‘I suppose it’s a flower,’ I said. ‘A generic one.’
She shrugged.
‘Wait – I see something,’ I said. It had caught my eye, upside down, when I saw the second flower. ‘A padlock.’
She raised her eyebrows and looked. Her mouth pursed a little. ‘I see,’ she said.
‘Is it open or closed?’ I asked.
She looked at me. ‘What do you think?’
‘What does it mean?’
She looked at the cup again. ‘It could be open or closed. One way, a surprise for you. The other, a need for precaution.’
I looked at the flower, right there above the padlock, and thought of Fleur, the girl I’d never met. As I looked at the cup, shapes seemed to coalesce out of the gathered leaves all at once, in a rush: a cloud of crosses; birds in a dark V against the sky; a boat on the water; curling waves.
She was watching me, her expression inscrutable, somehow aloof and intimate all at once. It was a look I came to know well, and I came to think that it derived from having a lot of knowledge that she always had to hold back. The shapes lost their definition and became wet leaves again.
‘You seem to know a lot about this,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘I’ve been doing it for a while.’ I wondered again how old she was. ‘It’s what I do,’ she explained. Her eyes strayed to the mirror, the crystal ball reflected there. ‘Fortune-telling. Psychic readings.’
My eyes narrowed.
She smiled again. ‘I know, I don’t look like one.’
I thought of the many curtained shopfront windows in the East Village and scattered across the city with their ubiquitous neon signs advertising futures foretold, and the psychic hotlines advertised in the paper. She seemed so sane and rational with her genteel linen and understated decorative scheme, unlike all the junk and fakery I associated with the profession, if that’s what it was. It reminded me too much of the crystal healing and spiritual arcana that my mother was obsessed with.
I stood and went to the mantel. ‘Do you use this?’ I asked, nodding at the crystal ball.
She gave a noncommittal kind of tilt of the head. ‘Cards. Palms. People feel comfortable with different sorts of things.’ She turned her own cup slowly on its saucer. ‘You’re a sceptic,’ she said, neutrally.
I touched the crystal ball. It was cold under my fingers, and perfectly clear.
‘That’s healthy,’ she said. ‘I understand.’
There was a small stack of business cards next to the crystal ball, pale brown like weak tea. M. Bee, they said in raised black type. Tasseography. Tarot. Predictions. There was a phone number.
My empty cup sat on the table. I had the feeling that she wasn’t telling me everything she saw there – she’d hardly told my fortune, after all, just pointed out the obvious sign of a journey, and observed that it was broken. As a sceptic I probably didn’t warrant a fully fledged set of predictions.
The buzzer sounded and she answered it. Moments later came a quick knock at the door and, when she opened it, a man stood there with three full grocery bags in his arms. He came in and took the bags to the kitchen. She pressed a couple of dollars into his hand and thanked him and he left, wordlessly.
‘Please excuse me,’ she said. ‘Some of this will need to be put away before it spoils.’
‘Would you like a hand?’ I offered.
She regarded me for a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Thanks. But you can come through and keep me company.’
She showed me through the archway to the kitchen. There was a square table set against one wall, big enough for three people to sit at. A hanging lamp cast light on the floor and the table. I brought in the tray with our tea things on it. The grocery bags were on the countertop. She went through them, packing food away into the fridge and cupboards. I sat at the table. The bags were printed with the name of a classy supermarket nearby.
‘How do you like the neighbourhood?’ she asked.
I said I liked it and told her that I’d lived here for a short time, not far away, a few years before.
‘I suppose it’s changed a little since then,’ she said.
‘Not that much,’ I replied.
Her skin was pale under the yellowish light, against the light green counters and white tiled floor. Watching her unpack groceries – a collection of mundane items, bread, cans of tomatoes, milk, pasta in a box – some of the mystique of the fortune-teller evaporated and she seemed more like a normal person. I asked how long she had lived here.
‘Oh, a long time,’ she said with a little laugh. ‘Forever.’ She set the teacups into the sink.
I drank tea with Mrs Bee often after that. She didn’t ever tell me her first name, or what to call her, and in her company I was able to get away without using her name at all. There had been a Mr Bee at some point, she revealed, but he was either dead or living far away; the way she put it made it ambiguous. There was a maternal edge in the way she treated me, an almost protective element in her attitude sometimes – never open – but something told me that she didn’t have children of her own. Once or twice I saw people going into her apartment who might have been clients coming to have their fortunes told. A well-dressed woman in impossibly high heels and a style I didn’t expect to see outside of the Upper East Side, two strings of pearls at her neck and a suit that looked like Chanel. A man with thinning hair, briefcase in his hand, nervous glances side to side before he went through the door. But mostly the people I saw coming and going from there were delivering something or other. Dinner, flowers, groceries, drycleaning, packages.
I came inside one afternoon and shucked off my coat as I sat on the couch. She was still in the kitchen putting the kettle on. ‘Have you been outside today?’ I called out. ‘It’s cold outside.’
‘Winter’s on the way,’ she said, and didn’t answer my question.
