‘He’d never want to do that,’ Rosie said. She was frightened and excited at the same time, and also a little angry at Rhoda for being so cynical, but all of these feelings had been suppressed beneath a bright layer of joy and relief: she was going to be all right for a little longer. And if Robbie really did offer her a contract, she might be all right for even longer than that. It was all very well for Rhoda Simons to preach caution; Rhoda wasn’t living in a single room three blocks from an area of town where you didn’t park your car at the curb if you wanted to keep your radio and your hubcaps; Rhoda had an accountant husband, a house in the suburbs, and a 1994 silver Nissan. Rhoda had a VISA and an American Express card.
Better yet, Rhoda had a Blue Cross card, and savings she could draw on if she got sick and couldn’t work. For people who had those things, Rosie imagined, advising caution in business affairs was probably as natural as breathing.
‘Maybe not,’ Rhoda said, ‘but you could be a small goldmine, Rosie, and sometimes people change when they discover goldmines. Even nice people like Robbie Lefferts.’
Now, drinking her tea and looking out the window of the Hot Pot, Rosie remembered Rhoda dousing her cigarette under the cold tap, dropping it in the trash, and then coming over to her. ‘I know you’re in a situation where job security is very important to you, and I’m not saying Robbie’s a bad man — I’ve been working with him off and on since 1982 and I know he’s not — but I’m telling you to keep an eye on the birds in the bush while you’re making sure the one in your hand doesn’t fly away. Do you follow me?’
‘Not entirely, no.’
‘Agree to do six books to start with, no more. Eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, right here at Tape Engine. A thousand a week.’
Rosie goggled at her, feeling as if someone had stuck a vacuum-cleaner hose down her throat and sucked the air out of her lungs. ‘A thousand dollars a week, are you crazy?’
‘Ask Curt Hamilton if he thinks I’m crazy,’ Rhoda said calmly. ‘Remember, it’s not just the voice, it’s the takes. You did The Manta Ray in a hundred and four. No one else I work with could have done it in less than two hundred. You have great voice management, but the absolutely incredible thing is your breath control. If you don’t sing, how in God’s name did you get such great control?’
A nightmarish image had occurred to Rosie then: sitting in the corner with her kidneys swelling and throbbing like bloated bags filled with hot water, sitting there with her apron held in her hands, praying to God she wouldn’t have to fill it because it hurt to throw up, it made her kidneys feel as if they were being stabbed with long, splintery sticks. Sitting there, breathing in long, flat inhales and slow, soft exhales because that was what worked best, trying to make the runaway beat of her heart match the calmer rhythm of her respiration, sitting there and listening to Norman making himself a sandwich in the kitchen and singing
‘Daniel’ or ‘Take a Letter, Maria’ in his surprisingly good barroom tenor.
‘I don’t know,’ she had told Rhoda, ‘I didn’t even know what breath control was until I met you. I guess it’s just a gift.’
‘Well, count your blessings, keed,’ Rhoda said. ‘We better get back; Curt’ll think we’re practicing weird female rituals in here.’
Robbie had called from his office downtown to congratulate her on finishing The Manta Ray — just as she was getting ready to leave for the day, this had been — and although he hadn’t specifically mentioned a contract, he had asked if she would have lunch with him on Friday to discuss what he called ‘a business arrangement.’ Rosie had agreed and hung up, feeling bemused. She remembered thinking that Rhoda’s description of him was perfect; Robbie Lefferts did look like the little man on the Monopoly cards.
When she put down the telephone in Curtis’s private office — a cluttery little closet with hundreds of business cards stuck to the cork walls on pushpins — and went back out into the studio to collect her bag, Rhoda was gone, presumably for a final smoke in the ladies’. Curt was marking boxes of reel-to-reel tape. He looked up and gave her a grin. ‘Great work today, Rosie.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Rhoda says Robbie’s going to offer you a contract.’
‘That’s what she says,’ Rosie agreed. ‘And I actually think she might be right. Knock on wood.’
‘Well, you ought to remember one thing while you’re dickering,’ Curtis said, putting the tape boxes on a high shelf where dozens of similar boxes were ranged like thin white books.
‘If you made five hundred bucks for The Mania Ray, Robbie’s already ahead of the game . . .
because you saved maybe seven hundred in studio time. Get it?’
She’d gotten it, all right, and now she sat here in the Hot Pot with the future looking unexpectedly bright. She had friends, a place to live, a job, and the promise of more work when she had finished with Christina Bell. A contract that might mean as much as a thousand dollars a week, more money than Norman made. It was crazy, but it was true. Might be true, she amended.
Oh, and one other thing. She had a date for Saturday. . . all of Saturday, if you counted in the Indigo Girls concert that night.
Rosie’s face, usually so solemn, broke into a brilliant smile, and she felt a totally inappropriate desire to hug herself. She took the last bite of her pastry and looked out the window again, wondering if all these things could possibly be happening to her, if there could actually be a real life where real people walked out of their prisons, turned right . . . and walked into heaven.
2
Half a block away, DON’T WALK went out and WALK came on. Pam Haverford, now changed out of her white chambermaid’s uniform and into a pair of trim red slacks, crossed the street with two dozen other people. She had worked an extra hour tonight and had no reason on earth to think Rosie would be in the Hot Pot . . . but she did think it, just the same. Call it woman’s intuition, if you wanted.
She glanced briefly at the big lug crossing beside her, who she thought she had seen at the Whitestone newsstand a few minutes ago. He might have qualified as someone interesting if not for the look in his eyes . . . which was no look at all. He glanced briefly at her as they stepped up on the far curb, and the lack of expression in those eyes — the feeling of some absence behind them — actually chilled her.
3
Inside the Hot Pot, Rosie abruptly decided she wanted a second cup of tea. She had no earthly reason to think Pam might drop in — it was a full hour past their usual time — but she did, just the same. Maybe it was woman’s intuition. She got up and turned toward the counter.
4
The little bitch beside him was sort of cute, Norman thought, tight red slacks, nice little ass.
He dropped back a couple of steps — the better to enjoy the view, my dear — but almost as soon as he did, she turned into a little restaurant. Norman glanced in the window as he went by, but saw nothing interesting, just a bunch of old bags eating gooey shit and slopping up coffee and tea, plus a few waiters rushing around in that mincing, faggy way they had.
The old ladies must like it, Norman thought. Fag-walking like that must pay off in tips. It had to; why else would grown men walk that way? They couldn’t all be fags . . . could they?
His gaze into the Hot Pot — brief and disinterested — touched on one lady considerably younger than the blue-rinsed, pants-suited types sitting at most of the tables. She was walking away from the window and toward the cafeteria-style serving counter at the far end of the tearoom (at least he supposed that was what you called places like this). He took a quick look at her ass, simply because that was where his eyes always went fast when it was a woman younger than forty, judged it not too bad but nothing to write home to Mother about.
Rose’s ass used to look like that, he thought. Back in the days before she let herself go and it got as big as a goddam footstool, that is.
The woman he glimpsed through the window also had great hair, much better than her fanny, actually, but her hair didn’t make him think of Rosie. Rosie was what Norman’s mother had always called a ‘brownette,’ and she rarely took any pains with her hair (given its lackluster mousehide color, Norman didn’t blame her). Pulling it back in a ponytail and securing it with a rubber band was her usual way of wearing it; if they were going out to dinner or a movie, she might thread it through one of those elastic scrunch things they sold in the drugstore.