maple replaced the damp, elaborate grass, and the toad—
It was the garbage bell. Had she remembered? She rose and rounded the bend of corridor into the kitchen just as the platform inside the shaft dropped. Bags from 7 and 8 came down the chute, rattling, and far below, muffled, it all smashed together into the smasher. But her own garbage was still waiting in the pail, unsorted and unwrapped.
Let it, she thought. She tried to return to the villa, closing her eyes and clutching for the talismanic image that would place her there: a wedge of sunlight, a window, sky, and the slight sway of the pine.
Alexa was reclining on the double bed. Timarchus knelt before her, head bowed (he was a new boy, Sarmatian, and rather shy), offering his mistress, on a scalloped tray, a small cake covered with pineae. (She was hungry.) “But I won’t touch it,” she told herself.
To Timarchus she said: “This afternoon when the bailiff can spare you, my boy, go down by the pool with a rag and rub the statue where it’s stained. Ever so gently, you know, just as though the stone were skin. It will take days, but—” She sensed that there was something wrong with the boy.
A smile. “Timarchus?”
He raised his head in answer: the olive skin formed two small, smooth hollows where eyes would have been.
It wouldn’t do. She ought to have known better by now than to try to bull her way through once she’d lost contact. The result was inevitably nightmares and silliness.
She set to work. It was, anyhow, nearly three o’clock. She spread a page of the Times across the counter and emptied the pail over it. A story in the second column caught her attention: a plane had been stolen from the Military Fair at Highland Falls. Apparently it had been flown away. But why? To have found out she would have had to brush aside a skum of eggshell, peelings, paper, sweepings, and a week’s worth of shit and husks from Emily’s cage.
Actually, she was not that curious. She made a tiny bundle, over and under, around and under once more, the only skill surviving from her flirtation with origami twenty years before. Her Japanese instructor, with whom she had also conducted a flirtation, had had to agree to a vasectomy as a condition of entering the U.S. It left the tiniest scar. His name was Sebastian… Sebastian… His last name escaped her.
She put the bundle on the platform.
She stopped in the doorway to untie, strand by strand the knot of muscle from her forehead down to her shoulders. Then four deep breaths. Noises seeped into this brief stillness: the icebox, the higher pitched purr of the filter, and, intermittently, a grinding whine that she had never understood. It seemed to come from the apartment overhead but she never remembered to ask what it might be.
Was there somewhere she was supposed to have gone?
This time it was the timer. Willa’s pies had a fine glaze. Alexa had used one of her own (real) eggs to brush the crust, a courtesy that would probably be invisible to Willa, who was capable of only the broadest gastronomic distinctions, as between beef and ice cream. The casserole squeezed in beside the rice pudding she was doing for Larry and Tom, who, lacking an oven of their own, paid for their time in Alexa’s with tickets to the opera from their subscription series, an informal, inflexible contract of many years’ standing. She closed the door, reset the timer, rewound and unplugged the instruction cassette.
And that, except for the mail, was that.
The key was in the penny dish, and the elevator, god bless it, was alive and well and only one floor off. Plotting how in coming up she would escape them by reading her mail, she read the graffiti going down: obscenities, the names of politicians, and everywhere (even the ceiling) “love,” which some patient cynic edited, each time it was scratched into the paint, to “Glove.” the super’s endearing theory was that this was all the work of lumpen-prole delivery men, the
It was the garbage bell. Had she remembered? She rose and rounded the bend of corridor into the kitchen just as the platform inside the shaft dropped. Bags from 7 and 8 came down the chute, rattling, and far below, muffled, it all smashed together into the smasher. But her own garbage was still waiting in the pail, unsorted and unwrapped.
Let it, she thought. She tried to return to the villa, closing her eyes and clutching for the talismanic image that would place her there: a wedge of sunlight, a window, sky, and the slight sway of the pine.
Alexa was reclining on the double bed. Timarchus knelt before her, head bowed (he was a new boy, Sarmatian, and rather shy), offering his mistress, on a scalloped tray, a small cake covered with pineae. (She was hungry.) “But I won’t touch it,” she told herself.
To Timarchus she said: “This afternoon when the bailiff can spare you, my boy, go down by the pool with a rag and rub the statue where it’s stained. Ever so gently, you know, just as though the stone were skin. It will take days, but—” She sensed that there was something wrong with the boy.
A smile. “Timarchus?”
He raised his head in answer: the olive skin formed two small, smooth hollows where eyes would have been.
It wouldn’t do. She ought to have known better by now than to try to bull her way through once she’d lost contact. The result was inevitably nightmares and silliness.
She set to work. It was, anyhow, nearly three o’clock. She spread a page of the Times across the counter and emptied the pail over it. A story in the second column caught her attention: a plane had been stolen from the Military Fair at Highland Falls. Apparently it had been flown away. But why? To have found out she would have had to brush aside a skum of eggshell, peelings, paper, sweepings, and a week’s worth of shit and husks from Emily’s cage.
Actually, she was not that curious. She made a tiny bundle, over and under, around and under once more, the only skill surviving from her flirtation with origami twenty years before. Her Japanese instructor, with whom she had also conducted a flirtation, had had to agree to a vasectomy as a condition of entering the U.S. It left the tiniest scar. His name was Sebastian… Sebastian… His last name escaped her.
She put the bundle on the platform.
She stopped in the doorway to untie, strand by strand the knot of muscle from her forehead down to her shoulders. Then four deep breaths. Noises seeped into this brief stillness: the icebox, the higher pitched purr of the filter, and, intermittently, a grinding whine that she had never understood. It seemed to come from the apartment overhead but she never remembered to ask what it might be.
Was there somewhere she was supposed to have gone?
This time it was the timer. Willa’s pies had a fine glaze. Alexa had used one of her own (real) eggs to brush the crust, a courtesy that would probably be invisible to Willa, who was capable of only the broadest gastronomic distinctions, as between beef and ice cream. The casserole squeezed in beside the rice pudding she was doing for Larry and Tom, who, lacking an oven of their own, paid for their time in Alexa’s with tickets to the opera from their subscription series, an informal, inflexible contract of many years’ standing. She closed the door, reset the timer, rewound and unplugged the instruction cassette.
And that, except for the mail, was that.
The key was in the penny dish, and the elevator, god bless it, was alive and well and only one floor off. Plotting how in coming up she would escape them by reading her mail, she read the graffiti going down: obscenities, the names of politicians, and everywhere (even the ceiling) “love,” which some patient cynic edited, each time it was scratched into the paint, to “Glove.” the super’s endearing theory was that this was all the work of lumpen-prole delivery men, the
Similar Books