We started drinking tea and talked about something else. The buzzer sounded and she answered the door to another delivery person, who handed her a paper bag closed and stapled at the top. She took it into the kitchen and came back.
‘You have it all worked out with this delivery system,’ I commented.
‘New York,’ she said. ‘You can have anything delivered here, to your door.’
When I was finished drinking my tea I asked her, ‘Have you been down there? To the World Trade Center site?’ I had still not made the trip to Ground Zero.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, as though we were talking about a visit to a very bad part of the Bronx.
There was a short silence.
‘It holds no interest for me,’ she said eventually, with all her usual Zen-like calm. ‘But you’ll get there.’
She had a way of peppering the conversation with little predictions like that, offhand, not portentous. Coming from anyone else they would have sounded just like reassurances or wishes, but from her mouth they had a different, oracular kind of tone.
I wanted to ask her how long it had been since she had gone outside the building, but it seemed to be overstepping some kind of boundary. By then I had come to the conclusion that she didn’t go outside. She didn’t seem to leave her apartment except to collect her mail from the vestibule inside the front set of doors. The big front window faced onto the street, blinds slanted down so that you could see out but it was hard to see in from the other side.
‘I’ll get there,’ I echoed.
She had set out fingers of shortbread on a plate, crumbly and sweet. A piece fell apart in my hands, sending crumbs over my skirt and onto the floor.
‘Don’t worry about it,’ she smiled.
She didn’t read my cup that day. There were hardly any leaves in it at the end for some reason. I looked down into it before I stood to go. The whole thing was like a Rorschach blot test, the leaves presenting fuzzy shapes that your mind could make into anything. I said this to Mrs Bee once. ‘That’s true, in a way,’ she had said. ‘That’s part of the whole thing. But you know. Sometimes you see a shape and you know what it
is – you know what that shape means to you.’ Today, the few leaves curled up in the bottom of the cup looked just like a leaf that had fallen from a tree. There was probably a meaning for that too.
When I told her at last, on my second or third visit, something about what I was doing there in New York, she nodded and didn’t ask questions. I was on my way to visit the Classics department up at Columbia. She listened to me patiently. It was hard to escape the feeling that she already knew everything I had to tell her, and was vaguely curious to see what words I would use myself to describe it, how much I would reveal or withhold. She would have made an excellent psychologist. That was probably part of her work too. I knew it was an aura that she cultivated – the quiet, knowing look. She was good at her job. But it worked. It was a powerful effect – the sense of being known, understood, and not judged – and I believed that it was true.
15.
The professor’s door was closed when I reached it. It was painted off-white like the walls around it, greying around the edges and the handle. The corridor was quiet as I considered knocking. The door opened suddenly: a girl burst out of it and walked away, her high sandals clopping. She didn’t meet my eyes. I could see that she had been crying. Her dark hair was pulled back, a short black dress, pink scarf around her neck, a thin body clutching books to her chest. The corridor filled with students who poured out of a room two doors down, a horde of swinging hair and backpacks. The crying girl was quickly lost in the crowd.
Ralph had given me a name, Jones, Ingrid’s adviser at Columbia. We had arranged the meeting over email, brief messages that had introduced me as a friend of Ingrid’s and asked for a short meeting when I was passing through New York. It was the only appointment I had made in advance of leaving Sydney. When I turned back to the door he was standing in the middle of the frame. He was tall, and wearing a sienna-brown shirt. He didn’t quite smile, but his look was not unfriendly for all that; curious, and challenging. His dark blond hair had been cut so that it fell into his eye. There was enough of it to show the dense beauty of the hair itself, its heavy straightness. I recognised the colour of wet sand and looked at the striking eyes, hazel green with their splinters of brown. The face in the Arms and Armor room at the museum.
‘Julia Alpers.’
He said my name like an announcement, voice English, educated, as I remembered.
‘Yes.’ I paused. ‘Have I come at a bad time?’
He looked confused for a second. ‘No. No, this is the time we arranged. Please, come in.’
He stepped to the side and motioned me into the room. Two walls were covered in books, many of them fat volumes dating from at least the nineteenth century. I looked straight to them and thought of the bookshop back in Sydney. This one’s spine was damaged slightly; the gold leaf on the title print was nicely intact. Titles in Latin and German and Greek. I took my eyes away.
The floor was covered in a Persian rug in tones of russet red, overlaying the institutional grey carpet underneath. One window looked down over the square below, full of sun and sharp shadows. I was wearing good clothes – my narrow black woollen pants and coat, a long top with chevron stripes in black and cream, red lipstick in place – but I wished that I had dressed up more, in heels.
The room was full of whatever had taken place just then to make the girl cry. His lack of embarrassment about the scene was unsettling. He took a seat at his desk and tilted back in his chair, a wide-legged pose with his hands clasped, fingers interlaced loosely. His features were softer than I remembered, but just as beautiful and distant-looking. The chair was old, polished wood, a teacher’s chair. He gestured to another chair for me. It was out of place in the room, a cheap, plastic thing. I sat. His silence had begun to intimidate me. I began to recognise something in him, the power of a teacher who is hard to please, and too late I found something coming out of my mouth that was meant to be pleasing. I said something about the crying girl that made him laugh, about how she hadn’t managed to convince him to give her a better grade. I felt bad then, sorry for making a joke of the girl’s misery.
