Stone Mattress: Nine Tales(70)
She smooths her hair, feels for stray wisps. Ambrosia Manor has its own salon complete with hairdresser, thank providence, and she relies on Sasha there to keep her trimmed. The most worrisome item during her morning preparation is her face. She can scarcely make it out in the mirror: it’s like one of those face-shaped blanks that once appeared on Internet accounts when you hadn’t added your picture. So no hope for the eyebrow pencil or the mascara, and hardly any for the lipstick, though on optimistic days she pretends to herself she can draw that on sightlessly. Should she chance it today? Maybe she’ll look like a clown. But if so, who would care?
She would. And Tobias might. And the staff, though in a different way. If you look demented they’re more likely to treat you as if you really are. So better to avoid the lipstick.
She finds the cologne bottle where it always resides – the cleaners have strict instructions not to move anything – and dabs herself behind the ears. Attar of Roses, with an undertone of something else, a citrus. She breathes in deeply: thank heavens she can still smell, unlike some of the others. It’s when you can’t smell any more that your appetite goes and you dwindle to nothing.
As she turns away she does manage to catch a glimpse of herself, or of someone: a woman disconcertingly like her own mother as she was in old age, white hair, crumpled tissue-paper skin and all; though, as the eyes are sideways, more mischievous. Possibly more malevolent as well, like an elf gone to the bad. That sideways glance lacks the candour of a full frontal gaze, a thing she will never see again.
Here comes Tobias, punctual as ever. They always have breakfast together.
He knocks first, like the courtly gentleman he purports to be. The time you should wait before entering a lady’s chamber, according to Tobias, is the time it would take the other man to dive under the bed. Appearances should be preserved when it comes to wives, several of whom have been undergone by Tobias. They were cheaters every one, though he doesn’t hold it against them any more because it would be hard to respect a woman who wasn’t desired by other men. He never let the wives know he knew, and he always enticed them back and made sure they were worshipping him again before giving them a sudden boot out the door, with no explanation, because why lower himself by accusing them? A firmly closed door was more dignified. That was the way to deal with wives.
In the case of mistresses, however, spontaneous emotion is likely to take over. A suspicious lover infuriated by jealousy and his own wounded honour is tempted to barge right in without knocking, and then there will be bloodshed, right there on the spot, with a knife or bare hands, or else in the form of duels, later.
“Did you ever kill anyone?” Wilma asked once, during this recitation.
“My lips are sealed,” Tobias replied solemnly. “But a wine bottle – a full wine bottle – can crush in a skull, at the temple. And I was a crack shot.”
Wilma kept her mouth still: she can’t see Tobias, but he can see her, and a smirk would hurt him. She finds these kinds of details rococo, like the vanished gold chocolate boxes, and suspects Tobias of making them up, not out of whole cloth but from creaky, ornate operettas and once-fashionable continental novels and the reminiscences of dandyish uncles. He must think that naive, bland, North American Wilma finds him decadent and glamorous, quite the roué; he must think she swallows this stuff whole. But maybe he believes it himself.
“Come in,” she says now. A blob appears in the doorway. She regards it sideways, sniffs the air. It’s Tobias for sure, it’s his aftershave: Brut, if she’s not mistaken. Has her sense of smell become sharper as her eyesight has faded? Probably not, though it’s comforting to think so. “How lovely to see you, Tobias,” she says.
“Dear lady, you are radiant,” says Tobias. He advances, plants a kiss of greeting upon her cheek with his thin, dry lips. A few bristles: he hasn’t shaved yet, just splashed on the Brut. Like herself, he must be worried about how he smells: that acid, stale odour of aging bodies so noticeable when all the Ambrosiads are assembled in the dining room, their base note of slow decay and involuntary leakage papered over with applied layers of scent – delicate florals on the women, bracing spices on the men, the blooming rose or brusque pirate image inside each of them still fondly cherished.
“I hope you slept well,” says Wilma.
“I had such a dream!” says Tobias. “Purple. Maroon. It was very sexual, with music.”
His dreams are frequently very sexual, with music. “It ended well, I hope?” she says. She’s overusing the word hope today.
“Not very well,” says Tobias. “I committed a murder. It woke me up. What shall we have today? The oat creations, or the bran ones?” He never pronounces the actual names of the dry breakfast cereals in Wilma’s repertoire: he finds them banal. Soon he will make a remark about the absence of good croissants in this place, or indeed of any croissants whatsoever.
“You choose,” she says. “I’ll have a mixture.” Bran for the bowels, oats for the cholesterol, though the experts keep changing their minds about that. She hears him rummaging: he’s familiar with her small kitchenette, he knows where the packages are kept. Here at the Manor, lunch and dinner are served in the dining room, but they have their breakfasts in their own apartments; those of them in the Early Assisted Living wing, that is. In the Advanced Living wing, things are different. She hasn’t wished to imagine exactly how different.