Rose Madder

IV. THE MANTA RAY

Norman left his hometown on Sunday, the day before Rosie was scheduled to start her new job… the job she was still not entirely sure she could do. He left on the 11:05 Continental Express bus. This wasn’t a matter of economy; it was a matter-a vital matter-of slipping back inside Rose’s head. Norman was still not able to admit how badly her totally unexpected flight had rocked him. He tried to tell himself he was upset because of the bank card-only that and nothing more-but his heart knew better. It was about how he’d never had a clue. Not so much as a premonition. There had been a long time in their marriage when he had known her every waking thought and most of her dreams. The fact that that had changed was driving him nuts. His biggest fear-unacknowledged but not entirely hidden from the deeper run of his thoughts-was that she had been planning her escape for weeks, months, possibly even a year. If he had known the truth of how and why she had left (if he had known about the single drop of blood, in other words), he would perhaps have been comforted. Or perhaps he would have been more unsettled than ever. Regardless, he realized that his first impulse-to take off his husband’s hat and put on his detective’s hat-had been a bad idea. In the wake of Oliver Robbins’s phone-call, he had realized that he needed to take off both of his hats and put on one of hers. He would have to think like her, and riding the bus she had ridden was a way of starting to do that. He climbed up the bus steps with his overnight bag in his hand and stood by the driver’s seat, looking down the aisle.

“You want to move it, buddy?” a man asked from behind him.

“You want to find out how getting your nose broken feels?” Norman replied without missing a beat. The guy behind him didn’t have anything to say to that. He took a moment or two longer, deciding which seat (she) he wanted, then made his way down the aisle to it. She wouldn’t have gone all the way to the back of the bus; his fastidious Rose would never have taken a seat near the toilet cubicle unless all the other seats were full, and Norman’s good friend Oliver Robbins (from whom he had bought his ticket, just as she had) had assured him that the 11:05 was hardly ever full. Nor would she want to sit over the wheels (too bumpy) or too close to the front (too conspicuous). Nope, just about halfway down would suit her, and on the left side of the bus, because she was left-handed, and people who thought they were choosing at random were in many cases simply going in the direction of their dominant hands. In his years as a cop, Norman had come to believe that telepathy was perfectly possible, but it was hard work… impossible work, if you were wearing the wrong hat. You had to find your way into the head of the person you were after like some kind of tiny burrowing animal, and you had to keep listening for something that wasn’t a beat but a brainwave: not a thought, precisely, but a way of thinking. And when you finally had that, you could take a shortcut-you could go racing across the curve of your quarry’s thoughts and some night, when he or she least expected it, there you’d be, stepping out from behind the door… or lying under the bed with a knife in your hand, ready to ram it upward through the mattress the moment the springs squeaked and the poor sap (sapette, in this case) lay down.

“When you least expect it,” Norman murmured as he sat in what he hoped had been her seat. He liked the sound of it and so he said it again as the bus backed out of its slot, ready to head west:

“When you least expect it.” It was a long trip, but he rather enjoyed it. Twice he got off to use the toilet at rest-stops when he didn’t really need to go because he knew she would have needed to go, and she wouldn’t have wanted to use the bus toilet. Rose was fastidious but Rose also had weak kidneys. Probably a little genetic gift from her late mother, who had always looked to Norman like the sort of bitch who couldn’t trot past a lilac bush without a pause to squat and piddle. At the second of these rest-stops he saw half a dozen people clustered around a butt-can at one corner of the building. He watched longingly for a moment, then went past them and inside. He was dying for a smoke, but Rose wouldn’t have been; she didn’t have the habit. Instead he paused to handle a number of fuzzy stuffed animals because Rose liked crap like that, and then purchased a paperback mystery from the rack by the door because she sometimes read that shit. He had told her a billion times that real police work was nothing like the crap in those books, and she always agreed with him-if he said it, it must be true-but she went on reading them just the same. He wouldn’t have been too surprised to learn that Rosie had turned this same rack, had picked a book from it… and then put it reluctantly back again, not wanting to spend five dollars on three hours” entertainment when she had so little money and so many unanswered questions. He ate a salad, forcing himself to read the book as he did, and then went back to his seat on the bus. In a little while they were off again, Norman sitting still with his book in his lap, watching the fields open out more and more as the East gave up its hold. He turned his watch back when the driver announced it was time to do so, not because he gave a shit about timezones (he was on his own clock for the next thirty days or so) but because that was what Rose would have done. He picked the book up, read about a vicar finding a body in a garden, and put it down again, bored. Yet that was only on the surface. Deeper down, he wasn’t bored at all. Deeper down he felt strangely like Goldilocks in the old kids” story. He was sitting in Baby Bear’s chair, he had Baby Bear’s book in his lap, and he was going to find Baby Bear’s little housie. Before long, if all went well, he would be hiding underneath Baby Bear’s little beddie.

“When you least expect it,” he said.

