An Aversion to Ladders 14c

The woman threw her long legs over the side of the bed to orient her heels in the floor. She stood up to squeeze her toes down into one. It was only with the restoration of a little distance the painter was able to take in the full magnitude of her.

Amber straightened her tight skirt. “You see, Michael, I too am a kind of daddy’s girl. And I too want to be a better person.”

His voice lifted. “Yes?”

“I want to redeem something of myself. Make up for a sin.”

“A sin?”

Amber swept the edge of the bed with her thigh, staying close while her words wandered further away. “I dream a lot about a little girl I lost, you see.”

“Are you speaking of a lost childhood? Of your childhood?”

“In a larger sense—yes.”

“If you feel that way, then I’m sure you can get something of it back.”

Her smile lightened the dark. “I believe you’re right.” The heel of her shoe bumped a crumpled piece of paper in the floor, prompting her to bend down and fetch it. “What’s this?”

He recalled the torn-up poem. It must have fallen out of his jacket when he took it off. He was vague. “An expression of love.”

“A love poem? A thrown-away love poem?”

“Written but not given.”

“For a daddy’s girl?”

“For you.”

The beautiful woman smoothed out the paper to fold it, and on placing it in her purse leaned over to plant wet kiss on his mouth. Her face almost broke through the shadowy veil they had been speaking through. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she whispered.

Michael roused under her spell. “Who are you?”

“Your ideal.”

The man was now doubly confused.

Amber bent down to scribble something on a pad, more by touch than sight. “If you ever want a free model, call.”

“But you live so far away.”

“I have an apartment in Stonesthrow.”

“Oh?”

“I’m on retainer with several of the fraternity houses at the college, so I spend a lot of weekends down there. It’s a cheap efficiency apartment, mind you. Big enough to sleep in—and only sleep in.”

Michael did not respond.

“So you’ll call?”

He acknowledged her offer with a nod mercifully muddied in shadow.

There was a wink, and her most indelible smile yet. The click of her pointy heels in the hallway was the last of her he would willingly relinquish. He tried to settle back into a faint-hearted sleep, but found himself stroking the concave space in the pillow beside him for a strand or two of her hair.

He was emotionally conflicted, and perhaps his ability to be easily conflicted was his protective shield in these matters. To give his heart to more than one woman was hedging his bets, and softening any potential pain by dividing its source. He wanted to be undivided in his affections, but could never trust a woman not to hurt him. Still, it was historically a losing strategy. Instead of agonizing about not choosing one woman, he would more comfortably not choose between two.

His mind drifted off in a long torturous moment, yet could find no way through the new complication. In his ambling, a flicker from the covered window brought him back to his senses. Detective Harrod Pincher was peeking out through a crack at the street below. Still in costume, his dark cape had concealed his presence in the room for some unknown time.

The intruder began obliquely. “This all used to be gaslight, before the great fire.” Turning from the window, he inquired, “I pray you had a good night’s sleep, Mr. Louden-West?”

Jarringly awake, the hotel guest shot up to flip on the bed lamp. “I came to see my lawyer.”

The detective stepped forward stiffly and pulled the borrowed videocassette out from his cape. “We will no longer be needing this.”

Michael did not reach out to grab the offered tape. “I should go get my lawyer if you’re going to interrogate me.”

Detective Pincher dropped the cassette on the foot of the bed. “That will not be required at this stage, Mr. Louden-West. My turning up here is simply to demonstrate to you I know what you are about. You have casually disregarded my request to stay put in order come up here to cavort with God-knows-who.”

Not knowing what was on the videotape, the painter stared at it with dread. He repeated his defense feebly. “But I came to see my lawyer. He lives in this building.”

“Yes, yes. So you say.” The detective let the man wriggle for a second or two longer. “As for the tape,” he confessed, “the room was too dark to record anything of use.” He turned in a half-circle toward the door. “I will not keep you any longer, sir. I pray you will return to town directly?”

The man shook his head compliantly.

“I bide you good day, then.” A cautious smile returned to the inspector’s face on disappearing into the hallway. “Good day, Mr. Louden-West!”

Michael laced up on his shoes with a throbbing headache pulsing up from the veins in his calves into his temples. He tore the prostitute’s phone number off the notepad and placed in his coat pocket, along with a strand of her hair entwined absently around his finger. In haste, the videocassette was forgotten.

The hotel guest limped back to the stairs that had earlier foiled him. On pushing into the well, he heard something bounding up out of its tiled throat. A light was out two floors down, and the snap of excoriated flesh and a woman’s clinch-lipped yelp told him how the darkness was being put to use. Michael fell back into the hallway and eyed the decrepit elevator fearfully, yet he knew no other way down other than a window ledge. The carriage fingered the black shaft tentatively in its descent, and in being liberated in body (if not mind) the man stumbled out to find the grey film of predawn on the lobby windows. None of the dark monitors winked in passing, although the concierge was peeking out the curtain and threatening to emerge.

Michael was already as good as gone.

He did not drive home immediately but made a swing by the old tenant house on the off chance he might find his fan still on the premises. He stealthily entered the hallway and unlocked the door with a copy key; his former rooms now seemed as distant to him as any from his childhood. The fan, not surprisingly, was nowhere to be seen. He was about to return to the car when a disturbance in a window pulled him around to the side of the house. What could only be a floor fan was kicking up a bluster in the new tenant’s curtains. He was glad to see it. Or, better put, he wanted to believe his fan had fatefully found its way into the Hispanic woman's hands and not those of the evil neighbor.

The traveler nearly beat the Sun back to Stonesthrow. He left the prostitute’s number on the dashboard, feeling the vehicle was a kind of purgatory halfway between the trashcan and an undefined course of action. Daybreak was warming his dingy sofa when he stepped through the door. The empty beer bottle on the coffee table tugged like dead weight in the middle of his memory, and, resigned to leave it, he lumbered upstairs to his bedroom.

Michael stripped off of his clothes to discover the unexpected smell of perfume on his skin. The moment had him trying to piece together Amber’s face in another blank place, as well the alleged attempt at intimacy Omar had put her up to. His thoughts of the woman were troubling, if only because he was continuing to have them. He chanced to glimpse his grey body in the dresser mirror. As a boy, it had had been too close to see—too painful to endure. Now, with age, it was too far away to relate to as belonging to him. Shamed by its company, he went into the bathroom to shower. A more composed man returned downstairs to throw away the beer bottle.

Amber was, after all, only a whore: a whore who was paid to like him.