Rose Madder

  She walked across the room to the picture. The blonde woman's chiton seemed almost to glow in the late-spring light. And she was a woman, Rosie thought. Not a lady, and most certainly not a gal. She stood up there on her hill, looking fearlessly down at the ruined temple and the tumbled gods...

  Gods? But there's only one ... isn't there?

  No, she saw, there were actually two--the one peering serenely up at the thunderheads from its place near the fallen pillar, and another one, way over to the right. This one was gazing sideways, through the tall grass. You could just see the white curve of stone brow, the orbit of one eye, and the lobe of an ear; the rest was hidden. She hadn't noticed this one until now, but what of that? There were probably lots of things in the picture she hadn't noticed yet, lots of little details--it was like one of those Where's Waldo pictures, full of things you didn't see at first, and ...

  ... and that was bullshit. The picture was very simple, actually.

  "Well," Rosie whispered, "it was."

  She found herself thinking of Cynthia's story about the picture in the parsonage where she had grown up ... De Soto Looks West. How she'd sat in front of it for hours, watching it like television, watching the river move.

  "Pretending to watch it move," Rosie said, and ran up the window, hoping to catch a breeze and fill the room with it. The thin voices of little kids in the park playground and bigger kids playing baseball drifted in. "Pretending, that's all. That's what kids do. I did it myself."

  She put a stick in the window to prop it open--it would stay where it was for a little bit, then come down with a crash if you didn't--and turned to look at the picture again. A sudden dismaying thought, an idea so strong it was almost a certainty, had come to her. The folds and creases in the rose madder gown were not the same. They had changed position. They had changed position because the woman wearing the toga, or chiton, or whatever it was, had changed position.

  "You're crazy if you think that," Rosie whispered. Her heart was thumping. "I mean totally bonkers. You know that, don't you?"

  She did. Nevertheless, she leaned close to the picture, peering into it. She stayed in that position, with her eyes less than two inches from the painted woman on top of the hill, for almost thirty seconds, holding her breath so as not to fog the glass which overlaid the image. At last she pulled back and let the air out of her lungs in a sigh that was mostly relief. The creases and folds in the chiton hadn't changed a bit. She was sure of it. (Well, almost sure.) It was just her imagination, playing tricks on her after her long day--a day which had been both wonderful and terribly stressful.

  "Yeah, but I got through it," she told the woman in the chiton. Talking out loud to the woman in the painting already seemed perfectly okay to her. A little eccentric, maybe, but so what? Who did it hurt? Who even knew? And the fact that the blonde's back was turned somehow made it easier to believe she was really listening.

  Rosie went to the window, propped the heels of her hands on the sill, and looked out. Across the street, laughing children ran the bases and pumped on the swings. Directly below her, a car was pulling in at the curb. There had been a time when the sight of a car pulling in like that would have terrified her, filled her with visions of Norman's fist and Norman's ring riding on it, riding toward her, the words Service, Loyalty, and Community getting bigger and bigger until they seemed to fill the whole world... but that time had passed. Thank God.

  "Actually, I think I did a little more than just get through it," she told the picture. "I think I did a really good job. Robbie thought so, I know, but the one I really had to convince was Rhoda. I think she was prepared not to like me when I came in, because I was Robbie's find, you know?" She turned toward the picture once more, turned as a woman will turn to a friend, wanting to judge from her face how some idea or statement strikes her, but of course the woman in the picture just went on looking down the hill toward the ruined temple, giving Rosie nothing but her back to judge from.

  "You know how bitchy us gals can be," Rosie said, and laughed. "Except I really think I won her over. We only got through fifty pages, but I was a lot better toward the end, and besides, all those old paperbacks are short. I'll bet I can finish by Wednesday afternoon, and do you know the best thing? I'm making almost a hundred and twenty dollars a day--not a week, a day--and there are three more Christina Bell novels. If Robbie and Rhoda give me those, I--"

  She broke off, staring at the picture with wide eyes, not hearing the thin cries from the playground anymore, not even hearing the footsteps which were now climbing the stairs from the first floor. She was looking at the shape on the far right side of the picture again--curve of brow, curve of bland, pupilless eye, curve of ear. A sudden insight came to her. She had been both right and wrong--right about that second crashed statue's not being visible before, wrong in her impression that the stone head had somehow just materialized in the picture while she'd been off recording The Manta Ray. Her idea that the folds in the woman's dress had changed position might have been her subconscious mind's effort to bolster that first erroneous impression by creating a kind of hallucination. It did, after all, make slightly more sense than what she was seeing now.

