The neighborhood was a crazy quilt of hippies, sailors on liberty and barefoot girls in floppy hats. It was evening; Greenwich Village had awakened with a clamorous jolt. Brenda hesitated a moment in the doorway, then stepped out onto Seventh Avenue and dogged her way into the crowds. The spring air was cool and she wore a light fuzzy sweater over her shoulders. It was not long before she felt dowdy, like an old lady in a shawl.
Two chicks loped toward her, their slender, coltish legs snugly defined by skin-tight bell-bottoms. She stared in amazement at their nearly exposed breasts under the fishnet teeshirts they wore. The round globes bounced free, innocent of bras, the pink tips poking through the loosely woven material like impudent tongues.
A tall, perfectly built boy in wet-look leather pants and shirt swiveled his tiny hips as he passed a bemused sailor, who glanced guiltily at his groin before turning pointedly away. The young boy grinned knowingly and winked, tossing his head so that the earring in his right lobe danced with a saucy, mocking invitation. Brenda looked at him in wonderment and hostility. How could he stand those pants so tight, she asked herself, remembering Harl's pained gasp: "These pants are choking my balls off." She too looked at the boy's crotch and saw his nuts pinched into a huge knot of flesh. He saw her glance and curled his lip at her in disgust, his eyes raking her body. He gave a theatrical shudder and minced past.
Goddamn him! An answering surge of femininity rose in her. She had what he would love to be able to offer to another man! Memories of her afternoon with Harl came back to her now and made her hot and itchy once again in the face of the fairy's challenge.
She came to a tiny sidewalk cafe and chose a table by the railing so that she could watch the scene go by. Now that she was sitting down, out of the teeming phalanx of people, she relaxed a little. New York! She was here at last, in the midst of the excitement and anonymity for which she had longed. A diminutive black waiter in a dashiki and a cambric apron that threatened to trip him skidded to a stop and took her order for Viennese coffee. When he brought it, she made a dunking game of the blob of whipped cream and listened to the conversations around her.
"If there a spirit present, will the table please rise?"
Brenda turned and saw a powerfully built man, his back to her, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers resting on the sticky surface of the wire table. Something about the back of his head was vaguely familiar to her. Across from him sat a long-haired brunette in a denim jumpsuit, holding a Yorkshire terrier and drawing on the place mat with her left hand, her eyes closed and her lips parted and slightly moist. Her lids fluttered with a contained excitement as the pencil scrawled in aimless lines.
The dog struggled to be free and the girl opened her eyes, putting the pencil down and soothing the animal.
"You can't break the line," the man said. "That drives the spirit away." His voice lowered to a silky, suggestive note, "We'll try it again, later, when there isn't so much of a crowd around."
"We're getting bad vibrations from the subway," the brunette purred, rubbing her nose against that of the high-strung dog.
Suddenly Brenda recognized the man. It was the rental agent who leased the apartment to her. His name was Leo… something. He was about thirty-five, with satanic good looks and straight black hair that looked like a licorice cap. His face was dark and sensual, with full red lips and a deep cleft in the chin.
Just then he turned around and caught her eye. His face moved in surprised recognition, and Brenda detected a trace of secrecy as he glanced quickly at the brunette who was cooing to the yapping dog.
"Well, hi. You getting out to see your new neighborhood?" he asked.
"Yes. I-I thought I'd get some air."
She hated herself for the hesitant, unsophisticated reply as the brunette looked up and gave her a catty smile. The long, white-polished nails looked ready and willing to scratch the eyes out of any female who encroached too far onto her territory. It was obvious that Leo was staked out, Brenda thought, but even more obvious that he wished he weren't. His black eyes flickered over her in interest, making her remember the little bodily contacts he had managed to make when he showed her the apartment. A hand on the elbow, a touch on the waist to guide her through a doorway. As he nodded in attempted casualness and turned back to his date, Brenda knew that she would see him again.
A pair of hippies came in with a Siamese cat in a basket and the brunette's little dog nearly had a convulsion. She rose and Leo stood up immediately, reaching into his pocket for some change. As he turned to leave he glanced at Brenda and smiled once more, his eyes lowering to the points of her breasts.
What had they been doing? She reached over and picked up the place mat and held it so that it caught the bright glare of the street light. For a moment it made no sense; it was just a collection of scrawls interspersed with purple circles from the girl's wine glass.
Then the pencil markings took on a hideous shape.
The girl had drawn an oval. From it, spilling out like serpentine meanderings, was an erratic curving line that twisted and turned and wove back on itself until it ended in a tangled mass of scribbles.
Crawling fear dug into the back of her neck as she dropped the paper and shrank away from it. It lay still for a moment, and then fluttered in a breeze and blew off the table onto the sidewalk.
It was the face in the poster! She could not take her eyes from it as it lay on the grimy pavement. Someone stepped on it, then someone else, until at last it was kicked into the gutter. Brenda could not move. As cars and taxis crawled by in the torpid traffic she waited, barely breathing, a silent shriek throbbing through her brain. Kill her! Run over her! Take her away from me so she won't hurt me!
What was it Leo had said as he held his fingertips on the table? "If there's a spirit present, will the table please rise?" The brunette had broken the spell when she was distracted by her dog, yet…
The spirit had been present, Ginny's spirit! It was Ginny that she had drawn, just as it was Ginny in the poster.
A noisy rumble vibrated under Brenda's feet. It was a subway passing under the sidewalk. She looked at the grating by the curb and saw that the place mat had been swept up by the whoosh of air and fluttered over the grill. Suddenly it was sucked into the opening and disappeared.
She crumpled in relief. It was gone. Ginny was gone; her spirit had vanished into the grimy pit. She stood up and put some money on her check and left the cafe.