Warm and Willing

by Lawrence Block

  “You sell it,” he said. “You sell that thing. You wonderful.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “Never think we sell it,” Mr. Yamatari said. “Cost…what? Sixteen dollar, fifty cent. Three year ago. Never think we sell the damn thing, and you sell it.”

  She hadn’t exactly. The woman with the bleached hair had come in looking for some overpriced and foul object, poorly constructed and shabbily designed, and it had taken no special genius to guess that the black lacquered commode was just what she was searching for. From that point, the commode had sold itself.

  “You get ten dollar extra this week,” Mr. Yamatari said expansively. “Ten dollar, no tax.”

  That fixed her mood for the rest of the afternoon. She nearly sang as she moved around the shop. Customers who might have annoyed her did not get on her nerves, and when one woman’s young son smashed a china Buddha to smithereens she insisted that the woman forget the whole thing, that it was perfectly all right.

  At four-thirty the blonde girl entered the store. Rhoda almost failed to recognize her at first, hadn’t thought of her since the night before. The blonde girl came directly over to her, and Rhoda thought that she was returning the little heart. The idea that her choice had been unsuccessful made her strangely unhappy, as though she herself had failed.

  But the girl said, “I was just passing by. I thought I would come in.”

  “I’m glad you did.” She hesitated. “Did your friend like the heart?”

  “I don’t know. I mailed it to her.”

  “Oh, you should have told me she lived out-of-town. I would have sent it right from here-”

  “She’s in town,” the girl said. Her voice was oddly strained. “I just thought I would put it in the mail, just on the spur of the moment.” She paused, then looked directly into Rhoda’s eyes. Her own eyes were green, Rhoda saw.

  “When do you finish work?”

  “Why…five-thirty. Why?”

  “Would you have dinner with me?”

  “I-”

  “I don’t feel like eating alone tonight,” the girl went on “I’d like company. Unless you’re busy-”

  She remembered how the girl had looked the night before, in Washington Square. A study in loneliness. She said, “No, I’m not busy.”

  “Then I’ll pick you up here? In an hour or so?”

  “Well, I ought to change-”

  “You look lovely,” the girl said. “We’ll just grab a bite in the neighborhood. About five-thirty?”

  “All right.”

  The blonde girl’s smile was almost radiant. “My name is Megan,” she said. “Megan Hollis, sometimes called Meg. But not too often because I don’t much care for it. And you’re-”

  She gave her name.

  “Rhoda,” Megan repeated. Her eyes took in Rhoda’s face, swept downward, then up again. “A nice name. I like it. It fits you.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Five-thirty,” Megan said. “I’ll see you then.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  The restaurant was a small Italian place on Thompson Street. I was low-priced and off the beaten track, and the tourists never knew that it existed. They sat together across a small table in the rear. A candle burned in a Chianti bottle, dripping wax over the green sides of the wine bottle. There was a red and white checked cloth on the table, a portrait of Garibaldi on the far wall, an air of shabby-genteel antiquity permeating the room. They ate spaghetti with marinara sauce and drank Chianti at room temperature.

  “I’m very glad you’re here,” Megan was saying. “I couldn’t face the idea of eating alone not tonight. And you’re good company.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Do you like this place? It’s always been a favorite of mine.”

  “I like it very much.”

  “More wine?”

  “Well-”

  But Megan was already filling both their glasses. “I’m a real sinner when it comes to wine,” she said, grinning. “I don’t like to drink otherwise, because I don’t like to get drunk. I hate the idea of losing control of myself, and if I drink hard liquor that usually happens.” She took a small sip of wine. “But this is different,” she went on. “Wine just gives you a happy and heady feeling. And tastes good, too. Have you been in the Village long, Rhoda?”

  “Five months.”

  “But you lived in the city before that, didn’t you?”

  She nodded. “Uptown for almost three years. On the west side first, while I was working. And then on the east side after I got married.”

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  “I’m not. It didn’t work out.”

  “Divorce?”

  “Annulment. I suppose it amounts to the same thing. Except that I have my maiden name, and that I don’t collect alimony.” She lowered her eyes. “I didn’t want his money,” she said.

  “A couple of bad years, huh?”

  “Yes.”

  Megan touched her hand very briefly. The contact was vaguely reassuring to Rhoda, as if the touch of another sympathetic human being helped make the world that much safer for her.

  “You poor kid. What happened?”

  She hesitated.

  “I’m sorry, I’m just like that. Forgive me, Rhoda. I’m the nosiest girl in the state. When I ask personal questions, just slap my wrist and tell me to mind my own damned business.”

  “No, I-”

  “Because I don’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s all right.” She sipped her wine, savoring the sharp, dry bite of the Chianti. She set the glass down on the table and closed her eyes. Her head swam pleasantly; evidently the wine was having more of an effect on her than she realized. “He ran around,” she said finally. “Other women.”

  “He must be out of his mind.”

  She looked up, startled.

  “A girl like you,” Megan explained. “Any man married to a woman like you would have to be crazy to look at another girl. Maybe you don’t know it, Rhoda, but you’re a beautiful woman.”

