Naked Came the Phoenix

by Marcia Talley

  In Pied Piper fashion, she played her fluted voice and called Phoenix’s newcomers to follow. From the table where Ondine’s manager sat with Dr. de Vries and King David, the group gathered in a short, stout woman with cropped iron-gray hair and an evening dress of the same no-nonsense shade. The dress was brocade, the stiff kind Caroline had seen on her mother’s old prom dress when she dragged it out of the attic to illustrate the story about how she could have married the boy who was now CFO of WorldCom.

  With a start, Caroline realized that the wearer of brocade was Phyllis V. Talmadge. The recognition was spurred by Ms. Talmadge’s latest bestseller, Flex Your Psychic Muscles, lying near her plate, her picture, unsmiling and intense, glaring up from the back cover.

  As Claudia de Vries led them on, Caroline was relieved to see the book retrieved by King David. Had Phyllis V. been toting her own tome around, Caroline might have lost her composure.

  The image of this uncompromising chunk of womanhood stumping through the spirit world in her all-purpose formal wear and Sears Roebuck foundation garments, the lavish unreality of the dining room coupled with the diaphanous presence of their hostess—a businesswoman in butterfly’s clothing—were working on Caroline like cheap champagne at a wedding. Laughter, broken in pieces by an adolescent inappropriateness, threatened to explode in uncontrollable giggles.

  A sudden and too familiar sense of falling hit Caroline. For her the room turned cold, the colorful people surreal, as if normalcy was a gift others shared without her. Hilarity turned abruptly to the icy pinch of an anxiety attack.

  Four more spa clients were swept up by Claudia’s passage, but Caroline was only peripherally aware of them. She breathed slowly, concentrating on pulling the air in and pushing it out as her therapist had taught her, a way of anchoring herself in the present when an attack threatened to carry her away.

  Caroline’s panic attacks had started three months ago, when her father was first diagnosed with cancer. Stress, her therapist had told her. Not me, she’d thought. The therapist listed the changes in Caroline’s life: new marriage, husband’s election, traveling to Washington, leaving her job with the symphony, her father’s death. Not me, Caroline had insisted. Straight-A student, magna cum laude from Juilliard, youngest first chair in the philharmonic. Always in control.

  Unfortunately, logic had little effect on the process. Feeling fear pour through her veins, shatter her thoughts, Caroline had to accept that she was only human. Stress was real.

  Perhaps she was due for some world-class pampering. For the first time since they’d driven through the imposing front gate and up the winding drive, she was glad to be at Phoenix Spa.

  Her terror receded slowly. At length Caroline could breathe again. Eyes opened fully to the beauty of the night and the place, she finally allowed herself to laugh; not the hysterical giggling that threatened earlier but a full-throated woman’s laugh that she didn’t feel obligated to explain to anybody.

  Hurrying to catch up, she ran down the shallow steps flowing from the dining room to the brick walk circling the lake. The others had stopped at the shore to admire the view. As Caroline rejoined the group, Hilda smiled and held out her hand. Her mother was so small, her figure, still perfect, straight and proud in her new midnight velvet dress, her never-to-be-gray hair in a classic French twist. Maybe it was a trick of the moonlight, but Caroline thought she saw something new in her mother’s face—a softness she remembered from when she was a very little girl. Caroline took her hand and squeezed it briefly before letting go.

  “The lake is twenty-five acres,” Claudia said in good tourguide fashion. “Fed by natural springs.”

  Purposely, Caroline tuned out the statistics. Like a poem, the night should not be dissected into mere meter and rhyme but enjoyed in its wholeness.

  Claudia prattled on. Caroline let the musical voice babble around her, taking in a word or two when interest stirred. The lake was nestled in a hollow formed by the rumpled skirts of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Around it, scattered at odd angles to fit in with nature’s artful chaos, were A-frame cottages, each different in design but all echoing the cathedral windows of the main hall and dining room. Ground-level lights, shuttered to shine only on the walkways, ringed the water and branched off to the cottages, creating a spiderweb of light.

