What is it? Gabriel asked, as he handed over his card.
She told him everything. She told him where, when, and by which company the measuring wheel had been made, she told him the location of the seamstresses’ workshop the measuring wheel had been used in and the dates between which that workshop had been in operation. Harriet told Gabriel staff numbers, key names from the history of the workshop, and the exciting honor of being selected to supply chiffon to one of Paris’s grand fashion houses (now also long forgotten). She told him how the brass measuring wheel had found its way to the shop in a boxful of other objects that had already been sold. She laid out tracing paper and showed him how the seamstress would have used it to gauge how cloth would curve around a neckline or the opening of a sleeve, where buttonholes could go, from what distance a pattern should repeat itself. Gabriel stuffed the measuring wheel into his coat pocket and said he’d cherish it. He was looking at her wheat-sheaf ring. Harriet stifled her laughter; he’d been all happy and playful when he’d thought she was no longer wearing it, but now that he saw she still was . . . she put away the tracing paper and whispered the rest of the story of the measuring wheel to herself as she moved boxes around underneath the counter. Gabriel was still there when she returned to the surface.
Sorry I didn’t call you back, he said.
Huh, call me back when?
Gabriel stood aside while someone asked how much a gilded statuette of the goddess Athena cost. Then he said: I think it was last week?
Last week? I didn’t call you last week.
He smiled (more smirked, really—what was the matter with him?) and said: OK. Anyway, sorry. And now I’ve got to go, but I wanted to see you . . .
That’s . . . nice to hear.
He wanted to see her . . . , and he kept saying he had to go and then just staying. She wrapped and boxed the Athena statuette and a strand of green malachite beads, then asked Gabriel if he was going back to work. He said he was going back to uni. She could see how this would have come about—Gabriel preparing to join the company and Ari telling him to go and train as a solicitor first, perhaps sugarcoating the long delay: We need a great lawyer, and you’ve got more of a head for this sort of stuff than Rémy . . .
As he headed for the shop door, he said that even if Harriet wasn’t the one who had called him, she should keep a better eye on her phone . . . thirty-eight missed calls were a bit much . . .
OK, stop right there . . . er, please. Gabriel had his phone in hand. Harriet took it and scrolled through his call history (Mum, Mum, Uncs, Mum, Dad, Uncs, who’s Jocasta, who’s Kaidi, who’s Polly, lots of calls from them, Uncs . . . ) and eventually she found her own name, in red, with the number 38 in brackets beside it. She was taken aback by the fact that she really did seem to have done this, and she was dismayed by his having seen all the calls and still not calling her back.
Same thing last month, but the record doesn’t go that far back, Gabriel said, taking his phone.
I . . .
Should I go first? Gabriel asked. OK, I missed that window of time. You know, the one that lets you respond without it being blatant that you thought too much about how to respond . . . or too little. And then I thought it’s not as if we talk much on the phone anyway. We’re always good in person. Aren’t we? There was something you really wanted to talk about, so. Here I am in person.
Something I really wanted to talk about, eh? I wish I knew what it was!
Really? His voice, or perhaps just the closeness of it, made her realize they were the only ones left in the shop. He put one arm around her waist, then the other. Her hands rose as his lowered. She laid both hands against his chest, just to let them rest there, but he stepped back as if pushed away; he was saying Sorry and I shouldn’t have—
That was no good. She put her arms around him this time, and his hands covered hers. They breathed, hand over hand. She looked up at him and thought:
I think he thinks I—
He’s right. (Mostly? I think? Seventy-five percent? Sixty percent? More than fifty, anyway.)
Oh, he’s going to—
She grabbed a large snow globe and a crossbow, held them up on either side to obstruct the views of both security cameras, and she and Gabriel kissed and kissed and kissed the way they’d wanted to for years, the way only a hormonally enflamed sixteen-year-old and a likewise enflamed eighteen-year-old can. He kept trying to talk but she kept kissing him, and she tried to talk but he kept kissing her, but eventually they were able to hold off just long enough for her to put down the snow globe and the crossbow and rest her arms, though she and Gabriel kept very close together in case of urgent kiss deficiency. During this pause he was able to tell her, I was seeing someone, but we broke up . . . we broke up because you called me thirty-eight times in a row . . .
* * *
—
HARRIET STAYS OFF ALCOHOL because it brings out deviousness in her—a self-directed deviousness. Drunken Harriet creates puzzles that sober Harriet is then expected to solve. Take those two dates on which Harriet bombarded Gabriel’s phone with calls (and left voicemail . . . it took him months to tell her about all the voicemail she left)—both were boozy picnic days. Drunken Harriet had retreated to the corner of the studio with her phone and decided to work on her own love life. She felt exempt, marvelously exempt from all those rules that usually seemed to be in place to keep her from full and honest expression of her thoughts . . . perhaps this was what it was like to be her mother. Now she could inquire whether Rémy would risk it for a chocolate biscuit. Or she could call Gabriel. Gabriel or Rémy, Rémy or Gabriel. Wouldn’t chasing Rémy be like running after a tiny kitten that turned around, morphed into a cheetah, and hunted you down because you’d stepped on its tail? Whereas Gabriel would be the kitty that got a bit cross, then just lapped up some milk and went back to sleep.
I know, thought Drunken Harriet. I’ll phone Gabriel and ask if I can ever be anything more to him than a good deed his family did. Oh, he’s not answering. I’ll leave him the question in a voicemail. That was a mistake; I’ll call and tell him to delete that voicemail without listening to it. Still not answering . . . now I’ll scream WHO CARES, YOU’RE JUST SOME BOY, JUST SOME BOY . . . I WOULD BE A GREAT GIRLFRIEND, YOU WISH YOU DESERVED A GIRLFRIEND LIKE ME. What to do now? Apologize, apologize, and apologize. No more calls. Wait, just one more. This is the voicemail I should have left in the first place. When he hears this he’ll come to me. I’ll tell him he is Paradise and that I want him really badly, and then I’ll laugh and cry and snuffle like a little piglet. He will find this endearing. No, he won’t. Why did I make a mess of all those voicemails . . . I know, I’ll delete the call records from my recent calls and turn my phone off. Sober Harriet won’t remember a thing, Gabriel will be too scared/repulsed to mention it, and it’ll be just as if this never happened.
Both times Drunken Harriet had done this, Gabriel had been with his girlfriend—
Polly, Kaidi, or Jocasta?
He wouldn’t say. But Polly-Kaidi-Jocasta had been amused and then suspicious, had held on to his phone saying, Let’s see how many times she calls, and thus become the villain of both evenings. Then the voicemails themselves . . . Gabriel let Harriet listen to the voicemail she’d left, and afterward all she could say was: Clever, clever drunken me.
I just thought you . . . must like me a lot, Gabriel said.
And you liked me a lot, Harriet told him.
Play the messages that demonstrate this?