Doris Lane

“Look, Masie, this is what I do,” Rafe told her on the corner of Sixth Avenue and Christopher Street. “I kill bad guys. The law doesn’t do it; I do it.”

“Rafe, it’s wrong.”

“Masie, it’s right.”

She turned and hurried away through a mob of carefree-looking gay men that clogged the sidewalks. He stood watching her go until he could see no more of the back of her head. He couldn’t keep following her everywhere. He knew that wasn’t fair to her. He loved her, but he couldn’t hold her. He couldn’t make her understand. She’d have to come to it herself. Weary of the come-on looks he was getting, Rafe started up Sixth Avenue to where life was not quite so gay.

He turned into the Riviera on a whim and sat down at the bar before realizing the new bartender was Louise’s friend, Daniel. Perched on a stool near the front window, in all her glory, there in support of her friend’s new job, was Louise. Rafe almost turned and walked out, but he heard Daniel call, “Hey, Rafe!”

Louise said, “Rafe, how are you?”

He could tell by her expression she knew exactly how he was. Mumbling something meant to sound sociable, he started to leave the bar. A crowd of people blocked his way. Not a significant obstruction, but it was enough to turn Rafe back to take a barstool.

Louise was cool, even damned aloof, but Daniel looked sympathetic.

Placing a beer in front of Rafe, he said, “On me.”

“I can’t lose her,” Rafe said, miserably sad.

“Then you can’t keep on doing what you’re doing,” Louise pointed out.

“Louise,” Daniel chided. “Have a heart.”

“I’m sorry to say it, Rafe,” Louise continued, “but I wouldn’t want to have a killer for a boyfriend, either.”

“You’re not sorry to say it at all,” Rafe answered, tipping back his beer, and staring into the mirror that lined the back bar.

“Actually, I’m not,” Louise said, pushing her arms into her coat sleeves. “I think Masie is doing the right thing.”

When she was gone, Daniel said, “I know I should feel the same way, but I’m confused. Rafe, we’re Masie’s friends and we love her, too. We want what’s best for her. I just wish you could make me understand.”

“It’s none of your business.”

“You may not like it, pal, but Masie’s business is my business, and Louise’s. That’s how we operate. We’re friends.”

“Well, I don’t have any friends. Just Masie. She’s all I want.”

“What? You don’t want her to have any friends? Just you?”

Rafe didn’t answer and Daniel said, “You are a sad case, Rafe.”

“Well, I got a class. Thanks for the beer, Daniel.”

“Take care, Rafe,” Daniel said and watched as Rafe jaywalked into Sixth Avenue traffic. He’s a handsome devil, Daniel was thinking. If he weren’t straight, I could go for him myself.

Louise was not as good a rehearsal partner as Rafe. She was willing, though, and Masie worked hard to run through the scripts she had scheduled to read for her classes. Still, Masie missed Rafe’s sensitive direction. How he’d say she should be turning her head only so far, pushing her hair away, or letting it fall forward. She missed him in the early afternoons when he’d cross the street just to take her to bed on his way to school. She’d have to find a theater person to rehearse with, she knew. It was the other she could not quite handle, not just yet. There was an empty place inside her she didn’t know how she would fill.

“It’s an educational film, something for the government,” she answered, as she realized what Louise had just said. “I never heard of the guy, but, hey, it’s my first real part.”

“It’s great,” Louise said.

“Arthur doesn’t want me to do it. He says it sounds fishy.”

“What sounds fishy?”

“The rehearsals at 9:00 at night in his apartment. Arthur is old school, you know.”

Unconsciously she looked out the window, over the rooftop, and across the street to the Van Gogh apartment house lit up like a Christmas tree. Arthur Lawrence’s was one such window. She knew he was at his desk writing movie summaries for The New York Times television listing. He liked to do six at a time based on projected programming. He had almost always seen the movie at least once. But he wrote what he called pre-reviews of movies he had never seen, as well. He imagined from the title and cast, the year it was made, what it might be like and summarized his ideas. Then, when the movies actually aired, he would have half his work done and fun with testing his pre-reviews.

“I can ask Carol Lomax. She knows everybody.” Masie heard Louise’s voice as if from a great distance.

