Enough of Sorrow

by Lawrence Block

  She nodded.

  “You don’t mind that kind of lying, do you?” She assured him that she didn’t. “Because it’s necessary in this business. All right, that’s how it goes with the phone calls. Now when somebody—”

  The phone rang. He started to reach for it, then stopped himself. “You might as well learn right away,” he said. “Answer it.”

  She picked up the phone. “LeGo Associates,” she said, her voice crisply efficient and professional. “Good morning.” A female voice wanted to speak with Leon. “Who’s calling, please?” The caller identified herself. “One moment, please,” she said.

  She pressed the Hold button and turned to Gordon. “It’s—”

  “The switch,” he said. “The intercom switch.”

  “But you’re right here,” she said.

  “Just so you get the hang of it.”

  She threw the switch. “Miss Marla Harriman, Mister Gordon.” she said.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said.

  And, after he had told Marla Harrison that he had not heard from someone named Prager, but that he would be in touch with her as soon as anything popped, he told Karen she had done very well. “A good telephone manner,” he said. “Very important. Now with people walking right into the office you do about the same, only different. As soon as they come in you flip the switch, and that way I can hear the whole conversation. If it’s somebody which you don’t know, and they’ll all be like that at the start, you make sure they say their names loud and clear. Or otherwise you greet them and mention their name, so either way I know who it is. Sometimes it can be a lot of trouble to duck people you would rather not talk to, and who needs the aggravation, and if you come into the office to ask me and then come out and tell them I’m out they know I’m just ducking them, and it’s a headache, believe me. Now, do you see those two bulbs on the desk?”

  She looked. There were two bulbs on the desk top, one red and one green.

  “When I hear the name, I’ll flash you. A red means get rid of the bum, a green means send him right on in. That way anybody who gets sent away is sure it’s on the up-and-up. I had to get all of this specially designed. I paid for it, believe me, but you couldn’t ask for a better system. You think you understand how it works?”

  “I think so.”

  “You seem like a pretty sharp girl, I’ll admit that. And a very good voice on the telephone. You handle the calls and the creeps that walk into the office and you that properly and I’ll tell you the truth, there’s not an awful lot of other work to do. There’s a typewriter on your desk but you probably won’t use it more than once a week if that. I’m funny, I got in the habit of typing all my own letters. So if you just answer the phone and the rest of it, that’s enough. You get the picture?”

  “Yes,” she said

  “Good.” He grabbed his hat. a dark gray fedora with the crown slightly crushed in front. “I’ve got to see a guy,” he said. “I’ll be back in forty minutes or an hour. Anybody calls, you tell ’em I’m out.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said.

  She had not thought the job would be terribly taxing but it was even easier than she had guessed. Gordon was gone most of the morning. There were about a dozen calls, and she told each caller that the agent was out and tried to get a message. When there were messages she typed them up on 3 x 5 index cards and placed them on his desk.

  Three times the office door opened that morning. A messenger left a package, a very tall and very thin blonde asked for Gordon and left without giving her name when she learned he was out, and a stately middle-aged man paused in the doorway, smiled brightly at her, and told her that she improved the agent’s office immeasurably.

  He looked astonishingly familiar but she could not place him at first. He was tall and slender, with black hair combed straight back, gray at the temples. His nose was long and hawklike, his eyes brightly blue. He said something she didn’t hear, and then she blurted out, “Oh, you’re Judge Randall!”

  “Fantastic,” the man said.

  She blushed profoundly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I knew you looked familiar, and then I remembered—”

  “Judge Philip Randall,” he intoned. “Linda’s understanding uncle on As Time Goes By. To be known for that…But it does sell a lot of soap, doesn’t it? Shakespeare never sold soap, the poor soul, so that’s a point in our favor. Edwin Booth never sold soap, Jack Barrymore never sold soap.”

  She was still blushing. He smiled disarmingly. “Don’t redden so. I’m actually quite delighted to be Judge Randall, and equally delighted to be recognized at all. Your employer is a diamond in the truly rough but his heart is pure. And his skill is enormous, getting steady work for an old has-been. An old has-been by the unlikely name of Adrian March, to be specific. Is Leon in?”

  “No, I’m afraid he’s out, Mister March.”

  “A pity. Tell him—let me think, now—tell him I came by, and it was nothing urgent, but that Slade wants me for a commercial and he should get in touch with him. And that I got the impression they want me rather badly, though I fail to see how I can persuade a clutch of frustrated housewives to use Flem in their automatic washers. Or whatever idiocy they’re selling. Can you remember that?”

  “Yes, Mister March.”

  “And tell him also that he’s engaged a perfectly charming girl, albeit one who’s a bit out of place in the employ of so ill-bred a lad as Leon. Be sure you tell him that. It’s ever so much more important than a television commercial. I didn’t see you here at all last week, and I was here Friday. Did you just start work?”

  “This morning.”

  “And your name is…”

  “Karen,” she said. “Karen Winslow.”

