The Silver Metal Lover(35)

I’m so slow. It was ages as she stood there with the panther, before I knew she wanted me to bribe her. I started to panic, as if I’d committed some breach of social etiquette. I didn’t know how to get over it. As I fumbled about in my mind, Geraldine put down the panther and walked crisply out.

I followed her into the birdcage lift and touched the button. Geraldine looked into space with her hard sad eyes that had parcels of lines in the thick mascara under them. I wondered frenziedly if everyone always tipped her with some valuable piece, if her apartment was stuffed with collectors items, against her compulsory retirement, which would have to be any year now. I began to feel sorry for her, her tired skin, her carnivorous nails.

We reached the foyer and she stepped out and over to the lift in the support. At the door she hesitated. She turned and looked at me.

“You’re going to find it difficult,” she said, “being poor. But you’re a tryer, I’ll say that for you.”

I was overwhelmed. It was ridiculous.

“Geraldine,” I said, blatant, because suddenly I wanted her to have the panther, and so being devious was unimportant, “where do I send—?”

“Keep it,” she said. “You’re going to need every money unit you can get your hands on.”

The doors shut. I sat down on the foyer floor, wondering if she was ever someone’s daughter, too. I was still sprawled there three quarters of an hour later, when the phone went. It was Casa Bianca. They’d be at the house by midnight and they’d pay me—it was more money than I’d ever had, and it would just be enough.

Guess what I did as the Casa Bianca removal took away all my things? I cried. (I feel I ought to edit out my tears by now. But, they happened.) It was my life going. Strange, when I’d hardly ever thought about any of it. Strange, that when I had thought about it, none of it had seemed like mine, yet there I was, wandering from place to place in the swiftly emptying rooms to avoid the machines, crying. Goodbye, my books, goodbye, my necklaces, goodbye my ivory chessmen. Goodbye my coal-black bear.

Goodbye, my childhood, my roots, my yesterdays. Goodbye, Jane.

Who are you now?

I made a tape for my mother, and left it on the console for her, with the light ready to signal when she came in. I wasn’t very coherent, but I tried to be. I tried to explain how I loved her and how I’d call her, soon. I tried to explain what I’d done. I didn’t say anything about Silver. Not one word. Yet everything I said, of course, was about him. I simply might have been saying his name over and over. And I knew she’d know. My wise, clever, brilliant mother. I couldn’t hide anything from her.

I and my white suitcase, with Casa Bianca’s Pay On Demand check in it, caught the four A.M. flyer to the city. There was a gang on the flyer, and they shouted obscene things at me, but didn’t dare do anything else because of the rightly suspected policode. I was afraid of them anyway. I’d never been so close to people like that, always taking cabs when it was late, always on the bright streets, or in another corridor, or on the other side of the walk. It was as if my mother’s aura had protected me, and now I had exiled myself, and now I was no longer safe.

When I remember doing all this, I’m shattered. I still don’t quite believe I did. I dialed an instant-rental bureau from a kiosk at the foot of Les Anges Bridge, and then gave in and took a taxi to the address they gave me.

The caretaker was human, and he swore at me for getting him up. It was very dark. There were no streetlights outside; the nearest was five hundred feet away up the street. My window looks on to a subsidence of brickwork and iron girders. I don’t know what it could have been before the tremor shook it down, but weeds have seeded all over it. I didn’t see till daylight crawled through the dirty window, and then the autumn colors of the weeds, smeared on the dereliction, made me unhappy. Unhappier.

I didn’t sleep, of course. I huddled by my suitcase on the old couch by the window. I knew I couldn’t stay here. I knew I would have to go home. But where was home?

When day came, I went on huddling. I knew my next move was to go to Egyptia, and then to Clovis. Repay Clovis, persuade Egyptia. And then I’d take Silver. I’d really have bought him, as Casa Bianca had bought my furniture. He’d belong to me. And I couldn’t. After everything, I couldn’t. Couldn’t buy him or own him. Couldn’t bring him here to this frightful place.

I dozed, and when I woke, the day was shrinking away behind the girders as if it were scared of them. My stomach was queasy and sore because I hadn’t eaten, except for a sort of sandwich I’d made myself in the servicery at the house. I drank some water from the drinking tap in the muddy bathroom of the rented apartment. The water tasted very chemical, and full of germs.

My mother would be home, soon. I wondered what she would do. I became frantic, and saw her shock as she found the suite stripped of furnishings and me. I began to believe I’d done something truly awful to her. I wanted to run down to the pay phone in the foyer of the rental apartment block, down all the cracked cement steps, for the lift here didn’t work anymore. But then I knew I couldn’t. And then at last I knew that I was afraid, terribly, violently afraid, of Demeta, who only wants the best for me, the very best, as she sees it.

Eventually, I found the paper pad I’d written on and which I’d put in the suitcase with the money and the few clothes, and I started to write this, the second chapter of what’s happened to me.