The window to Arthur’s senile mother’s apartment was on the floor above his and to the left. That window, she expected, would be dark. Mrs. Lawrence liked to go to sleep early, and Rafe, her nurse and Masie’s ex-lover, scheduled his courses at the film school for evenings. Just then the light went on in Mrs. Lawrence’s apartment. Rafe was back from class. She turned away so she wouldn’t see anything of him passing the window.

“Masie?” Louise said, “Carol Lomax?”

“Okay,” Masie said. “It can’t hurt.”

Louise bent over the script. She wondered if Masie would ever get over Rafe.

“Yukl,” Masie said, “tell Carol, Charles Yukl.”

“Yukl! I don’t have to ask Carol anything. That’s the nut with the surveys in Washington Square. He’s not a filmmaker, he’s a graduate student in psychology or something.”

“Well, he is a filmmaker now, I guess.”

Louise shook her curly head as if to clear it. She remembered the creep. Day after day he stood in the park having NYU students fill out questionnaires for his dissertation. Eventually it was noticed that he only approached female students. One day Louise had told him to fuck off, you pig, and he had stopped coming around. But she’d heard he was doing it again up at Hunter.

Masie remembered him too, now, and said, “Not the guy who wears plaid pants?”

“And striped shirts,” Louise answered. “Well, dressed like that.”

“He’s probably harmless,” Masie laughed.

On the night Masie was to meet with Charles Yukl for their first rehearsal, she was ready two hours ahead of time. She paced nervously for a while and then began to feel closed in. She decided to go to a café to wait until five minutes to nine before heading for Waverly Place. The night was cold and the streets, for the Village, were almost empty. She enjoyed wandering the narrow streets and imagined the winding country lanes and cow paths from which they had grown.

Swinging west and south, she walked down the brightly lit Hudson Street to Barrow. Arthur had told her Barrow Street was originally named Reason Street after Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and the locals had called it Raisin Street. She turned off Barrow into Commerce Street. At the bend in the narrow street stood the Cherry Lane Theater. Her father would take her there as a child to watch his friends perform in experimental theater and then to the Blue Mill for supper.

The street was very, very dark and very, very empty. Suddenly, Masie felt too alone and hustled out the Bedford Street end of the block. Looking behind her down the short block she had just left, she saw nobody, but felt someone was there in shadow. She could see the lights of busy Bleecker Street, where pedestrians were turning into Bedford, and her fears were calmed, but she wanted to know if she had imagined the whole thing.

She stepped into a darkened doorway across from her favorite house, 75-1/2 Bedford, the narrowest house in New York. John Barrymore had lived there and Edna St. Vincent Millay. The Dutch-looking house with the stepped gable was a kind of shrine for Masie and she felt she was protected. But the sudden appearance of a shadowy form in front of her told her she was not.

Heart pounding, she tried to push past, but the man grabbed her arm and said, “Masie.”

“Rafe! You son of a bitch, are you following me?!”

“Masie, please,” he said softly. “You can’t walk the streets at night alone. It’s dangerous.”

“You’re sick,” she said, jerking her arm free. “Don’t you ever do this again or I will have you arrested.”

“Masie”

“Don’t, Rafe, just don’t.”

“I want to protect you.”

“Nobody can protect me but me, Rafe. Now get out of my life.”

At the Dante, Masie saw Louise sitting with Carol Lomax. She stopped at the counter and ordered an espresso on her way to the tiny round table. The small space was filled with artists from the Village and SoHo and with local Italians. There was a steady buzz of conversation spiked with the occasional loud word to prove a point. The windows were steamed over from the cold outside meeting the heat inside through glass. In the crowded café Masie felt isolated from the world, but safe and warm.

Carol was saying, “Yogi Frietag, he’s a vocal coach, but he always said he wanted to get into film. Everybody calls him Charlie.”

“Masie, hi,” Louise said.

Carol had to leave right away, but she assured Masie she thought Charlie was okay. She grabbed her moth eaten mink coat off the back of her chair and put it on. It was the color of her hair, which she shoved up under a fur hat. Carol asked after their mutual friend, Anna, who had moved to France, leaving Masie her rooftop apartment. Masie said Anna was loving it there and told Carol she’d have a party as soon as the weather turned warm, so that Carol could revisit the rooftop.

She added, “We’ve named it ‘Anna’s Rooftop.’”