“When you least expect it.” He got off the bus in the early hours of the following morning and stood just inside the door from the loading-gate, surveying the echoing, high-ceilinged terminal, trying to put aside his cop’s assessment of the pimps and the whores, the buttboys and the beggars, trying to see it as she must have seen it, getting off this same bus and walking into this same terminal and seeing it at this same hour, when human nature is always at low tide. He stood there and let this echoing world flood in on him: its look and smell and taste and feel. Who am I? he asked himself. Rose Daniels, he answered. How do I feel? Small. Lost. And terrified. That’s the bottom line, right there. I’m utterly terrified. For a moment he was overwhelmed by an awful idea: what if, in her fear and panic, Rose had approached the wrong person? It was certainly possible; for a certain type of bad guy, places like this were feeding-pools. What if that wrong person had led her off into the dark, then robbed and murdered her? It was no good telling himself it was unlikely; he was a cop and knew it wasn’t. If a crackhead saw that stupid gumball-machine ring of hers, for instance-He took several deep breaths, regrouping, refocusing the part of his mind that was trying to be Rose. What else was there to do? If she’d been murdered, she’d been murdered. There was nothing he could do about it, so it was best not to think of it… and besides, he couldn’t bear the thought that she might have escaped him that way, that some coked-up boogie might have taken what belonged to Norman Daniels. Never mind, he told himself. Never mind, just do your job. And right now your job is to walk like Rosie, talk like Rosie, think like Rosie. He moved slowly out into the terminal, holding his wallet in one hand (it was his substitute for her bag), looking at the people who rushed past in riptides, some dragging suitcases, some balancing string-tied cardboard boxes on their shoulders, some with their arms around the shoulders of their girlfriends or the waists of their boyfriends. As he watched, a man sprinted toward a woman and a little boy who had just gotten off Norman’s bus. The man kissed the woman, then seized the little boy and tossed him high into the air. The little boy shrieked with fear and delight. I’m scared-everything’s new, everything’s different, and I’m scared to death, Norman told himself. Is there anything I feel sure about? Anything I feel I can trust? Anything at all? He walked across the wide tile floor, but slowly, slowly, listening to his feet echo and trying to look at everything through Rose’s eyes, trying to feel everything through her skin. A quick peek at the glassy-eyed kids (with some it was just three-in-the-morning tiredness; with some it was Nebraska Red) in the video alcove, then back into the terminal itself. She looks at the bank of pay phones, but who is she going to call? She has no friends, she has no family-not even the providential old aunt in the Texas Panhandle or the mountains of Tennessee. She looks at the doors to the street, perhaps thinking of leaving, of finding a room for the night, a door to put between her and the whole wide confusing indifferent dangerous world-she has money enough for a room, thanks to his ATM card-but does she do it? Norman stopped by the foot of the escalator, frowning, changing the shape of the question: Do I do it? No, he decided, I don’t. I don’t want to check into a motel at three-thirty and be kicked out at noon, for one thing; it’s bad value for my money. I can stay up a little longer, run on my nerves a little longer, if I have to. But there’s something else keeping me here, as well: I’m in a strange city, and dawn is still at least two hours away. I’ve seen a lot of TV crime-shows, I’ve read a lot of paperback mysteries, and I’m married to a cop. I know what can happen to a woman who goes out into the darkness by herself, and I think I’ll wait for sunrise. So what do I do? How do I pass the time? His stomach answered the question for him, rumbling. Yes, I have something to eat. The last rest-stop was at six in the evening, and I’m pretty hungry. There was a cafeteria not far from the ticket-windows and Norman went that way, stepping over the bag-bums and restraining the urge to kick a few ugly, lice-ridden heads into the nearest steel chair-leg. This was an urge he had to restrain more and more often these days. He hated homeless people; thought of them as dog turds with legs. He hated their whining excuses and their inept pretenses at insanity. When one who was only semi-comatose stumbled over to him and asked if he had any spare change, Norman was barely able to resist an impulse to grab the bum’s arm and heat him up with an old-fashioned Indian Burn. Instead he said, “Leave me alone, please,” in a soft voice, because that’s what she would have said and how she would have said it. He started to grab bacon and scrambled eggs from the steam-table, then remembered she didn’t eat that stuff unless he insisted, which he sometimes did (what she ate wasn’t important to him, but her not forgetting who was boss of the shooting match was important, very important). He ordered cold cereal instead, along with afoul cup of coffee and half a grapefruit that looked as if it might have come over on the Mayflower. The food made him feel better, more awake. When he was done he grabbed automatically for a cigarette, briefly touched the pack in his shirt pocket, then let his hand drop away. Rose didn’t smoke, therefore Rose wouldn’t be subject to the craving he now felt. After a moment or two of meditation on this subject, the craving retreated, as he had known it would. The first thing he saw as he came out of the cafeteria and stood there, tucking in the back of his shirt with the hand that wasn’t holding his wallet, was a large lighted blue-and-white circle with the words TRAVELERS AID printed on the outer stripe. Inside Norman’s head, a bright light suddenly went on. Do I go there? Do I go to the booth under that big, comforting sign? Do I see if there’s anything there for me? Of course I do-where else? He walked over there, but on a slant, first sliding past the booth and then hooking back toward it again, getting a good look at the booth’s occupant from both sides. He was a pencil-necked Jewboy who looked about fifty and about as dangerous as Bambi’s friend Thumper. He was reading a newspaper Norman recognized as Pravda, and every now and then he would raise his head from it and shoot a meaningless, random glance out into the terminal. If Norman had still been doing Rose, Thumper would undoubtedly have spotted him, but Norman was doing Norman again, Detective Inspector Daniels on stakeout, and that meant he blended into the scene. Mostly he kept moving back and forth in a gentle arc behind the booth (keeping in motion was the important part; in places like this you didn’t run much risk of being noticed unless you stood still), staying out of Thumper’s view but within earshot of Thumper’s conversations. Around quarter past four, a crying woman came up to the Travelers Aid booth. She told Thumper that she’d been on the Greyhound from New York City and someone had stolen her wallet out of her bag while she was sleeping. There was a lot of blah-de-blah, the woman used several of Thumper’s Kleenexes, and he ended up finding a hotel that would trust her for a couple of nights, until her husband could send her some more money.

If I was your husband, lady, I’d bring you the money myself, Norman thought, still describing his drifting little back-and-forth pendulum movement behind the booth. I’d also bring you a swift kick in the ass for doing such a dumbass thing in the first place. In the course of his telephone conversation with the hotel, Thumper gave his name as Peter Slowik. It was enough for Norman. As the Jewboy began talking with the woman again, giving her directions, Norman quit the vicinity of the booth and returned to the pay phones, where there were actually two telephone books which hadn’t yet been torched, torn to pieces, or carried away. He could get the information he needed later in the day, by calling his own police department, but he preferred not to do it that way. Depending on how things went with the Pravda-reading Jewboy, calling people could be dangerous, the kind of thing that might come back to haunt a person later. And it turned out not to be necessary. There were just three Slowiks and one Slowick in the city directory. Only one of them was a Peter. Daniels jotted down Thumperstein’s address, left the station, and walked over to the cab-stand. The guy in the lead cab was white-a break-and Norman asked him if there was a hotel left in this city where a person could get a room for cash and not have to listen to the cockroach races once the lights were off. The driver thought it over, then nodded.

“The Whitestone. Good, cheap, cash accepted, no questions.” Norman opened the back door of the cab and got in.

“Let’s do it,” he said.

Robbie Lefferts was there, just as he’d promised, when Rosie followed the gorgeous redhead with the long fashion-model legs into Studio C of Tape Engine on Monday morning, and he was as nice to her as he had been on the streetcorner, when he’d persuaded her to read aloud from one of the paperbacks he had just bought. Rhoda Simons, the fortyish woman who was to be her director, was also nice to her, but… director! Such a strange word to think of in connection with Rosie McClendon, who hadn’t even tried out for her senior class play. Curtis Hamilton, the recording engineer, was also nice, although he was at first too busy with his controls to do more than give her hand a quick, abstracted shake. Rosie joined Robbie and Ms Simons for a cup of coffee before setting sail (which was how Robbie put it), and she was able to manage her cup normally, without spilling a single drop. Yet when she stepped through the double doors and into the small glass-sided recording booth, she was seized with an attack of such overwhelming panic that she almost dropped the sheaf of Xeroxed pages which Rhoda called “the sides.” She felt much as she had when she had seen the red car coming up Westmoreland Street toward her and thought it was Norman’s Sentra. She saw them staring at her from the other side of the glass-even serious young Curtis Hamilton was looking at her now-and their faces looked distorted and wavery, as if she were seeing them through water instead of air. This is the way goldfish see people who bend down to look in through the side of the tank, she thought, and on the heels of that: I can’t do this. What in the name of God ever made me think I could? There was a loud click that made her jump.

