Rose Madder

by Stephen King

Very distantly, she heard a rumble that could have been thunder. That was strange, too, because the sky had been clear when Bill brought her home--she had looked up and marvelled at how many stars she could see, even with all the orange hi-intensity streetlights.

  She drifted, sliding away, sliding into the last dreamless sleep she would have for some time, and her final thought before the darkness claimed her was How can I hear crickets or smell grass? The window's not open; I closed it before I got into bed Closed it and locked it.

  V

  CRICKETS

  1

  Late that Wednesday afternoon, Rosie almost floated into the Hot Pot. She ordered a cup of tea and a pastry and sat by the window, slowly eating and drinking as she watched the endless river of pedestrians outside--most of them office-workers at this hour, headed home for the day. The Hot Pot was actually out of her way now that she was no longer working at the Whitestone, but she'd come here unhesitatingly just the same, perhaps because she had had so many pleasant after-work cups of tea here with Pam, perhaps because she wasn't much of an explorer--not yet, at least--and this was a place she knew and trusted.

  She had finished reading The Manta Ray around two o'clock, and had been reaching under the table for her purse when Rhoda Simons had clicked through on the speaker. "Do you want a little break before we start the next one, Rosie?" she had asked, and there it was, as simple as that. She had hoped she would get the other three Bell/Racine novels, had believed she would, but the relief of actually knowing could not be matched.

  Nor was that all. When they'd broken at four, already two chapters into a lurid little slash-and-stalk thriller called Kill All My Tomorrows, Rhoda had asked Rosie if she would mind stepping down to the ladies' bathroom with her for a few minutes.

  "I know it sounds weird," she said, "but I'm dying for a smoke and it's the only place in the whole damned building I dare to sneak one. Modern life's a bitch, Rosie."

  In the bathroom, Rhoda had lit a Capri and perched on the sink-ledge between the two basins with an ease that bespoke long familiarity. She crossed her legs, hooked her right foot behind her left calf, and looked at Rosie speculatively.

  "Love your hair," she said.

  Rosie touched it self-consciously. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing she'd had done in a beauty-shop the previous evening, fifty dollars she could not afford ... and had been unable not to spend. "Thanks," she said.

  "Robbie's going to offer you a contract, you know."

  Rosie frowned and shook her head. "No-I don't know. What are you talking about?"

  "He may look like Mr. Pennybags on the Monopoly Community Chest cards, but Robbie's been in the audio-book biz since 1975, and he knows how good you are. He knows better than you do. You think you owe him a lot, don't you?"

  "I know I do," Rosie replied stiffly. She didn't like the way this conversation was going; it made her think of those Shakespearian plays where people stabbed their friends in the back and then reeled off long, sanctimonious soliloquies explaining how unavoidable it had been.

  "Don't let your gratitude get in the way of your self-interest," Rhoda said, tapping cigarette ash neatly into the basin and chasing it with a squirt of cold water. "I don't know the story of your life and I don't particularly want to know it, but I know you did The Manta Ray in just a hundred and four takes, which is fucking phenomenal, and I know you sound like the young Elizabeth Taylor. I also know-because it's just about taped to your forehead--that you're on your own and not used to it. You're so tabula rasa it's scary. Do you know what that means?"

  Rosie wasn't entirely sure-something about being naive, she thought--but she wasn't going to let on to Rhoda. "Yes, of course."

  "Good. And don't get me wrong, for Christ's sake-I'm not trying to cut in on Robbie, or cut my own piece out of your cake. I'm rooting for you. So's Rob, and so's Curtis. It's just that Rob's also rooting for his wallet. Audio-books is still a brand-new field. If this were the movie business, we'd be halfway through the Age of the Silents. Do you understand what I'm trying to say?"

  "Sort of."

  "When Robbie listens to you reading The Manta Ray, he's thinking of an audio version of Mary Pickford. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. Even the way he met you adds to that. There's a legend about Lana Turner being discovered in Schwab's Drugstore. Well, Robbie's already making a legend in his own mind about how he discovered you in his friend Steiner's pawnshop, looking at antique postcards."