  Unconsciously, she felt herself blushing. She covered her nervousness first with another longer sip of Chianti, then by lighting a cigarette. She drew on the cigarette, took smoke deeply into her lungs, then blew it out in a long thin column that hung hazily together as it floated toward the ceiling. Her eyes followed the column of smoke while it rose. Then they dropped to fix on the base of the wine bottle.

  “I don’t know whose fault it was,” she said. “I…it was a big mistake from the beginning, the whole thing. I met him and he gave me a big rush and proposed, and I managed to fool myself into thinking I was in love with him.”

  “That happens.”

  “I guess I made it easy. I was all alone here in New York. I didn’t know anybody. And family, not here or anywhere else. He was nice to me, and he was successful and good-looking and he wanted to marry me, and I managed to talk myself into being in love with him.”

  She finished her wine, barely noticed when Megan refilled her glass. “He wanted to sleep with me before we were married.”

  “Did you ever-”

  “No. Never.” More wine. She was a little bit sleepy now, her eyelids very heavy. But she felt warm and comfortable in a way she had not felt in far too long. She was completely at ease now. The full night’s sleep, the good day of work at the shop, the sale of the black lacquered commode, the dinner, the presence of Megan, the wine “I should have,” she said suddenly. “I should have slept with him. Then maybe I would have known better than to marry him. But I was a scared little girl and I held out for that wedding ring, and we were married, and the wedding night was a fiasco. It was terrible.”

  “Don’t think about it,” Megan said.

  But she couldn’t help it.

  She remembered that evening all too clearly. First the wedding, with no family present, just a scattering of his friends and those few acquaintances of hers from the office, and two school friends of hers who had also wound up in New York. No
one else.

  An afternoon wedding. A shower of rice, and then the trip in his car, speeding north out of the city and into Connecticut. He had arranged it all, had made reservations at a lodge called Hadrian’s, had planned everything without consulting her to any great degree. And he drove quickly, purposefully, as if he could not wait an extra moment to get her in a bedroom and steal her virginity.

  She was terrified. She sat in the seat beside him, scarcely listening to the words he spoke, her mind on the night ahead of them. He would make love to her. They would be in a room together, shades drawn and door latched, and she-his wife now-would have to let him do as he pleased with her. At school she had known girls who let boys make love to them, but she had never been one of those girls. She did not know what it would be like and she could not imagine it without fearing it.

  “I love you, kitten,” he told her. “And you’re my wife now. My wife.”

  My wife. That was what he was saying, that she was his, that she belonged to him in the eyes of God and man. My wife. Not we are married but you’re my wife, as though the whole sacrament of marriage had been a specifically acquisitive act on his part.

  “Tonight,” he said, speaking her thoughts. “I’ve waited a long time for you, sugar. I can’t wait much longer.”

  But why did he have to talk about it? She couldn’t even think about it without trembling inside. Why did he have to talk about it?

  Once he put an arm around her. “My baby,” he said. “My wife, my little girl.”

  My, my, my. Possession, ownership. God!

  Hadrian’s was a massive stone building, its decor suggestive of medieval England. The high ceilings were supported by rough oak beams, the walls paneled, the doors composed of wide boards highly polished. At another time she might have been captivated by the lodge, receptive to its atmosphere, but now it only conjured up images of a castle lord taking the chastity of a young serf according to the ancient droit du seigneur. His wife.

  A gray-haired bellhop showed them to their room. A large room with a view of a patterned garden in the rear. A large room with heavy furniture and a massive bed that, in her frightened eyes, dominated the room utterly. She could not take her eyes off that bed. It fascinated and repelled her, like a snake in the eyes of a bird. She wished it were smaller or less imposing. As it was, it seemed slightly obscene.

  And he mistook her feelings. He grinned and touched her arm. “That’s the bed, all right,” he said. “You’re getting excited just looking at it, aren’t you?” He squeezed her arm. “Don’t worry, sugar. We’ll be in it soon enough.”

  They would be in it. She wanted to throw back her head and scream. This couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening to her. And how could he think she was excited, how could he read her fear as passion? He didn’t know her at all. They were a pair of strangers united in a farce called matrimony and nothing good could come of it.

  She was sure of this.

  “You must be hungry,” he said. “We’ll eat first. The food is supposed to be excellent here. We’ll have dinner and then we can come back upstairs.”

  A reprieve. She would have a meal first-that was his concession to her virginity. She would be appeased with food, fattened for the slaughter, then taken upstairs and possessed. How could he think that she was hungry? Didn’t he know her at all? Didn’t he have the slightest degree of sensitivity, of empathy?

  Downstairs, they ate in a dining room with paneled walls and heavy furniture. There was no cloth on the table, just well-weathered old wood. The food could have been good or bad and she would not have known. She never tasted it. She sat across from him and tried to make conversation but could barely do that, and she ate without being aware of what she was eating.

  Then he hurried her upstairs

  He carried her over the threshold. He was a tall man, a strong man, and as he lifted her in his arms she thought that this ought to be giving her a sense of security. But it had the opposite effect. She felt so very small and weak that she wanted to cry out.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She couldn’t answer.