“Ms McClendon?” It was the recording engineer’s voice.

“Could you sit down in front of the mike so I can get a level?” She wasn’t sure she could. She wasn’t sure she could even move. She was rooted to the spot, looking across the room to where the head of the mike was pointing at her like the head of some dangerous, futuristic snake. Even if she did manage to cross the room, nothing would come out of her mouth once she sat down, not so much as a single dry squeak. In that moment Rosie saw the collapse of everything she had built up-it flashed past her mind’s eye with the nightmarish speed of an old Keystone Kops short. She saw herself turned out of the pleasant little room she’d lived in for only four days when her small supply of cash ran out, saw herself getting the cold shoulder from everyone at Daughters and Sisters, even Anna herself. I can’t very well give you your old place back, can I? she heard Anna say inside her head. There are always new girls here at D and S, as you know very well, and they have to be my first priority. Why were you so foolish, Rosie? What ever made you think you could be a performance artist, even at such a humble level as this? She saw herself being turned away from the waitress jobs in the downtown coffee shops, not because of how she looked but because of how she smelled-of defeat, shame, and lost expectations.

“Rosie?” That was Rob Lefferts.

“Would you sit down so Curt can get a level?” He didn’t know, neither of the men knew, but Rhoda Simons did… or suspected, at least. She had taken the pencil which had been sticking out of her hair and was doodling on a pad in front of her. She wasn’t looking at what she was doodling, though; she was looking at Rosie, and her eyebrows were drawn together in a frown. Suddenly, like a drowning woman flailing for any piece of floating detritus which might support her for a little while longer, Rosie found herself thinking of her picture. She had hung it exactly where Anna had suggested, beside the window in the living-room area-there had even been a picture-hook there, left over from a previous tenant. It was the perfect place, especially in the evening; you could look out the window for awhile, at the sun going down over the forested greeny-black of Bryant Park, then back at the picture, then out at the park again. The two things seemed perfect together, the window and the picture, the picture and the window. She didn’t know why it was so, but it was. If she lost the room, though, the picture would have to come down… No, it’s got to stay there, she thought. It’s supposed to stay there! That got her moving, at least. She walked slowly across to the table, put her sides (they were photo-enlargements of the pages of a paperback novel published in 1951) in front of her, and sat down. Except it felt more like falling down, as if her knees were locked in position by pins and someone had just pulled them. You can do this, Rosie, the deep voice assured her, but its authority now sounded false. You did it on the streetcorner outside the pawnshop, and you can do it here. She wasn’t terribly surprised to find herself unconvinced. What did surprise her was the thought which followed: The woman in the picture wouldn’t be afraid of this; the woman in the rose madder chiton wouldn’t be afraid of this piddle at all. The idea was ridiculous, of course; if the woman in the picture were real, she would have existed in an ancient world where comets were considered harbingers of doom, gods were thought to dally on the tops of mountains, and most folks lived and died without ever seeing a book. If a woman from that time were transported into a room like this, a room with glass walls and cold lights and a steel snake’s head poking out of the only table, she would either run screaming for the door or faint dead away. Except Rosie had an idea that the blonde woman in the rose madder chiton had never fainted dead away in her entire life, and it would take a lot more than a recording studio to make her scream. You’re thinking about her as if she’s real, the deep voice said. It sounded nervous. Are you sure that’s wise? If it gets me through this, you bet, she thought back at it.

“Rosie?” It was Rhoda Simons’s voice coming through the speakers.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said, and was relieved to find that her voice was still there, only a little croaky.

“I’m thirsty, that’s all. And scared to death.”

“There’s a cooler filled with Evian water and fruit juices under the left side of the table,” Rhoda said.

“As for being afraid, that’s natural. And it will pass.”

“Give me a little more, Rosie,” Curtis invited. He had a pair of earphones on now, and was tweaking a row of dials. The panic was passing, thanks to the woman in the rose madder gown. As a calmative, thinking of her even beat fifteen minutes of rocking in Pooh’s Chair. No, it’s not her, it’s you, the deep voice told her. You’re on top of it, kiddo, at least for the time being, but you did it yourself. And would you do me a favor, no matter how the rest of this turns out? Try to keep remembering who’s really Rosie around here, and who’s Rosie Real.

“Talk about anything,” Curtis was telling her.

“It doesn’t matter what.” For a moment she was utterly at a loss. Her eyes dropped to the sides in front of her. The first was a cover reproduction. It showed a scantily clad woman being menaced by a hulking, unshaven man with a knife. The man had a moustache, and a thought almost too fleeting to be recognizable (wanna get it on wanna do the dog) brushed past her consciousness like a breath of bad air.

“I’m going to read a book called The Manta Ray,” she said in what she hoped was a normal speaking voice.

“It was published in 1951 by Lion Books, a little paperback company. Although it says on the cover that the author’s name is… have you got enough?”

“I’m fine on the reel-to-reel,” Curtis said, foot-powering himself from one end of his board to the other in his wheeled chair.

“Just give me a little more for the DAT. But you’re sounding good.”

“Yes, wonderful,” Rhoda said, and Rosie didn’t think she was imagining the relief in the director’s voice. Feeling encouraged, Rosie addressed the mike again.

“It says on the cover that the book was written by Richard Racine, but Mr Lefferts-Rob-says it was actually written by a woman named Christina Bell. It’s part of an unabridged audio series called

“Women in Disguise,” and I got this job because the woman who was supposed to read the Christina Bell novels got a part in a-”

“I’m fine,” Curtis Hamilton said.

“My God, she sounds like Liz Taylor in Butterfield 8,” Rhoda Simons said, and actually clapped her hands. Robbie nodded. He was grinning, obviously delighted.

“Rhoda will help you along, but if you do it just like you did Dark Passage for me outside the Liberty City, we’re all going to be very happy.” Rosie leaned over, just avoided whamming her head on the side of the table, and got a bottle of Evian water from the cooler. When she twisted the cap, she saw that her hands were shaking.

“I’ll do my best. I promise you that.”

“I know you will,” he said. Think of the woman on the hill, Rosie told herself. Think of how she’s standing there right now, not afraid of anything coming toward her in her world or coming up behind her from mine. She doesn’t have a single weapon, but she’s not afraid-you don’t need to see her face to know that, you can see it in the set of her back. She’s…”

… ready for anything,” Rosie murmured, and smiled. Robbie leaned forward on his side of the glass.

“Pardon? I didn’t get that.”

“I said I’m ready to go,” she said.

“Level’s good,” Curtis said, and turned to Rhoda, who had set out her own Xeroxed copy of the novel next to her pad of paper. “ready when you are, Professor.”

“Okay, Rosie, let’s show “em how it’s done,” Rhoda said.

