He entered the elevator and threw me a kiss as the doors closed. I stood, burning with shame, then hurried back to the tea things. I lifted the cream pot to my nose and sniffed it, took a small swallow from a spoon. It tasted fine to me. “Rosa,” I called, and she came hurrying out with the teapot in her hand, confused that my guest had left so quickly. I made her take a taste as well, but Rosa also thought the cream was fine, and we shrugged at each other, and I retired to my room to let my headache hatch into the beast it would become.
It was only late last night when I awoke again to the night-glimmering apartment that I understood, at last, what my old friend had meant. That night in the elevator in Buenos Aires, the sniff of my neck, what he had smelled so many years ago. Milk. I lay awake all night, burning. My granddaughter came by this morning and took one look at my face and was gentle with me. Later, my son called and invited me to go with him and his wife to Tortola in a few weeks, and it’s very possible that I will accept. I should like sun and beach and daiquiris, and a sky with some blue in it, some freedom from the inevitable winter.
Still, at moments since the odd last encounter with Ancel de Chair, I have found myself watching the bare trees move on my glistening walls, thinking of Buenos Aires. Many times in my life I longed to return to that city, and though I could have gone a dozen times, a hundred, for some reason I never did. I probably never will. I find myself wondering now, in the shining, expensive desert of my apartment during this endless winter, if that city I loved so dearly could have stayed the same, after all this time. If the tiny old woman still sits in the park on her bench, silently weeping into her hands. If that old man still presses his wizened cheek to the bosoms of plump brides, humming tangos in the gaslit streets. If the jungle-smelling wind carries great flights of butterflies into the streets. If, in the restaurants, the waiters are still elegant and the steaks still glisten thick as tongues; if there are those great rivers, those oceans of wine to dizzy us, to wash our bodies sweet again.
Fugue
THE WOMAN DOESN’T KNOW HOW LONG SHE’S been here, or where she was before. It doesn’t matter: all that does is this hotel window with its sulfurous draft and the quiet street beyond. The trees scrape forklike against the sky, the mud is matte on the ground. This village rests in a hollow so deep the sun cannot reach into it. Up the street the abandoned hotels hunch in perpetual dim, awaiting the end of winter.
The only variation is the girl who makes the bed, cleans the bathroom, carries up meals. A strange one, all safety pins and pink hair, a new type, a punk. But gentle: the girl sometimes brings with her small gifts, evidence of the world’s quickening. A crocus bulb with a tender flag unfurling. An abandoned nest with a speckled green egg. When the woman holds those tiny things, she feels something rising in her that she is careful to chase away before it can catch and seize her.
This morning, the girl cleans, then stands beside the woman until she grabs one of her hands in its constant flight. Ma’am? she says. You a musician or something? Because your hands. They always look like they’re playing music.
In the girl’s bitten fingers, the woman’s hand is elegant, the type that probably played music well. I believe so, the woman says; she doesn’t know for sure. The girl nods and leaves, her footsteps echoing in the empty hotel.
Alone now, the woman recalls her own body. The filthy skirt, the cashmere sweater, the mud-caked calves. Unpleasant: she has begun to stink. She goes into the bathroom, dropping her clothes on the way. Under the hot hiss of the shower she notices what has been burning all along: the long, swollen cut in her thigh, the blood black at its edges. The water turns pink. The wound is deep.
Only when it is stanched with great handfuls of toilet paper can the woman sit again at the window, look out into the town, listen to the roar of the wind corkscrewing down into the hollow. Only then can she recapture all that stillness, all that peace.
I BELIEVE, BETTINA SAYS as she cuts the gizzard from the turkey, that she’s a ghost. A sad old ghost, yearning to go home.
Jason cracks pecans and winks at Jaime behind Bettina’s back; he seems to believe that Jaime and he are in some confederacy against his wife. Jason is handsome in a military, washed-out way, with features that blur into one another and buzzed, rust-colored hair. His fingers are long and delicate and can craft woodwork that seems a marvel of sensitivity, but he tells the raunchiest jokes Jaime has ever heard. He keeps her off balance.
Bettina turns toward them, her violet eyes, overstuffed lips, a beauty mark in a sickle shape across her cheek. She reminds Jaime of an iced cake, all fondant and sugar pansies. She is plump and British, too refined for this dark place, the falling-apart hotel in its sulfur-stinking valley. Jaime, she says, what do you think about our guest?
Bettina has only begun asking Jaime her opinions, though Jaime has been with them for almost nine months. Jaime’s family had come to Sharon Springs every year since her own grandparents were children, her Orthodox Jewish kin climbing the hill from the springs, their dark clothes damp. Bettina and Jason aren’t Jewish, but are fixing up the village’s grandest hotel, and Jaime’s mother loves them for it. One morning last summer, over blueberry pie, Jaime’s mother had confided to Bettina that her sweet girl had turned sullen, strange. Dressed in rags, wore makeup, refused her religion. Only the day before she came home in a police cruiser; she’d tried to buy cocaine from a boy at the Stewart’s up the hill.
We don’t know what we did, Jaime’s mother had wept in Bettina’s kitchen, her wig sliding slowly over one ear. How could a good girl become bad so fast? How could our little Jamina become so different? It is our fault, her father’s and mine. We gave her too much, now she wants none of it. The eighties! Jaime’s mother said savagely. Nowadays people think they can do whatever they want.
Bettina patted her lips and said, Why don’t you leave her with us for the winter? What trouble will she get into in Sharon Springs? Give her a few months with us in this old barn in the wintertime, nothing to do. She’ll run back to you.
That was that: at the end of the summer Jaime’s parents drove off, and Jaime stood staring at their exhaust. All fall and winter Jaime has been at this closed-up hotel. School had been her choice — she was sixteen — and she’d said, No thanks, thinking of the cloddish boys and passive-aggressive farm girls she’d find there. Without school her days stretched long. She learned to cook, to love the town in winter, empty of people. She’d go for long hikes in the mountains, wander in the huge, abandoned hotels, finding the postcards in odd corners, the cellulose dolls left by forgotten children.
The night the woman showed up, Bettina and Jason and Jaime had been in the parlor watching the show they all liked with the wily Texas rich folk: the main character, a raven-haired beauty, had begun to act strangely, an evil new glint in her eye. Then came a knock on the hotel’s dark window, and there was the woman, bedraggled in the rain, like a zombie from a horror film. She’d insisted on a room though the hotel was officially closed until May. She signed her name in an indecipherable scrawl, something like Danielle or Diane or Donna, then closed her door and has not emerged since.
Jaime wants to tell Bettina and Jason about this morning, when she’d plucked one of the woman’s hands from its graceful scrabble in the air, and felt her flesh, and knew she was real. But she only says, blushing, I just think she’s a really sad person. She told me she plays music.
Bettina massages butter and herbs under the turkey’s skin, her imagination afire. She speaks of a cellist she once knew who had been in a coma, who had dreamed of her soul wandering, desperate to find its body again. Jaime has stopped listening. Jason is watching her, his face impassive. He puts down the nutcracker. Jaime flushes. Bettina natters, back turned. A quiet lunge, and Jason pins Jaime’s hand on the cutting board, slides his own up her holey tee-shirt, cups her breast, squeezes it.