Lying in Bed by J. D. Landis

the evening doorman. He had never seen me with a woman. The apartment had been in my mother’s family, and when she left it to me in her will, I told the people renting it that their lease would not be renewed and moved in when they vacated. That had been some five years before. No woman had visited me, aside from Elspeth, who cleaned for me then as now.
    But what astonished the doorman even more than the presence of a woman at my side was my speaking to him. For reasons that I could hardly have explained, unless I’d written him a letter, I had stopped speaking to him about a year before. He must have been perplexed, for I had always been friendly in my greetings, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he didn’t at first feel I had singled him out in my silence, until he must inevitably have discussed with the other doormen and with the superintendent as well what he took to be my rudeness, at which point all of them would have realized from their common experience with me that I had simply stopped speaking. I am sure there was such a meeting, for I noticed, much to my relief, so uncivil had I come to think they must find me, that they all stopped greeting me at precisely the same time. From then on, they might open the door for me as I left on and returned from my daily walk into the city or hand me a package they had signed for and kept secure in the parcels closet, but they never said a word, not even when I tipped them. These doormen were, after all, with Elspeth, my only consistent human contact during that period of my silence, and I foundit comforting that we be equal in the exchange of language and therefore that the burden of speech be lifted from us all. (Elspeth, for her part, went right on talking to me as she dusted and polished, with her usual lack of concern that I even be in the same room, to say nothing of her seeming obliviousness to my utter lack of response to everything she said.)
    But how, then, it must have shocked the evening doorman, whose eyes had already opened wide beneath his quasi-military hat at the sight of my jaunty companion in her rambunctious clothes, when I said, as we passed by him through the door he held open, “Thank you, Frank.”
    He actually let go of the door, which would have slammed into my shoulder had I not put out my hand to stop it.
    â€œGood evening, Mr. Chambers,” he finally found himself able to say, though by that time I had caught up to my new friend and was walking through the chalcedony lobby toward the elevator.
    â€œI’m terribly sorry,” he called after me, and only the spreading open of the elevator doors, which struck me for the first time as something vaguely sexual, kept me from turning around and asking Frank what he was sorry for: nearly slamming the door on me; having the clean simplicity of our silence come to an end; or seeing me with a woman for the first time and believing like most men that there has been no dictator yet born who can subjugate a man the way a woman can?
    The elevator operator wore white gloves. I was tempted to hold out my right hand to him and let him congratulate me on my reentry into the world. But I settled for a mere “Hello, Eddie” and was amazed to find that he held out his hand to me and seemed about to wrap his other handaround my shoulder until he realized that the elevator would have ground to a stop should he remove that hand from its semicircular brass controls.
    â€œNice to see you again, Mr. Chambers.” Eddie shook my hand as if I had been gone for a year instead of merely silent.
    I could feel his eyes on my companion’s bottom as we stood together on the landing while I turned one key and then another in the locks on the door to the apartment, of which there was one per floor. Only after I had closed that door behind us did I hear through it the clangor of the metal gate being pushed shut and then the coming together of the elevator doors themselves. I thought of Eddie