“All it means to me is never again being embarrassed in a drugstore. It’s your own business but when you say an operation—”
“If I meant an abortion I would have said so.”
“You do tend to cut to the heart of the matter. You know, downstairs I was half convinced you were a virgin, and in bed I got the complete reverse of that impression.”
“In other words, how close to a virgin am I? There were five men. Nobody ever made love to me more than once.”
“An hour from now,” he said, “you won’t be able to make that statement.”
They were married by a justice of the peace in Doylestown on a rainy Thursday afternoon in October. For twenty-five years there had never been a day when she was not conscious of her love for him. He was never an unpleasant drunk, never had blackouts, never became sloppy or hostile. Nor was he ever wholly sober.
He warned her before the wedding that he might not remain faithful to her. “Just don’t bring anything home with you,” she said.
“You wouldn’t get upset?”
“Five years ago the tools in this town passed a law that no dog could run free within town limits. The day the law became official I took two good beagles and gave them to a farmer the other side of Lahaska. I never want anything with a leash on it.”
“I’ve got to marry you because God knows I’ll never find anyone else like you.”
“Of course if a dog or a man would sooner stay home in front of the fire I wouldn’t hold it against him. But it’s got to be him that decides.”
He never once had another woman because he never once wanted one. And not even in fantasy could she entertain the thought of another man. She paid for paints and canvases and he would paint in occasional spurts of great energy. The walls of the clapboard house were covered with his work to the point where every room but one looked like an art gallery.
The exception was the bedroom. Only one canvas hung there, the blank one he had given her on their first meeting. She had hung it that first night, centered over her bed. She had never taken it down.
“It’s a shame he couldn’t have cooled his heels for another month,” Olive said now. “As of Decoration Day we go on summer hours. I’d had it in mind to see if you’d want to work full time starting then. Our summer schedule’s about standard for New Hope. Tuesday through Sunday, eleven to ten, sometimes later on Saturdays if the crowds hold up. Like everybody else we close Mondays. I generally work most of Saturday and Sunday and split shifts on weekdays with whoever works for me.
“I can use you a minimum of forty hours a week, maybe a little more if you want extra work. And I’ll raise you to two fifty an hour. Not out of the goodness of my heart. I pay more during the season because it’s more work. In the good months you’re busy all day long. The scum of the earth streams in and out of the shop in a neverending stream. They may not buy much of anything, but they’re there. Forty hours at two-fifty an hour is a hundred a week before deductions, and if you can’t live on that you’ve got a problem.”
“I can live on that easily.”
“That’s starting Decoration Day. In the meantime it’s pointless to extend the hours. It would just give you more time to sit around waiting for something to happen. What I will do is raise your hourly rate to two fifty immediately. That’s not charity either, it’s an inducement to keep you working for me for the next six weeks. It’s not hard to find summer help around here. There’s nothing easier. What’s hard is to find anybody who’s any good, or if you do they pack up and go to Woodstock in the middle of July and leave you stranded. If you don’t plan on staying through Labor Day, I’d like you to tell me now.”
“I’ll stay. Definitely.”
“Fair enough. In the meantime you can work four days instead of three. That would be twenty-four hours. On Saturdays and Sundays you can open at eleven I’ll take over at two. That’s six more hours making it thirty hours comes to seventy-five dollars a week. Can you get by on that?”
“Yes.”
“Barely, but you can make it.”
“The thing is—”
“What?”
“I’ve almost felt guilty working for you this winter. There are days when the shop doesn’t take in enough to pay my salary, and I don’t want—”
“You don’t want to be a charity case. Well, I don’t want to be a home for stray cats, as far as that goes. I don’t make a profit on weekdays off-season. I stay open because it does a business good in the long run to have regular hours and keep to them. If people never know whether you’ll be open or not they give up after a while and stop coming around.
“This is the most amateur town in the world, Linda. The English are supposed to be a nation of shopkeepers. Well, New Hope is a town of shopkeepers, but ninety percent of them are doing it as a hobby. They don’t have to make a living, but they’re sick of playing solitaire and not bright enough for anything else, so they come here and open some artsy-fartsy shop and try not to lose more money than they can afford. As long as the stock dividends or the alimony or daddy’s check comes in every month they’ve got nothing to worry about.”
She refilled the coffee cups, gave Linda a cigarette and took one herself. She said, “Well, I’m an amateur myself. I opened the Lemon Tree because I thought it would be something interesting to do. I like to watch people. I think they’re the most amusing animals on God’s earth. The locals give you more long-range laughs but the tourists are always good for a few chuckles. They tickle the hell out of me.
“But I wouldn’t keep the shop open if it didn’t make a profit. The money’s not important in and of itself. I could live without it, or God knows I could find easier ways to make more of it. But I don’t want to play a game and lose at it, and the money is how you keep score. Now this is a roundabout way to say what I said in the beginning. I’m not doing you any favors. I’m not extending hours to create work. They’re just hours that I’d be working myself otherwise, and there’s no difference between paying two and a half bucks an hour to you or paying it to myself. Does that cover the subject?”
“I guess so.”
“You can go on down and open up as soon as you finish that coffee. I stay on summer hours until sometime in October, so you’ll have enough to live on at least that long. And by then you’ll have some other man to live with.”
“No, I won’t.”
“Oh? Perhaps not. You’re tougher than you look, aren’t you?”
“I’m learning,” she said.
She left her coffee unfinished and went to the shop and opened for business. That first day was a fluke; although the volume of tourists was no higher than usual, she somehow took in over two hundred dollars. A third of the sum came in a single sale. There were a dozen of Clement McIntyre’s canvases on one wall, and she sold one of them for seventy-five dollars. It was the first painting she had sold in all the months she’d worked there. Later she found out that there was a twenty percent commission on the pictures. “But don’t get carried away,” Olive warned her. “It’ll probably be six months before you sell another one.”
The days that followed were a return to normal, with a handful of small sales scattered across the hours. She chose to take it as an omen that her first day was such a good one. It seemed like confirmation of Olive’s offer and of her own acceptance of it.
She found herself more involved with the Lemon Tree now. She worked more hours, yet found the work less boring. Before the job had been a place to go and little more. If owning the Lemon Tree had been a hobby for Olive, working there had been much the same sort of thing for her. Before she had put in an occasional afternoon before going home to Marc; now she worked there six days a week for the money that she lived on, and when she left it was to return to an empty apartment. By the end of the first week in May she realized that she was getting along very well. She had anticipated bad moments and there had been several of them, but they had not been as bad as she had feared. There were some sleepless nights, and black hours of self-doubt and self-loathing. But they were no worse than similar hours while Marc lived with her. Solitude in and of itself was not a cause of despair, any more than companionship was in and of itself a cure.