Rose Madder

“Hello?”

“Hello, Rosie?” Not Bill. A woman.

“It’s A

“Oh, A

“I’m not doing too well,” A

“Not too well at all. Something very unpleasant has happened, and I need to tell you about it. It may not have anything to do with you-I hope with all my heart it doesn’t-but it might.” Rosie sat down, frightened now in a way she hadn’t been even when she had felt the shapes of dead insects hiding behind the backing of her picture.

“What, A

“I don’t know,” Rosie said numbly.

“I’ll have to think. I… A

“Liberty City,” an older man’s voice said.

“Yes, may I speak to Mr Steiner?”

“This is Mr Steiner,” the slightly hoarse voice replied, sounding amused. Rosie was confused for a moment, then remembered that he was in business with his dad.

“Bill,” she said. Her throat was dry and painful again.

“Bill, I mean… is he there?”

“Hold on, miss.” A rustle and a clunk as the phone was laid down, and, distant:

“Billy! It’s a lady forya!” Rosie closed her eyes. Very distantly, she heard the cricket in the sink: Reep-reep. A long, unbearable pause. A tear slipped out from beneath the lashes of her left eye and started down her cheek. It was followed by one from her right, and a snatch of some old country song drifted through her mind:

“Well, the race is on and here comes Pride up the backstretch… Heartache is goin” to the inside…” She wiped them away. So many tears she had wiped away in this life of hers. If the Hindus were right about reincarnation, she hated to think what she must have been in her last one. The telephone was picked up.

“Hello?” A voice she now heard in her dreams.

“Hello, Bill.” It wasn’t her normal speaking voice, not even a whisper, not really. It was more like the husk of a whisper.

“I can’t hear you,” he said.

“Can you speak up, ma’am?” She didn’t want to speak up; she wanted to hang up. She couldn’t, though. Because if A

“Bill? It’s Rosie.”

“Rosie!” he cried, sounding delighted.

“Hey, how are you?” His unaffected, undisguised delight only made it worse; all of a sudden it felt as if someone were twisting a knife in her guts.

“I can’t go out with you on Saturday,” she said, speaking rapidly. The tears were coming faster now, oozing from beneath her eyelids like some nasty hot grease.

“I can’t go out with you at all. I was crazy to think I could.”

“Of course you can! Jesus, Rosie! What are you talking about?” The panic in his voice-not the anger she had half-expected, but real panic-was bad, but somehow the bewilderment was worse. She couldn’t stand it. “don’t call me and don’t come over,” she told him, and suddenly she could see Norman with horrible clarity, standing across from her building in the pouring rain with the collar of his overcoat turned up and a streetlight faintly illuminating the lower half of his face-standing there like one of the hellish, brutal villains in a novel by

“Richard Racine.”

“Rosie, I don’t understand-”

“I know, and that’s actually for the best,” she said. Her voice was wavering, starting to break apart.

“Just stay away from me, Bill.” She hung the telephone up quickly, stared at it a moment, then voiced a loud, agonized cry. She turned the phone out of her lap with the backs of her hands. The handset flew to the end of its cord and lay on the floor, its open-line hum sounding strangely like the hum of the crickets which had sent her off to sleep on Monday night. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the sound, felt that if she had to listen to it for even another thirty seconds, it would split her head in two. She got up, went to the wall, squatted, and pulled the phone-jack. When she tried to get up again, her trembling legs would not support her. She sat on the floor, covered her face with her hands, and let the tears have their way with her. There was really no choice. A

Five blocks beyond the Hot Pot, where he had come within four seconds of meeting his wife’s eyes through the plate-glass window, Norman turned into a discount store called No More Than 5.

“Everything in the Store Priced Under $5.00!” the store’s motto read. It was printed below a wretchedly executed drawing of Abraham Lincoln. There was a broad grin on Lincoln’s bearded face, he was dropping a wink, and to Norman Daniels he looked quite a bit like a man he had once arrested for strangling his wife and all four of his children. In this store, which was literally within shouting distance of Liberty City Loan amp; Pawn, Norman bought all the disguise he intended to wear today: a pair of sunglasses and a cap with CHISOX printed above the bill. As a man with just over ten years” experience as a detective inspector, Norman had come to believe that disguises only belonged in three places: spy movies, Sherlock Holmes stories, and Halloween parties. They were especially useless in the daytime, when the. only thing makeup looked like was makeup and the only thing a disguise looked like was a disguise. And the gals in Daughters and Sisters, the New Age whorehouse where his pal Peter Slowik had finally admitted sending his rambling Rose, were apt to be particularly sensitive to predators slinking around their waterhole. For gals like these, paranoia was a lot more than a way of life; it was full state-of-the-art. The cap and dark glasses would serve his purpose; all he had pla