Rose Madder (23 page)

I can get through this,
she thought.
I don't know if I can actually eat, but surely I can find enough courage to sit down with him for awhile in this well-lighted place. And am I going to worry about him raping me later on? I think rape is the last thing on this man's mind. That's just one of Norman's ideas—Norman, who believes no black man ever owned a portable radio that wasn't stolen from a white man.

The simple truth of this made her sag a little with relief, and she smiled at Bill. It was weak and a little trembly at the corners, but better than no smile at all. “I'm all right,” she said. “A tiny bit scared, that's all. You'll have to bear with me.”

“Not scared of me?”

Damned right scared of you,
Norman said from the place in her head where he lived like a vicious tumor.

“No, not exactly.” She raised her eyes to his face. It was an effort, and she could feel her cheeks flushing, but she managed. “It's just that you're only the second guy I've ever gone out with in my whole life, and if this is a date, it's the first real one I've been on since my high-school senior prom. That was back in 1980.”

“Holy God,” he said. He spoke softly, and without a trace of facetiousness. “Now
I'm
getting a little scared.”

The host—Rosie wasn't sure if you called him a
maitre d'
or if that was someone else—came up and asked if they wanted smoking or nonsmoking.

“Do you smoke?” Bill asked her, and Rosie quickly shook her head. “Somewhere out of the mainstream would be great,” Bill said to the man in the tuxedo, and Rosie caught a gray-green flicker—she thought it was a five-dollar bill—passing from Bill's hand to the host's. “A corner, maybe?”

“Certainly, sir.”
He led them through the brightly lighted room and beneath the lazily turning paddle-fans.

When they were seated, Rosie asked Bill how he had found her, although she supposed she already knew. What she was really curious about was
why
he had found her.

“It was Robbie Lefferts,” he said. “Robbie comes in every few days to see if I've gotten any new paperbacks—well,
old
paperbacks, actually; you know what I mean—”

She remembered David Goodis—
It was a tough break, Parry was innocent
—and smiled.

“I knew he hired you to read the Christina Bell novels, because he came in special to tell me. He was
very
excited.”

“Was he really?”

“He said you were the best voice he'd heard since Kathy Bates's recording of
Silence of the Lambs,
and that means a lot—Robbie
worships
that recording, along with Robert Frost reading ‘The Death of the Hired Man.' He's got that on an old thirty-three-and-a-third Caedmon LP. It's scratchy, but it's amazing.”

Rosie was silent. She felt overwhelmed.

“So I asked him for your address. Well, that's maybe a little too glossy. The ugly truth is I pestered him into it. Robbie's one of those people who happen to be very vulnerable to pestering. And to do him full credit, Rosie . . .”

But the rest drifted away from her.
Rosie,
she was thinking.
He called me Rosie. I didn't ask him to; he just did it.

“Would either of you folks care for a drink?” A waiter had appeared at Bill's elbow. Elderly, dignified, handsome, he looked like a college literature professor.
One with a penchant for Empire-waist dresses,
Rosie thought, and felt like giggling.

“I'd like iced tea,” Bill said. “How 'bout you, Rosie?”

And again. He did it again. How does he knew I was never really a Rose, that I've always been really Rosie?

“That sounds fine.”

“Two iced teas, excellent,” the waiter said, and then recited a short list of specials. To Rosie's relief, all were in English, and at the words
London broil,
she actually felt a thin thread of hunger.

“We'll think it over, tell you in a minute,” Bill said.

The waiter left, and Bill turned back to Rosie.

“Two other things in Robbie's favor,” he said. “He suggested
I stop by the studio . . . you're in the Corn Building, aren't you?”

“Yes, Tape Engine is the name of the studio.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, he suggested I stop by the studio, that all three of us could maybe go out for a drink after wrap one afternoon. Very protective, almost fatherly. When I told him I couldn't do that, he made me absolutely
promise
that I'd call you first. And I tried, Rosie, but I couldn't get your number from directory assistance. Are you unlisted?”

“I don't actually have a phone yet,” she said, sidestepping a little. She
was
unlisted, of course; it had cost an extra thirty dollars, money she could ill afford, but she could afford even less to have her number pop up on a police computer back home. She knew from Norman's bitching that the police couldn't conduct random sweeps of unlisted phone numbers the way they could sweep the ones in the phone books. It was illegal, an invasion of the privacy people voluntarily gave up when they allowed the phone company to list their numbers. So the courts had ruled, and like most of the cops she had met during the course of her marriage, Norman had a virulent hatred for all courts and all their works.

“Why couldn't you come by the studio? Were you out of town?”

He picked up his napkin, unfolded it, and put it carefully down on his lap. When he looked up again she saw his face had changed somehow, but it took several moments more for her to grasp the obvious—he was blushing.

“Well, I guess I didn't want to go out with you in a gang,” he said. “You don't really get to talk to a person that way. I just sort of wanted to . . . well . . . get to know you.”

“And here we are,” she said softly.

“Yes, that's right. Here we are.”

“But
why
did you want to get to know me? To go out with me?” She paused for a moment, then said the rest. “I mean, I'm sort of old for you, aren't I?”

He looked incredulous for a moment, then decided it was a joke and laughed. “Yeah,” he said. “How old are you, anyway, granny? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?”

At first she thought
he
was making a joke—not a very good one, either—and then realized he was serious enough underneath the light tone. Not even trying to flatter her, only stating the obvious. What was obvious to
him,
anyway. The realization shocked her, and her thoughts went flying in all
directions again. Only one came through with any sort of clarity: the changes in her life had not ended with finding a job and a place of her own to live; they had only begun. It was as if everything that had happened up to this point had just been a series of preshocks, and this was the onset of the actual quake. Not an earthquake but a lifequake, and suddenly she was hungry for it, and excited in a way she did not understand.

