“Fourteen.”
“It’s old. The things in here are old.” She brushed against a fringed lampshade and touched it with her fingers.
Shy Mr. Dolarhyde. She was perfectly aware that it had excited him to see her with the tiger; he had shuddered like a horse when she took his arm leaving the treatment room.
An elegant gesture, his arranging that. Maybe eloquent as well, she wasn’t sure.
“Martini?”
“Let me go with you and do it,” she said, taking off her shoes.
She flicked vermouth from her finger into the glass. Two and a half ounces of gin on top, and two olives. She picked up points of reference quickly in the house—the ticking clock, the hum of a window air conditioner. There was a warm place on the floor near the kitchen door where the sunlight had fallen through the afternoon.
He took her to his big chair. He sat on the couch.
There was a charge in the air. Like fluorescence in the sea, it limned movement; she found a place for her drink on the stand beside her, he put on music.
To Dolarhyde the room seemed changed. She was the first voluntary company he ever had in the house, and now the room was divided into her part and his.
There was the music, Debussy as the light failed.
He asked her about Denver and she told him a little, absently, as though she thought of something else. He described the house and the big hedged yard. There wasn’t much need to talk.
In the silence while he changed records, she said, “That wonderful tiger, this house, you’re just full of surprises, D. I don’t think anybody knows you at all.”
“Did you ask them?”
“Who?”
“Anybody.”
“No.”
“Then how do you know that nobody knows me?” His concentration on the tongue-twister kept the tone of the question neutral.
“Oh, some of the women from Gateway saw us getting into your van the other day. Boy, were they curious. All of a sudden I have company at the Coke machine.”
“What do they want to know?”
“They just wanted some juicy gossip. When they found out there isn’t any, they went away. They were just fishing.”
“And what did they say?”
She had meant to make the women’s avid curiosity into humor directed at herself. It was not working out that way.
“They wonder about everything,” she said. “They find you very mysterious and interesting. Come on, it’s a compliment.”
“Did they tell you how I look?”
The question was spoken lightly, very well done, but Reba knew that nobody is ever kidding. She met it head-on.
“I didn’t ask them. But, yes, they told me how they think you look. Want to hear it? Verbatim? Don’t ask if you don’t.” She was sure he would ask.
No reply.
Suddenly Reba felt that she was alone in the room, that the place where he had stood was emptier than empty, a black hole swallowing everything and emanating nothing. She knew he could not have left without her hearing him.
“I think I’ll tell you,” she said. “You have a kind of hard clean neatness that they like. They said you have a remarkable body.” Clearly she couldn’t leave it at that. “They say you’re very sensitive about your face and that you shouldn’t be. Okay, here’s the dippy one with the Dentyne, is it Eileen?”