Immediately, she felt ashamed of herself for having thought such a thing. After all, it was hardly Nicky’s fault that his babysitter had never arrived. Marion smiled as she thought of her little son’s wide, blue eyes and curly hair, so pale it was almost white. Everyone who saw him declared that he was the brightest, most beautiful child they had ever seen. The babysitter, an older woman, adored him—brought him small gifts and candy whenever she came, which was supposed to be three times a week: Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. On Wednesdays, she came an hour earlier than usual so Marion could leave for her weekly lunch date with Irene. But here it was, almost noon, and almost certainly Wednesday. Marion was late for her lunch, and the sitter still had not arrived. She had missed last week’s lunch at Etienne’s—she couldn’t quite remember why—and it would be unthinkably embarrassing to miss it yet again. There was nothing for it but to take Nicky with her to the restaurant.
She flicked through her coats one last time and nodded as she made up her mind. There was always the blue velvet—so versatile. She lifted it carefully from the hanger, gave it three good smacks to get the worst of the dust, then pulled it on over the silk blouse and three wool sweaters she was already wearing.
“Time to go, Nicky,” she called as she threaded her way toward the nursery.
One had to be careful. There were several holes in the ceiling, and two in the floor. Broken glass littered the rugs. The windows all were shattered. She had asked the handyman about fixing them when she had run into him outside on the walk two days ago. But he had only bared his teeth at her and mumbled in a breathless sort of way, “The hell with your windows, you bitch!”
She had never approved of people who cursed.
Nicky was sitting in his crib, right where she had left him, looking like a little man in his short pants and blazer. She held her hands out toward him. “All ready to go, pummy cake?”
He glared at her.
“Don’t you want to come with Mommy, Nicky pie?”
He remained stubbornly motionless in the corner of his crib. It wasn’t like him. He usually beamed and chortled at the prospect of going places. Marion sighed once more. Maybe he wasn’t feeling well. She felt a little under the weather herself—nothing major, a few stomach troubles and general tiredness. Still, even small ailments could make a person cranky, especially a baby.
On the other hand, maybe it was something simpler. Maybe Nicky missed his father. Gerald, a financial analyst in the city thirty miles away, traveled a great deal in his work. He hadn’t been home in some time. She couldn’t remember his mentioning it, but she assumed he was gone on a business trip.
“Never mind, Nicky, dear. Daddy will be home soon,” she said as she reached down and picked him up.
Marion became aware of an unpleasant odor in the air and discreetly opened the waistband of Nicky’s pants to check his diaper. Clean and dry, so that couldn’t be it. She had noticed the odor several times lately and wished she could call the pediatrician about it. But of course, that wasn’t possible until the phone was repaired.
Marion tottered downstairs with Nicky balanced on her hip, trying not to rely too much on the banister, which had come loose. She considered setting Nicky down and letting him scramble to the bottom by himself, but he wasn’t very good at stairs yet. And besides, in a mood like this, he would probably just sit down, cross his little arms, and refuse to budge anyway.
When she reached the entryway, she laid her hand on the front door latch, then realized her mistake and laughed aloud at her own silliness. The front entrance was no use because it was blocked by a heap of broken masonry— another thing the handyman had refused to clean up. Fortunately, the house was lovely and old, built long before the Bauhaus school had transformed architecture into an array of featureless walls and sterile lines. It possessed all the amenities, including a wondrous number of doors, any of which could be used instead of the front entrance.
She stepped gingerly over the chandelier and several icy puddles that had accumulated from drips in the ceiling. The plumbing as well as the phones seemed badly out of order. She made her way toward the kitchen, thinking how glad she was that at least she didn’t have to rely on the broken pipes for drinking. She and Gerald always kept a large supply of bottled spring water on hand.
On her way to the kitchen door, she stopped in front of the pantry, pressing the tip of one finger to her cheek as she considered a new complication. She and Irene enjoyed Chez Etienne so much because Etienne provided excellent food with impeccable service. But things were in such a turmoil lately that even Etienne might find his resources strained.