  The air was warm for late October, but an indefinable tang of autumn dispelled summer’s somnolence. In the morning the palette of black and silver would be burned away by a conflagration of fall colors blazing in the ancient hardwoods that pressed close around the spa’s grounds.

  The spa’s services were housed in four centers, one set on each side of the lake, Caroline learned as they walked. The square they formed, Claudia told them, created a proper feng shui pattern guaranteed to enhance mental and physical well-being.

  The first was the bathhouse. “An old-fashioned name,” Claudia said as she pulled a ring of keys fit for a jailer from a beaded evening bag. “Though we welcome the new, we’ve been careful not to throw the baby out with the bathhouse. The old methods of soothing the soul and stimulating the spirit carry with them a special alchemy.”

  Claudia must have given this talk a thousand times, yet her love of the place breathed life into the worn spiel. While Claudia talked she opened three locks on the bathhouse doors. Two were dead bolts; Caroline heard them slide free and wondered at such heavy-duty security measures. What in this idyll, tucked away from urban areas and the fly-by crime of the turnpikes, needed to be kept out? Or in?

  The double doors swung open and the lights came on, either triggered by the movement of the doors or an electric eye. Caroline joined the others in an appreciative, “Ahhh.”

  The architect had managed a harmonious marriage of Swedish modern and the stained-glass-and-tile opulence of a vintage nineteen-thirties bathhouse. A fountain, sprung to sudden life with the lights, sparkled under a high ceiling cut through with skylights, each of the panels depicting a flowering herb in jeweltoned glass.

  Claudia arranged herself prettily in front of the falling water. “I won’t show you all the facilities tonight, but I wanted to give you a glimpse of the world you entered into when you chose Phoenix Spa.” She went on to list the wonders that awaited behind the closed doors: mud baths in stone tubs from the turn of the century, steam rooms with aromatic and healthful plant extracts added to the boiling water, massage rooms, facials. Most of the treatments were standard, made unique to Phoenix by the addition of herbal therapy. Herbs, plants, and flowers, all, Claudia insisted, gathered from the surrounding woods by an expert in botany brought over from Bombay specifically for his arcane knowledge of how to use plants for spiritual enhancement.

  Caroline couldn’t help but wonder what a guy from Bombay could know about the plants of the Blue Ridge, but she didn’t interrupt. She liked good theater as much as anyone and had to admit the concept intrigued her.

  “Plant materials are used in many of our treatments,” Claudia went on. “By using only those indigenous to the area, the harmony of persons, places, and things brings harmony between the spirit and the flesh of each of you precious people who have come to us for succor.”

  The rhetoric was getting a bit thick. Caroline’s attention wandered as they returned to the lakeshore and Claudia triple-locked the bathhouse doors behind them. With a wave of a beringed hand that set her evening wrap, a shawl of a thousand scraps of feather-light fabric, to quivering like an aspen in a windstorm, Claudia led the troop onward.

  Caroline found that she had fallen in step with the stalwart psychic. Phyllis Talmadge’s head barely came to Caroline’s shoulder. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall even in her sensible one-inch pumps.

  “Hah!” the little woman puffed.

  “I beg your pardon?” Caroline said politely.

  “Hah!” she repeated for Caroline’s edification. “Herbal, schmerbal. What bullshit. They’d better not go smearing any of that muck on me. Bombay. Hah.”

  Caroline snorted unb
ecomingly, a startled laugh that went up her nose when she tried to smother it. “What brought you here?” she asked, since it didn’t seem to be the promise of youthrejuvenating vegetative wraps or the energizing properties of aromatherapy.

  “They told me to come,” Phyllis Talmadge replied enigmatically. “The center is threatened. It may not hold.” With that garbled quote from Yeats, she trundled on, a small female tank with a mission.

  Caroline slowed, letting the others move ahead so she could better enjoy the play of the light on water, the stealthy promises whispered by the wind as it passed through dry leaves.

  “You hear it, too?”

  The voice in her ear was as smooth as the autumn breeze and as hard-edged as winter’s first bite. Shying in the time-honored way of startled colts, she bumped into the man standing as close as a lover behind her. He had appeared without a sound, without her sensing him, and it scared her. Either her survival instincts were at low ebb, or he was as conversant with the night as Count Dracula.

