Warm and Willing

CHAPTER ONE

That night she dreamed the dream once again. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and yet it terrified her each time. This time she awoke before the dream could end; awoke with her forehead damp with cool beads of perspiration, awoke with her heart hammering furiously, and her eyes staring, and her hands-small hands, narrow fingers, nails immaculately manicured-curled into tight little fists, with the nails digging harshly into the palms of her hands.

A dream of flight, of a chase with her own self cast as victim, as person pursued. And with the pursuer unknowable. In the dream she was running eternally down an endless hallway, a hallway which grew gradually but inexorably narrower as she raced through it, the walls closing slowly on her.

The walls, an ivory white, were unbroken by windows or doors. Sometimes, smoking a cigarette in the sweaty aftermath of the nightmare, she would force herself back over the dream and try to figure out its setting, and try to establish what sort of hallway she ran through night after endless night. A hospital? But hospital walls were always that weak gray-green of impending death, and the walls in the dream were white. And the floor was black, not tile or linoleum or wood or stone-an endless ribbon of black which seemed to be made of no particular material at all.

And she ran in the dream, ran until her legs ached, ran while her heart pounded, ran with a whirlwind behind her, and her mouth parted for a scream that never came, and something, something, behind her and coming ever closer.

She had dreamed the dream a countless number of times. She had never been caught. She had never reached the end of the corridor, if indeed it had an end. Each time she awoke with terror shrieking through her body.

Now she sat very still in the narrow bed. A shaft of light came through her window. She looked around quickly, making sure of where she was, focusing upon familiar objects in an effort to assure herself of what was reality and what was the dream. Her cigarettes were on the bedside table. She lit one, shook out the match, reached over to turn on the bedside lamp. There was a clock on the table beside the lamp. She looked at it. It was a few minutes past four. She had gone to sleep a little after midnight, so she had slept just four hours.

She would not be able to sleep any more now. She knew this. Once the dream brought her swiftly awake, sleep was over and done with for the night. She could only get up and bide her time, read a book or take a shower or have a few cups of inky coffee, waiting out the hours until it was time for breakfast and then for work.

There was a hot plate on her dresser, a teakettle centered upon it. She filled the teakettle at the sink and put water on to boil. Then she slipped into a cotton robe and sat down in the room’s one chair and smoked her cigarette all the way down. When the water boiled she made instant coffee and sat in the chair to drink it.

Her name was Rhoda Moore. Not long ago it had been Rhoda Moore Haskell, but the Haskell part had since been carefully cut away through the aseptic surgery of the judicial process. She had thought at the time that this was one of the chief advantages of annulment as opposed to divorce; one automatically returned to one’s maiden name. Legally, one had never been married.

Her lawyer had been against the annulment. “You’re not a Catholic,” he had told her. “You’ve got no basic feeling against divorce. And God knows you’ve got grounds, Rhoda. Why shouldn’t you make him pay?”

“I don’t want his money.”

“Any court in the country would award you a healthy chunk of alimony, a steady income until such time as you remarry. You could go to Reno and call it mental cruelty, or you could stay right here in New York and call it by its rightful name. Adultery. He couldn’t possibly contest it and he couldn’t get out from under.”

But she had held out. She did not want any money from Thomas J. Haskell. Neither a lump sum settlement nor a lifetime annuity in the form of alimony. She had already taken as much from the man as she wanted. He paid court costs and he paid her lawyer’s fee, but that was all he paid.

The annulment was easily arranged. Her lawyer selected the grounds-breaking a premarital promise to raise a family. They had been married two years and had not conceived any children, so this was a handy excuse for the termination of the marriage. It took hardly any time at all and she was free and away from him, out of their apartment and into a room of her own, out of their double bed and into her single bed.

She had been just twenty-two when she married Tom Haskell. She was twenty-four now, a slender girl with finely chiseled features. Her hair was that very dark shade of brown hardly distinguishable from black, and she wore it long so that it reached almost to her shoulders. It was versatile hair; she could spin it into a French roll, braid it into adolescent pigtails, bind it up into a severe chignon or have it teased into something still more flamboyant. But most of the time she wore it long and flowing, very simple but very effective. That was the way she had always worn it as a girl, and she could remember sitting for hours at her mirror, brushing it herself or having it brushed systematically by her mother.

