by Craig Nova
The light here was fluorescent, and he stood in front of the mirror. He opened his mouth, but the light was directly above him, and all he saw was the rictus formed by his own barely recognizable lips. Then he went into a stall and stood in front of the urinal. He was so frightened of what he would see, the inky urine that came from the dead lining of his kidneys, that when he produced nothing more than a clear stream, he started shaking. Maybe the fever would pass. He swallowed and then stood in front of the sink, where he washed his face with soap that smelled like the stuff that had been in the bathrooms of the schools he had gone to when he had been a kid.
CHAPTER 10
May 2, noon
KAY WASN’ T hungry, exactly, but nevertheless she had a craving that left her a little agitated, and while she tried to think what it might be, she knew that someone had done this to her. Not Briggs. She was pretty sure of that. However much she knew this craving was artificial, she wanted to satisfy it. Whatever it was, she hoped she would recognize it when she saw it, but how to find it, or to get herself in a place where such recognition could take place? For a while she assumed that it was something she wanted to eat—French fries with ketchup, a crumb doughnut, a steak with onions, pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and garlic, chocolate cake— but as she went through the list, the craving grew.
She looked out the window of the hotel. The thin clouds covered the sun like a photographer’s umbrella. Some birds flew against it, and they coasted after each wingbeat, making an up-and-down pattern like the sagging of telephone wires between poles. Was that it? she thought. The desire to fly? To get away?
On the street she didn’t go in any particular direction, although she noticed that she wanted to see plants and flowers, and she walked toward the trees at the end of the block and stood in the green tinted shade. It was refreshing, but it didn’t do that much good, really, and soon she was so restless again that she continued searching. In this part of town she saw some food carts on the street, and she stopped in front of some, but it was useless. It wasn’t food. She passed a church, and while she was tempted by the dark and empty shadows, the remote and diminishing odor of incense, she only hesitated and then moved on, hearing the flap of wings and seeing the shape of the birds against that bright, luminescent sky.
The Botanical Garden was at the end of a long avenue, and after Kay passed it, she stopped and turned back. The building was made of marble with a Greek Revival front, and on both sides of it, behind black bars that were topped with spikes, formal gardens stretched into the distance. Even from here she heard the plash of a fountain, and she saw a marble figure standing in a pool of water, a woman with full hips, her hands holding a fish, from the mouth of which green-tinted water flowed.
She bought a ticket and went in to the marble-floored lobby, where her shoes made a clicking echo. Directly in front of her was a greenhouse with a glass roof, and in the soft air and the soothing light she saw a chaos of fronds and palms, mosses, creepers, small flowers that weren’t much bigger than a pinhead. The fronds were neatly arrayed, like jalousies. She went in.
She sat on a bench next to a woman in a dark dress who wore very red lipstick. Everything about her seemed familiar, and the damp, warm air of the greenhouse, the mixture of leaves and flowers, the sight of chains of red ants, all contributed to a sense of comfort.
“Kay,” said Carr.
Carr had a bag of lemon sweets. The paper made a diminutive, sad crinkle when she opened it.
“May I have one of those?” said Kay.
Kay reached out for one, and then glanced back at the tropical tree trunks, which had the color of an elephant’s skin, and against the bark the orchids hung in a cascade of petals. The moment in the elevator came back to her when the wetness ran along her leg, the stuff getting everywhere, on her hands, the lining of her coat. The petals had a ridged texture, the raised lines reminding her of the pattern on the vanilla ice cream when she had drawn the spoon between her lips. She closed her eyes to recall the taste. Finally she put the lemon candy in her mouth: that was what she had craved. The instant she tasted it, she knew she had been sent for.
“What do you want?” Kay said.
“Oh, such a sharp tongue,” said Carr. “Well, that will come in handy.”
The room had a hush that came from so much vegetation crowded into the enclosed space.
“I guess,” said Kay.
“My,” said Carr, “you sulk beautifully. So tell me, have you broken any hearts recently?”
“And what is it to you?” said Kay.
“To me?” said Carr. “Why, it is everything to me.”
Carr carefully looked into Kay’s eyes.
“And what gives you the right to feel that way?” said Kay.
“How dare you speak to me like that?” said Carr. She raised her hand as though to strike, but then she stopped and sat back. She looked around, seemingly hoping that she could draw something from the leaves and flowers. Then she looked back at Kay and said, “I am sure you know, if you would just give it a moment’s thought. Haven’t you ever been discarded? And when you are discarded, my sweet, you learn something about self-loathing,” said Carr. She made that small, sad laugh. “And self-loathing is the sister of revenge.”
“I guess,” said Kay.
“Oh, sulk like that,” said Carr. “I love to see it. So tell me, are you going to see Blaine?”
“Soon,” said Kay.
Carr swallowed as though she had been thinking about something that she craved. “I’ll want to know if he cried, if he begged. I want the words he says, flecks of gold, each one.” She came closer to Kay. “You and I will gather them up. We will hammer them into some beautiful thing to wear.”
