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As the months passed into a year, and that year gave way to a second, in the
windows of her world, Mona found a particular pleasure in imagining herself
one with the girls who lived their brief lives on the streets outside. A saucy
brunette with a great flat leather portfolio under her arm would cross Mona's
vision and in her window sanctuary Mona would merge with the brunette, knowing
her feet were tired from having stood behind a perfume counter for eight
hours. She would take heart, however, in the knowledge that now she was on her
way to art school, where she would perfect her charcoal technique a little
more. And one day I'll be a very good artist, and work for one of the big
women's slicks, and one of the models will ask me for a date, and I'll go with
him to the Chateaubriand, and then he'll ask me to ...
As the brunette passed out of sight around the corner.
With the lights out in the apartment, and darkness providing a mummer's cloak,
Mona picked up a slatternly blonde shuffling up Seventh Avenue, pausing at the
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light, and empathically she entered the blonde's head, feeling her hands
sinking into the side pockets of the Alligator raincoat, wishing I was home in
Cedar Rapids instead of going to meet Arnie, that stupe, that creep. But I
suppose I'll marry him because if I don't, I'll never get those bills paid at
Saks and Klein's.
He's not very good-looking, but at least he can make it in the rack, and hell,
what am I after, James Garner, or a meal ticket? If only he didn't have that
ridiculous astigmatism, those dopey glasses with the tortoise-shell frames!
Well, hell, I can always make him go in for contact lenses after I get him ...
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Into the restaurant and out of sight of Mona.
It went this way, hour and hour and hour after hour. One girl, two girls,
three, four and more, always more, coming down the Avenue, crossing
Twenty-third Street, leaving buildings and entering bakeries, pausing at
traffic lights and whistling through the twilight mistiness.
It was a whole new, vicarious, utterly satisfying life. And soon, Mona began
to realize that she was better than all of them down there.
For they only had one life each, but she had thousands. There were worse fates
than merely being ugly, and lonely. She knew all of those fates, because she
was Everywoman, and experienced their brief walking-past lives more totally
than any of them could. She was each happy girl, every sad girl, all the
pretty ones, and for change the not-pretty ones. She thought their many
thoughts, wore their many expressions, loved their many lovers, lived life to
its fullest. She thrived. Yet there came a night ...
In the dark painting that lived in her window, she saw, this night, a
cheap-looking but sensuous
Puerto Rican girl in a thigh-length black leather coat, beehive hairdo, smoky
hose and overpainted face, strolling liquidly, languidly, close to the
buildings. A pickup girl, a loose girl, a scarlet Miss looking for a
five-dollar John.
Mona's pale eyes swooped down and slid inside the girl, knowing her soreness
between the legs, knowing her weariness at having to make another ten tonight
or they'll lock my bags in the room, and I'll have to find a flop somewhere
till I can get my clothes out.
There was a stirring in the shadowed doorway, and the Puerto Rican girl who
was Mona turned half toward the noise. A hand snaked out of the darkness and
physically away! Mona was wrenched, back to her place high in the window,
watching terrified and mutely as the man half-pulled the tramp into the
doorway.
Mona stared disbelieving as the alter ego that had been hers, a moment before,
was thrown to the sidewalk. The man descended on the leather car coat, tore it
open and, as Mona stared in horror, violated the streetwalker with an animal
ferocity that forced Mona to bite her fist, stifle a scream, and finally, as
the man arched upward in climax, faint painfully away from her viewport into
reality.
It could only have been a few minutes of unconsciousness, for when she pulled
herself to her knees on the foam cushions, the Puerto Rican girl was still
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