Rose Madder (22 page)

“I think you can,” Norman said, and something in his face or his voice—perhaps it was both—must have alarmed Slowik, because his brown eyes widened and he started to draw back, his hand going to the door, probably meaning to slam it in Norman's face. If so, he was too late. Norman moved fast, seizing the sides of Slowik's outer shirt and driving him back into the house. Norman raised one foot and kicked the door shut behind him, feeling as graceful as Gene Kelly in an MGM musical.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said again. “I hope for your sake you can. I'm going to ask you some questions, Thumper,
good
questions, and you better pray to your bignose Jewboy God that you're able to come up with some good answers.”

“Get out of here!” Slowik cried. “Or I'll call the police!”

Norman Daniels had a good chuckle at that, and then he whirled Slowik around, twisting Slowik's left fist up until it touched his scrawny right shoulderblade. Slowik began to scream. Norman reached between his legs and cupped his testicles.

“Stop,” he said. “Stop it right now or I'll pop your balls like grapes. You'll hear them go.”

Thumper stopped. He was gasping and letting out an occasional choked whimper, but Norman could live with that. He herded Thumper back into the living room, where he used the remote control he found sitting on an endtable to turn up the television.

He frogmarched his new pal into the kitchen and let go of him. “Stand against the refrigerator,” he said. “I want to see your ass and shoulderblades squashed right up against that baby, and if you move so much as an inch away from it, I'll rip your lips off. Got it?”

“Y-Y-Yes,” Thumper said. “Who-Who-Who are you?” He still looked like Bambi's friend Thumper, but now he was starting to sound like Woodsy Fucking Owl.

“Irving R. Levine, NBC News,” Norman said. “This is how I spend my day off.” He began pulling open the drawers
along the counter, keeping an eye on Thumper as he did so. He didn't think old Thump was going to run, but he might. Once people got beyond a certain level of fright, they became as unpredictable as tornadoes.

“What . . . I don't know what—”

“You don't have to know what,” Norman said. “That's the beauty of this, Thump. You don't have to know a goddam thing except the answers to a few very simple questions. Everything else can be left to me. I'm a professional. Think of me as one of the Good Hands People.”

He found what he was looking for in the fifth and last drawer down the line: two oven gloves with flower patterns. How cute. Just what the well-dressed Jewboy would want to wear when taking his wittle kosher cassewoles out of his wittle kosher oven. Norman pulled them on, then went quickly back down the drawerpulls, rubbing out any prints he might have left. Then he marched Thumper back into the living room, where he picked up the remote control and wiped it briskly on the front of his shirt.

“We're going to have us a little face-to-face here, Thumper,” Norman said as he did this. His throat had thickened; the voice which came out of it sounded barely human, even to its owner. Norman wasn't very surprised to find he had a raging hardon. He tossed the remote control onto the sofa and turned to Slowik, who was standing there with his shoulders slumped and tears oozing out from beneath his thick hornrimmed glasses. Standing there in that white man's undershirt. “I'm going to talk to you up close. Right up close. Do you believe that? You better, Thump. You just fucking better.”

“Please,” Slowik moaned. He held his shaking hands out to Norman. “Please don't hurt me. You've got the wrong man—whoever you want it's not me. I can't help you.”

But in the end, Slowik helped quite a bit. By then they were down cellar, because Norman had begun to bite, and not even the TV turned all the way to top volume would have completely stifled the man's screams. But screams or no screams, he helped quite a bit.

When the festivities were over, Norman found the garbage bags under the kitchen sink. Into one of these he put the oven gloves and his own shirt, which could not now be worn in public. He would take the bag with him and get rid of it later.

Upstairs, in Thumper's bedroom, he found only one item of clothing that would come even close to covering his own much broader upper body; a baggy, faded Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. Norman laid this on the bed, then went into Thumper's bathroom and turned on Thumper's shower. While he waited for the water to run hot, he looked in Thumper's medicine cabinet, found a bottle of Advil, and took four. His teeth hurt and his jaws ached. The entire lower half of his face was covered with blood and hair and little tags of skin.

