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wasn’t going to beg for it; she’d just wait it out. At least he wasn’t dangerous in a sexual sense. When she’d first started working there, she guessed she’d be fighting him off constantly, and would probably get fired for not giving in. But it was all innuendo with Simonetti, and no real action. He leered, patted, threatened, and made funny sucking noises, and that was it.
    Iola tried to figure him out. “I don’t think he’s queer,” she said, “but maybe he’s one of those weirdos that can only get it off against the side of a building or in his mother’s pocketbook.”
    Whatever the reason, they were relieved. There was enough trouble with some of the clients. One of them they’d nicknamed Supercreep, but it was like whistling in the dark. They were really afraid of him. He always came to the studio well-dressed, with slicked-down hair and heavily scented aftershave, and he was polite to the point of formality. He danced like a mechanical man with too few gears for a variety of movement. And he made the same stiff conversation with his instructor during each lesson, as if they had just met for the first time. Sometimes, not always, he spoke with a foreign accent no one could place. If anyone asked where he was from, he only smiled and shut his eyes in a peculiar way, like a lizard.
    Simonetti said that he couldn’t act on their complaints. So the guy wasn’t Robert Redford. As far as he could see, he was still a perfect gent.
    “Maybe you’d better get your eyes checked,” Iola told him.
    “Okay, what does he do?” he asked. “Does he cop feels? Does he use rough language?”
    “
You
,” Iola said, disgusted. “If the Boston Strangler boogied in here, you’d think it was Prince Charles.” She convinced Simonetti to at least spread Supercreep’s lessons around, so he wouldn’t get a fix on any one of the girls.
    But he did, anyway, on Linda. He hung around the building for hours until she left, and walked just behind her to the bus stop, saying some more inane things inhis robot’s voice. “I believe we are in for bad weather,” he’d say. “Do you enjoy living in New Jersey?”
    After a few days, his conversation became more personal. “I admired your blouse today. Did your boyfriend buy it for you? You must have plenty of boyfriends.” From there it was only a skip and a jump to: “Does your boyfriend put it in you when you are wearing that blouse? I would like to put it in you.” Etc. etc. etc.
    Sometimes, when he wasn’t there, she suspected that he was close by but not making himself known to her. And she began to get telephone calls in the middle of the night. At first there was the usual breathing, and then … 
humming
. Not a tune or anything, just the menacing humming sound an insect might make before diving for the kill. Linda was terrified.
    Simonetti said she read too many books. The guy was harmless, all talk. Iola suspected Simonetti had signed him up for a Lifetime Membership. “Maybe even with a clause for the afterlife,” she said.
    Linda believed she was going to be killed. Unidentified body of young woman between the ages of … Mutilated beyond … Dental charts necessary for … She realized that she had not been to a dentist for over two years.
    Instead of being murdered, she ended up getting married. Not to Supercreep, of course, but to Wright, who was walking past the bus stop one evening when she was sure she was being followed. It was raining and the visibility was very poor. Headlights appeared occasionally in the foggy distance, with the eerie glow of UFO’s. But the bus didn’t come. Did she only imagine she heard a humming sound? Oh, God, were those
footsteps?
The footsteps grew stronger and closer, and Wrightappeared under the streetlight, a reasonable-looking man with his hands in the pockets of his bomber jacket. She rushed over to him and touched his sleeve. “Please,” she said. “Could I walk with you?”
    What she remembers best