The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [40]
There was no movie within walking distance. There was the Playhouse, but seats were not inexpensive and she had never been that much of a theatergoer. In the time she had been with Marc, first in New York and then here, she had seen far more plays than she cared to.
Occasionally she went to the Raparound and sat over a cup of coffee for an hour or two. The problem was that she hated to go alone, not because she minded sitting by herself, but because she looked as though she were waiting to be approached. She had enough men coming on to her without sitting around asking for it.
“You ought to get out more,” Tanya told her one afternoon. She was at the Lemon Tree and Tanya had stopped in to handle the dolls, tap experimentally on the African drums, and chat idly while she examined the stock. “You must go nuts spending that much time looking at four walls.”
“I don’t mind it.”
“No? It would, have me walking across the ceiling in no time at all. I need people, conversation.”
If she required conversation, Linda thought, her affair with the silent painter smacked of masochism. “Besides,” Tanya, went on, “how are you going to meet somebody?”
“Going to meet who?”
“Well, anybody.”
“Who am I supposed to meet?”
“Well, you won’t know his name until you meet him, Linda. A man, like. You don’t want to be a nun, do you?”
Did she? She was unsure of the answer and had spent recent weeks trying to avoid the question. She said, “I don’t really want to meet anybody just now.”
“It’s like horse riding. When you have a bad fall the thing is to get right back on again.”
“So you can have another bad fall? I would think the thing to do is stay away from horses. But that’s not the point, Tanya. I didn’t really have a bad fall. I’m in better shape now than I was before he left. I was going to leave him sooner or later, he just happened to get around to it first. ‘You can’t fire me, I quit,’ that sort of thing.”
“Then what’s the hassle?”
“I don’t feel like getting involved with anybody for the time being. That’s all.”
“Well, that’s cool.” She picked up a woven shoulder bag, modeled it, put it back on its hook. “But just girl to girl, what do you do about sex?”
“About sex,” she drawled, “I has me cuppa tay.”
“Huh?”
“Oh, it’s a joke. An Englishman is in the west of Ireland, and he likes it there but there’s nothing to do for sex, so he asks an Irishman what they do about sex, and the Irishman says about sex we have our tea. I can’t do accents at all and it’s not that good a joke in the first place but I happened to think of it.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“It’s not very funny.”
“But besides tea, Linda, what do you do?”
For the slightest moment she wondered what the point of this was, wondered if there was a motive to Tanya’s interest. Paranoia, she told herself. Not everyone in the world wanted her fair white body. And Tanya was an unlikely lesbian; Bill kept her busy enough in his room across the hall. All the two of them seemed to do was screw and watch television, and they hadn’t been watching much television lately.
“I don’t do anything,” she said.
“I don’t mean to pry.”
“No, that’s all right.”
“But don’t you … I don’t know, doesn’t it get to you? I mean you’ve lived with guys, you get used to it”
“I’ve lived without them and I’ve gotten used to that, too.”
“I suppose so. I couldn’t go without it myself. I just get so I can’t even talk to people. I start biting my nails, I get ginchy, the whole trip. I mean a couple of days and I just about break out in hives. I guess people are different that way.”
“I guess they are.”
“For me it wouldn’t be healthy. And as far as getting involved. I mean there are enough guys in this town and the last thing they want is getting involved. Unless you’re afraid of falling in love yourself and getting hurt.”
“No.”
“The point is, you could take care of your needs without getting involved.”
“Well,