Kay looked at the fronds, which were so like green venetian blinds.
“But it’s not enough to break his heart. Not really. What we want is to make sure he loses his sense of who he is. He likes to think he is competent. Well, we will fix that, won’t we?”
“We will?” said Kay.
“Of course, my sweet,” said Carr. “But of course. Can’t you feel the impulse?”
Kay looked down.
“Yes,” she said. “I can feel it.”
“And?” said Carr.
“It’s so bitter,” said Kay.
“Yes,” said Carr. “And who is more bitter, you or me?”
Kay swallowed.
“I don’t know,” she said.
Carr took Kay’s hand and held it in her own.
“Listen to me,” she said. “Confuse him. Give him bad advice. Let him make mistakes that only a fool would make. He won’t even know who he is anymore.”
Carr got up and kissed Kay on the forehead.
“You are so lovely,” she said.
She held out the bag.
“Would you like another?” she said. She opened the bag up, displaying the jumble of lemon balls.
Kay had the feeling that if she could resist the craving, if she could simply swallow and forget it, she would be able to do what she wanted.
“Here,” said Carr.
Kay reached into the bag, her fingers going over the candies. She put one into her mouth and sat there, sucking it.
“Bittersweet,” said Carr, “isn’t it?”
Carr walked into the greenish light of the place, passing the small fountain where a spout gurgled, and in which people had thrown coins as they had made a wish. The coins lay in a clutter on the bottom. Kay thought of Rome, of the fountains there, the light that covered all the walls like dust. She wished that she had a piece of paper and a pencil so she could write to Briggs, just a few words, and while she was sure they would be imperfect and imprecise, she hoped that in the imperfection of what she wrote, he would see something of her, some quality that could only be conveyed by awkwardness, which, at certain moments, might have a beauty of its own. Then she stood up and walked out through the open fans of the ferns, the cascades of flowers, as though a handful of bright red scraps of paper had been dr
opped from a height and now fell through the green-on-green shadows here. She went out into the street.
CHAPTER 11
May 2, afternoon
“DID KAY call?” Blaine said to his housekeeper.
“No,” she said.
“And she hasn’t come here? Hasn’t left a note?”
She shook her head.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Blaine,” she said.
Blaine’s housekeeper put an early dinner on the table, and later she saw that he was sitting there in front of the roast, the spinach soufflé, the wild rice, all of it uneaten. Blaine sat there alone, looking at the food as though the things there were an indictment of him for never being able to ask for what he needed. Or for not understanding what he required. This was what appalled him: his inability to know what he needed, and how important the ordinary really was. He imagined his wife as she had sat opposite him at their lunches, waiting for him to die. Surely this was the saddest pleasure, waiting for someone you hated to die.
When he was certain that he wouldn’t be able to eat, he went back into the library, where, on a card table, he stared at the jigsaw puzzle he had worked on for the last few days. The pieces lay there with a mysterious incoherence, a refusal to be put together. He stood there, a tall shape in dark clothes in the yellow light of the library, and in the shadows he picked up the box the puzzle had come in and swept it in. He thought, Yes, my son is waiting for me to die, too.
He sat down and looked out the window. Now, at eight, a few lights burned, and he saw the stars beyond the roofs and towers, their shapes mocking, since a few days before the stars had seemed to be part of an order, a pattern, which made sense and had been studied and understood, but which now just looked like flecks of senseless blue light. The buildings appeared as usual, although their luminescence seemed frail, like a flashlight bulb when the battery is running down.
He wanted to put a label on what he had gotten from Kay. He tried to do this by saying to himself that she had given him a sense of sweetness, like the aroma in a Vermont sugarhouse in the spring, when the clouds of steam were like a sweet fog that he could feel on his skin and taste on the tip of his tongue. But the odd thing was that this sensation wasn’t physical, but mental. Along with it he had the certainty that she understood him. She forgave. She made him feel that his coldness had been a vicious artifice, and that if he was lucky, she might give him a second chance.
He hadn’t shaved, brushed his hair, or changed his shirt. He knew that soon people from the office would be coming for him, but he didn’t care. He waited for Kay to arrive. He was certain that if he could spend some time with her, he would know what to do. She might play for him. Afterwards they might . . . They might what? She might kiss him. Could he really be so far gone as to want just a kiss? Well, maybe more than that, when he got down to cases, but a kiss was what he craved. Then he thought of what it would be like to sleep with her, to be in that sweet, damp caress, at once physical, as though inhaling the dulcet fog of the sugarhouse, and yet mental too, as though his thoughts were part of that same enveloping mist.
The housekeeper came in and said, “She’s here,” and then turned and went out, her red, pink-soled shoes squeaking on the floor. Kay came into the room in the wake of the housekeeper’s departure.
“Ah, Kay,” he said. “Kay.”
He moved forward on his chair.
“Don’t get up,” said Kay. “Don’t. You look tired.”
“Do I?” he said. “Well. Here I am. The great man himself. Just look!”
She sat down opposite him.
“And how did I come to this?” Blaine said.
