"Debbie, don't you EVER hang up the phone on me AGAIN," Juan's rage reached into the telephone wires through furiously clenched teeth.
"I...DIDN'T...hang up on you. Why do you want to know?" Debbie's uncertain voice responded in terror. She slammed the phone down on the bed, stormed out of the room.
"I don't have to put up with this fucking shit!" Her scream sprang forth from the loaded tension of the office, frozen in politeness all day long.
"Debbie, who just answered the phone?" he had demanded.
"I...I don't know...a friend."
"Debbie!! Why are you lying to me?! Who answered the phone?!"
"Why...do I have to tell you?" she screamed desperately.
"Who is in the apartment with you? Debbie, you better tell me who." He warned her ominously.
"I have to go...I have something burning," she whispered and fled into the pantry, dropping the receiver on teh bed. And then he called back.
Maxine picked up the phone and began to "reason" with the paranoid psychotic.
"Juan! I was afraid! I didn't want you to know I was here. I thought you didn't like me!" She cried in desperation. "Nicole should be home in half an hour. She went to get something to eat. Chinese food."
"Black jeans and flat shoes," she said. Juan always asked questions. What was she wearing when she left? You don't know? You saw her leave and you don't remember what she was wearing? You don't remember what time she left?
"She just got home from work. She doesn't want to fight with anybody. No, I'll take care of her. It isn't worth it."
Debbie hid in the other bedroom. But the one-sided conversation chilled her. What did he mean, he would take care of her? Why had she answered the phone?
And now, here on the Upper West Side where things were uncertain and where she felt far away from home, strangely, for nowhere else in the city did she have that feeling, here, his threats seemed more real. Or wsa it unreal, she thought, in her dazed state of mind. She felt alone, separate from these ordinary people who walked the sidewalks and crossed the streets beside her.
The Musuem of Natural History loomed large and mysterious as it rose through the mist. Stark curling tree branches etched the sky.
Could someone have followed her on the crosstown bus? Was someone following her now? Could he pay someone to do that? Maybe she was already being watched by his several corrupt friends who had remained in the city. Did they know who Scott was? Would they, worse yet, "take care of" him?
"He couldn't really do anything, could he?" she had questioned Nicole that night of the telephone conversation, over hot chocolate and bagels at Wolf's Delicatessen. Cotton snow rose up from the windowsill where giant candy canes had been posted.
"Oh, that's nothing," Nicole had said. "You don't know..." she warned, her beautiful face tense and grave.
How she wished Scott could protect her now...as they walked down the mysterious streets of the Upper West Side, the bold splashy storefronts and cafes collectively forming a lime green, purple, coral, peach and aqua streetscape. She tilted her head to look up at Scott. He stared back in silence. He noted her new wave haircut, one side cut shorter than the other, the coral lipstick and matching sweater pulled over the short green ruffled skirt. She had changed since her first day in the office, but innocence remained in her blue eyes. She clung to his arm, shivering slightly from the cold as block after block of Italian designer boutiques appeared. Tall mannequins in lime green jackets and popsicle pink micro mini skirts held their poses on a bare stage, alluring behind glass. Groups of foreign students walked alongside them, exploring the strange world of the Upper West Side and all it had to offer them, dark-haired, sporting black leather jackets, as they strolled by brightly costumed window display after display. "Take care of me," she said to him. He pulled her into an alcove outside a closed restaurant and leaned way down, wordlessly, to kiss her. She paused at the corner. The sign blinked "Walk" but she did not see it. She looked to a place no one else could see, not the strangers here beside her, not the people in the restaurants today, not even anyone else on the crowded sidewalks in the entire city.
0520D
