III. PROVIDENCE
When Rosie and Pam Haverford came down in the service elevator after work on the following Wednesday, Pam looked pale and unwell.
“It’s my period,” she said when Rosie expressed concern.
“I’m having cramps like a bastard.”
“Do you want to stop for a coffee?” Pam thought about it, then shook her head.
“You go on without me. All I want to do right now is go back to D and S and find an empty bedroom before everyone shows up from work and starts yakking. Gobble some Midol and sleep for a couple of hours. If I do that, maybe I’ll feel like a human being again.”
“I’ll come with you,” Rosie said as the elevator doors opened and they stepped out. Pam shook her head.
“No you don’t,” she said, and her face lit in a brief smile.
“I can make it on my own just fine, and you’re old enough to have a cup of coffee without a chaperone. Who knows-you might even meet someone interesting.”
Rosie sighed. To Pam, someone interesting always meant a man, usually the kind with muscles that stood out under their form-fitting tee-shirts like geological landmarks, and as far as Rosie was concerned, she could do without that kind of man for the rest of her life. Besides, she was married. She glanced down at her wedding band and diamond engagement ring inside it as they stepped out onto the street. How much that glance had to do with what happened a short time later was something of which she was never sure, but it did place the engagement ring, which in the ordinary course of things she hardly ever thought of at all, somewhere toward the front of her mind. It was a little over a carat, by far the most expensive thing her husband had ever given her, and until that day the idea that it belonged to her, and she could dispose of it if she wanted to (and in any way she wanted to), had never crossed her mind. Rosie waited at the bus stop around the corner from the hotel with Pam in spite of Pam’s protestations that it was totally unnecessary. She really didn’t like the way Pam looked, with all the color gone from her cheeks and dark smudges under her eyes and little pain-lines running down from the corners of her mouth. Besides, it felt good to be looking out for someone else, instead of the other way around. She actually came quite close to getting on the bus with Pam just to make sure she got back all right, but in the end, the call of fresh hot coffee (and maybe a piece of pie) was just too strong. She stood on the curb and waved at Pam when Pam sat down beside one of the bus windows. Pam waved back as the bus pulled away. Rosie stood where she was for a moment, then turned and started walking down Hitchens Boulevard toward the Hot Pot. Her mind turned, naturally enough, back to her first walk in this city. She couldn’t recall very much of those hours-what she remembered most was being afraid and disoriented-but at least two figures stood out like rocks in a billowing mist: the pregnant woman and the man with the David Crosby moustache. Him, particularly. Leaning in the tavern doorway with a beer-stein in his hand and looking at her. Talking (hey baby hey baby) to her. Or at her. These recollections possessed her mind wholly for a little while, as only our worst recollections can-memories of times when we have felt lost and helpless, utterly unable to exert any control over our own lives-and she walked past the Hot Pot without even seeing it, her heedless eyes blank and full of dismay. She was still thinking about the man in the tavern doorway, thinking about how much he had frightened her and how much he had reminded her of Norman. It wasn’t anything in his face; mostly it had been a matter of posture. The way he’d stood there, as if every muscle was ready to flex and leap, and it would take only a single glance of acknowledgment from her to set him off- A hand seized her upper arm and Rosie nearly shrieked. She looked around, expecting either Norman or the man with the dark red moustache. Instead she saw a young fellow in a conservative summer-weight suit.
“Sorry if I startled you,” he said, “but for a second there I was sure you were going to step right out into the traffic.”
She looked around and saw that she was standing on the corner of Hitchens and Watertower Drive, one of the busiest intersections in the city and at least three full blocks past the Hot Pot, maybe four. Traffic raced by like a metal river. It suddenly occurred to her that the young man beside her might have saved her life.
“Th-Thank you. A lot.”
