Rose Madder (44 page)

“I'm sorry,” h
e
said, trying to make his voice soft and conciliatory. “You were talking, weren't you? What did you say?”

“
I said thirty sounds about right to me. How's it sound to you?”

Norman took a folded-over packet of bills out of his left front pocket, slid two twenties out from under the tarnished old moneyclip, and held them out.

“Thirty sounds too low,” he said. “Take forty, along with my apologies. You did a great job. I've just had a bitch of a week, that's all.” You don't know the half of it, buddy, he thought
.

Samuel Lowe relaxed visibly and took the money. “No prob, bro,” he said. “And I wasn't kiddin—you ain't got a bad-lookin head at all. You ain't Michael, but ain't nobody Michael.”

“ 'Cept Michael,” the newcomer named Dale said. The three black men laughed heartily and nodded at one another. Although he could have killed all three of them without turning a hair, Norman nodded and laughed along with them. The newcomers in the barber shop had changed things. It was time to be careful again. Still laughing, he went out.

A trio of teenagers, also black, were leaning against a fence near the Tempo, but they hadn't bothered doing anything to the car, possibly because it was too much of a dog to bother with. They eyed Norman's pallid white head with interest, then glanced at each other and rolled their eyes. They were fourteen or so, boys without much trouble in them. The one in the middle started to say “You lookin at
me?”
like Robert De Niro in
Taxi Driver.
Norman seemed to sense this and stared at him—just at
him,
it seemed, ignoring the other two completely. The one in the middle decided that maybe his De Niro imitation needed a little more work and quit it.

Norman got into his freshly washed stolen car and drove away. Six blocks in toward the center of the city, he went into a used-clothing store called Play It Again, Sam. There were several browsers in the store, and they all looked at him, but that was okay. Norman didn't mind being looked
at, especially if it was his freshly shaven skull they were paying attention to. If they were looking at the top of his head, they wouldn't have the slightest fucking idea what his face looked like five minutes after he left.

He found a motorcycle jacket that gleamed with studs and zippers and small silver chains and creaked in every fold when he took it off its hanger. The clerk opened his mouth to ask two hundred and forty dollars for the jacket, looked at the haunted eyes peering out from beneath the awesome white desert of that freshly shaven skull, and told Norman the jacket was one-eighty, plus tax. He would have gone lower had Norman dickered, but Norman didn't. He was tired now, his head was throbbing, and he wanted to go back to the hotel and go to sleep. He wanted to sleep right through until tomorrow. He needed all the rest he could get, because tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

He made two more stops on the way back. The first was at a store which sold ostomy supplies. Here Norman bought a motorless second-hand wheelchair which would fit, folded up, into the trunk of the Tempo. Then he went to the Women's Cultural Center and Museum. Here he paid six dollars to get in but looked at no exhibits and did not so much as peer into the auditorium, where a panel discussion on natural childbirth was being held. He made a quick trip to the gift shop, then left.

Back at the Whitestone, he went upstairs without asking anyone about Blondie with the cute little ass. He would not have trusted himself to ask for a glass of club soda in his current condition. His newly shaven head was pounding like a steel-forge, his eyes were beating in their sockets, his teeth hurt and his jaws throbbed. Worst of all, his mind now seemed to be bobbing along above him like a float in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade; it felt as if it were tethered to the rest of him by a single fragile thread and might break away at any moment. He had to lie down. To sleep. Maybe then his mind would go back inside his head, where it belonged. As for Blondie, his best course would be to treat her as an ace in the hole, something to be used only if absolutely necessary. Break Glass in Case of Emergency.

Norman went back to bed at four o'clock on Friday afternoon. The throbbing behind his temples was no longer anything resembling a hangover; it was now one of the headaches he called his “specials.” He got them frequently
when he was working hard, and since Rose had left and his big drug-case had heated up, two a week weren't unusual. As he lay in bed looking up at the ceiling, his eyes ran and his nose leaked and he could see funny bright zigzag patterns pulsing around the edges of things. The pain had reached the point where it felt like there was some horrible fetus in the middle of his head, trying to be born; the point where there was nothing to do but hunker down and wait for it to be over, and the way you did that was by getting through the moments one at a time, going from one to the next the way a person might use stepping-stones to cross a stream. That tugged some hazy memory far back in his mind, but it couldn't get past the relentless throbbing, and Norman let it go. He rubbed his hand back and forth across the top of his head. The smoothness up there felt like nothing that could be a part of him; it was like touching the hood of a freshly waxed car.

“Who am I?” he asked the empty room. “Who am I? Why am I here? What am I doing? Who am I?”

Before he could stab at an answer to any of these questions he fell asleep. The pain followed him for quite a distance into its dreamless depths, like a bad idea that won't let go, but finally Norman left it behind. His head sagged to one side on his pillow, and a wetness which was not precisely tears ran out of his left eye and left nostril and trickled down his cheek. He began to snore thickly.

When he woke up twelve hours later, at four o'clock on Saturday morning, his headache was gone. He felt fresh and energized, as he almost always did after one of his specials. He sat up, put his feet on the floor, and looked out the window at darkness. The pigeons were out there on the ledge, cooing to each other even in their sleep. He knew, completely and surely and without any doubt, that this day was going to see the end of it, probably the end of
him,
as well, but that was a minor matter. Just knowing there would be no more headaches, not ever, made that seem like a fair trade.

Across the room, his new motorcycle jacket hung over a chair like a black and headless ghost.

Wake up early, Rose,
he thought almost tenderly.
Wake up early, honeybunch, and get a good look at the sunrise, why don't you? You ought to get the best look you can, because it's the last one you're ever going to see.

