He pushed his hair from his forehead. “I don’t think it’s going to grow too much in the next couple of days.”
“There! You do understand!”
“It’s a good job?”
“Oh, it is. It certainly is.” She stopped at the lions as though they marked some far more important boundary. “That’s the Labry Apartments, up on 36th. It’s the four hundred building. Apartment 17-E. Come up there any time in the afternoon.”
“Today?”
“Certainly today. If you want the job.”
“Sure.” He felt relief from a pressure invisible till now through its ubiquitousness. He remembered the bread in the alley: its cellophane under the street lamp had flashed more than his or her fogged baubles. “You have an office there. What do you do?”
“I’m a psychologist.”
“Oh,” and didn’t narrow his eyes. “I’ve been to psychologists. I know something about it, I mean.”
“You do?” She touched the lion’s cheek, not leaning. “Well, I think of myself as a psychologist on vacation right now.” Mocking him a little: “I only give advice between the hours of ten and midnight, down at Teddy’s. That’s if you’ll have a drink with me.” But that mocking was friendly.
“Sure. If the job works out.”
“Go on over when you get ready. Tell whoever’s there that Mrs. Brown—Madame Brown is the nickname they’ve given me at Teddy’s, and since I saw you there I thought you might know me by it—that Mrs. Brown told you to come up. Possibly I’ll be there. But they’ll put you to work.”
“Five dollars an hour?”
“I’m afraid it isn’t that easy to find trustworthy workers now that we’ve got ourselves into this thing.” She tried to look straight up under her eyelids. “Oh no, people you can trust are getting rarer and rarer. And you!” Straight at him: “You’re wondering how I can trust you? Well, I’ve seen you before. And you know, we really are at that point. I begin, really, to think it’s too much. Really too much.”
“Get your morning paper!”
“Muriel! Oh, now Muriel! Come back here!”
“Get your morning—Hey, there, dog. Quiet down. Down girl!”
“Muriel, come back here this instant!”
“Down! There. Hey, Madame Brown. Got your paper right here.” Maroon bells flapping, Faust stalked across the street. Muriel danced widdershins about him.
“Hello, old girl.”
“Good morning there,” Madame Brown said. “It is about time for you to be along, Joaquim, isn’t it?”
“Eleven-thirty, by the hands on the old church steeple.” He cackled. “Hi there; hi there, young fellow,” handing one paper, handing another.
Madame Brown folded hers beneath her arm.
He let his dangle, while Faust howled to no one in particular, “Get your morning paper,” and went on down the street. “Bye, there, Madame. Good morning. Get your paper!”
“Madame Brown?” he asked, distrusting his resolve.
She was looking after the newspaper man.
“What are those?”
She looked at him with perfect blankness.
“I’ve got them.” He touched his chest. “And Joaquim’s got a little chain tight around his neck.”
“I don’t know.” With one hand, she touched her own cheek, with the other, her own elbow: Her sleeve was some cloth rough as burlap. “You know, I’m really not sure. I like them. I think they’re pretty. I like having a lot of them.”
“Where did you get them?” he asked, aware he broke the custom Faust had so carefully defined the day before. Hell, he was still uneasy with her dog, and with her transformation between smoke and candlelight.
“A little friend of mine gave them to me.” She had the look, yes, of someone trying not to look offended.
He shifted, let his knees bend a little, his toes go, nodded.
“Before she left the city. She left me, left the city. And she gave me these. You see?”
He’d asked. And felt better for the violence done, moved his arm from the shoulder…his laughter surprised him, broke out and became huge.
Over it, he heard her sudden high howl. With her fist on her chest, she laughed too, “Oh, yes!” squinting. “She did! She really did. I was never so surprised in all my life! Oh, it was funny—I don’t mean funny peculiar, though it certainly was. Everything was, back then. But it was funny ha-ha. Ha-ha-ha-haaaaa.” She shook the sound about her. “She—” almost still—“brought them to me in the dark. People shouting around out in the halls, and none of the lights working. Just the flickering coming around the edge of the shades, and the terrible roaring outside…Oh, I was scared to death. And she brought them to me, in handfuls, wound them around my neck. And her eyes…” She laughed again, though that cut all smile from him. “It was strange. She wound them around my neck. And then she left. There.” She looked down over the accordion of her neck, and picked through the loops. “I wear them all the time.” The accordion opened. “What do they mean?” She blinked at him. “I don’t know. People who wear them aren’t too anxious to talk about them. I’m certainly not.” She leaned a little closer. “You’re not either. Well, I’ll respect that in you. You do the same.” Now she folded her hands. “But I’ll tell you something: and, really there’s no reason behind it, I suppose, other than that it seems to work. But I trust people who have them just a little more than those who don’t.” She shrugged. “Probably very silly. But it’s why I offered you that job.”
“Oh.”
“I suspect we share something.”
“Something happened,” he said, “when we got them. Like you said. That we don’t like to talk about.”
“Then again, it could be nothing more than that we happen to be wearing the same…” She rattled the longest strand.
“Yeah.” He buttoned another button. “It could be.”
“Well. I’ll drop in on you at the Richards’ later in the afternoon. You will be there?”
He nodded. “Four hundred, on 36th Street…”
“Apartment 17-E,” she finished. “Very good. Muriel?”
The dog clicked back from the gutter.
“We’ll be going now.”
“Oh. Okay. And thanks.”
“Perfectly welcome. Perfectly welcome. I’m sure.” Madame Brown nodded, then ambled down the street. Muriel caught up, to circle her, this time deasil.
He walked barefoot through the grass, expectation and confusion hobbling. Anticipation of labor loosened tensions in his body. At the fountain, he let the water spurt in his eyes before he flooded and slushed, with collapsing cheeks, water between filmed teeth. With his forearm he blotted the tricklings, squeegeed his eyelids with rough, toad-wide fingers, then picked up his paper, and, blinking wet lashes, went back up to the trees.
Lanya still lay on her belly. He sat on the drab folds. Her feet, toes in, stuck from under the blanket. An olive twist lay over the trough of her spine, shifting with breath. He touched her wrinkled instep, moved his palm to her smooth heel. He slid his first and second finger on either side of the tendon there. The heel of his hand pushed back the blanket from her calf, slowly, smoothly, all the way till pale veins tangled on the back of her knee. His hand lay on the slope of her thigh.
Her calves were smooth.
His heart, beating fast, slowed.
Her calves were unscarred.
He breathed, and with it was the sound of air in the grass around.
Her calves had no scratch.
When he took his hand away, she made some slumber sound and movement. And didn’t wake. He opened today’s paper and put it on top of yesterday’s. Under the date, July 17, 1969, was the headline: