Tightrope Walker Read Free Page A

old clock on the shelf told me that it was half-past ten. It was so quiet in these two rooms over the shop that I could hear each tick, like a heart beating, and then a truck passed on the street outside and blurred the silence. The kitchen was very plain: oilcloth tacked to the wall behind the sink, and scruffy linoleum on the floor. No counter top but a long old wooden table with knife cuts on it, scrubbed clean; an ancient gas stove, two sets of homemade wooden shelves for groceries and dishes, and a really decadent refrigerator that snored peacefully for days and then suddenly vibrated wildly until I gave it a kick and put it to sleep again. The bath was off the short passage to the living room, and very much the same.
    Coffee in hand I returned to the living room, carefully avoiding the slip of yellow paper that I could see waiting for me out of the corner of my eye. The coffee grounded me, it returned me to the present: so did Pegasus, standing guard next to my couch-bed, his head high and mane flying. I went to one of the two windows and opened it and looked out. The street was silent and empty but not dark; this was a street where other people lived over shops, too, the family across the street who ran the secondhand book store, the dressmaker next to them, the Nearly New Clothes Shop beyond, and the palmist, Madame Helen, above that. The lights were bright squares: one by one I watched them extinguished.
    I thought, “There must be some way to find out who wrote that note.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous,” scoffed the contrary half of me, “it could have been written years ago. And she didn’t even give her name.”
    “She gave half of it.”
    “You
think
she gave half of it. It could just as easily have been written by a man named Hannahsburg or some such.”
    “But the note was written, it doesn’t matter by whom.”
    “Yes, and the person who wrote it is probably walking around alive and sound at this very minute. Don’t be a fool.”
    “If she’s alive, then why didn’t she recover the note and tear it up?”
    “Too much trouble, of course. The nightmare was over.”
    “I’m familiar with nightmares,” I pointed out dryly, “and they are not ended so easily. She wouldn’t have forgotten that note.”
    “Then if you believe she’s dead, what’s the point of trying to find out anything about her?”
    “It’s a responsibility.”
    “Don’t be a fool. Dr. Merivale said you’re much too imaginative, and don’t forget that streak of the morbid in you. Next you’ll be saying it’s a hand reaching out to you from the grave.”
    “There’s nothing gravelike about that letter,” I argued. “I think she valued life, and I admire that. And she addressed the note to me. She wrote it to whoever found it and I found it, didn’t I? And there’s
no one else to care
.”
    “Then you just might tell me what you think you can do.”
    And of course I hadn’t the slightest idea.
    I turned from the window and looked at the room behind me. In this room I’d affected my environment, as Dr. Merivale would phrase it; he was always urging me to affect my environment. I’d sanded the bumpy old plaster walls and painted them off-white, and a man had come in with a machine to refinish the hardwood floor. It was a room that pleased me very much: there was Pegasus rearing up beside the couch, a Buffet print on the wall, a yellow beanbag chair, a thick rug in primary colors, a number of plants hanging from the ceiling in rope bags—and of course the hurdy-gurdy against the wall beside my banjo. This room was my cocoon now, its shining white walls and bright colors were what gave my downstairs life in the shop a lovely dimension. I didn’t want to lose the sensuous delight of creating more of this—I hadn’t even begun on the kitchen. I didn’t want to turn my attention elsewhere, which I would have to do if I went plunging out into the world to look for a woman who had written that she was going to be