“This is The Manta Ray, by Christina Bell. The client is Audio Concepts, the director is Rhoda Simons, and the reader is Rose McClendon. Tape is rolling. Take one on my mark, and… mark.” Oh God I can’t, Rosie thought once more, and then she narrowed her mind’s vision down to a single powerfully bright image: the gold circlet the woman in the picture wore on her upper right arm. As it came clear to her, this fresh cramp of panic also began to pass.

“Chapter One.

“Nella didn’t realize she was being followed by the man in the ragged gray topcoat until she was between streetlights and a garbage-strewn alley yawned open on her left like the jaws of an old man who has died with food in his mouth. By then it was too late. She heard the sound of shoes with steel taps on their heels closing in behind her, and a big, dirt-grimed hand shot out of the dark…”

Rosie pushed her key into the lock of her second-floor room on Trenton Street that evening at quarter past seven. She was tired and hot-summer had come early to the city this year-but she was also very happy. Curled in one arm was a little bag of groceries. Poking out of the top was a sheaf of yellow fliers, announcing the Daughters and Sisters Swing into Summer Picnic and Concert. Rosie had gone by D amp; S to tell them how her first day at work had gone (she was all but bursting with it), and as she was leaving, Robin St James had asked her if she would take a handful of fliers and try to place them with the storekeepers in her neighborhood. Rosie, trying hard not to show how thrilled she was just to have a neighborhood, agreed to get as many up as she could.

“You’re a lifesaver,” Robin said. She was in charge of ticket sales this year, and had made no secret of the fact that so far they weren’t going very well.

“And if anybody asks you, Rosie, tell them there are no teenage runaways here, and that we’re not dykes. Those stories’re half the problem with sales. Will you do that?” “sure,” Rosie had replied, knowing she’d do no such thing. She couldn’t imagine giving a storekeeper she had never met before a lecture on what Daughters and Sisters was all about… and what it wasn’t all about. But I can say they’re nice women, she thought, turning on the fan in the corner and then opening the fridge to put away her few things. Then, out loud:

“No, I’ll say ladies. Nice ladies.” Sure, that was probably a better idea. Men-especially those past forty-for some reason felt more comfortable with that word than they did with women. It was silly (and the way some women fussed and clucked over the semantics was even sillier, in Rose’s opinion), but thinking about it called up a sudden memory: how Norman talked about the prostitutes he sometimes busted. He never called them ladies (that was the word he used when talking about the wives of his colleagues, as in

“Bill Jessup’s wife’s a real nice lady'); he never called them women, either. He called them the gals. The gals this and the gals that. She had never realized until this moment how much she had hated that hard little back-of-the-throat word. Gals. Like a sound you might make when you were trying hard not to vomit. Forget him, Rosie, he’s not here. He’s not going to be here. As always, this simple thought filled her with joy, amazement, and gratitude. She had been told-mostly in the Therapy Circle at D amp; S-that these euphoric feelings would pass, but she found that hard to believe. She was on her own. She had escaped the monster. She was free. Rosie closed the refrigerator door, turned around, and looked across her room. The furnishings were minimal and the decorations-except for her picture-were nonexistent, but she still saw nothing which did not make her want to crow with delight. There were pretty cream-colored walls that Norman Daniels had never seen, there was a chair from which Norman Daniels had never pushed her for “being smart,” there was a TV Norman Daniels had never watched, sneering at the news or laughing along with reruns of All in the Family and Cheers. Best of all, there was not a single corner where she’d sat crying and reminding herself to vomit into her apron if she got sick to her stomach. Because he wasn’t here. He wasn’t going to be here.

“I’m on my own,” Rosie murmured… and then actually hugged herself with joy. 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 slighdy 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 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 Glint, 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 traveling 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.”

While Rosie was marketing, Norman Daniels was lying on a White-stone 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 packs 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 a 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 smoker’s 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’s 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 you 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 first 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 when 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 shoofiies 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 comer 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-that was 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-remembered how 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. He had been watching the signs march past and judged that he should be approaching Carolina Street now. He got to his feet, walked to the front of the bus, and stood there holding the pole. When the bus pulled up at the corner and the doors flapped open, he walked down the steps and slipped into the darkness without saying a word. He’d bought a city street-map in the hotel newsstand, six dollars and fifty cents, outrageous, but the cost of asking directions could be even higher. People had a way of remembering the people who asked them directions; sometimes they remembered even five years later, amazing but true. So it was better not to ask. In case something happened. Something bad. Probably nothing would, but TCB and CYA were always the best rules to live by. According to his map, Carolina Street connected with Beaudry Place about four blocks west of the bus stop. A nice little walk on a warm evening. Beaudry Place was where the Travelers Aid jewboy lived. Daniels walked slowly, really just sauntering, with his hands in his pockets. His expression was bemused and slightly dopey, giving no clue that all his senses were on yellow alert. He catalogued each passing car, each passing pedestrian, looking especially for anyone who appeared to be looking especially at him. To be seeing him. There was no one, and that was good. When he reached Thumper’s house-and that’s what it was, a house, not an apartment, another break-he walked past it twice, observing the car in the driveway and the light in the lower front window. Living-room window. The drapes were open but the sheers were drawn. Through them he could see a soft colored blur that had to be the television. Thumper was up, Thumper was home, Thumper was watching a little tube and maybe munching a carrot or two before heading down to the bus station, where he would try to help more women too stupid to deserve help. Or too bad. Thumper hadn’t been wearing a wedding ring and had the look of a closet queer to Norman anyway, but better safe than sorry. He drifted up the driveway and peeked into Thumper’s four- or five-year-old Ford, looking for anything that would suggest the man didn’t live alone. He saw nothing that set off any warning bells. Satisfied, he looked up and down the residential street again and saw no one. You don’t have a mask, he thought. You don’t even have a nylon stocking you can pull over your face, Normie, do you? No, he didn’t. You forgot, didn’t you? Well… actually, no. He hadn’t. He had an idea that when the sun came up tomorrow, there was going to be one less urban Jewboy in the world. Because sometimes bad stuff happened even in nice residential neighborhoods like this. Sometimes people broke in-jigs and junkies for the most part, of course-and there went the old ballgame. Tough but true. Shit happens, as the tee-shirts and bumperstickers said. And sometimes, hard as it was to believe, shit happened to the right people instead of the wrong ones. Pravda-reading Jewboys who helped wives get away from husbands, for instance. You couldn’t just put up with stuff like that; it was no way to run a society. If everyone acted like that, there wouldn’t even be a society. It was pretty much rampant behavior, though, because most of the bleeding hearts got away with it. Most of the bleeding hearts hadn’t made the mistake of helping his wife, however… and this man had. Norman knew that as well as he knew his own name. This man had helped her. He mounted the steps, took one more quick look around, and rang the doorbell. He waited, then rang again. Now his ears, already attuned to catch the slightest noise, picked up the sound of approaching feet, not clack-clack-clack but hish-hish-hish, Thumper in his stocking feet, how cozy.

