What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours(3)
They left the reunion early and in a hurry, along with a small group of attendees who’d found themselves unable to sustain the pretense of total success. Having fallen into Lucy’s bed, they didn’t get out again for days. How could they, when Lucy held all Safiye’s satisfactions in her very fingertips, and each teasing stroke of Safiye’s tongue summoned Lucy to the brink of delirium? They fell asleep, each making secret plans to slip away in the middle of the night. After all, their passion placed them entirely at each other’s command, and they were bound to find that fearsome. So they planned escape but woke up intertwined. It was at Lucy’s bidding that Safiye would stay or go. And who knew what Safiye might suddenly and successfully demand of Lucy? Stop breathing. Give up tea. The situation improved once it occurred to them that they should also talk; as they came to understand each other they learned that what they’d been afraid of was running out of self. On the contrary the more they loved the more there was to love. At times it was necessary to spend months apart, coaxing valuable goods out of people using methods they avoided discussing in detail. Lucy sent Safiye paintings and orange blossoms, and Safiye directed a steady flow of potential portrait subjects Lucy’s way. The lovers fought about this; it seemed to Lucy that Safiye was trying to trick her into making a “respectable” living. Lucy had promised herself that she’d only paint faces she found compelling and it was a bother to have to keep inventing excuses for not taking on portraits.
“It’s all right, you’re just not good at gifts,” Lucy said, with a smile intended to pacify. Gifts didn’t matter when they were together, and gifts didn’t have to matter when they were apart either. But Safiye was outraged.
“What are you talking about? Don’t you ever say that I’m bad at gifts!”
If there are any words that Lucy could now unsay, it would be those words about Safiye being bad at gifts; if Lucy hadn’t said them Safiye wouldn’t have set out to steal the gift that would prove her wrong, and she wouldn’t have got caught.
The lovers spent Christmas together, then parted—Lucy for Grenoble, and Safiye for Barcelona. They wrote to each other care of their cities’ central post offices, and at the beginning of April Safiye wrote of the romance of St. Jordi’s Day. Lucy, it is the custom here to exchange books and roses each year on April 23rd. Shall we?
—
LUCY HAPPILY settled down to work. First she sent for papyrus and handmade a book leaf by leaf, binding the leaves together between board covers. Then she filled each page from memory, drew English roses budding and Chinese roses in full bloom, peppercorn-pink Bourbon roses climbing walls and silvery musk roses drowsing in flowerbeds. She took every rose she’d ever seen, made them as lifelike as she could (where she shaded each petal the rough paper turned silken), and in these lasting forms she offered them to Safiye. The making of this rose book coincided with a period in Lucy’s life when she was making money without having to lie to anyone. She’d fallen in with an inveterate gambler who’d noticed that she steadied his nerves to a miraculous degree. He always won at blackjack whenever she was sitting beside him, so they agreed he’d give her 10 percent of each evening’s winnings. This man only played when the stakes were high, so he won big and they were both happy. Lucy had no idea what was going to happen when their luck ran out; she could only hope her gambler wouldn’t try to get violent with her, because then she’d have to get violent herself. That would be a shame, because she liked the man. He never pawed at her, he always asked her how Safiye was getting on, and he was very much in love with his wife, who loved him too and thought he was a night watchman. The gambler’s wife would’ve gone mad with terror if she’d known how close she came to losing her life savings each night, but she didn’t suspect a thing, so she packed her husband light suppers to eat at work, suppers the man couldn’t even bear to look at (his stomach always played up when he was challenging Lady Luck), so Lucy ate the suppers and enjoyed them very much, the flavor of herbed olives lingering in her mouth so that when she drank her wine she tasted all the greenness of the grapes.
—
FROM WHERE LUCY sat beside her gambler she had a view through a casement window, a view of a long street that led to the foot of a mountain. And what Lucy liked best about her casement window view was that as nighttime turned into dawn, the mountain seemed to travel down the street. It advanced on tiptoe, fully prepared to be shooed away. Insofar as a purely transient construction of flesh and blood can remember (or foretell) what it is to be stone, Lucy understood the mountain’s wish to listen at the window of a den of gamblers and be warmed by all that free-floating hope and desolation. Her wish for the mountain was that it would one day shrink to a pebble, crash in through the glass, and roll into a corner to happily absorb tavern life for as long as the place stayed standing. Lucy tried to write something to Safiye about the view through the casement window, but found that her description of the mountain expressed a degree of pining so extreme that it made for distasteful reading. She didn’t post that letter.
Safiye had begun working as a lady’s maid—an appropriate post for her, as she had the requisite patience. It can take months before you even learn the location of a household safe, let alone discover the code that makes its contents available to you. But was that really Safiye’s plan? Lucy had a feeling she was being tricked into the conventional again. Safiye instigated bothersome conversations about “the future,” the eventual need for security, and its being possible to play one trick too many. From time to time Lucy paused her work on the rose book to write and send brief notes: