Mr. Bones

by Paul Theroux

  He stared at the pretty lips that had said this. He thought of installing Mara in his apartment. He had plenty of room. But he said, “How much are we talking about?”

  Mara mentioned a round figure. It was nothing to him, yet with facial expressions and movements of his head he made his habitual show of puzzling over the amount.

  He normally carried a quantity of ready cash, in case he might see a piece he wanted to buy, and dealers almost swooned when they saw real money. He picked out the amount she had named from his wallet, folded it, and pushed it across the table, the way he might ante up in a poker game.

  Palming the money, Mara began to cry again, and then, dabbing her eyes, she wrote something on a napkin and put it into his hand. And, as though overcome by his kindness, she hurried away without another word.

  He saw that a telephone number had been stabbed into the limp napkin. But he didn’t call her. Almost a week went by, and she called him, asking him whether he wished to visit her.

  “Because you’re responsible for my being here,” she said. “I make good coffee.”

  Had she forgotten saying that? Because when he visited her, she opened a bottle of wine and poured him a glass.

  “How have you been doing?”

  “You know this economy better than I do. I’ve sent out a million résumés.”

  He understood what she meant: I don’t have any work.

  “I know the art galleries are hurting.”

  “You did them a huge favor,” she said. “But my background is finance.”

  She was a banker, reduced to flunkying for Tony Faris. To make it easier for her, he said, “How much do you need?”

  She mentioned a figure, she raised it by a third, she smiled sadly. She said, “I’ll pay you back with my first paycheck.”

  She took the money and made it disappear in her pale hand. She was beautiful, perhaps the more so for looking submissive, with her slightly tangled hair, wearing her best dress. She had a dancer’s legs, slender and yet strong, like her fingers, and her head was small and well shaped on her long neck.

  As he was reflecting on her doll-like beauty—thinking, Chinese? Cambodian?—she said, “The first time I saw you with Faris in the gallery I knew you were powerful, the way you carried yourself. I knew you by reputation. I hadn’t realized how young and handsome you were.”

  “Very kind of you,” Minor Watt said. “Made my day.”

  And as he got up to leave, Mara said, “You don’t have to rush off.”

  He said, “I’m tempted to stay.”

  But he kissed her lightly and left, wondering at this turn of events.

  Then it was he who called her, and met her again at the café in the park. He offered her more money, and she took it without mentioning that she’d pay him back. This happened two more times. It seemed that his giving her money kept her from finding a job, though at the third meeting she said she was still sending out résumés.

  “Anyone interested?”

  “Sporadically,” she said, and held his hand, tugging. She told him about her family, from Mizoram, next to Assam, all Baptists, yet with an ancient pedigree. Her full name was Mara Lal Pawl. That was how she’d known the Naga necklace and the khanjar and the silver dah. But she was alone here; she had not found another Mizo in New York. Minor Watt thought, Imagine!

  “Meet me tomorrow,” he said, and specified a store on Madison Avenue.

  He took her to buy jewelry. He helped her pick out shoes. She selected some clothes. He sat while she tried them on, and he thought how she was like a small daughter saying, “How do you like my new dress, Daddy?” He paid for the clothes.

  They left the last store—Barneys—and walked around the corner to the Pierre for a drink. He said, “You should have a boyfriend, pretty girl like you.”

  “Fired him,” she said. “Besides, I have you.”

  He did not reply, just kept walking, and he could see that she was thrown. He said, “Would you do something for me?”

  Mara didn’t hesitate. She said, “Anything.”

  He let her move into an empty apartment in one of the buildings he owned that was visible from where he lived. Using binoculars he could sometimes see her at her window. He began to live for these glimpses, Mara flashing past, or lingering to look out, not knowing that she was being caressed by his gaze.

  Minor Watt went on visiting in the oblique way of a wealthy and secretive friend. He sat and held her in a scrutinizing way, thinking: What is it about her that makes her lovely? The only way to possess her was not to love her, but to support her, to satisfy her with money, and yet to keep her a little hungry and apart. He knew that feeling—the poor might be content with the little they have, but the rich always want more. Sonia had always resisted, her defiance subdued him, and he loved her, but he had never truly possessed her.

