“Oh, stop,” she told him.
“When I need something uplifting, I’ll buy a support bra.” She had never in her life said anything remotely like that to a man-it was downright suggestive-but she had never felt like this in her whole life… as if she were spacewalking, or running giddily across a tightrope with no net beneath. And wasn’t it perfect, in a way? Wasn’t it the only fitting epilogue to her marriage? I decided on the rock, she heard him say in her mind; his voice had been shaking with sentiment, his gray eyes actually a little moist. Because I love you, Rose. For a moment the laughing jag was very close. She held it at arm’s length by sheer force of will.
“Is it worth anything?” she asked.
“Anything at all? Or is it just something he got out of a gum-machine somewhere?” He didn’t bother with the loupe this time, just held the ring up into the sunbeam again.
“Actually, it is worth a bit,” he said, sounding relieved to be able to pass on a little good news.
“The stone’s a ten-buck item, but the setting… that might have gone as much as two hundred bucks, retail.
“Course, I couldn’t give you that,” he added hurriedly.
“My dad’d read me the riot act. Wouldn’t he, Robbie?”
“Your dad always reads you the riot act,” said the old man squatting by the paperbacks.
“That’s what kids are for.” He didn’t look up. The jeweller glanced at him, glanced back at Rosie, and stuck a finger into his half-open mouth, miming a retch. Rosie hadn’t seen that one since high school, and it made her smile. The man in the vest smiled back.
“I could give you fifty for it,” he said.
“Interested?”
“No, thanks.” She picked up the ring, looked at it thoughtfully, then wrapped it in the unused Kleenex she was holding.
“You check any of the other shops along here,” he said.
“If anyone says they’ll give you more, I’ll match the best offer. That’s dad’s policy, and it’s a good one.” She dropped the Kleenex into her purse and snapped it shut.
“Thanks, but I guess not,” she said.
“I’ll hang onto it.” She was aware that the man who’d been checking out the paperbacks-the one the jeweller had called Robbie-was now looking at her, and with an odd expression of concentration on his face, but Rosie decided she didn’t care. Let him look. It was a free country.
“The man who gave me that ring said it was worth as much as a brand-new car,” she said. “do you believe that?”
“Yes.” He replied with no hesitation, and she remembered his telling her she was in good company, that lots of ladies came in here and learned unpleasant truths about their treasures. She guessed this man, although still young, must already have heard a great many variations on the same basic theme.
“I suppose you do,” she said.
“Well then, you should understand why I want to keep the ring. If I ever start getting woozy about someone else-or even think I am-I can dig it out and look at it while I wait for the fever to pass.”
She was thinking of Pam Haverford, who had long, twisting scars on both forearms. In the summer of ’92 her husband had thrown her through a storm door while he was drunk. Pam had raised her arms to protect her face as she went through the glass, and the result had been sixty stitches in one arm and a hundred and five in the other. Yet she still almost melted with happiness if a construction worker or housepainter whistled at her legs when she walked by, and what did you call that? Endurance or stupidity? Resilience or amnesia? Rose had come to think of it as Haverford’s Syndrome, and only hoped that she herself could avoid it.
“Whatever you say, ma’am,” the jeweller replied.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, though. Myself, I think it’s why pawnshops have such a bad rep. We almost always get the job of telling people that things aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. Nobody likes that.”
“No,” she agreed.
“Nobody likes that, Mr-”
“Steiner,” he said.
“Bill Steiner. My dad’s Abe Steiner. Here’s our card.” He held one out, but she shook her head, smiling.
“I’d have no use for it. Have a nice day, Mr Steiner.” She started back toward the door, this time taking the third aisle because the elderly gentleman had advanced a few steps toward her with his briefcase in one hand and a few of the old paperbacks in the other. She wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to her, but she was very sure that she didn’t want to talk to him. All she wanted right now was to make a quick exit from Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn; to climb aboard a bus and get busy forgetting she had ever been here. She was only vaguely aware that she was passing through an area of the pawnshop where clusters of small statuary and pictures, both framed and unframed, had been gathered together on the dusty shelves. Her head was up, but she was looking at nothing; she was not in the mood to appreciate art, fine or otherwise. So her sudden, almost skidding stop was all the more remarkable. It was as if she never saw the picture at all, at least on that first occasion. It was as if the picture saw her.
