Rose Madder

by Stephen King

  "I don't know--let's get it into the light."

  Anna picked the picture up by the sides of the frame, carried it across the room, and set it on the Ping-Pong table. The five women gathered around it in a semicircle. No, Rosie saw, glancing around, now they were seven. Robin St. James and Consuelo Delgado had come downstairs and joined them--they were standing behind Cynthia, looking over her narrow, bird-boned shoulders. Rosie waited for someone to break the silence--she was betting on Cynthia--and when nobody did and it began to spin out, she started feeling nervous.

  "Well?" she asked at last. "What do you think? Somebody say something."

  "It's an odd picture," Anna said.

  "Yeah," Cynthia agreed. "Weird. I think I seen one like it before, though."

  Anna was looking at Rosie. "Why did you buy it, Rosie?"

  Rosie shrugged, feeling more nervous than ever. "I don't know that I can explain, really. It was like it called to me."

  Anna surprised her--and eased her considerably--by smiling and nodding. "Yes. That's really all art is about, I think, and not just pictures--it's the same with books and stories and sculpture and even castles in the sand. Some things call to us, that's all. It's as if the people who made them were speaking inside our heads. But this particular painting... is it beautiful to you, Rosie?"

  Rosie looked at it, trying to see it as she had in the Liberty City Loan & Pawn, when its silent tongue had spoken to her with such force that she had been stopped cold, all other thoughts driven from her mind. She looked at the blonde woman in the rose madder toga (or chiton--that was what Mr. Lefferts had called it) standing in the high grass at the top of the hill, again noting the plait which hung straight down the middle of her back and the gold armlet above her right elbow. Then she let her gaze move to the ruined temple and the tumbled

  (god)

  statue at the foot of the hill. The things the woman in the toga was looking at.

  How do you know that's what she's looking at? How can you know? You can't see her face!

  That was true, of course ... but what else was there to look at?

  "No," Rosie said. "I didn't buy it because it was beautiful to me. I bought it because it seemed powerful to me. The way it stopped me in my tracks was powerful. Does a picture have to be beautiful to be good, do you think?"

  "Nope," Consuelo said. "Think about Jackson Pollock. His stuff wasn't about beauty, it was about energy. Or Diane Arbus, how about her?"

  "Who's she?" Cynthia asked.

  "A photographer who got famous taking pictures of women with beards and dwarves smoking cigarettes."

  "Oh." Cynthia thought this over, and her face suddenly brightened with recollection. "I saw this picture once, at a catered party back when I was cocktailing. In an art gallery, this was. It was by some guy named Applethorpe, Robert Applethorpe, and you want to know what it was? One guy gobbling another guy's crank! Seriously! And it wasn't any fake job like in a skin magazine, either. I mean that guy was making an effort, he was taking care of business and working overtime. You wouldn't think a guy could get that much of the old broomhandle down his--"

  "Mapplethorpe, " Anna said dryly.

  "Huh?"

  "Mapplethorpe, not Applethorpe."

  "Oh yeah. I guess that's right."

  "He's dead now."

  "Oh yeah?" Cynthia asked. "What got him?"

  "AIDS." Anna was still looking at Rosie's picture and spoke absently. "Known as broomhandle disease in some quarters."

  "You said you saw a picture like Rosie's before," Gert rumbled. "Where was that, squirt? Same art gallery?"

  "No." While discussing the Mapplethorpe, Cynthia had only looked interested; now color pinked her cheeks and the comers of her mouth dimpled in a defensive little smile. "And it wasn't, you know, really the same, but ..."

  "Go on, tell," Rosie said.

  "Well, my dad was a Methodist minister back in Bakersfield," Cynthia said. "This is Bakersfield, California, where I came from. We lived in the parsonage, and there were all these old pictures in the little meeting-rooms downstairs. Some were Presidents, and some were flowers, and some were dogs. They didn't matter. They were just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn't look too bare."

  Rosie nodded, thinking of the pictures which had surrounded hers on those dusty pawnshop shelves--gondolas in Venice, fruit in bowls, dogs and foxes. Just things to hang on the walls so they wouldn't look too bare. Mouths without tongues.

