Rose Madder (20 page)

“Chaper 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 . . .”

R
osie 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 & 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 & 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 to 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 slightly 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 the 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 Clint, 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 travelling 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.