Its powerful attraction was without precedent in her life, but this did not strike Rosie as extraordinary-she had been living an unprecedented life for over a month now. Nor did that attraction strike her (at first, anyway) as abnormal. The reason for this was simple: after fourteen years of marriage to Norman Daniels, years when she had been all but cut off from the rest of the world, she had no tools for judging the normal from the abnormal. Her yardstick for measuring how the world behaved in given situations mostly consisted of TV dramas and the occasional movie he had taken her to (Norman Daniels would go see anything starring Glint Eastwood). Within the framework provided by those media, her reaction to the picture seemed almost normal. In the movies and on TV, people were always getting swept off their feet. And really, none of that mattered. What did was how the picture called to her, making her forget what she had just found out about her ring, making her forget that she wanted to get away from the pawnshop, making her forget how glad her sore feet were going to be when she saw the Blue Line bus pulling up in front of the Hot Pot, making her forget everything. She only thought: Look at that! Isn’t that the most wonderful picture! It was an oil painting in a wooden frame, about three feet long and two feet high, leaning against a stopped clock on the left end and a small naked cherub on the right end. There were pictures all around it (an old tinted photograph of St Paul’s Cathedral, a watercolor of fruit in a bowl, gondolas at dawn on the Grand Canal, a hunting print which showed a pack of the unspeakable chasing a pair of the uneatable across a misty English moor), but she hardly gave them a glance. It was the picture of the woman on the hill she was interested in, and only that. In both subject and execution it was not much different from pictures moldering away in pawnshops, curio shops, and roadside bargain barns all over the country (all over the world, for that matter), but it filled her eyes and her mind with the sort of clean, revelatory excitement that belongs only to the works of art that deeply move us-the song that made us cry, the story that made us see the world clearly from another’s perspective, at least for awhile, the poem that made us glad to be alive, the dance that made us forget for a few minutes that someday we will not be. Her emotional reaction was so sudden, so hot, and so completely without connection to her real, practical life that at first her mind simply floundered, with no idea at all of how to cope with this unexpected burst of fireworks. For that moment or two she was like a transmission that has suddenly popped out of gear and into neutral-although the engine was revving like crazy, nothing was happening. Then the clutch engaged and the transmission slipped smoothly back into place. It’s what I want for my new place, that’s why I’m excited, she thought. It’s exactly what I want to make it mine. She seized on this thought eagerly and gratefully. It would only be a single room, true enough, but she had been promised it would be a large room, with a little kitchen alcove and an attached bathroom. In any case it would be the first place in her whole life that was hers and hers alone. That made it important, and that made the things she chose for it important, too… and the first would be the most important of all, because it would set the tone for everything that followed. Yes. No matter how nice it might be, the room would be a place where dozens of single, low- income people had lived before her and more dozens would live after her. But it was going to be an important place, all the same. These last five weeks had been an interim period, a hiatus between the old life and the new. When she moved into the room she had been promised, her new life-her single life-would really begin… and this picture, one Norman had never seen and passed judgement on, one that was just hers, could be the symbol of that new life. This was how her mind-sane, reasonable, and quite unprepared to admit or even recognize anything which smacked of the supernatural or paranormal-simultaneously explained, rationalized, and justified her sudden spike reaction to the picture of the woman on the hill.
It was the only painting in the aisle that was covered with glass (Rosie had an idea that oil paintings usually weren’t glassed in, maybe because they had to breathe, or something), and there was a small yellow sticker in the lower lefthand corner. $75 OR? it said. She reached out with hands that trembled slightly and took hold of the frame’s sides. She lifted the picture carefully off the shelf and carried it back up the aisle. The old man with the battered briefcase was still there, and still watching her, but Rosie hardly saw him. She went directly to the counter and put the picture carefully down in front of Bill Steiner.
“Found something you fancy?” he asked her.
“Yes.” She tapped the price-sticker in the corner of the frame. “seventy-five dollars or question-mark, it says. You told me you could give me fifty for my engagement ring. Would you be willing to trade, even-Steven? My ring for this picture?” Steiner walked down his side of the counter, flipped up the pass-through at the end, and came around to Rosie’s side. He looked at the picture as carefully as he had looked at her ring… but this time he looked with a certain amusement.
“I don’t remember this. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before. Must be something the old man picked up. He’s the art-lover of the family; I’m just a glorified Mr Fixit.” ’does that mean you can’t-” “dicker? Bite your tongue! I’ll dicker until the cows come home, if you let me. But this time I don’t have to. I’m happy to do it your way-even swapsies. Then I don’t have to watch you walk out of here with your face practically dragging on the floor.” And here was another first; before she knew what she was doing, Rosie had wrapped her arms around Bill Steiner’s neck and given him a brief, enthusiastic hug.
“Thank you!” she cried.
“Thanks so much!” Steiner laughed.
“Oh boy, you’re welcome,” he said.
“I think that’s the first time I’ve ever been hugged by a customer in these hallowed halls. See any other pictures you really want, lady?” The old fellow in the topcoat-the one Steiner had called Robbie-walked over to look at the picture.
“Considering what most pawnshop patrons are like, that’s probably a blessing,” he said. Bill Steiner nodded.
“You have a point.” She barely heard them. She was rooting through her bag, hunting for the twist of Kleenex with the ring in it. Finding it took her longer than it needed to, because her eyes kept wandering back to the picture on the counter. Her picture. For the first time she thought of the room she would be going to with real impatience. Her own place, not just one camp-bed among many. Her own place, and her own picture to hang on the wall. It’s the first thing I’ll do, she thought as her fingers closed over the bundle of tissue. The very first. She unwrapped the ring and held it out to Steiner, but he ignored it for the time being; he was studying the picture.
“It’s an original oil, not a print,” he said, “and I don’t think it’s very good. Probably that’s why it’s covered with glass-somebody’s idea of dolling it up. What’s that building at the bottom of the hill supposed to be? A burned-out plantation-house?”
“I believe it’s supposed to be the ruins of a temple,” the old guy with the mangy briefcase said quietly.
“A Greek temple, perhaps. Although it’s difficult to say, isn’t it?” It was difficult to say, because the building in question was buried almost to the roof in underbrush. Vines were growing up the five