She was five and a half feet tall, narrow-waisted, with high firm breasts and narrow hips. Her complexion was quite light, her mouth small, her eyes a very deep blue, her forehead high. When men looked at her quickly their first impression was one of facile attractiveness; they had to look a second time to realize that she was beautiful. Her beauty was a quiet sort, less than dramatic, the beauty of refinement.

Born in Pennsylvania, in Scranton, a town she scarcely remembered except for vague recollections of smoky air and dirty little houses. When she was seven her father, after a careful analysis of his assets and liabilities, realized the impossibility of increasing the former to the point where they compared favorably to the latter and, after setting his house in some semblance of order, drove his car to the outskirts of town, and blew out his brains with a. 45-calibre automatic pistol.

She remembered little of her father. He had smelled of liquor and cigars, he had held her on his lap and had told her wonderful stories.

That was about all.

After the funeral, after the settling of accounts, she and her mother had moved north to Syracuse, in New York State. She had aunts and uncles there. Her mother worked and Rhoda went to school, and during her third year in high school her mother went to the hospital for an operation, and just eighteen months later, and a week before Rhoda graduated from high school, her mother died.

There was a little insurance money and there was a scholarship, and she went to Harpur College, in Binghamton, and majored in English. She worked nights clerking at a drugstore and she worked summers counseling at a girls’ camp at Lake George. After four years she had a diploma. She took it to New York and carted it around from one publishing house to the next, looking for an editorial position. A trade journal publisher hired her as a receptionist.

She met Tom Haskell there. And dated him, and took his ring, and married him. And lived with him for two years in an apartment on East Eighty-Fifth Street just a few blocks from the park.

“You’re done with it now,” her lawyer had told her. “Glad to be Miss Rhoda Moore again?”

“Yes, very glad.”

A brief touch on the shoulder. “You’re free now. You had a rotten time and he was a pretty rotten man, but you don’t want to let the experience sour you on men in general. We’re not all bad. You’ll take it easy now, relax a little, start building a new life. Pretty soon you’ll meet some guy and get married again. You’re a young girl, Rhoda and you’ve got a full life ahead of you. That’s a cliche, I know, but it happens to be true. You’ll remarry, and you’ll choose a better one this time, and it’ll work for you.”

Remarry?

No. Never.

At seven-thirty she put down the book she had been reading. She took a towel and a bar of soap and went to the bathroom down the hall. It was unoccupied. She locked the door and showered quickly, working a rich lather into her smooth skin, rinsing herself thoroughly. She toweled herself dry and went back to her room and dressed. It was early October, a cool and comfortable time in the city. She put on a lime green sweater, black wool skirt, black shoes, and carried a black calf bag.

Her room was in a four-story brownstone on Grove Street in the Village. It was a quiet street in one of the quietest parts of the Village, a section happily lacking in coffee shops and bars and tourist traps. She walked over to Seventh Avenue, and ate breakfast at Riker’s on Sheridan Square. She sat at the counter with an empty stool to either side of her. The counterman, a balding man with tattoos on his forearms, tried to start a conversation about the weather. She brushed him off easily. She concentrated on her ham and eggs and tried not to think about the nightmare. She drank three cups of black coffee and smoked two cigarettes, then paid the check and left a tip and went out into the morning again.

She liked the Village. At first she had moved there only to avoid the subway. She hated the crush of bodies on the subway, the rancid underground air, the hurry, the hustle, the little men who grabbed at you. Her job was in the Village, and it had seemed worthwhile to pay a higher rental than she could afford for a small and unimposing room, in return for the pleasure of walking to work. She had tasted gracious living for two years as Tom’s wife; she could live without it now.

Bu the neighborhood had turned out to be more than a convenience. She liked the small shops, the narrow, crooked streets, the low buildings, the quiet people who led unhurried lives. She liked the Italian markets on Bleecker, the Armenian restaurant on Charles, the benches in Washington Square. Parts of the Village were too noisy, especially on weekends. Parts were too loudly commercial, too cluttered with tourists, too overwhelmed by bearded boys and bra-less girls toying with rebellion. She avoided those areas and loved what remained.

Her job was on one of those commercial streets. She worked at a small shop on Eighth Street near Macdougal called Heaven’s Door. Her employer was a quiet little man named Seguri Yamatari, a stoop-shouldered and myopic Japanese who eked out a tenuous living selling Oriental goods to tourists. He stocked prints, saki sets, salt and pepper shakers, long bamboo cigarette holders, ivory and teak Buddhas, remaindered sets of steak knives, small porcelain elephants, and similar functional and non-functional bits of bric-a-brac. Occasionally he would escort a customer into the back room, and the customer would leave five or ten minutes later, carrying a package wrapped carefully in brown paper. Rhoda had guessed that Mr. Yamatari carried on some clandestine backroom trade which had little to do with prints or saki sets or porcelain elephants, but she didn’t dig deeper.