  "Is that what he told you I was doing?" she asked, feeling a surge of warmth for Robbie Lefferts that was almost love.

  "Uh-huh, but where he found you and what you were doing there doesn't really matter. The fact is that you're good, Rosie, you're really, really talented. It's almost as if you were born to this job. Rob discovered you, but that doesn't give him a right to your pipes for the rest of your life. Don't let him own you."

  "He'd never want to do that," Rosie said. She was frightened and excited at the same time, and also a little angry at Rhoda for being so cynical, but all of these feelings had been suppressed beneath a bright layer of joy and relief: she was going to be all right for a little longer. And if Robbie really did offer her a contract, she might be all right for even longer than that. It was all very well for Rhoda Simons to preach caution; Rhoda wasn't living in a single room three blocks from an area of town where you didn't park your car at the curb if you wanted to keep your radio and your hub-caps; Rhoda had an accountant husband, a house in the suburbs, and a 1994 silver Nissan. Rhoda had a VISA and an American Express card. Better yet, Rhoda had a Blue Cross card, and savings she could draw on if she got sick and couldn't work. For people who had those things, Rosie imagined, advising caution in business affairs was probably as natural as breathing.

  "Maybe not," Rhoda said, "but you could be a small goldmine, Rosie, and sometimes people change when they discover goldmines. Even nice people like Robbie Lefferts."

  Now, drinking her tea and looking out the window of the Hot Pot, Rosie remembered Rhoda dousing her cigarette under the cold tap, dropping it in the trash, and then coming over to her. "I know you're in a situation where job security is very important to you, and I'm not saying Robbie's a bad man-I've been working with him off and on since 1982 and I know he's not--but I'm telling you to keep an eye on the birds in the bush while you're making sure the one in your hand doesn't fly away. Do you follow me?"

  "Not entirely, no."

  "Agree to do six books to start with, no more. Eight in the morning to four in the afternoon, right here at Tape Engine. A thousand a week."

  Rosie goggled at her, feeling as if someone had stuck a vacuum-cleaner hose down her throat and sucked the air out of her lungs. "A thousand dollars a week, are you crazy?"

  "Ask Curt Hamilton if he thinks I'm crazy," Rhoda said calmly. "Remember, it's not just the voice, it's the takes. You did The Manta Ray in a hundred and four. No one else I work with could have done it in less than two hundred. You have great voice management, but the absolutely incredible thing is your breath control. If you don't sing, how in God's name did you get such great control?"

  A nightmarish image had occurred to Rosie then: sitting in the comer with her kidneys swelling and throbbing like bloated bags filled with hot water, sitting there with her apron held in her hands, praying to God she wouldn't have to fill it because it hurt to throw up, it made her kidneys feel as if they were being stabbed with long, splintery sticks. Sitting there, breathing in long, flat inhales and slow, soft exhales because that was what worked best, trying to make the runaway beat of her heart match the calmer rhythm of her respiration, sitting there and listening to Norman making himself a sandwich in the kitchen and singing "Daniel" or "Take a Letter, Maria" in his surprisingly good barroom tenor.

  "I don't know," she had told Rhoda, "I didn't even know what breath control was until I met you. I guess it's just a gift."

  "Well, count your blessings, keed," Rhoda said. "We better get back; Curt'll think we're practicing weird female rituals in her
e."

  Robbie had called from his office downtown to congratulate her on finishing The Manta Ray--just as she was getting ready to leave for the day, this had been--and although he hadn't specifically mentioned a contract, he had asked if she would have lunch with him on Friday to discuss what he called "a business arrangement." Rosie had agreed and hung up, feeling bemused. She remembered thinking that Rhoda's description of him was perfect; Robbie Lefferts did look like the little man on the Monopoly cards.

  When she put down the telephone in Curtis's private office--a cluttery little closet with hundreds of business cards stuck to the cork walls on pushpins--and went back out into the studio to collect her purse, Rhoda was gone, presumably for a final smoke in the ladies'. Curt was marking boxes of reel-to-reel tape. He looked up and gave her a grin. "Great work today, Rosie."

  "Thanks."

  "Rhoda says Robbie's going to offer you a contract."