Marion set Nicky on the drainboard and began rummaging through one of the kitchen drawers. After a time, she located some matches, lit a candle, and held it up in the dark little pantry. She hesitated only a moment before pulling a can of vichyssoise and a jar of artichoke hearts from the shelf. She loaded them into her coat pockets along with the matches and a can opener, muttering to herself. Gerald wouldn’t approve. He would say she was too soft on service people, and she knew it was true, but she couldn’t help feeling kindly toward Etienne after so many years of wonderful Wednesday lunches in his establishment.
“Here we go, Nicky,” she said. And she opened the back door.
The gray snow was still falling, and it was even colder outside than inside. A gust of raw wind stung her cheeks.
“Oh, poor Nicky, dear!” she cried, suddenly remembering that she hadn’t been able to find his coat, and his legs were bare. She opened her own coat, pressed him close, and wrapped it around him as well as she could, wishing fiercely that she hadn’t been so vain, that she had worn the warm Russian sable instead of the velvet.
She blinked at the sun, nothing more than a light gray spot in the heavy gray sky, and tried hard to suppress a quite involuntary shudder. “There are times,” her mother had always said, “when a person of good breeding must overlook conditions, behave with good humor, and rise to the occasion.” She turned as smartly as she could on the buckled sidewalk and started down the street toward Etienne’s, stepping over a downed power pole and making a wide detour around the first heap of rubble.
She waved as she passed the Sutherlands’ house. The front wall had fallen down, and there was Mrs. Sutherland, sitting on the sofa, rocking back and forth with a large bundle in her arms. Something gray and brown and tattered. Marion couldn’t quite tell what it was.
“Halloo, Mrs. Sutherland,” she called. “How’s little Alex these days?”
Mrs. Sutherland stopped rocking, stared at her, and said nothing, absolutely nothing. Her face went stiff as wood. She wasn’t looking well.
“I say, how’s Alex doing?” Marion repeated.
Just as if Marion weren’t there at all, Mrs. Sutherland started rocking again.
Marion frowned and continued down the street, thinking that Mrs. Sutherland, who seemed of good quality otherwise, must have a serious deficiency in her upbringing. Obviously, no one had ever taught her about rising to the occasion.
She passed several other people on her way and smiled and nodded at each one, but no one smiled in return. In fact, one fellow, wrapped up in a soiled wool overcoat with the lapels pulled together as if his life depended on it, started weeping and ran away from her. By the time she reached Etienne’s, she felt rather out of sorts herself.
The front doors at Chez Etienne, made of heavy oak with weathered brass fittings, were stuck. Marion had to perch Nicky on a tilted bus stop bench while she cleared away a tangle of rubbish and tugged the doors open. She grabbed Nicky up and went inside. She could hardly see anything. There was only one window, which, Etienne had once explained to her, made for a cozier atmosphere. Remembering the matches in her pocket, she lit several of the candles that always stood in crystal holders on the tables.
As the light in the room grew to a warm glow, Marion found her way to the quiet table in the rear where she and Irene usually sat. Some plaster from the ceiling had come down, and the chairs
were quite dusty. While she was wiping them off with her handkerchief, she spied Irene, sitting against the wall in the corner.
“Irene! How wonderful to see you. I was afraid you might not make it, with everything in such a state.”
Irene had a surprised look on her face. Her hat, a Garbo-style felt, was tipped at a jaunty angle on her head, and powdered plaster frosted the shoulders of her jacket.
Marion settled Nicky in a chair and scooted him up to the table. Then she rushed over to Irene. “Here. Let me help you up. Really, it’s so wonderful to see you,” she said, and grabbed Irene under the arms.
It was a little awkward getting her into a chair, but Marion managed. As she stopped to catch her breath, she noticed the unpleasant odor again. She sniffed the air, wondering if it was Nicky. But this time, the odor was definitely coming from Irene. She shrugged it off. It wasn’t important, after all, and at any rate, it wasn’t the sort of thing one mentioned in public.
Neither Etienne nor any of the waiters seemed to be about, so she fished the vichyssoise and artichoke hearts from her coat pockets. “I’ve come prepared!” she said, and laughed gaily. “Isn’t it terrible, the mess everything’s in?”