She liked the man, and her work. He was always perfectly polite to her, calling her Rhoda or Loda depending upon his whim of the moment, and never much caring if she came to work late or spent extra time on her lunch hour. The work itself could hardly have been simpler. When customers came into the store (which did not happen too often) she waited on them. She showed them whatever they wanted to see, gave them whatever advice she guessed that they wanted to hear, and took their money and sent them on their way with their purchases in hand. For this Mr. Yamatari paid her sixty-five dollars a week. It was not much, but it was enough for her to live on.

This morning the shop was already open when she arrived. It almost always was. Mr. Yamatari seemed to be of that breed of tireless shopkeepers who never leave their shops; several times she had passed the shop well after midnight and had seen his light on in the back room. She went into the shop now, turned on lights, arranged counters, and prepared the place for customers.

It was a slow morning. Around ten, Mr. Yamatari brought out two cups of green tea and sat across a lacquered black desk from her. They drank tea together and Mr. Yamatari spoke politely about a book he had been reading and a movie he had seen. Half an hour later there was a sudden rush of customers. She sold two saki sets, one small screen, several fans, and a china tea service. A little later, a man came in and bought some dangling earrings. The pair he picked out was a terrible one, poorly made, poorly designed, and the ultimate in gaucherie.

“These are perfect,” he told her. “This is the kind of stuff my wife really goes for.”

Your wife must be a terrible person, she thought. But she wrapped the earrings, put them in a small gift box, and took his money.

Get up in the morning, have breakfast, go to work, have lunch, back to work, eat dinner, go home, change clothes, go to a movie, to a play, for a walk, home, to bed-until morning or until the dream made sleep impossible. A quiet life, she thought. A rather uneventful life. There were amusements to it, and there was pleasure, and there were high points and low points.

Sometimes she forgot how utterly alone she was.

That morning, she remembered. There was one young couple, a pair of just-marrieds who came in and shopped around endlessly, and finally bought a small ashtray with the figure of a running horse on it. And there was something so beautifully close about them that it caught at her heart and wrenched. She watched them holding hands, talking closely together, talking in whispers, and she thought of herself in her little bed in her little room, living an absolutely solitary life.

She managed to brush the thoughts away. It looked good on the surface, she told herself. The closeness, the lovey-love. But it didn’t work out. She knew.

There was something special about the blonde. She sensed it the minute the girl came into the shop, very tall, very blonde, very striking in a print blouse and Capri pants. The blonde was not a typical customer of Heaven’s Door.

She was not a tourist, for one thing. When you lived in the Village you developed a special sort of disdain for tourists-they were too noisy, too pushy, too tasteless, too stupid. The blonde was definitely not a tourist. While she didn’t fit any of the convenient stereotypes for Villagers, something about her made it quite obvious that she belonged here.

The blonde’s eyes were on Rhoda as she walked over toward her. She could almost feel the woman’s gaze, steady and confident, and it made her vaguely uncomfortable to be stared at that way. But the girl’s face softened into a smile as Rhoda drew close.

“May I help you?”

“You sure can,” the blonde said. “I’m looking for a gift for a friend. She’s fond of the Oriental motif.”

“A wedding present?”

The blonde seemed amused, “Oh, no,” she said. “Lord, not that, not for her. Although in a way-” She broke off suddenly and smiled again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a tendency to go on talking to myself. No, not a wedding present. Nothing for her apartment. A personal present.”

“Jewelry?”

“Something like that.”

“A pair of earrings-”

“She doesn’t wear them.” The blonde picked up one of the white porcelain elephants, looked at it, put it back in place on the counter. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something rather nice. I was thinking of a necklace or a pendant, something like that. Would you have anything along those lines?”

She moved toward the jewelry counter and began to show the necklaces and pendants. But the blonde girl wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were on Rhoda.

“I’m at a loss,” the girl was saying. “Could you select something? You have excellent taste. I like your sweater.”

“Why, I-”

“You pick,” the girl said. “Something that would make an appropriate farewell gift. For a very close friend.”