“Coming, coming,” Thumper called. The door opened. Thumper looked out at him, big eyes swimming behind his hornrimmed glasses.

“Can I help you?” he asked. His outer shirt was unbuttoned and untucked, hanging over a strap-style tee-shirt, the same style of tee-shirt Norman himself wore, and suddenly it was too much, suddenly it was the last straw, the one that fractured the old dromedary’s spinal column, and he was insane with rage. That a man like this should wear an undershirt like his! A white man’s undershirt!

“I think you can,” Norman said, and something in his face or his voice-perhaps it was both-must have alarmed Slowik, because his brown eyes widened and he started to draw back, his hand going to the door, probably meaning to slam it in Norman’s face. If so, he was too late. Norman moved fast, seizing the sides of Slowik’s outer shirt and driving him back into the house. Norman raised one foot and kicked the door shut behind him, feeling as graceful as Gene Kelly in an MGM musical.

“Yeah, I think so,” he said again.

“I hope for your sake you can. I’m going to ask you some questions, Thumper, good questions, and you better pray to your bignose Jewboy God that you’re able to come up with some good answers.”

“Get out of here!” Slowik cried.

“Or I’ll call the police!” Norman Daniels had a good chuckle at that, and then he whirled Slowik around, twisting Slowik’s left fist up until it touched his scrawny right shoulderblade. Slowik began to scream. Norman reached between his legs and cupped his testicles. “stop,” he said. “stop it right now or I’ll pop your balls like grapes. You’ll hear them go.” Thumper stopped. He was gasping and letting out an occasional choked whimper, but Norman could live with that. He herded Thumper back into the living room, where he used the remote control he found sitting on an endtable to turn up the television. He frogmarched his new pal into the kitchen and let go of him. “stand against the refrigerator,” he said.

“I want to see your ass and shoulderblades squashed right up against that baby, and if you move so much as an inch away from it, I’ll rip your lips off. Got it?”

“Y-Y-Yes,” Thumper said.

“Who-Who-Who are you?” He still looked like Bambi’s friend Thumper, but now he was starting to sound like Woodsy Fucking Owl.

“Irving R. Levine, NEC News,” Norman said.

“This is how I spend my day off.” He began pulling open the drawers along the counter, keeping an eye on Thumper as he did so. He didn’t think old Thump was going to run, but he might. Once people got beyond a certain level of fright, they became as unpredictable as tornadoes.

“What… I don’t know what-”

“You don’t have to know what,” Norman said.

“That’s the beauty of this, Thump. You don’t have to know a goddam thing except the answers to a few very simple questions. Everything else can be left to me. I’m a professional. Think of me as one of the Good Hands People.” He found what he was looking for in the fifth and last drawer down the line: two oven gloves with flower patterns. How cute. Just what the well-dressed Jewboy would want to wear when taking his wittle kosher cassewoles out of his wittle kosher oven. Norman pulled them on, then went quickly back down the drawerpulls, rubbing out any prints he might have left. Then he marched Thumper back into the living room, where he picked up the remote control and wiped it briskly on the front of his shirt.

“We’re going to have us a little face-to-face here, Thumper,” Norman said as he did this. His throat had thickened; the voice which came out of it sounded barely human, even to its owner. Norman wasn’t very surprised to find he had a raging hardon. He tossed the remote control onto the sofa and turned to Slowik, who was standing there with his shoulders slumped and tears oozing out from beneath his thick hornrimmed glasses. Standing there in that white man’s undershirt. Tm going to talk to you up close. Right up close. Do you believe that? You better, Thump. You just fucking better.”

“Please,” Slowik moaned. He held his shaking hands out to Norman.

“Please don’t hurt me. You’ve got the wrong man-whoever you want it’s not me. I can’t help you.” But in the end, Slowik helped quite a bit. By then they were down cellar, because Norman had begun to bite, and not even the TV turned all the way to top volume would have completely stifled the man’s screams. But, screams or no screams, he helped quite a bit. When the festivities were over, Norman found the garbage bags under the kitchen sink. Into one of these he put the oven gloves and his own shirt, which could not now be worn in public. He would take the bag with him and get rid of it later. Upstairs, in Thumper’s bedroom, he found only one item of clothing that would come even dose to covering his own much broader upper body: a baggy, faded Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. Norman laid this on the bed, then went into Thumper’s bathroom and turned on Thumper’s shower. While he waited for the water to run hot, he looked in Thumper’s medicine cabinet, found a bottle of Advil, and took four. His teeth hurt and his jaws ached. The entire lower half of his face was covered with blood and hair and little tags of skin. He stepped into the shower and grabbed Thump’s bar of Irish Spring, reminding himself to dump that into the bag, too. He actually didn’t know how much good any of these precautions were going to be, because he had no idea how much forensic evidence he might have left downstairs in the basement. He had kind of grayed out there for awhile. As he washed his hair he began to sing:

“Raaamblin” Rose… Raamblin” Rose… where you raaamble… no one knows… wild and windblown… that’s how you’ve grown… who can cling to… a Ramblin” Rose?” He turned off the shower, stepped out, and looked at his own faint, ghostly image in the steamy minor over the sink.

“I can,” he said flatly.

“I can, that’s who.”

Bill Steiner was raising his free hand to knock yet again, mentally cursing his nervousness-he was a man who wasn’t ordinarily nervous about women-when she answered.

“Coming! I’m coming, just a second, be right there.” She didn’t sound pissed, thank God, so maybe he hadn’t rousted her out of the bathroom. What in hell am I doing here, anyway? he asked himself again as the footsteps approached the door. This is like a scene in some half-baked romantic comedy, the kind of thing not even Tom Hanks can do much with. That might be true, but it didn’t change the fact that the woman who had come into the shop last week had lodged firmly in his mind. And, rather than fading as the days went by, her effect on him seemed to be cumulative. Two things were certain: this was the first time in his life he’d ever brought flowers to a woman he didn’t know, and he hadn’t felt this nervous about asking for a date since he’d been sixteen years old. As the footsteps reached the other side of the door, Bill saw that one of the big daisies was on the verge of doing a header out of the bouquet. He made a hurried adjustment as the door opened, and when he looked up he saw the woman who’d traded her fake diamond ring for a piece of bad art standing there with murder in her eyes and a can of what looked like fruit cocktail raised over her head. She appeared frozen between her desire to make a pre-emptive strike and her mind’s struggling realization that this wasn’t the person she’d expected. It was, Bill thought later, one of the most exotic moments of his life. The two of them stood looking at each other across the doorjamb of Rosie’s second-floor room on Tremont Street, he with his bouquet of spring flowers from the shop two doors down on Hitchens Avenue, she with her two-pound can of fruit cocktail raised over her head, and although the pause could not have lasted more than two or three seconds, it seemed very long to him. It was certainly long enough for him to realize something that was distressing, dismaying, annoying, amazing, and rather wonderful. Seeing her did not change things, as he had rather expected it would; it made them worse, instead. She wasn’t beautiful, not the media version of beauty, anyhow, but she was beautiful to him. The look of her lips and the line of her jaw for some reason just about stopped his heart, and the catlike tilt of her bluish-gray eyes made him feel weak. His blood felt too high and his cheeks too hot. He knew perfectly well what these feelings signalled, and he resented them even as they made him captive. He held out the flowers to her, smiling hopefully but keeping tabs on the upraised can.

