"I ... Well ..."
What did she say? Rosie touched her tongue nervously to her upper lip, glanced away from him in an effort to clear her mind, and saw the pile of yellow fliers sitting on the counter. She felt both disappointment and relief as she looked back at Bill.
"I can't. Saturday's the Daughters and Sisters picnic. Those are the people who helped me when I came here-my friends. There's a softball game, races, horseshoes, craft booths--things like that. And then a concert that night, which is supposed to be the real moneymaker. This year we're having the Indigo Girls. I promised I'd work the teeshirt concession from five o'clock on, and I ought to do it. I owe them such a lot."
"I could have you back by five no sweat," he said. "Four, if you wanted."
She did want to ... but she had a lot more to be afraid of than just showing up late to sell teeshirts. Would he understand that if she told him? If she said, I'd love to put my arms around you while you drive fast, and I'd love for you to wear a leather jacket so I could put my face against the shoulder and smell that good smell and hear the little creaking sounds it makes when you move. I'd love that, but I think I'm afraid of what I might find out later on, when the ride was over ... that the Norman inside my head was right all along about the things you really want. What scares me the most is having to investigate the most basic premise of my husband's life, the one thing he never said out loud because he never had to: that the way he treated me was perfectly okay, perfectly normal. It's not pain I'm afraid of; I know about pain. What I'm afraid of is the end of this small, sweet dream. I've had so few of them, you see.
She realized what she needed to say, and realized the next moment that she couldn't say it, perhaps because she'd heard it in so many movies, where it always came out sounding like a whine: Don't hurt me. That was what she needed to say. Please don't hurt me. The best part of me that's left will die if you hurt me.
But he was still waiting for her answer. Waiting for her to say something.
Rosie opened her mouth to say no, she really ought to be there for the picnic as well as the concert, maybe another time. Then she looked at the picture hanging on the wall beside the window. She wouldn't hesitate, Rosie thought; she would count the hours until Saturday, and when she was finally mounted behind him on that iron horse, she would spend most of the ride thumping him on the back and urging him to make it gallop faster. For a moment Rosie could almost see her sitting there, the hem of her rose madder chiton hiked high, her bare thighs firmly clasping his hips.
That hot flash swept through her again, stronger this time. Sweeter.
"Okay," she said, "I'll do it. On one condition."
"Name it," he said. He was grinning, obviously delighted.
"Bring me back to Ettinger's Pier-that's where the D and S thing is happening--and stay for the concert. I'll buy the tickets. It's my treat."
"Deal," he said instantly. "Can I pick you up at eight-thirty, or is that too early?"
"No, it's fine."
"You'll want to wear a coat and maybe a sweater, too," he said. "You might be able to stow em in the saddlebags coming back in the afternoon, but going out's going to be chilly."
"All right," she said, already thinking that she would have to borrow those items from Pam Haverford, who was about the same size. Rosie's entire outerwear wardrobe at this point consisted of one light jacket, and the budget wouldn't stand any further purchases in that department, at least for awhile.
"I'll see you, then. And thanks again for tonight." He seemed briefly to consider kissing her again, then simply took her hand and squeezed it for a moment.
"You're welcome."
He turned and ran quickly down the stairs, like a boy. She couldn't help contrasting this to Norman's way of moving--either at a head-down plod or with a kind of spooky, darting speed. She watched his elongated shadow on the wall until it disappeared, then she closed the door, secured both locks, and leaned against it, looking across the room at her picture.
It had changed again. She was almost sure of it.
Rosie walked across the room and stood in front of it with her hands clasped behind her back and her head thrust slightly forward, the position making her look comically like a New Yorker caricature of an art gallery patron or museum habitue.