Irene said nothing. Perhaps she wasn’t feeling very talkative.
“Really, I’ve been so worried that you’d be angry at me for missing last Wednesday. But the phones are impossible. I couldn’t call. So I just had to trust your good nature. You don’t mind it that I brought Nicky, do you? He’s being so good. I’m afraid his sitter didn’t come today. Really, you’re not angry, are you?”
Still, Irene said nothing. Marion felt suddenly breathless and warm, as if she might burst into tears any moment. How odd. There was nothing to cry about, after all. She glanced at the wavering shadows the candles cast on the walls and shut her eyes against an inexplicable flood of panic.
“Here. Here,” she said. “There’s not enough light, don’t you think?” And she hurried around to the other tables, gathering up all the candles she could find. She set them in front of Irene and lit each one carefully.
Still, Irene did not speak.
It was then that Marion saw the scene in the mirror. The entire north wall of Chez Etienne was lined with mirror glass; it made the room seem larger, Etienne had told them once, passing the time of day while a waiter twisted the pepper mill over their salads. Now, amid chaos and destruction, the mirror remained perversely intact. Reflected in it, Marion saw first a brilliant cluster of candle flames in the center of a table. She didn’t recognize the woman who stood by the table, a filthy hag who regarded her with a faint smile and bright, demented eyes—a bag lady, she thought, who must have wandered away from her home in the city subway tunnels. Beside her sat two people who, Marion slowly realized, were actually corpses in varying degrees of decomposition. One was that of a small child, the other that of a lady who had once been stylishly dressed.
Marion felt a sudden rush of warmth and pity for the bag lady. “Oh, my dear,” she said, leaning forward.
“Oh, my dear,” said the woman in the mirror, leaning forward at precisely the same moment.
Marion blinked and shuddered. A tiny whimper escaped from her throat. Not wanting to, not wanting to at all, Marion began to remember in vivid detail exactly why she had missed last week’s lunch at Etienne’s.
“No,” she cried, staring into Etienne’s mirror. “No, no, no!”
Marion Cumberly, who had never done such a thing in her life, picked up a chair and threw it into the mirror. Shards of glass flew sparkling into the air, and in their place appeared a wall of blessed, empty shadow.
Marion smiled. “Shall we have some vichyssoise, Irene, dear?” she said. “I’m not sure whether Nicky will like it. He’s never tried it before.”
And with a flourish, she produced the can opener from the pocket of her coat.
THE SAILOR’S BARGAIN
I am whimpering in my sleep again. Across the abyss between our beds, I hear my friend Mary Fairfax calling my name.
“Electra. Electra! Wake up.”
But I can’t seem to separate her voice from the cobweb fabric of the dream. Neither can I separate the roar of the wind from the roar of my own blood, or tell which is real and which imagined.
“Wake up!”
Fairfax crosses the dark room, grabs my shoulders. In my dream, I kneel on the rain-swept deck of a wooden ship, a ship with many sails, huge and dark. Waves crash over the bow, and the masts groan as if they are about to splinter. In my dream, the wind shakes me until my teeth clack. It tears at me, and it laughs, and it says, A bargain is a bargain, part and parcel.
Then I realize that the bow of the ship is really the chapel of the orphanage in San Francisco where I grew up. I am taking part in the celebration of some skewed Mass. A canticle response rises to my lips. It is part of no prayer I have ever heard. I do not know where it came from. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and are spent without hope. O remember that my life is wind.
At once, the chaos of the dream falls away, a black mirror shattered by words, and I am sitting up, staring into Fairfax’s face. Dim light from a street lamp seeps through the window. In it I can see the disheveled spikes of her hair, like a fiery halo, which I have envied since we were children, and the wrinkled impression her pillow has left across one of her cheeks. The orphanage and the chapel and the ship have disappeared. It has happened just the same way almost every night for two months.
“Shit,” says Fairfax. “I can’t take anymore of this. Either get some help, or I’m moving out.”