  "The picture is bigger," Rosie said.

  No. That wasn't quite it.

  She lifted her hands, sizing the air in front of the hung picture and confirming the fact that it was still covering the same three-feet-by-two-feet area of the wall. She was also seeing the same amount of white matting inside the frame, so what was the big deal?

  That second stone head wasn't there before, and that's the big deal, she thought. Maybe ...

  Rosie suddenly felt dizzy and a little sick to her stomach. She closed her eyes tightly and began rubbing at her temples, where a headache was trying to be born. When she opened her eyes and looked at the picture again, it burst upon her as it had the first time, not as separate elements--the temple, the fallen statues, the rose madder chiton, the raised left hand--but as an integrated whole, something which called to her in its own voice.

  There was more to look at now. She was nearly positive that this impression wasn't hallucination but simple fact. The picture wasn't really bigger, but she could see more on both sides... and on the top and bottom, as well. It was as if a movie projectionist had just realized he was using the wrong lens and switched, turning boxy thirty-five millimeter into wide-screen Cinerama 70. Now you could see not just Clint, but the cowboys on both sides of him, as well.

  You're nuts, Rosie. Pictures don't get bigger.

  No? Then how did you explain the second god? She was sure it had been there all the time, and she was only seeing it now because...

  "Because there's more right in the picture now," she murmured. Her eyes were very wide, although it would have been difficult to say if the expression in them was dismay or wonder. "Also more left, and more up, and more d--"

  There was a sudden flurry of knocks on the door behind her, so fast and light they almost seemed to collide with each other. Rosie whirled around, feeling as if she were moving in slow motion or underwater.

  She hadn't locked the door.

  The knocks came again. She remembered the car she'd seen pulling up at the curb below--a small car, the kind of car a man travelling alone would be apt to rent from Hertz or Avis--and all thoughts of her picture were overwhelmed by another thought, one edged about in dark tones of resignation and despair: Norman had found her after all. It had taken him awhile, but somehow he had done it.

  Part of her last conversation with Anna recurred--Anna asking what she'd do if Norman did show up. Lock the door and dial 911, she'd said, but she had forgotten to lock the door and there was no phone. That last was the most hideous irony of all, because there was a jack in the corner of the living-room area, and the jack was live--she'd gone to the phone company on her lunch hour today and paid a deposit. The woman who waited on her had given her her new telephone number on a little white card, Rosie had tucked it into her purse, and then out the door she'd marched.
Right past the display of phones for sale she had marched. Thinking she could get one at least ten dollars cheaper by marching out to the Lakeview Mall when she got a chance. And now, just because she'd wanted to save a lousy ten dollars ...

  Silence from the other side of the door, but when she dropped her eyes to the crack at the bottom, she could see the shapes of his shoes. Big black shiny shoes, they would be. He no longer wore the uniform, but he still wore those black shoes. They were hard shoes. She could testify to that, because she had worn their marks on her legs and belly and buttocks many times over her years with him.

  The knocking was repeated, three quick series of three: rapraprap pause, rapraprap pause, rapraprap.

  Once again, as during her terrible breathless panic that morning in the recording booth, Rosie's mind turned to the woman in the picture, standing there on top of the overgrown hill, not afraid of the coming thunderstorm, not afraid that the ruins slumped below her might be haunted by ghosts or trolls or just some wandering band of thugs, not afraid of anything. You could tell by the set of her back, by the way her hand was so nonchalantly raised, even (so Rosie really believed) by the shape of that one barely glimpsed breast.

