“Will anyone else have to know?”
“I sincerely hope not. It would simplify my life enormously if Tony could know, but nothing on earth would persuade me to tell him. Instead he simply thinks the world’s gone mad. Your performance last night, and now I’m missing rehearsal. And I never miss rehearsals. I simply gave no explanation at all. They can put anyone up here to read my lines off a script. It’s no great hardship.” He grimaced. “But I can’t miss tonight’s performance. Thank all Gods there’s no matinee tomorrow.” He checked his watch again. “I think I’ll go see how the girls are getting along. And closet myself in my bedroom to practice my couchside manner. You’re holding up well, aren’t you?”
“Am I? I guess I am.”
“It gets easier as it goes along. Like sodomy. Pay for my coffee, will you? I’m off.”
She was wrapping a painting when she saw Tanya outside in the hallway. The young actress was walking arm in arm with a tall boy with long hair and a Zapata mustache. Linda had seen them together before.
The painting’s new owner was reluctant to leave. She kept saying how willing she would have been to pay for it. “I feel so guilty,” she kept saying. “Could I buy one of the others? This is my favorite, but there are others I like as well.”
Linda explained that she couldn’t take money for any of them and that they were one to a customer. The woman assured her that she hadn’t been trying to make off with another free one and ultimately left saying that she would donate the price of the painting to charity.
The shop was empty of customers, and Linda was grateful. She sat down and put her head in her hand. She thought she knew why Olive wanted her to give the paintings away and only wished it were not so depressing. It would have been bad enough if people would just take the things and be grateful, but they always wanted to talk about it and she couldn’t bring herself to explain the situation.
On a better day she would have invented a story. But this was not one of her better days. There had been few enough of those lately. Everything got to her.
Tanya, for example. Tanya had a boyfriend, and that almost certainly meant that Tanya had a lover; the girl was hardly the sort given to long courtship or platonic relationships. Bill Donatelli had been replaced while his body was still warm.
Well, she admitted, that was not quite true. And Tanya was not yet living with the new one. She was still sleeping nights in her room at the Shithouse. She had moved back in after that one night in Linda’s bed — and how she could have managed that was another thing Linda did not understand. In a while Tanya might move in with her new lover, or he might move in with her, but for the time being Tanya slept alone.
But why did this bother her? A new love was just what Tanya needed, and it was healthy that she was able to accept it. Linda had no loyalty to Bill Donatelli’s memory. So why should she find the sight of the two of them, arm in arm and obviously delighted with one other, so personally disturbing?
She thought of Tanya and Bill and Olive and Clem. She thought of love and death and how the two seemed to go together in a hideous progression. Love and Death walked arm in arm, as obviously delighted with each other as Tanya and the boy with the mustache.
The phone rang. Hugh. He had just finished work for the day. The book was going well; it was going better than that; he was just pages from the end and would finish it tomorrow. And a premature celebration was just what he was in the mood for, and would she have dinner with him?
“I can’t,” she said; “I have to work tonight.”
Well, how about a late dinner? Or just a few drinks after she closed for the night?
“I’m exhausted already. I wouldn’t be good company.”
But there was something he wanted to discuss with her, something that wouldn’t work at all over the phone. Couldn’t he just see her for half an hour? He could even come to the shop if she wanted.
She gritted her teeth. People just wouldn’t leave you alone. Over the telephone, face to face, anywhere. They wouldn’t leave you alone. You couldn’t give them free paintings and shove them out the door. You couldn’t turn down a dinner or a drink or a marriage proposal, couldn’t get them off the phone.
“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice firmer than she had intended. “Not tonight. It’s impossible; everything is impossible.”
She broke the connection before he could force any more words into her head. There were too many words there already. She couldn’t handle the ones she had.
She didn’t want to marry him. She didn’t want to be his wife or Karen’s mother. She didn’t want to be anybody’s anything.
People never left you alone.
“Wasn’t that a dynamite dinner, Petey?”
“Just sensational.”
“I’m still a little hungry, though. Maybe we could go out for a milk shake. Would you like that?”
“Well—”
“A milk shake’s just what I want.”
A milk shake was not just what he wanted. What he wanted, what he really wanted, was to go somewhere private and vomit up the mountain of food he had just finished stuffing down his throat. It would be such an overwhelming sensual pleasure to vomit. He had never before appreciated the potential enjoyment of nausea.
“Then milk shakes are what we’re going to have,” he said. “Let’s go someplace good.”
Someplace with a men’s room. If he could get to it first, he could make room for the milk shake.
Karen came down the stairs and pulled up short when she saw her father. He was sitting in the living room with the telephone receiver in one hand, and he looked as though he had been sitting in that position for some time.
She said, “Daddy?”
He looked up, his eyes blank for a moment. “Oh,” he said. “Hello there.”
“Hello. Is something the matter?”
“Just lost in thought. Brown-study time.” He became aware that he was holding the telephone receiver, looked at it, hung it up. “Maybe something is the matter. I don’t know. I was talking to Linda and I didn’t like the way she sounded.”
She listened as he recounted the conversation.
“I’m a little worried about her,” he added. “She didn’t sound right at all. She seemed very troubled. I wonder if I shouldn’t drive over there and make sure she’s all right.”
“From what she said—”
“She said not to, I know, but it might be right for me to ignore that. Sometimes people say things in the hope that they’ll be ignored.”
“I don’t know if I should say anything or not.”
“What do you mean, kitten?”
“I don’t know. If it’s my place to say anything.”
“Please do.”
She hesitated, working things out in her mind first. She said, “Well, I dropped in on Linda awhile ago. I stop in and see her every once in awhile when I’m in the neighborhood. And we got to talking.”
“And?”
“She told me not to say anything. What it is, she likes you very much. But she doesn’t want to get serious. She didn’t say it that way but that was what she was saying, if that makes any sense.”
“It makes a lot of sense.”
“She doesn’t want to be rushed. She isn’t ready for it.”
“She said that when I first started seeing her.”
“And she... well, she’s also seeing somebody else. She didn’t come right out and say it but that’s what’s happening.”
“Oh.”
“I don’t think she’s serious about him or anything. I think she’s seeing him mostly because she doesn’t want to be seeing just one man. I’m just guessing, but... I guess I shouldn’t have said anything.”