“There you are,” the old man said, pulling me by the wrist into the cramped room. “What took you so long? We’ve been waiting for ages.”
They had been up to their usual shenanigans in my absence. Someone had found a lipstick and rouge, and they had painted their faces. And each woman had a new hairstyle: Marie in a medusa of dreadlocks, Alice in a Veronica Lake wave that dipped over one eye, Dolly in twin braided pigtails of prodigious length, and Jane and Flo, tall and small, in matching pageboys. Powder caked their faces, and they looked altogether artificial. Beckett’s eyes had been shadowed with kohl, making his stare starker still, and even the baby had rosy cheeks. Perhaps the little one smelled or saw the cereal through the plastic or heard a typical rattle, for he implored me by clenching and unclenching his miniature hand to give over the loot.
I pulled off the lid and offered the container, and he reached in up to his wrist and came away with little Oaty-Ohs sticking to his skin and spilling from his grasp. The tot seemed more concerned with what he had lost than with what was still in hand, and he struck me in the moment as somewhat emblematic of the human condition, not to read too much into basic greed and regret. He shoved the lot in his mouth and happily chewed and chewed. Alice took the cup of milk and set it on the sink counter, and then reached for her broom and pulled out a single strand of straw and blew on one end, forcing a hole the length of it to make a suitable tube through which the child might easily drink. The crowd in the bathroom saluted her ingenuity, and everyone watched as if they had never before seen a child take a sip. His first assay was too forceful and the boy gasped and spewed out the milk, but he soon learned his lesson, and general applause was proffered. Fondness and pride buoyed our hearts. I wondered what raising a child with Sita might be like.
Batting his eyes at me, Beckett resembled a rather gaunt raccoon, but when he fluttered his eyelids again, there was no mistaking his ploy to attract my attention. As best we could, we huddled into a corner for a tête-à-tête. He spoke in a hoarse whisper that anyone could hear. “You were gone a long time. Is anything awry?”
“Now that you mention it, the whole of the downstairs has been redecorated, like some designer’s bad dream of the future. Very modern, very austere. Someone came in and got rid of all my stuff.”
He put a finger to his bottom lip in a gesture of cogitation. He was wearing pink lip gloss. “That isn’t right. Much too soon.”
“Do you have any ideas as to who’s behind all these changes?”
“Household elves,” he said, without hesitation. “Or perhaps gremlins, or the faerie changelings or wayward angels. A pair of giant lobsters or two tramps with nothing to be done. How the hell should I know?”
His sarcasm perplexed me, but I did not press the point. Beckett had saved my life five times, yet possessed a preternatural relationship with the five would-be assassins, cozying up to them in my absences. Nonchalant to the essence of my predicament, he seemed awfully familiar, yet his true identity shifted in mysterious ways. One moment he reminded me of my deceased father, the next I was sure he was the spirit of Samuel Beckett come to wait with me for a truth that would never arrive. I could not tell if he was friend or foe, and as these thoughts raced through my mind, he smiled dumbly at me, as though content to let me stop and ponder it all. The rouge on his cheeks, the pink gloss on his lips, and the heavy black around his eyes contributed to his rather seedy demeanor. For the first time that night, he looked old and tired. I felt a sudden need to strike back at him for his cold remarks. “Have you seen yourself in a mirror? You look like an old drag queen at five A.M. on the morning after.”
Brushing me aside, he stepped to consider his reflection, pulled off his glasses, and leaned so closely that the tip of his nose was touching the glass. I fear I may have hurt his feelings, for tears collected in the red bottom rims of his eyelids. Jane gave him a hand towel the moment he reached out blindly, and burying his face in the cloth, he rubbed savagely against his features, blew his nose, and handed the towel back to her. The old face had returned to the old man, and with it, the old glee and lechery. He ogled a pair in the corner and then turned to me with mischief in mind.