Boy, Snow, Bird(25)
“Correct,” she’d said.
“Uh . . . I really like the costumes,” I said.
Olivia switched my cigar from the left side of my mouth to the right side and looked approvingly at me through her opera glasses. “Yes, the tale is what you just said it is, but it’s also about two people who walk through fire and water together, unscathed because they are together. You’ll agree that that’s not a sentimental interpretation, that that’s literally what happens? The trials those two undergo are about being beyond words.”
I shivered, and she’d offered me the stole. “Chinchilla. It keeps you warm.” But I’d declined. Cuban cigars and chinchilla stoles; this was more Mia Cabrini’s scene, and I was better off not developing a taste for it.)
Olivia stood back, admiring the effect. “Yes, it never looked quite right on me. But Boy, you were born to wear this.”
Arturo whispered, “Poor Viv—” in my ear. Vivian said a stole like that wouldn’t have lasted long in her wardrobe anyway, what with her talent for spilling things. But she minded; of course she minded, here was a fur stole she’d probably grown up coveting and I’d swiped it right from under her nose. Her fiancé didn’t even have the good sense to say he’d get her one. Or maybe it was good sense and a healthy awareness of his salary level that kept him from saying it.
All through dinner Arturo and I held hands under the table, like a couple of kids, and that made the dinner quite wonderful, even though Mrs. Fletcher kept staring at Olivia as though committing her to memory. It got so bad that Olivia turned to her husband and said: “Has it happened at last, Gerald? Have I become a curiosity?”
Gerald clinked wineglasses with her and said: “You were always a curiosity, darling.” And Arturo proposed a toast to curiosities.
Webster and Agnes didn’t eat much dinner, but that would have been the case even if we’d been at a restaurant. Webster was three weeks away from getting married and consequently she was on the diet to end all diets. Arturo thought it was rude of her to eat so little, and was ready to tell her so. I said, “Look . . . I wouldn’t if I were you.” I’d fasted before, so I knew how being hungry can make a girl get a little bit enigmatic. Webster’s psychology was one short straw away from abnormal. She’d conceived a disgust for the moon, kept calling “her” fat. “Fat hog, fat hog . . . what does she eat, to bloat up like that? Nothing up there but air, right? So greedy she stuffs herself with air . . . or stars . . . ?” Ted and Arturo started talking shop during the first course, just making remarks about the new catalogue they were putting together and how hard it was to find professional hand-and-ankle models who didn’t demand that a full makeup team be present at the shoot. Webster said, “Talking shop, Teddy?” and gave him such a ghoulish smile that he broke his sentence off there and started reminiscing about wedding speeches he’d heard and liked. I didn’t care whether or not Webster ate what I cooked. She cared enough to show up, and that was great. The same went for Agnes, though Snow was probably the main attraction for her. She was sitting directly across from Snow, and her eyes lit up whenever Snow laughed, which was often, since the girl shared a private joke with every spoonful of potato salad on her plate.
There was a brass water pitcher set up in the center of the table, and a couple of times I found myself smiling at my reflection in the side of it, but stopped just before anyone caught me. The smile was a chinchilla fur kind of smile. Look what I got you, it seemed to say. And I can get you more. But I wasn’t the only one smiling at myself that night. Snow was too, peeping out from under her eyelashes. She might have been copying me. I couldn’t tell. When she got tired, she lay her head down beside her ice cream dish and just slept. It was Agnes who put her to bed, blushing at the way everybody at the table went slightly gooey eyed at the resemblance between them.
8
i’m sure I didn’t mean to make anyone feel uncomfortable,” Mrs. Fletcher said the next morning. She put on a pretty good show of being abashed, folded hands and glum head shakes, but I wasn’t fooled. When I saw that I wasn’t going to get an explanation out of her, I changed the subject and told her about meeting Sidonie’s mother and very briefly masquerading as a teacher. She covered her eyes and groaned.
“I wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Oh, so I should’ve told Sidonie’s mom that her daughter doesn’t go to school but comes here—”
“And drinks much more soda than is good for her and associates with disagreeable women and reads novels she’s permitted to select without supervision or even orderly thought, yes. Then her mother would have made her stop coming here.”
“Well, exactly.”
“But since you failed to inform Mrs. Fairfax of those facts, now I’ve got to do the forbidding.”
I licked an envelope flap. “I don’t see how that follows, but sure. Let’s see how long that lasts.”
Mrs. Fletcher still hadn’t uncovered her eyes. “No, really, Boy. This goes for all three of them. They’ve got to go to school.”
She didn’t seem to notice that those were more or less the same words I’d said to her on my first day at the bookstore.
I said: “Well, this joke has fallen flat. I never met Mrs. Fairfax; I don’t care for that neighborhood. Everything’s the same as it was this time yesterday, okay?”