This was a vast relief. It was so vast a relief, and left her so limp in the sudden release from pressure, that she became fully aware then, for the first time, how much she had been dreading the prospect of taking any action. Now she need only wait with patience and react appropriately to whatever developed.
Getting out of the chair, she turned the stack of recordings over on the spindle and set the mechanism again and went into the bedroom. In bed, she lay and listened to the waltzes, trying to remember as little as possible and to anticipate nothing at all. She knew very little about music and had little knowledge about the Chopin she was listening to, but she did know that the music made everything else seem less important for the time that she listened to it. With their help, and that of the strong drink, she went into a dreamless sleep and awakened early the next morning.
After dressing, she had coffee in the kitchen and went directly to the shop, arriving about an hour before the shop normally opened. She entered by the front door, locking it after her, and passed through the luxurious simplicity of the salon to her room at the rear. There, she began without delay to work on a half-completed sketch, and she worked, apparently with complete absorption, until she heard, after half an hour, Gussie Ingram at the rear door. She went out then and let Gussie in and returned to the room with Gussie following.
“Snow!” Gussie said bitterly. “God, how I hate the filthy stuff! To think that there are places in the world, on this very continent, where the sun is warm and the days are long and there isn’t one snotty nose or congested chest or any of this Goddamn virus stuff that the doctor always says you’ve got when he doesn’t know. Honest to God, a person must be insane to live in a hellish place like this.”
“Why do you live in it, then?”
“Because I’m insane, darling. Hadn’t you guessed? We’re all insane. If we weren’t, we’d simply swallow a bellyful of sleeping pills, or use any one of the many other pleasant and painless methods of getting out of this filthy mess for good and all instead of hanging on and on for more of the same.”
Filthy was one of her favorite words. She slumped into a chair and began to cough, covering her mouth with a pink tissue. After a while she stopped coughing and lit a cigarette and immediately began to cough again. Watching her, Donna thought that she looked tired and ill, even more tired and more ill than she usually looked. She was, in fact, quite an ugly woman, but it was a striking kind of ugliness that had its own kind of appeal. Her skin was sallow, stretched tightly over the frame of her face and emphasizing the size of a nose and mouth that were large yet lacked emphasis. The cords in her neck became prominent when she turned her head, and her body was thin to the point of emaciation, collar and hip bones threatening, it seemed, to tear through their thin coating of flesh. There was grace in her gauntness, though, an unorthodox smartness in the way she walked and gestured and wore her clothes. Donna often wondered how old she was, and was sure that she was neither young nor old nor any particular age at all, a woman arrested and fixed who would go on and on all her life without ever looking a day older, just closer to dying.
“That’s a nasty cough,” Donna said. “Wouldn’t you like to go home and take care of it?”
“No, thanks.” Gussie extended her legs and blew smoke at her feet. “Another day alone at home with my sweet thoughts is the last thing I want. I’ll gobble lozenges till quitting time and whisky till bedtime, and I’ll manage to survive for a while yet.”
“Did you have a bad Sunday?” Donna asked.
“Filthy. Utterly filthy. I thought the damn day would never end. Not you, I’ll bet. You must have gone on a real fancy kick.”
“Why?”
“Because of the peau de soie, I mean. It isn’t every day you can hang four hundred dollars’ worth of your own talent on someone like Queen Hattie Tyler. Not that the one sale in itself is so much. It’s what it means to your future, darling.”
“Well, I didn’t really go on a very fancy kick. Aaron took me out to dinner and then out to Mother’s. I spent the night and practically all of yesterday there. Do you actually think the sale to Harriet Tyler will turn into something?”
Gussie dragged on her cigarette and coughed the smoke out of her lungs. Her wide, ugly mouth stretched into a smile as she looked at Donna through the blue thinning cloud.
“I’ll be damned surprised if it doesn’t. You know why? Because you’ve got it, darling. You’ve got the feel or the touch or whatever the hell you want to call it. That little thing that the rest of us haven’t got and would give our souls to have. The job you sold Hattie was a perfect conception and a flawless execution, and you can’t say any more than that for any gown. It’ll stand out in any crowd with any comparison, and Hattie will look just like her precious William Walter’s millions because she’s got something to give to the gown as well as to get from it. I hate the bitch, but I’ll have to admit she’s stacked properly, and every slob and scarecrow who sees her in the gown will get the idea they’d look the same in one like it. Oh, don’t worry, darling, they’ll follow Hattie, and Hattie will be back. You’ve got what it takes to get what you want, and now it’ll begin coming with Hattie and the rest, and I’m damn glad of it, because I like you. That makes you exclusive, darling, whether you know it or not, for the people I like are very few. I could count the people I like on the fingers of one hand.”
“Thanks, Gussie. I like you, too. Better than anyone else, I think. You know that.”
“Sure, I know it. There’s a kind of rare and holy bond between us that’s just too precious for words, so let’s forget it. For God’s sake, I couldn’t stand any sloppy scenes this morning. You say you spent Saturday night and Sunday at your mother’s?”
“That’s right. Aaron drove me out after dinner.”
“I commend your devotion, darling. To me, it seems a filthy dull way to waste a night that should have been celebrated.”
“Aaron wasn’t feeling well, as a matter of fact. I think he wanted to get to bed early.”
“His heart again?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say it was that.”
“He never does. Just totes his little detonating pills around, in case. Probably one of these days he’ll pop off in an instant, and it’s a filthy shame because he’s a sweet guy. He’s a sweet, lonely, damned little apostate, and he’s another one of the fingers on the hand I count my friends on.”
The words invoked in Donna’s mind the image of Aaron as the words were spoken, Aaron alone and dead and damned, and she closed her eyes upon the image, trapping it behind her lids. Then, in succession, came the sound of the rear door opening and closing, the brisk swishing of galoshes outside, and the near, softer sound of Gussie’s long sighing.
“That’ll be Serena,” Gussie said. “God bless her pretty little pointed head.”
Serena was a saleslady and sometime model, Gussie’s subordinate. She was a pale blonde with a tall willowy body and almost perfect classical features that were, fortunately, only slightly blemished by vacuity.
“Oh, come off it, Gussie,” Donna said. “You know very well you consider Serena a valuable employee.”
“Of course I do,” Gussie admitted, “but I am constantly amazed by the girl’s absolutely perfect stupidity. In its way, it’s every bit as perfect as her face.”
“That’s all right. A girl with Serena’s looks doesn’t have to have brains.”
“No, darling, you’re wrong there.” Gussie shook her head and leaned forward to crush her cigarette in a tray. “A girl with Serena’s looks needs brains more than most of us. In just her face and body, without anything in addition, she has the most useful tools that a woman can have on earth, but she has to have the brains to use them effectively. It staggers the imagination to consider what things she might accomplish for herself if she were only a little clever, and it’s horribly depressing to know what a monstrous waste Serena is bound to make of them. Do you know that she’s in love? It’s the truth, so help me God, and it’s simply the filthiest kind of a shame. She’s in love with a kid who’s a bookkeeper in a department store and will be a bookkeeper in a department store forever, and they’re only waiting until he gets a lousy ten-dollar raise or something so they can be married. She is simply too stupid to understand that she could just as easily go to bed with the goddamn owner if only she knew how to use what she’s got.” Gussie stood up abruptly and moved toward the door. “Oh, well, the hell with it! It’s no skin off my tail. I’d better go get things open up front. If Queen Hattie wore that gown during the weekend, we may have an early rush for Donna Buchanan originals.”