  "But there was this one ... it was called ..." She frowned, trying to remember. "I think it was called De Soto Looks West. It showed this explorer in tin pants and a saucepan hat standing on top of a cliff with these Indians around him. And he was lookin over all these miles of woods toward a great big river. The Mississippi, I guess. But see ... the thing was ..."

  She looked at them uncertainly. Her cheeks were pinker than ever and her smile was gone. The bulky bandage over her ear seemed very white, very much there, like some sort of peculiar accessory which had been grafted onto the side of her head, and Rosie found time to wonder--not for the first time since she had come to D & S--why so many men were so unkind. What was wrong with them? Was it something that had been left out, or something nasty which had been unaccountably built in, like a bad circuit in a computer?

  "Go on, Cynthia," Anna said. "We won't laugh. Will we?"

  The women shook their heads.

  Cynthia stuck her hands behind her back like a little girl who has been called upon to recite in front of the entire class. "Well," she said, speaking in a much smaller voice than her usual one, "it was like the river was moving, that was the thing that fascinated me. The picture was in the room where my father had his Thursday-night Bible school classes, and I'd go in there and sometimes I'd sit in front of that picture for an hour or more, looking at it like it was television. I was watching the river move... or waiting to see if it would move. Now I can't remember which, but I was only nine or ten. One thing I do remember is thinking that if it was moving, a raft or a boat or an Indian canoe would go by sooner or later and then I'd know for sure. Except one day I went in and the picture was gone. Poof. I think my mother must have looked in and seen me just sitting there in front of it, you know, and--"

  "She got worried and took it away," Robin said.

  "Yeah, probably threw it in the trash," Cynthia said. "I was just a kid. But your picture reminds me of it, Rosie."

  Pam peered at it closely. "Yep," she said, "no wonder. I can see the woman breathing."

  They all laughed then, and Rosie laughed with them.

  "No, it's not that," Cynthia said. "It's just... it looks a little old-fashioned, you know ... like a schoolroom picture ... and it's pale. Except for the clouds and her dress, the colors are pale. In my De Soto picture everything was pale except for the river. The river was bright silver. It looked more there than the rest of the picture."

  Gert turned to Rosie. "Tell us about your job. I heard you say you got a job."

  "Tell us everything," Pam said.

  "Yes," Anna said. "Tell us everything, and then I wonder if you could step into my office for a few minutes."

  "Is it ... is it what I've been waiting for?"

  Anna smiled. "As a matter of fact, I think it is."

  8

  It's an optimum room, one of the best on our list, and I hope you'll be as delighted as I am," Anna said. There was a stack of fliers perched precariously on the comer of her desk, announcing the forthcoming Daughters and Sisters Swing into Summer Picnic and Concert, an event which was part fundraiser, part community relations, and part celebration. Anna took one, turned it over, and sketched quickly. "Kitchen here, hide-a-bed here, and a little living-room area here. This is the bathroom. It's hardly big enough to turn around in, and in order to sit on the commode you'll practically have to put your feet in the shower, but it's yours."

  "Yes," Rosie murmured. "Mine." A feeling that she hadn't had in weeks--that all this was a wonderful dream and at any moment she would wake up beside
Norman again--was creeping over her.

  "The view is nice--it's not Lake Drive, of course, but Bryant Park is very pretty, especially in the summer. Second floor. The neighborhood got a little ragged in the eighties, but it's pulling itself together again now."

  "It's as if you've stayed there yourself," Rosie said.

  Anna shrugged--a slender, pretty gesture--and drew the hall in front of the room, then a flight of stairs. She sketched with the no-frills economy of a draftsman. She spoke without looking up. "I've been there on a good many occasions," she said, "but of course that's not what you mean, is it?"

  "No."

  "A little of me goes out with every woman when she leaves. I suppose that sounds corny, but I don't care. It's true, and that's all that really matters. So what do you think?"

  Rosie hugged her impulsively, and instantly regretted it when she felt Anna stiffen. I shouldn't have done it, she thought as she let go. I knew better. And she had. Anna Stevenson was kind, there was no doubt about that in Rosie's mind--maybe even saintly--but there was that strange arrogance, and there was this, too: Anna didn't like people in her space. Anna especially didn't like to be touched.

