Rose Madder (16 page)

“I see you are,” Anna said dryly.

“I flipped Gert,” she said. “You should have seen it. I think it was the thrill of my life. Honestly.”

“I'm sure it was, but Gert would tell you she flipped herself,” Anna said. “You just helped her do what her body wanted to do already.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Cynthia said. She got cautiously to her feet, then promptly plumped back down on her fanny (what there was of it) and giggled some more. “God, it's like someone put the whole room on a record-player.”

Anna came across the room to where Rosie and Pam were sitting. “What have you got there?” she asked Rosie.

“A picture. I bought it this afternoon. It's for my new place, when I get it. My room.” And then, a little fearfully, she added: “What do you think?”

“I don't know—let's get it into the light.”

Anna picked the picture up by the sides of the frame, carried it across the room, and set it on the Ping-Pong table. The five women gathered around it in a semicircle. No, Rosie saw, glancing around, now they were seven. Robin St. James and Consuelo Delgado had come downstairs and joined them—they were standing behind Cynthia, looking over her narrow, bird-boned shoulders. Rosie waited for someone to break the silence—she was betting on Cynthia—and when nobody did and it began to spin out, she started feeling nervous.

“Well?” she asked at last. “What do you think? Somebody say something.”

“It's an odd picture,” Anna said.

“Yeah,” Cynthia agreed. “Weird. I think I seen one like it before, though.”

Anna was looking at Rosie. “Why did you buy it, Rosie?”

Rosie shrugged, feeling more nervous than ever. “I don't know that I can explain, really. It was like it called to me.”

Anna surprised her—and eased her considerably—by smiling and nodding. “Yes. That's really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures—it's the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that's all. It's as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads. But this particular painting . . . is it beautiful to you, Rosie?”

Rosie looked at it, trying to see it as she had in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn, when its silent tongue had spoken to her with such force that she had been stopped cold, all other thoughts driven from her mind. She looked at the blonde woman in the rose madder toga (or chiton—that was what
Mr. Lefferts had called it) standing in the high grass at the top of the hill, again noting the plait which hung straight down the middle of her back and the gold armlet above her right elbow. Then she let her gaze move to the ruined temple and the tumbled

(god)

statue at the foot of the hill. The things the woman in the toga was looking at.

How do you know that's what she's looking at? How can you know? You can't see her face!

That was true, of course . . . but what else
was
there to look at?

“No,” Rosie said. “I didn't buy it because it was beautiful to me. I bought it because it seemed
powerful
to me. The way it stopped me in my tracks was powerful. Does a picture have to be beautiful to be good, do you think?”

“Nope,” Consuelo said. “Think about Jackson Pollock. His stuff wasn't about beauty, it was about energy. Or Diane Arbus, how about her?”

“Who's she?” Cynthia asked.

“A photographer who got famous taking pictures of women with beards and dwarves smoking cigarettes.”

“Oh.” Cynthia thought this over, and her face suddenly brightened with recollection. “I saw this picture once, at a catered party back when I was cocktailing. In an art gallery, this was. It was by some guy named Applethorpe, Robert Applethorpe, and you want to know what it was? One guy gobbling another guy's crank! Seriously! And it wasn't any fake job like in a skin magazine, either. I mean that guy was making an
effort,
he was taking care of business and working overtime. You wouldn't think a guy could get that much of the old broomhandle down his—”

“Mapplethorpe,”
Anna said dryly.

“Huh?”

“Mapple
thorpe
,
not
Apple
thorpe
.”

“Oh yeah. I guess that's right.”

“He's dead now.”

“Oh yeah?” Cynthia asked. “What got him?”

“AIDS.” Anna was still looking at Rosie's picture and spoke absently. “Known as broomhandle disease in some quarters.”

“You said you saw a picture like Rosie's before,” Gert rumbled. “Where was that, squirt? Same art gallery?”

