The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [38]
“But I wouldn’t keep the shop open if it didn’t make a profit. The money’s not important in and of itself. I could live without it, or God knows I could find easier ways to make more of it. But I don’t want to play a game and lose at it, and the money is how you keep score. Now this is a roundabout way to say what I said in the beginning. I’m not doing you any favors. I’m not extending hours to create work. They’re just hours that I’d be working myself otherwise, and there’s no difference between paying two and a half bucks an hour to you or paying it to myself. Does that cover the subject?”
“I guess so.”
“You can go on down and open up as soon as you finish that coffee. I stay on summer hours until sometime in October, so you’ll have enough to live on at least that long. And by then you’ll have some other man to live with.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Oh? Perhaps not. You’re tougher than you look, aren’t you?”
“I’m learning,” she said.
She left her coffee unfinished and went to the shop and opened for business. That first day was a fluke; although the volume of tourists was no higher than usual, she somehow took in over two hundred dollars. A third of the sum came in a single sale. There were a dozen of Clement McIntyre’s canvases on one wall, and she sold one of them for seventy-five dollars. It was the first painting she had sold in all the months she’d worked there. Later she found out that there was a twenty percent commission on the pictures. “But don’t get carried away,” Olive warned her. “It’ll probably be six months before you sell another one.”
The days that followed were a return to normal, with a handful of small sales scattered across the hours. She chose to take it as an omen that her first day was such a good one. It seemed like confirmation of Olive’s offer and of her own acceptance of it.
She found herself more involved with the Lemon Tree now. She worked more hours, yet found the work less boring. Before the job had been a place to go and little more. If owning the Lemon Tree had been a hobby for Olive, working there had been much the same sort of thing for her. Before she had put in an occasional afternoon before going home to Marc; now she worked there six days a week for the money that she lived on, and when she left it was to return to an empty apartment. By the end of the first week in May she realized that she was getting along very well. She had anticipated bad moments and there had been several of them, but they had not been as bad as she had feared. There were some sleepless nights, and black hours of self-doubt and self-loathing. But they were no worse than similar hours while Marc lived with her. Solitude in and of itself was not a cause of despair, any more than companionship was in and of itself a cure.
And, too, she was becoming more open to casual conversations than she had been before Marc’s departure. She found herself chatting briefly with other residents of the Shithouse. Before she had rarely spoken to anyone there besides Peter and Gretchen—who had been Marc’s friends through the theater—and the couple on the first floor from whom she had bought a handmade silver necklace. And at work she seemed to be functioning as more of a social being.
Part of it, she knew, stemmed from her availability. Other men had followed in Sully’s wake, with more or less subtlety but with the same lack of success. She was open and friendly in most cases but she was simply not interested.
But not everyone who talked to her was a man on the make. She felt that she must be projecting more warmth, that she must give the impression of greater openness. More people were waving hello on the street; more casual acquaintances would stop into the Lemon Tree to exchange a few words.
Peter confirmed it for her. “You’ve changed,” he said. “I suppose everyone’s told you that.”
“As a matter of fact, you’re the first. How have I changed?”
“You seem less uptight, I guess.”
“Maybe I am. How?”
“I don’t know. You’re easier to talk to.”
“Did I used to be