“Truce?” he said.

His invitation to go out to dinner with him followed so quickly on her realization that he wasn’t Norman that she was surprised into accepting. She supposed simple relief played a part, too. It wasn’t until she was in the passenger seat of his car that Practical-Sensible, who had been pretty much left in the dust, caught up and asked her what she was doing, going out with a man (a much younger man) she didn’t know, was she insane? There was real terror in these questions, but Rosie recognized the questions themselves for what they were-mere camouflage. The important question was so horrifying Practical-Sensible didn’t dare ask it, even from her place inside Rosie’s head. What if Norman catches you? That was the important question. What if Norman caught her eating dinner with another man? A younger, good-looking man? The fact that Norman was eight hundred miles east of here didn’t matter to Practical-Sensible, who really wasn’t Practical and Sensible at all, but only Frightened and Confused. Norman wasn’t the only issue, however. She hadn’t been alone with any man but her husband in her entire life as a woman, and right now her emotions were a gorgeous stew. Eat dinner with him? Oh, sure. Right. Her throat had narrowed down to a pinhole and her stomach was sudsing like a washing machine. If he had been wearing anything dressier than clean, faded jeans and an Oxford shirt, or if he’d given the faintest look of doubt to her own unpretentious skirt-and-sweater combination, she would have said no, and if the place he took her to had looked too difficult (it was the only word she could think of), she didn’t believe she would have been able even to get out of his Buick. But the restaurant looked welcoming rather than threatening, a brightly lighted storefront called Pop’s Kitchen, with paddle-fans overhead and red-and-white-checked tablecloths spread across butcherblock tables. According to the neon sign in the window, Pop’s Kitchen served Strictly Kansas City Beef. The waiters were all older gentlemen who wore black shoes and long aprons tied up under their armpits. To Rosie they looked like white dresses with Empire waists. The people eating at the tables looked like her and Bill-well, like Bill, anyway: middle-class, middle-income folks wearing informal clothes. To Rosie the restaurant felt cheerful and open, the kind of place where you could breathe. Maybe, but they don’t look like you, her mind whispered, and don’t you go thinking that they do, Rosie. They look confident, they look happy, and most of all they look like they belong here. You don’t and you never will. There were too many years with Norman, too many times when you sat in the corner vomiting into your apron. You’ve forgotten how people are, and what they talk about… if you ever knew to begin with. If you try to be like these people, if you even dream you can be like these people, you are going to earn yourself a broken heart. Was that true? It was terrifying to think it might be, because part of her was happy-happy that Bill Steiner had come to see her, happy that he had brought flowers, happy that he had asked her to dinner. She didn’t have the slightest idea how she felt about him, but that she had been asked out on a date… that made her feel young and full of magic. She couldn’t help it. Go on, feel happy, Norman said. He whispered the words into her ear as she and Bill stepped through the door of Pop’s Kitchen, words so close and so real that it was almost as if he were passing by. Enjoy it while you can, because later on he’s going to take you back out into the dark, and then he’s going to want to talk to you up close. Or maybe he won’t bother with the talking part. Maybe he’ll just drag you into the nearest alley and do you against the wall. No, she thought. Suddenly the bright lights inside the restaurant were too bright and she could hear everything, everything, even the big sloppy gasps of the overhead paddle-fans walloping the air. No, that’s a lie-he’s nice and that’s a lie! The answer was immediate and inexorable, the Gospel According to Norman: No one’s nice, sweetheart-how many times have I told you that? Down deep, everyone’s streetgrease. You, me, everyone.

“Rose?” Bill asked.

“You okay? You look pale.” No, she wasn’t okay. She knew the voice in her head was a lying voice, one which came from a part of her that was still blighted by Norman’s poison, but what she knew and what she felt were very different things. She couldn’t sit in the midst of all these people, that was all, smelling their soaps and colognes and shampoos, listening to the bright interweavings of their chatter. She couldn’t deal with the waiter who would come bending into her space with a list of specials, some perhaps in a foreign language. Most of all she couldn’t deal with Bill Steiner-talking to him, answering his questions, and all the time wondering how his hair would feel under her palm. She opened her mouth to tell him she wasn’t okay, that she felt sick to her stomach and he’d better take her home, perhaps another time. Then, as she had in the recording studio, she thought of the woman in the rose madder chiton, standing there on top of the overgrown hill with her hand upraised and one bare shoulder gleaming in the strange, cloudy light of that place. Standing there, completely unafraid, above a ruined temple that looked more haunted than any house Rosie had ever seen in her life. As she visualized the blonde hair in its plait, the gold armlet, and the barely glimpsed upswell of breast, the flutters in Rosie’s stomach quieted. I can get through this, she thought. I don’t know if I can actually eat, but surely I can find enough courage to sit down with him for awhile in this well-lighted place. And am I going to worry about him raping me later on? I think rape is the last thing on this man’s mind. That’s just one of Norman’s ideas-Norman, who believes no black man ever owned a portable radio that wasn’t stolen from a white man. The simple truth of this made her sag a little with relief, and she smiled at Bill. It was weak and a little trembly at the corners, but better than no smile at all.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“A tiny bit scared, that’s all. You’ll have to bear with me.”

“Not scared of me?” Damned right scared of you, Norman said from the place in her head where he lived like a vicious tumor.

“No, not exactly.” She raised her eyes to his face. It was an effort, and she could feel her cheeks flushing, but she managed.

“It’s just that you’re only the second guy I’ve ever gone out with in my whole life, and if this is a date, it’s the first real one I’ve been on since my high-school senior prom. That was back in 1980.”

“Holy God,” he said. He spoke softly, and without a trace of facetiousness.

“Now I’m getting a little scared.” The host-Rosie wasn’t sure if you called him a maitre d” or if that was someone else-came up and asked if they wanted smoking or non-smoking. “do you smoke?” Bill asked her, and Rosie quickly shook her head. “somewhere out of the mainstream would be great,” Bill said to the man in the tuxedo, and Rosie caught a gray-green flicker-she thought it was a five-dollar bill-passing from Bill’s hand to the host’s.

“A corner, maybe?”

“Certainly, sir.” He led them through the brightly lighted room and beneath the lazily turning paddle-fans. When they were seated, Rosie asked Bill how he had found her, although she supposed she already knew. What she was really curious about was why he had found her.

“It was Robbie Lefferts,” he said.