“No.” While discussing the Mapplethorpe, Cynthia had only looked interested; now color pinked her cheeks and the corners of her mouth dimpled in a defensive little smile. “And it wasn't, you know, really the
same,
but . . .”

“Go on, tell,” Rosie said.

“Well, my dad was a Methodist minister back in Bakersfield,” Cynthia said. “This is Bakersfield, California, where I came from. We lived in the parsonage, and there were all these old pictures in the little meeting-rooms downstairs. Some were Presidents, and some were flowers, and some were dogs. They didn't matter. They were just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn't look too bare.”

Rosie nodded, thinking of the pictures which had surrounded hers on those dusty pawnshop shelves—gondolas in Venice, fruit in bowls, dogs and foxes. Just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn't look too bare. Mouths without tongues.

“But there was this one . . . it was called . . .” She frowned, trying to remember. “I think it was called
De Soto Looks West.
It showed this explorer in tin pants and a saucepan hat standing on top of a cliff with these Indians around him. And he was lookin over all these miles of woods toward a great big river. The Mississippi, I guess. But see . . . the thing was . . .”

She looked at them uncertainly. Her cheeks were pinker than ever and her smile was gone. The bulky bandage over her ear seemed very white, very much
there,
like some sort of peculiar accessory which had been grafted onto the side of her head, and Rosie found time to wonder—not for the first time since she had come to D & S—why so many men were so unkind. What was wrong with them? Was it something that had been left out, or something nasty which had been unaccountably built in, like a bad circuit in a computer?

“Go on, Cynthia,” Anna said. “We won't laugh. Will we?”

The women shook their heads.

Cynthia stuck her hands behind her back like a little girl who has been called upon to recite in front of the entire class. “Well,” she said, speaking in a much smaller voice than her usual one, “it was like the river was
moving,
that was the thing that fascinated me. The picture was in the room where my father had his Thursday-night Bible school
classes, and I'd go in there and sometimes I'd sit in front of that picture for an hour or more, looking at it like it was television. I was watching the river move . . . or waiting to see if it
would
move. Now I can't remember which, but I was only nine or ten. One thing I do remember is thinking that if it
was
moving, a raft or a boat or an Indian canoe would go by sooner or later and then I'd know for sure. Except one day I went in and the picture was gone. Poof. I think my mother must have looked in and seen me just sitting there in front of it, you know, and—”

“She got worried and took it away,” Robin said.

“Yeah, probably threw it in the trash,” Cynthia said. “I was just a kid. But your picture reminds me of it, Rosie.”

Pam peered at it closely. “Yep,” she said, “no wonder. I can see the woman breathing.”

They all laughed then, and Rosie laughed with them.

“No, it's not
that,”
Cynthia said. “It's just . . . it looks a little old-fashioned, you know . . . like a schoolroom picture . . . and it's pale. Except for the clouds and her dress, the colors are pale. In my De Soto picture everything was pale except for the river. The river was bright silver. It looked more
there
than the rest of the picture.”

Gert turned to Rosie. “Tell us about your job. I heard you say you got a job.”

“Tell us
everything,”
Pam said.

“Yes,” Anna said. “Tell us everything, and then I wonder if you could step into my office for a few minutes.”

“Is it . . . is it what I've been waiting for?”

Anna smiled. “As a matter of fact, I think it is.”

I
t's an optimum room, one of the best on our list, and I hope you'll be as delighted as I am,” Anna said. There was a stack of fliers perched precariously on the corner of her desk, announcing the forthcoming Daughters and Sisters Swing into Summer Picnic and Concert, an event which was part fundraiser, part community relations, and part celebration. Anna took one, turned it over, and sketched quickly. “Kitchen here, hide-a-bed here, and a little living-room area here. This is the bathroom. It's hardly big enough to turn
around in, and in order to sit on the commode you'll practically have to put your feet in the shower, but it's
yours.”