Yes, she saw, although the picture's dimensions remained the same, she was all but positive that it had widened again somehow. On the right, beyond the second stone face-the one peering blindly sideways through the tall grass-she could now see what looked like the beginnings of a forest glade. On the left, beyond the woman on the hill, she could now see the head and shoulders of a small shaggy pony. It was wearing blinders, was cropping at the high grass, and appeared to be harnessed to some sort of a rig--perhaps a cart, perhaps a shay or a surrey. That part Rosie couldn't see; it was out of the picture (so far, at least). She could see some of its shadow, however, and another shadow as well, growing out of it. She thought this second shadow was probably the head and shoulders of a person. Someone standing beside the vehicle to which the pony was harnessed, maybe. Or maybe--
Or maybe you've gone out of your mind, Rosie. You don't really think this picture is getting bigger, do you? Or showing more stuff, if you like that better?
But the truth was she did believe that, she saw that, and she found herself more excited than scared by the idea. She wished she had asked Bill for his opinion; she would have liked to know if he saw anything like what she was seeing ... or thought she was seeing.
Saturday, she promised herself. Maybe I'll do it Saturday.
She began to undress, and by the time she was in the tiny bathroom, brushing her teeth, she had forgotten all about Rose Madder, the woman on the hill. She had forgotten all about Norman, too, and Anna, and Pam, and the Indigo Girls on Saturday night. She was thinking about her dinner with Bill Steiner, replaying her date with him minute by minute, second by second.
8
She lay in bed, slipping toward sleep, listening to the sound of crickets coming from Bryant Park.
As she drifted she found herself remembering--without pain and seemingly from a great distance--the year 1985 and her daughter, Caroline. As far as Norman was concerned, there never had been a Caroline, and the fact that he had agreed with Rosie's hesitant suggestion that Caroline was a nice name for a girl didn't change that. To Norman there had been only a tadpole that ended early. If it happened to be a girl-tadpole according to some nutty headtrip his wife was on, so what? Eight hundred million Red Chinese didn't give a shit, in Normanspeak.
1985--what a year that had been. What a year from hell. She had lost
(Caroline)
the baby, Norman had nearly lost his job (had come close to being arrested, she had an idea), she had gone to the hospital with a broken rib that had lacerated and almost punctured her lung, and, as a small extra added attraction, she had been cornholed with the handle of a tennis racket. That was also the year her mind, remarkably stable until then, began to slip a little, but in the midst of all those other festivities, she barely noticed that half an hour in Pooh's Chair sometimes felt like five minutes, and that there were days when she took eight or nine showers between the time Norman left for work and the time he came back home.
She must have caught pregnant in January, because that was when she started to be sick in the mornings, and she missed her first period in February. The case which prompted Norman's "official reprimand"--one that would be carried in his jacket until the day he retired--had come in March.
What was his name? she asked herself, still drifting in her bed, somewhere between sleep and waking, but for the time being still closer to the latter. The man who started all the trouble, what was his name?
For a moment it wouldn't come, only the memory that he had been a black man ... a jiggedy-jig, in Normanspeak. Then she got it.
"Bender," she murmured in the dark, listening to the low creak of the crickets. "Richie Bender. That was his name."
1985, a hell of a year. A hell of a life. And now th
ere was this life. This room. This bed. And the sound of crickets.
Rosie closed her eyes and drifted.
9
Less than three miles from his wife now, Norman lay in his own bed, slipping toward sleep, slipping into darkness and listening to the steady rumble of traffic on Lakefront Avenue, nine floors below him. His teeth and jaws still ached, but the pain was distant now, unimportant, hidden behind a mixture of aspirin and Scotch.
As he drifted, he also found himself thinking about Richie Bender; it was as if, unknown to either of them, Norman and Rosie had shared a brief telepathic kiss.
"Richie, " he murmured into the shadows of his hotel room, and then put his forearm over his closed eyes. "Richie Bender, you puke. you fucking puke. "
A Saturday, it had been-the first Saturday in March of 1985. Nine years ago, give or take. Around eleven a.m. on that day, a jiggedy-jig had walked into the Payless store on the corner of 60th and Saranac, put two bullets in the clerk's head, looted the register, and walked out again. While Norman and his partner were questioning the clerk in the bottle-redemption center next door, they were approached by another jig, this one wearing a Buffalo Bills jersey.
