YOU WON’T TELL, WILL YOU RIGBY?

“Did y’tell your husband where you was going?”

“You know I didn’t,” Rita replied, trying to manage the fear in her voice.

Rigby’s sunken eyes leered at her from under his grizzled brow. He wore a cap with its flaps pulled down over his ears, fingerless gloves and several layers of wool, which were still damp from the snow. He stepped just inside of the doorway of the squalid basement hovel he called home, and as Rita squeezed by, she could smell the foul steam rising from his clothing.

The room was no bigger than a large utility closet. Papers and rags, heaped in one corner, appeared to be his bed. Next to his bed, perched on a crate, was a kerosene lantern which cast a claustrophobic gloom and seemed to suck the oxygen from the clammy quarters. The outer wall was insulated with stacks of magazines, in various stages of collapse. The only window in the room, near the top of the wall at street level, was broken. Rags stuffed into the cracks reduced the drafts but did little to keep the winter bitterness from intruding.

“Welcome to my domicile,” he said with a grand sweeping gesture of his outstretched arm.

He offered her an upturned crate to sit upon, while he sat on his bed. He retrieved a lit cigarette from a tin can overflowing with butts and inhaled deeply. He drank from an already half empty bottle and then extended his arm and handed her a glass. “It’s gin. I got the glass in an office upstairs. Even washed it for ya, too.”

She accepted the glass but wouldn’t touch the gin, so she tried to smile and engage him in conversation, instead. “You work here?”

“Yup, I’m the janitor of this here building.” He guzzled more gin and took another long pull from his cigarette, then studied her with sluggish eyes.

“Is that how you came by all these magazines, from the offices upstairs?” she asked gazing about.

“Yup.”

“Do you read any of them?”

“Some of ‘em. Some are nothing but numbers an’ fancy words. But I like the ones with pictures from foreign countries. Ever been to a foreign country, Rita?”

“Once, several years ago,” she replied wistfully.

“Where’d y’go?”

“France. It was the spring of 1929, right before the Depression, so we had the money for a honeymoon in Paris. We ate rich pastries and drank bitter coffee at quaint sidewalk cafés. We visited the Eiffel Tower and …”

“Built in1889 and 984 feet high! I read it in one of them magazines!”

“I tried eel for the first time,” she said.

“Ain’t never had eel. Did y’like it?”

“No.” She smiled and was about to continue when Rigby, who was becoming quite drunk, lit another cigarette and abruptly changed the subject.

“Y’know where I was when I seen you the first time, Rita? Up on the roof of this here building last summer. It gets hot down here in this stinking hole, so I go up to the roof after curfew to get me some air. That’s when I saw you. I could look across the street and right into your windas. You was sitting atop of some guy, going at it like a carnival ride. Ever since, I go up there most nights, just sit up there and watch the show.”

Her body visibly tensed. She could feel the bile rise in her throat.

“I didn’t mean to scare you today, stopping you on the street like that. I could tell it bothered you seein’ as how I was a complete stranger to you.”

He took another sloppy swig from the bottle and wiped the drizzle from his mouth with his sleeve. “’Course I knew who you were,” he added with a sneer. The air was fetid and beginning to stifle her breathing.

“You is so purty, Rita. I noticed that right off. You is little and delicate like a china doll. And that long, dark hair of yours … Makes a man just ache.” He took one long drag on his cigarette, sucking the last remnants of life out of it, then stubbed it out into the smoldering pile of butts in the tin can. He lit another cigarette and said, “This is nice, ain’t it. Just two friends talking over drinks.”

With a determined effort, he staggered to his feet and extended his arm towards Rita with the nearly empty bottle of gin. “How’s ‘bout s’more?”

“What do you want, Rigby?”

He straightened up unsteadily, his movements exaggerated by the alcohol, and replied, “I thought we could be, y’know, friends.” Then he grinned exposing his rotted teeth.

“What do you want?” Rita repeated, this time forcefully, as she stood up to face him.

He sidled up close, uncomfortably close, so close that she was forced to inhale his stench and to feel the bristle on his face rub against her cheek, his chin kneading her shoulder as he whispered in her ear, “I want you t’climb on top of me and ride me just like you done with them others.”

Rita jerked herself free of him, repelled as much by his presence as by his request, and pushed him backwards onto his bed.

“Don’t play shy with me, Rita,” he scoffed as he slumped against the wall. “I seen you do those things lots of times with lots of guys, even with your husband.” He saw the terror in her eyes and said, “But he don’t know ‘bout them others, does he? No, I reckon he don’t.” He drained the bottle and said, “I thought we could do some business. That is what you do up there, isn’t it? Y’got yourself a business. I seen them pay you for pleasuring them.”

It seemed like such a simple, logical answer at the time. When Rita lost her job, she had to find a way for them to keep the apartment. It was the landlord who, while looking her up and down, had taken advantage of her tears and suggested bartering for part of the rent. Her husband’s meager pay would force them into the slums or maybe even the shanty towns living on beans. So she told her husband she worked at home doing paperwork for small businesses, and she prayed that no one would compel her to identify which businesses. If that happened, she’d lose her husband and possibly even be arrested.

She looked around the room and asked, “You don’t have any money, do you?”

“I figger my silence is worth sum-thin.” He had difficulty keeping his eyes open as he began slipping into a stupor. He pulled himself forward, his head lolled to the side, as he slapped the place next to him and said, “C’mon, sit by me, my purty little Rita.”

Rita stared at Rigby and faced the inevitable. In these hard times, when jobs were non-existent, you do what you have to do. So she reluctantly sat down upon the heap of rags, not too close to him, though, and leaned in towards him, steeled herself to the task at hand and whispered, “You won’t tell, will you, Rigby?” But Rigby didn’t hear her plea.

There was nothing Rita had to do, not really. Rigby had passed out. In the process, his arm, with the lit cigarette dangling between his fingers, flopped perilously close to a pile of papers. Just the slightest nudge of his arm with her foot, barely a tap really, was all it took to dislodge the cigarette. And the kerosene lantern was so close. When the flames took hold she closed his door, and as she walked across the street to go home she decided she must find some money for curtains.

Previous story: Stuck In An Elevator With Mandy Patinkin

Next: Quid Pro Quo, Nick