She chose a small green heart on a gold chain. The heart was veined with red like bloodstone. “It’s not very Oriental,” she began.

“It’s lovely.” The smile again. “And quite appropriate.”

That night she saw the blonde girl a second time. First she ate dinner alone at an Italian restaurant half a block from Heaven’s Door. She walked down Sixth Avenue to see what was playing at the Waverly but it was a picture she had already seen. She wandered around, then drifted over to Washington Square. The sun had gone down and the air was cool but not uncomfortable. There was a slight breeze. She sat alone on a bench on one of the less traveled paths that wound through the park and took a paperback novel from her bag. She read a few chapters, smoked a cigarette, started reading again.

When she looked up she saw the blonde girl. She was walking down another path about twenty yards away and had not noticed Rhoda. She walked slowly, her eyes lowered, and there was an air of infinite sadness about her. She might have been a character in some movie walking down the Champs Elysee in the rain with tears staining her face. That effect. Nothing so obvious, but the air.

Rhoda almost called to her, almost went to her. The girl had been friendly, but that was nothing extraordinary-customers were often friendly, and sometimes too much so. What was it? A feeling of compatibility, perhaps. A feeling that she and the blonde girl might be able to relax together, to talk, to have a meal or a cup of coffee together.

The blonde girl moved off out of sight; Rhoda went back to her book and tried to lose herself in it. She couldn’t.

She got up from the bench and went back to her room.

That night there was no dream. She slept soundly and woke easily, vitally anxious to begin the day. She had breakfast, and hurried to the shop. Nothing very much happened during the morning, but the time seemed to pass quickly anyway.

A few minutes after two that afternoon she sold a black lacquered commode for $79.95. The customer, a heavyish woman with bleached hair, paid cash for the commode and left delivery instructions. She lived somewhere on Long Island. When she had left the store, Mr. Yamatari danced out of the back room with an expression of glee on his face that was not inscrutable in the least.

“You sell it,” he said. “You sell that thing. You wonderful.”

“Well,” she said.

“Never think we sell it,” Mr. Yamatari said. “Cost…what? Sixteen dollar, fifty cent. Three year ago. Never think we sell the damn thing, and you sell it.”

She hadn’t exactly. The woman with the bleached hair had come in looking for some overpriced and foul object, poorly constructed and shabbily designed, and it had taken no special genius to guess that the black lacquered commode was just what she was searching for. From that point, the commode had sold itself.

“You get ten dollar extra this week,” Mr. Yamatari said expansively. “Ten dollar, no tax.”

That fixed her mood for the rest of the afternoon. She nearly sang as she moved around the shop. Customers who might have annoyed her did not get on her nerves, and when one woman’s young son smashed a china Buddha to smithereens she insisted that the woman forget the whole thing, that it was perfectly all right.

At four-thirty the blonde girl entered the store. Rhoda almost failed to recognize her at first, hadn’t thought of her since the night before. The blonde girl came directly over to her, and Rhoda thought that she was returning the little heart. The idea that her choice had been unsuccessful made her strangely unhappy, as though she herself had failed.

But the girl said, “I was just passing by. I thought I would come in.”

“I’m glad you did.” She hesitated. “Did your friend like the heart?”

“I don’t know. I mailed it to her.”

“Oh, you should have told me she lived out-of-town. I would have sent it right from here-”

“She’s in town,” the girl said. Her voice was oddly strained. “I just thought I would put it in the mail, just on the spur of the moment.” She paused, then looked directly into Rhoda’s eyes. Her own eyes were green, Rhoda saw.

“When do you finish work?”

“Why…five-thirty. Why?”

“Would you have dinner with me?”

“I-”

“I don’t feel like eating alone tonight,” the girl went on “I’d like company. Unless you’re busy-”

She remembered how the girl had looked the night before, in Washington Square. A study in loneliness. She said, “No, I’m not busy.”

“Then I’ll pick you up here? In an hour or so?”

“Well, I ought to change-”

“You look lovely,” the girl said. “We’ll just grab a bite in the neighborhood. About five-thirty?”

“All right.”

The blonde girl’s smile was almost radiant. “My name is Megan,” she said. “Megan Hollis, sometimes called Meg. But not too often because I don’t much care for it. And you’re-”

She gave her name.

“Rhoda,” Megan repeated. Her eyes took in Rhoda’s face, swept downward, then up again. “A nice name. I like it. It fits you.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Five-thirty,” Megan said. “I’ll see you then.”