Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [26]
Damn it!
At a quarter to seven, the phone rang. She nearly tripped rushing to it. It was Megan.
“Honey, I’m sorry as hell. I’ve been working like a maniac, I should have been home hours ago. This was the first chance I had to call.”
“Where are you?”
“Way the hell up in the East Sixties. A job, complete decoration of an entire apartment, and she wants antiques—”
“She?”
“An old battle-ax living it up on insurance money. One Letitia Warren. Antiques! The hardest part of this job will be finding a chair older than she is. I’m going to have about two weeks of hard work and a hell of a lot of money to show for it, kitten. Listen, I’m in a phone booth. I was all set to hop in a cab but I wanted to call you first. Everything all right?”
“Everything’s fine.”
“Party tonight. Can you throw some dinner together? I didn’t even have lunch, I’ve been going full steam since this morning. This Warren woman. You’d have to see her to believe her. Honey, I would have called you earlier—”
“Oh, it’s all right.”
“—only I didn’t have the chance, I really didn’t. You’re not mad at me?”
“Of course not.”
And she wasn’t, couldn’t be. And couldn’t imagine how she had been jealous, how just moments ago she had been pacing and trembling hysterically. There was no reason for jealousy. Everything was as good as it had ever been.
“I’ll have dinner ready,” she said. “Hurry home, love.”
After Megan had hung up she stood for a moment holding the dead phone in her hand. She felt enormously relieved. And yet the mere knowledge that she been so irrationally jealous worried her a little. She never realized that she had that sort of capacity for jealousy. It was a new discovery for her.
Maybe, she thought, it was an index of love. Perhaps only those so deeply in love could be so blindly jealous.
She went into the kitchen and busied herself with dinner. Megan was working again, she thought. And that was good. She would throw herself into the job and get all wrapped up in her work. It wasn’t good for Megan to have too much time on her hands. Her jobs, she knew, were the type that made for a disjointed sort of life; she might go a month without doing any work all, then might land two decorating jobs at once and work fifteen hours a day for three weeks straight. But work would be good for her.
How very jealous she had been…
“Jan loves to play hostess,” someone was saying to her. “Her parties are never to be missed. Everything has a slightly phony smell to it, and in another twenty minutes or so Jan is going to turn the lights down low and recite a poem by Sappho, but she does know how to throw people together. And how to supply liquor.”
It was Bobbie talking to her, a more sober Bobbie than she had met two nights ago at Leonetti’s. And she looked prettier now; before she had been simply striking, but now her beauty seemed to blend into itself. The chestnut hair was done up in a beehive that made Bobby look even taller than she was. Her dress, a silk shift in black and white, somehow emphasized the curves of her body more than if she were wearing something and clinging. Her lipstick was a deep, dark red.
“I must have made a lovely impression the other night,” Bobby went on. “Boy, was I stoned! You should have seen me the morning after. I woke up and was afraid I would die, and then after a few minutes I was afraid I wouldn’t die. I didn’t, but I might as well have. Tonight, however, I am sober.”
“And happier,” Rhoda said.
“Uh-huh. Where did Meg go?”
“For more drinks, I think.”
“She’s a love, Meg is. Oh, lord. Look over there.”
She looked. Jan Pomeroy, their hostess, was setting a pair of candles on a massive Victorian pedestal. Jan was a dark girl with Semitic features and large gold hoop earrings. She wore a great deal of eye makeup.
“The candle routine,” Bobby explained. “God above, first time I came to one of these parties and saw her fussing with those things I thought we were going to have