  "That's what she says," Rosie agreed. "And I actually think she might be right. Knock on wood."

  "Well, you ought to remember one thing while you're dickering," Curtis said, putting the tape boxes on a high shelf where dozens of similar boxes were ranged like thin white books. "If you made five hundred bucks for The Manta Ray, Robbie's already ahead of the game ... because you saved maybe seven hundred in studio time. Get it?"

  She'd gotten it, all right, and now she sat here in the Hot Pot with the future looking unexpectedly bright. She had friends, a place to live, a job, and the promise of more work when she had finished with Christina Bell. A contract that might mean as much as a thousand dollars a week, more money than Norman made. It was crazy, but it was true. Might be true, she amended.

  Oh, and one other thing. She had a date for Saturday ... all of Saturday, if you counted in the Indigo Girls concert that night.

  Rosie's face, usually so solemn, broke into a brilliant smile, and she felt a totally inappropriate desire to hug herself. She took the last bite of her pastry and looked out the window again, wondering if all these things could possibly be happening to her, if there could actually be a real life where real people walked out of their prisons, turned right ... and walked into heaven.

  2

  Half a block away, DON'T WALK went out and WALK came on. Pam Haverford, now changed out of her white chambermaid's uniform and into a pair of trim red slacks, crossed the street with two dozen other people. She had worked an extra hour tonight and had no reason on earth to think Rosie would be in the Hot Pot ... but she did think it, just the same. Call it woman's intuition, if you wanted.

  She glanced briefly at the big lug crossing beside her, who she thought she had seen at the Whitestone newsstand a few minutes ago. He might have qualified as someone interesting if not for the look in his eyes ... which was no look at all. He glanced briefly at her as they stepped up on the far curb, and the lack of expression in those eyes--the feeling of some absence behind them--actually chilled her.

  3

  Inside the Hot Pot, Rosie abruptly decided she wanted a second cup of tea. She had no earthly reason to think Pam might drop in--it was a full hour past their usual time--but she did, just the same. Maybe it was woman's intuition. She got up and turned toward the counter.

  4

  The little bitch beside him was sort of cute, Norman thought, tight red slacks, nice little ass. He dropped back a couple of steps-the better to enjoy the view, my dear-but almost as soon as he did, she turned into a little restaurant. Norman glanced in the window as he went by, but saw nothing interesting, just a bunch of old bags eating gooey shit and slopping up coffee and tea, plus a few waiters rushing around in that mincing, faggy way they had.

  The old ladies must like it, Norman thought. Fag-walking like that must pay off in tips. It had to; why else would grown men walk that way? They couldn't all be fags ... could they?

  His gaze into the Hot Pot-brief and disinterested-touched on one lady considerably younger than the blue-rinsed, pants-suited types sitting at most of the tables. She was walking away from the window and toward the cafeteria-style serving counter at the far end of the tearoom (at least he supposed that was what you called places like this). He took a quick look at her ass, simply because that was where his eyes always went first when it was a woman younger than forty, judged it not too bad but nothing to write home to Mother about.

  Rose's ass used to look like that, he thought. Back in the days before she let herself go and it got as big as a goddam footstool, that is.

  The woman he glimpsed through the window also had great hair, much better than her fanny, actually, but her hair didn't make him think of Rosie. Rosie was what Norman's mother had always called a "brownette, " and she rarely took any pains with her hair (given its lackluster mousehide color, Norman didn't blame her). Pulling it back in a ponytail and securing it with a rubber band was her usual way of wearing it; if they were going out to dinner or a movie, she might thread it through one of those elastic scrunch things they sold in the drugstore.

  The woman upon whom Norman's gaze touched briefly when he looked into the Hot Pot was not a brownette but a slim-hipped blonde, and her hair was not in a ponytail or a scrunch. It hung down to the middle of her back in a carefully made plait.

  5

  Perhaps the best thing to happen all day, even better than Rhoda's stunning news that she might be worth a thousand dollars a week to Robbie Lefferts, was the look on Pam Haverford's face when Rosie turned away from the Hot Pot cash register with her fresh cup of tea. At first Pam's eyes slid over her with absolutely no recognition at all ... and then they snapped back, widening as they did so. Pam started to grin and then actually shrieked, probably pushing at least half a dozen pacemakers in the ferny little room dangerously close to overload.