  "I'm sorry," she said, drawing back.

  "Don't be silly," Anna said brusquely. "What do you think?"

  "I love it," Rosie said.

  Anna smiled and the small awkwardness was behind them. She drew an X on the wall of the living-room area, near a tiny rectangle which represented the room's only window. "Your new picture... I'll bet you decide it belongs right here."

  "I'll bet I do, too."

  Anna put the pencil down. "I'm delighted to be able to help you, Rosie, and I'm so glad you came to us. Here, you're leaking." It was the Kleenex again, but Rosie doubted it was the same box Anna had offered her during their first interview in this room; she had an idea that a lot of Kleenex got used in here.

  She took one and wiped her eyes. "You saved my life, you know," she said hoarsely. "You saved my life and I'll never, ever forget it."

  "Flattering but inaccurate," Anna said in her dry, calm voice. "I saved your life no more than Cynthia flipped Gert downstairs in the rec room. You saved your own life when you took a chance and walked out on the man who was hurting you."

  "Just the same, thank you. Just for being here."

  "You're very welcome," Anna said, and for the only time during her stay at D & S, Rosie saw tears standing in Anna Stevenson's eyes. She handed the box of Kleenex back across the desk with a little smile.

  "Here," she said. "Looks like you've sprung a leak yourself."

  Anna laughed, took a Kleenex, used it, and tossed it into the wastebasket. "I hate to cry. It's my deepest, darkest secret. Every now and then I think I'm done with it, that I must be done with it, and then I do it again. It's sort of the way I feel about men."

  For another brief moment, Rosie found herself thinking about Bill Steiner and his hazel eyes.

  Anna took the pencil again and scratched something below the rough floor-plan she'd drawn. Then she handed the sheet to Rosie. It was an address she'd jotted down: 897 Trenton Street.

  "That's where you live," Anna said. "It's most of the way across the city from here, but you can use the buses now, can't you?"

  Smiling--and still crying a little--Rosie nodded.

  "You may give that address to some of the friends you've made here, and eventually to friends you make beyond here, but right now nobody knows but the two of us." What she was saying felt like a set-piece to Rosie--a goodbye speech. "People who show up at your place will not have found out how to get there at this place. It's just how we do things at D & S. After twenty years of working with abused women, I'm convinced it's the only way to do things."

  Pam had explained all this to Rosie; so had Consuelo Delgado and Robin St. James. These explanations had taken place during Big Fun Hour, which was what the residents called evening chores at D & S, but Rosie hadn't really needed them; it only took three or four therapy sessions in the front room for a person of reasonable intelligence to learn most of what she needed to know about the protocols of the house. There was Anna's List, and there were also Anna's Rules.

  "How worried are you about him?" Anna asked.

  Rosie's attention had wandered a little; now it snapped back in a hurry. At first she wasn't even sure who Anna was talking about.

  "Your husband--how worried are you? I know that in your first two or three weeks here, you expressed fears that he would come after you ... that he'd 'track you down,' in your words. How do you feel about that now?"

  Rosie considered the question carefully. First of all, fear was an inadequate word to express her feelings about Norman during her first week or two at D & S; even terror didn't completely serve, because the core of her feelings concerning him was lapped about--and to some degree altered--by other emotions: shame at having failed in her marriage, homesickness for a few possessions she had cared deeply about (Pooh's Chair, for instance), a sensation of euphoric freedom which seemed to renew itself at some point each day, and a relief so cold it was somehow horrible; the sort of relief a wire-walker might feel after tottering at the furthest edge of balance while crossing a deep canyon ... and then recovering.

