I STAYED IN THE CHAIR near the elevator even after the Chinese man left my daughter.
I wasn’t afraid anymore. I was glad I hadn’t said anything to Billie, though. You can’t let the baseball cap she wears fool you. She takes everything hard.
TESS’S NEXT-TO-LAST VISITOR is the counsel, so much taller than the cleaning person that his pale hair grazes a mobile. He has drafted the preliminary statement to the court, he silently informs the now sleeping child. He doesn’t touch her, and his stance is not reverential like the cleaning person’s, but reflective. His thoughts are not in the interrogative mood, but the mildly threatening conditionaclass="underline" If we are to continue to save you, why, someone must be made responsible. Responsible in a financial sense is of course what he means.
THE TALL GUY pushed the elevator button over and over and it finally came.
I went into the room.
She looked okay, sleeping on her side, though when I lifted the blanket and undid a couple of snaps I saw that she still had the diaper rash. Her skin just burned itself off sometimes because she didn’t crawl or even roll, just lay there in her stuff. She might turn over someday, one of them said. She’d never eat and drink and she was deaf and she was impaired but really she knew me always.
I put the blanket back on. I watched her ear for a while. All those windings and curves. My little girl’s little ear.
I got the toy she liked best from the windowsill. The red floppy dog. They always forgot it. I put it in a corner of the crib. Then I unscrewed the end of the heart tube from the aqua clothespin and I slipped it under the blanket so the blood would pool quiet and invisible like a monthly until there would be no more left.
FIDELITY
WHEN OLD VICTOR CULLEN, housebound, his sight dimming fast, filed a report from his bed with the invented dateline of Ataraku, Japan, his editor at World Enough, elderly himself but with mental and physical gears fully engaged, didn’t know what to do. So he did what he’d always done: edited the piece (never much work except for those damned ellipses), corrected the galleys, checked the blues. With the help of the art director — also Victor Cullen’s friend and colleague — he fooled around with photographs of Matsushima and Tsuwano and Aomori and came up with convincing composites. An impoverished young artist who happened to be Japanese was let in on the mischief. She did a fine wash drawing of an imaginary Shinto temple. The editor sent the proofs up to Godolphin, the town Victor and Nora Cullen had moved to twenty years ago, no, twenty-one; leaving New York, no, forsaking New York. Godolphin was just outside of Boston. Their daughter practiced medicine there.
Nora telephoned right away.
“Greg,” she said softly. “This Ataraku … it doesn’t—”
“I know,” he said, cutting her short; her voice still had the power to liquefy him. “It’s okay. Victor’s fans adore whatever he writes.”
That much was true — the magazine’s readers never tired of praising the keen eye and ear, the turns of phrase, the research. Every Victor Cullen contribution to World Enough inspired enthusiastic letters to the editor — letters in longhand, letters pecked on derelict typewriters, letters composed on word processors, and nowadays e-mail. “Ataraku: An Edgy Serenity” reaped the usual harvest.
It had been a prank, Greg figured: the prank of a furious old monarch, assisted by loyal retainers. King Victor. Maybe he’ll rest now.
Almost immediately came Stwyth, Wales, whose entire population was named Pugh.
After Stwyth came Mossfontein, South Africa: such extravagant gardens.
Greg, in his third-floor office, edited Stwyth and Mossfontein and gave them pride of place in consecutive issues. The publishers on the twentieth floor published them. Did anyone in that suite even read the rag? World Enough made money; that was all the conglomerate wanted to know. World Enough had always made money despite its refusal to take ads from hotels, airlines, cruise ships, and package tours. Instead, whisky distillers, cigar makers, purveyors of tweeds and cashmeres willingly bought space; also antique booksellers and rug dealers and, increasingly, retirement communities and facilities for assisted living.
Victor next filed a story from Akmed, a Nile village, though the envelope bore the familiar Godolphin postmark. Young Katsuko, the artist, drew the ruins outside Akmed with the precision of Piranesi. The art director, back in the office after hip surgery, spread out on Greg’s desk photographs of Egyptians from bygone issues. “They’re not all Egyptians,” he admitted. “Some are Jordanians. This one’s an Afghan.” Such wisdom in those seamed faces, Greg thought — they’d glow on the page. The art director cleared his throat. “Are we paying Victor the usual?”
“No. More.”
“Good. I don’t like to think of Nora scrimping,” he said, not meeting Greg’s eyes. “The daughter’s divorced now, can’t help much.”
“THE EXUBERANT CASTLE OF LUBASZ,” Victor’s latest smoothly began, “is our temporary abode; it lies twenty kilometers from Budapest. In our bedroom an extraordinary armoire …”
Greg and the art director studied the new piece. They arranged and shot interiors to fit Victor’s prose. Greg’s own armoire carved with bearded cherubim was pressed into service. Victor had reported that the genitalia of the cherubim were as long as their beards. One would think he’d actually seen this unrestrained bit of furniture. But Victor had never laid eyes on the thing, had he; Greg found it on Third Avenue after the Cullens left town.
Nora must have described the armoire. Greg squinted at the galleys and then through them; he saw Victor propped in a bed trying to imagine the work of a Hungarian craftsmen. “Well, Greg has this sort of closet under the skylight,” Nora might have indiscreetly remarked. She was eighty now; slippage was to be expected.
“Does he really,” Victor would have drawled. Then, snapping, “And how do you happen to know that?”
TWO DECADES AGO, on a September morning — Greg still recalled the stinging clarity of that fall day — she had trundled by early-morning train from Boston to Manhattan. Her handbag was stuffed with designs for fabric. The appointment with the vice president of the fabric company lasted an hour; then, flushed with success, she hurried down Madison and arrived at the restaurant further flushed, eyes shining. “They bought three, Greg. And they want some more silly beasts for children’s curtains — kangaroos, wombats. This commission comes in so handy. How are you?”
They were both nearing sixty then. For so long he had played the role of neighbor and friend, guest at the feasts, editor of the articles. And on the rare occasions that Victor traveled alone on assignment, Greg escorted Nora to this concert and that party, expecting nothing more than to kiss the silken cheekbone and then return to his cramped apartment and its priceless view of the sky. But now they lived in different cities: a different convention obtained.
“How am I, Nora? I am dying for love of you.”