These two penniless girls knew every trick in the book, and their not being able to identify each other was one of the downsides of being an efficient fraud. Both women moved from town to town under an assortment of aliases, and both believed that collaboration was for weaklings. Lucy and Safiye hadn’t come to that gathering looking for friendship or love; they were there to make contacts. Back when they had toiled at honest work—Lucy at a bakery and Safiye at an abattoir—they’d wondered if it could be true that there were people who were given money simply because they looked as if they were used to having lots of it. Being blessed with forgettable faces and the gift of brazen fabrication, they’d each gone forth to test this theory and had found it functional. Safiye loved to look at paintings and needed money to build her collection. Lucy was an artist in constant need of paint, brushes, turpentine, peaceful light, and enough canvas to make compelling errors on. For a time Lucy had been married to a rare sort of clown, the sort that children aren’t afraid of: After all, he is one of us, you can see it in his eyes, they reasoned. How funny that he’s so strangely tall. Lucy and her husband had not much liked being married to each other, the bond proving much heavier than their lighthearted courtship had led them to expect, but they agreed that it had been worth a try, and while waiting for their divorce to come through Lucy’s husband had taught her the sleight of hand she eventually used to pick her neighbor’s pocket down to the very last thread. The night she met Safiye she stole her earrings right out of her earlobes and, having retired to a quiet corner of the mansion to inspect them, found that the gems were paste. Then she discovered that her base metal bangle was missing and quickly realized that she could only have lost it to the person she was stealing from; she’d been distracted by the baubles and the appeal of those delicate earlobes. Cornered by a banker whose false memory of having been in love with her since matriculation day might prove profitable, Lucy wavered between a sensible decision and a foolhardy one. Ever did foolhardiness hold the upper hand with Lucy; she found Safiye leaning against an oil lantern out in the garden and saw for herself that she wasn’t the only foolish woman in the world, or even at that party, for Safiye had Lucy’s highly polished bangle in her hand and was turning it this way and that in order to catch fireflies in the billowing, transparent left sleeve of her gown. All this at the risk of being set alight, but then from where Lucy stood Safiye looked as if she was formed of fire herself, particles of flame dancing the flesh of her arm into existence. That or she was returning to fire.
They left the reunion early and in a hurry, along with a small group of attendees who’d found themselves unable to sustain the pretense of total success. Having fallen into Lucy’s bed, they didn’t get out again for days. How could they, when Lucy held all Safiye’s satisfactions in her very fingertips, and each teasing stroke of Safiye’s tongue summoned Lucy to the brink of delirium? They fell asleep, each making secret plans to slip away in the middle of the night. After all, their passion placed them entirely at each other’s command, and they were bound to find that fearsome. So they planned escape but woke up intertwined. It was at Lucy’s bidding that Safiye would stay or go. And who knew what Safiye might suddenly and successfully demand of Lucy? Stop breathing. Give up tea. The situation improved once it occurred to them that they should also talk; as they came to understand each other they learned that what they’d been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love. At times it was necessary to spend months apart, coaxing valuable goods out of people using methods they avoided discussing in detail. Lucy sent Safiye paintings and orange blossoms, and Safiye directed a steady flow of potential portrait subjects Lucy’s way. The lovers fought about this; it seemed to Lucy that Safiye was trying to trick her into making a “respectable” living. Lucy had promised herself that she’d only paint faces she found compelling and it was a bother to have to keep inventing excuses for not taking on portraits.
“It’s all right, you’re just not good at gifts,” Lucy said, with a smile intended to pacify. Gifts didn’t matter when they were together, and gifts didn’t have to matter when they were apart either. But Safiye was outraged.
“What are you talking about? Don’t you ever say that I’m bad at gifts!”
If there are any words that Lucy could now unsay, it would be those words about Safiye being bad at gifts; if Lucy hadn’t said them Safiye wouldn’t have set out to steal the gift that would prove her wrong, and she wouldn’t have got caught.
The lovers spent Christmas together, then parted—Lucy for Grenoble, and Safiye for Barcelona. They wrote to each other care of their cities’ central post offices, and at the beginning of April Safiye wrote of the romance of St. Jordi’s Day. Lucy, it is the custom here to exchange books and roses each year on April 23rd. Shall we?
—
LUCY HAPPILY settled down to work. First she sent for papyrus and handmade a book leaf by leaf, binding the leaves together between board covers. Then she filled each page from memory, drew English roses budding and Chinese roses in full bloom, peppercorn-pink Bourbon roses climbing walls and silvery musk roses drowsing in flowerbeds. She took every rose she’d ever seen, made them as lifelike as she could (where she shaded each petal the rough paper turned silken), and in these lasting forms she offered them to Safiye. The making of this rose book coincided with a period in Lucy’s life when she was making money without having to lie to anyone. She’d fallen in with an inveterate gambler who’d noticed that she steadied his nerves to a miraculous degree. He always won at blackjack whenever she was sitting beside him, so they agreed he’d give her 10 percent of each evening’s winnings. This man only played when the stakes were high, so he won big and they were both happy. Lucy had no idea what was going to happen when their luck ran out; she could only hope her gambler wouldn’t try to get violent with her, because then she’d have to get violent herself. That would be a shame, because she liked the man. He never pawed at her, he always asked her how Safiye was getting on, and he was very much in love with his wife, who loved him too and thought he was a night watchman. The gambler’s wife would’ve gone mad with terror if she’d known how close she came to losing her life savings each night, but she didn’t suspect a thing, so she packed her husband light suppers to eat at work, suppers the man couldn’t even bear to look at (his stomach always played up when he was challenging Lady Luck), so Lucy ate the suppers and enjoyed them very much, the flavor of herbed olives lingering in her mouth so that when she drank her wine she tasted all the greenness of the grapes.