"I know that nigger, " he said.
"What nigger is that, bro?" Norman asked.
"Nigger rob that Payless," the jig had replied. "I was standin right over there by that mailbox when he come out. Name Richie Bender. He a bad nigger. Sell crack out of his motel room down there. " He had pointed vaguely east, toward the train station.
"What motel might that be?" Harley Bissington asked.
Harley had been partnered with Norman on that unfortunate day.
"Ray'road Motel, the black man said.
"I don't suppose you happen to know which room?" Harley had asked. "Does your knowledge of the purported miscreant stretch that far, my brown-skinned friend?"
Harley had almost always talked that way. Sometimes it cracked Norman up. More often it'd made him want to grab the man by one of his narrow little knit ties and choke the Kokomo out of him.
Their brown-skinned friend knew, all right, of course he did. He was undoubtedly in there himself two or three times a week-maybe five or six, if his current cash-flow situation was good-buying rock from that bad nigger Richie Bender. Their brown-skinned friend and all his brown-skinned jiggedy-jig pals. Probably this fellow currently had some sort of down on Richie Bender, but that was nothing to Norman and Harley; all Norman and Harley wanted was to know where the shooter was so they could bust his ass right over to County and clear this case before cocktail hour.
The jig in the Bills jersey hadn't been able to recall the number of Bender's room, but he'd been able to tell them where it was, just the same: first floor, main wing, right in between the Coke machine and the newspaper boxes.
Norman and Harley had bopped on down to the Railroad Motel, clearly one of the city's finer dives, and knocked on the door between the Coke machine and the newspaper dispensers. The door had been opened by a slutty high-yellow gal in a filmy red dress that let you get a good look at her bra and panties, and she was obviously one stoned American, and the two cops could see what looked like three empty crack vials standing on the top of the motel television, and when Norman asked her where Richie Bender was, she made the mistake of laughing at him. "I don't own no Waring Blender," she said. "You go on now, boys, n get your honky asses out of here. "
All of that was pretty straightforward, but then the various accounts had gotten a little confusing. Norman and Harley said that Ms. Wendy Yarrow (known more familiarly in the Daniels kitchen that spring and summer as "the slutty high-yellow gal") had taken a nailfile from her purse and slashed Norman Daniels with it twice. Certainly he had long, shallow cuts across his forehead and the back of his right hand, but Ms. Yarrow claimed that Norman had made the cut across his hand himself and his partner had done the one over his eyebrows for him. They had done this, she said, after pushing her back into Unit 12 of the Railroad Motel, breaking her nose and four of her fingers, fracturing nine bones in her left foot by stamping on it repeatedly (they took turns, she said), pulling out wads of her hair and punching her repeatedly in the abdomen. The short one then raped her, she told the IA shooflies. The broad-shouldered one had tried to rape her, but hadn't been able to get it up at first. He bit her several times on the breasts and face, and then he was able to get an erection, she told them, "but he squirted all over my leg before he could get it in. Then he hit me some more. He tole me he want to talk to me up close, but he did mos of his talkin with his fists. "
Now, lying in bed at the Whitestone, lying on sheets his wife had had in her hands, Norman rolled onto his side and tried to push 1985 away. It didn't want to go. No surprise there; once it came, it never did. 1985 was a hangerarounder, like some blabby asshole gasbag neighbor you just can't get rid of.
We made a mistake, Norman thought. We believed that goddam jig in the football jersey.
Yes, that had been a mistake, all right, a rather big one. And they had believed that a woman who looked so much as if she belonged with a Richie Bender must be in Richie Bender's room, and that was either a second mistake or an extension of the first one, and it didn't really matter which, because the results were the same. Ms. Wendy Yarrow was a part-time waitress, a part-time hooker, and a full-time drug addict, but she had not been in Richie Bender's room, did not in fact know there was such a creature as Richie Bender on the planet. Richie Bender had turned out to be the man who had robbed the Payless and wasted the clerk, but his room wasn't between the soda machine and the newspaper boxes; that was Wendy Yarrow's room and Wendy Yarrow had been all by herself, at least on that particular day.
