“You were right about the picture-I never would have believed it at the time, but you were. I guess you must have had this place in mind, though, huh?” She shook her head, now smiling herself.
“When I bought the picture, I didn’t even know this room existed.”
“You must be psychic, then. I bet it looks especially good there where you’ve hung it in the late afternoon and early evening. The sun must sidelight it.”
“Yes, it’s nice then,” Rosie said, not adding that she thought the picture looked good-perfectly right and perfectly in place-at all times of the day.
“You’re not bored with it yet, I take it?”
“No, not at all.” She thought of adding, And it’s got some very funny tricks. Step over and take a closer look, why don’t you? Maybe you’ll see something even more surprising than a lady getting ready to brain you with a can of fruit cocktail. You tell me, Bill-has that picture somehow gone from ordinary screen size to Cinerama 70, or is that just my imagination? She said none of this, of course. Bill put his hands on her shoulders and she looked up at him solemnly, like a child being put to bed, as he leaned forward and kissed her forehead on the smooth place between her eyebrows.
“Thank you for coming out with me,” he said.
“Thank you for asking.” She felt a tear go sliding down her left cheek and wiped it away with her knuckle. She was not ashamed or afraid for him to see it; she felt she could trust him with at least one tear, and that was nice.
“Listen,” he said.
“I’ve got a motorcycle-an old butch Harley softail. It’s big and loud and sometimes it stalls at long red lights, but it’s comfortable… and I’m a remarkably safe cyclist, if I do say so myself. One of the six Harley owners in America who wears a helmet. If Saturday’s nice, I could come over and pick you up in the morning. There’s a place I know about thirty miles up the lake. Beautiful. It’s still too cold to swim, but we could bring a picnic.” At first she was incapable of any sort of answer-she was simply flattened by the fact that he was asking her out again. And then there was the idea of riding on his motorcycle… how would that be? For a moment all Rosie could think of was how it might feel to be behind him on two wheels cutting through space at fifty or sixty miles an hour. To have her arms around him. A totally unexpected heat rushed through her, something like a fever, and she did not recognize it for what it was, although she thought she remembered feeling something like it, a very long time ago.
“Rosie? What do you say?”
“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 tee-shirt 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 tee-shirts. 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 in 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. Rose 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 blinkers, 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.
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 there was this life. This room. This bed. And the sound of crickets. Rosie closed her eyes and drifted.
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 of1985. Nine years ago, give or take. Around eleven a.m. on that day, a jiggedy-jig had walked into the Payless store on the comer 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