R
osie woke at a few minutes past four on Saturday morning and fumbled for the lamp by the bed, terrified, sure that Norman was in the room with her, sure she could smell his cologne, all my men wear English Leather or they wear nothing at all.

She almost knocked the lamp onto the floor in her panicky efforts to make a light, but when it was finally on (with the base hanging halfway over oblivion) her fear subsided quickly. It was just her room, small and neat and sane, and the only thing she could smell was the faint, bedwarm fragrance of her own skin. No one was here but her . . . and Rose Madder, of course. But Rose Madder was safely put away in the closet, where she undoubtedly still stood with one hand raised to shade her eyes, looking down at the ruins of the temple.

I was dreaming about him,
she thought as she sat up. I
was having another nightmare about Norman, that's why I woke up so scared.

She pushed the lamp back on the table. It clinked against the armlet. Rose picked it up and looked at it. Strange, how hard it was to remember

(what you have to remember)

how she'd come by this trinket. Had she bought it in Bill's shop, because it looked like the one the woman in her picture was wearing? She didn't know, and that was troubling. How could you forget

(what you need to forget)

a thing like that?

Rosie lifted the circlet, which felt as heavy as gold but was probably just gilded potmetal, and looked across the room through it, like a woman looking through a telescope.

As she did, a fragment of her dream came back, and she realized it hadn't been about Norman at all. It had been about Bill. They had been on his motorcycle, but instead of taking her to a picnic place by the lake, he had driven her down a path that wound deeper and deeper into a sinister forest of dead trees. After awhile they came into a clearing,
and in the clearing was a single live tree, laden with fruit the color of Rose Madder's chiton.

Oh, what a great first course!
Bill had cried cheerily, hopping off his motorcycle and hurrying toward the tree.
I've heard about these—eat one and you can see out of the back of your head, eat two and you live forever!

That was where the dream had crossed the line from the merely unsettling into real nightmare country. She knew somehow that the fruit of that tree wasn't magic but horribly poisonous and she ran to him, wanting to stop him before he could bite into one of the tempting fruits. But Bill wouldn't be convinced. He merely put an arm around her, gave her a little hug, and said,
Don't be silly, Rosie—I know pomegranates, and these aren't them.

That was when she'd awakened, shivering madly in the dark and thinking not about Bill but about Norman . . . as if Norman were lying in bed someplace near and thinking about
her.
This idea made Rosie cross her arms over her breasts and hug herself. It was all too possible that he was doing just that. She put the armlet back down on the table, hurried into the bathroom, and turned on the shower.

Her troubling dream of Bill and the poisoned fruit, her questions about where or how she might have come by the armlet, and her confused feelings about the picture she'd brought, then unframed, then hidden away in the closet like a secret . . . all these things faded behind a larger and more immediate concern: her date. It was today, and every time she thought of that she felt something like a hot wire in her chest. She was both afraid and happy, but more than anything else she was curious. Her date.
Their
date.

If he even comes,
a voice inside whispered ominously.
It could have all been a joke, you know. Or you might have scared him off.

Rosie started to step into the water, and realized just in the nick of time that she was still wearing her panties.

“He'll come,” she murmured as she bent and slipped them off. “He'll come, all right. I know he will.”

As she ducked under the spray and reached for the shampoo, a voice far back in her mind—a very different voice, this time—whispered,
Beasts will fight.

“What?” Rosie froze with the plastic bottle in one hand. She was frightened and didn't quite know why. “What did you say?”

Nothing. She couldn't even remember exactly what it was that she'd thought, only that it was something else about that damned picture, which had gotten into her head like the chorus of a song you can't forget. As she began to lather her hair, Rosie decided abruptly to get rid of it. The thought of doing that made her feel better, like the thought of quitting some bad habit—smoking, drinking at lunch—and by the time she stepped out of the shower, she was humming.

B
ill didn't torture her with doubt by being late. Rosie had pulled one of the kitchen chairs over by the window so she could watch for him (at quarter past seven she had done this, three full hours after she'd stepped out of the shower), and at twenty-five past eight a motorcycle with a cooler strapped to the carrier-rack pulled into one of the spaces in front of the building. The driver's head was covered by a big blue helmet and the angle was wrong for her to see his face, but she knew it was him. Already the line of his shoulders was unmistakable to her. He gunned the engine once, then killed it and used a booted heel to drop the Harley's kickstand. He swung one leg off, and for a moment the line of his thigh was clearly visible against his faded jeans. Rosie felt a tremor of timid but unmistakable lust go through her and thought:
That's what I'll be thinking about tonight while I'm waiting to go to sleep; that's what I'm going to see. And if I'm very, very lucky, it's what I'll dream about.

She thought of waiting for him up here, of letting him come to her the way a girl who is comfortable in the home of her parents might wait for the boy who is going to take her to the Homecoming Dance, waiting even after he has come, watching in her strapless party dress from behind the curtain of her bedroom window, smiling a small secret smile as he gets out of his father's newly washed and waxed car and comes to the door, self-consciously adjusting his bowtie or tugging on his cummerbund.

She thought of it, then opened the closet door, reached in, and snatched out her sweater. She hurried down the hall, slipping into it as she went. It crossed her mind as she came to the head of the stairs and saw him already halfway up, his
head raised to look at her, that she had reached the perfect age: too old to be coy for the sake of coyness, but still too young not to believe that some hopes—the ones that really matter—may turn out against all odds to be justified.

“Hi,” she said, looking down from her place. “You're on time.”

“Sure,” he said, looking up from his. He seemed faintly surprised. “I'm
always
on time. It's the way I was raised. I think it might have been bred in my genes, too.” He held one gloved hand up to her, like a cavalier in a movie. He smiled. “Are you ready?”