  “Poetry,” Adrian March said. “Echoes of Winslow Homer paintings mingled with a shiver of lush Scandinavian blondeness. Your name, that is. Karen Winslow.” He sighed theatrically. “Oh, to be young again. Or even to be forty again. Or fifty, or sixty.”

  “You’re not sixty—”

  “Don’t step on my lines, Karen Winslow, Do you have the message?” She parroted it back to him. “Extraordinary,” he said. “Beauty combined with flawless efficiency. Remarkable in one so young.”

  She was blushing and grinning at once. It was time for a fast curtain, and the actor knew as much. He swept out the door and closed it after him. She sat for a moment, thinking how remarkable it was to actually meet Judge Randall. Adrian March, she corrected herself. Adrian March.

  She typed his message on a neat white card and placed it on Gordon’s desk.

  The first week was an odd combination of nervous hurrying and long periods of nothing at all to do. Gordon managed to stay out of the office two or three hours a day and spent the rest of his time on the telephone. Sometimes the phone would ring constantly and she would have to field one call after the next, making sure that the right ones got through and the wrong ones did not. Other times the phone would remain placidly silent. Some hours there was an endless parade of clients to the office of LeGo and Associates, and she would play the usual merry games with Gordon’s intercom system Now and then something would go horribly wrong—once Gordon hit the wrong button by accident and had to go chasing down the hall to catch an important young singer before she disappeared into the elevator, and once she forgot to press the hold button and a newspaper columnist got the special treat of hearing Gordon bellow out. “Listen, make a note of this—I’m always out when that son of a bitch calls.”

  Put generally things went well, and she found that the job suited her perfectly. She had thought that the pressure might be difficult; instead she was delighted to learn that she thrived on it. And when no one came into the office, and when the telephone was oddly silent, and when Gordon himself was out and not apt to burst in on her to ask how to spell a word or whether it was who or whom that he should be using—during those quiet times she could sit at her desk with a book or newspaper and relax entirely.

  The job was fine and fulfilli
ng.

  The evenings, away from the office, were infinitely richer. Because her life was rapidly becoming bound up in Rae, and the love that had blossomed between them was ripening steadily. Day after day she waited for something to go wrong, waited for her mind to reel at the thought that what she and Rae did was wrong, that it was evil, perverse. But this was something that she could not believe at all, and so the thought refused to come to trouble her.

  Instead she grew progressively more convinced of the utter rightness of the love they had. She was not about to run through the streets enlisting converts to lesbianism. Nor was she about to dress in slacks and mannish jackets to announce her predilection to the world. It was something private, and there was no reason why it should not remain that way. Before, when she lived with Ronnie, she had not worn a button proclaiming I Am A Heterosexual, and an inverse proclamation would be at least as ridiculous.

  But what she felt was not shame. Never that.

  Love.

  It was love, genuine love, and that was simply all there was to it. No—she corrected herself—it was more than love, ever so much more than love. It was, in addition, feeling at long last of belonging entirely to the world in which she lived, the special private and personal world she inhabited. And it was this feeling that made her realize, perhaps for the first time, just how very much she had come so very close to losing when she sliced the razor blade across each of her wrists in turn.

  Life seemed little enough to lose at the time. And death, however fearful and unknowable, is less terrible when life has nothing to offer. But now, now, she lived in love and loved life, and she would wake up shaking at the thought of having almost succeeded in the awful business of suicide.

  The job was part of her satisfaction, part of the world she belonged in. But she did not kid herself. She knew that Rae and Rae’s love were the major factors.

  Not just…not just the bed part, she thought. There were times when it was sheer heaven, times when it was so good she could not believe it was really happening. But by the end of the week, after the initial thrill of fresh discovery had somewhat abated, the sex part was not so constant a part of their relationship. They slept together every night—always in Rae’s room—and they made love every night, but by Friday they had stopped flying at one another whenever the opportunity presented itself. They actually left the building now and then—to a movie Thursday night, for a walk earlier in the week. The sexual side of their life was better than ever, and every night they found out new things about each other, found more delightful ways of making love. But now the rest of their love was ripening, too, and she liked it even better that way.

  Friday afternoon she sat at the desk in the LeGo Associates office and studied the real estate advertisements in that morning’s copy of the Times. For several days now she had wanted to look at the listings of apartments for rent, and each time she fad forced herself to skip the listings because she knew what it would mean. Some of the things that Rae had said stuck in her mind. She remembered phrases about girls who fell in love with one another so that they could split the rent. She remembered that Rae had moved to the rooming house to get away from that whole rat race.

  But suppose they took an apartment in an ordinary neighborhood, not in one of the standard refuges for lesbians and male homosexuals. Suppose they found an apartment right in the neighborhood where they were already living, a small but comfortable place in the general vicinity of Gramercy Park. Nothing expensive nothing very fancy. Just something generally pleasant.