“You’ll feel better in a little while,” she said.
“Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. Wrong,” he said. “I can’t think clearly.”
He put his head in his hands.
“Don’t you have to make a decision about what to do?” she said. “About the markets?”
“Yes,” he said. “I guess . . . ”
Kay looked around the room. Then she turned to Blaine. How reduced he was, nothing more than a bundle of nerves. He had brought himself to this by throwing away the things she had craved: children, family, a regular life. She even thought of him standing on the rail of his terrace, looking down, hair in disarray, the birds swirling around him, making him dizzy as he thought of stepping off: this would be the moment when he realized that he was a failure as a bureaucrat and as a man, too. She could already see his stricken expression.
“Kay,” he said. “Won’t you play a little something?”
She got up and went to the piano, lifting the cover from the keys. The line of them, in black and white, stretched away into the darkness at the end of the keyboard. She put her coat on a chair behind her and sat down. Then she pulled up the bench and worked one of the pedals, which made a squeak. She kept looking at Blaine, at the room, and as she looked around, she wanted to get away. She didn’t have time for this. She had other things to do.
“Well?” he said. “What are you waiting for? Are you sick?”
“Shhh,” she said. “Please.”
“Please what?” he said.
“Please be quiet. I don’t want to hear your voice.”
“My voice?” he said.
She reached out to the lid of the piano and slammed it shut, and then again, the humming, discordant sound of the piano coming once and then again, and then a third time when the lid cracked at the hinges and hung like some drunken thing.
“Kay,” he said. “Kay!”
“What did I tell you?” she said.
She thought, Now. Now is the moment. She stood up and walked over to him, her hip next to his face. Outside, the city lights shimmered in blues and yellows, and for a moment she couldn’t determine whether they looked like that because of the air or because of her fury.
“Will you do something for me?” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “Kay. Anything.”
She sat down in the chair opposite him.
“What? Tell me,” he said.
She closed her eyes. For a moment she remembered the elevator in the dim light, the sweat, the touch of the bars as she reached out with one hand to steady herself.
“I was supposed to get you to do something stupid,” she said.
“Were you?” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I was going to bitch you up and give you some bad advice. I’ve already started. Didn’t those things I told you about Indices Tracking sound good?”
“Yes,” he said.
“That was just something to establish a little credibility. I had some other ideas.”
He watched her.
“My advice would have sounded good,” she said. “But it wasn’t worth much.”
“And you had planned on doing this?” he said. “From the beginning?”
“Yes,” she said.
He looked at her, his eyes bloodshot, his face hanging in tired jowls.
“And why would you have done that?” he said.
She shrugged.
“Anger,” she said. “Bitterness.”
“Yes,” he said. “Bitterness. That’s something I understand. At least now.”
He sat opposite her, looking at her face, her hands.
“And why didn’t you go through with it?”
“I wanted to be at my best,” she said.
“Oh?” he said.
She nodded. Out the window, over the jagged tops of the buildings, the stars had emerged as yellow points in the pink-gray sky. The effect of them was soothing, and she sat there puzzled by their effect. Then she considered those moments when she had imagined that shade of pink, in the heart of the first leaves of spring, when the new growth had appeared like the open mouths of birds, their flesh just as pink as the first blush of the leaves they resembled. What, after all, is at the heart of a color, or the implication of it? Hope. It was so tied up with wanting to be at one’s best for another human being. To be trusted. And admired.
“I fell in love,” she said. “That’s the short answer. You want to be at your best then, don’t you?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Blaine, a little sadly. “Tell me, whom did you fall in love with?”
He looked up with a delirious hope.
“No,” she said. “Not you.”
“Oh,” said Blaine. “Well.”
He stood up, into the shadows, then he put his hand out, into her hair.
“My darling,” he said.
She sat there, letting him touch her, head down.
“Go on,” she said. “Make a decision.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m tired. A little fuzzy.”
“Take a bath,” she said.
“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t know.”
“And shave,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”
“Will I?” he said. “Kay?”
“Do me a favor,” she said.
“And what is that?” he said. “I’d do anything for you. Kay, you must know that.”
“Do what you know how to do. Make a decision,” she said. “Be a . . . ”
“A what? A man? Is that what you mean?” he said.
She shrugged.
“Yes,” she said. “You could put it that way.”
“Perhaps. I’ve got to change my shirt. Put on a tie.”
“That’s right,” said Kay.
“Then I can go downtown,” he said. “Jimmy will take me.”
“Yes,” said Kay. “Jimmy will take you.”
She stood up and kissed him once on the lips, and turned and went through the shadows and out to the door. Blaine watched her go. Then he said, “Kay, please. Wait.”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said.
“But wait,” he said.
“I’ve got something to do,” she said. “I’m in a hurry.”
“Kay, Kay,” he said. “Where are you going?”
“I’ve got to meet someone,” she said. “Do you know a man by the name of Krupp?”
“No,” said Blaine.
Kay shrugged.
“It shouldn’t take long,” she said. “I’m going to do a favor for a friend.”