He stepped into the shower and grabbed Thump's bar of Irish Spring, reminding himself to dump that into the bag, too. He actually didn't know how much good any of these precautions were going to be, because he had no idea how much forensic evidence he might have left downstairs in the basement. He had kind of grayed out there for awhile.

As he washed his hair he began to sing: “Raaamblin' Rose . . . Raaamblin' Rose . . . where you raaamble . . . no one knows . . . wild and windblown . . . that's how you've grown . . . who can cling to . . . a Ramblin' Rose?”

He turned off the shower, stepped out, and looked at his own faint, ghostly image in the steamy mirror over the sink.

“I can,” he said flatly. “I can, that's who.”

B
ill Steiner was raising his free hand to knock yet again, mentally cursing his nervousness—he was a man who wasn't ordinarily nervous about women—when she answered. “Coming! I'm coming, just a second, be right there.” She didn't sound pissed, thank God, so maybe he hadn't rousted her out of the bathroom.

What in hell am I doing here, anyway?
he asked himself again as the footsteps approached the door.
This is like a scene in some half-baked romantic comedy, the kind of thing not even Tom Hanks can do much with.

That might be true, but it didn't change the fact that the woman who had come into the shop last week had lodged firmly in his mind. And, rather than fading as the days went by, her effect on him seemed to be cumulative. Two things were certain: this was the first time in his life he'd ever
brought flowers to a woman he didn't know, and he hadn't felt this nervous about asking for a date since he'd been sixteen years old.

As the footsteps reached the other side of the door, Bill saw that one of the big daisies was on the verge of doing a header out of the bouquet. He made a hurried adjustment as the door opened, and when he looked up he saw the woman who'd traded her fake diamond ring for a piece of bad art standing there with murder in her eyes and a can of what looked like fruit cocktail raised over her head. She appeared frozen between her desire to make a pre-emptive strike and her mind's struggling realization that this wasn't the person she'd expected. It was, Bill thought later, one of the most exotic moments of his life.

The two of them stood looking at each other across the doorjamb of Rosie's second-floor room on Tremont Street, he with his bouquet of spring flowers from the shop two doors down on Hitchens Avenue, she with her two-pound can of fruit cocktail raised over her head, and although the pause could not have lasted more than two or three seconds, it seemed very long to him. It was certainly long enough for him to realize something that was distressing, dismaying, annoying, amazing, and rather wonderful. Seeing her did not change things, as he had rather expected it would; it made them worse, instead. She wasn't beautiful, not the media version of beauty, anyhow, but she was beautiful to him. The look of her lips and the line of her jaw for some reason just about stopped his heart, and the catlike tilt of her bluish-gray eyes made him feel weak. His blood felt too high and his cheeks too hot. He knew perfectly well what these feelings signalled, and he resented them even as they made him captive.

He held out the flowers to her, smiling hopefully but keeping tabs on the upraised can.

“Truce?” he said.

H
is invitation to go out to dinner with him followed so quickly on her realization that he wasn't Norman that she was surprised into accepting. She supposed simple relief
played a part, too. It wasn't until she was in the passenger seat of his car that Practical-Sensible, who had been pretty much left in the dust, caught up and asked her what she was doing, going out with a man (a
much younger
man) she didn't know, was she insane? There was real terror in these questions, but Rosie recognized the questions themselves for what they were—mere camouflage. The important question was so horrifying Practical-Sensible didn't dare ask it, even from her place inside Rosie's head.

What if Norman catches you?
That was the important question. What if Norman caught her eating dinner with another man? A younger, good-looking man? The fact that Norman was eight hundred miles east of here didn't matter to Practical-Sensible, who really wasn't Practical and Sensible at all, but only Frightened and Confused.