  Fear had been the keychord, though; there was no doubt about that. During those first two weeks at D & S she'd had the same dream over and over: she was sitting in one of the wicker chairs on the porch when a brand-new red Sentra pulled up to the curb in front. The driver's door opened and Norman got out He was wearing a black tee-shirt with a map of South Vietnam on it. Sometimes the words beneath the map said HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS; sometimes they said HOMELESS & HAVE AIDS. His pants were splattered with blood. Tiny bones--finger-bones, they looked like--dangled from his earlobes. In one hand he held some sort of mask which was splattered with blood and dark clots of meat. She tried to get up from the chair she was in and couldn't; it was as if she were paralyzed. She could only sit and watch him come slowly up the walk toward her with his bone earrings bobbing. Could only sit there as he told her he wanted to talk to her up close. He smiled and she saw his teeth were also covered with blood.

  "Rosie?" Anna asked softly. "Are you here?"

  "Yes," she said, speaking in a little breathless rush. "I'm here, and yes, I'm still afraid of him."

  "That's not exactly surprising, you know. On some level I suppose you'll always be afraid of him. But you'll be all right as long as you remember that you're going to have longer and longer periods when you're not afraid of anything ... and when you don't even think of him. But that isn't exactly what I asked, either. I asked if you're still afraid that he'll come after you."

  Yes, she was still afraid. No, not as afraid. She had heard a lot of his business-related telephone conversations over the last fourteen years, and she'd heard him and his colleagues discuss a lot of cases, sometimes in the rec room downstairs, sometimes out on the patio. They barely noticed her when she brought them warm-ups for their coffee or fresh bottles of beer. It was almost always Norman who led these discussions, his voice quick and impatient as he leaned over the table with a beer bottle half-buried in one big fist, hurrying the others along, overriding their doubts, refusing to entertain their speculations. On rare occasions he had even discussed cases with her. He wasn't interested in her ideas, of course, but she was a handy wall against which to bounce his own. He was quick, a man who wanted results yesterday, and he had a tendency to lose interest in cases once they were three weeks old. He called them what Gert had called her self-defense moves: leftovers.

  Was she a leftover to him now?

  How much she wanted to believe that. How hard she had tried. And yet, she couldn't... quite ... do it.

  "I don't know," she said. "A part of me thinks that if he was going to show up, he would have already. But there's another part that thinks he's probably still looking. And he's not a truck-driver or a plumber; he's a cop. He knows how to look for people."

  Anna nodded. "Yes, I know. That makes him especially
dangerous, and that means you'll have to be especially careful. It's also important for you to remember you're not alone. The days when you were are over for you, Rosie. Will you remember that?"

  "Yes."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Yes."

  "And if he does show up, what will you do?"

  "Slam the door in his face and lock it."

  "And then?"

  "Call 911."

  "With no hesitation?"

  "None at all," she said, and that was the truth, but she would be afraid. Why? Because Norman was a cop and they would be cops, the people she called. Because she knew Norman had a way of getting his way--he was an alpha-dog. Because of what Norman had told her, again and again and again: that all cops were brothers.

  "And after you call 911? What would you do then?"

  "I'd call you."

  Anna nodded. "You're going to be fine. Absolutely fine."

  "I know." She spoke with confidence, but part of her still wondered ... would always wonder, she supposed, unless he showed up and took the matter out of the realm of speculation. If that happened, would all of this life she had lived over the last month and a half--D & S, the Whitestone Hotel, Anna, her new friends--fade like a dream on waking the moment she opened her door to an evening knock and found Norman standing there? Was that possible?

  Rosie's eyes shifted to her picture, leaning against the wall beside the door to the office, and knew it was not. The picture was facing inward so only the backing showed, but she found she could see it anyway; already the image of the woman on the hill with the thundery sky above and the half-burned temple below was crystal clear in her mind, not the least dreamlike. She didn't think anything could turn her picture into a dream.

  And with luck, these questions of mine will never have to be answered, she thought, and smiled a little.

  "What about the rent, Anna? How much?"

  "Three hundred and twenty dollars a month. Will you be all right for at least two months?"

  "Yes." Anna knew that, of course; if Rosie hadn't had enough runway to assure her of a safe take-off, they would not have been having this discussion. "That seems very reasonable. As far as the room-rent goes, I'll be fine to start with."

  "To start with," Anna repeated. She steepled her fingers under her chin and directed a keen look across the cluttered desk at Rosie. "Which brings me to the subject of your new job. It sounds absolutely wonderful, and yet at the same time it sounds ..."