“What?” she looked at him. “You, with your Kosher chicken appetite. You’ve got nothing to say.”
The cat can well look at the queen, thought the Mayor, miffed.
Claire climbed up into the hammock with her goods. The wobbly table was already prepared with an ashtray, a candle, and five Kodak boxes of unopened slides. These were the last days of McLeod Gange and the first color shots from her third day in Queens. Maybe one of them would be brilliant. One would be sufficient. Claire lit the candle to hold each slide in front of. This was not the way it was done, but she had sold her projector and carousel to Sami Ja back in McLeod Gange, the Tibetan village where she’d lived above the Tea Shop of the Tibetan Moon. She was used to doing it this way, now. And Sami Ja was back in the Himalayas making a living showing slides of naked Bagwanis from Poona to the wide-eyed Tibetans. His shows were a raving success. Even the sweet, aproned ladies came. The sight of those earnest, pink-faced yuppies on the road to redemption via nudity delighted them. They laughed and laughed.
Sami Ja was a Tibetan teenager who’d latched on to Claire like a suckling wolf when he’d heard where she came from. “New York?” he’d cried, ecstatic. “Want some hash?” Claire could still see him with his scant Fu Manchu and a lavender jacket that read CBS Sports, front and back. He would pay her to marry him, he’d told her on the day she’d arrived in the village, filthy dirty from the coal truck. “No? And what about a letter to sponsor? Oh, no? Well then, how would she feel about a good down sleeping bag? Brand new! Mountain climber died first day out. Good zipper!”
Claire had bought the sleeping bag. All alone, late at night when the tea shop was closed and the mice scurried joyfully over the icy rafters, she was happy to have her good zipper. Claire would miss Sami Ja. “Another day,” he’d flick his prayer beads over easy, “another dollah.” He would be all right, back there, taking bets from the trekkers, selling forbidden tours of the Dalai Lama’s palace, playing poker with the disenchanted. One day he, too, would know these highlights of American culture that he could now only hear of and dream about: Haagen Daaz. “Dynasty.” That polyester mecca of bliss: Atlantic City. Someday it would all be his.
Claire held the first slide of him up to the light.
There he was, on tiptoes, squinting at the camera from the waterfall. He was thinking maybe this photograph would be seen by some big-shot producer. Claire sighed, remembering the cool, enduring waterfall.
A car came down the block and its headlights lit up the spider web along the rail, turning it silver and exposing wriggling victims caught and now doomed. Claire groaned and looked the other way. It wasn’t the spider that troubled her. Spiders were good luck. This one scrambled over to his favorite, strategic thread and waited for wind and traffic to send him his well-earned dinner. What troubled Claire were those he wouldn’t eat. Grudgingly, she’d have to get up and untangle the ones she felt especially sorry for. She couldn’t help it. She suspected she was only prolonging their inevitable karmic rebirths to a higher form of life, but it was a tricky problem. After all, destiny had placed her in this spot, too, complete with her sucker’s instinct to save the stupid things. The spider would only catch more, so what good would it do? And what was good, anyway? What you meant well very often turned out to be a muddle. Like the time in McLeod Gange when she’d run around trying to get some help for the dying cat. Claire had barely known the cat, but Hula, the proprietress of the tea shop, had pulled the mangy thing off the street for her and her aversion to mice and so she’d felt bound to the thing.