The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  “Yes, Mary. I believe that I mean that precisely.”

  And the whore does not reply, and for a moment they sit, side by side, and listen to the Atlantic wind pressing cold and raw against the eaves of the museum.

  “I need you to stand for me,” the geologist says at last. “Just there, directly in front of me.” And she points to a spot below the nearest mural, beneath the Lælaps and the dying Hadrosaurus.

  “My feet ache something terrible,” the girl complains. “I swear, sometimes I think I’d be better off without them.”

  “Please. Just for awhile. Stand for me, Mary. You may remove your boots, if it would help.”

  “Is that what you want tonight? You want me to take off my boots?”

  “No, Mary. It does not matter to me one way or another. I only make the suggestion thinking that it might ease your discomfort.”

  “I’ll keep my boots on, thank you all the same,” says Mary. “These marble floors are cold, I bet. I bet they’re almost as frigid as the goddamn bottom of the sea.”

  “Maybe,” says the geologist. “I couldn’t say for certain.” And she listens closely as the girl gets up, the delicious rustle and swish of the new red dress, the friction of skirts against petticoats and stockings.

  “You want me to stand here? Just stand?”

  “Yes. That’s what I need you to do.”

  “It’s a queer sort of game you’re playing at, you know that?” The geologist swallows and licks her lips again, wishing that she were not so thirsty, that her parched mouth were not such a distraction.

  “Do I pay you any less than the men who expect so much more?” she asks.

  “No,” the whore answers. “If you did, I wouldn’t be here, Professor.”

  “In point of fact, do I not pay much, much more?”

  The geologist can almost hear the whore smile.

  “A girl has her reputation to consider,” says Mary “Risks weighed against the benefits and all. People talk, you know. There are already men on the docks who will not employ my services because, well, because...” but she trails off, and so the geologist finishes for her.

  “Because you come to me, Mary.”

  “It makes them nervous, I suspect.”

  “But not your protector. It doesn’t make him nervous.”

  “No. He understands that it’s only because I’m so well compensated. He knows I’m not a tribade. That if I’m to be found tipping the velvet now and again, it’s strictly business, and in no way pertaining to my habitual proclivities.”

  “Of course,” the geologist whispers, so low that Mary almost doesn’t catch the words.

  “You just want me to stand here?” the whore asks again, and her heels sound almost like horseshoes clacking against the marble as she shifts from one foot to the other.

  “Yes. That’s enough for now,” the geologist replies, slipping her right hand inside a pocket of her skirt. Her fingers close around the pearl-handled razor hidden there, and suddenly her mouth does not seem so very dry, and her heart is no longer racing in her chest. No rosary beads for her, no crucifix, but only the smooth curve of this solid shank for her fetish, her talisman. Nacre stolen from an oyster or mussel’s inner shell to conceal the fine steel edge, which she keeps honed and ready with a leather strop. She squeezes it, imprinting its outline upon her palm, and opens her eyes again. “Don’t slump your shoulders,” she says. “Stand up straight.”

  In dreams, the geologist kneels in the grey estuary muck of low tide, some tide so low that all the bay has drained away into the distance, and everywhere fish lie flopping and suffocating beneath a blazing summer sun. Cod and mackerel, haddock and flounder, starving gills and desperate, bulging eyes as the crabs move in to have their fill of this unexpected banquet. Here and there, the sea’s retreat has exposed boulders which usually lie submerged, and the stones are clothed in fleshy, reeking mats of kelp and Irish moss and knotted wrack. She is naked, with not even a chemise to protect her from the blazing Cyclopean eye of this July or August afternoon, and already her skin has gone a delicate, pale pink; soon enough, it will turn the angry red of a boiled lobster and begin to blister. She has sunken so deeply into the mud that it reaches up above her knees, but at least, she thinks, her legs and feet are covered and safe from the devouring sun. Around her, the hulls and titled masts of stranded fishing boats jab at the blue-white sky, and the city is only a hazy silhouette of gambrel rooftops and church steeples looming above the quay.

  “You will burn alive out here,” the painter of landscapes and murals says, but when she raises her head to look at him, stinging sweat trickles down her brow into her eyes, and the geologist blinks painfully and stares down at the mud, instead.

