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.
2
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.