Rose Madder (19 page)

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 a 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 purse 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.

R
obbie 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 novel 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.