  I'm not her, I am afraid--so afraid I'm almost wetting my pants--but I'm not going to let you just take me, Norman. I swear to God I won't do that.

  For a moment or two she tried to remember the throw Gert Kinshaw had shown her, the one where you seized the forearms of your onrushing opponent and then turned sideways. It was no good--when she tried to visualize the crucial move, all she could see was Norman coming at her, his lips drawn back to show his teeth (drawn back in what she thought of as his biting smile), wanting to talk to her up close.

  Right up close.

  Her grocery bag was still standing on the kitchen counter with the yellow picnic-announcement fliers beside it. She'd taken out the perishables and stuck them in the refrigerator, but the few canned goods she'd picked up were still in the bag. She walked across to the counter on legs which seemed as devoid of feeling as wooden planks, and reached in.

  Three more quick knocks: rapraprap.

  "Coming," Rosie said. Her voice sounded amazingly calm to her own ears. She pulled out the biggest thing left in the bag, a two-pound can of fruit cocktail. She closed her hand around it as best she could and started toward the door on her numb woodplank legs. "I'm coming, just a second, be right there."

  4

  While Rosie was marketing, Norman Daniels was lying on a Whitestone Hotel bed in his underwear, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the ceiling.

  He had picked up the smoking habit as many boys do, hooking cigarettes from his dad's pack of Pall Malls, resigning himself to a beating if he got caught, thinking that possibility a fair trade for the status you gained by being seen downtown on the corner of State and Route 49, leaning against d phone pole outside the Aubreyville Drugstore and Post Office, perfectly at home with the collar of your jacket turned up and that cigarette dripping down from your lower lip: crazy, baby, I'm just a real cool breeze. When your friends passed in their old cars, how could they know you'd hawked the butt from the pack on your old man's dresser, or that the one time you'd gotten up courage enough to try and buy a pack of your own in the drug, old man Gregory had snorted and told you to come back when you could grow a moustache?

  Smoking had been a big deal at fifteen, a very big deal, something that had made up for all the stuff he hadn't been able to have (a car, for instance, even an old jalop' like the ones his friends drove--cars with primer on the rocker panels and white "plastic steel" around the headlights and bumpers held on with twists of haywire), and by the time he was sixteen he was hooked--two packs a day and a bona fide smokers hack in the morning.

  Three years after he married Rose, her entire family--father, mother, sixteen-year-old brother--had been killed on that same Route 49. They had been coming back from an afternoon of swimming at Philo Quarry when a gravel truck veered across the road and wiped them out like flies on a windowpane. Old man McClendon's severed head had been found in a ditch thirty yards from the crash, with the mouth open and a generous splash of crowshit in one eye (by then Daniels was a cop, and cops heard such things). These facts hadn't disturbed Daniels in the least; he had, in fact, been delighted by the accident. As far as he was concerned, the nosy old bastard had gotten exactly what he had coming to him. McClendon had been prone to asking his daughter questions he had no business asking. Rose wasn't McClendon's daughter anymore, after all--not in the eyes of the law, at least. In the eyes of the law she had become Norman Daniels's wife.

  He dragged deep on his cigarette, blew three smoke rings, and watched them float slowly toward the ceiling in a stack. Outside, traffic beeped and honked. He had only been here half a day, and already he hated this city. It was too big. It had too many hiding places. Not that it mattered. Because things were right on track, and soon a very hard and very heavy brick wall was going to drop onto Craig McClendon's wayward little daughter, Rosie.

  At the McClendon funeral--a tripleheader with just about everyone in Aubreyville in attendance--Daniels had started coughing and had been unable to stop. People were turning around to look at him, and he hated that kind of staring worse than practically anything. Red-faced, furious with embarrassment (but still unable to stop coughing), Daniels pushed past his sobbing young wife and hurried out of the church with one hand pressed uselessly over his mouth.

