Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [17]
The apartment itself had not been at fault. It was the life she led there which made her loathe the place itself. A reaction to an apartment, she thought, was an intensely personal thing. It was based less on the place itself than on the life one lived there. She had spent a bad two years with Tom; it would have been inconceivable that she could have liked the place where those two years were spent. And she had spent a lonely and wretched batch of months on Grove Street, so that room could only emerge as a symbol of loneliness.
She had spent the finest night of her life at Megan’s apartment on Cornelia Street. How could she help falling in love with the apartment, as with Megan?
Megan was there at five-thirty. They hurried through crowded streets to her rooming house and climbed the stairs and went into her room. Megan looked around the little cubicle and shook her head.
“This isn’t you,” she said.
“It was. For awhile. I was someone else before last night.”
“A bud that hadn’t opened.”
“I’m open now.” She felt giddy, ready to break out into foolish laughter. She danced into the middle of the room and threw her arms wide apart. “I’m a flower,” she said. “See my pretty petals? I’m a flower in full bloom.”
“You’re a little idiot whom I love.”
“So kiss me. Be a bee and steal my precious nectar.”
“I think you’re a little bit crazy.”
“Is that bad?”
“Not very.”
“I feel so young,” she said. She got a suitcase from the closet, opened it on the bed and began throwing things into it. “I’m twenty-four and I feel about seventeen. How old are you, Megan?”
“Twenty-five.”
“Just a year older than me. You know so much more.”
“Clean living.”
“You make me feel like a child, sometimes. Have you slept with very many girls?”
“You’re the only one.”
“Seriously. Have you?”
A pause. “Not so many.”
“Is that something I shouldn’t ask? I’m sorry. I just want to know everything about you, that’s all. Were you ever with a man?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t married or anything?”
“Hardly.” A long sigh. “I was young, very young, and in college, and there was another girl, and we made love. I was too young to know what I was doing, I guess. And then I was very scared. You know how it is at that age. The most important thing on earth is to be like everybody else, and here I was so obviously different from everybody else. I couldn’t let myself believe that I was really different. I managed to convince myself that it was a question of adjustment. That I could be perfectly normal if I tried hard enough.”
“Heavens.”
“Uh-huh. Oh, I tried, all right. I very nearly got pregnant in the process. I tried with half a dozen different men, tried my damnedest to feet something more profound than boredom and disgust while they grunted over me.”
“And it didn’t work.”
“Of course not. It took a while for me to understand what I am, and to accept it. It may be hard for you.”
“It isn’t now.”
“But it may be.”
There were three suitcases and an armful of coats and dresses. They carried everything downstairs and Megan hailed a cab. They rode to her building. Rhoda paid the driver and they carried the suitcases and loose clothes inside and upstairs to Megan’s apartment. Their apartment now. The Apartment of Megan Hollis and Rhoda Moore.
She took half the closet and one of the two dressers in the bedroom. She hung her toothbrush in the holder in the bathroom, put one of her towels over a towel bar. She came out. Megan was holding two glasses of red wine. She took one and they touched glasses.
“Hello, roommate,” Megan said.
“Hello, lover.”
They drank deeply.
Megan did not refill the glasses.
They turned and looked at each other, and Rhoda felt