Chapter 5
Reva had all day Sunday to recuperate from her experiences with Len and then .Frank Porter. When she phoned into The Jewel Carpet Company for her leads on Monday morning at nine-thirty, the Girl Friday at the desk gave her a list of six people to see. Some people, like Len, sold carpeting in a matter of minutes. If he didn't have the sale in ten minutes, he just walked out. On the other hand, Reva often took the better part of an hour to make a sale. Many a sale Len would have walked out on for lack of patience was made by Reva because she stayed a little longer and probed a little deeper. So six leads was all Reva was able to handle.
Today her leads were all in Queens. South Ozone Park and Forest Hills. That meant a mixture of poor and wealthy. Oddly enough, she often made her best sales with poor people, offering them the company's lay away plan. There were no interest charges with the lay away plan, and this intrigued the people who would otherwise have remained without carpeting. Usually, it was the wealthy people who gave her the most trouble. It was also the wealthy who wanted to pay the least. They always tried bargaining her down. If Reva felt a sale was to be made, she allowed them to bargain her so far, but no farther.
By one o'clock she had finished with her first three leads in Ozone Park, and all three were sales. She had lunch, then went to Forest Hills. There she found a woman living alone who had been left a fortune by her husband, but the woman wasn't in the mood to part with any of it. She wanted Reva's most expensive carpeting but at the price of the cheapest. So Reva walked out.
Her second Forest Hills appointment was a young married couple that had just moved into a house and wanted all five rooms carpeted.
Reva sold them her most expensive carpeting. She gave them a different color for each room.
The last appointment of the day, at four o'clock, was with a wealthy widow who lived with her twenty-seven-year old son. It was obvious from the start that momma was controlled by her loving son, and so it was the loving son she would have to sell.
It was a large, two story house, with loads of Victorian furniture, casement windows, and an atmosphere of semi-gloom.
"Mother," Armand Leon said to his dowager mother, "you stay down in the living room while I show Mrs.. . " he turned to Reva, waiting for her to give her name.
"Brent," Reva replied.
"I'll show Mrs. Brent the upstairs and let her take the measurements of the rooms," he finished.
He wasn't bad-looking, not at all. About five-feet-ten inches in height, with black hair that came halfway below his earlobes, bushy eyebrows, heavy cheeks that gave him an almost ape-like appearance, and a rock-solid chin. His shoulders were broad, like those of an ex-football player, which he happened to be, and he had long arms. Reva wondered if he might be some kind of simian throwback. He was wearing a white shirt and neatly tailored brown slacks.
Reva's coat was hanging in the coat closet, and she had on a simple blue dress. It was obvious Armand was interested, but was it in the carpeting? Reva somehow doubted it. She had seen the look in his eyes before, in the eyes of countless other men whom she had turned down. But that had been before Saturday evening and early Sunday morning. Now she was a different Reva. Now the broadloom she was showing them, which retailed at thirty dollars a square yard, and which she was able to discount as low as sixteen dollars would remain at thirty dollars. Armand had told her he wanted to do the entire house, which consisted of eleven rooms and three hallways. That meant a sale of between four and five thousand dollars. It was a sale on which she would have walked out, last week, because she seemed to know in advance what was in Armand's mind.
HI
"All right," he said, once they were in his bedroom, an almost cavernous toom with a huge bed at one end and all kinds of imagine video equipment, including a recorder, all around. "Let's you and I talk."
"About what?" she asked.
"About me giving you the order."
"You know I'm offering you the best nylon carpeting around," she told him. "What's there to talk about?"
"You and me," Armand told her, shrugging, making no move to shut the door, as if half expecting her to try and make a run.
What he didn't know was that the animalism of him had aroused Reva, partly because of what the other two men had done to her, but mostly because their doing it had awakened instincts in her she had never before realized she had. Another part of her, the part that she was more familiar with, was urging her to turn and run. Yet the first part was wondering what kind of penis this almost monstrous man had, and how would it feel sinking between her thighs. She ached to feel more of the animalistic release she had discovered not too long before.
"We can work something out," Reva said calmly, though inside she was shaking like the proverbial leaf.
The look in his eyes told her he was surprised she had consented so readily. He had sincerely believed she would either have refused him outright, or she would have made him really work to coax her. Her easy acceptance seemed to give her the upper hand, and if there was one thing Armand insisted on, it was control of any situation between himself and any woman.
"Then you agree," he nodded
"On the condition that your mother signs the contract and you give me a down payment of half the full amount, first."
"You wait here," he told her.
"Cash, by the way," she insisted, as he walked out of the room.
When he returned, about five minutes later, he handed her a signed contract, and a packet of hundred dollar bills. She put them in the briefcase she brought.
"All right," she nodded. "When and where?"
"Here and now," he told her.
Was he insane? Here, in the upstairs bedroom, with his mother only a few yards away, downstairs? Was he whacko? He wasn't even making an attempt to shut the door. But the look in his eyes told her he was dead serious about wanting her in here. What was more, Reva knew she was going to do precisely as he instructed.
She walked to the door with the intention of shutting it, but he said, "Leave it open, honey. Part of the fun is letting mom overhear. Don't worry, she won't come up."
"Come on," Reva snapped. "I'm willing to give you what you want, when you want it, and where you want it. But I want some privacy."
"Off with the clothes, honey," he insisted, tapping his foot.