  “Don’t be afraid-”

  When she saw him nude for the first time she began to tremble visibly. She was afraid, she couldn’t look at him. The sight of him, and the feel of his eyes on her own bare flesh, and the huge bed looming at her.

  He lay for a long time on the bed with her, his hands busy with her body. She felt him touch her, his hands on her breasts, her legs, and she thought that this was supposed to be awfully exciting. But all his games of love had the opposite effect of what he intended. Every touch made her quiver, not with passion but with fear and distaste. Every kiss made her just that more aware of what was to come.

  And she began to realize that this was wrong, that there was something specifically wrong with her. A woman was not supposed to be revolted by her husband’s caresses. Fear might be normal, fear at the onset of love, fear of pain and fear of the unknown. All virgins were frightened at first. But what she felt was a great deal more than the normal fear and anxiety of a virgin bride. Much more.

  Finally, it was time. She felt her whole body go rigid, resisting him with the passive determination of a follower of Gandhi, and she felt his hands, strong, sure of themselves. And then a sharp stab of pain that seared her flesh and blinded her and brought tears to her eyes. She gasped from the pain, and he seemed to take that gasp for evidence of long-dormant passion.

  The pain ebbed gradually but not completely, so that there was a subtle background of pain as an accompaniment to everything that followed. She lay inert, a living corpse, feeling nothing but the pain, feeling none of the pleasurable sensations you were supposed to feel when the pain receded and the man you loved made sweet love to you.

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Afterward, when he had rolled aside and lay panting next to her, she stared up at the ceiling and wondered if this was really all there was to it. It seemed so small, so useless, so-so unpleasant. There had to be something wrong with her, something very wrong with her.

  “I love you,” he said.

  She said nothing.

  “Baby?” His hand on her shoulder. “I hurt you, didn’t I?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “I wanted it to be good for you. But… well, maybe it has to be painful the first time, for a woman. How do you feel?”

  Dead, she thought. Dead and turning cold.

  “It’ll be better for you,” he said gently. “It’ll be better.”

  It never was.

  They walked through cool streets now, She was smoking a cigarette. It burned down until it began to burn her fingers, and she dropped it quickly and swayed, trying to step on the butt. Her foot missed the cigarette and she giggled. She tried again and missed again, and Megan stepped on the cigarette for her and they walked on.

  “I drank too much,” she said.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Such lovely wine. Such lovely food, but such very lovely dovely wine. Oh, I’m drunk, I’d better get home, Megan.”

  “Not like this.”

  She stopped, stared owlishly at the blonde girl. “No?”

  “No. First we’ll walk off some of this wine. Then you can come up to my place for some coffee. You need to unwind, Rhoda. If you went home now I would worry about you. You might start to cross a street and decide halfway there to try walking under a car.”

  “I’m not that drunk, am I?”

  “ Almost.”

  She giggled again. They had crossed a street and they had turned a corner, and she didn’t recognize the neighborhood. A narrow crooked street, mostly residential with a handful of first-floor shops. Little brick buildings three stories tall and brownstones four or five stories. A dark sky overhead, starless. A chill to the night air. Megan’s hand holding hers.

  “I’m sorry I’m so drunk,” she said.

  “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have kept filling your glass. I can drink win
e all night long without getting much of a glow, and I have a habit of forgetting that not everyone has the same kind of hollow leg. How do you feel now?”

  She considered this. “My head,” she said solemnly, “weighs less than a trio of feathers.”

  “Is that good?”

  “It’s beautiful. I could walk forever, I think.”

  “I live on the next block. Feel like coming up for coffee?”

  Megan’s building was much nicer than the one she lived in, cleaner and newer and with less of a transient air about it. Yet none of the Villagey charm was lost. The old-fashioned atmosphere of a brownstone was maintained, merely enhanced by the renovation. The hallway was thickly carpeted, the walls freshly painted, the air fresh-smelling. Inside, the apartment was a perfect reflection of Megan herself. It was done simply but elegantly in blues and greens. The furniture was modern without being garish. There were surrealistic paintings on the walls, a few bits of sculpture, a pastel of Megan.

  Megan, she knew, was an interior decorator. She worked free-lance, taking an occasional job and earning a small living without working very hard at it. She seemed to be good at her work. Rhoda was impressed.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Everything is beautiful.”

  There was a bedroom, small but adequate. There was a minute kitchen and a small bathroom. The living room was quite large, with a part of it set up as a sort of alcove with a round teak table and four chairs. They had coffee there. Megan made thick, strong coffee and they both drank it black and smoked cigarettes. Rhoda did most of the talking. She had not really talked to anyone in far too long. The wine had loosened her up, and the coffee had not yet sobered her, and Megan was easy to talk to. She found herself opening up, found the words spilling out.

  She talked about her marriage, about two years with Tom Haskell, two years that had never worked out for her at all. Sex had been the main problem, but from it all sorts of other problems had quickly sprung into existence. With the realization that she could not enjoy sleeping with Tom came the realization that she should never have married him in the first place, that she did not want to be a wife at all. And from that step it was only a short leap to the knowledge that she did not love him, that she had never loved him.