Episode 11 | Woman From Another Planet | Part Two

A taxi swung to the curb at last and Loring got in and gave the driver Janice's Horatio Street address. He relaxed a little and watched Village stores, restaurants and dry cleaning establishments sweep past the windows of the cab. The almost completely deserted aspect of the Village before ten in the morning never ceased to fascinate him. He didn't quite know why.

Three minutes later, the taxi drew in to the curb in front of a four-story brownstone. Loring paid the driver, climbed the stoop and walked up two flights of stairs to the door of Janice's apartment. He inserted the key she had given him into the lock.

Janice's apartment seemed completely peaceful—quiet and appealing in the early morning light which streamed in from a high window directly opposite the daybed. The covers were in disarray and there was a slipper in the middle of the floor and a small oaken stand had been overturned in her hurry to get away. But otherwise the room was in order and her presence seemed to hover over everything that Loring touched.

He was staring at the slipper when a chill thought crept into his mind, and made his heart stand still. What if she were not alive and safe and waiting for him in the apartment they'd soon be sharing? What if he were a lover returning alone to a house that would never echo to her footsteps again?

What if she occupied a narrow home beneath a row of cypresses and he was alone now with only memories to comfort him, or tear cruelly at his heart?

If he were returning alone to such a dwelling, could he bear even to look at the slipper, the unmade bed, all of the dear, precious things her hands had touched?

He remembered suddenly that in the past when he had allowed his mind to dwell even for a moment on some great and inconsolable loss which had never actually taken place he was the better for it—a man more capable of taking full advantage of every moment of joy and happiness in the narrowing orbit of his days. You had to live every moment to the full, with as much heightening of consciousness as you were capable of experiencing,

because the orbit started narrowing when you were twenty and never grew any wider even when it stopped narrowing for a time and stayed the way it had been.

In the past such thoughts had not shaken him too profoundly or left a cold chill in their wake. But now they did, somehow. The room felt perceptibly more somber and the chill seemed to spread out from his mind in widening circles to envelop the chairs and bedside table, the bricks of the fireplace and even the pictures on the wall.

He did not hear the door open, though it made a faint click which would have been audible to anyone less preoccupied.

He did not even hear the woman's footsteps approaching him across the room. Her tread was very light and the rug was deep-napped and very soft.

But her quick, excited breathing and the heady perfume which was distilling its essence through the room—an odor of jasmine—and the rustle of her dress as she moved quickly made him aware that he was no longer alone.

He turned abruptly and stood staring at her, unable to move or speak, a look of dazed disbelief in his eyes.

He had never seen the woman before. Once seen, her face would have stayed forever in his memory and he could not possibly have forgotten how tormentingly beautiful it was or failed to remember every first- encounter impression, the time, the place, the exact moment when she had ceased to be a stranger.

Her beauty was so overwhelming that it stirred the heart in ways that were dangerous. Instantly, tumultuously, like a drug injected directly into the aorta, tightening the muscle fibers, drawing them together, increasing each pulse beat, turning each beat into a hammer blow in a bursting stillness.