Richie Bender's room had been on the other side of the Coke machine. That mistake had almost cost Norman Daniels and Harley Bissington their jobs, but in the end the IA people had believed the nailfile story and there had been no sperm to support Ms. Yarrow's claims of rape. Her assertion that the older of the two-the one who had actually gotten it into her-had used a condom and then flushed it down the toilet was not provable.
There had been other problems, though. Even their greatest partisans in the department had to admit that Inspectors Daniels and Bissington might have gone a little overboard in their efforts to subdue this one-hundred-and-ten-pound wildcat with the nailfile; she did have quite a few broken fingers, for instance. Hence the official reprimand. Nor had that been the end of it. The uppity bitch had found that kike ... that little baldheaded kike ...
But the world was full of uppity, troublemaking bitches. His wife, for instance. But she was one uppity bitch he could do something about ... always supposing, that was, he could get a little sleep.
Norman rolled over onto his other side, and 1985 at last began to fade away. "When you least expect it, Rose, " he murmured. "That's when I'll come for you. "
Five minutes later he was asleep.
10
That slutty gal, he called her, Rosie thought in her own bed. She was close to sleep herself now, but not there quite yet; she could still hear the crickets in the park. That slutty high-yellow gal. How he hated her!
Yes, of course he had. There had been a mess with the Internal Affairs investigators, for one thing. Norman and Harley Bissington had escaped from that with their skins intact--barely-only to discover that the slutty high-yellow gal had found herself a lawyer (a baldheaded kike ambulance-chaser, in Normanspeak) who had filed a huge civil suit on her behalf. It named Norman, Harley, the entire police department. Then, not long before Rosie's miscarriage, Wendy Yarrow had been murdered. She was found behind one of the grain elevators on the west side of the lake. She had been stabbed over a hundred times, and her breasts had been hacked off.
Some sicko, Norman had told Rosie, and although he had not been smiling after he put the telephone down--someone at the cop-shop must have been really excited, to have called him at home--there had been undeniable satisfaction in his voice. She sat in at the game once too often and a wildcard came out of the
deck. Hazard of the job. He had touched her hair then, very gently, stroking it, and had smiled at her. Not his biting smile, the one that made her feel like screaming, but she'd felt like screaming anyway, because she had known, just like that, what had happened to Wendy Yarrow, the slutty high-yellow gal.
See how lucky you are? he'd asked her, now stroking the back of her neck with his big hard hands, now her shoulders, now the swells of her breasts. See how lucky you are not to be out on the street, Rose?
Then--maybe it had been a month later, maybe six weeks--he had come in from the garage, found Rosie reading a romance novel, and decided he needed to talk to her about her entertainment tastes. Needed to talk to her about them right up close, in fact.
1985, a hell of a year.
Rosie lay in bed with her hands under her pillow, slipping toward sleep and listening to the sound of the crickets coming in through the window, so close they sounded as if her room had been magically transported onto the bandstand in the park, and she thought of a woman who had sat in the comer with her hair plastered against her sweaty cheeks and her belly as hard as a stone and her eyes rolling in their shock-darkened sockets as the sinister kisses began to tickle at her thighs, that woman who was still years from seeing the drop of blood on the sheet, that woman who had not known places like Daughters and Sisters or men like Bill Steiner existed, that woman who had crossed her arms and gripped the points of her shoulders and prayed to a God she no longer believed in that it not be a miscarriage, that it not be the end of her small sweet dream, and then thinking, as she felt it happening, that maybe it was better. She knew how Norman fulfilled his responsibilities as a husband; how might he fulfill them as a father?
The soft hum of crickets, lulling her to sleep. And she could even smell grass--a husky-sweet aroma that seemed out of place in May. This was a smell she associated with August hayfields.
I never smelled grass from the park before, she thought sleepily. Is this what love-infatuation, at least-does to you? Does it sharpen your senses at the same time it's making you crazy?