The Cloisters(28)

I stopped for a coffee among the wealthy neighborhood shops, a few blocks from the park, and sat outside for a few minutes to watch the flow of people come and go, baskets in their arms full of produce and fruits.

“There’s a greenmarket today,” the woman who delivered my coffee said when I asked where they were coming from. A greenmarket, a place where I might buy a bouquet of flowers, something to restore the mood in my studio.

Coffee in hand, I wandered along the row of stalls set up on Seventy-Ninth Street, surprised to discover a wealth of produce that spilled from baskets and down the fronts of tables. There were sellers of honey and lip balms, pole beans, and even a small bunch of ranunculus that I purchased, and some sachets of lavender that I wished I could have. There was something about window shopping that I had always equally loved and resented. It was a joy to be in a group of people, to take in beautiful things, but the feeling of knowing you couldn’t afford anything but a handful of stems was restrictive, dark.

Toward the end of the row, people were gathered around a small card table that lacked the protective tent other vendors enjoyed. It was largely bare, without the extravagant display of the other sellers. And then, I heard him before I saw him.

“Ann?” said Leo, coming around to the front of the table and taking my wrist in his hand. “What are you doing here?”

“Just walking.” I was so flustered to see him that I didn’t even notice he was pulling me around to his side of the table and pointing me toward a chair.

“Sit there,” he said as he took cash from a woman dressed in a chic, structured dress. She tucked whatever he handed her into a leather handbag and walked off.

I watched Leo make a few more transactions, sometimes selling items off the table, sometimes pulling them from a basket underneath, until finally there was a break in the activity, and he faced me.

“So just walking?”

I nodded. It was, after all, a coincidence, wasn’t it?

“No one sent you down here? Rachel didn’t tell you to come find me?”

I wondered that Rachel would have known where Leo was on a Saturday morning, but simply said, “No one. It’s just me.”

Leo handed me something off the table. It was a string of black seeds, delicately held together in a necklace. I fingered their shiny exterior.

“You’ll want that,” Leo said, motioning at the string. “Put it on.”

I looked up at him and noticed again how he dwarfed the card table. It was almost comical, Leo’s torn jeans and black T-shirt with holes along the neck, his legs and torso both so long that everything he wore looked a little too small, as if it had been made for a child.

“What are they?” I asked.

“Peony seeds. Said to ward off evil spirits and nightmares.”

“I haven’t had trouble sleeping.”

“Yet,” he said.

I slipped the strand over my head while he made another sale, the business brisk.

“What else are you selling?” I walked over and consulted the table. There were amulets of woven grass and strings of peony seeds. A handful of crushed things in small plastic packets, each with a shockingly high price sticker. The strand of peony seeds I wore was tagged for $40.

“Remedies. Remedies for the malaises of the rich.”

I turned over one of the grass amulets to see the price—$60. I held it to my nose.

“Lemon verbena,” I said.

“Very good. We’ll make you a horticulturalist yet. But mostly it’s vervain. Same family. I add the lemon verbena for smell.”

Everything on the table I realized was also grown in the Bonnefont garden at The Cloisters, the garden that contained the magical and medicinal herbs most commonly used in the Middle Ages.

“What about this?” I asked, picking up one of the plastic packets.

“Henbane. Dried and pulverized. Two grams.” When I didn’t say anything, Leo continued, “It’s a narcotic.”

He said it with a shrug, as if selling organic narcotics to richly dressed women was no big deal.

“Have you tried it?” I asked.

He nodded.

“Can I?”

He looked at me appraisingly. “You can, but I have some better stuff you might prefer.” From under the table he pulled out a box of labeled herbs. There was mandrake and absinthe. He offered me a packet labeled sea holly.

“What’s it for?”

He leaned in to my ear and whispered, his other hand holding my upper arm, “It’s an aphrodisiac, a stimulant.” He took the packet from my hands and licked his pinky before dipping it in. He held his coated finger in front of my lips. I took him up on the offer and licked the dust off. It was grainy and bitter, tinged with the salt of his skin.

“How long does it take to work?”

“You’ll find out.”

I watched him go back to the table, where a line of people were waiting for his help. I didn’t want to leave. Being around Leo’s energy made the papers seem very far away.

“Could you help me?” a woman asked, attempting to squeeze behind the table, past where Leo was now exchanging an amulet for cash.

I looked to Leo for direction, but when he didn’t say anything, I stood and threw myself into the business of it all, saying, “Of course. What were you looking for?”