  “You’ll bake, poor thing. In the end, this ooze will be your tomb, holding you secret as any trilobite. You will sleep away the ages while your shrouds lapidify about you.”

  “I will not dream of you,” she whispers. She tries to stand, but the sucking, squelching mud holds her fast.

  “I would have loved you,” the painter sighs. “I would have carried you away from this stinking shore and given you the lights and wonders of the city. I would have given you all my love. I would even have given you a child.”

  “I never wanted you,” she growls. “I never wanted you or your child.” And now the geologist grits her teeth against the salt crystallizing in her eyes.

  There’s strange, piping music from the direction of the wharves, and the painter talks of sirens and Odysseus, of mermaids and Andromeda chained upon the Æthiopian shore by jealous Nereids and offered up as a sacrifice by her own father to the monster Cetus. The music is a fever, and his words are fever dreams. They fall from his lips and lie squirming all about her. At least, she thinks, Andromeda hid the sea while she awaited death, cool Mediterranean waves lapping at her heels and toes, not this barren, uncovered littoral plain, this hellish expanse of dying fish and hungry crabs.

  “It’s that lie that holds you here,” says the painter. “It’s that lie that took your sight.””

  “It was an accident,” she replies, trying not to remember the day and recalling it all too clearly, so many years past, but not the least bit forgotten or diminished, the day a small stoppered bottle of muriatic acid slipped from her fingers and shattered.

  “That was what, a week after I returned home? Two weeks, perhaps: I missed my razor almost at once. You stole it from me, didn’t yon?”

  “I’m not a sneak thief,” she says, knowing it to be a lie in more ways than just the one.

  He bends down, his hand cupped beneath her chin, the callused fingers that never touched her. He kisses her, but those are not the painter’s lips. Those are the lips of Mary or some other whore, the first girl the geologist paid to come to the museum after sunset, or the second, or the third.

  “You taste so sweet,” the artist says, speaking with the borrowed voice of a dollymop.

  “I am lost,” she says. “I am lost forever.”

  “Not lost,” the whore tells her. “You have merely been misplaced. You have lain yourself aside, that’s all.”

  And then those callused, masculine fingers wander down to her nipples, the wide brown aureolae which have become encrusted round about with the sharp, scabby plates of barnacles, The painter and all the whores laugh to themselves, and then they are speaking all at once, though not quite in unison, not quite in perfect androgynous syncopation.

  “You have need of no other lover than the sea and the stones that are forged within the night of its eternal crucible. You have not any exigency or desire for mere human hearts, nor touch, nor company.”

  “Tike it back,” she says, meaning the pearl-handled razor, not those indelible, damning words, for you cannot take back anything so tattooed upon one’s soul. “I would not have it anymore. Take it, please, and then please leave me be.” But she has left the razor in the bureau drawer where she keeps it when it is not tucked into a pocket, or when she is not sitting before her dressi
ng mirror folding it open and closed, open and closed, admiring the polished gleam by lantern light. Marveling at the simplicity of so deadly an instrument just as she admires Scene in the Museum (1896) the teeth of venomous serpents or the sickle claws of Jefferson’s Megatherium americanum.

  So she cannot give it back, no matter how much she might wish to, and so the painter shrugs and shakes his head and turns away again, leaving her there in the muck. She has sunk in up to her thighs now, and the fleshy, stinging polyps of sea anemones sprout where once a brown thatch of hair concealed her sex. Across the mud, a regiment of crabs are coming for her on jointed, scuttling legs, their pincers held high, waving in time to the music from the docks.

  In dreams, she is consumed by silt and sand, by every hungry thing that waits below the waves. She is a feast for all Poseidon’s offspring, and as they enter her—that host of chitinous shells and slithering, eel-formed bodies—and as she screams, a fantastic, towering shadow rises in the east and a roar rides out before it, like the commingled voices of all the tempests since time’s beginning, as the mighty wave bears down upon the town.

  Below the murals, the whore named Mary stands up straight and the geologist sits stiff on her granite bench, pretending that she can see the girl. That she can see the unnatural red of the noisy new dress, and the insatiable eyes of the painted Dinosaurian gargoyles leering down from their place upon the wall, and that she can see, too, the girl’s unremarkable face, which she has only ever felt with her hands. She inhales the musty smells of the museum; the faint and omnipresent scent of the sea; the whore’s bouquet. She listens, straining now to hear something more than the wind, more than the faint hiss from the gaslight sconces and a buoy clanging disconsolately in the harbor.