‘So,’ he sighed, ‘you were a friend of Ingrid’s?’
‘Yes, we were friends in Australia, before she moved over here more permanently.’
‘Ah, yes. We never heard much about her life there. She had a strange accent too, not one I would have recognised straight off as Australian. A little like yours.’ It sounded vaguely like an accusation.
In my memory Ingrid’s voice had a kind of precision along with phrasing that was sometimes a little off. ‘Her father was … French? Swiss? Her voice had that sound.’
He looked doubtful. ‘And are you visiting the Metropolitan Museum while you’re in town?’
It was the first reference either of us had made to that earlier, accidental meeting, and I wondered whether he was actually recalling that experience, or whether he didn’t remember at all and it was a casual question. It seemed to take a long time to process those various possibilities in my mind. His hands were spread on the desk in front of him, long and elegant, and he studied them as he spoke.
There was a knock at the door behind me, which he had left slightly open. He didn’t respond, but looked into my face, still waiting for me to answer his question. A moment passed, and the door was pushed open a little. A girl half-stepped into the room, her face lit with apprehension, eyes wide with huge lashes and lines of kohl.
He looked at her irritably. ‘Did I ask you to enter?’
Her eyes dropped and raised again.
‘Why knock if you don’t wait for a response?’
She stood still.
I cleared my throat. ‘Maybe I have come at a bad time. You’re very busy with your students. Sorry for the interruption. Perhaps I can make a time to see you later in the week.’
He was a little breathless when he turned, as though he was concentrating hard to focus on me and the girl at the same time.
‘Maybe another time. But I don’t know what you want to know. I don’t know what I can tell you.’ He sounded irritated, but he decided to give me something. ‘You should talk to Trinh, you know. They were friends.’
‘Trinh?’
‘Another student here. You can get her number from the office. You might find her in the department if you wait.’ He checked his watch briefly. ‘She finishes teaching about now.’
The girl didn’t say a word, she stood just inside the doorway, relaxed and expectant. As I left I caught a look from the side of her eyes, something like contempt. The door closed firmly behind me.
I started off down the hall, thinking about the crying girl, her red and tired face.
The department office was a long, narrow room connected to a small mailroom walled in with shelves, sectioned into slots for the faculty and students. Behind a glass partition a woman with glasses was typing at a computer behind a desk surrounded by filing cabinets.
‘Excuse me,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for Trinh.’
‘Yes?’
The voice came from the mailroom behind me, from a young woman standing in front of the rows of shelves against the wall. ‘I’m Trinh.’
Her eyes were the startling grey-blue of coloured contact lenses. She was holding a stack of papers, student assignments. The blue-black line of a tattoo snaked out across her wrist from under the cuff of her shirt.
Julia. I’m a friend of Ingrid Grey.’
The stack of papers slipped from her hands just then and they began to fall, sliding onto the floor. We both bent to collect them. Her hair was short, black and glossy. She had not spoken again.
‘I was hoping to talk to you,’ I offered. ‘I was just speaking with Professor Jones and he said you were friends. With Ingrid. I’m here in New York looking for Ingrid – not looking for her – looking. Looking into what she was doing here.’
Trinh gave me a stare that was both injured and suspicious.
‘You are looking for her?’
‘No, just – I’m an old friend.’
Trinh reached down to the floor and picked up a leather briefcase. She slid the papers inside.
‘OK, I’ll talk to you. I’m busy now.’
She started walking. Her shoes made a loud clip on the floor, heels at least two inches high. I followed her.
‘Can you meet me later?’ she asked. ‘Do you want to meet for a drink?’
‘Sure.’
‘Cool. Give me your hand.’
Her grip was light and smooth. With a pen she wrote the name and street of a bar on the back of my hand.
‘It’s down in Chinatown. Can you be there at about nine?’ ‘OK.’
‘See you there.’
We stopped outside the lift. Trinh pressed the up button and the lift doors opened immediately. She stepped inside. As the doors closed she smiled, a transforming effect.
I pressed the button to go down and waited. The corridor was oppressive, low ceiling made of pocked, square white panels. The smile was a talisman to take me out of the building, away from crying and contemptuous girl students and into the air outside. I looked down at my right hand.
Lilac Lounge.
Already the ink had started to bleed into my skin, blurring the lettering.
When I finally descended the stairway to the Lilac Lounge, I had walked past the unmarked building at least twice in my search for the place. Finally I had made out a faded ‘L’ on a corner of the building’s façade that could mean something. Layers of paint peeled off the front of the building, yellow and red and blue, each layer revealing a different set of indistinguishable letters. Stairs led down from the street to basement-level doors that opened onto a candle-lit interior. Couples and groups of people huddled in small alcoves around the room.
Trinh was sitting at the bar, clad in shining leather. She welcomed me and talked in low tones to the bartender, ordering me a drink.
‘I hope you didn’t have too much trouble finding the place.’
The Legacy Page 19