  “Easy.” He caught her by the shoulders as she stumbled over the hem of her evening gown. He was tall, six-four or -five, and lean without weakness or frailty. His dark hair fell in a wild mass past his shoulders, the green highlights creating the illusion of seaweed. King David. The rocker. What had she read in Rolling Stone? Ah. That he’d gotten rabies biting off the heads of live bats at a concert in Detroit in 1979.

  “Easy,” he said again and smiled. The effect was electric. The lightning bolt tattoos at the corners of his eyes crinkled and straightened, and his very white teeth flashed. Pure animal magnetism boiled off the man. For an instant Caroline was afraid she was going to swoon like the heroine in a cheap romance. No wonder he was still packing stadiums with shrieking fans after thirty years.

  Carefully, as though he’d long been aware of his effect on the weaker sex, he let go of her arms and watched to be sure she could stand on her own two feet.

  “Did I hear what?” she snapped in response to his earlier question. Humiliation was turning her hostile.

  “The music,” he said softly. “You’re a musician. You hear it.”

  The wind in the leaves, the minute skittering as those already fallen whispered across the brick walk: the music she’d been listening to when he’d come upon her. “How did you know?” she demanded, suddenly afraid that this strange man knew all her secrets.

  He caught her left hand in both of his. Running his thumb over her fingertips he said, “Calluses. Violin?”

  “Cello.” His touch was paralyzing. She willed herself to snatch her hand back with some show of indignation, but nothing happened.

  He released her. She felt relieved, bereft, and ridiculous. A gust of wind whipped the hair across King’s sharp features, then pulled it away. A dark curtain closing on one scene and opening on another. The lightning sewn into his skin flashed, his eyes narrowed, and he said, “Musicians are mad, you know.”

  She was aware that he spoke not only of himself but of her.

  “Not cellists,” she retorted. “We aren’t amplified.”

  He laughed and she was drawn into it. Annoyed that a man old enough to be her father was giving her vapors, she began to walk toward her cottage. He’s good at this, she thought. It’s a game he’s played for longer than I′ve been alive.

  Without being invited, King fell into step alongside her.

  “Why are you at Phoenix?” She asked the most banal question she could think of to reintroduce normalcy into what was becoming a seriously peculiar evening.

  “The same reason you are,” he replied in his ice and honey voice.

  “And why is that?” Irrationally, she was afraid of what the answer might be.

  “I’m looking for something that once belonged to me.”

  Caroline walked faster. Refusing to take the hint, he stayed beside her, his long stride easily matching hers.

  “You don’t have to walk me to my cabin.” Caroline was aware she sounded desperate but was unable to do anything about it.

  He smiled again. She wished he’d stop that. “My cabin’s there.” He pointed to the A-frame next to the one she shared with her mother. “I’m going to bed.”

  “Oh.”

  “Enjoy the music.” He touched her cheek as lightly as a leaf blowing by and turned away.

  When she realized she was standing where he’d left her watching him leave, she shook her head and whispered, “I’ve got to call Douglas.” She was up the walk and opening the door before she remembered that Phoenix Spa cottages had no phones. Guests were even encouraged to check their cell phones when they registered. The same went for laptops.

  Feeling adrift and disconcerted, she let herself into the cottage. The A-frame had two bedrooms, one downstairs and one in a loft reached by a spiral staircase made of beautifully polished and treacherously slick hardwood. The loft overlooked the living area with its small fireplace and grand view of the lake.

  A single lamp was lit. Hilda sat under it in an old morris chair refinished to a rich gleam. She still wore the velvet gown, every hair lacquered in place. With both hands on the chair arms, knees together, feet flat on the floor, she looked like a miniature monarch. Caroline half expected a curt, “Off with her head!” as she entered the room.

  Needing to sort out her feelings, Caroline intended to slink by and flee up the spiral stairs to bed. A faint glistening on her mother’s cheek stopped her. Hilda was crying.

