Boy, Snow, Bird(75)
“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.”
3
on Saturday morning I had a long talk with Arturo about Frances and the rat catcher and what I meant to do. He laughed at me and then he forbade me and then he warned me. I walked out of the room and he followed me into the next room. Then he walked out of the room and I followed him into the next room, and not for a second did either of us stop talking. We split a sandwich for lunch and he conceded that if he were in my place he’d want to meet Frances too. If there’s still anything left of her. If she wants to meet us. I think he was just getting hoarse. Plus he knows this terrain. He’s been handling the difference between the mother you want and the mother you get for years, managing the discrepancy like a pro, making it look easy.