  By the second month Mara, in her acceptance, became entirely dependent on him.

  “I saw Faris the other day,” he said. “He told me I was ruthless.”

  “He doesn’t know anything. You’re really very compassionate.”

  “You think so?”

  She had a beautiful smile. “Oh, yes.”

  She didn’t know him. He was a stranger, as featureless as a bank, which was all he was to her, a source of light and money, her sole support.

  But with the connoisseurship he’d acquired over many years, he knew her well. She was as familiar to him as any object he’d studied, and like those objects she was an empty vessel, self-regarding, inward-looking, even smug and needing to be held, like all the art he’d ever owned. But that didn’t matter. She was also one of a kind, exotic for being a Mizo, lovely in her own way, perhaps lovelier, more delicate and fragile, more breakable than any piece that had ever passed through his hands. And she belonged to him.

  What Minor Watt imagined happening, and what he rehearsed in his mind, was that on the anniversary of Sonia’s leaving him, the beginning of the stock market slide, he would take out the dah that she had once recognized and named. He would carry it to the apartment that Mara occupied, and he would confront her, gripping the foot-long dagger by its silver hilt. And then, as before, when facing Sonia with the rare vase, he would hope for inspiration. Perhaps nothing would happen. Perhaps in dramatic finality he would lift his hand and slash Mara’s throat and watch her bleed to death on the carpet from Khotan. And he would say to all the people who condemned him, “Now do you see?”

  What actually happened was that he visited the apartment, the dah tucked inside his jacket. Mara smiled when she let him in, but she also seemed to notice that his posture was odd. He was slightly canted to one side, favoring a crease in his jacket.

  Minor Watt touched her, smoothing her pale slender neck with his fingers, a characteristic gesture.

  Then he said, “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Mara stepped back with widened eyes, moving her lips, as though translating what he had just said into her own language, and terrified by it. Surprised by her reaction—why wasn’t she reassured?—Minor Watt slipped his hand beneath his jacket and located the knife. But Mara was quicker. She moved on him with an old-fashioned slap, an efficient Asiatic chop, and the knife clattered to the hardwood floor. She dived at it and with a sweeping gesture grasped the handle, shook off its scabbard, and poked the blade at him. Flapping his hands in distress, Minor Watt shrieked. His own voice scared him: she had cut him, she had drawn blood. No one had ever injured him. Fearing for his life, he grew small as Mara loomed. In that moment she ceased to be ornamental. She was a horror to him, as though one of his pieces of art had come alive. Turning into a tribeswoman, suddenly feline, with blazing eyes, she pointed the dagger at him.

  Minor Watt was murmuring as if in prayer, pleading for his life, as Mara said, “This is a Burmese dah, but we have similar knives in Mizoram. Some are well made. Most of them are tools,” she went on, examining the blade, “instruments for cutting—for killing.” Now she held it to his anguished face. “They
are not trophies. Not art, but useful objects. Now I think you know that.”

  Minor Watt backed away, looking at the ugly thing in her hand, reminding her that he had been kind to her.

  “Here’s what I want you to do for me,” Mara said.

  “Anything,” he said.

  “Remove all your clothes,” she said.

  Without raising her voice, Mara repeated her request. And he obeyed, undressing slowly, and finally stepping out of his boxer shorts, one hand cupped at his groin for the sake of modesty, the other raised to protect his face, at the level of the blade.

  Begging her now, he was gabbling, and Mara’s look of disgust convinced him that she meant to kill him. She made as if to slash him, but only nicked his chin. Even so, he howled at the sight of the blood that dripped on his pale belly.

  She prodded again, moving him with the blade into the elevator and down to the ground floor, then let him run. And—grateful, eager—he fled from the apartment, out of the building, naked, his hands and body smeared, absurd, from his touching his wounds, a laughingstock on the busy street, a hilarious news item in these anxious times.

