Lawrence Block: Warm and Willing

Remarry?

No. Never.

At seven-thirty she put down the book she had been reading. She took a towel and a bar of soap and went to the bathroom down the hall. It was unoccupied. She locked the door and showered quickly, working a rich lather into her smooth skin, rinsing herself thoroughly. She toweled herself dry and went back to her room and dressed. It was early October, a cool and comfortable time in the city. She put on a lime green sweater, black wool skirt, black shoes, and carried a black calf bag.

Her room was in a four-story brownstone on Grove Street in the Village. It was a quiet street in one of the quietest parts of the Village, a section happily lacking in coffee shops and bars and tourist traps. She walked over to Seventh Avenue, and ate breakfast at Riker’s on Sheridan Square. She sat at the counter with an empty stool to either side of her. The counterman, a balding man with tattoos on his forearms, tried to start a conversation about the weather. She brushed him off easily. She concentrated on her ham and eggs and tried not to think about the nightmare. She drank three cups of black coffee and smoked two cigarettes, then paid the check and left a tip and went out into the morning again.

She liked the Village. At first she had moved there only to avoid the subway. She hated the crush of bodies on the subway, the rancid underground air, the hurry, the hustle, the little men who grabbed at you. Her job was in the Village, and it had seemed worthwhile to pay a higher rental than she could afford for a small and unimposing room, in return for the pleasure of walking to work. She had tasted gracious living for two years as Tom’s wife; she could live without it now.

Bu the neighborhood had turned out to be more than a convenience. She liked the small shops, the narrow, crooked streets, the low buildings, the quiet people who led unhurried lives. She liked the Italian markets on Bleecker, the Armenian restaurant on Charles, the benches in Washington Square. Parts of the Village were too noisy, especially on weekends. Parts were too loudly commercial, too cluttered with tourists, too overwhelmed by bearded boys and bra-less girls toying with rebellion. She avoided those areas and loved what remained.

Her job was on one of those commercial streets. She worked at a small shop on Eighth Street near Macdougal called Heaven’s Door. Her employer was a quiet little man named Seguri Yamatari, a stoop-shouldered and myopic Japanese who eked out a tenuous living selling Oriental goods to tourists. He stocked prints, saki sets, salt and pepper shakers, long bamboo cigarette holders, ivory and teak Buddhas, remaindered sets of steak knives, small porcelain elephants, and similar functional and non-functional bits of bric-a-brac. Occasionally he would escort a customer into the back room, and the customer would leave five or ten minutes later, carrying a package wrapped carefully in brown paper. Rhoda had guessed that Mr. Yamatari carried on some clandestine backroom trade which had little to do with prints or saki sets or porcelain elephants, but she didn’t dig deeper.

She liked the man, and her work. He was always perfectly polite to her, calling her Rhoda or Loda depending upon his whim of the moment, and never much caring if she came to work late or spent extra time on her lunch hour. The work itself could hardly have been simpler. When customers came into the store (which did not happen too often) she waited on them. She showed them whatever they wanted to see, gave them whatever advice she guessed that they wanted to hear, and took their money and sent them on their way with their purchases in hand. For this Mr. Yamatari paid her sixty-five dollars a week. It was not much, but it was enough for her to live on.

This morning the shop was already open when she arrived. It almost always was. Mr. Yamatari seemed to be of that breed of tireless shopkeepers who never leave their shops; several times she had passed the shop well after midnight and had seen his light on in the back room. She went into the shop now, turned on lights, arranged counters, and prepared the place for customers.

It was a slow morning. Around ten, Mr. Yamatari brought out two cups of green tea and sat across a lacquered black desk from her. They drank tea together and Mr. Yamatari spoke politely about a book he had been reading and a movie he had seen. Half an hour later there was a sudden rush of customers. She sold two saki sets, one small screen, several fans, and a china tea service. A little later, a man came in and bought some dangling earrings. The pair he picked out was a terrible one, poorly made, poorly designed, and the ultimate in gaucherie.

“These are perfect,” he told her. “This is the kind of stuff my wife really goes for.”

Your wife must be a terrible person, she thought. But she wrapped the earrings, put them in a small gift box, and took his money.

Get up in the morning, have breakfast, go to work, have lunch, back to work, eat dinner, go home, change clothes, go to a movie, to a play, for a walk, home, to bed-until morning or until the dream made sleep impossible. A quiet life, she thought. A rather uneventful life. There were amusements to it, and there was pleasure, and there were high points and low points.

Sometimes she forgot how utterly alone she was.

That morning, she remembered. There was one young couple, a pair of just-marrieds who came in and shopped around endlessly, and finally bought a small ashtray with the figure of a running horse on it. And there was something so beautifully close about them that it caught at her heart and wrenched. She watched them holding hands, talking closely together, talking in whispers, and she thought of herself in her little bed in her little room, living an absolutely solitary life.

She managed to brush the thoughts away. It looked good on the surface, she told herself. The closeness, the lovey-love. But it didn’t work out. She knew.

There was something special about the blonde. She sensed it the minute the girl came into the shop, very tall, very blonde, very striking in a print blouse and Capri pants. The blonde was not a typical customer of Heaven’s Door.

She was not a tourist, for one thing. When you lived in the Village you developed a special sort of disdain for tourists-they were too noisy, too pushy, too tasteless, too stupid. The blonde was definitely not a tourist. While she didn’t fit any of the convenient stereotypes for Villagers, something about her made it quite obvious that she belonged here.

The blonde’s eyes were on Rhoda as she walked over toward her. She could almost feel the woman’s gaze, steady and confident, and it made her vaguely uncomfortable to be stared at that way. But the girl’s face softened into a smile as Rhoda drew close.

“May I help you?”

“You sure can,” the blonde said. “I’m looking for a gift for a friend. She’s fond of the Oriental motif.”

“A wedding present?”

The blonde seemed amused, “Oh, no,” she said. “Lord, not that, not for her. Although in a way-” She broke off suddenly and smiled again. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a tendency to go on talking to myself. No, not a wedding present. Nothing for her apartment. A personal present.”

“Jewelry?”

“Something like that.”

“A pair of earrings-”

“She doesn’t wear them.” The blonde picked up one of the white porcelain elephants, looked at it, put it back in place on the counter. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something rather nice. I was thinking of a necklace or a pendant, something like that. Would you have anything along those lines?”

She moved toward the jewelry counter and began to show the necklaces and pendants. But the blonde girl wasn’t looking at them. Her eyes were on Rhoda.