Carol said, “That’s nice. The place holds a lot of memories for me. Well, I gotta book. There’s a set designer waiting outside my door right this minute.”

Louise insisted, “Wait a minute. But don’t you think he’s strange?”

Carol, wrapping a long muffler several times around her neck, answered, “Who, Charlie? Strange, well, strange. Everybody’s strange in show business.”

A moment after leaving it, Carol was back at the table to say Rafe was standing across the street watching the café Louise went to the door with Carol to look, but Rafe was gone.

“I can’t take it,” Masie moaned. “I may have to move out of Jane Street.”

“What! Move from Anna’s Rooftop, how could you?”

“He’s following me everywhere I go. The other day, earlier tonight, and now this; I don’t think I can make him stop.”

“Masie, have you ever thought that Rafe could be dangerous?”

“No, he wouldn’t harm me. He’d never.”

“Well, he is a killer. Maybe you should move.”

“I don’t know if it would do any good, really. I think he would just find me.”

Masie was despondent as she walked to 120 Waverly Place to meet Charles Yukl, or Yogi Frietag, or whatever his name was. She kept looking back over her shoulder for Rafe. It was almost beginning to seem he should be there behind her. But this time he wasn’t. And, perversely, it saddened her.

Charles Yukl’s apartment was the typical village pad, with Indian spreads for curtains, a couple of bean bags left over from the Sixties, and shelves supported by bricks that were filled with books. A mattress was laid across a worktable and it, too, was covered with an Indian spread. A poster hung on one wall showed a beautifully happy Vietnamese woman releasing the doves of peace. “The War Is Over,” the poster read. Masie was a bit young for all this, but she had been raised on a college campus and remembered sneaking out of bed to watch moonlit vigils and candlelit marches of protest from her window. The war had gone on her entire lifetime before ending only last year.

“We’ll start,” Yukl was saying, “with some voice work.”

He sat himself at the piano and gestured for Masie to sit beside him. She started to ask, but then figured he just wanted to test her for sound in his own peculiar way. She could feel the heat from his body next to hers, though, and she was vaguely uncomfortable. Then as he played, his arm would reach across her front and brush against her breasts. She stood up and he asked if something were wrong.

“No,” she denied it. “I just prefer standing when I sing.”

“Okay, do you know ‘Melancholy Baby’?”

Masie snorted, “I know it from my grandparents. What’s it got to do with an educational film?”

“Are you sure you are all right, Masie? We have to do these exercises to relax you and prepare you to take on a role. Are you sure you are an actress, after all?”

Masie was stung. She quickly pushed down her fears. It wouldn’t do to question everything this way.

Come to me, my melancholy baby/Cuddle up and don’t feel blue

Suddenly Yukl snapped closed the key cover and stood.

“That’s enough,” he said. “It’s getting late and we have another exercise to cover. Here, sit in this chair.”

Masie hesitated. He had shifted his attention so rapidly. But then she did as she was directed. He walked around her a few times, framing her with his hands cupped around his eyes.

“Good, good,” he kept saying. “Now, we have to try a pose. I like to use a Lifebuoy Soap ad.”

Puzzled, Masie just nodded and waited. He came back with the ad showing a blurred image of a nude woman soaping in the shower. He was holding a black necktie and looking intently at Masie for a reaction.

“I won’t,” Masie said.

“You don’t have to take everything off, just your top. And I want you to wear this necktie.”

“A necktie? In the shower?”

“It’s artistic and stylish,” he said. “But, if you are too uptight, I understand.”

“N-no,” Masie said. “Just go in the other room for a minute. I want some privacy. I’m n-not used to this.”

He smiled then, with a hard look in his eyes, and said, “There is no other room, as you can see.”

Masie forced herself to smile back at him.

“Please,” she said, blushing.

His eyes softened and he murmured, “Yes, yes, you will do. You will do quite nicely.”

The instant he closed the bathroom door behind him, Masie leapt for her coat she’d left hanging on the back of a chair. She never stopped moving and reached the apartment door just as she heard the bathroom door thrown open. Rushing headlong down the stairs, she could hear his footsteps on the landing and heard him call, “Masie! Masie! Come back here. What’s wrong?”