“Yes,” Rosie murmured. “Mine.” A feeling that she hadn't had in weeks—that all this was a wonderful dream and at any moment she would wake up beside Norman again—was creeping over her.

“The view is nice—it's not Lake Drive, of course, but Bryant Park is very pretty, especially in the summer. Second floor. The neighborhood got a little ragged in the eighties, but it's pulling itself together again now.”

“It's as if you've stayed there yourself,” Rosie said.

Anna shrugged—a slender, pretty gesture—and drew the hall in front of the room, then a flight of stairs. She sketched with the no-frills economy of a draftsman. She spoke without looking up. “I've been there on a good many occasions,” she said, “but of course that's not what you mean, is it?”

“No.”

“A little of me goes out with every woman when she leaves. I suppose that sounds corny, but I don't care. It's true, and that's all that really matters. So what do you think?”

Rosie hugged her impulsively, and instantly regretted it when she felt Anna stiffen.
I shouldn't have done it,
she thought as she let go.
I knew better.
And she had. Anna Stevenson was kind, there was no doubt about that in Rosie's mind—maybe even saintly—but there was that strange arrogance, and there was this, too: Anna didn't like people in her space. Anna especially didn't like to be touched.

“I'm sorry,” she said, drawing back.

“Don't be silly,” Anna said brusquely. “What do you think?”

“I love it,” Rosie said.

Anna smiled and the small awkwardness was behind them. She drew an
X
on the wall of the living-room area, near a tiny rectangle which represented the room's only window. “Your new picture . . . I'll bet you decide it belongs right here.”

“I'll bet I do, too.”

Anna put the pencil down. “I'm delighted to be able to help you, Rosie, and I'm so glad you came to us. Here, you're leaking.” It was the Kleenex again, but Rosie doubted it was the same box Anna had offered her during their first
interview in this room; she had an idea that a lot of Kleenex got used in here.

She took one and wiped her eyes. “You saved my life, you know,” she said hoarsely. “You saved my life and I'll never, ever forget it.”

“Flattering but inaccurate,” Anna said in her dry, calm voice. “I saved your life no more than Cynthia flipped Gert downstairs in the rec room. You saved your own life when you took a chance and walked out on the man who was hurting you.”

“Just the same, thank you. Just for being here.”

“You're very welcome,” Anna said, and for the only time during her stay at D & S, Rosie saw tears standing in Anna Stevenson's eyes. She handed the box of Kleenex back across the desk with a little smile.

“Here,” she said. “Looks like you've sprung a leak yourself.”

Anna laughed, took a Kleenex, used it, and tossed it into the wastebasket. “I hate to cry. It's my deepest, darkest secret. Every now and then I think I'm done with it, that I
must
be done with it, and then I do it again. It's sort of the way I feel about men.”

For another brief moment, Rosie found herself thinking about Bill Steiner and his hazel eyes.

Anna took the pencil again and scratched something below the rough floor-plan she'd drawn. Then she handed the sheet to Rosie. It was an address she'd jotted down: 897 Trenton Street.

“That's where you live,” Anna said. “It's most of the way across the city from here, but you can use the buses now, can't you?”

Smiling—and still crying a little—Rosie nodded.

“You may give that address to some of the friends you've made here, and eventually to friends you make beyond here, but right now nobody knows but the two of us.” What she was saying felt like a set-piece to Rosie—a goodbye speech. “People who show up at your place will not have found out how to get there at
this
place. It's just how we do things at D & S. After twenty years of working with abused women, I'm convinced it's the only way to do things.”

Pam had explained all this to Rosie; so had Consuelo Delgado and Robin St. James. These explanations had taken place during Big Fun Hour, which was what the residents
called evening chores at D & S, but Rosie hadn't really needed them; it only took three or four therapy sessions in the front room for a person of reasonable intelligence to learn most of what she needed to know about the protocols of the house. There was Anna's List, and there were also Anna's Rules.