Lawrence Block - Warm and Willing

“I’m at a loss,” the girl was saying. “Could you select something? You have excellent taste. I like your sweater.”

“Why, I-”

“You pick,” the girl said. “Something that would make an appropriate farewell gift. For a very close friend.”

She chose a small green heart on a gold chain. The heart was veined with red like bloodstone. “It’s not very Oriental,” she began.

“It’s lovely.” The smile again. “And quite appropriate.”

That night she saw the blonde girl a second time. First she ate dinner alone at an Italian restaurant half a block from Heaven’s Door. She walked down Sixth Avenue to see what was playing at the Waverly but it was a picture she had already seen. She wandered around, then drifted over to Washington Square. The sun had gone down and the air was cool but not uncomfortable. There was a slight breeze. She sat alone on a bench on one of the less traveled paths that wound through the park and took a paperback novel from her bag. She read a few chapters, smoked a cigarette, started reading again.

When she looked up she saw the blonde girl. She was walking down another path about twenty yards away and had not noticed Rhoda. She walked slowly, her eyes lowered, and there was an air of infinite sadness about her. She might have been a character in some movie walking down the Champs Elysee in the rain with tears staining her face. That effect. Nothing so obvious, but the air.

Rhoda almost called to her, almost went to her. The girl had been friendly, but that was nothing extraordinary-customers were often friendly, and sometimes too much so. What was it? A feeling of compatibility, perhaps. A feeling that she and the blonde girl might be able to relax together, to talk, to have a meal or a cup of coffee together.

The blonde girl moved off out of sight; Rhoda went back to her book and tried to lose herself in it. She couldn’t.

She got up from the bench and went back to her room.

That night there was no dream. She slept soundly and woke easily, vitally anxious to begin the day. She had breakfast, and hurried to the shop. Nothing very much happened during the morning, but the time seemed to pass quickly anyway.

A few minutes after two that afternoon she sold a black lacquered commode for $79.95. The customer, a heavyish woman with bleached hair, paid cash for the commode and left delivery instructions. She lived somewhere on Long Island. When she had left the store, Mr. Yamatari danced out of the back room with an expression of glee on his face that was not inscrutable in the least.

“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.”

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.”