She expected to hear him pounding down the stairs after her, but she reached the street door safely and realized he hadn’t followed. She all but collapsed on the stoop, she was so out of breath, and weeping wildly, almost choking with fear. She felt herself pulled up by strong arms. For a moment she thought Yukl had come out by a different exit. She struck out, punching with all her might, and trying to wrench herself free.

Then she saw it was Rafe she was striking and collapsed into his arms.

He held her a minute and then pushed her to arm’s length.

“Tell me,” he demanded angrily.

Rafe was up at the top of the steps banging on the door before Masie realized he had left her. He began jabbing all the doorbells in the building. Windows were thrown up and angry neighbors were yelling at him. He stood back a step and screamed with rage, “Yuuuuklllll!!”

Masie tried to calm him, but it was as if he was out of his mind. She kept talking and he kept screaming Charles Yukl’s name. The neighbors were threatening to call the police when the super came out and pushed Rafe, who lost his balance, and slipped back down a couple of steps. Masie swiftly put herself between the two angry men, apologizing to the super, and begging Rafe to come with her.

“Rafe, Rafe, please, come now. Please, Rafe. This is no good. Come with me. Come with me.”

She was aware of a crowd having gathered in the street. She didn’t worry about appearances. She had her arms pushing against his shoulders. Finally, she raised them around his neck and started giving soft kisses over his face, pressing up against him.

“Please, baby, please,” she whispered.

He jerked away from her and stormed off. She was left alone and humiliated before the onlookers, who acted as if they were watching a scene in a play. She raised her head and squared her shoulders. On impulse, she bowed grandly, tossed a kiss, before turning away, stepping lightly down the street.

Applause.

Curtain.

She didn’t bother catching up with Rafe. It seemed more sensible to let him calm down before she spoke with him again. She knew she would have to speak with him or Carl Yukl could turn up dead. After the high emotion of the scene with Rafe, Masie was wondering if she had over-reacted to the strange man’s come on, if that’s what it was. Maybe she hadn’t been in danger, after all. Perhaps her emotional state had caused her to misread the situation. If Rafe went after Yukl, Masie would have a murder on her conscience.

But Rafe was waiting on Masie’s doorstep.

The next morning waking up in his arms, Masie was again filled with confusion. She heard Arthur using his key at the downstairs door for their usual breakfast together. She jumped up and threw on a robe. She entered the kitchen trying to comb her fingers through her tangled hair.

“Hmmm,” Arthur noted, “looks like sex.”

“Be quiet. Rafe’s sleeping.”

“I wondered where he was. I should fire him.”

But Arthur was smiling happily as he prepared the coffee. He loved both Rafe and Masie and wanted nothing more than to see them together. His smile died slowly as Masie told him of her visit with Charles Yukl. He turned and stared at Masie and then past her to where Rafe was lounging in the doorway.

“Don’t worry, I won’t kill him. If I ever see him I’ll just punch his face in, I promise.”

Winter passed and the vine-covered brick wall that bordered Anna’s Rooftop turned green with ivy and white with specks of honeysuckle. Louise was serving a tray of drinks as Rafe passed the hors d’oeuvres. Arthur’s mother was sleeping soundly in a chaise longue. Carol and Masie were playing a game of checkers, while Arthur and Daniel talked quietly about a cabaret act they’d both seen. Rafe put down the plate. He stretched, luxuriating in the hot sun. Louise frankly watched his muscles ripple.

Music drifted out from Masie’s stereo playing Arthur’s collection of old 78s.

Come to me, my melancholy baby /Cuddle up and don’t feel blue

Masie felt a chill spread around her heart.

She was making a move across the board, her arm stretched out, when Carol asked, “Isn’t it something about Charlie Yukl?”

Rafe grabbed her by the shoulder and demanded, “What? What?”

Carol shrugged him off, flicked her wrist, and said, “Down, doggie.”

Louise came over to Masie and moved the checker for her. She put her arm around Masie. Daniel and Arthur and Rafe stood watchful. Carol was horrified, just remembering Masie’s rehearsal session last winter.

“Oh, Masie. It’s pretty awful. I have the afternoon Post in my bag.”

The girl had been so young, just 23, and lovely. It was her first audition. Her body was found on a rooftop on Waverly Place. She wore nothing but a black necktie tight around her neck.

Arthur’s mother stirred in her chaise longue and spoke into the silence.

“One for you, Rafe,” she said.