Warm and Willing - Lawrence Block [57]
“Oh, Jesus—”
“Yeah.” Bobbie closed her eyes. The room was very still. Claude held his pose on the chair like a statue. “I can’t believe it, I knew it would happen sooner or later. But I still can’t believe it. All the times she tried to kill herself and this time she managed it, finally.”
Bobbie looked at her now. Her face was a mask of sorrow but her eyes were quite dry. “Everything’s so rotten,” she said. “So goddamned rotten, everything.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
She hadn’t realized it would be that easy. In the morning, when she left the apartment and went to work, she took off the plain gold wedding band Bobbie had given her and slipped it into her purse. In the early afternoon a man came into the store to buy a present for his sister, a birthday present. She smiled warmly at him, and when she showed him some possible gifts she let her fingers brush his hand. She felt his eyes on her face, her body. After the sale was concluded, he lingered in the shop, talking to her. She handled the conversation easily. It wasn’t long before he asked her name and told her his. Wasn’t long before he asked her to have dinner with him that evening.
“I’d like that,” she said.
“Where can I pick you up? At your apartment?”
“Fine.” She gave him the address. He wrote it down in a small black book and returned the book to his breast pocket. He smiled at her and said he would see her then. She smiled back at him.
So very simple, she thought. All you had to do was make it obvious that you were interested and available. The men did the rest. There was nothing to it, nothing at all.
When he was gone, she opened her purse and replaced the plain gold wedding band upon her finger.
Bobbie was out of town. Peg Brandt was a Chicago girl and her body had been shipped home to her family for burial. Bobbie and Lucia and a few of the other girls who had known Peg very well had gone to Chicago for the funeral. At first Rhoda had wanted to go. Bobbie talked her out of it.
“You don’t have to go,” she said. “You didn’t know her that long or that well. And it would probably be best to keep the New York contingent to a minimum. Peg’s folks know about her, but they might feel that it would be in bad taste for a whole army of lesbians to show up for the funeral.”
She felt badly about it at first. She had liked Peg, and she felt wrong missing the funeral. But what Bobbie said made sense.
The funeral was that afternoon. Bobbie would be staying overnight, returning on a morning plane. Rhoda had the evening to herself.
She would be spending it with a man.
It was an odd decision, one she did not fully understand even now. When the idea first came to her that she ought to do this, there had been an element of compulsion in the notion, as though it was something which had to be undertaken for its own sake with no rhyme or reason involved. The impulse had sprung up as soon as she realized that the opportunity itself was there, as soon as she realized that Bobbie would be gone for an evening. She had thought, automatically and spontaneously, that she could use that time to be with a man.
And, after the shock of her own thought had worn off, the reasons came to her. She had to try, had to see what would happen. Because she saw herself going on and on and on this way, living with Bobbie until, inevitably, she broke with Bobbie, living with another girl and another girl and a whole endless parade of other gay girls. And working for Mr. Yamatari forever, or quitting her job and taking another meaningless job after that, and another, always aching for important work but never finding it, and never really looking too very hard for it. And growing old, and killing herself like Peg Brandt, or being killed slowly by time itself. And burial somewhere, with six gays for pallbearers and a covey of lesbians to mourn her.
No…
Not all of this emptiness, all of this agony, merely because she liked to sleep with girls and did not like to sleep with men. She had been a frightened little girl when she was married to Tom Haskell. She was older now,