The Mirror Thief(131)
The screen door slams: the girl is back. She does a ballet move off the porch, then pounces on Claudio, mussing his hair. Watching Stanley the whole time.
Stanley, Claudio says, Cynthia and I are going to see a film tonight after dinner. Will you come along with us?
Stanley gives them both a frosty look. Sorry, he says. I gotta have a word with your pops tonight, sweetheart. Man to man. But thanks for the ask-along.
A funny expression crosses the girl’s face—irritated and embarrassed, a little panicked too, like Stanley just interrupted her graduation speech to tell her her slip is showing—but then that’s whisked aside by a wiseacre grin. Wow, she says. It’s a little early to be asking for my hand, don’t you think? We haven’t even had our first date.
Yeah, Stanley says. Well, I move pretty quick. Hope that trousseau’s coming along okay.
She throws her head back with a showy, throaty laugh. Then she smacks Claudio on the side of his head. Go inside and rinse your dukes, you savages, she says. We’ll see if Mommy needs any help with the chow.
They start toward the porch. So, Stanley asks, what’s the movie?
Bonjour Tristesse, Claudio says.
Buh-huh buh what?
Bonjour Tristesse. The new film of Otto Preminger, starring David Niven, and the young actress Jean Seberg. In Saint Joan she was not so good, I think. But maybe for her this role will be better.
Is this some kinda frog flick?
Ribbet-ribbet, Cynthia says.
The door swings open, and Adrian Welles is standing in the kitchen, resting an affectionate hand on Synn?ve’s back. He turns to them with an impish grin.
He’s an inch or two shorter than his wife. Not quite as thick around the middle as Stanley had thought: broad, sure, but more brawny than soft. He must’ve been wearing a bunch of layers the other night. The snuffling dog is with him; it charges the open door, yapping its monstrous little head off. Cynthia catches it by the collar and hauls it inside, its white-rimmed popeyes rolling.
The air in the kitchen is thick with the smells of hot oil and celery and garlic and fish. Welles’s powder-blue eyes have taken on a bright sheen beneath his spectacles, like pebbles of quartz washed by unaccustomed rain. He calls to Stanley and Claudio over the skillet’s hiss. Greetings, my young friends! he says. Such unexpected pleasure you have brought us!
45
The fish get plated alongside scoops of greenbean casserole and hunks of fresh bread. Synn?ve pulls an extra folding chair from a hallway closet, passes some cucumber salad around. Stanley watches carefully before he takes a bite of anything.
Everyone eats the fish whole—bones and all, like sardines—but they don’t taste like sardines. Stanley remembers small fish that his Italian neighbors cooked around Christmastime, in those years when his father was away and his mother wasn’t speaking and he had to take meals wherever he could find them: these taste a little like those did. As he chews he thinks of the seething silver carpet on the moonlit sand, and also of the bag of heads by the backdoor—the tangle of guts, the little mouths working, the cloudy unblinking eyes—making himself think these things. But they don’t really bother him. The fish taste good. He’s hungry. He hasn’t had a proper kitchen-table meal in months.
Welles keeps standing up and sitting down, splashing pale gold wine into half-empty glasses. Soave classico, he says. I’ve had these bottles for more than a year. It’s lucky I saved them! For this meal it’s just right. Fish on Friday! My god, are you angling to re-Catholicize me? Well, it may be working, damn it all, it may be working.
The guy is keyed up, on a roll; nobody makes much effort to share the stage. Synn?ve and Cynthia each get in some good licks, and Claudio slow-pitches a few earnest questions, but mostly they just let Welles wind himself down. Stanley feels like he’s watching a swordfight in an old movie where the hero—Errol Flynn, maybe, or Tyrone Power—holds off a dozen guys at once, only none of them seem to be trying very hard to scratch him. Cynthia keeps raising her eyebrows, smirking. Welles talks with his hands, barely touches his food. Stanley finds it all sort of depressing.
Speaking of Catholicism, Welles says, and then recites part of a poem, something he just wrote. Stanley clenches his jaw, stares at his plate, pushes a french-cut greenbean around with a tightly gripped fork. Thus does faith fold distance! Welles says. So bend the Ptolemaic rays! And Poor Clare perceives, ether-borne, the priest’s vestmented image on the wall. Please stop, Stanley thinks. Stop spoiling it. Stop talking.
I suppose you’ve heard, Welles says, that the pope just named Clare of Assisi the patron saint of television. Two or three weeks ago, I think. Rather more inventive than declaring the Archangel Gabriel to be the patron of radio, wouldn’t you say? But then the church has always been quite comfortable with the concept of the discarnate word propagated through space. Less so with the discarnate image. The pope had to work a little harder to locate divine precedent. Lately, as I write, I’m finding myself drawn to stories such as these. It seems that this is what the new work will be about. The power of the image. The image of power.
Cripes! Cynthia says. Get a load of the clock! We better cut out, kemosabe. The curtain goes up at tick sixteen.
She and Claudio retreat to the entryway, Claudio clasping hands and murmuring thanks as Cynthia passes him his jacket. Stanley gets up, catches Claudio in the hallway, hands him some folded bills. For the movie, he says.