  Mr. Bones

  WHENEVER I GET sentimental and take on a reminiscing tone and talk about how my father used to read to me and encourage me, I realize that I’m lying. Is it a way of being kind to his memory, like “You look marvelous,” something he used to say? “Pretty as a picture”—seldom true. “Looks good enough to eat,” over my mother’s gristly meatloaf. But then generosity can often seem to verge on the satirical.

  My father, apparently a simple cheery soul, seemed impossible to know. His smiles made him impenetrable. In his lifetime I found it hard to see through his niceness, and even now, ten years after his death, he seems more enigmatic than ever. There he stands, at a little distance, jingling coins in his pocket, waiting for someone to need him, a satisfied man with the sort of good humor and obliging manner I associate with an old-fashioned servant. “Glad to oblige!”

  A smile is the hardest expression to fathom—you don’t inquire, you don’t even wonder. He must have known that. I never thought: Who is he? What does he want? He said he was happy. He would not have said otherwise, but though I believed him, there were things I didn’t know. At the period I am thinking of, he had just lost his job. Never mind, he found another one. Did he like it? “I’m tickled to death!”

  He was so thoroughly nice it did not occur to us that we did not know him. He didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke. He never went out at night except to church. Bowling and the movies he abandoned after first becoming a father. He had few friends, no close ones, no confidants—he wasn’t the confiding type. He wasn’t a joiner.

  I was eleven. With two older brothers and a younger sister—there would be three more children eventually—I was invisible, in the lower middle of the pack, always a few steps behind, beneath notice. And my father was the insubstantial presence he wished to be, merely a voice, a man who lived in the house. Dramatic entrance, and then silence. A hush. Dramatic departure, and then silence again.

  This all sounds harmonious, yet there was disorder and tension and conflict in our household. It was crooked in the angular splinters in the woodwork, pulsing in the air, a disturbance that was deep, subtle, and without any voice, a noiseless bewilderment and uncertainty, the vibrant presence of low-pitched rivalries, and it was all masked by politeness, or sometimes hostile displays of affection. The quiet-seeming household is often more turbulent or intimidating than the household of the tyrant or the drunkard.

  One of the unspoken conflicts in the house was the house itself, a constant reproach in the cabinets that failed to catch, in every creak of the floorboards, the peeling wallpaper, the stains on the ceiling like mocking faces, every draft that scuttled under the doors. All these awkward reminders. My mother’s version of the story, which was the blaming version—the one that my mother wouldn’t let him live down—was that having decided that we had to move (four kids in a tiny house and a fifth on the way), my father would be the house hunter. My mother was pregnant and busy, but she was also the sort of person who provoked us to make a decision, so that if we failed she could say, “Whose fault is that?” Deniability was a defense she mastered long before such a word was coined.

  By directing my father to look for a new house, she became the one to be propitiated: a scolding silence if it was a good choice, loud blame if it was a bad one. Dad was like hired help, the house hunter. “And it better be a good one.”

  Unused to the trick of spending a large amount of money, risking this big decision, Dad became more affable, more genial than I’d ever seen him. It was sheer nervousness, a kind of helpless hilarity, like that of an almost ruined gambler at the blackjack table risking everything on the turn of a card.

  He saw three or four houses. They were unsuitable. He liked all of them. My mother was vexed. This was dinner table talk: we were discouraged from speaking during mealtime, so we listened. Buying anything involved endless deliberation. “What’s good about it?” my mother would say. “It’ll be hard to heat,” or “It’s not on a bus line,” or “That’s a bad neighborhood.”

  One winter night Mother was in tears. Dad had seen another house he liked. He was told the price. He was in the nervous affable mood, his gambler’s anxiety. He did not bargain, or say “My wife will have to see it,” or “We’ll think it over.”

  He said, “We’ll take it!” with a sudden flourish of money that startled even the seller of the house, who was a cranky old woman in a soiled apron.