  “Mary,” she says. “I would ask a favor of you.”

  “A favor? Does that mean I have a choice?”

  “You always have a choice,” the geologist replies. “It’s not like I’m holding a gun to your head, is it?”

  “No,” the girl admits. “It’s not like that. So, is this a favor I can do sitting down?”

  “No,” says the geologist as firmly as she dares, and she grips the razor tighter still. “‘You should remain standing.”

  The girl sighs almost as loudly as the wind.

  “There is something I would ask you to do, my precious Star of the Sea.”

  “Don’t you call me that,” the whore says.

  “Why not, Mary? It’s only what your name means. Mary, from the Latin, Maria, or the Hebrew Miryam, and you are precious to me.”

  “I’m not some sort of goddamn Jewess,” the girl sneers, and the geologist draws in a very deep breath and allows herself the indulgence of folding the blade partway open. When she speaks again, there is only the slightest tremor in her voice.

  “No, Mary, you are surely not that. But you wear the name of the Blessed Virgin, the very Queen of Heaven. And you wear it like a crown, like a jeweled diadem, like a new red dress. You wear it well, and always you shine like the brightest star hung above the ocean’s abyss. Even to my blind eyes, you shine.”

  “Fine. So what’s the favor? I already told you my feet hurt, didn’t I?”

  “There is something I would ask you to do.”

  “Isn’t that usually how it works, Professor?”

  The geologist shuts her eyes again. “Please, Mary, do be quiet. Unless you would have us stop this now, and so seek your evening’s wages in some other, less strenuous quarter.”

  The girl shifts fretfully from foot to foot, heel to heel, toe to toe, and again the clacking of her hoots on the marble puts the geologist in mind of the stamping of some bizarre bipedal horse.

  “I have appetites,” the geologist says, opening her eyes and folding the razor shut. “And I freely confess, they are strange to me, Mary. I have terrible appetites.”

  The whore coughs nervously, and then, in a smaller, less strident voice, she says, “I think you would find my blood sour and fouled with spirits.”

  The geologist wants to laugh, but she doesn’t. She only permits herself a smile, instead. “I don’t want your blood, Mary, my Star of the Sea. Don’t be so ghoulish. I only suffer from lesbianism. I am not a vampire.”

  “And I was only making a fucking joke,” the girl says, unconvincingly. “My feet are killing me, Professor. I don’t see why I can’t do this favor sitting.”

  The geologist sighs and leans towards the whore, leaning forward but an inch or so, leaning into and through something far denser than the long night of blindness or the stagnant, antique atmosphere of the museum, leaning through her own desire. “No,” she says. “I need you to stand, and so you will stand. Or you will leave. The choice is yours, as always.”

  For a few seconds there’s not even the sound of Mary’s restless feet, just the wind, and the geologist begins to wonder if perhaps tonight she’s pushed too hard. But then the girl’s skirt rustles, and she scuffs at the floor with the toe of a boot.

  “I am standing,” she says.

  “Thank you, Mary. That is very kind of you. Many in your line of work are not so tolerant of my whims. Now, would you come closer, please, and would you kiss me?”

  “Will you remove your spectacles?” the whore asks. “I’ve never seen your eyes.”

  And you never shall, the geologist almost says, almost, but then there’s a sudden and unfamiliar flutter in her belly, some unexpected and not wholly unpleasant twinge. None of them have ever seen her eyes, not even the ones she has undressed for and lain with. None of them have ever looked upon the sickly opalescent sheen eclipsing her pupils and retinas, corneas and sclerae. None of them has ever had the gall to ask that she remove her spectacles.

  “I warn you, it is not a pretty sight,” she says.

  “I don’t expect it to be. It’s a hard world, and I daresay harder on some few of us than on others. I see a lot of ugly things, Professor. Only, sometimes they don’t seem that way to me, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “You are an odd one, Mary. Possibly, I have not given you due credit.”