“Robbie comes in every few days to see if I’ve gotten any new paperbacks-well, old paperbacks, actually; you know what I mean-” She remembered David Goodis-It was a tough break, Parry was innocent-and smiled.

“I knew he hired you to read the Christina Bell novels, because he came in special to tell me. He was very excited.”

“Was he really?”

“He said you were the best voice he’d heard since Kathy Bates’s recording of Silence of the Lambs, and that means a lot-Robbie worships that recording, along with Robert Frost reading

“The Death of the Hired Man.” He’s got that on an old thirty-three-and-a-third Caedmon LP. It’s scratchy, but it’s amazing.” Rosie was silent. She felt overwhelmed. “so I asked him for your address. Well, that’s maybe a little too glossy. The ugly truth is I pestered him into it. Robbie’s one of those people who happens to be very vulnerable to pestering. And to do him full credit, Rosie…” But the rest drifted away from her. Rosie, she was thinking. He called me Rosie. I didn’t ask him to; he just did it.

“Would either of you folks care for a drink?” A waiter had appeared at Bill’s elbow. Elderly, dignified, handsome, he looked like a college literature professor. One with a penchant for Empire-waist dresses, Rosie thought, and felt like giggling.

“I’d like iced tea,” Bill said.

“How “bout you, Rosie?” And again. He did it again. How does he know I was never really a Rose, that I’ve always been really Rosie?

“That sounds fine.”

“Two iced teas, excellent,” the waiter said, and then recited a short list of specials. To Rosie’s relief, all were in English, and at the words London broil, she actually felt a thin thread of hunger.

“We’ll think it over, tell you in a minute,” Bill said. The waiter left, and Bill turned back to Rosie.

“Two other things in Robbie’s favor,” he said.

“He suggested I stop by the studio… you’re in the Corn Building, aren’t you?”

“Yes, Tape Engine is the name of the studio.”

“Uh-huh. Anyway, he suggested I stop by the studio, that all three of us could maybe go out for a drink after wrap one afternoon. Very protective, almost fatherly. When I told him I couldn’t do that, he made me absolutely promise that I’d call you first. And I tried, Rosie, but I couldn’t get your number from directory assistance. Are you unlisted?”

“I don’t actually have a phone yet,” she said, sidestepping a little. She was unlisted, of course; it had cost an extra thirty dollars, money she could ill afford, but she could afford even less to have her number pop up on a police computer back home. She knew from Norman’s bitching that the police couldn’t conduct random sweeps of unlisted phone numbers the way they could sweep the ones in the phone books. It was illegal, an invasion of the privacy people voluntarily gave up when they allowed the phone company to list their numbers. So the courts had ruled, and like most of the cops she had met during the course of her marriage, Norman had a virulent hatred for all courts and all their works.

“Why couldn’t you come by the studio? Were you out of town?” He picked up his napkin, unfolded it, and put it carefully down on his lap. When he looked up again she saw his face had changed somehow, but it took several moments more for her to grasp the obvious-he was blushing.

“Well, I guess I didn’t want to go out with you in a gang,” he said.

“You don’t really get to talk to a person that way. I just sort of wanted to… well… get to know you.”

“And here we are,” she said softly.

“Yes, that’s right. Here we are.”

“But why did you want to get to know me? To go out with me?” She paused for a moment, then said the rest.

“I mean, I’m sort of old for you, aren’t I?” He looked incredulous for a moment, then decided it was a joke and laughed.

“Yeah,” he said.

“How old are you, anyway, granny? Twenty-seven? Twenty-eight?” At first she thought he was making a joke-not a very good one, either-and then realized he was serious enough underneath the light tone. Not even trying to flatter her, only stating the obvious. What was obvious to him, anyway. The realization shocked her, and her thoughts went flying in all directions again. Only one came through with any sort of clarity: the changes in her life had not ended with finding a job and a place of her own to live; they had only begun. It was as if everything that had happened up to this point had just been a series of preshocks, and this was the onset of the actual quake. Not an earthquake but a lifequake, and suddenly she was hungry for it, and excited in a way she did not understand. Bill started to speak, and then the waiter came with their iced teas. Bill ordered a steak, and Rosie asked for the London broil. When the waiter asked her how she wanted it, she started to say medium-well-that was how she ate beef because that was how Norman ate beef-and then she took it back.

“Rare,” she said.

“Very.”

“Excellent!” the waiter said, speaking as if he really meant it, and as he walked away Rosie thought what a wonderful place a waiter’s Utopia would be-a place where every choice was excellent, very good, marvellous. When she looked back at Bill she saw his eyes still on her-those disquieting eyes with their dim green undertint. Sexy eyes.

“How bad was it?” he asked her.

“Your marriage?”

“What do you mean?” she asked awkwardly.

“You know what. I meet this woman in my dad’s Swap n Loan, I talk to her for maybe ten minutes, and the goddamnedest thing happens to me-I can’t forget her. This is something I’ve seen in the movies and occasionally read about in the kind of magazines you always find in the doctor’s waiting room, but I never really believed it. Now, boom, here it is. I see her face in the dark when I turn out the light. I think about her when I eat my lunch. I-” He paused, giving her a considering, worried look.

“I hope I’m not scaring you.” He was scaring her a lot, but at the same time she thought she had never heard anything so wonderful. She was hot all over (except for her feet, which were cold as ice), and she could still hear the fans churning the air overhead. There seemed to be a thousand of them at least, a battalion of fans.

“This lady comes in to sell me her engagement ring, which she thinks is a diamond… except way down deep, where she knows better. Then, when I find out where she lives and go to see her-with a bouquet in my hand and my heart in my mouth, you might say-she comes this far from braining me with a can of fruit cocktail.” He held up his right hand with the thumb and the forefinger half an inch apart. Rosie held her own hand up-the left-with the thumb and forefinger an inch apart.

“Actually, it was more like this,” she said.

“And I’m like Roger Clemens-I have excellent control.” He laughed hard at that. It was a good sound, honest and from the belly. After a moment, she joined him.

“In any case, the lady doesn’t exactly fire the missile, just makes this scary little downward twitch with it, then hides it behind her back like a kid with a copy of Playboy he stole out of his dad’s bureau drawer. She says, “Oh my God, I’m sorry,” and I wonder who the enemy is, since it’s not me. And then I wonder how ex the husband can be, when the lady came into my dad’s pawnshop with her rings still on. You know?”

“Yes,” she said.

“I suppose I do.”

“It’s important to me. If it seems like I’m being nosy, okay, probably I am, but… on very short notice I’m very taken with this woman, and I don’t want her to be very attached. On the other hand, I don’t want her to be so scared she has to go to the door with a jumbo-sized can of fruit cocktail in her hand every time someone knocks. Is any of this making any sense to you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“The husband is pretty ex.” And then, for no reason at all, she added:

“His name is Norman.” Bill nodded solemnly.