Norman wasn't the
only
issue, however. She hadn't been alone with any man but her husband in her entire life as a woman, and right now her emotions were a gorgeous stew. Eat dinner with him? Oh, sure. Right. Her throat had narrowed down to a pinhole and her stomach was sudsing like a washing machine.

If he had been wearing anything dressier than clean, faded jeans and an oxford shirt, or if he'd given the faintest look of doubt to her own unpretentious skirt-and-sweater combination, she would have said no, and if the place he took her to had looked too difficult (it was the only word she could think of), she didn't believe she would have been able even to get out of his Buick. But the restaurant looked welcoming rather than threatening, a brightly lighted storefront called Pop's Kitchen, with paddle-fans overhead and red-and-white-checked tablecloths spread across butcherblock tables. According to the neon sign in the window, Pop's Kitchen served Strictly Kansas City Beef. The waiters were all older gentlemen who wore black shoes and long aprons tied up under their armpits. To Rosie they looked like white dresses with Empire waists. The people eating at the tables looked like her and Bill—well, like Bill, anyway: middle-class, middle-income folks wearing informal clothes. To Rosie the restaurant felt cheerful and open, the kind of place where you could breathe.

Maybe, but they
don't
look like you,
her mind whispered,
and don't you go thinking that they do, Rosie. They look confident, they look happy, and most of all they look like they
belong here. You don't and you never will. There were too many years with Norman, too many times when you sat in the corner vomiting into your apron. You've forgotten how people are, and what they talk about . . . if you ever knew to begin with. If you try to be like these people, if you even
dream
you can be like these people, you are going to earn yourself a broken heart.

Was that true? It was terrifying to think it might be, because part of her
was
happy—happy that Bill Steiner had come to see her, happy that he had brought flowers, happy that he had asked her to dinner. She didn't have the slightest idea how she felt about him, but that she had been asked out on a date . . . that made her feel young and full of magic. She couldn't help it.

Go on, feel happy,
Norman said. He whispered the words into her ear as she and Bill stepped through the door of Pop's Kitchen, words so close and so real that it was almost as if he were passing by.
Enjoy it while you can, because later on he's going to take you back out into the dark, and then he's going to want to talk to you up close. Or maybe he won't bother with the talking part. Maybe he'll just drag you into the nearest alley and do you against the wall.

No,
she thought. Suddenly the bright lights inside the restaurant were
too
bright and she could hear everything,
everything,
even the big sloppy gasps of the overhead paddle-fans walloping the air.
No, that's a lie—he's nice and that's a lie!

The answer was immediate and inexorable, the Gospel According to Norman:
No one's nice, sweetheart—how many times have I told you that? Down deep, everyone's street-grease. You, me, everyone.

“Rose?” Bill asked. “You okay? You look pale.”

No, she wasn't okay. She knew the voice in her head was a lying voice, one which came from a part of her that was still blighted by Norman's poison, but what she knew and what she felt were very different things. She couldn't sit in the midst of all these people, that was all, smelling their soaps and colognes and shampoos, listening to the bright interweavings of their chatter. She couldn't deal with the waiter who would come bending into her space with a list of specials, some perhaps in a foreign language. Most of all she couldn't deal with Bill Steiner—talking to him, answering his questions, and all the time wondering how his hair would feel under her palm.

She opened her mouth to tell him she
wasn't
okay, that she felt sick to her stomach and he'd better take her home, perhaps another time. Then, as she had in the recording studio, she thought of the woman in the rose madder chiton, standing there on top of the overgrown hill with her hand upraised and one bare shoulder gleaming in the strange, cloudy light of that place. Standing there, completely unafraid, above a ruined temple that looked more haunted than any house Rosie had ever seen in her life. As she visualized the blonde hair in its plait, the gold armlet, and the barely glimpsed upswell of breast, the flutters in Rosie's stomach quieted.