  "Rosie? Is that you? Oh ... my ... God!"

  "It's me," Rosie said, laughing and blushing. She was aware that people were turning to look at them, and discovered--wonder of wonders--that she did not exactly mind.

  They took their tea to their old table by the window, and Rosie even allowed Pam to talk her into another pastry, although she had lost fifteen pounds since coming to the city and had no intention of putting it back on if she could help it.

  Pam kept telling her that she couldn't believe it, simply couldn't beleeeve it, a remark Rosie might have been tempted to chalk up to flattery, except for the way Pam's eyes kept moving from her face to her hair, as if she was trying to get the truth of it straight in her mind.

  "It makes you look five years younger," she said. "Hell, Rosie, it makes you look like jailbait!"

  "For fifty dollars, it ought to make me look like Marilyn Monroe," Rosie replied, smiling ... but since her talk with Rhoda, she felt a lot easier in her mind about the amount she'd spent on her hair.

  "Where did you--" Pam began, then stopped. "It's the picture you bought, isn't it? You had your hair done the same as the woman in the picture."

  Rosie thought she would blush at this, but no blush came. She simply nodded. "I loved that style, so I thought I'd try it." She hesitated, then added: "As for changing the color, I still can't believe I did it. It's the first time in my whole life that I've changed the color of my hair."

  "The first--! I don't believe it!"

  "It's true."

  Pam leaned across the table, and when she spoke it was in a throaty, conspiratorial whisper: "It's happened, hasn't it?"

  "What are you talking about? What's happened?"

  "You've met someone interesting!"

  Rosie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again without the slightest idea of what she intended to say. It turned out to be nothing; what came out instead of words was laughter. She laughed until she cried, and before she was done, Pam had joined in.

  6

  Rosie didn't need her key to open the street door at 897 Trenton Street--that one was left unlocked until eight or so on weeknights-but she needed the small one to open her mailbox (R. McCLENDON taped to the front of it, boldly asserting that she belonged here, yes she did
), which was empty except for a Wal-Mart circular. As she started up the stairs to the second floor, she shook out another key. This one opened the door to her room, and except for the building super, she had the only one. Like the mailbox, it was hers. Her feet were tired-she had walked the entire three miles from downtown, feeling too restless and too happy to sit on a bus, also wanting more time than a bus would give her to think and dream. She was hungry in spite of two Hot Pot pastries, but her stomach's low growling added rather than detracted from her happiness. Had she ever in her life felt such gladness? She thought not. It had spilled over from her mind into her entire body, and although her feet were tired, they still felt light. And her kidneys didn't hurt a bit, in spite of the long walk.

  Now, letting herself into her room (and remembering to lock the door behind her this time), Rosie began to giggle again. Pam had her someone interestings. She had been forced to admit a few things--she was, after all, planning to bring Bill to the Indigo Girls concert on Saturday night and the women from D & S would meet him then--but when she protested that she hadn't colored her hair and plaited it simply on Bill's account (this felt true to her, actually), she got only comically rolling eyeballs and a burlesque wink from Pam. It was irritating ... but also rather sweet.

  She opened the window, letting in the mild late-spring air and the sounds of the park, then crossed to her small kitchen table, where a paperback lay beside the flowers Bill had brought her on Monday night. The flowers were fading now, but she didn't think she could bring herself to throw them out. Not, at least, until after Saturday. Last night she had dreamed of him, had dreamed of riding behind him on his motorcycle. He kept driving faster and faster, and at some point a terrible, wonderful word had occurred to her. A magic word. She couldn't remember exactly what it had been now, something nonsensical like deffle or feffle, but in the dream it had seemed like a beautiful word ... powerful, too. Don't say it unless you really, really mean it, she remembered thinking as they flashed along some country highway with hills on the left and the lake winking blue and gold sunflashes through the firs on their right. Up ahead was an overgrown hill, and she knew that there was a ruined temple on the far side of it. Don't say it unless you mean to commit yourself, body and soul.