‘What seeds?’ Rosie asked, frightened. She smelled her fingers and caught just a ghost of an aroma, a smell that reminded her of baking and sweet cooked sugar. ‘ What seeds? What happened last night? Is it — ‘ She made herself stop there. She knew what she had been about to say, but didn’t want to hear the question actually articulated, hanging in the air like unfinished business: Is it still happening?
She got into the shower, adjusted the water until it was as hot as she could take it, and then grabbed the soap. She washed her hands with particular care, scrubbed them until she could not see so much as a trace of that rose madder stain, even under her nails. Then she washed her hair, beginning to vocalize as she did so. Curt had suggested nursery rhymes in different keys and vocal registers, and that was what she did, keeping her voice low so not to disturb the people above or below her. When she got out five minutes later and dried off, her body was starting to feel a little more like real flesh and a little less like something constructed out of barbed wire and broken glass. Her voice had almost returned to normal, as well.
She started to put on jeans and a tee-shirt, remembered that Rob Lefferts was taking her to lunch, and put on a new skirt instead. Then she sat down in front of the mirror to plait her hair. It was slow going, because her back, shoulders, and upper arms were also stiff. Hot water had improved the situation but not entirely cured it.
Yes, it was a good-sized baby for its age, she thought, so absorbed in getting the plait just right that what she was thinking did not even really register. But as she was finishing, she looked into the mirror which reflected the room behind her and saw something which widened her eyes. The morning’s other, more minor discordancies slipped from her mind in an instant.
‘Oh my God,’ Rosie said in a strengthless little voice. She got up and walked across the room on legs which felt as nerveless as stilts.
In most regards the picture was just the same. The blonde woman still stood on top of her hill with her plaited hair hanging down between her shoulderblades and her left arm raised, but now the hand shading her eyes made sense, because the thunderheads which had overhung the scene were gone. The sky above the woman in the short gown was the faded blue denim of a humid day in July. A few dark birds which hadn’t been there before circled in that sky, but Rosie hardly noticed them.
The sky’s blue because the storm is over, she thought. It ended while I was . . . well . . .
while I was somewhere else.
All she could remember for sure about that somewhere else was that it had been dark and scary. That was enough; she didn’t want to remember any more, and she thought maybe she didn’t want to have her picture re-framed, after all. She knew she had changed her mind about showing it to Bill tomorrow, or even mentioning it. It would be bad if he saw the change from overcast and thunderheads to hazy sunshine, yes, but it would be even worse if he saw no change at all. That would mean she was losing her mind.
I’m not sure I want the damned thing anymore at all, she thought. It’s scary. Do you want to hear something really hilarious? I think it might be haunted.
She picked the unframed canvas up, holding the edges with her palms, denying her conscious mind access to the thought
(careful Rosie don’t fall in)
that caused her to handle it that way. There was a tiny closet to the right of the door leading out into the hall, with nothing in it yet but the lowtop sneakers she’d been wearing when she left Norman and a new sweater made out of some cheap synthetic stuff. She had to put the picture down in order to open the door (she could have tucked it under her arm long enough to free one hand, of course, but somehow didn’t like to do that), and when she picked it up again she paused, looking fixedly at it. The sun was out, definitely new, and there were big black birds circling in the sky above the temple, probably new, but wasn’t there something else, as well? Some other change? She thought so, and she thought she wasn’t seeing it because it wasn’t an addition but a deletion. Something was gone. Something —
I don’t want to know, Rosie told herself brusquely. I don’t even want to think about it, so there.
Yes, so there. But she was sorry to feel the way she did, because she’d begun by thinking of the picture as her personal good-luck charm, a kind of rabbit’s foot. And of one thing there was absolutely no doubt: it was thinking of Rose Madder, standing there so fearlessly on top of her hill, that had pulled her through on her first day in the recording studio, when she’d suffered the panic attack. So she didn’t want to be having these unpleasant feelings about the picture, and most assuredly didn’t want to be afraid of it . . . but she was. After all, the weather in oil-paintings usually didn’t clear up overnight, and the amount of stuff you could see in them usually didn’t grow and contract, as if some unseen projectionist were switching back and forth between lenses. She didn’t know what she was going to do with the picture in
the long run, but she knew where it was going to spend today and the coming weekend: in the closet, keeping her old sneaks company.
She put it in there, propped it against the wall (resisting an urge to turn it around so it would also face the wall), and then closed the door. With that done, she slipped into her only good blouse, took her bag, and left the room. As she walked down the long, dingy corridor leading to the stairs, two words whispered up from the very bottom of her mind: I repay. She stopped at the head of the stairs, shivering so violently she almost dropped her bag, and for a moment her right leg ached almost all the way up to her buttock, as if she had been struck with a savage cramp. Then it passed, and she went quickly down to the first floor. I won’t think about it, she told herself as she walked down the street to the bus stop. I don’t have to if I don’t want to, and I most definitely don’t want to. I’ll think about Bill instead. Bill, and his motorcycle.
12
Thinking about Bill got her to work and into the dark-toned world of Kill All My Tomorrows without a hitch, and at lunch there was even less time to think of the woman in the painting.
Mr Lefferts took her to a tiny Italian place called Delia Femmina, the nicest restaurant Rosie had ever been in, and while she was eating her melon, he offered her what he called ‘a more solid business arrangement.’ He proposed signing her to a contract which would pay her eight hundred dollars a week for twenty weeks or twelve books, whichever came first. It wasn’t the thousand a week Rhoda had urged her to hold out for, but Robbie also promised to put her together with an agent who would set her up with as many radio spots as she wanted.
‘You can make twenty-two thousand dollars by the end of the year, Rose. More, if you want it . . . but why knock yourself out?’
She asked him if she could have the weekend to think about it. Mr Lefferts told her she certainly could. Before he left her in the lobby of the Corn Building (Rhoda and Curt were sitting together on a bench by the elevator, gossiping like a couple of thieves), he held his hand out to her. She returned the gesture, expecting her hand to be shaken. Instead he took it in both of his, bowed, and kissed it. The gesture — no one had ever kissed her hand before, although she had seen it done in lots of movies — sent a shiver up her back.
It was only as she sat in the recording booth, watching Curt thread up a fresh reel in the other room, that her thoughts returned to the picture which was now safely (you hope Rosie you hope)
stashed away in her closet. Suddenly she knew what the other change had been, what had been subtracted from the picture: the armlet. The woman in the rose madder chiton had been wearing it above her right elbow. This morning her arm had been bare all the way to her shapely shoulder.