"You felt nothing at all?"
She stopped her ministrations, and looked at him. “I never have."
"He loved her at first,” he insisted.
"He loved the idea of her. He loved her thighs and breasts and nose. He loved the liniment of her pretend."
He rose, more stooped than ever, slow and careful as an old man. He turned to go, and she stopped him again, just at the door.
"Abram said, ‘what man never wanted a wife without any thought in her.’ He said that about his Marzi, when he first loved her,” she told him.
He stared at her for a long time, perhaps remembering running his fingers over her morphology, checking the depths of crevices.
"Do you think she can still feel, Pinoy? Out there in the sea?"
"I don't know."
"Do you think she's alone? Is there marzipan in the sea?"
"No,” he said. “There is no marzipan in the sea. Only salt.” He sighed.
"Pinoy,” she said after a moment. “I wish you had given me rose petals instead of sage. You would have been happier."
"Yes,” he said. “You're probably right.” Then he left.
She went to his workshop and sat there until night, staring around at the cast-off things: the pigeon feathers and old shoes and bits of string and jars of herbs and a half-empty sack of salt. In the dark, Rashi took off her wide-brimmed hat, her hooded cloak, her scarf, her gloves, her overthings and undergarments, her boots, her woolen socks, and her thick hose.
"Only salt,” she said.
She remembered how she had ground the almonds, how she had cooked the Marzi batch by batch over the fire: drawn her out, poured the simple batter on Pinoy's marble slab, kneaded her and shaped her, and slept by her that night while she cooled. She remembered how Pinoy had come to press the rose petals deep in the marzipan chest and head, and smoothed over the imprints of his fingers.
Rashi stepped out, naked, into the last rains of Omestas, unnoticed on the night-slick streets of Ulmagon; one needed thing amongst thousands, remembering Marzi and the way she bled away down the roads of water.
Little-by-little Rashi turned into less-and-less. When she could no longer walk, she crawled. When she could no longer crawl she lay still, her eyes open to the sky. Somewhere amongst the puddles, with the very substance of her being, Rashi became her own, small ocean.
* * * *
[Back to Table of Contents]
Rowboats, Sacks of Gold
Tim Pratt
1.
First time. College. A bagel shop with bright murals done as part of a WPA project in the thirties when the restaurant was a public building of some kind, a painting of happy workers shearing wheat with sickles, a yellow-and-orange sunset spread across the wall. I ordered a plain bagel with raspberry cream cheese—I've had an abiding love for raspberries, since I was a little girl. The boy behind the counter flirted with me and I looked at him blankly; how could he flirt at six-thirty in the morning? It was too early. I couldn't possibly be cute so early.
I also ordered raspberry tea. The boy behind the counter said I'd better be careful, if I kept on this way I would turn into a raspberry. I wanted to pat him gently and tell him it would be okay, that someday some girl would like that kind of joke.
I took my food outside. The sun was barely up, and not even half as bright as the one in the mural. I shivered in the chill coming off the bay, just a few blocks away. There were trees in the courtyard, I didn't know what kind, shedding pink blossoms.
A man sat at a table in the otherwise untenanted courtyard, with an enormous wooden board set up before him. A plate rested on the chair beside him, but the food was gone, just a dusting of crumbs left behind. I couldn't tell what he'd been eating.
A mason jar full of white and black smooth stones stood on the chair beside his plate. He reached into the jar in a measured way, without looking away from the board, and drew out a white stone. He placed it on the board, seemingly arbitrarily. There were already several stones of both colors on the board. He contemplated the configuration for a moment, then reached into the mason jar, again without looking, and drew out a black stone. He placed it on the board and nodded to himself.
I recognized the game, though it took a moment. Go. I'd heard of it. I'd never played it.
He looked up and caught my eye. He was older than I'd thought at first, lines around his eyes, careworn, but I liked his face—it looked genuine and lived-in, if a little sad. He wore a light jacket, pale green, zipped all the way to his chin. He nodded toward the chair across from him, on the other side of the board, the invitation implicit—sit.
I sat. It seemed the thing to do, all a piece of the morning, as inevitable as midday following dawn.
"Go,” he said, drawing a white stone from the jar. I wasn't sure if he was identifying the game or telling me to take a turn.
"I've never played."
His hand trembled, slightly. I might not have noticed, but I could see the movement telegraphed through the polished stone. He didn't look at me. “Never played. So. Would you like to?"
I shrugged. I often shrugged. I fancied myself jaded.
He explained the rules to me, briefly but clearly.
When he'd finished, I frowned. “But I've been watching you, and you haven't been removing the captured stones at all."
"I keep track in my head,” he said. “Truly advanced players don't need a board at all."
"But how do you use the spaces again when you don't remove the captured stones?” I demanded.
He waved his hand dismissively. “Never mind. We'll play in the traditional way."
I played white. He devastated me methodically.
He sat back when he finished, not smugly, just naturally, a man relaxing. I frowned at the board, furious. I didn't like losing, not even then. My raspberry cream cheese bagel sat on its plate, uneaten. A flower had fallen on top of it, stuck in the pinkish cream, and that made me angry. My tea had gone cold.
"Now you've played,” the man said, sounding both solemn and satisfied. “That's one.” He stood up. “Some say Go is very symbolic."
"In what way?” I asked, vicious and sarcastic. I was an economics major, and I thought symbols were stupid.
He shrugged. It was an eloquent, shoulder-rolling shrug, the shrug of an indifferent master. A shrug to which I could at that time only aspire.
Nodding goodbye, he walked away, out of the courtyard. “Hey!” I called. “Your board!” As if he could have left it by accident, forgotten it, a board as big as a tabletop. He walked on, shoulders slumped, wispy hair lifting in the breeze.
I nudged the Go board with my finger. It was heavy as lead. It might have been carved from petrified wood.
Grumpily, I picked the blossom from the cream cheese and ate my bagel in four bites. I poured my tea out on the bricks.
I didn't see the man again for two years.
* * * *
2.
Second time. New Orleans. My last year of college, a spring break trip. I was walking alone in the French Quarter, my head thudding. I was hungover, but couldn't stand the motel room any more that morning, with the five girls I hardly considered friends and all their belongings jumbled everywhere. They were prettier than me, and they'd spent a lot of time last night showing their tits to frat boys while I tried to convince them to come listen to jazz.
New Orleans was all a-bustle, even at ten in the morning, but at some point I noticed that the noise had faded, that people no longer filled the streets. I looked up from the cobblestones and realized, with a dark thrill, that I didn't know where I was. The buildings were dark and old and ornamented, like mausoleums for giants. I walked along, wondering which way the tourist district was, wondering if I wanted to find my way out of this dark and water-stained section of the city. It might be nice, I thought, to get lost in the midst of my adult life.
Adult life had not been impressive so far. I'd changed majors three times in college, finally settling on Classical Studies as
a reaction against my hatred for economics, the cold arithmetic of business. I wanted a useless course of study, knowledge for its own sake.
My love life had been as indecisive as my academic one, until finally I'd given up on serious boyfriends, settling on casual affairs. I often spent the night with the boy from the bagel shop, the same one who made the silly joke about raspberries. He never stopped thinking I looked cute in the morning. He was dumb and sweet, the romantic equivalent of empty calories, and apparently incapable of jealousy or possessiveness, all qualities which suited me fine. I wanted to touch life only lightly. It seemed easier that way.
I went down a twisty alley, thinking that it might be a shortcut to somewhere worthwhile. The alley looked like it should smell of piss and beer, but it didn't. It smelled vaguely of flowers, cherry blossoms.
I came upon a little courtyard, and found a wrought-iron table tucked under a tree (not a cherry tree; a gnarled thing, a roughened tree). The careworn man was there, sitting, and I recognized him right away. He had his jacket zipped to his chin again. Still. A green glass bottle, with a fluted neck, sat on the table, as did a deck of cards. The man looked at me, and put his hand over the cards. He nodded to the chair across the table.
