The Assistant by Bernard Malamud Page B

“That ain’t your conscience you are worried about.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œIt’s something else. I hear those Jew girls make nice ripe lays.”
    Frank went back without his gun.
    Â 
    Helen was with her mother as Ida counted the cash. Frank stood behind the counter, cleaning his fingernails with his jackknife blade, waiting for them to leave so he could close up.
    â€œI think I’ll take a hot shower before I go to bed,” Helen said to her mother. “I’ve felt chilled all night.”
    â€œGood night,” Ida said to Frank. “I left five dollars change for the morning.”
    â€œGood night,” said Frank.
    They left by the rear door and he heard them go up the stairs. Frank closed the store and went into the back. He thumbed through tomorrow’s News, then got restless.
    After a while he went into the store and listened at the side door; he unlatched the lock, snapped on the cellar light, closed the cellar door behind him so no light would leak out into the hall, then quietly descended the stairs.
    He found the air shaft where an old unused dumb-waiter stood, pushed the dusty box back and gazed up the vertical shaft. It was pitch-dark. Neither the Bobers’ bathroom window nor the Fusos’ showed any light.
    Frank struggled against himself but not for long. Shoving the dumb-waiter back as far as it would go, he squeezed into the shaft and then boosted himself up on top of the box. His heart shook him with its beating.
    When his eyes got used to the dark he saw that her bathroom window was only a couple of feet above his head. He felt along the wall as high as he could reach and touched a narrow ledge around the air shaft. He thought he could anchor himself on it and see into the bathroom.
    But if you do it, he told himself, you will suffer.

    Though his throat hurt and his clothes were drenched in sweat, the excitement of what he might see forced him to go up.
    Crossing himself, Frank grabbed both of the dumb-waiter ropes and slowly pulled himself up, praying the pulley at the skylight wouldn’t squeak too much.
    A light went on over his head.
    Holding his breath, he crouched motionless, clinging to the swaying ropes. Then the bathroom window was shut with a bang. For a while he couldn’t move, the strength gone out of him. He thought he might lose his grip and fall, and he thought of her opening the bathroom window and seeing him lying at the bottom of the shaft in a broken, filthy heap.
    It was a mistake to do it, he thought.
    But she might be in the shower before he could get a look at her, so, trembling, he began again to pull himself up. In a few minutes he was straddling the ledge, holding onto the ropes to steady himself yet keep his full weight off the wood.
    Leaning forward, though not too far, he could see through the uncurtained crossed sash window into the old-fashioned bathroom. Helen was there looking with sad eyes at herself in the mirror. He thought she would stand there forever, but at last she unzippered her housecoat, stepping out of it.
    He felt a throb of pain at her nakedness, an overwhelming desire to love her, at the same time an awareness of loss, of never having had what he had wanted most, and other such memories he didn’t care to recall.
    Her body was young, soft, lovely, the breasts like small birds in flight, her ass like a flower. Yet it was a lonely body in spite of its lovely form, lonelier. Bodies are lonely, he thought, but in bed she wouldn’t be. She seemed realer to him now than she had been, revealed without clothes, personal, possible. He felt greedy as he gazed, all eyes at a banquet, hungry so long as he must look. But in looking he was forcing her out of reach, making her into a thing only of
his seeing, her eyes reflecting his sins, rotten past, spoiled ideals, his passion poisoned by his shame.
    Frank’s eyes grew moist and he wiped them with one hand. When he gazed up again she seemed, to his