"I may," she said as though carrying something away with her that she was not yet ready to share.

"Do you mind my asking, Do you work at Lord and Taylor's?"

"Macy's."

Julie closed the door behind her and went to the back where she removed her smock and hung it on the bathroom door. "Macy's," she said aloud with wonder at her own perception. "I'll be d.a.m.ned."

True to Amy Ross's prediction, a note from Pete awaited Julie when she opened the shop door Monday morning.

Friend Julie, I'm sorry to have gone into my vanishing act. A sick friend needed me and since that doesn't happen very often I stood by. May the G.o.ds inspire you and the fates send custom.

Pete P.S. Thanks for returning my kit and kaboodle to the Forum.

So long, Pete, Julie thought. Disengagement. What an exercise in saying nothing gracefully. Even his handwriting, long and lean like himself, seemed to lope off the page. Kiss-and-Run Pete, Amy had called him. Then there was Mrs. Ryan's version of Pete. To h.e.l.l with that, but to h.e.l.l with him too. Julie locked up again long enough to walk to Ninth Avenue and buy herself some lilacs.

Later that morning Amy stopped by on her way to rehearsal. "See, didn't I tell you?" she said of the flowers.

"Yep."

The curious looked in the window now and then throughout the day, but as they would into a cage in the zoo. Ready to run if a paw came out at them. A few friends came to talk, but no paying customer. That afternoon Julie had cards printed, thinking of Mrs. Ryan and her Bingo crowd. The next day she decided to distribute some of the cards herself to shops within a few blocks' range. Almost everybody gave her a little counter s.p.a.ce near the cash register. She was soon on a first-name basis with the florist, the baker, the shoemaker, dry cleaner, deli owner... and Mr. Bourke in the electrical equipment shop who had lived down the hall from Mrs. Ryan until he was asked to leave. He looked so normal. Square. A slight man of fifty or so with gla.s.ses that kept sliding down his nose. He was very pleasant to Julie. The boyish type.

"Did Pete Mallory speak to you about a couple of spotlights for my place?" Julie asked him.

"I haven't seen Pete lately."

"On loan, he thought maybe."

Mr. Bourke was accustomed to Pete's nonprofit business. "What did you want to use them for?"

Julie explained.

"I'll see what I can do for you."

"Thanks," Julie said.

Going out of his place Julie walked into Goldie. He'd been waiting for her. "Looking for me, Julie?"

"Nope."

"If any of the cats on this stroll give you a hard time, you tell Goldie." He grinned and drew his finger across his throat to show what he would do about it.

"You bet." She went into the fish market, which was the nearest exit.

Late in the day Mrs. Ryan came by with her friend Mrs. Russo. She left Mrs. Russo and took fifty of Julie's cards. Mrs. Russo represented cash, but what she was really paying for was someone to tell about the wonderful man she was married to, the precinct detective, and she inquired of the cards more for him than for herself. Something good was going to happen for him, Julie told her, although there might be a slight delay.

"Two weeks, two months... Does the number two mean anything to you?"

"Second grade! Detective second grade. That's the very thing I wanted to know."

Friend Julie became a familiar figure on Forty-fourth Street and environs, and people did visit her, though not by and large on a paying basis. n.o.body could afford ten dollars certainly, and except with the Macy's woman on whom she had tested her strength, she would have felt like a charlatan to take it. She accepted five and sometimes two. She certainly had no qualms. In fact, she felt she might be doing some good for once in her life. And if she was not writing an actual story, she was filling a notebook with colorful characters, most of their color of her own invention. She did not miss Doctor Callahan. Definitely not.

7.

SHE HAD SEEN THE GIRL before, a mere child. She had to be a child to take Julie for an older woman. "Ma'am"-that was something new in Julie's life.

"I need to talk to someone, ma'am." She stood with her back to the entrance. Every time anyone pa.s.sed in front, throwing a shadow through the window, she averted her face.

"I read cards," Julie said. She was wary of the word need.

"How much do you charge?" The youngster kept looking with a mute longing toward the inside room.

"Come on in," Julie said and ushered her into the back room.

"Five dollars? Ten? I'll pay you whatever it is."

"Five is fine and you pay it later."

They sat at the low table. Julie could see the street if she leaned back in her chair. The seeker was concealed, and more at ease as a consequence. Julie still put her age at fifteen or sixteen, but a street person. There was nothing garish about her; she wore a dark green pants suit with a white ascot at her throat; her shoulder-length hair hung soft and richly brown, and her only makeup was eye shadow. Her own lashes. What was it then that marked her? And was the mark forever? It occurred to Julie that Goldie might have sent her, whatever pretext she was about to lay on: the thing about wh.o.r.es was that they were terrific actors.

"You know what I am," the girl said, getting it out front. She had no smile. Not for Julie. Down all the way.

"How did you expect me to know?"