“Not a problem,” he said, and on the far side of Watertower, WALK flashed out in white letters. The young man gave Rosie a final curious glance and then stepped off the curb and into the crosswalk with the rest of the pedestrians and was borne away. Rosie stayed where she was, feeling the momentary dislocation and deep relief of someone who wakes from a really bad dream. And that’s exactly what I was having, she thought. I was awake and walking down the street, but I was still having a bad dream. Or a flashback. She looked down and saw she was holding her bag clamped tightly against her midsection in both hands, as she had held it during that long, bewildering tramp in search of Durham Avenue five weeks ago. She slipped the strap over her shoulder, turned around, and began retracing her steps. The city’s fashionable shopping section started beyond Watertower Drive; the area she was now passing through as she left Watertower behind consisted of much smaller shops. Many of them looked a little seedy, a trifle desperate around the edges. Rosie walked slowly, looking in the windows of secondhand clothing stores trying to pass themselves off as grunge boutiques, shoe stores with signs reading BUY AMERICAN and CLEARANCE SALE in the windows, a discount place called No More Than 5, its window heaped with dollbabies made in Mexico or Manila, a leathergoods place called Motorcycle Mama, and a store called Avec Plaisir with a startling array of goods-dildos, handcuffs, and crotchless underwear-displayed on black velvet. She looked in here for quite awhile, marvelling at this stuff which had been put out for anyone passing to see, and at last crossed the street. Half a block farther up she could see the Hot Pot, but she had decided to forgo the coffee and pie, after all; she would simply catch the bus and go on back to D amp; S. Enough adventures for one day. Except that wasn’t what happened. On the far corner of the intersection she had just crossed was a nondescript storefront with a neon sign in the window reading PAWNS LOANS FINE JEWELRY BOUGHT AND SOLD. It was the last service which caught Rosie’s attention. She looked down at her engagement ring again, and remembered something Norman had told her not long before they were married-If you wear that on the street, wear it with the stone turned in toward your palm, Rose. That’s a helluva big rock and you’re just a little girl. She had asked him once (this was before he had begun teaching her that it was safer not to ask questions) how much it had cost. He had answered with a headshake and a small indulgent smile-the smile of a parent whose child wants to know why the sky is blue or how much snow there is at the North Pole. Never mind, he said. Content yourself with knowing it was either the rock or a new Buick. I decided on the rock. Because I love you, Rose. Now, standing here on this streetcorner, she could still remember how that had made her feel-afraid, because you had to be afraid of a man capable of such extravagance, a man who could choose a ring over a new car, but a little breathless and sexy, too. Because it was romantic. He had bought her a diamond so big that it wasn’t safe to flash it on the street. A diamond as big as the Ritz. Because I love you, Rose. And perhaps he had… but that had been fourteen years ago, and the girl he’d loved had possessed clear eyes and high breasts and a flat stomach and long, strong thighs. There had been no blood in that girl’s urine when she went to the bathroom. Rosie stood on the corner near the storefront with the neon in the window and looked down at her diamond engagement ring. She waited to see what she would feel-an echo of fear or perhaps even romance-and when she felt nothing at all, she turned toward the pawnshop’s door. She would be leaving Daughters and Sisters soon, and if there was someone inside this place who would give her a reasonable sum of money for her ring, she could leave clean, owing nothing for her room and board, and maybe even with a few hundred dollars left over. Or maybe I just want to be rid of it, she thought. Maybe I don’t want to spend even another day carting around the Buick he never bought. The sign on the door read LIBERTY CITY LOAN amp; PAWN. That struck her as momentarily strange-she had heard several nicknames for this city, but all of them had to do either with the lake or the weather. Then she dismissed the thought, opened the door, and went inside.
