Of course I had to admit, as I looked at the women in and out of the two thermal pools, I wasn’t exactly surrounded by nubile Circassian slaves or indolent pampered sultanas. Except for the three of us, and none of us were in our youth, the average age here was about seventy. These were women whose lives you could see on their bodies, from their humped shoulders to their swollen ankles. Some were stiff and withered, almost fleshless, as they let themselves down ever so slowly into the healing waters. Others had the big collapsed bellies and elongated breasts of many pregnancies, or the elephantine legs of gout. Hard work and gravity had pressed them almost into the earth; their spines were twisted, their arms were heavy and their legs barely moved. Yet once in the water they floated like lilies, the tentative, halting land movements became luxurious and sure, their cracked, shriveled skin plumped up like raisins and the sparse hair below their bellies streamed like underwater plants.
Submerged in this warm mineral sea of menopausal crones, I relaxed my own thin, freckled limbs, and thought of purification and renewal. Water washed the soul clean, it baptized, it was sacred and holy. But it was also profane; heated, water relaxed the muscles and opened the pores. It brought back memories of the womb, of being lightly held in a pool of fluid. Warm water was erotic; it loosened inhibition, encouraged nudity. Cloudy with steam or mist, yet transparent, it allowed the bather to half hide, half reveal; it allowed the voyeur to see yet pretend to be blind.
Jack found a spot under a small waterfall and, raising herself slightly, let a stream of water come down on her neck and shoulders. I saw for the first time that she had a scar on her lower abdomen and that it had healed jaggedly.
“Had my appendix out in Nepal last year,” she said following my gaze. “I don’t recommend it. I was laid up for weeks.”
And there it was again, that faint rhythmic drumbeat of age that I had begun to hear in the clacking of the train on the Northern Line coming down to Tottenham Court Road, and that was still beating, however much I tried to distance myself. I saw my own loosening, wrinkling, scarred flesh on my friend’s body, saw myself old and crippled and getting ready to die, not like my father whose heart attack killed him quickly, but like my Aunt Maeve, trapped in an old people’s home with a wasting disease.
“Eva’s got her eye on you,” Jack whispered. “Go for it.”
I felt the warm water slip like silk between my legs and flutter teasingly in and out of my hidden places, and suddenly I was alive again. The only thing that prevented me from totally giving into lust was the knowledge that I had a rather battered shower cap on my head.
On Eva the shower cap looked cute, as if she were in a bubblebath in a movie from the fifties. She floated peacefully, her breasts bobbing. Just before she’d stepped into the pool I’d seen how athletic her body was still: the hard tight calves and strong thigh muscles, the broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist.
I wanted to talk about romance. Eva wanted to talk about business.
“If you wanted to work for us, Cassandra,” she said, “I’m sure, with your languages and background as a translator, I could get you many jobs.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I don’t have a head for business. It’s a great weakness.”
“Oh, I’m sure that is only modesty.”
“I wish I could be modest,” I said. “All too often I’m given to bragging about the things I do well.”
“And those things are?”
“Reading train timetables, bargaining, writing postcards. Crossing borders. Transgressing boundaries. And of course translation.”
“But your Spanish would come in so handy at O.K. I have a businessman from Madrid in town right now whose English is rather poor… Of course!”
Eva lifted herself out of the pool and reached for the bag she’d brought into the thermal baths with her. She took out the cellular phone. Moisture ran down her nose from her piled-up blond hair as she dialed.
“Señor Martínez, do you have dinner plans?” she said smoothly, and then laughed, “No, no, but I have someone I’d like you to meet, one of our newest secretaries… She speaks excellent Spanish. Ms. Reilly is her name. We’re in the baths at the Gellért Hotel. Why don’t you meet us at eight o’clock in the restaurant upstairs? Jack too. Yes, yes,” Eva’s laugh glittered. “My bodyguards.”
Before I could protest, Eva silenced me with her finger on my lips. “You would be doing us an enormous favor. Señor Martínez is only here for a short time. Surely you could spare an hour or two a day from your busy schedule.”
She knew, of course, that I had nothing more compelling going on than to wait for my visas and tickets to China.
“I would really quite enjoy getting to know you better too, Cassandra,” Eva said. “I think you and Jacqueline are rather remarkable. I’ve never met any women like you before.”
The buoyant breasts came maddeningly near and then bobbed off again. Some women would find this frustrating. As an ex-Catholic girl, however, I’m used to ambiguous desire and prolonged courtship.
If Eva had the interest, I had the time.
“Count me out,” Jack said, when Eva told her that our evening date included her. “I’m not spending another evening chatting up men I don’t like.”
“But Jack,” said Eva reasonably and firmly. “In a business like ours networking is frightfully important. We want to make a good impression on Señor Martínez so that he will keep doing business with us.”
“All Señor Martínez wants is to get into your knickers,” Jack said.
“That’s why I need both of you with me,” Eva said. “Do you think I like the idea of these men pawing me and making suggestive remarks just because I’m little and have blond hair? Well, I don’t. But I’m not going to spend my life living with my aunt in a small flat. I’m going to make something of myself and I’m going to make a difference in Hungarian women’s lives!”
The intensity of this ringing declaration was slightly muffled by Eva swallowing some water and sputtering. Jack pulled her up and pounded her on the back a few times.
“Dinner and that’s it,” she said firmly.
Eva beamed at her. “We’re meeting him at eight upstairs in the restaurant,” she said.
“I hope you like violins,” said Jack cryptically to me before swimming off like the dormouse in Alice in Wonderland.
Buy Trouble in Transylvania Now!
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the Seattle Arts Commission Individual Artists Program, whose support helped with the development of this work, and the following individuals for reading and commenting on the manuscript in various stages: Rebecca Brown, Faith Conlon, Dorsey Green, Richard Labonté, Ruthie Petrie, Rachel Pollack and Linda Semple. A special thanks to Candace Coughlin of Barcelona.
About the Author
Barbara Wilson is the pen name under which Barbara Sjoholm has published the Cassandra Reilly Mysteries and the Pam Nilsen Mysteries. Gaudí Afternoon, of the Cassandra Reilly series, won a Lambda Literary Award and a Crime Writers’ Association Award, and was made into a film by the same name. Like her detective Cassandra Reilly, Sjoholm is a translator, but of Norwegian and Danish books. In addition to her fiction and the memoir Blue Windows, Sjoholm is the author of the travel books The Pirate Queen: In Search of Grace O’Malley and Other Legendary Women of the Sea, Incognito Street, and The Palace of the Snow Queen. Her essays have appeared in the American Scholar, Harvard Review, the New York Times, Smithsonian, and Slate, among other publications.
For more about Barbara Sjoholm, please visit www.barbarasjoholm.com.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblanc
e to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Barbara Wilson. © 2012 by Barbara Sjoholm
Cover design by Tracey Dunham
978-1-4804-5517-7
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Gaudi Afternoon Page 20
