“That’s very generous of you,” she said.
“Not generous. I need a waitress and you need work. One hand washes the other, I think they call it. Just a question of being practical.”
“I’m impractical.”
“How’s that?”
“I don’t think I’d like the work, Mr. Jaeger.”
“I’m an easy guy to work for, Linda, and—”
“I understand you make it a point to sleep with your waitresses.”
He looked hurt. “Who told you that?”
“Everybody.”
“Well, I don’t know what you heard—”
“I just told you what I heard.”
“I don’t know what you heard, but don’t believe everything you hear.” The smile. “Sleep with all my waitresses. Like some Arab with his harem, the way you make it sound. I admit it sometimes works out that there’s what they call a mutual attraction, and then nature takes its course. But as far as—”
“I’m sorry if I jumped to conclusions,” she said, her tone as flat as she could make it. “Thank you for the offer, then. But I really don’t think I’d care for the work.”
“How do you know till you try it?”
“I waited on tables before, Mr. Jaeger. I didn’t like it.”
He nodded, and his face changed; he had tried and failed and was now giving up. “Well, you could always change your mind,” he said.
“I’ll let you know if I do.”
“You do that,” he said.
When the door was closed and the key turned in the lock she sagged against the door and listened to his footsteps on the stairs. She felt drained, exhausted. Early in the conversation she had wanted a cigarette but had been unwilling to step out of the doorway to get one.
Now she found the pack and lit a cigarette, walked listlessly around the room. She wondered if she had handled it well and decided that she had. She had made it nixonially clear that she was not interested in his job or in him and had done so in a manner which ought to discourage further overtures. And she had kept her cool; he left disappointed but left without hating her. It was never a good idea to have a landlord who carried a grudge against you. Life at the Shithouse was bad enough without that.
Men, she thought, were just incredible. She would have gladly bet her remaining hundred and fifty-seven dollars that he had no prospective tenant with an urgent need to know if her apartment was up for grabs. She was convinced that Sully had known the answers to his questions before he asked them. The question that mattered to him was one he had never put in words, however clearly he got his meaning across.
Well, she’d answered that question, too.
She put out the cigarette. She would have to get used to this sort of thing from now on. Men would be sniffing at her like dogs at a bitch in heat. That she had never been less in heat seemed to be immaterial. All that mattered was her availability.
It had been that way after her divorce. Some of the suitors surprised her. Friends of Alan’s, husbands of her own friends, men who had never done so much as exchange a secret glance with her at parties, were suddenly turning up on her doorstep. Not because she was irresistible. Merely because she was there.
The best thing about living with a man, she thought, was that it tended to keep some of the others away.
Sully was breathing heavily on his way down the stairs. He bore the rejection philosophically. The easiest way to get any woman was to be the nearest man around during times of stress. Folk wisdom had it that recent widows were the easiest game on earth, and while Sully couldn’t bear that one out on the basis of personal experience, he saw every reason in the world why it should be true. They leaned on some man for ten or twenty years and all at once he wasn’t there, so they fell over. And as soon as they hit the ground they opened their legs.
This one wasn’t having any. Well, that was up to her. But the only way to find out was to find out, and it hadn’t cost him more than a short walk and a couple flights of stairs. It was like being a salesman, he had often thought. You had to make the calls and get the doors shut in your face if you were going to make any sales. A guy who stopped girls on the street and asked them if they’d like to fuck would get his face slapped a lot, but he would also get laid a damn sight more frequently than the average Joe.
He paused at the ground-floor landing. She’d riven him a hard-on just standing there and talking to him, and he’d been wondering if she was going to notice. If she had, she’d given him no sign of it. But you couldn’t be sure with that kind; she was all ice water, frozen to the bone.
He touched himself. He was still partially tumescent, and his groin throbbed with need. He thought of his wife. She would be in bed now. If there was a late movie that she liked, she’d be watching it, propped up with pillows. Or she’d be asleep, smelling jointly of Shalimar and her own warm musk. She always wore Shalimar to bed, and nothing else. She had said so not long before the wedding, and the line had charmed him. Later he found that a movie star had said it twenty years ago, that some flack wrote the line for the star, and that the extent of Melanie’s originality had been to change the name of the perfume from Chanel to her own brand.
He could smell her now, could remember the way her skin felt against his.
He started for the door, stopped abruptly, turned and walked down the hallway. He stopped before a door and put his head against the panel. No voices, just soft music. And a light was on; he could see it under the bottom of the door.
He knocked.
“Who’s there?”
“Me. Sully.”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want? I want to go across the Atlantic in a rowboat.”
“Not tonight.”
“Oh?”
“I got company.”
She might have had company, or she might have been alone. There was no way of knowing. The relationship he had with her was such that he felt free to knock on her door whenever he felt like it, while she in turn was just as free to turn him down. She had not turned him down often, and on those few occasions she had always made an excuse — that she was with someone, that she was feeling sick, that she was washing her hair.
He walked to the Barge Inn parking lot and picked up his car. He drove home and used his key in the door. The bedroom light was out, but he saw her in bed, illuminated in the glow of the television set.
She smiled. “Missed you,” she said.
“Long night.”
“Busy?”
“Fairly busy. What are you watching?”
“Nothing sensational. You could turn it off, I was just looking at it until I fell asleep.”
He tuned off the set, undressed in the darkness and got into bed beside her. He breathed her smell and put a hand on her and she turned to him and pressed against him. He ran his hands over her and felt the texture of her skin and kissed her.
“Oh, I missed you,” she said.
He kissed her and stroked her, telling himself how perfect her breasts were, how warm she was, how desirable. He focused his mind on the urgency of his desire and how much he wanted her. He made love to her with expert hands and she made small noises and caught at the hair on his back and shoulders.
“Oh God don’t make me wait—”
Nothing. Nothing at all. He could get a hard-on talking to a dime-a-dozen nobody who wished he would drop dead, and now he was with a beautiful woman who was dying for him and he didn’t have enough cock to fill a thimble.
“Sully—”
He kicked the bedclothes back, kissed her breasts, then moved downward. Not her fault so why leave her hanging? His mouth found her and she sighed luxuriously with pleasure, told him over and over how good it was.
He performed skillfully, hating her and hating himself all the while. For a while he thought she was never going to make it, but she got there with a near scream and collapsed gasping on her pillow.