Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [36]
Oh, God—
“I’ve been settling down,” Bobbie said. “I spend of most of my time just sitting around my apartment, usually with a glass in my hand. But not always. I met a girl this weekend after the party and I thought everything was going to start swinging again, but after a night I knew this was strictly a short-time affair, and she left this morning and I couldn’t be happier. She was fine in bed—I’m being vulgar, aren’t I, Meg?”
“A little.”
“I’m the vulgar sort. Dirty old Bobbie. She was fine in the hay, kids, but that doesn’t have much to do with things. It truly doesn’t. She was so very boring, one of the pretentiously intellectual types, the kind that likes to discuss Sartre between sets. She tried to come on strong like the dyke in No Exit. We parted company, thank heaven.” She sighed. “So if anybody ever wants to come looking for little Bobbie, you know where she can be found. Home, and alone.”
And then a brief but significant glance at Rhoda—
She was very nice to Megan on the way home. They had kept rubbing one another the wrong way earlier in the evening, but now everything seemed to have smoothed out. They walked arm in arm, and they talked easily, and there was only one thing wrong.
Rhoda knew that she was acting.
Acting, playing a part, fitting herself into a role. Because she was being very nice to Megan now, and she would continue to be very nice to Megan, and she felt very close to Megan, closer now, oddly enough, than she had felt when love was stronger between them.
They hurried upstairs to Megan’s apartment, a little lightheaded from the scotch, and they had coffee together in the kitchen. She did not say anything to Megan about Bobbie having been home that night after all, did not let on that she knew Megan had lied about calling her. And Megan did not mention Bobbie, either.
But afterward, in bed, waiting for sleep to come, she let herself think all the thoughts that might better have been left unthought. And she knew just what was going to happen, knew it with a quiet certainty.
In the morning, she would go to work. And at five-thirty, after work, she would go somewhere for a quick dinner which she would eat without tasting. Then, after a quick drink or two at Leonetti’s for courage, she would go where she could not help going.
To Bobbie’s apartment.
CHAPTER NINE
It went as she had known it would and she moved through the day as if in a dream. Her mind somehow failed to involve itself in what she did, and she waited on customers in Heaven’s Door without seeing their faces, showing them ashtrays and saki sets, taking their money and wrapping their packages, and making pleasant conversation with the enthusiasm of a well-designed robot programmed for retail sales work. She thought of Bobbie, and of herself, and she thought how little control she had over what she did. She was a puppet dancing from bloody strings, tripping here and there with no direction of her own.
It was early when she got to Leonetti’s. The bar was deserted, with just one couple huddled close in the back and one butchy girl drinking straight shots at the bar. She took a stool at the far end of the bar from the mannish girl, and ordered J & B on the rocks, drank the drink quickly and took a refill. She had never done much drinking before—hardly any in college, very little during the years as Tom Haskell’s wife. But she was learning. She worked more slowly on her second drink, letting the liquor seep into her body and settle her down. A couple of quick ones for courage, she thought. Lord, how she had changed.
She left the bar. Bobble’s apartment was a few blocks uptown on Horatio Street. She had never been there before but she remembered the address and had no trouble finding the building. A brownstone, well preserved. Over one of the doorbells, a small card with Roberta Kardaman in Gothic script. Roberta—she had never thought of the girl as Roberta. Just as Bobbie.
She did not ring the bell. She climbed stairs, found the door to Bobbie’s apartment. The same card in a slot under a peephole