In the Absence of Angels Read Online Free Page A

childhood, he had often hung around in the areaways of old brownstones such as this had been. In the corners there had always been a soft, decaying smell, and the ironwork, bent and smeared, always hung loose and broken-toothed. The areaway of this house had been repaved with slippery flag; even in the humid night there was no smell. Black-tongued grillwork, with an oily shine and padlocked, secured the windows and the smooth door. Fastened on the grillwork in front of the door was the neat, square proclamation of a protection agency.
    “You don’t have a key for the padlocks, do you?”
    “No.” She stood on the curb, looking up at the house. “It was a nice room I had there. Nicest one I ever did have, really.” She crossed to the car and got in.
    He followed her over to the car and got in beside her. She had her head in her hands.
    “Don’t worry. We’ll get in touch with somebody in the morning.”
    “I don’t. I don’t care about any of it, really.” She sat up, her face averted. “My parents, or any of the people they tangle with.” She wound the lever on the door slowly, then reversed it. “Robert, or my mother, or Arthur,” she said, “although he was always pleasant enough. Even Vince — even if I’d known him.”
    “He was just a screwed-up kid. It could have been anybody’s window.”
    “No.” Suddenly she turned and faced him. “I should think it would be the best privilege there is, though. To care, I mean.”
    When he did not immediately reply, she gave him a little pat on the arm and sat back. “Excuse it, please. I guess I’m groggy.” She turned around and put her head on the crook of her arm. Her words came faintly through it. “Wake me when we get there.”
    She was asleep by the time they reached his street. He parked the car as quietly as possible beneath his own windows. He himself had never felt more awake in his life. He could have sat there until morning with her sleep-secured beside him. He sat thinking of how different it would be at Rye, or anywhere, with her along, with someone along who was the same age. For they were the same age, whatever that was, whatever the age was of people like them. There was nothing he would be unable to tell her.
    To the north, above the rooftops, the electric mauve of midtown blanked out any auguries in the sky, but he wasn’t looking for anything like that. Tomorrow he would take her for a drive — whatever the weather. There were a lot of good roads around Greenwich.

Point of Departure
    A FTERWARD, LEANING THEIR ELBOWS on the mantel, they lit cigarettes and stared at each other warily. The late afternoon, seeping into the small apartment, pushed back its boundaries, melted them into shadow, intruding into the comfortably trivial box the long finger of space.
    They were, she thought, like two people holding on to the opposite ends of a string, each anxious to let go first, or at least soon, without offending the other, yet each reluctant to drop the curling, lapsing bond between them. Always, afterward, there was the sense of a dialectic, a question not concluded; after the blind engulfment the two separate egos collected themselves painfully, slowly donned their bits of protective armor, and maneuvered once more for place.
    It would be easy, good, she thought, to talk long and intimately afterward, to meet on close ground, divested of all pretense. But they never want this; they never do. The long, probing conversations that women tried to force upon them, getting closer to the nerve of personality — how they hated them, retreating from them brusquely into silence, sheepishly into the commonplace of the consolatory pat! Or, after the aura of wanting had ebbed, did they too feel a little bereft, bare, in front of the speculative, now disenchanted eyes opposite them; did they too conceal a fumbling need to linger a little longer in the dark recesses of emotion, to examine, to assess what had been separate, had blended, and now was