“Yes.”
“Are you courting anyone?”
“No.”
“Are you a drinker?”
“Some. Not much.”
“I don’t like to have friends of mine that get drunk and tell everything they know.”
“I can understand that.”
“And I never let a friend of mine come here without he makes an appointment ahead of time. I don’t open my door if I’m not expecting a person. I don’t care whether he’s been a friend of mine before. He don’t get in. You understand that all right?”
“Yes.”
“Another thing you have to promise, if you get to be a friend of mine, don’t ever tell anybody you’re a friend of mine before you ask my permission.”
“I see.”
“One other thing. Don’t ever come here inebriated, regardless of whether you have an appointment. Don’t come here inebriated. Did our friend say how much a visit?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Twenty dollars a visit.”
“Twenty dollars?”
“And always have the money with you. I don’t extend any credit. This isn’t a place, you know. I only have a very few friends. You agree to everything?”
“Yes.”
“Then hang up your clothes in the wardrobe and I’ll be back in a couple minutes. Oh, I almost forgot. No cigars. Never light a cigar while you’re visiting me.”
She went out and he undressed and hung his clothes in the wardrobe and sat on the edge of the bed. She returned, wearing a bathrobe, which she quickly took off and hung on the back of a chair.
“Say,” he said, admiring her body.
For the first time she smiled. “Worth it, huh?” She made a complete turn.
“Just about perfect,” he said.
“I had one friend of mine wanted to carve me in marble. He said I ought to be carved in marble.”
“He’s right.”
“Well, a woman likes to hear compliments. You waiting for me to get in?”
“I guess I was.”
“Let me have a look at you first. Oh. Our friend didn’t tell me about this. You’re young, aren’t you? Twenty-six? Twenty-seven?”
“Almost twenty-seven.”
“I have mostly older friends. I guess you’re the youngest. Well, lie down, honey, and we’ll get used to each other. Would you like that, honey? We get used to each other? The first couple times we got to get used to each other’s ways.”
In 1871 she said to him, “Well, I guess I’ll be losing you as a friend, Abe. I heard my customers talking about you courting a young lady in Richterville. Is that true?”
“Yes.”
“Well, tell me when it’s our last night and I’ll give it to you for a wedding present.”
“I want to give you a present.”
“All right, if it’s cash. You know me, the only kind of presents I take are cash.”
“Oh, it’ll be cash.”
“A young fellow getting married—if you wanted to make me a present of five hundred dollars, I’ll agree to have you be a friend of mine for a year, in case the young lady’s hard to get along with. Some are, and I had a friend of mine wish to visit me again, but I only take so many.”
“All right, I’ll give you five hundred dollars.”
“My downstairs business is getting bigger, and I just as soon weed out some of my friends, but I can’t afford it yet. When I have enough saved up I’m going to move away. Sell the downstairs business and go live in New York City. I want to get some millionaire for my keeper before I start getting old. But first and foremost I want to leave here respectable, no talk about me. If I don’t find a millionaire I may open up a high-class place, and that’ll take money. Be the best in the long run, pay better, because I’d run the place as long as I live. But it takes money and you have to know the right people. You can’t just open up somewhere. My dream come true would be if I found a millionaire and he knew the right people, and maybe put up enough to get me started. A place where a lady could go. I know ladies right here in town, if they had a place to go, they’d go there. I had a lady, one of my downstairs customers, she keeps hinting around that she’d like to see my upstairs rooms. I know what she wants. She wants to see if she can trust me, and then make me an offer to use these rooms. But women are big-mouthed. So are men, but I never had a friend of mine talk, so far. I don’t want any women up here, only me. I spend an hour every day keeping these rooms neat and clean so I don’t have to hire a servant-girl … So you’re going to leave me, Abe? Well, if it’s who they say it is, five hundred dollars won’t break you, and maybe you’ll want to come back. But that doesn’t say I don’t wish you luck. And maybe some time she’s in the family way, you can come and see me. You’d be much better off with me instead of somebody you didn’t know.”
“Thanks, Annabella.”
“And, like I just said, five hundred won’t break you.”
“I’ll have it with me the next time I come to visit you.”
“Where’s she getting her wedding dress, your bride-to-be? Do you know?”
“No. Fort Penn, I guess. Why?”
“Well, it’d be funny if she got it here. I could get a good look at her before you do. I could tell her a few things, too, couldn’t I, Abe? Maybe if she knew what I know she’d run like a cat shot in the behind.”
“Now, Annabella.”
“Oh, don’t worry. I’m only teasing you.”
With no question of fidelity involved he had yet been faithful to Annabella Crowe for nearly five years. All during that period he had known that Mrs. Crowe was going to bed with—as well as he could figure out—three other men and possibly four. But he had known this from the beginning, and he neither felt jealousy nor expressed any desire for exclusive rights to her services. The machinery of a regulated need and its satisfaction created neither lasting gratitude nor masculine vanity nor any other item in the stuff of love. Spontaneity was, of course, entirely absent because of the precautionary appointment arrangements, and Annabella Crowe was so candidly in the business of hiring out her lovely body that she could not more effectively have thwarted romantic notions. After an hour in bed with a man she would sit in her wrapper, holding his folded banknotes in her hand as he dressed, sometimes fanning herself with the money, sometimes using it in gestures, chatting amiably until it was time to lead him to the front door and close it behind him for the night.
But the sexual act with Adelaide was so unlike the brief, calculated meetings with Annabella Crowe that it was a relationship and not a transaction, similar only in the union of their bodies. There was never, when a variation was tried, the suspicion that the variation had originated with Adelaide and another man. It was all, all new and unique with Adelaide, and here was the beginning of love. Abraham Lockwood chose to think of himself as a man of experience, but for the first time in the more than thirty years of his life he was living with a woman and not visiting her. If it was seduction by marriage it was still the larger experience of living with her, and the marriage as a personal institution gained and was strengthened, and finally became love. When it happened Adelaide knew the difference, but she made no comment. She only loved the more.