  “Possibly, you think all whores cut from the selfsame cloth,” the girl replies. “But I have seen such sights, and never have I turned away. I have seen the ravages of typhus and cholera and the pox. I have seen the innumerable disfigurements life at sea works upon the body of a man. Once, I saw a sailor who’d been mauled by a shark. It took away every tiling below his waist, and yet, by God, he lived on an hour afterwards.”

  Again, the flutter deep in the geologist’s gut, and she folds the razor open once more. She hears the girl take a step towards her, and then another. If I reach out, she thinks, if I reach out, I could touch those silken folds again. I could cut—

  “I’ll tell you something else,” the whore says, speaking now with an air of confidentiality, and the geologist realizes that she is being seduced by this filthy, unschooled guttersnipe, this scheming bit of meat and gaudy raiment. But she sits still, and she listens. The razor’s blade is cool against her palm.

  “What, Mary? What will you tell me?” she asks.

  And the whore takes another step nearer the granite bench. “It was the damnedest thing,” she says. “When I still lived in Gloucester, it came up in the nets of a whaling barque, though I don’t recollect the ship’s name or the name of its captain. But I saw it sprawled there on the dock, after it’d been run through and killed by one of the harpooners. I thought it might have been a mermaid, at the first, like you hear of in tales and chanteys and the like. But it weren’t no mermaid, I’ll swear to that. And if your eyes are even half as fucking unseemly as the eyes I saw that day, I’ll give you the night’s snatch for free.”

  “That’s a bold proposition,” the geologist replies, trying to imagine what the girl might have seen lying dead and speared upon the Gloucester docks, what she might have first mistaken for a mermaid.

  “My feet hurt like the devil, Professor, and discomfort always makes me bold.”

  With her left hand,
the geologist removes her pince-nez from the bridge of her nose and then sits and stares unseeing at the spot where she knows the girl is standing. The razor is still open, and the fingers of her right hand have begun the bleed, a fresh gash or an old one reinaugurated for the occasion.

  “No, that’s not so fucking terrible,” Mary says, and she bends and cups the geologist’s chin in her hands, and though a streetwalker’s palms are not so soft as the supple hands of idle women, they are sometimes softer than anticipated.

  “No?” asks the geologist, folding the razor closed.

  “Nothing to make me turn away, but like I said, I seen some unlovely fucking exhibitions of the Almighty’s handwork. So it might be I’m not the one to ask.”

  And then she kisses the geologist, exactly as she has been bidden and paid to do, as she has done many times before. Outside the museum, the wild, salty wind cries like a widow mourning at her husband’s grave, and somewhere in this moldering and ramshackle town fetched up like so much foam and flotsam at the edge of the sea, a bell begins to toll the hour.

  The Madam of the Narrow Houses

  She has never called herself a medium, this furtive, brown-eyed woman who lives alone where Hull Street crosses Snow Hill Street and runs down to the glassy, slow river. She does not seek to profit from the bereaved, nor to offer solace to grieving widows, widowers, or orphans. She does not hold séances in hushed and darkened parlors, and never has she practiced automatic writing, nor even once communicated with otherworldly spheres via planchettes and elaborate codes of table rapping and the cracking of knuckles. She does not call the dead, for always have they come to her unbidden, in their own time and in their own service. Rarely do they speak to her, and when they do, it is even more rarely that they share words she would dare repeat.

  By day, she is a sempstress, an architect with needle and thread and thimble, clothing well-bred Boston women, and she minds her spools and stitches. She has a fondness for old hymns, and often hums them while she works, though she is not particularly religious. Religion has always seemed to her the domain of questions which will be answered in the fullness of time, one way or the other, by and by. Or they will not, in which case it hardly seems they matter very much. She lives in the high gabled house left behind by her mother and father when they passed—only one month apart, one from the other—and she imagines that she will live there until the end of her own days. She has an especial liking for yellow roses, and for mulled cider, as well, and late autumn, and the inscriptions she finds carved on slate headstones when she walks between the rows at Copp’s Hill. Of the latter, she has two favorites, both of which she has copied down and pinned upon the wall near her chifforobe. They offer some comfort on those infrequent occasions when it occurs to her, in passing, that perhaps she is a lonely woman who has simply never paused to recognize her own particular sort of loneliness. One reads: