2
reading Bird’s notes took the comfort away. Frank’s claim that I’m evil doesn’t shock me so much, partly because I’ve questioned myself on the very same subject before. It’s not my actions that raise the questions, but my inaction, the way I’ve consciously and consistently avoided chances to reduce other people’s unhappiness. I call it a side effect of growing up in a building full of families and thin walls and floors: We all heard everything and did nothing. I heard love going wrong for people, so wrong. The silence for weeks when Mrs. Phillips next door miscarried. Then the weeks of noise that followed—Mr. Phillips came home later and later, and Mrs. Phillips waited up for him, playing records until the small hours, switching off the gramophone and sobbing when he came in through the door. Mr. Kendall on the other side of us kept spending the rent money; his wife kept faking surprise at this. Every month Mrs. Kendall asked, “How could you, Fred? How could you? What are we going to do?” and you could hear her hatred and her boredom; it stayed in her voice even as he hit her. For a few months there was a pretty glamorous-looking couple upstairs—down on their luck, I guess. I remember them particularly because I never found out either of their names, only heard him calling her whore, whore, WHORE. Of course they must have heard the rat catcher knocking me around too. We all got a little less human so we could keep living together.
No, these are the words that kissed my equilibrium good-bye:
It was the one time in my life I wished I was a woman.
There it was, in my daughter’s handwriting. Frances had wanted to come back.
I couldn’t sleep. Arturo snored blissfully beside me until I put a stop to that.
“Arturo. Arturo. Wake up.”
He gasped and waved his arms. “What? What is it? Fire?”
“No. I need to know how to break a spell. Any ideas?”
“Break a spell, you say?”
“Yeah. How?”
“Woman, how the hell should I know? Let me sleep.”
“Quit yelling.”
“I’m not yelling.”
“Sounds like yelling to me.”
He stuck his head underneath his pillow; I got up. Dawn broke calmly and filled the house with its glow. And Alecto Fletcher answered the phone when I called her.
“Oh. I knew it was you. Who else could be so disrespectful of an old woman’s need for rest?”
“I won’t keep you long, Alecto. I just wondered if you knew how to break a spell.”
“That’s right, ask the crone; she’ll know. Are we talking about a magic spell?”
“Um. Not in origin, but in effect maybe.”
“And you’re asking for a friend . . .”
“My friends just don’t know how to behave.”
“Your friend already asked me herself. Sid Fairfax came over yesterday with a fairly interesting book of art monographs and the very same question you’ve just called me to ask. I’m worried about her too. It’s plain to see that she loathes this town, but she’s told herself she can’t leave because she loves her mother and she can’t be happy if her mother is unhappy.”
“I didn’t know any of that. I thought she was staying because she’s in love with Kazim.”
“Yes, we’d be in love with Mr. Bey, wouldn’t we, if we dared to be? Agnes Miller allows herself to flirt with him; perhaps we should too.”
“What can I say? He’s an actual Prince Charming. But what’d you tell Sidonie?”
“I told her that magic spells only work until the person under the spell is really and honestly tired of it. It ends when continuing becomes simply too ghastly a prospect.”
“I’m not sure I . . .”
“Pester your subject, Boy. Pester this person, whoever it is. Make the enchantment inconvenient for them, find myriad ways to expose their contentment as false, show them that the contentment is part of the spell, engineered to make it last longer. Do you see?”
“I take it you’ve broken a lot of spells, Alecto?”
“I’m speaking more from the experience of having been under them.”
“May you live forever.”
“Yes, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? So you could phone me at five in the morning forever.”
—
i made cocoa, took a cupful out onto the porch and closed my eyes as the sun climbed the sky. I pretended that the light was patting my black eye in a friendly, investigative way, trying to see if early light alone could heal it. I’d pretended this a number of times back in New York. It was the quickest way to feel cared for after you’d taken a battering. With my eyes closed, I returned to the apartment on Rutgers Street, tried to find something, anything, maternal in what I remembered of the rat catcher. There was nothing. I saw his sneer again. His sneer and his fists. His eyes I couldn’t remember so well; I rarely let him look into my eyes, I’d kept him out no matter what. Okay, scratch maternal. How about feminine? Maybe a few moments too fleeting to articulate, but that’s men for you—it was like that with Arturo too. Through the keyhole of the rat catcher’s bedroom door I once saw him place his hand on his girlfriend’s calf and slide upward to the top of her thigh. Could I file that under feminine? Yes and no. It was the touch of a lover. Slow and sure. Taking pleasure, promising more. She bent over him and nipped at his earlobe and they laughed a little and moaned a little and I backed away from that keyhole in a hurry.
—
snow came up the garden path and asked if there was any cocoa going spare. I said yes and made a fresh batch, ignoring her protests that she hadn’t intended to put me to any trouble.
“Why are you up so early?”
“I just wanted to walk around without seeing anybody,” she said, studying the porch floor. I thought she looked a little fatigued, so I made her take a vitamin tablet and tried to enact a talking cure.
“You go home tomorrow, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And do you go back to work right away?”
“No, I don’t have a case until next week.”
There was a skin on my cocoa, and a thicker one on hers, but she was drinking around the edges of it.
“A case?”
“I knew you weren’t listening the other morning.”
“I’m sorry, honey.” Honey. I’d never called anybody honey in my life before then.
She smiled. “Don’t be. It’s dirty work, Boy. I’ve been following men’s wives and taking note of their indiscretions. It pays well because it’s valuable to the clients. It makes their divorces significantly cheaper.”
You never really feel your jaw until it drops. I think it was the crispness of her words just as much as the worldliness of what she was saying. Should a diaphanous butterfly ever perch on my finger and provide analysis of the day’s stock market activity I won’t bat an eyelash.
She looked up (we were directly beneath Bird’s window) and continued in a whisper: “I don’t know if I can stick it out for much longer. You’re taking photos of a couple from across the street, you’re sitting next to them in some bar, eavesdropping for incriminating details, sometimes the guy will get up and go to the restroom and the unfaithful wife will turn around and just start talking to you. People in love are so trusting. They’ll say, ‘Hey, don’t worry, your prince will come,’ and I’m all no no no, don’t talk to me, I’m stalking you. One woman . . . I liked her, and it was sad to hand in the stuff I’d got on her . . . she started telling me about her life with her lover. It was all moonshine, I knew who her husband was, and where their home was, and where she sent her kids for their education. But she told me the man she was with was her husband and they had four boys he took fishing every Sunday, and between the boys and work they only had one date night a month so they had to make it special, and I just started shaking. I keep going to Isidor—that’s my boss—to tell him I’m quitting, but then he pays me . . .”
I sniggered, and then we were both laughing.
“Don’t go home tomorrow, Snow. Stay awhile, okay?”
She hesitated.
“Isidor might fire you, but if the job makes you shake, is it really right for you? Visit awhile longer. Please.”
“It’s not because of Isidor. It’s that kiddie bedroom. But I guess I only have to sleep there.”