The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [33]
“I’m an easy guy to work for, Linda, and—”
“I understand you make it a point to sleep with your waitresses.”
He looked hurt. “Who told you that?”
“Everybody.”
“Well, I don’t know what you heard—”
“I just told you what I heard.”
“I don’t know what you heard, but don’t believe everything you hear.” The smile. “Sleep with all my waitresses. Like some Arab with his harem, the way you make it sound. I admit it sometimes works out that there’s what they call a mutual attraction, and then nature takes its course. But as far as—”
“I’m sorry if I jumped to conclusions,” she said, her tone as flat as she could make it. “Thank you for the offer, then. But I really don’t think I’d care for the work.”
“How do you know till you try it?”
“I waited on tables before, Mr. Jaeger. I didn’t like it.”
He nodded, and his face changed; he had tried and failed and was now giving up. “Well, you could always change your mind,” he said.
“I’ll let you know if I do.”
“You do that,” he said.
When the door was closed and the key turned in the lock she sagged against the door and listened to his footsteps on the stairs. She felt drained, exhausted. Early in the conversation she had wanted a cigarette but had been unwilling to step out of the doorway to get one.
Now she found the pack and lit a cigarette, walked listlessly around the room. She wondered if she had handled it well and decided that she had. She had made it nixonially clear that she was not interested in his job or in him and had done so in a manner which ought to discourage further overtures. And she had kept her cool; he left disappointed but left without hating her. It was never a good idea to have a landlord who carried a grudge against you. Life at the Shithouse was bad enough without that.
Men, she thought, were just incredible. She would have gladly bet her remaining hundred and fifty-seven dollars that he had no prospective tenant with an urgent need to know if her apartment was up for grabs. She was convinced that Sully had known the answers to his questions before he asked them. The question that mattered to him was one he had never put in words, however clearly he got his meaning across.
Well, she’d answered that question, too.
She put out the cigarette. She would have to get used to this sort of thing from now on. Men would be sniffing at her like dogs at a bitch in heat. That she had never been less in heat seemed to be immaterial. All that mattered was her availability.
It had been that way after her divorce. Some of the suitors surprised her. Friends of Alan’s, husbands of her own friends, men who had never done so much as exchange a secret glance with her at parties, were suddenly turning up on her doorstep. Not because she was irresistible. Merely because she was there.
The best thing about living with a man, she thought, was that it tended to keep some of the others away.
Sully was breathing heavily on his way down the stairs. He bore the rejection philosophically. The easiest way to get any woman was to be the nearest man around during times of stress. Folk wisdom had it that recent widows were the easiest game on earth, and while Sully couldn’t bear that one out on the basis of personal experience, he saw every reason in the world why it should be true. They leaned on some man for ten or twenty years and all at once he wasn’t there, so they fell over. And as soon as they hit the ground they opened their legs.
This one wasn’t having any. Well, that was up to her. But the only way to find out was to find out, and it hadn’t cost him more than a short walk and a couple flights of stairs. It was like being a salesman, he had often thought. You had to make the calls and get the doors shut in your face if you were going to make any sales. A guy who stopped girls on the street and asked them if they’d like to fuck would get his face slapped a lot, but he would also get laid a damn sight more frequently than the average Joe.
He paused at the ground-floor landing. She’d riven him a hard-on just standing there and talking to him, and he’d been