She had expected it to be dark, and it was dark, but it was also unexpectedly golden inside the Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn. The sun was low in the sky now, shining straight down Hitchens, and it fell through the pawnshop’s west-facing windows in long, warm beams. One of them turned a hanging saxophone into an instrument which looked as if it were made of fire. That’s not accidental, either, Rosie thought. Someone hung that sax there on purpose. Someone smart. Probably true, but she still felt a little enchanted. Even the smell of the place added to that sense of enchantment-a smell of dust and age and secrets. Very faintly, off to her left, she could hear many clocks ticking softly. She walked slowly up the center aisle, past ranks of acoustic guitars strung up by their necks on one side and glass cases filled with appliances and stereo equipment on the other. There seemed to be a great many of those oversized, multi-function sound-systems that were called “boomboxes” on the TV shows. At the far end of this aisle was a long counter with another neon sign bent in an arc overhead. GOLD SILVER FINE JEWELRY, it said in blue. Then, below it, in red: WE BUY WE SELL WE TRADE. Yes, but do you crawl on your belly like a reptile? Rosie thought with a small ghost of a smile, and approached the counter. A man was sitting on a stool behind it. There was a jeweller’s loupe in his eye. He was using it to look at something which lay on a pad in front of him. When she got a little closer, Rosie saw that the item under examination was a pocket-watch with its back off. The man behind the counter was poking into it with a steel probe so thin she could barely see it. He was young, she thought, maybe not even thirty yet. His hair was long, almost to his shoulders, and he was wearing a blue silk vest over a plain white undershirt. She thought the combination unconventional but rather dashing. There was movement off to her left. She turned in that direction and saw an older gentleman squatting on the floor and going through piles of paperbacks stacked under a sign reading THE GOOD OLD STUFF. His topcoat was spread out around him in a fan, and his briefcase-black, old-fashioned, and starting to come unsprung at the seams-stood patiently beside him, like a faithful dog.
“Help you, ma’am?” She returned her attention to the man behind the counter, who had removed the loupe and was now looking at her with a friendly grin. His eyes were hazel with a greenish undertint, very pretty, and she wondered briefly if Pam might classify him as someone interesting. She guessed not. Not enough tectonic plates sliding around under the shirt.
“Maybe you can,” she said. She slipped off her wedding ring and her engagement ring, then put the plain gold band into her pocket. It felt strange not to be wearing it, but she supposed she could get used to that. A woman capable of walking out of her own house for good without even a change of underwear could probably get used to quite a lot. She laid the diamond down on the velvet pad beside the old watch the jeweller had been working on.
“How much would you say that’s worth?” she asked him. Then, as an afterthought, she added:
“And how much could you give me for it?” He slipped the ring over the end of his thumb, then held it up into the dusty sunbeam slanting in over his shoulder through the third of the west-facing windows. The stone sent back sparks of multicolored fire into her eyes, and for just a moment she felt a pang of regret. Then the jeweller gave her a quick look, just a glance, really, but it was long enough for her to see something in his hazel eyes she didn’t immediately understand-a look that seemed to say Are you joking?
“What?” she asked.
“What is it?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“Just a mo.” He screwed the loupe back into his eye and took a good long look at the stone in her engagement ring. When he looked up the second time, his eyes were surer and easier to read. Impossible not to read, really. Suddenly Rosie knew everything, but she felt no surprise, no anger, and no real regret. The best she could do was a weary sort of embarrassment: why had she never realized before? How could she have been such a chump? You weren’t, that deep voice answered her. You really weren’t, Rosie. If you hadn’t known on some level that the ring was a fake-known it almost from the start-you would have come into a place like this a lot sooner. Did you ever really believe, once you got past your twenty-second birthday, that is, that Norman Daniels would have given you a ring worth not just hundreds but thousands of dollars? Did you really? No, she supposed not. She’d never been worth it to him, for one thing. For another, a man who had three locks on the front door, three on the back, motion-sensor lights in the yard, and a touch-alarm on his new Sentra automobile would never have let his wife do the marketing with a diamond as big as the Ritz on her finger.
“It’s a fake, isn’t it?” she asked the jeweller.
“Well,” he said, “it’s a perfectly real zirconia, but it’s certainly not a diamond, if that’s what you mean.”
“Of course it’s what I mean,” she said.
“What else would I mean?”
“Are you okay?” the jeweller asked. He looked genuinely concerned, and she had an idea, now that she was seeing him up close, that he was closer to twenty-five than thirty.
“Hell,” she said, “I don’t know. Probably.” She took a Kleenex out of her purse, though, just in case of a tearful outburst-these days she never knew when one was coming. Or maybe a good laughing jag; she’d had several of those, as well. It would be nice if she could avoid both extremes, at least for the time being. Nice to leave this place with at least a few shreds of dignity.
“I hope so,” he said, “because you’re in good company. Believe me, you are. You’d be surprised how many ladies, ladies just like you-”