  That was my mother’s version, in the oral tradition of the family history, the only version that was ever allowed, all the blame on Dad. In a matter of an hour or so my father had seen the house and agreed to buy it. Another detail to his discredit was that he had seen it in the dark. Because it was January and he worked until five-thirty, he would have driven there after work, tramped through the snow, looked it over, and by seven or so it was a deal.

  The reason for my mother’s tears was that, anticipating his finding the right house, Dad had been carrying five hundred dollars in small bills around with him, and the papers he signed that very night (the old woman had them handy in the pocket of her apron) specified a deposit of that amount, nonreturnable.

  “Our whole life’s savings!” my mother cried, thumping the table. “How could you?”

  Obviously he’d liked the house, he didn’t want to risk losing it, he wasn’t a bargainer, and he was pressed for time, house hunting after work. It was: buy the house, pay the rest of the money with a mortgage, or lose the deposit. “Our life’s savings—wasted!”

  My father suffered, smiling sheepishly through a number of scenes at the dinner table—and other times too. I heard bedroom recriminations, rare in our household. But in a short time the mortgage was granted, the house was bought, and we moved—a huge disruptive event in a family with few, almost no, events that involved a substantial outlay of money. It was the only time we moved house, and what made it memorable were my mother’s tears. After it was done, her father and mother paid a visit. Her father—sententious, pinched and pious, a self-proclaimed orphan—looked at the house, surveyed the street, pronounced it a disaster, and said, “Poor Anna.”

  The house was large but odd-shaped, bony and tall and narrow, like a cereal box, the narrow side to the street, the wide side a wall of windows, and somehow unfinished—the kitchen not quite right, the doors either sagging or poorly fitting or missing, varnished cabinets of thin wood, the floors creaky and uneven. But it had four bedrooms. Fred and Floyd shared a room with bunk beds. “There’s room for the piano,” my father said in a voice of hollow enthusiasm.

  “Life’s savings” was probably an exaggeration, but not much: my father’s new job was menial, a shoe clerk. He was grateful for the job, but a man selling shoes spends a great deal of time on his knees.

  He never stopped smiling that winter. His smile said, All’s well. Mother banged the kitchen cabinets to demonstrate the loose hing
es, the broken latches. She tugged at the front door, exaggerating the effort, saying she was coming down with a cold because of the drafts, sighing loudly, all the sounds and gestures in the theater of discontent.

  Dad said, “Say, I’ll see to that.”

  He was imperturbable, not so chummy as to cause offense, but deferentially amiable. “How can I help?” A kind of submissiveness you’d see in the native of a remote colony, with the wan demeanor of a field hand or an old retainer.

  Spring came. The roof began to leak, the gutters were rotted, the nailed-on storm windows proved hard to take down. Now that we were less confined by winter, we could see that the house was big and plain and needed paint.

  Dad began to paint it, with a borrowed ladder and a gallon of yellow paint. A neighbor saw him and said in a shocked voice, “You’re not going to paint that house yellow!”

  So Dad returned the yellow and bought some cans of gray.

  “That’s a lot better,” the neighbor said.

  My mother pointed out that he’d dripped gray paint onto the white trim. He corrected it by repainting the trim.

  Mother said, “Now you’ve gone and dripped white paint on the shingles.”

  Dad smiled, repainting, never quite getting it right.

  Anticipating warm weather and insects, he put up screens. The screens were wobbly and rusted; holes had been poked in them.

  “Didn’t you look at the screens before?”

  She was talking about January, when he’d bought the house. This was mid-March.

  The stove was unreliable. The fuel oil in the heater gurgled and leaked from the pump, and that had to be replaced by a plumber, Dad’s fellow choir member Mel Hankey. He worked for nothing, or for very little, groaning in wordless irritation as he toiled, like giving off a smell.

  My father’s new job was a problem: long hours, low pay, my mother home with the small children, and pregnant—due in June. She was heavy and walked with a tippy, leaning-back gait, supporting her belly with one hand, seeming to balance herself as she moved.