I didn't feel that sense of inevitability this time, and I just stood there.
"You don't have to take my suggestions,” he said. “But it does make things go more smoothly."
I sat down. The ironwork on the seat pressed into the bottoms of my thighs. I regretted wearing such a short skirt; the metal was cold. I felt like we were sitting in a blind corner of the world, the blank backs of buildings facing us, windows unadorned by curtains and grimed by dust. Anything could happen here, any sort of transaction, and no one would ever know. It would have been sinister, except for the cherry-blossom smell.
"Absinthe,” the man said, thumping the green bottle with his fingernail, making a ting sound.
"Wormwood wine?” I asked, surprised. “Doesn't that make you go blind, and isn't it illegal?"
He shrugged, but not so expansively as that last time, two years before. This was a shrug of ordinary indifference. “You've never had it before,” he said, voice rising a little at the end, like it was a question.
"No,” I said, amused, wincing over the remnants of my hangover-headache. “Nor do I intend to have it now."
He sighed. “Suit yourself. Have you ever had your fortune read with Tarot cards?"
"No."
"That, then."
I nodded toward his hand, still covering the deck. “Go ahead."
He looked at his hand as if surprised to see it resting there, over the cards. “Oh, no.” He lifted the deck of cards, showed me the back. Worn blue playing cards, Bicycle brand. Not Tarot cards at all. “These are for . . . other games."
"What kind?"
"Mostly card cutting.” He wouldn't meet my eye. I wondered if I'd somehow embarrassed him. “You know, high card wins."
I looked at him, frowning. The man who played Go in his head also cut cards for fun? “Do you want to play that?"
"I don't think so. You've cut cards before, I assume."
"Sure. It's like flipping a coin, I've used it to decide where to go have dinner, things like that."
"Well, then. It's not important."
"So fortune telling?"
"Go to Jackson Square and pay your ten dollars like the other tourists,” he growled. His face was quite serene despite the growl. He picked up his green bottle, sloshed the liquid, sighed, and walked away.
I sat in the courtyard for a while. It didn't feel any less oppressive with him gone, and the comforting smell of cherry blossoms had faded.
I found my way back to the French Quarter easily, after turning a couple of corners at random. I went to Jackson Square, annoyed with myself for doing as the man said. I found a woman near the church, with a kind face and hoop earrings. She sat at a rickety card table, turning over Tarot cards in a desultory fashion. Too early for her to have much business, I guessed. I sat across from her.
"Ten,” she said. I handed over a bill, and it disappeared. She had me cut the deck, explaining a little about the mysteries of the Tarot, a set spiel that she delivered without much enthusiasm.
The first card she turned over was the Death card. I sighed at the cheap drama of it all, and wondered if she'd stacked the deck to make it come out that way. I hadn't expected more than a gentle scam anyway, but this was too much like a B-Movie. Death was a skeleton with its jaw agape, mowing a field of wheat with a scythe. “Now don't worry,” the fortune teller said. “Death isn't literal death, but symbolic death. Death is symbolic of transformation. There's a great change coming in your life."
That was a safe enough prediction, I thought. Everything changes. Always.
The next card was also Death. I gathered from the fortune teller's gasp that such a thing was unusual, and wondered, a bit nervously, if this was part of the scam, too. High drama. But this Death was damned unsettling, not like the cartoonish walking boneyard from the first card. This death was inhuman, for one thing, with a skull more like a pig's than a man's, complete with tusks. He stood in a meadow, slashing at pink wildflowers with a shiny silver blade.
The fortune teller turned the card over quickly, muttering. She reached for the next card, then paused. “I'll give you your ten dollars back,” she said. “Someone's messed with my deck, it's not like it should be, I'm sorry."
"It's okay,” I said, rising. I felt as if my brain were tethered to me on a string, like a balloon, and floating a few feet above my body. “It's okay, things change.” I hurried away.
