“Rose?” Bill asked.
“You okay? You look pale.” No, she wasn’t okay. She knew the voice in her head was a lying voice, one which came from a part of her that was still blighted by Norman’s poison, but what she knew and what she felt were very different things. She couldn’t sit in the midst of all these people, that was all, smelling their soaps and colognes and shampoos, listening to the bright interweavings of their chatter. She couldn’t deal with the waiter who would come bending into her space with a list of specials, some perhaps in a foreign language. Most of all she couldn’t deal with Bill Steiner-talking to him, answering his questions, and all the time wondering how his hair would feel under her palm. She opened her mouth to tell him she wasn’t okay, that she felt sick to her stomach and he’d better take her home, perhaps another time. Then, as she had in the recording studio, she thought of the woman in the rose madder chiton, standing there on top of the overgrown hill with her hand upraised and one bare shoulder gleaming in the strange, cloudy light of that place. Standing there, completely unafraid, above a ruined temple that looked more haunted than any house Rosie had ever seen in her life. As she visualized the blonde hair in its plait, the gold armlet, and the barely glimpsed upswell of breast, the flutters in Rosie’s stomach quieted. I can get through this, she thought. I don’t know if I can actually eat, but surely I can find enough courage to sit down with him for awhile in this well-lighted place. And am I going to worry about him raping me later on? I think rape is the last thing on this man’s mind. That’s just one of Norman’s ideas-Norman, who believes no black man ever owned a portable radio that wasn’t stolen from a white man. The simple truth of this made her sag a little with relief, and she smiled at Bill. It was weak and a little trembly at the corners, but better than no smile at all.
“I’m all right,” she said.
“A tiny bit scared, that’s all. You’ll have to bear with me.”
“Not scared of me?” Damned right scared of you, Norman said from the place in her head where he lived like a vicious tumor.
“No, not exactly.” She raised her eyes to his face. It was an effort, and she could feel her cheeks flushing, but she managed.
“It’s just that you’re only the second guy I’ve ever gone out with in my whole life, and if this is a date, it’s the first real one I’ve been on since my high-school senior prom. That was back in 1980.”
“Holy God,” he said. He spoke softly, and without a trace of facetiousness.
“Now I’m getting a little scared.” The host-Rosie wasn’t sure if you called him a maitre d” or if that was someone else-came up and asked if they wanted smoking or non-smoking. “do you smoke?” Bill asked her, and Rosie quickly shook her head. “somewhere out of the mainstream would be great,” Bill said to the man in the tuxedo, and Rosie caught a gray-green flicker-she thought it was a five-dollar bill-passing from Bill’s hand to the host’s.
“A corner, maybe?”
“Certainly, sir.” He led them through the brightly lighted room and beneath the lazily turning paddle-fans. When they were seated, Rosie asked Bill how he had found her, although she supposed she already knew. What she was really curious about was why he had found her.
“It was Robbie Lefferts,” he said.
“Robbie comes in every few days to see if I’ve gotten any new paperbacks-well, old paperbacks, actually; you know what I mean-” She remembered David Goodis-It was a tough break, Parry was innocent-and smiled.
“I knew he hired you to read the Christina Bell novels, because he came in special to tell me. He was very excited.”
“Was he really?”
“He said you were the best voice he’d heard since Kathy Bates’s recording of Silence of the Lambs, and that means a lot-Robbie worships that recording, along with Robert Frost reading
“The Death of the Hired Man.” He’s got that on an old thirty-three-and-a-third Caedmon LP. It’s scratchy, but it’s amazing.” Rosie was silent. She felt overwhelmed. “so I asked him for your address. Well, that’s maybe a little too glossy. The ugly truth is I pestered him into it. Robbie’s one of those people who happens to be very vulnerable to pestering. And to do him full credit, Rosie…” But the rest drifted away from her. Rosie, she was thinking. He called me Rosie. I didn’t ask him to; he just did it.