The Mirror Thief(129)
Yes, he’s here. Are you Stanley? You must be Stanley.
She swoops down the steps, along the path. Her gait is quick and athletic; it’s easy to imagine her playing tennis, or golf. She’s barefoot, and her tan forearms are speckled with what looks like white paint. She’s carrying a steaming cup of tea, and as she reaches the fence she shifts it to her left hand to shake with her right.
I’m Synn?ve, she says. I’m Adrian’s wife. He was so happy to meet you! He couldn’t stop talking about you. Now, who is this?
I am called Claudio, Claudio says. I am greatly honored, se?ora.
Sorry for the mess on my hands. I’ve been all morning in the studio. My word, look at all these cats! What on earth are you carrying?
My friend and I, Stanley says, we went fishing last night, and—
Are those grunion? So early?
Yes ma’am. We wound up with more than we know what to do with, so we thought that maybe you and Mister Welles—
Well, aren’t you both dear! You’ve come at the perfect time, too. I hadn’t a notion of what to do for dinner tonight, and we simply adore grunion. Now, you must both come in at once, before these furry bandits devour you. Come, come! I still have hot water for tea.
Mrs. Welles—Synn?ve?—has a funny accent: Scandinavian maybe, or German, or Dutch. She speaks English like she learned it in England. Adrian! she calls over the music as she opens the front door again. Stanley and Claudio are here! They’ve brought us fish for dinner!
If Welles responds, Stanley can’t hear him over the shrieking hi-fi. He and Claudio set their buckets on the kitchen floor—the fish make shadowy airfoils under the ceiling fixture’s light—and while Synn?ve fixes the tea and chats with Claudio, Stanley takes a look around. The walls and the tabletops are cluttered with weird art: old planks splashed with hot lead, driftwood snared with yarn, burst ceramic eggs that something hatched from in a hurry. As Stanley pokes around, he hears a quiet precise male voice filter from the next room; at first he thinks it’s Welles. Then a second voice joins in, just as Stanley’s noticing the tinniness of the sound: it’s a radio program, coming through a loudspeaker. Why the radio and the hi-fi would be on at the same time he can’t begin to guess. From upstairs comes a creak of floorboards, a scrape of wood: someone moving just overhead.
Stanley, Synn?ve calls, Adrian told me that you’ve come all the way from New York, and that you found his book of poems there. Is that true?
Yes, ma’am, Stanley says. I’m from Brooklyn. I picked it up in Manhattan.
Wonderful! I think it’s what every poet dreams of, in a way. It’s like putting notes into bottles and throwing them into the ocean. I am an artist—when I make something, I know where it goes—so I don’t really understand. Adrian says I don’t. But I must tell you this. Yesterday? When he came home from his office? He went upstairs to his study, and he closed the door. Now? Tonight? It is just the same. He has not written like this in years. Years! It is because of you. He will not tell you this, so I’m telling you. Would you like some milk in your tea? Or sugar?
No ma’am. Just plain. Thanks.
A pale light flickers in the next room—Stanley sees its reflection in the windowglass, and on the glazed curve of a lamp’s base—and he realizes that the quiet voices are coming not from a radio but a television set. He steps across the threshold for a closer look. It’s around the corner to the left: a Philco model, with a twentyone-inch tube in a mahogany console. Stanley’s been around TVs before, plenty of times, but it’s mostly been in shops, not people’s houses. This one’s playing newsreels—old ones, he’s guessing, unless the Nazis are back in power somewhere and Roosevelt’s risen from the grave. Just like always, Stanley has a hard time focusing on the picture: he keeps getting distracted by the texture of the screen, staring until the image disintegrates into a mosaic of tiny pulsing lights. He blinks hard, shakes his head, turns away in sudden revulsion.
When his vision settles again, it finds another pair of eyes staring back at him from near the floor. He jumps, makes a startled sound.
It’s the dirty-blond girl from the coffeehouse: the one he saw kissing Welles’s cheek. She’s seated on the thick patterned rug—her back pressed against a footstool, a multi-colored afghan draped over her shoulders—and she blends smoothly into the furnishings. Stanley can’t remember the last time he walked into a room and didn’t notice somebody. He thinks maybe he never has. The girl’s eyes track him; her body doesn’t move at all. Her expression is relaxed, alert, leonine. It says you’re still alive because I’m not hungry.
Synn?ve comes up behind him, hands him a cup and saucer. Oh! she says. Cynthia! I thought you’d gone out.
Something in Synn?ve’s voice is uneasy, like she’s as startled as Stanley to find the girl here, and not quite happy about it. The girl’s eyes shift from Stanley to Synn?ve, then back to Stanley again. She blinks once, slowly, and says nothing.
Cynthia, Synn?ve says, meet Stanley and Claudio. They’re friends of—
She breaks off abruptly, like she’s forgotten what she was saying, or thought better of it. They are our friends, she finishes. Would you like tea?
Yes please, the girl says.
Her voice is plummy: a fat girl’s voice, Stanley thinks, though she’s hardly fat. He makes her for seventeen, eighteen tops. She’s got nice curves for her age, but it’s a figure with a sell-by date: in ten years she’ll be fighting the weight off. Most guys won’t see that now, of course, or won’t care. If her outfit’s not the same one she wore two days ago—bulky black scoop-neck sweater over a black leotard, gossamer crimson kerchief knotted at her neck—then it’s identical. I saw you at the coffee joint, Stanley says.