I press the sheets against my forehead to soak away the dream sweat. I look around the room. It takes me a moment to realize that I’m not seeing the adobe walls of the dormitory at Our Lady of the Harbor. It’s been almost two years since Fairfax and I left the Catholic orphanage. Now we live on the campus at Las Piedras University, in a “temporary dorm”—really just a trailer with several sleeping cubicles and a big bathroom.
Outside I hear the night wind rushing from the land to the sea, prowling around beaverboard corners, scrabbling at the cheap window frames. This little box of a shelter feels like paper compared to Our Lady of the Harbor, with its thick walls, oak beams, and heavy, nail-studded doors.
“I don’t want any help,” I say. “I’ve made up my mind this dream is never coming back again.”
But Fairfax knows me too well.
She sighs and switches on my chipped bedside lamp. In its comforting yellow glow, our room is a perfect illustration of the differences between us. My side is cluttered with treasures I have gathered at random from secondhand stores and flea markets, while hers is stark and clean as a monk’s cell. I buy wobbly tables, hats with holes in them, and boxes full of crystals and buttons. Fairfax prefers modern European prints and slim watches with no numbers on their faces.
She sits beside me on the bed, naked except for a pair of kelly green satin bikinis and a thin gold necklace. She refuses to wear nightclothes. They get tangled around her like ropes in the night, she says, and they’re good for nothing.
She hugs herself in the cool night air. Her skin is covered with freckles and goose bumps. “Nobody, not even you, can just decide not to have a dream. You know as well as I do it’ll be back again. This isn’t normal, Electra. Something’s wrong.”
She looks down at the linoleum floor, looks up again, her chin held very high. “I think I really mean it. You and your nightmares are driving me crazy. If you don’t talk to somebody about this, I’m moving out.”
She turns off the light. I listen to the slap of her feet on the floor as she walks back to her bed. I pull the covers up and stare out the window at the thrashing treetops. In her own way, she is just trying to help.
The next morning, a Tuesday, Fairfax is sitting in her bathrobe playing her cello when I leave our room. I wave good-bye, as usual; she nods vaguely, as usual, without taking her eyes from the music.
I have an early class on Tuesdays, number theory, the only c
ourse I am taking this quarter. In June, when the summer term opened, the elegance and purity of number theory delighted me—made the world seem acute, well formed, and larger than humankind. But now it is August. For two months, dreams of wind and ships have robbed me of sleep. Often, the concepts our professor introduces make no sense to me, and sometimes proofs that would have seemed obvious before escape me.
This morning, just as I expect, I doze through the class. When the hour is over, the professor takes me aside. “Electra, I regard you as one of our most promising mathematics majors. But lately I’ve noticed a certain … shall we say … lack of concentration. Is anything wrong?”
“No. No, nothing at all,” I say, staring at my feet. Some men, most men in fact, make me nervous. In front of this male teacher, I’m an even more inept liar than usual.
He frowns and rubs his neck.
“Sorry,” I mumble. “I’m late. I really have to be going.”
I hurry out of the classroom toward the cafeteria, where I usually eat breakfast after class. On my way, I pass the campus chapel and hesitate there, trying to compose my rattled nerves. In its distant beginnings, Las Piedras was a Catholic school. Now it is secular, but the chapel remains for those who wish to use it. I have been inside it often for Mass.
I stop on the terrazzo plaza in front to look up at the gilt mosaic on the chapel’s facade, of Christ walking on the water after he has calmed the storm. For no reason at all, goose flesh rises on my arms. It is a cloudless, brilliant day, and a warm breeze drifts inland from the ocean, heavy with the smell of seaweed. It blows my hair across my eyes so that all the world becomes the color of sand.
In that moment, everything reels and folds, and I am plunged into my nightmare without warning. This time, I seem to be looking down on the black ship from midair. It is the same ship, wooden, with seven or eight square sails. Towering waves ram her broadside, and she heels and screams. I gasp for air, afraid that I will die if she dies. I have had the dream many times before but never like this, wide awake, in the middle of a daily routine. I try to claw my way back to the solid reality of the plaza and the glittering mosaic.
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