The Children of Hamelin Read Online Free PDF Page A

in the Rain to happen to you?”
    “I suppose I have,” I said. “And you’ve been standing here all night just waiting for me?”
    “No. I’ve been waiting here for the right someone to happen to. I just feel like happening to someone tonight. I’m the Girl in the Rain and you’re my Man in the Rain, and if you ask any more questions, I’ll turn back into a pumpkin.”
    I just smiled. “Tom,” I said.
    “Robin.”
    Unwillingly, I found myself remembering something Ted had once said: “Robin is a name girls give themselves.” Retro me, satanis!
    “Is there someplace we can go? Rain is beautiful for meeting, but not for making love.”
    “Two blocks down.”
    Suddenly she was ten years old. She bounced up and down. “Let’s run!” she bubbled, and she yanked me forward into an all-out sprint. And we ran down St. Mark’s, two kids laughing and panting hand in hand through the falling rain.
    Although my apartment was on the fifth floor, it was still the best pad I had ever had, and I must admit I was kind of sneakily houseproud. The bathtub was in the bathroom and even had a shower; bedroom, living room and kitchen all had neat paint jobs and the furnishings were Salvation-Army-class.
    So I gave thanks to the $100 a week I was knocking down at the good old Dirk Robinson Literary Agency as I raced Robin up the stairs, grateful that the magic of this moment was not about to be exorcised by the kind of seedy mess I used to inhabit in the Bad Old Days.
    Panting, soaking and giggling, we reached the fifth floor landing. The pangs in my lungs, the wet clinging of my clothes to my body, the soggy tangle of hair over my forehead—as I led her to the door to my apartment, they made me hyper-aware of my flesh: the grace of my muscles under my skin, the blood moving down my thighs, the water dribbling down over my face. For the first time in many moons, I really noticed that my body was alive.
    As we stood hand in hand at the threshold, I felt some conventional gesture was required. I started to draw her to me, but with the slightest widening of her eyes, a playful tensing of her palm in mine, a hint of irony in that overwhelming smile, she told me no, this was her show, and my timing was a little off, and just let it happen, baby.
    So I unlocked the doorlock and the police-lock, swung the door open and the police-lock bar aside, and led her into the kitchen. The table and its clutter and the mess of dishes in the sink were barely visible in the light from the living room windows filtering past the bead curtain hanging in the doorway between kitchen and living room. Robin took one quick look around, seemed to grimace slightly, then wisely steered me through the bead curtain and into my own darkened living room.
    I hit the wall switch and the orange-and-red-painted frosted globe I had put up over the bare ceiling fixture flooded the room with a fair imitation of firelight. I felt pretty smug about this room, having achieved true East Village Class here with a little of this and a little of that. The bamboo-matted floor and the plain white walls made the room look Japanese instead of just bare. Panels of colored cellophane glued to the windows hid the vista of fire escapes behind a stained-glass effect. Two old cots met at right angles in the corner furthest from the bedroom door and they were both covered with the same huge piece of black velvet I had copped somewhere, giving the effect of a giant sectional. In the center of the room and dominating it was a huge round red table (a Con Edison cable spool I had liberated and painted) with a pole-lamp growing up from the center hole like a brass tree. The stereo rig and record racks against the wall next to the bedroom door were the only things in the room that were as expensive as they looked. The shelves of books beside them looked very intellectual, but were in fact mostly old science fiction paperbacks. And the warm orange light softened all the edges and hid the New