I went to the Cafe du Monde. The careworn man sat at a table, with an empty chair across from him, of course. He had a plate before him, dusted with fine grains of sugar and a few crumbs.
"I got you a demitasse,” he said when I approached. I sat down and picked up the cup he'd indicated, sniffing it suspiciously. It smelled wonderful, and I drank.
"I just had the worst fortune telling ever,” I said.
"Maybe Tarot doesn't work objectively. Maybe it's a metaphor."
"For what?” He exasperated me. I'd spent perhaps forty minutes with him, total, over our two meetings, and still he exasperated me as no lover, no relative, ever had.
"That probably depends on your perspective."
I looked into my cup, at the black liquid. “There were two Death cards."
"That's odd."
"She didn't even finish telling my fortune."
"Maybe she did, and she didn't know it, and you didn't, either. You can never say you haven't had your fortune read, now."
"The second death had a pig's skull.” I looked up at him for some reaction.
A garden-variety shrug. “According to the Chinese, pigs are omens of good health.” He cocked his head, as if trying to recall something half-forgotten, slippery. “Sometimes boars are associated with the devil."
"That doesn't help me much."
He shrugged again. “Perspective.” He dropped two big silver dollars, Lady Liberty cartwheels, on the table. I wasn't sure why. He'd ordered at the counter, paid already. “Two,” he said, sounding satisfied again but not so solemn.
Sensing he was about to leave, I said “I don't even know your name."
"When I think of you,” he said, “I think of you as ‘Carla.’”
"My name isn't Carla. That's not even close."
A more impressive shrug. “Tra la.” He walked away.
I always thought of him as “Carl” after that.
* * * *
3.
Third time. San Francisco. A year after graduation. I worked at a PR firm, “slaving in the bowels” as I told my friends. I mostly copyedited and nudged pixels. It wasn't a bad life. I didn't care about my job, so I had no stress, and it paid fairly well. I didn't live in the City, but I lived close enough to go there anytime I wanted, which I did fairly often, having nothing much better to do.
Walking one afternoon in Golden Gate Park,
I saw cherry blossoms on the sidewalk. “Shit,” I said, and hurried down the walk. I found Carl sitting on a bench. It was summer, but he still had his green jacket zipped to his chin. A paper plate rested on the seat next to him, smeared with a bit of mustard but otherwise empty.
He greeted me with a grave nod. I started to sit down beside him, but he held up a hand to stop me. He reached to the side of the bench and lifted a canvas-and-wooden folded thing. A camp stool, I realized. He opened it up and set it on the path. I nodded—this felt right, sitting across from him and not beside—and took my seat, perching on the flimsy stool.
"Have you ever eaten a lotus?” he asked, and lifted a plastic sack full of pale flowers. The sack came from a grocery store, and one of the handles had broken at some point and been tied back together.
"No,” I said. I'd been thinking about him a lot, off and on, about his questions, the things he said. “I don't want to eat lotus."
"A very potent flower, the lotus. You've heard of lotus-eaters? Their bliss?"
"I studied the Classics. Of course I've heard of the lotus-eaters.” I snorted. “Their bliss? They never did anything but forget. I guess that's bliss."
"Ah. I didn't realize you'd studied such things."
"It's not like we know each other well, Carl."
He looked startled, then smiled. “So you don't want the lotus?"
"That's not the thing I'm after. You always nudge me toward things I've never done before, right?"
"I don't know about always,” he said. “That's a bit lofty. We've only met twice."
"Yeah, and you did the same stuff each time, so that's always."
He shrugged, a “this doesn't matter, you're wasting time on semantics” shrug. I could understand his shrugs better than I understood most people's conversations.
"Well this time,” I said. “I want to fly.” I'd planned this for ages. I wanted to see what he'd do.
"You've flown before.” He yawned, not a bit put out.
"What do you mean? What, in my dreams? Does that count?"
"You've flown sixteen times. The first time on a trip to Ohio to visit family when you were a little girl, most recently to go back home for a funeral, many times in between."
Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 13 Page 6