“I see why you left him.” Rosie began to giggle and clapped her hands to her mouth. Her face felt hotter than ever. At last she got it under control, but by then she had to wipe her eyes with the corner of her napkin.

“Okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I think so.”

“Want to tell me about it?” An image suddenly arose in her mind, one with all the clarity of something seen in a vivid nightmare. It was Norman’s old tennis racket, the Prince with the black tape wound around the handle. It was still hanging by the foot of the cellar stairs back home, as far as she knew. He had spanked her with it several times during the first years of their marriage. Then, about six months after her miscarriage, he had anally raped her with it. She had shared a lot of things about her marriage (that was what they called it, sharing, a word she found simultaneously hideous and apt) in Therapy Circle at D amp; S, but that was one little nugget she’d kept to herself-how it felt to have the taped handle of a Prince tennis racket jammed up your ass by a man who sat straddling you, with his knees on the outsides of your thighs; how it felt to have him lean over and tell you that if you fought, he would break the water-glass on the table beside the bed and cut your throat with it. How it felt to lie there, smelling the Dentyne on his breath and wondering how bad he was ripping you up.

“No,” she said, and was grateful that her voice didn’t tremble.

“I don’t want to talk about Norman. He was abusive and I left him. End of story.”

“Fair enough,” Bill said.

“And he’s out of your life for good?”

“For good.” “does he know that? I only ask because of, you know, the way you came to the door. You sure weren’t expecting a representative from the Church of Latter-Day Saints.”

“I don’t know if he knows it or not,” she said, after a moment or two to think it over-certainly it was a fair enough question.

“Are you afraid of him?”

“Oh, yes. You bet. But that doesn’t necessarily mean a lot. I’m afraid of everything. It’s all new to me. My friends at… my friends say I’ll grow out of it, but I don’t know.”

“You weren’t afraid to come out to dinner with me.”

“Oh yes I was. I was terrified.”

“Why did you, then?” She opened her mouth to say what she had been thinking earlier-that he had surprised her into it-and then closed it again. That was the truth, but it wasn’t the truth inside the truth, and this was an area where she didn’t want to do any sidestepping. She had no idea if the two of them had any sort of future beyond this one meal in Pop’s Kitchen, but if they did, fancy footwork would be a bad way to begin the trip.

“Because I wanted to,” she said. Her voice was low but clear.

“All right. No more about that.”

“And no more about Norman, either.”

“That’s his for-real no-fooling name?”

“Yes.”

“As in Bates.”

“As in Bates.”

“Can I ask you about something else, Rosie?” She smiled a little.

“As long as I don’t have to promise to answer.”

“Fair enough. You thought you were older than me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Yes, I did. How old are you, Bill?”

“Thirty. Which has got to make us something like next-door neighbors in the age sweepstakes… same street, anyway. But you made an almost automatic assumption that you weren’t just older, you were a lot older. So here comes the question. Are you ready?” Rosie shrugged uneasily. He leaned toward her, those eyes with their fascinating greenish undertint fixed on hers. “do you know you’re beautiful?” he asked.

“That’s not a come-on or a line, it’s plain old curiosity. Do you know you’re beautiful? You don’t, do you?” She opened her mouth. Nothing emerged but one tiny breath-noise from the back of her throat. It was closer to a whistle than a sigh. He put his hand over hers and squeezed it gently. His touch was brief, but it still lit up her nerves like an electric shock, and for a moment he was the only thing she could see-his hair, his mouth, and most of all his eyes. The rest of the world was gone, as if the two of them were on a stage where all the lights except for one bright, burning spot had been turned out. “don’t make fun of me,” she said. Her voice trembled.

“Please don’t make fun. I can’t stand it if you do.”

“No, I’d never do that.” He spoke absently, as if this were a subject beyond discussion, case closed.

“But I’ll tell you what I see.” He smiled and stretched out his hand to touch hers again.

“I’ll always tell you what I see. That’s a promise.”

She said he needn’t bother escorting her up the stairs, but he insisted and she was glad. Their conversation had passed on to less personal things when their meals came-he was delighted to find out the Roger Clemens reference hadn’t been a fluke, that she had a knowledgeable fan’s understanding of baseball, and they had talked a lot about the city’s teams as they ate, passing naturally enough from baseball to basketball. She’d hardly thought of Norman at all until the ride back, when she began imagining how she would feel if she opened the door of her room and there he was, Norman, sitting on her bed, drinking a cup of coffee, maybe, and contemplating her picture of the ruined temple and the woman on the hill. Then, as they mounted the narrow stairs, Rosie in the lead and Bill a step or two behind, she found something else to worry about: What if he wanted to kiss her goodnight? And what if, after a kiss, he asked if he could come in? Of course he’ll want to come in, Norman told her, speaking in the heavily patient voice he employed when he was trying not to be angry with her but was getting angry anyway. In fact, he’ll insist on it. Why else would he spring for a fifty-dollar meal? Jesus, you ought to be flattered-there are gals on the street prettier than you who don’t get fifty for half-and-half. He’ll want to come in and he’ll want to fuck you, and maybe that’s good-maybe that’s what you need to get your head out of the clouds. She was able to get her key out of her bag without dropping it, but the tip chattered all the way around the slot in the center of the metal disk without going in. He closed his hand over hers and guided it home. She felt that electric shock again when he touched her, and was helpless not to think of what the key sliding into the lock called to her mind. She opened the door. No Norman, unless he was hiding in the shower or the closet. Just her pleasant room with the cream-colored walls and the picture hanging by the window and the light on over the sink. Not home, not yet, but a little closer than the dorm at D amp; S.

“This is not bad, you know,” he said thoughtfully.

“No duplex in the suburbs, but not at all bad.”

“Would you like to come in?” she asked through lips that felt completely numb-it was as if someone had slipped her a shot of Novocaine.

“I could give you a cup of coffee…” Good! Norman exulted from his stronghold inside her head. Might as well get it over with, right, hon? You give him the coffee, and he’ll give you the cream. Such a deal! Bill appeared to think it over very carefully before shaking his head.

“It might not be such a good idea,” he said.

“Not tonight, at least. I don’t think you have the slightest idea of how you affect me.” He laughed a little nervously.

“I don’t think I have the slightest idea of how you affect me.” He looked over her shoulder and saw something that made him smile and offer her a pair of thumbs-up.

“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 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 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 shoofiies. 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 rotted 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 hanger-arounder, 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.

That slutty gal, he called her, Rose 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 corner 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 fulfil them as a father? The soft hum of the 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 smelted 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? Very distantly, she heard a rumble that could have been thunder. That was strange, too, because the sky had been clear when Bill brought her home-she had looked up and marvelled at how many stars she could see, even with all the orange hi-intensity streetlights. She drifted, sliding away, sliding into the last dreamless sleep she would have for some time, and her final thought before the darkness claimed her was How can I hear crickets or smell grass? The window’s not open; I closed it before I got into bed. Closed it and locked it.