  Caroline tried to remember the last time she’d seen her mother cry and couldn’t. Maybe never. The tears shocked her, made her awkward and dumb, but she could not ignore them. Kicking off her shoes, she padded across the thick white carpeting and sat on the footstool by her mother’s chair. Neither spoke. Caroline wanted to take her mother’s hand, offer her some crumb of love and comfort, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know how.

  “I wasn’t a good wife to Hamlin,” Hilda said, the tears continuing in their course.

  “You did—″

  “No,” Hilda said quietly, ″I wasn’t. In the beginning I might have been, but something changed. I changed. I thought I needed to be more than a wife and mother and ended up being less.

  “I loved your father.” She looked at Caroline for the first time. She needed desperately to be believed; it was in her eyes. So Caroline believed her.

  “Those weeks and months when he was dying, I was so angry. He never gave me what I needed and now he was leaving me. Just like that. He seemed so tired, and I couldn’t be kind.”

  The tears fell faster. Hilda made no move to brush them away, and Caroline resisted the temptation to run for the Kleenex box. Her mother needed to cry, long and hard.

  “I’m going to miss him,” she said simply. “I’m going to miss being the wife I could have been, and now it’s too late.” Hilda swallowed a shuddering sigh and said, “I haven’t been a good mother to you, sweetheart.”

  The old endearment, seldom used in recent years, struck into Caroline’s heart like a firebrand, melting the ice she’d been keeping there. She took her mother’s hand. Holding it felt strange but right.

  Hilda manipulated. Perhaps it had been the only way she’d known to get what she needed to survive. Caroline had met her grandmother—Hilda’s mother—a total of three times as she was growing up but remembered her as a harsh woman wrapped tight in a religion that used God as a rallying cry and the Bible as a bludgeon. Maybe Hilda wasn’t acting. She’d married Hamlin when she was nineteen. For nearly four decades they’d slept in the same bed, worried over the same bills and, each in his or her own way, centered their lives around their only child.

  Looking at her mother’s face, turned slightly as if she looked back down the years, it occurred to Caroline that, to the best of her heart’s ability, Hilda might have loved Hamlin, might even now love her. A wave of compassion broke with such force tears came to Caroline’s eyes.

  Perhaps, here, now, for mother and daughter, a phoenix would rise from the ashes and a new life would begin.

 
2

  CAROLINE WOKE DREAMING OF pizza. She’d have sworn she could smell it—that first heady rush of spices and sauce and melted cheese.

  It was a huge disappointment to wake in the dark, without the pie. The perfume of the hothouse roses that bloomed out of a crystal vase on her dresser was lovely, subtle, and sweet.

  But she couldn’t eat the damn roses.

  Caroline rolled over in the huge bed and willed herself back to sleep. Hunger was a demon gnawing greedily at her insides, but she’d just have to wait until breakfast to satisfy him. Surely it was nearly time for breakfast by now. She opened one eye, looked at the bedside clock, and moaned. How could it only be two in the morning?

  She flopped over on her back and stared at the ceiling. She’d think of something else. Of anything else. Food had never driven her life. Of course, food had always been easily available. It was the absence of it that had changed the complexion of things.

  Would a cracker be too much to ask?

  No, no, she was here on a program. It would be good for her to be more regimented about her diet and her health, those things she took entirely too much for granted. It would be good for her mother. More, it would be good for their relationship.

  Maybe they’d actually have a relationship by the time they went home again.

  Her mother was grieving, really grieving, and that was unexpected. It shouldn’t have been, Caroline admitted. She hadn’t given her mother—perhaps not even her father—enough credit. More than thirty-five years of marriage stood for something, and those outside of it—even a child born from it—didn’t always understand what went on inside that intimate bubble.

  She’d try to be more sensitive to her mother’s feelings, more patient with her annoying habits. They’d bond over herbal wraps and mud baths.

  She’d be a better daughter, a better wife, a better human being. If she just had a damn sandwich.

  On a muttered oath, she switched on the light, rolled out of bed. When a desperate search of her purse, her bags, her pockets turned up nothing but half a tin of breath mints and one ancient piece of hard candy, she dropped into a chair, scowling at the walls.