"People can tell. Sometimes I think there must be a smell. I don't even wear perfume on account of what people say. I don't walk like a wh.o.r.e, I don't think. I know I don't talk like the ones I know."

"Do you feel like one?"

"I guess that's it. It's when I get feeling like one, that's the worst. That's when I want to kill myself. I have a knife even."

Even. "There's a lot of them around," Julie said of the knife.

"It means something to me, just having it."

"How old are you?"

"Seventeen."

"Really?"

"Going on. I've been away from home over a year."

"They could pick you up for truancy," Julie said, trying to find some way to an up in the conversation. There wasn't any. "Where's home?"

The girl's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "No you don't," she said.

"I don't even know your name, for G.o.d's sake."

"Rita. Rita Morgan."

"All right," Julie said. It wasn't going to be her real name anyway. And who cared? "Why don't you just go home wherever it is?"

"I keep trying but I can't. I'm afraid to for a lot of reasons. What if I slipped?"

"Are you into drugs?"

"Not heavy. Pot sometimes. I get even more depressed." She was right. She didn't talk like the street. Not that Julie considered herself an expert. Nevertheless.

"How come you left in the first place?"

"Lots of reasons. Most of them my father. And I couldn't stand to see my mother crying all the time. When I went along with a girl friend that first time, I thought of Dad. There wasn't a girl he could keep his hands off. I think myself he should have been castrated."

"Before or after you?"

"Before. I didn't ask to be born. Not of him. Sometimes I'll see a John on the street and think, Oh my G.o.d, it's him. It isn't ever, but..." She shuddered.

"Look, Rita, I don't mind your telling me these things if you want to, but just don't think you're going to get much advice from me, and I'm not going to be taking your money for it, I'll tell you that. I don't take myself that seriously. I mean if a person needs a doctor, I'm going to tell them. I'm not going to say I'm the doctor."

The way the girl's face screwed up, Julie thought she was going to attack her. Then the tears came and she pounded her little fists on the table. "I want help. I want to get out of 'The Life.' I wish I'd never got into it."

The tears were real and when Rita looked for Kleenex in her purse, Julie remembered the box beside Doctor's couch. It was not an office supply she had expected to need herself.

"Go ahead and talk if you want to."

"What I'm most afraid of is being blackmailed. I'd rather die than have my mother and kid brother find out."

She'd rather die than a lot of things. If she'd rather die.

"Who's going to blackmail you?"

"My pimp or somebody. He's a real blackmailer."

Julie flinched inside. Just like that, my pimp... my business manager, my agent. "Goldie?"

"Not Goldie. Goldie'd like to cop me if he could."

"Me too," Julie said.

Rita smiled. She could smile, and it was as though she had put on a whole new face, a Gioconda smile-something wispish, enigmatic-Oh G.o.d, there it was: something innocent. At the back of Julie's mind from the beginning was the question of how she had made it, a melancholic among the happy hookers. It stood to reason they had to pretend to be happy anyway.

"If I was going to have to stay, I might go to Goldie. I don't think I could fall in love with a black man. I just don't think so."

"And you don't want to?"

"No, ma'am, not with any man, black or white."

You're not telling it as it is, kiddo. What you really want is some nice young Bible freak from Iowa to take you in his arms and say, I wouldn't ever do a thing like that to you.

"Rita, what made you come in here? To me of all the people in New York?"

"I'm supposed to be on the street, hustling. In front of Bourke's Electrical Shop. Sometimes when the cops start busting everybody I go in there in back."

"So Mr. Bourke sent you."

"Not exactly. He said you were decent."

"He ought to know," Julie said. "There's a lot of decent people and some of them know a h.e.l.l of a lot more than I do."

"I don't know who they are. Everybody I know outside would say dirty, dirty girl. Or else go to the cops."

"You know the wrong people."

"That's for sure."

"What are you going to do when you go home?"

"Go back to school maybe. If I could just make it to college I keep feeling I'd be all right."

"You'd be fine."

"No I wouldn't. There'd always be a trick. I'd be standing on a corner maybe waiting for a light to change, and there he'd be-'Can I buy you a drink?'"

"You can say no, for G.o.d's sake."

"No isn't enough! I mean once he's said that to me, there's no other way."

"I guess I'm missing the connection," Julie said.

"That's because you're straight. I don't understand it myself, but that's the way it is."

"The only way to say no is to say yes? Oh, man, I don't dig it."

The girl nodded. A look of deep despair. She picked up her purse from where she had put it on the floor. "Thanks, anyway." She opened the purse.

"I don't want your money."

"It's dirty."

"No G.o.dd.a.m.n it. I don't know clean money from dirty. That's not what I mean either. There's all kinds of wh.o.r.es in the world, not just s.e.x wh.o.r.es."

"Maybe you think prost.i.tution is a good thing?" she said sweetly.