999_ Twenty-Nine Original Tales of Horror and Suspense - Al Sarrantonio [308]
She snatched up her jacket and purse from a chair, told the secretary “Take a long lunch today, Millie,” and strode out into the windowed Trump Tower arcade and then out to Fifth Avenue and its bustle, its squalls of stalled traffic in shadowed May. From the curbside she hailed a Yellow Cab and got into it.
“Where to?”
Freeboard hesitated, staring straight ahead. Something had found her. What was it? Some vague premonition. Of what? And what had she dreamed last night? she wondered.
“Where we goin’?”
“Somewhere else,” Freeboard murmured.
“Somewhere else?”
She came back, and her dimpled chin jutted up slightly, as if with a child’s defiance and grit. “Seven-seventy East River Drive,” she commanded. The cab and her thoughts lurched forward into gridlock, into the patterned sleep of her life.
“This is it,” she said assuredly half an hour later.
She was standing in a slowly ascending construction elevator with a couple from Hinsdale, Illinois, who were searching for a condo in Manhattan. Quiet, staring down at the elevator floor, they wore red hard hats over thoughtful expressions and hair that was white as the Arctic fox. Freeboard adjusted her own hard hat and finished, “You can’t get newer than this.”
The elfin elevator operator nodded. Stooped, middle-aged, looking older than his years, he wore a floppy and torn old gray wool sweater and was missing both his upper and lower front teeth. “Best views,” he grunted gummily. “Yeah. Ya see everythin’—the Williamsboig Bridge, the whole river. Sly Stallone is gonna take a place here. I seen him yestiddy.”
The building soared breathless above the East River. The couple wanted “new;” they had seen enough “old"—apartments for sale by their current occupants. “Why is it,” the husband had grumbled, “that in all of these terribly expensive apartments, every room where a guest might go looks great, but you walk into any other room, like the kitchen, and the place looks like the embryo ward in Alien.” Across from the Museum of Natural History, the master bedroom of a luxury apartment had only a single illumination, a naked bulb suspended by a wire coiling down from a crumbling and smoke-stained ceiling; in another a shower stall was situated in the middle of a bedroom wall: the occupant was using it to store women’s shoes; and later, in the chic and stately Dakota, the walls of an apartment the couple had inspected were completely covered over by massive paintings of nude men and women looking earnest and absorbed while engaged in injecting themselves with drugs.
“Oh, well, they could be diabetics,” the wife had noted kindly.
“You smell real good.”
Freeboard turned a dead gaze to the elevator operator. He was eyeing her with grudging surmise. “Peach bubble bath,” Freeboard told him inscrutably. The scent wafted up from her neck.
“Nice earrings,” the operator nodded.
“Thanks.”
“Hey, Eddie, come on, fer chrissakes! Hold up!”
An irritated workman was pounding on a door as the elevator creakily lurched up past him. The diminutive operator called down loudly, “You guys all smell like crap! You stink! I got real nice people with me here!”
The workman’s voice rumbled up in a guttural threat:
“You’re gonna pay for this, Eddie, you fuck!”
The couple from Hinsdale liked the apartment. Then something extraordinary occurred: standing at a window and breathing in plaster dust as she absently stared at a motor launch plowing white furrows in the murk of the river, Joan Freeboard, relendess pursuer of escrows, indomitable Realtor of the Year many times, whirled around to the couple and asked impulsively, “Are you sure you want to live in the city? It’s mean and it’s dirty and crowded and ugly.”
What the hell am I saying? thought the Realtor, aghast.