  A bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. That was all they needed. And one big bed, but not so big that they would have trouble finding each other…

  They could share an apartment for not much more than they were paying to rent their two unlovely rooms in the Nineteenth Street rooming home. And cooking their own food would mean a good saving, too. And it would certainly be easier for Rae to work if she had a larger, more comfortable place to work in. In one room she had now, she had to get out every hour no so or the walls seemed to be closing in on her. How could she get any decent work done in a place like that?

  In an apartment, their own apartment, there would be no furtive creeping, no sneaking from one room to the other, no need to be careful about noise so that someone on one other side of the paper-thin wall would not know that they were in bed together, making wild and wonderful love together, mouth to mouth and flesh on flesh. She would not have to sneak out of Rae’s room at dawn like a guilty adulterer. She could come and go with her head held high.

  Still she knew how Rae felt, knew what Rae would say. Nothing is forever. Always is a lie. And leases run for a minimum of a year, and in a year you might not even remember what I look like, kitten. It goes that way sometimes…

  They had dinner at the Italian restaurant. She drank more wine than usual but she was learning lately how to drink without letting it loosen her tongue. They almost always had wine with their meals, and Rae generally kept a bottle of scotch in her room, and she was learning to get a little alcoholic edge on without letting the alcohol get control of her. So she didn’t even mention her idea to Rae. She kept thinking about it, but she didn’t let out a word.

  And over coffee Rae said, “This is crazy damn foolishness. Karen, but I was thinking.”

  “What’s so crazy about thinking?”

  “About us.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mmmm. Shall I tell you?”

  “Unless it’s painful, my sweet,” she said, with their usual Bette Davis inflection. They laughed, loud and happy, and people turned to stare at them but they did not care at all.

  “It was a silly thought,” Rae said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Oh, you know. I just, well, I was sitting in that damned room and thinking what a prison a room like that can turn into, and how much cheaper it would be in the long run if we shared a place, and…”

  Saturday they picked up the early bird edition of the Sunday Times. They scanned it together and spent the afternoon hunting. By Sunday afternoon they had signed the lease. It took four nights to furnish the new apartment. Friday they moved in.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They sat together on the new deep purple couch. There was classical music on the radio, something by Dvorak. The only thing she knew by Dvorak was the New World Symphony, and this wasn’t it, so she wasn’t sure what they were listening to. And did not very much care.

  “I’m not sure about that print.”

  “You don’t like it there?” she said.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe the other wall.”

  “Over the chair? We tried it there already and you hated it. Don’t you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “Then…”

  “Oh, forget it, Karen.”

  “My point exactly.”

  “I can’t believe we managed everything that quickly, that’s all. Usually it takes hellishly long to find a place. And then when you find something one of you likes it and the other one doesn’t, and you fight, and then you finally take something that neither of you is too crazy about, and you both drag all your junk in and nothing matches.”

  “It’s a good thing we’re compatible.”

  “Because this way we’ve managed to produce a decorator’s dream, haven’t we?”

  “Oh, we surely have.”

  Actually, they hadn’t; few decorator’s dreams emerge from the Salvation Army furniture store. But the apartment looked surprisingly good in spite of the little they had spent on furniture. The bed was decent, of course, and they had bought a fairly good couch. Everything else was secondhand, and looked it, but the room went together nicely nevertheless, achieving an effect that was more comfortable than shabby, more lived-in than lived-to-death.

  The apartment was not far from the rooming house. They had a second-floor walkup in a brownstone on 22nd Street just a few doors east of Third Avenue. The neighborhood was a good one still and the building itself was decently maintained. Their place
was tiny—a small bedroom, a small living room, a bathroom with a tub you had to pleat yourself in order to fit in, a kitchen that was a joke. But it would do. It was large enough so that Rae could set up a small drawing table in the corner of the living room near the front window, large enough so that they could spend time in it without going stir crazy. And most important of all, it was theirs and theirs alone.

  “I think we’ll like it here, Karen.”

  “I know we will,” she said. She picked the bottle up from the coffee table and poured a little scotch into her glass. She was getting a wee bit tight, she thought. Just a little bit high and happy.

  “Ready for a refill?”

  “I’ve still get a full glass. Don’t go getting smashed on me, will you?”

  “Don’t worry.” She lifted her glass, drank off about a third of her drink. “It’s just that I’m happy, and I want to feel as happy as I can. But I won’t get too drunk.”

  “I hope not.”

  “In fact—” she drained her glass “—I think I’m beginning to feel just about perfect.”

  “No more creeping down the halls,” Rae said.

  “Or being careful not to jangle the bedsprings.”

  “Actually, they didn’t exactly jangle. It was more of a creak.”

  “Sort of a cree-yickkkk, cree-yickkk.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Rae settled close to her, and Karen put an arm around the blonde girl. Rae’s face settled against the side of Karen’s full breast. She was wearing a nubby yellow sweater and a black skirt. Rae wore lime stretch pants and a black tailored blouse. Karen put a hand on Rae’s leg and stroked the taut green material and felt the gentle swell of the flesh beneath it.

  “You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’d like to open your pants.”

  “Don’t talk dirty, kitten.”