Lawrence Block - Warm and Willing

That night she dreamed the dream once again. There was no rhyme or reason to it, and yet it terrified her each time. This time she awoke before the dream could end; awoke with her forehead damp with cool beads of perspiration, awoke with her heart hammering furiously, and her eyes staring, and her hands-small hands, narrow fingers, nails immaculately manicured-curled into tight little fists, with the nails digging harshly into the palms of her hands.

A dream of flight, of a chase with her own self cast as victim, as person pursued. And with the pursuer unknowable. In the dream she was running eternally down an endless hallway, a hallway which grew gradually but inexorably narrower as she raced through it, the walls closing slowly on her.

The walls, an ivory white, were unbroken by windows or doors. Sometimes, smoking a cigarette in the sweaty aftermath of the nightmare, she would force herself back over the dream and try to figure out its setting, and try to establish what sort of hallway she ran through night after endless night. A hospital? But hospital walls were always that weak gray-green of impending death, and the walls in the dream were white. And the floor was black, not tile or linoleum or wood or stone-an endless ribbon of black which seemed to be made of no particular material at all.

And she ran in the dream, ran until her legs ached, ran while her heart pounded, ran with a whirlwind behind her, and her mouth parted for a scream that never came, and something, something, behind her and coming ever closer.

She had dreamed the dream a countless number of times. She had never been caught. She had never reached the end of the corridor, if indeed it had an end. Each time she awoke with terror shrieking through her body.

Now she sat very still in the narrow bed. A shaft of light came through her window. She looked around quickly, making sure of where she was, focusing upon familiar objects in an effort to assure herself of what was reality and what was the dream. Her cigarettes were on the bedside table. She lit one, shook out the match, reached over to turn on the bedside lamp. There was a clock on the table beside the lamp. She looked at it. It was a few minutes past four. She had gone to sleep a little after midnight, so she had slept just four hours.

She would not be able to sleep any more now. She knew this. Once the dream brought her swiftly awake, sleep was over and done with for the night. She could only get up and bide her time, read a book or take a shower or have a few cups of inky coffee, waiting out the hours until it was time for breakfast and then for work.

There was a hot plate on her dresser, a teakettle centered upon it. She filled the teakettle at the sink and put water on to boil. Then she slipped into a cotton robe and sat down in the room’s one chair and smoked her cigarette all the way down. When the water boiled she made instant coffee and sat in the chair to drink it.

Her name was Rhoda Moore. Not long ago it had been Rhoda Moore Haskell, but the Haskell part had since been carefully cut away through the aseptic surgery of the judicial process. She had thought at the time that this was one of the chief advantages of annulment as opposed to divorce; one automatically returned to one’s maiden name. Legally, one had never been married.

Her lawyer had been against the annulment. “You’re not a Catholic,” he had told her. “You’ve got no basic feeling against divorce. And God knows you’ve got grounds, Rhoda. Why shouldn’t you make him pay?”

“I don’t want his money.”

“Any court in the country would award you a healthy chunk of alimony, a steady income until such time as you remarry. You could go to Reno and call it mental cruelty, or you could stay right here in New York and call it by its rightful name. Adultery. He couldn’t possibly contest it and he couldn’t get out from under.”

But she had held out. She did not want any money from Thomas J. Haskell. Neither a lump sum settlement nor a lifetime annuity in the form of alimony. She had already taken as much from the man as she wanted. He paid court costs and he paid her lawyer’s fee, but that was all he paid.

The annulment was easily arranged. Her lawyer selected the grounds-breaking a premarital promise to raise a family. They had been married two years and had not conceived any children, so this was a handy excuse for the termination of the marriage. It took hardly any time at all and she was free and away from him, out of their apartment and into a room of her own, out of their double bed and into her single bed.

She had been just twenty-two when she married Tom Haskell. She was twenty-four now, a slender girl with finely chiseled features. Her hair was that very dark shade of brown hardly distinguishable from black, and she wore it long so that it reached almost to her shoulders. It was versatile hair; she could spin it into a French roll, braid it into adolescent pigtails, bind it up into a severe chignon or have it teased into something still more flamboyant. But most of the time she wore it long and flowing, very simple but very effective. That was the way she had always worn it as a girl, and she could remember sitting for hours at her mirror, brushing it herself or having it brushed systematically by her mother.

She was five and a half feet tall, narrow-waisted, with high firm breasts and narrow hips. Her complexion was quite light, her mouth small, her eyes a very deep blue, her forehead high. When men looked at her quickly their first impression was one of facile attractiveness; they had to look a second time to realize that she was beautiful. Her beauty was a quiet sort, less than dramatic, the beauty of refinement.

Born in Pennsylvania, in Scranton, a town she scarcely remembered except for vague recollections of smoky air and dirty little houses. When she was seven her father, after a careful analysis of his assets and liabilities, realized the impossibility of increasing the former to the point where they compared favorably to the latter and, after setting his house in some semblance of order, drove his car to the outskirts of town, and blew out his brains with a. 45-calibre automatic pistol.

She remembered little of her father. He had smelled of liquor and cigars, he had held her on his lap and had told her wonderful stories.

That was about all.

After the funeral, after the settling of accounts, she and her mother had moved north to Syracuse, in New York State. She had aunts and uncles there. Her mother worked and Rhoda went to school, and during her third year in high school her mother went to the hospital for an operation, and just eighteen months later, and a week before Rhoda graduated from high school, her mother died.

There was a little insurance money and there was a scholarship, and she went to Harpur College, in Binghamton, and majored in English. She worked nights clerking at a drugstore and she worked summers counseling at a girls’ camp at Lake George. After four years she had a diploma. She took it to New York and carted it around from one publishing house to the next, looking for an editorial position. A trade journal publisher hired her as a receptionist.

She met Tom Haskell there. And dated him, and took his ring, and married him. And lived with him for two years in an apartment on East Eighty-Fifth Street just a few blocks from the park.

“You’re done with it now,” her lawyer had told her. “Glad to be Miss Rhoda Moore again?”

“Yes, very glad.”

A brief touch on the shoulder. “You’re free now. You had a rotten time and he was a pretty rotten man, but you don’t want to let the experience sour you on men in general. We’re not all bad. You’ll take it easy now, relax a little, start building a new life. Pretty soon you’ll meet some guy and get married again. You’re a young girl, Rhoda and you’ve got a full life ahead of you. That’s a cliche, I know, but it happens to be true. You’ll remarry, and you’ll choose a better one this time, and it’ll work for you.”