caught trespassing in the sanctum sanctorum of her boudoir. I roamed aimlessly around, looking over at the door by which I had entered every other moment. I strayed here and there, touching this, tapping that, poising three fingers in tripod formation on something else as I passed by. That was the only outward sign of the tension I was under.
    Everything was monogrammed. That seemed to be another fetish of hers. There must have been a time she hadn’t had much of anything, and now that she had plenty of everything she had to show whom it belonged to; she couldn’t let the observer take it for granted. She’d thought up a symbol of two Ms overlapping one another, so that they looked like a single capital with four downward stems. She must have stayed up all one night to arrive at that brilliant inspiration, I reflected. A sixth-grade school kid could have rigged up something more original in ten minutes flat.
    It had been sprinkled around wholesale. My only surprise was it had been left off the steam radiators and windowpanes and such. It was on cigarette boxes and on the cigarettes inside them and on matchsafes and worked into the corners of cushions and——
    Suddenly the telephone began to ring someplace right there in the room with me. They use the expression “jumping out of your shoes.” I didn’t jump out of mine, but if they weren’t actually clear of the plushy carpet for a moment they felt as though they were, with the frightened heave I gave.
    I stood perfectly still for a minute, waiting for it to quit. It didn’t. It kept on and kept on, until finally I couldn’t stand it any more. What made it worse was I couldn’t locate where it was at first, even by the sound. It was someplace near by, right in the same room with me, but there was no sign of it.
    I went looking around high and low for it, with furtive, trembling haste. It seemed to grow clearer over in a certain corner where there was a turquoise-lacquered object that might have been a chest of drawers. I clawed at the mid-section of it, and a little slab came down in desk formation. There it was behind that, lacquered turquoise to match everything else, and bleating like something smothering to death. Beside it was a little address book, with its pliable leather cover dyed the same inevitable color and stamped with the same inevitable monogram.
    I lifted the receiver finally, to try to silence it in that way. Then, because I already held it in my hand, I put it to my ear, stood quiet with it like that.
    A man’s voice said instantly, and with a sort of hurried intimacy, “Hello, Mia?” And then over again, because there was no answer from my end, “Hello, Mia?”
    That voice. I would have known his voice anywhere. I put my free hand down on the desk slab and braked myself against it while I curved over weakly above it, like when you have a pain in your stomach.
    â€œHello?” he kept saying. “Hello, Mia?”
    The colors in the room ran a little; a drop or two of turquoise seemed to swim around in my eyes. In this damn place you even shed turquoise teardrops.
    I didn’t have the heart for any cheap surprises, for any punishing triumphs. I didn’t want to be cruel to him. He was being cruel enough for the two of us. I put it down again quietly, almost tenderly.
    I didn’t have to worry about whether I had the right person or not now any more.
    Crazy thoughts without logic took turns slashing at me. “Why do they get you to learn to love them, if this is how they’re going to treat you after you do? Why do they come around you when you’re seventeen and aren’t doing anything to them, are just minding your own business, getting along all right without them,