  He stood outside, coughing so hard at first he had to bend over and put his hands on his knees to keep from actually passing out, looking through his watery eyes at several others who had stepped out for cigarettes, three men and two women who weren't able to go cold turkey even for a lousy half-hour funeral service, and suddenly he decided he was done smoking. Just like that. He knew that the coughing-fit might have been brought on by his usual summer allergies, but that didn't matter. It was a dumb fucking habit, maybe the dumbest fucking habit on the planet, and he was damned if some County Coroner was going to write Pall Malls on the cause-of-death line of his death certificate.

  On the day he had come home and found Rosie gone--that night, actually, after he discovered the ATM card was missing and could no longer put off facing what had to be faced--he had gone down to the Store 24 at the bottom of the hill and bought his first pack of cigarettes in eleven years. He had gone back to his old brand like a murderer returning to the scene of his crime. In hoc signo vinces was what it said on each blood-red pack, in this sign shalt thou conquer, according to his old man, who had conquered Daniels's mother in a lot of kitchen brawls but not much else, so far as Norman had ever seen.

  The initial drag had made him feel dizzy, and by the time he'd finished the cigarette, smoking it all the way down to a roach, he'd been sure he was going to puke, faint, or have a heart attack. Maybe all three at once. But now here he was, back up to two packs a day and hacking out that same old way-down-in-the-bottom-of-your-lungs cough when he rolled out of bed in the morning. It was like he'd never been away.

  That was all right, though; he was going through a stressful life experience, as the psychology pukes liked to say, and when people went through stressful life experiences, they often went back to their old habits. Habits--especially bad ones like smoking and drinking--were crutches, people said. So what? If you had a limp, what was wrong with using a crutch? Once he'd taken care of Rosie (made sure that if there was going to be an informal divorce, it would be on his terms, you might say), he would throw all his crutches away.

  This time for good.

  Norman turned his head and looked out the window. Not dark yet, but getting there. Close enough to get going, anyway. He didn't want to be late for his appointment. He mashed out his cigarette in the overflowing ashtray on the nighttable beside the telephone, swung his feet off the bed, and began to dress.

  There was no hurry, that was the nicest thing; he'd had all those accumulated off-days coming, and Captain Hardaway hadn't been the slightest bit chintzy about giving them to him wh
en he asked. There were two reasons for that, Norman reckoned. First, the newspapers and TV stations had made him the flavor of the month; second, Captain Hardaway didn't like him, had twice sicced the IA shooflies on him because of excessive-force allegations, and had undoubtedly been glad to get rid of him for awhile.

  "Tonight, bitch, " Norman murmured as he rode down in the elevator, alone except for his reflection in the tired old mirror at the back of the car. "Tonight, if I get lucky. And I feel lucky. "

  There was a line of cabs drawn up at the curb, but Daniels bypassed them. Cab-drivers kept records, and sometimes they remembered faces. No, he would ride the bus again. A city bus, this time. He walked briskly toward the bus stop on the corner, wondering if he had been kidding himself about feeling lucky and deciding he had not been. He was close, he knew it. He knew it because he had found his way back into her head.

  The bus--one that ran the Green Line route--came around the corner and rolled up to where Norman was standing. He got on, paid his four bits, sat in back--he didn't have to be Rose tonight, what a relief--and looked out the window as the streets rolled by. Bar signs. Restaurant signs. DELI. BEER. PIZZA BY THE SLICE. SEXEE TOPLESS GIRLZ.

  You don't belong here, Rose, he thought as the bus went past the window of a restaurant named Pop's Kitchen--"Strictly Kansas City Beef, " said the blood-red neon sign in the window. You don't belong here, but that's all right, because I'm here now. I've come to take you home. To take you somewhere, anyway.

  The tangles of neon and the darkening velvet sky made him think of the good old days when life hadn't seemed so weird and somehow claustrophobic, like the walls of a room that keeps getting smaller, slowly closing in on you. When the neon came on the fun started--thatwas how it had been, anyway, back then in the relatively uncomplicated years of his twenties. You found a place where the neon was bright and you slipped in. Those days were gone, but most cops-most good cops--rememberedhow to slip around after dark. How to slip around behind the neon, and how to ride the streetgrease. A cop who couldn't do those things didn't last very long.