Bill started to speak, and then the waiter came with their iced teas. Bill ordered a steak, and Rosie asked for the London broil. When the waiter asked her how she wanted it, she started to say medium-well—that was how she ate beef because that was how Norman ate beef—and then she took it back.

“Rare,” she said. “Very.”

“Excellent!” the waiter said, speaking as if he really meant it, and as he walked away Rosie thought what a wonderful place a waiter's utopia would be—a place where every choice was excellent, very good, marvellous.

When she looked back at Bill she saw his eyes still on her—those disquieting eyes with their dim green undertint. Sexy eyes.

“How bad was it?” he asked her. “Your marriage?”

“What do you mean?” she asked awkwardly.

“You know what. I meet this woman in my dad's Swap n Loan, I talk to her for maybe ten minutes, and the goddamnedest thing happens to me—I can't forget her. This is something I've seen in the movies and occasionally read about in the kind of magazines you always find in the doctor's waiting room, but I never really believed it. Now, boom, here it is. I see her face in the dark when I turn out the light. I think about her when I eat my lunch. I—” He paused, giving her a considering, worried look. “I hope I'm not scaring you.”

He was scaring her a
lot,
but at the same time she thought she had never heard anything so wonderful. She was hot all over (except for her feet, which were cold as ice), and she could still hear the fans churning the air overhead. There seemed to be a thousand of them at least, a battalion of fans.

“This lady comes in to sell me her engagement ring, which she thinks is a diamond . . . except way down deep, where she knows better. Then, when I find out where she lives and go to see her—with a bouquet in my hand and my heart in my mouth, you might say—she comes this far from braining me
with a can of fruit cocktail.” He held up his right hand with the thumb and the forefinger half an inch apart.

Rosie held her own hand up—the left—with the thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “Actually, it was more like this,” she said. “And I'm like Roger Clemens—I have
excellent
control.”

He laughed hard at that. It was a good sound, honest and from the belly. After a moment, she joined him.

“In any case, the lady doesn't exactly fire the missile, just makes this scary little downward twitch with it, then hides it behind her back like a kid with a copy of
Playboy
he stole out of his dad's bureau drawer. She says, ‘Oh my God, I'm sorry,' and I wonder who the enemy is, since it's not me. And
then
I wonder how ex the husband can be, when the lady came into my dad's pawnshop with her rings still on. You know?”

“Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.”

“It's important to me. If it seems like I'm being nosy, okay, probably I am, but . . . on very short notice I'm very taken with this woman, and I don't want her to be very attached. On the other hand, I don't want her to be so scared she has to go to the door with a jumbo-sized can of fruit cocktail in her hand every time someone knocks. Is any of this making any sense to you?”

“Yes,” she said. “The husband is pretty ex.” And then, for no reason at all, she added: “His name is Norman.”

Bill nodded solemnly. “I see why you left him.”

Rosie began to giggle and clapped her hands to her mouth. Her face felt hotter than ever. At last she got it under control, but by then she had to wipe her eyes with the corner of her napkin.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I think so.”

“Want to tell me about it?”

An image suddenly arose in her mind, one with all the clarity of something seen in a vivid nightmare. It was Norman's old tennis racket, the Prince with the black tape wound around the handle. It was still hanging by the foot of the cellar stairs back home, as far as she knew. He had spanked her with it several times during the first years of their marriage. Then, about six months after her miscarriage, he had anally raped her with it. She had shared a lot of things about her marriage (that was what they called it,
sharing,
a word she found simultaneously hideous and apt) in Therapy Circle at D & S, but that was one little nugget she'd kept to herself—how it felt to have the taped handle of a Prince tennis racket jammed up your ass by a man who sat straddling you, with his knees on the outsides of your thighs; how it felt to have him lean over and tell you that if you fought, he would break the water-glass on the table beside the bed and cut your throat with it. How it felt to lie there, smelling the Dentyne on his breath and wondering how bad he was ripping you up.

“No,” she said, and was grateful that her voice didn't tremble. “I don't want to talk about Norman. He was abusive and I left him. End of story.”

“Fair enough,” Bill said. “And he's out of your life for good?”

“For good.”

“Does
he
know that? I only ask because of, you know, the way you came to the door. You sure weren't expecting a representative from the Church of Latter-Day Saints.”

“I don't know if he knows it or not,” she said, after a moment or two to think it over—certainly it was a fair enough question.

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Oh, yes. You bet. But that doesn't necessarily mean a lot. I'm afraid of
everything.
It's all new to me. My friends at . . . my friends say I'll grow out of it, but I don't know.”

“You weren't afraid to come out to dinner with me.”

“Oh yes I was. I was
terrified.”

“Why did you, then?”

She opened her mouth to say what she had been thinking earlier—that he had surprised her into it—and then closed it again. That was the truth, but it wasn't the truth
inside
the truth, and this was an area where she didn't want to do any sidestepping. She had no idea if the two of them had any sort of future beyond this one meal in Pop's Kitchen, but if they did, fancy footwork would be a bad way to begin the trip.

“Because I wanted to,” she said. Her voice was low but clear.

“All right. No more about that.”

“And no more about Norman, either.”

“That's his for-real no-fooling name?”

“Yes.”

“As in Bates.”

“As in Bates.”

“Can I ask you about something else, Rosie?”

She smiled a little. “As long as I don't have to promise to answer.”

“Fair enough. You thought you were older than me, didn't you?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, I did. How old
are
you, Bill?”

“Thirty. Which has got to make us something like next-door neighbors in the age sweepstakes . . . same street, anyway. But you made an almost automatic assumption that you weren't just older, you were a lot older. So here comes the question. Are you ready?”